The Nation Newspaper

Category: Monday

  • Pupil Abubakar El-Rufai

    The media was awash last week with stories and photographs of the enrolment of Abubakar, the six year-old son of Kaduna State governor, Nasir El-Rufai in one of the state’s public primary schools.

    Some of the photographs showed El-Rufai, his wife and some security aides taking the little boy to school to have him formally enrolled. El-Rufai was also seen in one other picture sitting in front of the headmaster with his son on his laps. There was another picture showing Abubakar in the classroom sitting on the front seat with one other pupil presumably to clear doubts, as to the authenticity of the enrolment exercise.

    A very excited El-Rufai said the move was informed by on-going reforms to revamp public schools in the state and make them more competitive.

    “We are determined to fix public education and raise their standards so that private education will become a luxury. As we make progress we will require our senior officials to enrol their children in public schools”.

    He further explained the exercise was in fulfilment of a promise he made two years ago that his son who will be turning six years in 2019 would be enrolled in a public school as a mark of personal example. The enrolment was therefore to fulfil that promise and bolster confidence in our public schools.

    Ostensibly, the overall objective is to bring up public schools to offer quality education comparable with what obtains in private schools. And when this is achieved, the lure to have children in private schools even in the face of prohibitive costs would have been substantially stymied. The society will be better for it.

    Given the scandalous neglect our public education system has suffered over the years with parents preferring private schools with accompanying exorbitant fees, El-Rufai’s example would seem a step in the right direction. For one, it is an admission of the inherent dangers in the continued neglect of our public education system resulting in the lowering of standards. For another, it is a veritable statement to the effect that the poor quality of education offered in public schools would have been substantially reversed were our leaders to be sending their children to such schools. Again, he seems to be sending out signals that the quickest approach to reversing the criminal neglect of public education is for leaders to begin sending their children to such schools. With that, they will see the need to pay adequate attention to the debilitating challenges that have reduced our public education system to former ghosts of themselves.

    The scenario is that of vicious cycle of neglect-dilapidated buildings; lack of teaching and learning materials, lack of seats with pupils sitting on the floor in some states and poorly motivated teachers. All these accentuate general loss of confidence in the quality of services emanating from such poorly organized schools. If any modicum of public confidence is to be restored to the public education system especially at the primary level, the starting point is to substantially address these systemic deficits.

    That appears the point El-Rufai was underscoring. And he is not alone in this. He is making a very bold statement that public schools can be trusted to offer quality education. He is saying that public schools can be substantially upgraded to offer educational services that compare very favourably with what obtains in private schools. He is saying that the comatose state of public education system is consequent upon its neglect by governments and once that is reversed, standards will substantially improve. That goes without saying.

    Incidentally, this rot is not peculiar to the education sector as the same malfeasance permeates the entire fabric of our national life. The health sector where our leaders prefer medical tourism abroad to fixing our hospitals is a serious case in point. The discrimination, profiling and stigmatization of our citizens abroad in search of elusive greener pastures are also on account of the squandering of our collective patrimony and wrong priority setting by visionless and rogue leadership.

    If much of the resources this country is bountifully endowed is gainfully deployed to productive engagement, the nation would have been high up in the rungs of the ladder of development. And its domino effect would have been evident in all sectors of the national economy. So the deficit El-Rufai seeks to remedy in his state’s public education system is a general cankerworm afflicting all spheres of our national life. And it will require the right dose of therapy, commitment and visionary leadership to have them substantially redressed.

    El-Rufai has dramatized that rot in public schools in Kaduna and seeks to shore up public confidence in it by enrolling his son in the system. If he considers that school good enough for his son, there is no reason other citizens of the state cannot have confidence in the quality of education it offers. He wants us to believe in the capacity of that school to offer quality education. We have no reason to nurse the feeling that the school is not in a position to offer quality education. For it is inconceivable that the governor would just send his son to that school as a ‘guinea pig’ just to score some point.

    Yet, we have not been told how many of such schools exist presently in the state, the state of facilities provided to ensure quality education and whether the school is just a prototype the governor intends to replicate in other parts of the state. He should have gone further to provide additional information on other children of his; where they are currently pursuing their education careers. All these would have been helpful in the overall assessment of the outing especially given the media blitz and fanfare associated with his son’s school enrolment.

    Opinions differ as to whether El-Rufai should have made a public show of the enrolment or have it done privately. There are also issues with the retinue of officials that accompanied him to the event including his wife, its psychological effect on the pupils and whether cheap political point is not at the centre of it all. It would have made better sense for the mother of the child to have privately enrolled him in the school without the fanfare and drama we were treated to. All these tend to cast serious doubt on the purpose the outing was intended to achieve.

    Even then, disclosures that the governor spent N195 million to upgrade that school which had before now, been the choice of the affluent including a former governor of the state detracts substantially from whatever point El-Rufai intended to score. What seemed to have emerged from this is that Kaduna Capital School where the child was enrolled had even before now been considered somewhat elitist. That school is severely handicapped in serving as a gauge for the quality of education offered in Kaduna public schools. And that raises the question of the indecent haste in making public show of the enrolment when no substantial improvement seems to have been recorded in upgrading the standard and quality of teaching and learning in the state’s public schools system. It would have made better sense if the governor had come up with a list schools upgraded and revamped to offer comparable education with the one in which his son is enrolled.

    It is possible to contend that this is the first phase of the upgrading and that subsequent efforts would be made to bring all public schools in the state to the standard of the one under focus. Then, he should have waited for substantial improvement to be recorded in the entire education system before going to town the way he was seen last week.  And with mounting criticisms from the state against the dramatized enrolment, we are left with the inevitable conclusion that there is more to that enrolment than ordinarily meets the eyes.

    It is not just coincidental that the drama is coming on the heels of the flooding of the streets of Kaduna and Abuja with campaign posters of El-Rufai for the far-flung 2023 presidential elections. Suspicion is high that vaulting political ambition is at the centre of the attempt by the controversial governor to portray himself as a man of the people.

    He has not dissociated himself from the posters. And that gives further fillip to the suspicion that vaulting partisan political ambition is at the heart of all that drama. We will live to see how that ambition will serve the collective interest of our federal contraption.

  • ‘To secure, we have to love: herdsmen, kidnappers, Boko Haram and the climate of fear’

    Text of a lecture delivered by Chairman, The Nation’s Editorial Board, Sam Omatseye at the Annual lecture of the Faculty of Arts, Ekiti State University, Ado-Ekiti.

    Barely ten years ago, the Nigerian geographic sweep did not weep with bumps or deeps, except the physical ones. When we traversed the country’s landscape, death traps were open to the eyes. They were the Lucifer without spirits. The death traps materialised as craters on highways, sharp, precipitous drops  like cliffs. We know why. They arose from near illiterate survey works, and corruption that deprived some roads of enjoying the full weight of expenditure, according to the budget. They were unmistakable as gullies, unnatural valleys, potholes, sharp bends, erosions, and more. They accounted for fear on the highways. You didn’t have to drive slow, or speed to the death to die. As a character in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night put it, “care is an enemy to life.”

    Citizens died from collisions. They were of a variety sometimes craved now as the preferred option in a nation of sanguinary compulsions. Car-to car crashes, car-to-crater tragedies, trailers tumbling over fragile sedans, cars or buses sliding on mud-spattered paths into roadside ditches or bushes, or vehicles ramming into trees accidentally felled across the road, and so on.

    A few years back, a certain minister visited the Ore-Benin highway and she staged a rage of public tears. She bewailed the antediluvian atrocity of the structure. Humans – that is fellow citizens – found communion with wounds and fatal finalities on that fabled highway. I am referring to the former minister of oil, then of works, Diezani Allison-Madueke.

    Priests and imams prayed for wayfarers not to encounter death by the demons of bad roads or an ancient infrastructure.

    Today, it is a different story. Those plying some of the roads encounter bumps and deeps, but not just of the roads but of a vital part of their bodies: the heart. It is called palpitation. Death traps do not appear until you know them. Death traps are ghosts or spirits, bearing deaths and kidnapping. The highway menace is now two-fold. We fear the roads, the gullies, the valleys, et al. Now, we fear something infinitely more deadly: the brigand. We now fear and tremble, with bumps and deeps of the heart.

    Ten years ago, in another irony, it was safer when travelling from north to south. The traveller could sleep pacifically in the northern half of the trip, having no premonitions about highway robbers or killers or kidnappers. Now, the fear is more potent in the northern part than in the south. Once the travellers crossed the Middle-belt southwards, and entered such states as Edo, Nasarawa, Kogi etc, the eyes pop out in impotent vigilance. At night, the eyes are owlish. During daylight, the eyes are like owls in daytime. They are wide open but see nothing, until danger, ever lurking, pounces on them from the shadows. It does not pay whether you set out in the morning or at night. The journey will benefit from the prayer of one of Soyinka’s poems, that says, “You must set forth at dawn/ I promise marvels of the holy hour.”

    No holy hours now in the land. Demons frisk about at day, and like in Shakespeare play, Hamlet, “we are doomed for a certain term to walk the night.” The brigands who murdered sleep have murder and rapine awaiting the traveller every hour and at any turn.

    So, where did we get this problem, how did we become a nation that was not contented with the fatalities of the underdevelopment but now embrace the more spiritual, moral fatalities that some have now characterised as herdsmen clashes.

    Some have said it is a problem of ethnic suspicion. Some have chalked it up to poverty. Others said, it is merely the function of porous borders. A few have said it has been coming to us for decades, and the fatal ship only just arrived after a storm-tossed voyage. A few others say we have had religious fervour turned upside down, and that is what we get when we believe because, sooner or later, faith collapses into fanaticism.

    For those who say it is an issue of ethnic suspicion. They have their reasons. For instance, the Muhammadu Buhari administration has done little to project itself as an enclave none other than of tribal irredentists. Appointment after key appointment seems to present him as blindsided by his Fulani fidelity. His Kanuri appointees are seen not as Kanuris at heart but Fulani everywhere except in name and origin.

    But in spite of the outcry, it seems he hears only what his heart tells him. His heart beats only to the rhythm of his northwest origins, according to many of his critics. But it has been a nation of ethnic disloyalty, a fear of Nigeria as a nation. That accounts for why we hide under what the Yoruba call “Tiwa ni tiwa.” Our is ours. Let us recall an interview published in an online publication called The Niche with Professor Anya O. Anya, on the struggle for the June 12 actualisation.

    In the interview, Professor Anya recalled how the Yorubas and the Igbos had a handshake across the Niger, and formed what was known then as the Council of Unity and Understanding. Some of the key players included the great Pa Adekunle Ajasin, Ayo Opadokun, Segun Osoba, Ayo Adebanjo, and others from the southwest. From the east were persons like Ebitu Ukiwe, Professor Anya, and others.  The CUU did not anticipate the turbulence of the June 12 struggle and the maelstrom of the National Democratic Coalition or NADECO struggles.

    The group adopted Chief M.K.O Abiola as their candidate, and Theophilus Danjuma was also drafted into the field to include the Middle-belt. But once crisis hit the organisation, identity politics threatened to paralyse the body. It had happened when the body metamorphosed into NADECO after General Ibrahim Babangida annulled the June 12 polls in 1983.

    But the military had turned fierce and even bloody, clamping down on the media, opposition henchmen, civil society warriors, and students on the rampage. In responding to the annulment, the members of the group wanted to draft a statement to dissociate from the military move to nullify a democracy act. The Yoruba in the group thought that such a statement should include an ultimatum to the military government to reverse its position. The Igbo as well as votaries of the Middle-belt like General Theophilus Danjuma, thought otherwise. They saw such a move as perilous. Here is part of Professor Anya’s account:

    “But something happened that was to transform the nature of the NADECO that was formed. At one of our meetings, it was agreed that a statement should be issued, in that statement, there was one sentence that looked like an ultimatum to the government, I remember that Danjuma asked that the sentence be removed, Ukiwe also said the sentence should be removed and our argument was quite simple: that you are dealing with a military government and an ultimatum to a military government is a declaration of war. If they now decide to take you on, do you have the armament? Have you made the preparations?

    “So unanimously we agreed that the sentence should be removed but one of those things that happens in history, when the statement was published in The Punch, that sentence was still there. Of course, it upset some of us. I knew it upset Ukiwe and Danjuma.

    So, what happened? Why was the statement not expunged as agreed?

    “It turned out that after we had met, three people met again, all Yoruba, and decided that the sentence must be there.

    “I can’t speak for Ukiwe and Danjuma but I speak for myself. For me, it was a dangerous signal because what we were involved in, we were now going into a situation where any of us could be arrested, where it is even possible that any of us could be executed, the least you expect is that those people you are working with you can trust them, that whatever was agreed as our collective wisdom will be obeyed. That was dangerous because it means that you can get into an understanding and you go away doing certain things that was agreed and then the results will be different because some people are doing something else. So it undermined trust.”

    By this account, Professor Anya delineates what he saw as the metamorphosis of NADECO into a predominantly Yoruba force. This is the sort of suspicion that has eaten deep into the fabric of cooperation of the matter. In his recent book titled Battlelines, former Ogun State Governor Segun Osoba referred to the group, but he romanticised its virtues as a model of inter-ethnic harmony. But Anya saw it as a paragon of fear and distrust.

    All our stories of disaffection in Nigeria often start with the story telling. Who controls the narrative? Who is the better spinmeister? It is all about class and tribe and interests. The truth often is a casualty. The political scientist Harold Laski once asserted that “they think differently who live differently.” Those who describe Nigeria as a mere geographical expression find refuge in such episodes. The statement is credited to Chief Obafemi Awolowo, also echoed by one-time foreign minister Okoi Arikpo. But the expression is not original to the great Yoruba sage. The leading European Statesman Count Metternich said Italy was a mere geographical expression in 1814. It comprised a series of principalities occupying a space then known as Italian peninsula. This changed in 1870 when it became a single, harmonious nation.

    So what happened to the Igbo and Yorubas in the CUU that harmony melted into mistrust? It is the story of Nigeria. If we believe Professor Anya’s narrative, what shall we say? Was it that the Yoruba in the group thought the Igbo were cowards and did not understand the peril of June 12? Did the Igbo not understand that you cannot fight the military with kid gloves? Was it what the Yoruba were thinking? Were the Yoruba thinking in line with what Nobel Prize-winning novelist and absurdist philosopher Albert Camus enjoined when he said, “Better to die on one’s feet than to live on one’s knees?”

    If that was the position of the Yoruba, what was the need cohabiting with the Igbo? Why meet if they did not think there was a nexus for any such dialogue? Was it a case of Achebe in Things Fall Apart who turned Okonkwo as a tragic failure, who insisted on dying on his feet and lose rather than Obierika who insisted on living on his knees and compromise and ultimately surrender?

    Were the Igbo not right not to distrust a group that agreed during a meeting but went under cover to portray the wrong conclusions of the meeting? Does that portray the Yoruba in the group as capable of any sort of trust, or what the Yoruba call omoluabi? How, as Professor Anya noted, could the Igbo go into a fight with a person or group who jettisoned agreements. Did the Yoruba think the others were lackadaisical about the cause because Abiola was not their son, and so decided early on to conduct the duel with the military without the emotional or intellectual investment of the other tribes?

    At the bottom of this distrust is our perception of history and identities. So, it is such suspicion that has played out even in the resolution of the problem of resolving banditry in the country. But what is more important in the herders crisis is that it began, according to many analysts, in the ungoverned spaces. According to those who know, it is actually a battle between the Hausas and Fulani. This is a duo that have worked as two peas in a pod for over two centuries. It happened in the Zamfara State area where the Hausa, having been oppressed by the more prosperous Fulani, decided to lash back. It became a case of the Hausa who had since 1804 laboured under the lordship of the Fulani now taking back their pints of blood.

    Again we can also take our minds back to when the issue became a debate between those who wanted the herdsmen everywhere and those who did not care if they remained in the north. The argument was that they should be given ranches. You see, the argument for ranches could have been ordinarily unimpeachable. If the herdsmen had ranches anywhere, they would not wander into people’s farms, they would not have a reason to clash with locals because there would be no locals. But the question is not in the ranches. it is in the ranchers. That is our problem. We trust ranches but not the ranchers. If we don’t trust the ranchers, why would we live with their ranches?

    This takes us to our original sin? Distrust. We cannot work together even if we propound the best of ideas. In Plateau State, the Fulani arrived to the gusto of the natives’ welcoming arms. They were few then and that was decades past. They lived in harmony, but the population of the settlers grew. Then came the era of Ibrahim Babangida. He gave them a local government. They crowned their king, and suddenly, the concept of settler versus natives became a question of even constitutional dimension. They now had electoral legitimacy; they could vote and be voted for with enough numbers to tilt the election results against their hosts.

    Again, ordinarily, if we saw each other as neighbours, what was wrong with a people of so large a population seeking electoral legitimacy? After all, they came with their own culture and historical idiosyncrasies. How could they assimilate if the locals welcomed them while each maintained their individual characteristics?  Each group has their own values they compress to form culture. According to French writer and astronomer, Jerome Lalande,  values “most often represent a transition from facts to rights, from what is desired to what is desirable.”

    Remember this is the same Plateau where the popular Cock Crow at Dawn drama series flourished. The executive producer, Peter Igho, an Urhobo from Delta State, noted that the halcyon days that produced the drama no longer exists today. The same hosts now live in adversarial relationship with their hosts and claim proprietary rights over the landlords. That is what Governor Lalong has undertaken to douse by setting a template of harmony among the groups. To his credit, it has worked for most part, although we cannot rule out the eruptions of fifth columnists from time to time as we have seen.

    So, it was not that the Fulani could not have prospered without let. It was that suspicion grew when hegemonic forces came into play. Hegemony also comes because of a consciousness of a different identity from the host, and vice versa. The distrust of the Fulani by the locals grew because of the sense and perception that they (the Fulani) had grown proprietary wings.

    When the concept of RUGA took centre stage, many in the south said no. RUGA means the same as ranch. But it meant, according to those who know, a village in Fulani. It is a semiotic assault. They – that is the southerners – are not seeing them as merely a ranch but as a Fulani ranch. That killed the concept on arrival. The Plateau State Governor, Simon Lalong, tried to defrock it of its ethnic origin, by saying that a ranch by whatever name is a place where you breed animals for meat. That was clever but the politics of it puts semiotics over reality. Semiotics can also be its own reality.

    Yet there is a strong part of the narrative often downplayed in all these. It is the economic imperative. The herdsmen crisis has been posted as an economic issue. After all, the herders are selling animals, the customers are buying, and money keeps changing hands.

    Its supporters say the herder is not just an economic entity but a cultural one. Herding is their way of life. The herder has an almost ineluctable spiritual connection with the cow. So, the cow is not a totem; it has close to a totemic bond with its owner.

    But the economic factor stands. They have to eat to live to care for their animals. The reason the south has to accommodate the crisis in the first place is that if they hate the herdsmen they still love the cows. They need it for meat, for protein, for the big parties and assurance of a healthy life. They love the meat, if they think the herdsmen mean. If they must beef the seller, they must not beef the beef. Here lies the economic dilemma.

    cont’d – ‘To secure, we have to love: herdsmen, kidnappers, Boko Haram and the climate of fear’

     

  • Thinker. Worker. listener

    THE supporters of Abdullahi A. Sule may be gloating over his recent victory at the tribunal over his rival at the court. The double A governor just felled his challenger to the high seat of governor of Nasarawa State.

    But the fellow has also fascinated this writer as a few we have seen in the past, also a few in this dispensation. The man stands as a crossroads between the politician and the technocrat. In this era, we have another who I call the BOS of Lagos, Governor Babajide O. Sanwo Olu. His acts are starting to arc like rainbow over the city. In earlier eras, we had Babatunde Raji Fashola (SAN), the then governor of example and now the Trojan of works.

    But unlike Fashola and Sanwo-Olu, Governor Sule soared into politics from the summit of corporate Nigeria. Fashola and Sanwo-Olu rode formidable credentials but they happened on the political ring as uppercuts. Governor Sule anticipated the ring as a chest-beating wrestler. Yet, because he is from Nasarawa State without the neon lights and firmaments of the big city, some Nigerians will need to know that he is as good a technocrat as they came.

    His predecessor, the amiable Tanko Al-Makura supported him ahead of the other contenders in his APC. That was because he knew what few knew. Many Nigerians find credentials boring. They may be bored to learn that though they call him engineer, he is actually one. He did not pass a mere technical exam and arrogated it to himself like many of such ilk who pass off as engineers in a society that bows to titles. They will know that he gained his first degree in mechanical technology and his master’s degree in industrial technology from the Indiana State University in Terre Haute in the United States.

    But technocrats do not come in one package. A Godswill Akpabio is different from a Timipre Sylva, or a Sanwo–Olu, but technocrats are becoming an important part of modern democracy. The conflict, however, will continue to stalk governance and democracy in the near future as it has since the invention of the term and concept in 1919.

    The question has been whether the people’s mandate should take precedence over the efficiency of the unelected. Philosophers and sociologists have pondered this over generations. Saint-Simon, with an eye to a socialist nirvana, advocated a society where the politician would be flushed out of relevance by the cold-eyed efficiency of the technocrat. Daniel Bell, a capitalist roader, echoed Saint-Simon but for a different sentiment. Others like Thorstein Veblen want a match. They want a Sule to be in politics. Because Sule, who few know also trained as a firefighter in Texas, worked his 35 years that concluded with two boring distinctions. The first was the opportunity to save an oil behemoth from a humpty dumpty fall.  The firm AP Plc was looking at oblivion with a negative balance sheet of over N22 million. As chief executive he did not only give it first aid, it bounced to a surplus share capital of N5 billion in July, 2006.

    A year later, Aliko Dangote, always with an antenna for talent, head-hunted him in 2007, to be the managing director of the Dangote Sugar Refinery PLC but by the time he left for politics in 2018, Dangote trusted him to run his entire business empire as group managing director. Very boring indeed!!! Or indeed?

    Politics is exciting. It is like the fatty thigh in the soup. Technocracy is like the salad. Salad is boring. But we shall die of boredom without a few fat calories not only on our taste buds but also in the blood. Some technocrats have done well in politics. Some of them have acted as naturals like Asiwaju Tinubu, David Mark, Abiola Ajimobi. They are not without their Achilles’ Heels, though. But they don’t come in great numbers.

    But a politician who is not a good technocrat has no place in governance. Hence Aristotle suggested that no one should go into politics until they are forty years old and must have crested their professions. Politics is serious business and it is where the people say what they want and their listeners, the leaders, shepherd their desires. I don’t always agree with Aristotle on the politics of age, although his heart is in the right place. Ajimobi became senator after he headed one of Nigeria’s top conglomerates. He told me, as I recorded in his book, that he wanted to reach his acme as a technocrat before following the path of his father who was an Action Group force in Ibadan.

    What kind of a technocrat Governor Sule will be in politics is beginning to show in his first 100 days. He is beaming as a nurturer. While he wants to follow the path of all responsible governors who would not abandon a predecessor’s project just to stamp an individual imprimatur, he is showing he wants to train as a means of empowering. He is not one to make a nanny state, where all depend on government handouts.

    Governor Sule is focusing on training across the strata. He is doing that while giving many sewing and grinding machines to the youth and women, and setting up training schools in the state. But he knows he must do that in the context of a bigger picture like constructing technology innovation hubs. He has set the tone for the old by paying pensions, a thing that might smite Okorocha. He has deviated from the self-indulgent tone of many who set up airports for ego. Rather, his is a cargo one, focusing on commerce and economic empowerment.  Whether it is solar energy, of building rural roads, or intercity infrastructure, he is proving why he healed AP Plc and Dangote fished for him.

    It is still early days, but he has seen himself as a uniter in spirit, a man who sees no contradiction between Islam and Christianity, having grown up a Muslim but attended a Catholic school. This is the skill that he will have to bring into play to make the technocrat in him into a mandate, not just in polls but in the people’s heart.

    For a technocrat to succeed in politics, he has to bring a sort of drama into his acts. Awo began as a great politician. He ended a statesman who was more of a technocrat. That accounted for his inability to expand his base beyond his home region. He is Nigeria’s best leader ever. But he was a statesman first, which is the best virtue. As James Clarke noted, “a politician thinks of the next election. A statesman, of the next generation.” That was Awo. For me, the technocrat thinks of the next result. The virtue of the technocrat is impatience. They are managers in a hurry. That’s why men like Fashola and Akpabio were hailed after five years. But they would have flunked without the first of all virtues: political education. They knew the pulse on the streets. That’s why we cannot all agree with Plato, who applauds only the philosopher king.

    We need the thinker first, then the worker, then the listener. As the Prophet Isaiah said, “here a little, there a little.” This three-part goal is what Governor Sule is cultivating. So far, so good.

     

    Wilderness men

     

    THEY are everywhere. Young and middle-aged men like bush men. Their faces are drowned in bush. It enjoys no trimming or shaping, they are nature let loose on the wilderness. They see themselves as virile. I hear they do it to advertise their male significance as able men. Before it used to be a figure of a different kind of virility, not of male trouncing the female, but of men in holy, robust worship.

    The Muslim clerics still do it. The Jewish rabbi does that to distinguish his piety, his surrender to the ecclesiastical call. Graphic representations of Prophet Samuel and Abraham show them in holy beards. In Leviticus, the law encouraged it to distinguish God’s people from others. These days it is profane and superficial. It is not to show holiness, but the exact opposite.

    It is a projection of insecurity, also an admission that other than their beard, they have nothing to offer. It is an advertisement of impotence by other means. If they must wear those beards, let them be shapely or elegant. It also reflects an age of superficial joys, where inner beauty counts less than outward extravagance.

    The liberality of their beards may on the surface portray the liberalism of the age, but it does little to promote virtue. Rather it is a Freudian display of manhood.

  • Evacuating Nigerians!

    Even with copious assurances from South African authorities to halt xenophobic uprisings, it is good a thing steps have been taken to evacuate our citizens who feel seriously threatened by their continued stay in that country.

    In an uncommon display of corporate citizenship, a Nigerian airline, Air Peace has made two trips to that country repatriating 178 and 319 Nigerians craving to leave by all means. The number of evacuees would have been higher but for immigration hiccups introduced at the last minutes of the first airlifting operations. The airline had to fly back half empty after several hours of delay. Air Peace Chairman, Allen Onyema said the exercise would cost the company about N300 million.

    But as a mark of recognition of the rare corporate responsibility displayed by the airline, the House of Representatives has commended it with a recommendation to President Buhari to confer national honor on its chairman. That gesture spoke much of the level of uncommon patriotism displayed by the airline in time of serious national emergency. That is the type of proactive responses governments owe their citizens. Yet, here we find a corporate organization that is largely driven by profit taking the initiative. No amount of commendation given the airline can be considered too much given the enormity of the sacrifice it committed to the airlifting operations at its own cost.

    This column shares in the sentiments expressed by the House of Representatives and urges President Buhari not to waste time in appreciating the patriotism displayed by the airline. These days of increasing recline to primordial and parochial tendencies; celebrating that airline will spur people in other fields to emulate the good example.

    But there are others registered and ready to leave the country but not accommodated in the two flights. Their fate remains largely unclear. It is uncertain whether the airline is still prepared given the huge capital outlay to make another trip or some form of intervention will come from some other quarters. Even with the relative peace that has returned to that country, it is important that the federal government seizes the initiative from Air Peace and ensure that all those registered and ready for evacuation are assisted to leave the country without much delay.

    The narrative we get is that while many of those wishing to return had their means of livelihood either destroyed or burnt together with their travel documents, others had been stranded in that country for many years as the authorities refused to renew their work permit. Many do not even have the fare to ferry them back home. Such people constitute national embarrassment and should be brought back else their nuisance value re-enacts the same circumstances that breed irredentism.

    Read Also: Xenophobia: Nigerian Union in S/Africa lauds Air Peace boss for benevolence

    Yes, there are assurances from the South African authorities to stem xenophobic attacks and all such infractions. We have also been treated with some re-assuring diplomatic exchanges from the delegation to Nigerian that those incidents are at variance with what South Africa stands for as ‘a constitutional democracy’. Nigeria’s huge contributions to liberate that country from the strangulating chains of apartheid have also been cited as reasons our citizens should be entitled to fair treatment. All these can be admitted.

    Yet, they are not the real issues to the conflict.  Neither is there anything to indicate that the South African government deliberately engineered all the attacks and frequent killing of foreigners. At issue are allegations of criminal undertakings by foreigners; dealings in illicit drugs, grabbing jobs meant for citizens, ostentatious lifestyle, arrogance and having the best of their women.

    These are the issues to contend with. Attacking South African interests in Nigeria or evacuating citizens as desirable as it is; does not hold solutions to the issues that fuel rancor and animosities. The starting point will be to address and find resolution to all the complaints and grievances that breed distrust and precipitate violent attacks from South African citizens. Even then, it is estimated there are about 100, 000 Nigerians living in that country. Many of them have good businesses to their credit and will not be in a haste to leave. That the number of those evacuated so for is less than 0.6 per cent of our citizens living in that country says it all.

    When we compare that population with South Africans living in Nigeria, you will discover to your chagrin that their representation in this country is very negligible. You can also decipher that from the number of their companies in this country and their citizens both in the formal and informal sectors of our economy. The import of this is not hard to fathom. And it is that our citizens need that country more than theirs need ours. We should rather be more circumspect in giving in to mass hysteria and mob violence in our reactions to developments in that country.

    Reprisals as some had wanted to good us into will definitely prove rather counterproductive. What the situation requires is constructive engagement such that guarantees the rights of all law abiding people to their legitimate undertakings without fear of attack or molestation. That seems to be the message we can glean from the apologies from the South African delegation to Nigeria. Even with these assurances, there is still everything to suspect that the government of that country will tighten the noose around the activities of foreigners.

    There are speculations of ten years travel ban on Nigerians who made themselves available for evacuation in the on-going crises. The delays erected by that country’s immigration at the last minute were cited as part of the evidence of their discomfort with the development. We also hear of plans to refuse renewal of visas and work permits. All these are within the purview of the authorities of that country. There is practically little we can do here to change the situation should that country make good these speculations.

    But do we have their citizens in that number struggling desperately to live in this country? Are we in a position to extend equal measures to South African citizens without our citizens suffering immeasurable inconveniences in their country? Perhaps, answers to these posers will come handy when examined against recent statements credited to Blade Nzimande, South Africa’s minister of higher education, science and technology while addressing workers’ unions.

    Hear him: “we cannot absorb the results of all the problems that are made by leaders who want to loot their counties, who do not care about their own people. African leaders themselves must get their acts together, such that they do not destroy their country and people have to leave. It is time we ask those leaders in our continent, what are you doing to make your countries better places to live in”

    These are weighty statements. Issues raised by Nzimande, as blunt as they seem, are undoubtedly at the core of the constant skirmishes between South African citizens and other Africans who migrate to that country and other parts of the world in search of greener pastures. The high number of our citizens found in that country is on account of the better living opportunities there. And with high influx of foreigners (some of them without any genuine business) citizens of that country have had to contend with all that comes with the presence of such people.

    Given the recent experiences of the black South African population with the obnoxious apartheid regime, there is little doubt they are at some disadvantage when faced with competition from outsiders. Such discomfort manifests in the serial attacks and killings we have so for seen. The point Nzimande made is clear. And it is that the crises in South Africa have their roots in the influx of citizens of other African countries in search of better living conditions due to the mismanagement of their resources by rapacious and rogue leadership.

    The corollary is that its permanent resolution will hinge on the determination and capacity of African leaders to make their countries a better place for their citizens. He has said it all. African leaders aggrieved by Nzimande’s posturing should hide their faces in shame.

    For us in Nigeria, the message is unambiguous given the huge exodus of our citizens in the face huge natural endowments that are easily squandered by the privileged class.

  • Allegation of duress

    It’s unsurprising that Senator Rochas Okorocha, the immediate past governor of Imo State, is happy about his recent victory at the National Assembly Election Petitions Tribunal. It was another victory for him, after his controversial election as the Senator representing Imo West Senatorial District.  But the tribunal’s judgement in Okorocha’s favour didn’t lay the controversy to rest.

    The election petitions tribunal had dismissed petitions filed by Jones Onyereri  of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) and Osita Izunaso of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA),  challenging Okorocha’s victory  in the February 23 National Assembly election.  The petitioners claimed the Imo West Senatorial District election was characterised by irregularities, including intimidation and violence. But the tribunal held that the petitioners were unable to prove the allegations.

    When the Returning Officer, Prof Innocent Ibeawuchi, alleged that he was forced to declare Okorocha of the All Progressives Congress (APC) the winner of the poll, the allegation stained the winner as well as the win. Ibeawuchi had told reporters that he was held hostage from 7pm on February 24 till 11am the following day.  He was quoted as saying:  “I was compelled to announce the result which was inconclusive. I am a man of integrity and it is not true that the governor slapped me but I was held hostage by agents working for him. I was manhandled and I thank God I came back alive.”

    In an interview published on September 15, Okorocha said: “What is good about the judgement is that it has gone a long way to prove my innocence and to tell the world that my victory was not under duress, which was an action intended to paint me bad in the eyes of Nigerians. The tribunal has come to affirm that the election was not under duress; that I did not use force to get the victory as the senator representing Imo West. That for me is good news.”

    According to Okorocha, “The Returning Officer had announced the results and I was shocked after four days to hear that the Returning Officer said his child was kidnapped and that he was made to do the announcement under duress. That would mean somebody forcing you to do what you are not supposed to do. He calculated the votes from the wards for more than two hours and confirmed that everything was correct. So, where was the duress? When the court asked him where the duress came from, he could not answer it and that was when the court described him as a dramatist. That was a fabricated story which does not reflect any practical reality.”

    Now contrast Okorocha’s narrative with this February 25 report: “Before reeling out figures at the district collation centre in the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) Office in Orlu, Mr Ibeawuchi, a professor, said he was being held “under duress” to announce the results. “My name is Ibeawuchi Izuchukwu Innocent, a professor at the Federal University of Technology Owerri (FUTO), the returning officer for Imo West (Orlu) senatorial zone”, the official said. My area commander, my P.Os; the party agents here present; members of the press; ladies and gentlemen. I have been held hostage here for days so I’m trying to ease off and take my life home back to my children and for the sake of that I am calling these results under duress,” the returning officer said. He then reeled out the results.” Okorocha polled 97,762 votes to win the election, while Onyereri had 68,117 votes and Izunaso got 30,084 votes, Ibeawuchi had announced.

    Based on the don’s account, INEC withheld Okorocha’s certificate of return. Okorocha controversially got a certificate of return from INEC on June 11, following the order of a Federal High Court in Abuja. Justice Okon Abang’s judgement on June 7 favoured Okorocha who had challenged INEC’s decision to withhold his certificate of return. The judge said:”Once a declaration of the results has been made, that decision is final and can only be reviewed by the election petition tribunal and not by INEC… Once the declaration is made under section 68(c) of the Electoral Act, INEC has become functus officio (has completed its responsibility) and INEC has no lawful authority to withhold the Certificate of Return for any reason whatsoever.”

    According to Justice Abang, “If indeed, it is true that the Returning Officer made the declaration under duress, it is for the defendants who lost in the election to proceed to the election tribunal to challenge the election under section 138 of the Electoral Act… INEC has not, in its counter-affidavit, suggested that the plaintiff did not win the election. INEC did not declare the election as inconclusive. INEC did not declare that the election was won by any other person.”

    In response, NEC had highlighted “the likely consequences of this judgment for our electoral process in particular and our democracy in general.” The commission said in a statement: “Obviously, persons who seek elective offices could perceive in this judgment an irrelevance of due process and acting within the law.”

    “It is not farfetched that some of them could in future disregard laid-down processes, including voting, arm themselves and mobilise thugs and compel Returning Officers to declare them elected, irrespective of the true outcomes of the elections.

    “Moreover, it may become increasingly difficult for the commission to convince its officials that they are safe to carry out their legitimate functions without fear of being harassed, held to ransom or visited with bodily harm.”

    Does Okorocha’s victory at the election petitions tribunal mean Ibeawuchi’s allegation of duress is a fabrication? If  it is true that Ibeawuchi had declared Okorocha the winner under duress, why did the petitions against Okorocha fail at the tribunal?  Why were the petitioners unable to prove the allegation of duress? Why was Ibeawuchi unable to prove his allegation of duress? What was needed to prove the allegation of duress?

    The problem of electoral interference by candidates and their backers has various dimensions. A democratic system must not tolerate declaration of election winners under duress because democracy is not about duress. The big question is: If there was no duress, why did Ibeawuchi make an allegation of duress?

  • The Cow and Cowry

    IN the beginning was the land, and the land was with the people and the land was god. No one up till today, in spite of the sophisticates of technology and commerce, has been able to do it in. It has duelled men and with men, and men with it, and there is no effort that people ever made that was without the land.  When we fly, we come down to it alive, lame or dead; or when we paddle through roaring waters, we berth for peace. When it is all over, it has never lost appetite to swallow and digest the end of all flesh.

    It is the light of society even when we try to make light of it. Out of it we feed, on it we walk, from it we fly, for it we war and worry. Also, we make routes and in Nigeria, it has had its own tumults called the herdsmen and farmers.

    With a new government policy, it seems we are making peace with the land. It is perhaps the cowry, the mystique to cow the herd. When the idea was first propounded, the earth shook. They called it RUGA, and the storm was the name, not the idea. Or shall we say the name was the idea. RUGA is an Hausa word, and if it meant anything to those who did not like it, it was that the Hausa-Fulani in high places wanted to take over southern communities.

    Who would not think so when the whole idea was to call them RUGA in Kano and call them RUGA in Sapele or Onitsha. Did the locals not have their language? It came across as a hegemonic gambit and frowned at by those who did not call farm or cattle in the Hausa language.

    Meanwhile, Vice President Yemi Osinbajo was at the head of another project known as the National Livestock Transformation Plan (NLTP), and had to scramble to dissociate himself from RUGA. It became a name-tainting gamble to stand in Abuja and be tarred with the RUGA brush. Not I, said the vice president as though an echo of the bird in Wole Soyinka’s Death And The King’s Horseman.

    RUGA signified a ranch, but once you called it RUGA, it was a Hausa-Fulani ranch. Language can make the difference between war and peace, joy and suffering. It is a project of power. Literary and political theorists like Michel Foucault call it the rhetoric of discourse. It was language nationalism, and it is a sentiment that can change a meek man into a warrior.

    So, President Muhammadu Buhari cancelled it. So the Osinbajo project, working with others, became the saving face. But it was a project the north wanted, and the north only. Another man who had to confront the bear is the governor of Plateau State who is also the chairman of the Northern Governors Forum. It became clear that Governor Simon Lalong would have to expand his affairs as governor to the tempest of the region.

    But Governior Lalong now abides as governor in a relatively quiescent time, having confronted the apocalypse of the herder’s menace. He had set a template that made Plateau an oasis when others burned. Then the template fell into error from sabotage and it quickly found it feet after many dead. His solution, an envy and copycat of some neighbouring states, makes a case for him to lead his fellow governors at this time of unease in his region. As they say, cometh the hour, cometh the man.

    As one of the key figures working on with the vice president on NLTP committee, he had to bring the experience of the mechanics and politics. When he agreed on bringing ranching to his state, some forces opposed because they saw it has Fulanisation. But what he was doing was to revive a dead project long before he became governor. In fact, the existence of reserves dated back to the military era, to the colleagues of Jeremiah Useni, who got flunked in the last governorship polls.

    He had set up a 12-man committee headed by Prof Ochapa Onazi and members that included traditional rulers, Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) and Jama’atu Nasril Islam (JNI), as well as civil society organisations. This group recommended ranching. They were to revive the eight reserves in the state. But it turned out the army had appropriated the lands and only two reserves at Wase and Kanam survived the onslaught.

    The new project will encompass not only cows but also hens, goats, cocks, pigs, et al. It is a new way for peace, if we are ready for it. What this means is that herders don’t have to go about from place to place. Their cows will not moo into farms and munch the riches.

    If this works, it will be a historic shift. If the herders see their nomadic life as not only economic but also cultural, the NLTP project is fundamental, at least in the north. So what happens to the cattle and the argument that the cow cannot survive anything but a nomadic life. Obviously, it made no sense. The cow can be sedentary. It can sit, mull and moo.

    The cow will not mystify the grand poet John P. Clark, who in his famous poem, Fulani Cattle, wondered “what secret hope or knowledge/ locked in your hump away from man/ imbues you with courage/ so mute and fierce and wan/ That, not demurring nor kicking/ you go to the house of slaughter?”

    With Prof Osinbajo and Lalong working together, shall we not see this as the first major seed in putting to an end the suspicion? We still need to know the details. How is it going to be funded? Governor Lalong says it will be piloted by the federal government but it is essentially a local affair. Ironically the whole story started in the Jonathan era, and it had budgeted N100 billion. The Plateau State Governor clarified that the Buhari administration did not allocate N100 billion towards the dream.

    Peace is the first condition for prosperity. Governor Lalong with his colleagues just launched a mall in Kaduna as part of the effort to turn the north into post-crisis place. But Lalong knows that this is no easy venture. His experience in Plateau knows that to reconcile, you must watch. If he has been able to do it in Plateau, he has the challenge to do it all over north, especially with the bandits abroad in bushes and highways. the goons are rattling Governor Masari of Katsina State who heads the committee whose report is expected soon on security.

    The northern crisis has lingered too long. Lalong seems poised for success. So are all Nigerians.

     

    The Old man at Sea

     

    TO be old in Nigeria is to bleed and die alone. That explains the pensions system. It is tragic that most states are not interested in the lives and welfare of our senior citizens. Barely a third of the states pay pensions in the country. Rochas Okorocha, for all of his noise and flamboyant talk, has not been able to deny the charge that he did not pay pensioners when he was in office, even though he still would not yield government properties. For 77 months most of them did not get paid. Governor Emeka Ihedioha is undergoing a biometric investigation of those who are really elders. Preliminary report shows that there are ghost old men and women. Governor Ihedioha wants to know them and start payment immediately.

    His team is taking the data and combing everywhere. Old men should not be taken for granted. Gone are the days of communal joy when the old depended on the young. The rise of the city with individualism has alienated our senior citizens. They can hardly feed or enjoy healthcare. Hence the playwright, Tennessee Williams noted in his play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, that “you can be young without money, but you cannot be old without money.” Kudos Ihedioha.

  • Unprogressive continuity

    Self-restraint is in short supply among Nigeria’s Senators when it comes to spending public funds ostensibly for their work. That explains why the Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP), BudgIT, Enough is Enough (EiE) and 6,721 concerned Nigerians filed a suit at the Federal High Court, Ikoyi, Lagos, to  “restrain, prevent and stop the National Assembly Service Commission (NASC) from paying or releasing N5.550 billion budgeted for purchase of luxury cars for principal members of the Ninth Senate, and to restrain and stop the Senate from collecting the money until the downward review of the amount proposed by the Senate.”

    Describing the planned spending as unjust, unfair and unconstitutional, the plaintiffs argued that “The money could be better allocated to more important sectors of the National Assembly expenditure – like constituency projects and National Assembly-endowed educational scholarships.”

    This case is an interesting development. It remains to be seen whether the court will see things from the plaintiffs’ perspective. The case would have been unnecessary if the senators had shown a sense of restraint. The   Senate wants to buy Toyota Land Cruiser SUVs for its 109 members at an estimated cost of about N50m each. Does it mean only this brand at such price is considered befitting?

    The leadership of the House of Representatives is yet to determine the type of vehicles to buy for its 360 members. A source was quoted as saying: “The N34 million jeeps and the N14 million cars used by the 2015- 2019 Senators and Honourable members were sold off to them at between N1 million and N1.5million each.”

    Obviously, it is important to question the National Assembly’s questionable benefits. Do the federal legislators deserve what they enjoy simply because of their status? The federal legislature is not supposed to be a place where lawmakers just enjoy and enjoy.

    The benefits federal lawmakers enjoy make them look like political adventurers who are more interested in their own personal prosperity than patriotic performance that will enhance the country’s development.

    It is contracts and contractors season at the National Assembly. “The management of the National Assembly is in the process of awarding contracts worth at least N10billion as part of the efforts to ease the work of the newly inaugurated 109 Senators and 360 members of the House of Representatives,” a report said.

    According to the report, there will be contracts to supply “cars, television sets, refrigerators, water dispensers and office equipment, such as desktop computers, laptops, printers, scanners, and photocopying machines.” The new items will replace the old ones used by members of the 8th National Assembly, which were sold to them at giveaway prices after their tenure.

    Last-minute sales of office items to outgoing federal lawmakers at ridiculously low prices reflected a culture of waste. The items included computers, scanners, photocopying machines, plasma television sets, microwave ovens, standing fans, deep freezers, refrigerators, furniture and rugs.  Those who bought them were expected to pay with money deducted from their severance package.

    A piece of information exposed some of the outgoing lawmakers as greedy for gain.  According to a report, “Although some of the lawmakers gave the acquired items to their aides and supporters, others chose to sell theirs to willing buyers within the National Assembly complex.”

    Of course, those who sold the items they bought were business-minded and interested in profit. It was profitable for such lawmakers to buy and sell because the items were sold to them at giveaway prices.  Eleven office items were said to cost a total of N367, 479.33.

    The report said: “The breakdown showed that a Samsung double door refrigerator was given out for N25, 000; HP Envy Core 13, N49, 000; Apple Ipad Air computer, N41, 980; LED TV Samsung UA4600AR 50, N59, 500.

    Shredding machine, N19,800; Water dispenser with bottle, N8,990; Photocopying machine Sharp Copier AR 6021 N57,172.00; Scanner HP Scanjet Pro 3900 Fi N20,130.00; HP Laserjet Pro M201 N10,038.00; Desktop Computer Model Envy 233  Touch screen;  and Suit hanger N1,900.00. Any member taking the entire 11 items would pay N349, 970, 50, with N17, 498.83 as VAT for items.” This means the cost of the 11 items is less than N400, 000.   However, the report said the current market value of the 11 items was over N3m. This is a list of some of the items and their market prices: “LED television, N300, 000; HP Envy Core 13, N400, 000; HP Desktop Envy233 , N420,000; Samsung double door refrigerator, N315,000; Sharp Copier AR6023, N380,000; HP Laserjet M201 dw, N120,000; HP Scanjet Pro 3500F1, N195,000; and Cway water dispenser, N50,000.

    It is convenient for those involved in the transactions to argue that the items were used items. But can this justify the low, low prices?  The point is that the items were still usable. Indeed, even though they were tagged “used,” the items were unlikely to go for such giveaway prices outside the National Assembly, observers argued.

    Now that the items have been sold to outgoing legislators, incoming legislators will need to be provided with new items. That’s how a culture of waste is perpetuated.

    Then there is the hot issue of running costs. A former senator, Shehu Sani, had told the world that every senator got N13.5m monthly to run things. This fantastic figure is in addition to their salaries, he revealed last year, while he was a member of the upper legislature. It doesn’t make sense that senators get so much to cover so-called running costs. Each member of the House of Representatives gets between N8m and N12m for running costs monthly, a report revealed last year. What does it take to run the offices of federal legislators? How much is surplus to requirements? How do the legislators produce evidence that the money for running costs was spent for running costs?

    None of the legislators in the National Assembly may be ready for change, given what they enjoy because things are the way they are. Unprogressive continuity isn’t the next level Nigerians expect under a progressive federal government, properly so called.

     

  • Bandits’ swap

    Two closely related events in Katsina State last week illustrate vividly the predicament of that government in the festering armed banditry that has reduced life to a miserable lot for many of its citizens.

    First, was the publication in many national newspapers and the social media of a group photograph in which Governor Aminu Masari posed with the leader of the so-called bandits clutching an AK-47 assault rifle. The picture which was taken after the governor ostensibly held an amnesty meeting with the bandits also featured an unarmed Nigerian Army officer among other personalities.

    This was followed a few days later by an announcement from Masari of the swapping of six arrested bandits for 20 kidnapped citizens of the state in the detention cells of the gang. By the terms of the agreement, the bandits are to throw open farmlands with a promise not to harass or attack farmers and guarantee women unfettered access to markets to sell their dairy products. Masari rationalized the deal as part of on-going dialogue and negotiations between the state government and commanders of the various bandits’ groups terrorizing citizens in eight frontline local government areas of the state.

    There is the temptation to sympathize with the decision of the Katsina State government to swap six arrested bandits for 20 of its citizens kidnapped by the murderous group. The plight of the innocent citizens must have moved the state government into accepting the arrangement at least, to mitigate their sufferings. This is especially so, given the inability of the law enforcement agencies to get an enduring handle to armed banditry that has reduced life in parts of that state to a verity of the state of nature.

    By the calculations of that government, the exchange will ensure sustainable peace in the affected communities that have been held prostrate by the unending devious escapades of the bandits. If the swap succeeds in reining in the bandits, Katsina State would have recorded a great feat in successfully taming the monster. We may have to live with this optimism at least for now.

    Yet, it remains largely probable that bandits’ swap is all that is required to comprehensively and realistically identify and address both the immediate and remote causes of the recurring insurgency of that group. Even then, from the attestations of the state government, what the exchange is meant to achieve is largely of very limited value. All the same, it is good the so-called bandits’ commanders have pledged not to attack farmers and women going to the markets. They may also refrain from their regime of extortions and ancillary criminalities.

    If these happen, relative peace would have returned to that troubled state. That would be something to cheer. But this conclusion would amount to a very simplistic perspective of the matter. First, it is based on the underlying assumption that the commanders involved in the negotiations represent all the tendencies in the banditry business and that any agreement entered into with them would be binding on all. This may not be exactly so.

    There is also the other assumption that swapping the bandits for the kidnapped victims is all that is needed for the cessation of armed hostilities in that troubled state. It is unlikely to be so. There is the further presumption that the exchange and the promises extracted from the bandits’ leaders are the real issues to the reign of terror in the state. They are not the issues that gave rise to armed banditry in the first instance.  We may soon discover to our utter consternation that we have been treated to a public relations stunt that only scratched the surface of the matter.

    If anything, our experience in negotiations with the Boko Haram insurgents does not imbue much confidence that the Katsina bandits’ swap would immediately herald an end to armed banditry in that state. We are all living witnesses to the devious and whimsical conduct of Shuibu Moni, one of the five Boko Haram commanders freed in the swap that lead to the freeing of 82 Chibok Girls.

    After his release in which Wall Street Journal reported two million British pounds exchanged hands, Moni soon made his way back into Sambisa forest from where he issued new threats against the government. In a video footage, Moni and members of his team displayed awesome military might insisting that they remained very firm in that forest contrary to claims by the government.

    If the conduct of Moni and his team could be dismissed for any reason, the fact that Boko Haram insurgency has persisted years after that deal facilitated by the Swiss government cannot give much hope that the Katsina experiment will bring to a conclusive end armed banditry in that region. The state government will have to contend with the propriety of freeing and granting amnesty to bandits some of whom we have been told are foreign nationals. It would appear, we are yet to understand all there is to the insurgency of the bandits.

    More seriously, it made a mockery of the nation’s security architecture that a so-called armed bandit was allowed to enter the negotiation table with Governor Masari and his team and they saw nothing untoward in posing in a group picture with him in the manner it was published. It speaks volumes on the double standards that characterize the enforcement of the ban on such weapons. And if one may ask, what message was that photograph meant to serve?

    Without prejudice to the rights of the Katsina State government to find local solutions to the festering law of the jungle; bandits’ swap being limited in nature, is severely impaired in offering enduring therapy to all there is to that malfeasance. This is so because the state government is just targeting the manifestations of banditry rather than the conditions that nurture and sustain such activities.

    It does appear serious efforts are yet to be deployed in identifying the core of the banditry that has held parts of the northwest on the ground for some years now. Even then, discordant views from government circles do not seem to help matters. Nobody seems to know for certain, the real causes of armed banditry for which Zamfara and Katsina states have carved unenviable notoriety in.

    In the absence of concrete efforts to get at the root of the matter, various theories were bandied at different times to account for the phenomenon. Initially, cattle rustling was said to be at issue. That speculation faded away when bandits began to raid villages, killing innocent people and looting their properties. There was also the narrative of infiltration by foreign nationals; effects of climate change and the decrease in arable lands as contributory factors.  The federal government introduced another dimension to the Zamfara banditry when it claimed that illegal mining of gold was at the center of it all. It went ahead to ban all mining activities in that state on the grounds that a link existed between mining activities and banditry in that state. There is also the economic condition that force people into one form of criminality or the other.

    The Chief of Army Staff, Lt-Gen. Tukur Buratai upped the ante when he added partisan political dimension to the lingering banditry. He had said: “There are myriads of security challenges we are facing right now in the north-west, north-central and other part of the country. I want to believe and rightly so, that with the fallout of the just concluded general elections, there are politicians who saw their defeat as a means of revenge, sponsoring these criminal activities and even banditry and clashes between farmers and herders”.

    From the foregoing, it is obvious that there is yet any consensus on the factors or a combination of them that are at the root of the festering armed banditry in parts of the country. And in the absence of such consensus, evolving durable therapies would at best, remain a tall order. And that exposes the limitations of the measures taken by Katsina State to address armed banditry.

    It remains to be conjectured how bandits’ swap could possibly address all the complex issues associated with such uprisings. The government must first undertake a critical appraisal of all the factors that predispose people in the affected states to armed banditry. It is after such assessment that it will be in a better stead to evolve lasting solutions to the problem. Anything to the contrary will at best, remain cosmetic.

    But utmost caution must be exercised in the way the bandits are handled; else we may have Frankenstein monsters to contend with sooner or later. The Boko Haram insurgency offers a lesson to all.

  • Eating our own flesh

    While youths rage here and in South Africa, we should remember that our own juvenile boil has been targeted at fellow citizens. Their grouse is not because of so-called xenophobia but because they belong to the same country and community. Fellow Nigerians suffocate them. They hate them because they want them to be outcasts in their country. They also want to cast them out of the earth. So, no use for moral superiority here. We also did it against Ghana in the Shagari era.

    In the aftermath of the herders imbroglio that consumed citizens in rural areas, Governor Simon Lalong secured funds on the platform of AfriJapan as part of the drive to rebuild the broken lives like the citizens of Nghar village of the cleric who saved Christians in a mosque from the jaws of marauders. They made bonfires of their homes and properties and they became IDP habitués.

    Rather than focus on violence, we can look to more peaceful ways to engage countries and our young, and some of our leaders do that. One of them was the AfriJapan arrangement that Governor Lalong secured $300 million to improve livelihoods in rural areas

  • The Irish wizard

    So, we think that the problem was that South Africa’s loathes Nigerians. But it is. A failure of temperament and collapse of decorum. Yet it masks an angst lodged in both countries: Elite and government failure. The hatred launched itself with a subterfuge. It crept into our soul with a new word but “xenophobia” reflected how language can detract from the very malaise of the times.

    The states of both countries were trading diplomatic tackles while quietly congratulating themselves. The reason? The angry mobs were not a vote of no confidence on the state. It was a vote of no confidence of the poor in one country against the poor of another. In both countries, mass unemployment abound. One idle class the poor, and the other idle class the rich cherished a solidarity of indolence. They lashed out at the hardworking poor. For the elite though, diplomacy was a sport, a ceremony of violence minus the blood. The savage sport was down the ladder: blood, gore and eyesore belonged far away in the pit and squalor of hoi poloi.

    So this essay will peer, without reverence, at one episode that reflects why the state makes the poor impolite. It is the story of a company known as Process and Industrial Development (P&ID) that wants to milk Nigeria of $9.6 billion because of Nigeria’s tissue infection: corruption.

    That money was secured against the Nigerian state by a roadside mechanic who became a showbiz hustler. He knew everyone that was anybody in the Nigeria’s vortex of power. He knew Obasanjo, the late President Yar’Adua, the vocal, self-righteous Danjuma. Having failed to make it as a big name in showbiz in his native Ireland, he turned Nigeria into a showbiz for himself.

    His name was Michael Quinn. Though a big name among the Nigerian elite, he was of no value to the economy except to ruin it. A name without integrity, yet he was trusted by those who worked him and with him. He embodied the honour among thieves. He fit into how the Revelations described a false grandeur: “Thou hath a name that thou livest, but thou art dead.”

    He did not have a university education, set up companies that no one could trace their origins or staff, but he succeeded in turning this country into a cesspit and a laboratory of his experiments in lies, deception, and connivance. He was a laundromat of corrupt officials, a sick lever to review contracts over and over, a conman for decoys from the eyes of investigators. He was everything to everyone. He was a golfer to the athletic, an engineer to the scientist, a medical expert to the doctor, an oil baron to the oil industry, a gun runner to the miscreant, an accountant to the fiddler of figures, a spy to the diplomat, a fashionista, a military expert, a foodie who loved fish and chips, a socialite, a father and husband.

    He was a complete man in a wrong definition of manhood. He was the reverse of the universal man of the renaissance. My history professor Femi Omosini described Leonardo Dan Vinci as “a universal man of the Renaissance, a veritable jack of all trade and master of many.” Quinn was a master of the wrong trades and mastered them all. He was involved in oil bids, oil and gas deals, HIV projects. He had a prime finger in the construction era boom of the 1970’s. Remember  the Cement Armada, a scandal that ate up the career of Benjamin Adekunle, the “Black Scorpion? Quinn was an unseen spirit working the miracles.

    He was the chameleon who sparkled with the right colour for the environment. This mechanic was also a fop, dressed in his suits, a debonair look, moustachioed. So ruddy and smooth were his whiskers that he was compared to the goat species called mohair.  He was not good at businesses in Europe where things followed a civilised standard. He tried though with a fellow showbiz man, Albert Reynolds, when that fellow became prime minister of Ireland. Typical “men of grace” like him never get caught. The European Union flung its cobweb at him, but the roach crept out into the dark.

    He set up quite a few businesses, including one to make video cassettes, but they went belly up like a roach. In Nigeria, his businesses did not have to succeed. They only needed to be set up. In fact, his businesses were setups, entrapments for Nigeria in collaborations with Nigerians. Unlike in a scandal in Europe where his name and company were apparently traced including transactions, he was squeaky clean here. In the Mahon Tribunal scandal in Europe, they found his signature and company accounts in regard to some unkempt transactions. He denied. In Nigeria, he never had to deny and was free. In the Mahon Scandal, the weight of evidence dropped like a log but he ducked. No one knows why.

    He had a sense of religious irony. The company that built a factory with government money to make equipment to treat HIV patients was called Trinity, but it never took off. The company whose first name is Sheda was shed. Another irony.  He was also a military contractor who raked in millions of dollars for repairing and procuring parts of military tanks in Bauchi that never happened. The contracts were endlessly reviewed.

    The company that secured a $9.6 billion fine is like Quinn. It has no website, no staff, no known offices, no pedigree of successes.  General Theophilus Danjuma, who kept mum while the matter was raging until Bloomberg Businessweek interviewed him, said he knew the man and he had invested $40 million in the business and the man ran away with the investment. We need more explanation from the general. Even if Bill Gate’s $10 million were taken away by such a conman the world would know. He would be pursued to the ends of the earth.

    The general is quick to aerate about the murderous herdsmen and failures of coups and governance.  He could not find his voice until western reporters barrelled into his space and forced the words out of his commander lips.

    It is obvious Quinn did the business with Nigerian connivance. The story is also the failure of due process, unfruitful dalliance of our bureaucracy, the incompetence of our attorneys-general, including Malami who had an opportunity to clear it away when they offered $850 million dollars in settlement, including the rapacious naivety of our lawyers. The only Nigerian witness who appeared in court did not know anything about the case. Yet the interest mounts $1 million a day. The money amounts to seven years of education budget, or a quarter of our annual budget. It is about oil and gas but the fine could end gas flaring forever.

    It is a story of colonial mentality and inferiority complex. We assume the superior mentality of the western partner. We still have stories today like Siemens, about how the white man comes here to collude with our Nigerian official to fleece us. It is also a narrative of the military and their footloose morality and how they gave contracts and looted. Our civilians took over from where they left.

    Quinn was like the character in Kosinski’s novel Being There, of a man who cannot read but, by the happenstance of capitalism, rises and is being touted to become the United States president.

    Quinn was also like Jay Gatsby in the novel The Great Gatsby, who came from nothing, grew rich from questionable sources, and threw parties frequently to gain the attention of his childhood sweetheart who never materialised. He was a man without a community, except himself.

    No wonder, just like Gatsby at his funeral, Quinn was alone. At his funeral the music, the Lonesome Boatman, was his swansong. He was a serpent, and died like one – alone.

    Just as it is light out for Quinn, it’s still lights out for Nigerians for whom the P&ID contract was supposed to provide electricity. Cynically, the Irish wizard and his cohorts clinched the deal when, on sick bed, Yar’Adua as president was going “gentle into that good night,” apologies to Dylan Thomas. A necromantic affair.