The Nation Newspaper

Category: Monday

  • Three patients

    Three patients

    On New Year’s Day, I paid a visit to the hospital to show empathy to those not privileged to say happy new year to their fellow humans. Even if they said it, they did so without the cheer of an optimist but out of a ritual necessity.

    They were not at the place of vanity where beer frothed and the glutton had his feast. They did not enjoy the spiritual luxury of grand services ushering in a new year.

    I decided to visit the Lagos State University Teaching Hospital (LASUTH), and see the fragile clinging to life. LASUTH is growing into the hospital of choice of many, not only in Lagos, but across the country.

    For a government-run institution, we see the preponderance of facilities and eager zeal of doctors and nurses as far as we can see it in our society where competence and zest for work are replaced with the fervency of self-interest and casual attention to duty.

    I visited the pediatric complex. After the wary staff allowed me in, I was able to meet three patients with whom I could show some attention.

    The nurses identified a few others, but picked Marvelous, Mubarak and Idris.

    The first sense that assailed me at the sight of the three was helplessness. They were in the hospital but had no choice. A few days earlier, Governor Idris Wada of Kogi State had just declared, in a pose of boastful vanity, that he did not want treatment abroad. He was involved in an accident.

    The three I saw were even privileged to be in that hospital because the Lagos State Government had put in place a system where they did not pay for surgery, or bed or some of the services rendered free by LASUTH. In other places abroad, they could have paid the equivalent of millions of Naira.

    Yet they would have wanted better services, and they could have flown abroad if they had the resources at Governor Wada’s disposal, or Governor Chime’s or Suntai’s.

    Marvelous had a network of plasters that robbed her pretty face of its cherubic charm. She had been born over a month, and the parents had found it difficult to string together hours of sleep. Her problem was a little similar to that of Idris in that they were born without anuses and the doctors had to construct apertures to let out their body wastes.

    Idris had had two surgeries, and the parents were hopeful. The nurses, who spoke with intimate knowledge of their situations, also expressed pathos as she narrated little Marvelous’ troubles. A tube was passing blood away from her face. What was that? It had just occurred signifying that the second surgery also was a dud. The staff said it was not fresh blood, but until the doctors came the following day, no one would say the source of the crimson flow.

    But father and mother had given up, and they complained of money. The father, a fellow who could mask his despair more than mother who was a bundle of doldrums, said they wanted to go home. To what? They didn’t know. Father was worried that mother had lost all hope, and did not want to lose mother. Mother, moved to tears, choked whenever she wanted to utter any words. Meanwhile, the eyes of Marvelous seemed sharp, almost pleading. The nurse expressed more hope than father and mother.

    In Idris’ case, he was much older, about seven years, with a look of indifference to the world around him. But he had deceptive energy.

    Father and mother were also beside them but they could not utter any words as the visitor stood beside them. They looked more despondent than the sick. He had surgery but it did not resolve the matter, and he was now sore. He would have to heal before any corrective surgery. How long? No one knows. It could take months. The parents also complained of money, to buy some medication to keep the boy afloat. They complained that it cost them N1,000 a day, and it was too much. Idris did not look as healthy as Marvelous, precarious as the little girl looked. Like Marvelous, the doctors opened apertures for the release of their human wastes.

    Mubarak had a different story, but father was not there at the time. Mubarak’s case was desperate, and the mother, who has abandoned a business as a petty trader, gave an expression of one fighting against surrender.

    Mubarak is about four years old, and his case is that of abscess. He suffered a hole in the heart and it pumped pus into his brain. An operation was successfully done to rid the head of the pus. Thanks to the LASUTH doctors. But that is not the end of the story. He needs surgery that has to happen abroad, in India. Money. She needs about N2 million to fly the boy abroad and apply treatment. The boy’s limbs are weak and he struggles to eat. A bandage crowns his innocent face and gleaming skin.

    As I walked out of the hospital, I had overdosed on concern. It occurred to me that there are a good number of people who splurge on meaningless habits when just a fraction of what they have can help the needy like Marvelous, Idris and Mubarak. But we seem not to care about the affectionate society.

    Why can we not have a few of the rich go to hospitals like LASUTH and complement government efforts by adopting a patient? Some can adopt a ward, and others a section, others an ailment, some a particular brand of drugs, and others still can do equipment or sponsor doctors for update training. It would depend on the fatness of their wallets.

    It is also true that what in the United States is called MEDICAID is absent here. In the Nordic countries as well as in Canada, the states provide a form of backup for the vulnerable. But the state can only go so much. Those societies have developed elaborate tax systems upon which they draw for the very sick. But I think that a sort of insurance programme is necessary, that will need the contribution of those who work.

    I see how many fritter away minutes on recharge cards, almost as an addiction for some frivolous calls. I wonder if we cannot start a scheme in which the ordinary worker donates between N50 and 100 a month, and that is put in a medical trust fund. With this, we can rake in billions of Naira every year, and that will go to upgrading medical infrastructure and helping the Marvelouses and Idrises and Mubaraks of this world.

    Maybe Marvelous who reportedly died the night of my visit would still be alive today. Such a programme will enhance the medical welfare already in Lagos with the free services especially for children and the elderly, which is also available in Delta State. Osun State has initiated a programme aimed at the vulnerable, including home care.

    The narrative of LASUTH unveils positive government efforts but also the institutional limitation in a society in which self trumps others.

    There are many little children seeking help. No one is praying for them like Chime and Suntai. These guys have resources but not health. They have neither health nor resources , but only prayers. Their state is like patients in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s novel Cancer Ward where, like the Soviet society, the inmates depend only on inner joy to survive. What the patients suffer the society imposes.

    The problem is not medical but moral. If everyone joins in, we can heal this society. And as Tolstoy, another Russian novelist, says in War and Peace, “how can one be well… when one suffers morally?”

  • Obasanjo’s double speak

    Obasanjo’s double speak

    When former President Olusegun Obasanjo speaks, we are wont to take him very seriously. Apart from having presided over the affairs of this country at three different times, he is very highly respected at home and also by the international community having been engaged in peace negotiations and sundry activities in and around the globe. He has also been actively involved in shaping the content and direction of this country right from the civil war days till date.

    Whatever opinion such a personage volunteers on the affairs of this country, is bound to have profound influence on the thinking and direction of its people. Not a few Nigerians were therefore taken aback last week when he spoke to the CNN on how best to handle the Boko Haram menace in the country.

    Apparently unmindful of his previous views on the matter, Obasanjo had criticized the handling of the Boko Haram insurgency by the Jonathan administration on the grounds that it did not apply the ‘carrot and stick’ in fighting the scourge.

    Hear him, “to deal with a group like that you need the carrot and stick. The carrot is finding out how to reach them. When you try to reach out to them and they are not amenable to being reached out to you have to use the stick”

    He said Jonathan is just using the stick.

    The purport of Obasanjo’s contention is that Jonathan is only applying maximum force to the Boko Haram menace without engaging them in some form of dialogue. For him, this approach cannot effectively address the potent danger posed by that sect. That is Obasanjo’s opinion and he is entitled to it.

    A couple of weeks back, the same Obasanjo had berated the same administration for its slow action in fighting the scourge. He had then drawn parallels between his deployment of soldiers to Odi and Zaki Biam in Bayelsa and Benue states respectively and the Boko Haram challenge arguing that the menace could have been nipped in the bud if the government had acted fast as he did in these two states.

    But Jonathan sharply rebuffed that assertion arguing that the deployment of troops in Odi was a colossal disaster as it did not solve the problem of militancy in the Niger Delta region. He said the invasion only succeeded in the killing of innocent children, old men and women without hurting a single militant.

    Apparently sensing the dangers in his recommendation, Obasanjo through his former spokesman Femi Fani-Kayode attempted to reverse himself arguing that he never recommended the Odi approach to be applied to the Boko Haram menace. He said what he meant was that a solution ought to have been found or some sort of action ought to have been taken rather than allow the matter to fester overtime like a bad wound and get worse. Not many believed in this revisionism then.

    If Obasanjo had no intention of recommending the Odi strategy to the Boko Haram menace why compare the two? Why talk of quick action and the nipping of the matter in the bud if those references are not to the quick use of force? Was it possible to nip the Boko Haram insurgency in the bud then through negotiations whose duration Obasanjo himself could not predict?

    Thus, despite Obasanjo’s attempt to clarify his position on the matter, he left no one in doubt on his preference of brute force in handling Boko Haram.

    It is therefore very astonishing for the same character to now pontificate on the so-called carrot and stick approach as the best solution to the menace. If he was aware of such a strategy, why the copious references to the brute show of military force in Odi and Zaki Biam? Again, why did he not apply the carrot in those instances only for his predecessor Yar’Adua to give meaning to it?

    Today, the relative peace in the Niger Delta region owes its success to the late president. Yet Obasanjo was there for eight years and only found the stick the most appropriate option to militancy. May be then, he had not been sufficiently schooled in the carrot dimension to problem solving and can be excused on that ground.

    But this later day convert of the carrot approach has so contradicted himself that it is now difficult to understand where he stands on the matter. In one breadth he accuses Jonathan of being tepid and not acting fast and decisive. In another, he carpets him for solely relying on force rather than reaching out to the insurgents. These are contradictory positions with little value for our understanding of his real stand on the matter.

    In the face of this double speak, one is left with the inevitable impression that Obasanjo is being less than honest in the matter and should not be taken seriously. It seems his anecdotal positions are designed more to get even with Jonathan for whatever reasons.

    More fundamentally, the allegation that the carrot is not being applied in the instant case, contradicts the more. It was the same Obasanjo who sometime ago, reached out to the loyalists of the late leader of the original Boko Haram Mohammed Yusuf in a peace effort brokered by Mallam Shehu Sani in Maiduguri. Was the man who hosted him at that event not killed shortly after for daring to receive him? There was also the peace effort brokered by Dr. Datti Ahmed which failed mid-way due to mistrust among the parties. There have been other offers that failed to take off the ground due to suspicion on the quarters from which they were emanating. Even then, the federal government has said time without number that it is not averse to a peaceful end to the crises.

    All these go to underscore the point that Obasanjo’s carrot approach has been part of the calculations in ending the menace. He may quarrel with the progress in this direction. But he must admit that at no time was that possibility foreclosed.

    The point of divergence has been the insistence of the federal government that it cannot negotiate with ghosts. It wants the leaders of the group to come out, table their grievances and commence the negotiations. But because of the atrocities committed by the group, nobody would dare come out to be identified as their leader for fear of reprisals. That has been the main issue even as there is a welter of public opinion against negotiating with such a criminal and murderous group.

    Obasanjo cannot claim ignorance of the fact that Boko Haram in its present form is nothing but political grievances masquerading under a religious garb. It has its root in the way the last presidential primaries of the PDP were conducted and he was a prime actor in the events that brought about that pass. That party should hold itself accountable for the orgy of violence unleashed on this country by Boko Haram. The simmering bad blood between Obasanjo and Jonathan is an admission of failure by the PDP led government. At the root of it all, is the touted ambition of Jonathan in 2015. Maybe Obasanjo wants to recompense for his sins in the mortal mistake of scuttling the zoning arrangement of his party. That could be the potent handle to Boko Haram insurgency.

  • Yar’Adua’s ghost

    Yar’Adua’s ghost

    Those who heaved a glorious sigh when former President Umar Yar’Adua passed on should rethink. Don’t gloat quietly. We have not slain his ghost forever. In the words of Poet Dylan Thomas, he has not gone “gentle into that good night.”

    The past few months point to his “rage against the dying of the light.” His meek and gentle soul is squirming in his grave. He haunts us from the soft earth of Katsina where his body was swathed in cloth and domiciled forever.

    His ghost – or ghosts – hovers over us with subliminal vigour. Unlike other personages, Yar’Adua translated at death into many ghosts. The ghost of succession, the ghost of the cabal, the ghost of the doctrine of necessity, the ghost of acting or not acting president, the ghost of ethnic divide and north-south infighting, the ghost as intriguer.

    When he was sick, he was a Lazarus who died and came back to life. Like in the book of Genesis, when the serpent seduces Eve to eat the forbidden fruit, Yar’Adua “shall not surely die.” And the nation, ever facile to the theatre of the absurd, embraced it all, shivering with a sadistic thrill at all the actions, tensions, climaxes and anti-climaxes.

    When he was buried and succumbed to the era of the shoeless maestro, we only had a short respite before he reminded us that our leaders are not always dead but they follow our scent. Hence, in all our histories, we even deified our dead, especially in Yorubaland. Enter Ogun. Enter Oya. Enter Sango. Exit mortality.

    He is not in the throes of the presidency today, but we see his ghosts in five states already, roiling and tormenting the governors. They include Kogi, Kaduna, Taraba, Enugu and Cross River. In each of these states, the troubles of the last days of Yar’Adua are alive and well.

    As I write, Governor Danbaba Suntai of Taraba State, Governor Sullivan Chime of Enugu State and Governor Liyel Imoke of Cross River are abroad for medical reasons. Governor Patrick Yakowa died in an unfortunate air disaster, while Governor Idris Wada escaped death in a fatal accident that lapped up his ADC. He sustained leg injuries and may be confined to the wheelchair for about half a year. All of these instances evoke the constitutional fever that dramatise our lack of faith in the glory of the rule of law. They also expose our political class for not transcending the puerile antics and feline manoeuvres of the intriguer.

    Last week, Governor Suntai’s media team wired us a picture of the governor with his wife and newly delivered twins. Since pictures don’t lie, the message was clear: all those (shall we say cabal?) who are hankering for his position on the pretext that he suffers brain damage and could not assume the post of governor again are baying for constitutional blood. The man is alive, they tell us, and capable of taking up the task when he resumes soon.

    Is that Yar’Adua in the Suntai guise? Remember the story of the broadcast from Germany? Yar’Adua’s voice became the subject of acoustic analysts. Was it his voice? Was his voice faint, a feint, or ruddy, or technologically enhanced? Some are doing same to Suntai’s picture. At home, some politicians are already in the labyrinths of manoeuvres, trying to outdo each other in case the man is unable to return fully to this job.

    In Enugu State, we have received a welter of news reports and rumours. A recent one has it that, just like in the late president’s time, Chime was expected to return to stave off impeachment woes before December 31 last year. Many people waited in vain. There were also reports of his death, which were denied. Both sides fuel such reports: those who want to prop their man and those who would oust him.

    Governor Wada announced, with a hint of patriotic vainglory, that he did not want any treatment abroad. But political players in the state say it was more out of survival. The man may see live ghosts around him already, like those of rival Echocho and legislators against whom he scored dubious victory over the leadership of the state house of assembly. He would rather limp at home or chafe in a wheelchair or snuggle in the humble succour of a local hospital than risk the omen of plotters plodding their way to his throne while he recovers in a foreign land. Yar’Adua was not well when he stole back into the country even if he could not resume his office.

    Imoke’s story, like Wada’s, is still in sedate waters apparently, and his votaries are calming nerves in public. Like the early days of Yar’Adua, subversive tongues are either not wagging or are muted by mischief-makers jockeying for his power.

    The most potent is the Yakowa story. Here the man dies but the state suddenly reminds us of the primordial temper bisecting Kaduna State: Christian versus Muslim, Hausa-Fulani versus others, northern Kaduna versus south.

    That was the tension that whirled up the Yar’Adua story as the so-called cabal wanted to avert a Jonathan presidency because of his southern roots and Christian beliefs. In Yar’Adua’s case, he died and a southerner came to power. In Kaduna, the northern, Muslim and Hausa-Fulani man took over. Just as Jonathan felt slighted as the number two man, Yakowa’s successor confessed openly to the contempt with which some members of Yakowa’s cabinet fiddled with him in his days as second fiddle.

    Who says we cannot see the ghosts of the late president at work? In all, we see that the political class is impatient with the law, and would want to force things. Power is a great aphrodisiac, and those with a will would grasp and beaver away to get it.

    We should shun the sense of ill grace on both sides: those in power who would not leave and those outside grasping desperately to outplay incumbents.

    The law is clear, but those who are sick love to squeeze the last out of their health until nature’s ultimate triumph either in their favour when they survive or against them when they are permanently incapacitated or die.

    So when we thought that Yar’Adua had gone, we are reminded of what Mark Twain wrote: “Stories of my death are greatly exaggerated.” We also remember the great Azikiwe, when he was rumoured to have passed on. Ever a man of theatre, the Owelle of Onitsha quipped, “I am not in a hurry to leave this planet.”

    When we invoke past leaders’ ghosts, it is often for ugly things. A decade ago, Adam Hoschfield wrote a book titled, King Leopold’s Ghost about the Congo in the colonial era. King Leopold, whom a historian described as a “big-minded man in an insignificant kingdom,” turned the Congo into a vast slave land of miners to enrich Belgium. His ghost is invoked today because the mines inflict wars, hunger and other tragedies of the place today.

    It is not to our credit that this is how Yar’Adua comes to memory, over our contempt for simple laws. But Yar’Adua fights back to jolt us to respect law and show decency, virtues of which he was a victim both from the machinations of those who fought for him and against him.

    But Yar’Adua will not go until we rise above such malicious folly. United States President George Washington in his last days told his physician, “Doctor, I die hard, but I am not afraid to go.” Yar’Adua is like Duncan’s ghost in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, when the usurper Banquo exclaims to the ghost: “Avaunt and quit my sight. Let the earth hide thee, thy bone is marrowless and thy blood is cold.”

    We need a political sacrifice to Yar’Adua, and that is a rise from our puerile politics to the dignity of law and order. When Socrates was dying, he said, “I owe a cock to Asclepius, do not forget to pay.”

    The sacrifice we owe is a fidelity to the constitution. Then Yar’Adua can have an eternal rest.

    As comedian Bill Cosby noted, the past is a ghost and the future is a dream. When Yar’Adua rests, we can follow our dream. Which means the ghost is not Yar’Adua but us. When we do right, the ghost goes; when wrong, it appears.

  • A New Nigerian nation

    A New Nigerian nation

    President Goodluck Jonathan has in the last two weeks, been speaking on his vision for Nigeria this year. Apart from making lofty promises on development projects that will usher in employment and create wealth, he also touched on other non-tangible variables upon which real progress of this country will ultimately predicate.

    This was encapsulated in his new vision of Nigeria where everybody will be involved in the task of nation building. For him, Nigerians should brace up for the task of nation-building as the task of developing the country should not be left to the government alone. He would want us to celebrate the New Year with higher emphasis on national unity, peace, stability and progress above other considerations.

    Though this exhortation is not entirely new, it touched on some of the irreducible decimals for our continued survival as a nation. We can therefore ignore the central thesis of this presentation at a great peril. This is especially so at this stage of our national life where fissiparous and centrifugal tendencies have increasingly posed the greatest obstacles to development.

    There is a consensus that we must vigorously address the debilitating challenges of our national development for us to survive as a people. The fact that we have continued to trail on the ladder of development indicators despite the enormous resources at our disposal suggests that there are certain issues of our national existence we are yet to get right. And until we meaningfully and realistically identify and address them, this country will continue to falter.

    It is not enough to be a naturally endowed country. It is also not sufficient that we are an oil producing country reaping bountifully from its competitive price in the international market. These are not sufficient to launch us into the orbit of greatness. After all, there are countries doing pretty well in terms of development even without such a comparative advantage.

    That seems to be the central issue thrown up by Jonathan when he urged every Nigerian to be involved in the task of nation building and not to leave it for the government alone. It must be stated that nation building and national development do not essentially connote the same meanings. Whereas national development is a more embracing terminology that even encapsulates nation building, the latter involves the psychological reorientation of the citizens to inculcate in them, a sense of common national identity. It seeks to construct a common sense of belonging, cohesion and identity from the disparate, centrifugal and plural interests that compete for the loyalty of the citizens. In our case, it seeks to build a Nigerian out of the various ethnic and religious groups that have been the greatest sources of national disloyalty. When we achieve that, we will no longer see ourselves as Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba or Ijaw. We will begin to identify ourselves as Nigerians; the same way an American sees himself as an America wherever he finds himself.

    It is our inability to forge this common sense of national identity that has in the main, been the greatest obstacle to our national growth and development. Jonathan’s call on all to be involved in the daunting task of nation building is an admission of the inherent difficulty in achieving national development without forging a common sense of national unity and identity. That has been the greatest undoing of this country and its manifestations are palpable in all aspects of our national life. That is why successes in great national endeavors are usually appraised along the confines of how best they satisfied primordial and sectional predilections.

    That is why today, ethnic and religious cleavages rather than waning have further reinforced with greater ferocity, posing the greatest threat to the very foundation of this country. It is the same reason that has been largely responsible for the bitter competition for political power at the center. Today, politics is all about what accrues to the various ethnic groups through their elected members. Religion and ethnicity are in constant struggle with the state for the loyalty of the citizens.

    There is no way meaningful development can be achieved with such disorientation among the citizenry. That is why some sections of the country are talking of regional development and integration. The propelling force of this thinking is rooted in the loss of faith in the capacity of the Nigerian state as presently constituted, to fast-track even and balanced development of the constituent units.

    Incidentally, certain policies of our federal order such as skewed federal structure and residency factor have not helped matters. They have variously worked in the direction of alienating the people from that common sense of national identity direly needed for national progress. Curiously, the elite are the greatest purveyors of these destabilizing tendencies. Tribalism or ethnicity manifest as soon as there are spoils of our common patrimony to be shared. It is an elite commodity that most often does not tally with the feelings of the common people at the grassroots. But the elite take quick resort to it in their quest to gain undue advantage over others. Any genuine effort at nation building must start by whittling down the overbearing influence of ethnicity and religion in the nation’s body politic.

    It is the same trend that accounts for the devious successes the Boko Haram religious sect has been recording in its self-assigned militant agenda. It is difficult to talk of nation building in the face of the obstacle to it which that sect represents. Jonathan was right in arguing that nation building should involve all Nigerians.

    But there are structural changes that must be effected for quick progress to be recorded in this direction. Our defective federal structure is one. Residency factor is another. A situation the federal government literally controls life and death in this country through the excessive powers at its disposal is an obvious obstacle to nation building. Devolution will go a long way in reducing the acrimony that go with power struggles at the centre. With it, the constituent units will be more creative and focus more of their creative talents on how to elevate the living standards of their people through harnessing resources of comparative advantage.

    It is also a discredit to nation building that we are yet to settle the controversy surrounding the residency factor. A country that discriminates in employment matters and the enjoyments of the rights that go with citizenship because of state of origin cannot hope to forge a common sense of identity from it. Today many states prefer to employ foreigners instead of skilled Nigerians from other states. In some others those that were employed several years back have been sacked for no justifiable reason than they hailed from other states. And we want to build a nation out of this ruinous practice.

    These and other inequities of our federal structure are matters to be addressed for Jonathan to approximate nation building of his dream. Good enough some of the identified challenges are currently before the national assembly for possible amendment. Jonathan should identify with such amendments if he is serious on the matter.

  • Disappointed Vultures

    Disappointed Vultures

    When I contemplate Nigeria these days I focus on the vulture. The bird preys on carcasses but Nigeria, in spite of its fascination with death, has defied the day of the vulture.

    Some analysts think oil is the reason, and the fluid of life will sustain this country afloat over the stormy waters of ethnic and sectarian malice and the failures of the state to convert hope to joy for the teeming masses.

    Some say Nigeria is too interwoven in culture and history to cave in under superficial fisticuffs of cousins.

    But whatever it is, Nigeria has dared the vultures for long.

    The past year that ends today encapsulates how a country lives dangerously and still carries on as though immune from the temptations of the devil.

    The country has been flogged by Boko Haram, harassed by flood, whipped by kidnapping, boxed in by inelegant electoral jousting, jousted by corruption, pockmarked by robbers, grinded by poverty, immobilised by impotent leaders, steamrolled by road accidents, gutted by air crashes, pin-fallen by failed institutions and knocked out by despair.

    Yet Nigeria sleeps through all these and wakes up as though to a day of great expectations. It is like the character Nostromo in Joseph Conrad’s novel of that name. The character, a glorious thief just like Nigeria, has carted away great volumes of silver, and sleeps afterwards in a forest glade for over 12 hours. He wakes up to the presence of a vulture glowering greedily at him. But the thief stands up in his full masculine glory and exclaims to the disappointed bird, “I am not dead yet.”

    We can say same of this country. We never die, we just live, hoping and clutching at an existence of false peace and majesty.

    We see all the evils and the low moments. But we live with them. The problem with Nigeria is that it does not want to die and be born again. We want to live, even if imperfectly, if with corruption, if with probes without answers, if with bad roads comingling with deaths, if with the poor dying daily of preventable diseases, if and when we can have free and fair elections, if we can turn Boko Haram boys to assets of development.

    This thought crossed my mind when I attended the launching of Wole Soyinka’s new book, Harmattan Haze on an African Spring. The famous poem Abiku written by the Nobel laureate was advanced as a metaphor for Nigeria, with respect to corruption.

    Those who looked at the point included Soyinka, Pat Utomi, Oby Ezekwesili and they agreed that corruption was an Abiku and it keeps coming over and over again.

    I did not get the chance to rebut their position.

    Corruption, like many of the vices and institutional stumbles of our history, has not encountered the Abiku syndrome. The vices never die, they just come in different guises. They are more chameleons than carcasses. They have not witnessed the vulture visit.

    Can we say poverty has ever died, or educational malaise or corruption has ever died? They just come in new colours and aggressions. We need to let them die. But for them to die, the whole system giving them life must die with them. We are not ready for that sacrifice. For corruption to die, we must have rule of law. For education malaise to go, we must insist on standards. To have these virtues all those persons and practices that allow them must go. But they will not.

    “To be born again, first you have to die.” Those are the opening words of Salman Rushdie’s controversial novel Satanic Verses. So we do not have Abiku yet.

    Boko Haram is festering in the North because we did not address what gave birth to the sect. On the surface, it is religious inferno. At bottom though, it is poverty. It is the result of the absence of government. A government that allows an alternative society to breed under its very glare.

    President Jonathan set up an al majiri school as though that will create a new set of educated young in the North. What that kind of school will breed is alienation. They will be branded the al majiri graduates, and rather than integrate them, they will become outsiders.

    In the Niger Delta and the Southeast, we have had kidnapping, so much so that the Christmas was celebrated there mainly by the humble who had nothing to offer the greed of the rampaging goons.

    Primary education is at an all-time low, but billions of Naira goes to the purchase of primary school books. Most of the schools don’t have them.

    Roads are in permanent disarray; power in spite of the low boasts of the Jonathan administration is still epileptic. Something needs to give way.

    The oil subsidy debate raged through the year. We saw strikes, and then probes and then reports. In the end, the Nigerian was duped by the Jonathan administration. The money they collected in the name of subsidy was never accounted for in terms of revamping the infrastructure and education and health sectors. Rather, President Jonathan is seeking more subsidy removal while his finance minister is asking for another loan. This is the same minister asking for us not to spend money in a nation where spending will ease the infrastructure deficit plaguing us.

    The fuel scarcity is on us because the government that guarantees marketers to import fuel will not pay them. So they would not supply.

    So what happened to the fuel subsidy money fleeced from the fuel consumer all year?

    We also saw tragedies in high places. The air and road crashes that affected the mighty tell us that those in the marble places of power cannot avoid the tragedies their policies inflict on the poor.

    As I write this piece, four governors who were in the saddle when the year began are not fully in charge as the New Year dawns. One is dead tragically through an air crash, another is hospitalised over an avoidable air crash, one is mysteriously ill in an overseas hospital and the fourth is in the hospital over a road mishap.

    Never in our history have we had this sort of executive paralysis, except during the Gowon era when governors left the country on flimsy alibis.

    In spite of all these, the nation walks as though in a swagger. How long shall we push our luck and think, like Conrad’s Nostromo, we can always wake up to a disappointed vulture?

    We need the sort of leadership that wants to kill things in order to birth things anew. The Bible says: “Except a corn of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it abides alone. But when it dies, it brings forth new fruits.”

    In Soyinka’s Abiku, also J.P. Clark’s poem of the same title, the child dies first before it comes back to life.

    We cannot live a life of life-support. We must be willing to let the vermin go.

    Many of them are half alive, half dead. The education sector, the oil sector, infrastructure, are all half dead. So the vultures hover, waiting for the time of the vanquisher.

    In Chinua Achebe’s poem, The Vultures, he sees the bird

    Perching high on broken

    Bone of a dead tree

    All these sectors are bleeding on broken bones. Let them die so as to be reborn. This New Year, we can start that process.

  • Jonathan’s New Year resolution

    Jonathan’s New Year resolution

    When President Jonathan spoke last week on the goodies awaiting Nigerians in the New Year, it must have been to allay their frustrations in the inability of his regime to deliver since it came on stream. He had told his audience in Kaduna not to lose hope as the New Year will be better in all aspects of their lives. He said things will be better in 2013 and he will perform better in the New Year.

    Hear him, “the New Year shall be better in terms of job creation, wealth creation and security”. For a people who have been living in utter despair on account of the daunting challenges facing the country, these new year promises must have come as a very pleasant surprise.

    Coming on the eye of the New Year, these promises might as well pass as Jonathan’s New Year resolutions. It is very common in our clime for people to make resolutions on what they intend to do or not do in the New Year as part of the pact they have with their God.

    Most often, these resolutions come in form of a promise to turn a new leaf in the New Year as a way of atoning for the mistakes and human failings of the past. The practice draws a lot of support from religious tenets which encourage repentance with a firm promise not to fall back to ones decadent life style. If it is this religious zeal that is behind the high hopes the president reposes in the New Year, there is cause to give him the benefit of doubt. It is to be expected that since the promises are measurable, there must be concrete issues on the ground that may not be palpable to the people that give him such hopes. We do not seem to have an alternative than to believe him and then wait for those good things to come especially as the New Year is here.

    But the experiences we have had on this clime have been the relative ease with which New Year resolutions are kept in the breach. That is why that practice seems to be on the decline today. Most of those who have been involved in such promises will confess their inability to keep faith with them. We do not expect Jonathan’s will be one of those fading New Year resolutions. And since hope plays a very vital role in sustaining life, we must not be seen to be losing hope in the prospects of the future. The future or the social dynamics of history has a way of resolving nature’s numerous problems. So we must be prospective as a people.

    There is therefore very good reason for us to believe our president. Admitting that the changes might be coming slowly, he was optimistic that soon they will manifest in terms of better well-being of the people. Jonathan further cited the slight improvements in electricity supplies, as evidence of the good things to come if Nigerians exercise some patience.

    It would appear that we have no alternative than to take the president the way he has presented himself to us. After all, we have managed to live with these problems. Now we have been told that some respite is underway, we should have cause to heave a sigh of relief.

    The issues Jonathan touched on hinge on the survival of this country and its people. Unemployment is so grave today that something urgent has to be done to remedy the situation. It is a matter of grave concern that with the astronomical increase in the number of universities, not much has been done to create jobs for the products of those institutions.

    This is so despite the huge resources which mother nature has bountifully endowed this nation. In the face of this, much of our resources are filtered away in bogus projects that have little impact on the lives of the people. Added to this is the embarrassing corruption in official quarters. Despite all the grandstanding on the fight against corruption, the facts on the ground indicate that not much progress has been recorded in this direction.

    It will be difficult to create wealth in the face of the unbridled corruption in this country. Today, many families find it extremely difficult to eat one square meal a day. Yet they are daily treated with the embarrassing affluence of those who have had the opportunity to hold positions in government. Nobody cares to ask the source of this overnight wealth. But the many scandals involving politicians, sundry businessmen and critical institutions of government have tended to give out the sources of the questionable wealth. We have heard of the payment of billions of dollars to phoney companies as fuel subsidy without a litre of the commodity brought into our shores. It is good a thing that efforts are being made to put a stop to that scandal. Such efforts should be sustained to free the nation’s resources from the stronghold of sundry buccaneers masquerading as politicians and businessmen. Without confronting corruption in high places it will be neigh impossible to create wealth for a broad segment of the population. It is sad that recent ratings of the nation in the corruption index have made a mess of all the pontifications on the fight against the malaise. Today, politics has become the most profitable business drawing into its fold all manner of characters and charlatans. The lure of politics stems from the fact that it has become the quickest source of easy wealth.

    So it is not enough to raise the expectations of the people on the good things that will come their way this year. By this time last year Nigerians were treated with fuel price increase that precipitated riots in many parts of the country. Since after those protests, it has now dawned on our people that fuel subsidy payments have turned out the biggest scandal of our time. Yet we are being told at the slightest opportunity that the only solution to the abuse of the subsidy regime is its complete removal. The purport of this constant reminder is that we should be prepared for another round of fuel price increase. That is why the government has failed to implement those palliatives which it promised would come with the increase.

    It is therefore important that the current prosecution of those implicated in the malfeasance should be dutifully pursued. We are desirous in seeing the successful prosecution and conviction of some of the accused as evidence that government is seriously committed to the mater. The cases of former governors standing trial for corruption do not give hope that there is no official plan to cover up these cases through poor prosecution.

    Perhaps, the greatest challenge which Jonathan should convince our people that he has a handle to is the issue of insecurity. Even as he was promising that we should hope for the better in that direction, the killing of several people inside a church by religious fundamentalists on the eve of Christmas casts a serious slur on the promise. Insecurity, the type posed by the Boko Haram threat is one challenge that can undo this country. Yet we want to share in the president’s optimism of a brighter and more prospective New Year. As humans we must be optimistic that the New Year will put smiles on the faces of Nigerians. After all, Jonathan is not one of the new generation prophets that win coverts by giving them false hopes.

  • Person of the year The Nigerian “Refugee”

    Person of the year The Nigerian “Refugee”

    IT was a year of trinity, even from the beginning. It began with three evils: a subsidy removal, a fuel hike and, in consequence, a paralysis. As the nation shut down, strikes rumbled in Lagos and some other fragile areas and people stayed at home and President Jonathan swaggered with intransigence, we thought the year would be redefined only by another trinity: a fuel crisis, an angry people and a stubborn president.

    But in-between came another trio: water, wind and fire. But the last became the first. Boko Haram struck not once, not twice but many times even though they fell ominously silent during the strikes in January. It was as though they bowed to the first trinity. In a foul and macabre feast, the strikes swept from Borno to Abuja to Kaduna to Kogi like a display of blood and death. Its register was fire: bombs, guns and knives. Another trinity.

    It happened all year long. Soldiers died, police fled, worshippers fainted, defied and died, a security chief first complained in public and later lost his job, a president retreated inside Aso Rock. But mostly people were displaced. Southern governors sought the return of their “people.” Ethnic rhetoric inflamed more ethnic rhetoric. But mostly people fled. Markets became skeletal, churches wary and pastors invoking deity before a shrinking followership. Those born in the north, and those who had relocated there for business and those who had no other ways of life than the ones they knew either in Kano or Maiduguri or Sokoto, were stunned between stark choices: fight, wait to die or flee. Another awful trinity.

    It was a time that tested the unity of the country. Northern governors sought answers, held meetings, appealed and cajoled, but could not do what was necessary: stop the menace. The silence of southern leaders was as ominous as those who banged the doors for a national conference. It raised questions about state police, integrity of security budget and above all, the competence of a president who reacted to the news of carnage with another trinity: surrender, nonchalance – he left for Brazil after one of them – and bluster.

    In the midst of this was the combination of water and wind. Nigeria, just like the malice of Hurricane Sandy in the United States, saw flood. It came not only in the south, not only in east, not only in the west, not only in the north. It was fury without borders.

    In a bizarre replay of Boko Haram, houses fell, only not by fire. People fled their homes. Villages and homesteads vanished in watery tombs. It had no respect for the high and mighty, for the jalopy or cocky limousines. They were huddled in camps. In the camps, women delivered babies, men and women made love, old and young played and fought, scrambled for food rations, slept in makeshift beds. Fishes swam where families sat for dinner, hippopotamuses became threats before they inspired feasts. Governor Emmanuel Uduaghan risked life paddling a canoe in a symbolic gesture to the displaced.

    While water, wind and fire raged, the other trinity inflicted their own damages: jobs were lost, subsidy thieves exposed and companies closed, another shrill trinity.

    At bottom, many Nigerians were out of joint, and had to find refuge in places other than where they had comfort. “Something startles where I thought I was safest,” wrote Caribbean writer George Lamming. They became, in a strange irony, refugees at home. Those who fled the north have never found comfort at home in the south. Home was where trouble was. Flood sacked people who never returned to the home as they knew it. It was a case of alienation in body and in spirit. Subsidy-related jobs became as fragile as the homes swept off by flood.

    The refugee, often a term for those who flee their home countries for another, has come to define our year, except that these persons did not find refuge at home. The technical term is internally displaced persons, a wordy and inelegant term. They suffered all the indignities of the year: hunger, joblessness, homelessness, insecurity, bigotry, elemental fury, disenfranchisement and death. In a year of suffering, they embodied the worst.

    For these reasons, The Nation editors have picked the Nigerian “refugee” is our person of the year.

  • For the love of Hope

    For the love of Hope

    Harriman the school boy – slim, tall, full of vitality and humour. Harriman of Government College, Ibadan, who earned a Grade One certificate and would not live it down to his dying day. Harriman the pioneer, who turned the real estate business not only into a profession of stature in the country but also into a sort of charity, bestowing homes on the unsheltered.

    Chief Hope Harriman passed on at the age of 79, two months to January 3, when he was billed to have an elaborate party for his 80th birthday. His daughter, Representative Temi Harriman, had already bought a present. She saw her father last in London when he came to console her over the loss of her son and his grandson.

    By the testimonies of friends, clerics, fellow professionals and business associates, Chief Hope Harriman was a man after many hearts. Bonhomie, fortitude, a faithful memory, a beloved father and husband, a scrupulous man of means and, of course, a man of the world. These yarns electrified the sombre night at the tony Boat Club in the ambience of boats and quiet waters where a service of songs took place December 19.

    Monsignor Christopher Boyo captured the irony of the man when he recalled how Harriman, not much of a church person, connected him to personages to raise money for his church. But he celebrated that act of pious benevolence by signposting the fact that “Uncle Hope did not go to church.” Boat Club was where he “worshipped.”

    Others spoke, too. Rev. Oyebolu spoke as a fellow student at GCI, and he recalled how Harriman gained admission at the right age while doing an instant math that disqualified him – Oyebolu – who was 14 instead of 12 years old, which was Harriman’s age. They walked a long distance from the popular Ames bus station to school.

    His Cambridge school mate, Dayo Akinrele, was gung-ho about Harriman daring into choosing a profession not well known. He also referred to how, after many years when their mates started dying, he would quip that “Dayo, you are next.” But if he went first, he would let him know how life was on the other side. Victor Oritsejolomi, son of the famous professor and surgeon, Oritsejolomi Thomas, described him as brave.

    Femi Okunnu (SAN) spoke of his generosity and sense of principle.

    Apart from the family, the strongest presence was GCI Old Boys, and they filed out beside the boats and sang for the departed.

    There were different stories. One of the stories was an invitation he gave to some friends to his Florida home, but they arrived and there was no Hope. They had to welcome him to his home. “but Hope had made arrangements for us before we arrived.” That was an example of a Hope, the loving but troublesome friend.

    They spoke of his high spirit, a sense of humour and accommodating temperament. He once joked to a friend that on his epitaph should be written that he “threw the best parties.”

    All of them spoke of his large heart, his progressive politics and love of family.

  • A slave economy

    A slave economy

    At this time last year, the spectra of a strike loomed over us. The new year had begun to yawn with woes even before it was born. When it dawned, fuel price soared at the same proportion with the rage in the land.

    What was not debated with much frenzy at the early stage of the fulminations was the band of racketeers who turned our patrimony into platforms for cheap riches to fuel their showy lifestyles. Owned and rented jets, cars without number, palaces, front row seats in churches, superfine wristwatches, glamour mistresses, cameos with governors and the president, court jesters in high and low places, swarms of congratulation adverts in newspapers, birthday parties in Dubai, weddings in Spain. Society parties are coy without them.

    These were men who thrived on cheap imports of oil. But in the bowel of our earth, we had crude aplenty. Our NNPC, increasingly playing the role of a glorified carcass, is unable to meet its quota to tap them with the other carcasses called refineries. So it swaps with so-called marketers who import oil to meet that quota.

    The story of oil in Nigeria is the story of our impotence as a people. It is the story of ineptitude in high places. It is the tale of a state stale of ideas about indigenising an economy. Because all we do is import oil, we make import the queen of entrepreneurship.

    Now, Nigeria is an economic dumpster. China is our chief dumper. Whether it is oil, or building materials, or pharmaceuticals, or textiles or electronics, we have our supplier in that Asian warrior.

    I have worried over this in the past few years. The recent worry came when I learned that Dangote shut down his Gboko plant over cement importation. The first thing that came to mind was the textile industry. The once thriving giant, especially in the North with Kaduna as the beachfront, is now captive to foreign invasion.

    In Dangote’s case, it is reported that it affects about 2,500 workers. And this spells a bleak holiday for the workers and their families. There has been a back-and-forth of attacks and recriminations about this between Dangote and the Ibeto Company that imports cement. The debate is healthy for the economy if anything will come out of it.

    No argument can beat the concept of developing a local economy, not even when the importing company is also a monopolistic importer.

    What is strange is that this was a country that debated in the years of IBB the IMF loan. By overwhelming majority, we voted with our voices against it because we wanted to protect the local economy from the ravages of the foreign behemoths. The then President Babangida yielded openly but craftily implemented the ideas of the Breton Woods Institution, allowing us to become receptacles of a wide variety of goods.

    Bad as it was, today’s scale of imports is monumental. Look at building materials, for instance. We have the case of Dangote’s Gboko lament. But we also have all sorts of building materials from tiles to paints to pipes to chandeliers. Most of them come into the country without checks for standards. That is why when a person builds a house, the owner is assured to put money aside to replace much of the materials. They do not last.

    In the imported cement, for instance, do we check the product for standards? I understand that some of the cement making it into our market lack gypsum, an important ingredient.

    We are witnesses to the Chinese product called Gold milk, a teething powder that predated My Pikin and killed about 20 children. We are also witnesses to a step by NAFDAC sometime ago to crack down on fake Colgate toothpaste that contained the deleterious anti-freezing agent diethlyne-glycol that subjected its victims to bouts of abdominal pains, vomiting and liver damage. If taken in large doses, it could cause death.

    Those undetected are many in the market. That is why it is important we emphasise local industries. No economy grows on an appetite for foreign products.

    We call ourselves an oil producing country. If we take the inventory, we will find out that we import so much oil that it makes nonsense of our crude oil exports.

    Now, the infrastructure is in a mess. Security is also in shambles. Every condition to help the local producer, including the farmer, is in a bad state. Loans are not readily available to the creative investor. It is harmattan haze without much spring, apology to Wole Soyinka.

    The American economy complains of the Chinese rise, but virtually all of its imports are checked for standards before accepting them into the United States. We do little in that regard. We even flood the roads with cars and okadas that inflict diseases and environmental damages with their liberal fumes of carbon monoxide.

    Our inability to protect local industry calls back the feisty years of American battle for independence when Britain imposed a variety of taxes, including the stamp tax. The Americans called for boycott of British imports. But the wife of one of the frontline nationalists, Benjamin Franklin could not live down choice jewelry from overseas. A disappointed Franklin quipped: “Alas, it is by the luxury and vanity of women that empires decay.”

    We had such nationalistic fervour once. We saw importation as economic servitude and worked consciously as a nation against it. We had PAN that supplied governments with locally made cars. Odutola factory was a household name. Kanti Kwori in Kano was a behemoth now shrunken. Even vehicle spare parts were generally genuine. When you want to buy new phone chargers, you have to distinguish between Chinese and genuine one.

    If we do not want standards, we cannot improve. The standards are not imposed. We brew them here on policy tables and on factory floors. The policy tables are sterile, so the factory floors are shrinking and dying. Dangote’s Gboko plant is the latest of such tales of woe.

    No modern economy thrives without imports. But regulation is key to ensure that imports do not strangulate local production. When we do that, we create the racketeers like we have had in the oil sector. Import dependence spawns racketeers like we are dealing with in the so-called subsidy imbroglio.

    We can love others, but let us love ourselves first. That principle will elevate our economic policy.

     

  • Suswam: Yakowa and Suntai

    Suswam: Yakowa and Suntai

    Obviously, this country is in very perilous times. Events since the death of former Kaduna State governor, Patrick Yakowa and former National Security Adviser, Andrew Azazi and others, in the Navy helicopter crash, have again strongly reinforced this ominous tendency. In these and subsequent reactions can be gleaned all the trappings of a nation in dire stress. It is not hard to observe the perceptible discomfort in peoples’ reactions more so given the way the plane crashed, killing all the occupants barely three minutes after take-off.

    Both the presidency and the military echelon have shown visible signs of surprise at the incident. The Navy, while setting up an investigative panel to unravel the circumstances behind the crash, betrayed the same uncomfortable emotions. In a press conference, they not only gave a clean bill of health to the plane but strongly vouched for the competence of their pilots. Even as they would not want to pre-empt the investigations of the panel, it was discernable from their responses that there must be more to the crash than ordinarily meets the eyes.

    The same mood was also palpable in the quick deployment of soldiers to the streets of Kaduna, possibly to stave off any breakdown of law and order. The anticipation of a possibility of lawlessness following the crash meant that the people of the state may not see the crash purely as an accident.

    This may not be entirely surprising given the security challenges this country has had to contend with for quite sometime now. Kaduna has been a veritable theatre for pre-meditated violence. Much has happened to give room for suspicion and distrust in that state especially given the way the Boko Haram insurgents have carried out their activities. Their devious escapades have been such that deaths in some unclear circumstances are often screened for any links with the group.

    Matters have not been helped by the recurring orgy of sectarian crises following bomb attacks on churches by the same Boko Haram religious insurgents.

    The state has in the last one year or so, witnessed reprisal attacks between Christians and Muslims each time a place of worship came under attack. The situation has since remained tense but Yakowa managed to maintain some peace albeit; graveyard peace. Yakowa, the first Christian to occupy the number one seat in that former capital of northern Nigeria did not find it easy maintaining the balance. There were also feelings that his emergence as governor following the appointment of Namadi Sambo as aVice President may not have gone down well with some vested interests in that part of the country. And this will not surprise anyone.

    It was therefore to be expected that his sudden death could arouse sufficient suspicion and possible violence. Before now, we have been told by no less a person than President Jonathan that some of his cabinet members are also members of the Boko Haram sect. If they could infiltrate his cabinet, there is no gamut of our national engagement that should be possibly considered safe. If any ulterior motive is being ascribed to the crash, it is not out of place. That could explain the deployment of soldiers to the streets as the news of his death filtered.

    If that action was not enough to rope in the religious angle to the various possibilities regarding the cause of the accident, the lamentations of Benue State governor, Gabriel Suswam has brought the matter to a level where it can no longer be ignored. Suswam, citing security reports, was said to have told journalists that his life and that of his family were under threat by Boko Haram. He had lamented the fate of the four Christian governors in the north with the death of Yakowa and the fatal air crash involving the Taraba State governor Danbaba Suntai.

    Though an aspect of that report has been refuted by his media aide, the issue raised may not get out of public scrutiny in a hurry. Not with the zeal with which Boko Haram has been pursuing its agenda of driving Christians out of the north. Not with the constant targeting of Christian places of worship, killing and maiming of innocent souls. So what is there really to deny by Suswam on the possibility of his family being attacked by the group? It is a trite possibility that if the group has a way of attacking Suswam or his family or any other key government functionary, they will definitely do so. And they have never hidden their intention for mischief. For a group that successfully bombed a Church right inside Jaji and followed it up by subduing the SARS headquarters in Abuja, a governor or his family is definitely a very high impact target. After all, part of the original target of Boko Haram was public institutions and persons before that goal was displaced and they resorted to attacking defenseless and innocent people. But for this goal displacement, public institutions, public personages and their families symbolize that evil which western education represents and constitute the real enemy of the Boko Haram sect. So it will be in line with the propelling motivation of the sect if people in very high places are attacked and possibly decimated.

    Perhaps, the aspect of the report Suswam may have found uncomfortable was what was credited to him regarding the fate of Christian governors in the north following the air crashes involving Yakowa and Suntai. Coming from such a high profile person, there is no doubt that it will attract considerable public attention. For a nation that has been fighting hard to avert a religious war on account of the excesses of Boko Haram, his statement could in a way, be considered provocative even as many would prefer that lead to be fully explored. It is a coincidence so curious that it cannot be ignored. Even at that, the reaction of the governors’ forum by insisting on appointing their independent consultant to observe the investigations has with it every element of suspicion and mistrust in the manner these accidents have occurred.

    No less a person than Gen. Yakubu Gowon had to cautioned the people of the state to take the matter purely as an accident and not to attach motives to it. Relieving at Kafanchan how he escaped boarding the helicopter that fateful day, he had said “it was an accident. Don’t attach meaning to it. Don’t say it was planned to get rid of some people”. His choice of Kafanchan for these explanations and exhortations is quite instructive.

    What these go to underscore is that the crash is not just seen as a mere happenstance. That is why so many groups have shown keen interest in the investigations. And that also accounts for why efforts are being made to calm the people. The Minister of Information Labaran Maku equally spoke along the same line when he recounted just like Gowon that he would have boarded the flight but for destiny.

    These may as well be. But there are lessons to learn from the mood and thinking of the people irrespective of the way the investigations go. If any thing, they have aroused our consciousness to the mortal danger Boko Haram has become in our march to nationhood. If people now begin to impute sectional, ethnic or religious meanings to any and every event in this country, it is indicative of the level of drawback the Boko Haram menace has thrown this country into.

    It is time to stem this mortal danger else the prediction that Nigeria may turn out a failed state by 2015 may become a self-fulfilling prophesy. May God save us the possibility of such a foreboding cataclysm!