The Nation Newspaper

Category: Monday

Scourge of wrong values

Two recent events have once again brought to the fore all that is wrong with us as a people. And in them, we can reasonably find the causative factors for the recurring cycle of underdevelopment and poverty that have held this nation down over the years.

First was the conferment of national honours on 149 Nigerians by President Goodluck Jonathan during which event he threatened to withdraw the honours conferred on those who have been convicted or are facing criminal charges. The second has to do with the decision taken by the Association of Vice-Chancellors of Nigerian Universities on guidelines for the award of honorary doctorate degrees to reduce indiscriminate awards and restore the ‘age-long university culture and best practices’.

Secretary-General of the association, Prof. Michael Faborode said the awards were now based on wealth, political office and position as well as a means of generating revenue with little or no regard for integrity, contributions to the development of the university and the nation.

What clearly stands out from these is our scant regard for time tested values- values that are cherished and preserved in other climes as a mark of their national pride. The objective is to promote excellence and high attainment in all fields of human endeavour through the unleashing of the creative energies of the people for national development. By rewarding honour, virtue, patriotism and excellence, a statement is being made that only through such values can true greatness of the individual and the nation be attained. But the facts of our own situation seem to be negating these ennobling and high-minded objectives. Little wonder we have failed to make any significant progress in the development matrix.

Not long ago, the National Universities Commission (NUC) had decried the flouting of university tradition on the appointment of professors. The commission was piqued that the tradition requiring peer review and assessment of such appointees by at least three professors from both within and outside the country in addition to having a ‘Professorial Chair’ were being observed in their breach. It also noted that some people were parading themselves as professors without any evidence of affiliation to any recognized university or academic discipline in which such scholarly contributions were made. The award of professorships by parastatals, research institutes and allied establishments that have neither a senate nor affiliation to any recognized university was another issue that gave the commission serious worries.

In an article titled ‘NUC’s fake professors’, I had drawn copious attention to how these dysfunctions not only degrade our university system but the entire Nigerian society. We had also decried the high appetite of our people for sundry awards, recognitions, honours and titles without committing themselves to the necessary rigors and sacrifice that go with such elevated attainments. Our summation was that all these ruinous dispositions and high regard for vain glory signpost both the necessary and sufficient condition for colossal failure either as a people or nation.

Perhaps, the intervention of the Vice- Chancellors may have been part of the steps to address the observations of the NUC. That could as well be. But what all these go to buttress is that something has definitely gone awry with our values system. Much is also wrong with the way and manner we currently nominate and confer national honours on people. If our national honours were conferred on people who soon turned out as convicts or suspects standing trial before our courts, then we have with us all signs of a demented society.

It is a key evidence of the shoddiness that has over the years gone in the nomination and subsequent award of national honours to sundry characters using warped and questionable criteria. And this should not be a surprise to any one. Over the years, very well meaning Nigerians have voiced out against the conferment of honours on people solely on account of the political office they happened to occupy at the time. Merit, integrity, honour and contributions to the overall development of the country, are relegated to the back seat. It is not surprising that as soon as some of these characters leave office, they are apprehended to account for the criminal offences they committed in office. Is this not sufficient to cast a slur on the propriety and integrity of the award?

Perhaps, were such people allowed to complete their terms before their nomination for such awards, the government may have been saved the embarrassment of having to confer its highest honours on rogue individuals that it will be forced to withdraw so soon after. Ironically, even as Jonathan is pontificating on his intention to ensure that holders of national honours are truly worthy representatives of our national values, honour and are patriotic, the last award has with it all the trappings of previous ones. Much of the recipients were people currently occupying political offices either through elective offices or by appointment.

There is nothing to show that some of them will not go the way of those who were arraigned or convicted for one offence or the other soon after they left office. If Jonathan is serious in sanitizing the award process, he should have began by ensuring that current political office holders are disallowed from the process. Apart from saving the country the loss of face arising from conferring awards on questionable characters, we will also be ensuring that those in public offices do not use them to influence the award in their favour.

Again, relying on ascendancy to elective positions as a veritable criterion for national honours in a clime that is still struggling to evolve a credible electoral process makes the matter more laughable.

Nigeria is not lacking in individuals who have distinguished themselves in the mould Jonathan characterized. There are former governors and others who have occupied federal and state offices without blemish. Nobody has deemed it necessary to honour them. Yet serving governors, legislators and sundry political appointees have easily smiled home with such awards even with very curious credentials.

It may be interesting to publish the criteria on which recipients were rated and the scores of each on that scale. The outcome will be very revealing. There is also something untidy in relying solely on the nominations of state governments for such a sensitive national exercise. In the brand of politics we play in this country, there are bound to be very qualified people who are deliberately excluded just to settle political points. There has to be a way to fish out those people on their own merit so as to enhance the overall credibility of the exercise.

In all, our country is currently plagued by a scourge of wrong values. We must work hard to weed it of the debilitating malaise of denigrating time-tested values, awards and recognitions. Those who want to excel must be prepared to go through the mills of high attainment. That is the right path to national progress.

October 8, 2012
Dearth of salesmen

Since I read the play, Death of a Salesman, about two decades ago, I have never lived down the pithy vitality of its language, its barebones fury and patterned telling of a lovelorn world. Its genius of moral ambiguity is vitiated by a harsh human story that haunts all those who believe they will grow old one day.

But most potent for me has been its message about the ordinary worker, who toils from day to day and loses most of his life force to the employer, whose savage flair for profit is exceeded only by a fierce disregard for the tint and tonic of blood flowing cheerlessly in the veins of the employee.

At the end of the day, the hoary hour comes. He stares at the stark emptiness of his stewardship of many years, his inability to care for home and hearth, and to keep the family out of want and despair. He kills himself because the salesman made his pitches, travelled the cities of America in its grim entrails, and comes back to realise that, for all his sacrifices, he never really made a sale.

The play, written by American author Arthur Miller, was received by the world with chilly gratitude for its poignant tone and cheeky sincerity. For me, it has been a story that reminds me always of many loved ones I have known over the years, who have worked their whole lives and ended up as though, as Willy Loman – the main character – says, their lives were a “wonderful lie.”

Individuals may not make a sale, but what of a nation, or a government, when it desires to sell itself? For the first time, I was compelled to look at the play in the context of a nation selling itself last month in New York, the world’s headquarters of the sale.

It was at the tony New York Palace Hotel, located in the 50th street in Manhattan, around some of the shops and offices advertising and selling some of the world’s marquee brands. Feet fast and eyes dreamy, many buyers and sellers find the ambience of Manhattan the congenial locale. So that was where the Nigerian Roundtable took place, and it was billed as an investment forum to advertise Nigeria’s best to a city and world of appetite and profit.

But when I entered the hotel, I saw the sights that could only be described as Nigerian. I met a lady, dressed in a iro and buba and it was easy to know she was one of us and I asked where the Nigerian event was happening. I was on vacation, and I wanted only to enjoy the sights and other joys of the city. But the reporter could not miss out on such a potential news event. It turned out, though, that while I waited to see foreigners, all I saw were Nigerians. Most of them were dressed in suits, except some of the women, especially the two dames of subsidy, Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and Petroleum Minister Diezani Allison-Madueke.

My eyes swept over the hall. I saw only a sprinkle of foreigners. Most of the attendees were Nigerians. I wondered what the difference could have been if the show took place in the tranquil relic of Lokoja or conceited grandeur of Abuja or in the bustle of Lagos.

The Jonathan administration festooned the place with ministers and special advisers and even envoys from outside the United States. You would think it was a big deal, and Nigeria was going to finally nail the issue of investment.

But as speaker after speaker spoke, it was clear this was a case of Nigerians talking to Nigerians. The few foreigners were already doing business or talking business with Nigeria, including Goldman Sachs. And I spoke to a lady, an American who said she belonged to a consulting firm for companies that invested “in your country.”

So while a lady like Allison-Madueke made an elaborate show of making a pitch, I could not but see how comic it all was. She spoke about the changes in the oil sector including NNPC unbundling as well as the new bill, and she celebrated the upsurge in electricity supply. More comical was Okonjo-Iweala, who had earlier been cautioned by reporters when she rebuffed a question from this newspaper’s correspondent based in the U.S. She spoke at the event about savings, about the government’s attempt to restrain its spending and the general atmosphere of ease for investment.

But what was odd was that two state governments that had good stories to tell were put in the middle of this oddity. They included the Delta State Government and the Akwa Ibom State Government. Delta State Governor Dr. Emmanuel Uduaghan was represented by his senior adviser, Oma Djebah. Dr. Uduaghan, I learned, had to return to Nigeria for pressing matters after a high-scale meeting with the top brass of French diplomats, including the prime minister, for bilateral matters. Djebah, in his characteristic verve, spoke of Delta State’s potential in such areas as agriculture, health, maritime, manufacturing and education.

But what caught the imagination was when Akwa Ibom Governor Godswill Akpabio took the stage. He had been on song speaking about his infrastructure accomplishments, as well as the investment potentials of power, education, agriculture and a wide gamut. He is one of the best governors in telling his own story, with clear-eyed humour and enthusiasm. But the drama came when Okonjo-Iweala interjected and wanted Akpabio to speak in favour of savings.

“But I am in a spending mode,” answered Governor Akpabio, smiling. The Finance Minister, who is often described as the coordinating minister of the economy, generated some murmur in the audience, and some wondered why the minister was sounding such naïve tones.

I wondered how a country that had poor infrastructure, education, healthcare, and many other deficiencies would be speaking savings in an investment forum when it expected people to come in and spend. It is a reflection of how Okonjo-Iweala does not understand her job that she had to embarrass herself and the country. Anyway, only a sprinkling of foreigners was there.

Is it not by spending that you energise a poor economy? Even anti-Keynesians also know.

Just outside, I encountered a local newspaper the New York Post that reported that Nigerian contingent who attended the United Nations General assembly had enmeshed New York traffic with its big limousines in major arteries. They wondered how such a country with its poor profile should make a grandiloquent contrast in their roads. No wonder President Jonathan came with a flood of ministers and other aides. Our nation went to New York to sell itself but New York was absent at the party. It became an interior monologue. We failed there. Then we sold something awful: our primitive love of excess with our limousines. New York did not buy.

The worst sale came during the meeting of the U.N. on polio with President Goodluck Jonathan attending. I managed to attend. Two things struck me. Our President Acted unpresidential when the Australian prime minister entered late. She shook hands with Bill Gates and others including Pakistani prime minister. They all sat down to shake her hands. When it got to Jonathan’s, he stood up. Next was U.S. Secretary of Health who also did not stand up. Our president slumped back to his seat as though unable to find traction sitting upright. That was not a good way to sell a President. The other point was that the President said he would eradicate polio when this term ends in 2015. Fellow Nigerians, President Jonathan has now told us that he would run for another term. A poor way to sell an intention. I wonder what his speech writers were thinking, just as his Independence day stumble.

We don’t have many good salesmen.

Mimiko’s mimic men

My column last week generated not a few hate mails from those who clearly were partisan and I accept that. They are MimiKo’s mimic men. But none of them was able to fault my content. They just questioned my motive. That is a clear case of intellectual ignorance. Rather than read, they were embroiled in psychodynamic rigmarole. They chased the wind on end. That is the quality of the coward. I would really like it if readers actually read.

October 8, 2012
Brother today, gone tomorrow

A story looms in Ondo State, and it is not just about Governor Olusegun Mimiko and his opponents. He has cast himself a pariah to the story of brotherly love in the Southwest with the cold eyes he casts on the cooperative spirit of the Southwest. But the election is about that but not about that.

It is about whether the man who rode to power on wavelets of glee, éclat and abundance of hope has translated programmes into fruition of joys for his people. But it is about that and something else.

For me, it is about history and its perfidies. Is it possible that the people of Ondo State, with their historic warrior pedigree and political literacy, forget who now stands as their chief executive? We are our memories. Once we forget, we are lost.

Mimiko came to power with the air of a progressive, and many thought, including yours truly, that he had defrocked himself of his unstable past. Unstable in the sense of his sense of association. You associate with those with whom you share things, and not for the opportunism of personal profit.

When he decided to abandon Obasanjo, who was no little villain at the time, one could have thought that Mimiko had decided at last to prove his critics wrong. He had changed his chameleonic obsessions. He had become born again as a man of constant beliefs. That he would not allow the refrain gain ground that this man who jumps ship will jump ship again. That his hop from one party pole to another has made him too much of a feverish self-seeker, traitor, apostate, impostor even to the point of sanctimony. Brother today, gone tomorrow.

What Mimiko is doing by cozying up in the labour party against those who made him, his Southwest blood, reminds one of the words of Joseph Conrad: “There is no friend or enemy like a brother.”

But the rhythm of the Yoruba race, as other races, does not play out without turncoats. It all began with the Yoruba wars of the 19th century. If the Yoruba wars made the Yoruba race, Awolowo made the Yoruba man. The Yoruba wars threw up motifs of heroes and traitors, and it was sometimes difficult to tell one from the other. Whether it was the palace intrigue that upended the naïve Aole, or the rampaging Afonja, or the patrician pretensions of Ijaiye’s Kurunmi, or the Kiriji inferno, or the republican stealth of the Ibadan generals, the definition of hero sometimes depended on where you stood. What came out of that war was that each group in the Yoruba race fashioned its own identity based on sovereignty.

Enter Awolowo. The patriarch defined along what principle that sovereignty rode, and it was properly explained by the great scholars who told the story in the days of its crucible. Richard L. Sklar and Billy J. Dudley documented the Egbe Omo Oduduwa and its transformation to the Action Group party, and how most of its members reflected the ideological leanings of its people: the progressive world view. But there were principled dissenters. One of the most prominent was Adegoke Adelabu, the impresario as conservative who held the region in spell if only for his theatrics. But he was respected and respectable for his consistency.

What the southwest sought to avoid was the turncoat, the sort that pretended to belong. That was the cloth from which Ladoke Akintola was cut. As Awo was the John the Baptist of the modern Yoruba man, Akintola gave birth to the traitor. We have had a good number of them, if in little incarnations. One of them was Omoboriowo.

It is interesting that Mimiko was in bed with the Southwest ‘quisling,’ when the pulse of the region beat with the hoary wisdom of Chief Ajasin. I have wondered how a man who supped with Omoboriowo, with all we know about him, could enjoy trust among progressives. It is the story not only of forgiveness but naivety in Southwest politics. But it is the story of Nigerian politics as a whole where party or group membership tests do not consider the rigour of belief and activities. It is also a testament to the chameleonic agility of Mimiko to manoeuvre through the thickets of regional politics.

He was not done. He moved in with former Ondo State Governor Adefarati where he served in pivotal positions, and the man thought Mimiko was the man in whom he was well pleased. Mimiko could still hop out of the camp. He saw Agagu, the former Ondo State governor, and liked what he saw. He also served with him, even though Agagu belonged in a polar opposite party.

He left Agagu and moved to the centre with Obasanjo, probably in the hope of working with him to torpedo the governor under whom he served. He did not get his wish and went to the Labour Party, and earned the support of the Southwest. He left Obasanjo for the same reason he joined him: self-interest.

When he became governor, he seemed set to change the state. He began with what he called quick wins, in which he gave communities what they craved, like a town hall. But this was the work of the local governments which in his four years he has disenfranchised by not organising elections, and making no plans in that direction. He set himself to build a model school, on whose dream he has not delivered. He has not completed one road project. He has built the mother and child hospital, which is commendable, but he makes so much noise out of this whereas other states, such as Lagos and Delta that have done more do not make so much noise.

The markets he built are for local governments, and is that how to account for the money he collected in three and half years as the only Southwest oil-producing state. If he goes next door to Ekiti State, he will see what Governor Kayode Fayemi has done within two years. The whole of Ado-Ekiti is a massive infrastructure site, a thing that marvelled many who visited when he buried his mother a few months ago. Also next door in Edo State, Governor Adams is another marvel. Mimiko is sandwiched between performers. His anaemic stewardship is his worst show of betrayal.

Betraying the people is at the heart of the matter. In Julius Caesar, Shakespeare portrays Brutus as the traitor. But the real history shows otherwise. The historical Caesar betrayed Pompey, and Brutus stabbed him. Caesar was not popular with the people. Brutus betrayed Caesar, but Caesar betrayed the people. Shakespeare cast Brutus to be a worse villain than he was. The real traitor in history is Judas, who was trusted and betrayed the soul of a whole faith and world.

You can betray your associations or fellow ideologues, but you should not betray the people. Mimiko even betrayed Gani Fawehinmi by claiming credit for the diagnostic centre. It is owned by a private concern. What he has done is to betray both the living and the dead.

In his play, An Enemy of the People, Scandinavian writer Henrik Ibsen tells how two brothers are pitted against each other, one tries to hoodwink the people and the other tries to save them. The people are caught in the two narratives. One of them is a traitor, and the protagonist talks about nobility, not of talent or birth or even intelligence, but the nobility of character.

The election is as much about brothers as it is about character. Making that decision is a task before the Ondo people.

October 1, 2012
Paradox of unity at 52

I was preparing another topic for this column when it dawned on me by chance that today will mark 52 years of Nigeria as a sovereign independent (nation) country. A couple of years past, such an event meant so many things to so many Nigerians. It was not only a period of reminiscences on our journey so far, but equally served as a platform for the renewal of hopes and aspirations on what the future holds for our collective as one country. It also served as a gauge for evaluating the progress if any, made in approximating those lofty promises our founding fathers hoped independence would usher in. It was no doubt, an event to look forward to especially given the enormous sacrifices our people have made to keep this country together through a 30- month civil war.

That such symbolic event was about to pass by without attracting the usual attention and sentiments associated with it in years past, may mean one or two things.

It could either be an indication of a gulf between these hopes and their fulfilment or that Nigerian unity has become an aberrant concept that bears no semblance with extant facts or both. Whichever one it is, the facts on the ground especially events of our recent past have shown that the concept of Nigerian unity is more than ever before being confronted by serious crisis of relevance. Mildly put, it is now facing the greatest challenge of relevance since independence in 1960.

I had in an article on this date last year titled “In fear at 51” drawn copious attention to the palpable fears that had overtaken Nigerians regarding the prospects of the country surviving the stress of corporate preservation and survival. The fears raised then which are still very relevant today were that Nigeria was fast drifting apart and that unless something urgent was done to remedy the situation, we may inevitably be heading to the precipice. To support the prediction then was the dissonance from the various ethnic groups questioning the basis of our continued existence as a nation. In that regard, one had in mind the discordant tunes from the resurging ethnic militias and militants that were competing with the federal authority for the loyalty of the citizens. As that was not enough, we were also confronted by the Boko Haram surge that raised ethnic and religious cleavages to very dangerous dimensions. Apart from its threat to impose Islamic religion on the entire country, it matched it with action by hauling bombs in churches with a view to provoking a religious war. Through these bombings and selective killings, they also succeeded in making good their threat to force southerners out of the north. It was against the backdrop of such a foreboding scenario that the last independence was marked in the villa under great fear and trepidation. At 50, the celebration was heralded by bomb blasts that left shock and awe in its trail.

Those who chose the Independence Day celebrations to levy violence on the nation knew what they were doing. They were making a remarkably poignant statement. And it is that they do not believe in whatever that date represents for us as a people. They seem to have been passing a vote of no confidence on our collective existence as a nation. For them, independence does not seem to mean much again. That is why they have to mock its anniversary by hauling bombs, injuring and killing those who dared to come out to celebrate. Their objective was to change the face of that day to that of sorrow and mourning as against celebrations it rightly should be. They seem to be drawing attention to the fact that Nigerian unity has inevitably become a serious liability to the constituent units. They seem to be saying that instead of our shared experiences and close association over the years erecting a common bond of unity among the disparate peoples, they have further drawn us apart.

The issue has been so much so that today, questions are being raised regarding the prospects of Nigeria surviving as a country. Two former heads of state Obasanjo and Babangida captured this dilemma succinctly in a recent joint statement when they said “a deeply worrying trend that is emerging from this terrible situation is that a pervasive cynicism is beginning to set in, so much so that millions of true Nigerian patriots are starting to question the platform upon which the unity of the country rests”.

They also admitted that a regime of fear and frustrations currently pervade the nation even as the hope to build a united and peaceful nation where all will find accommodation is increasingly eroding. Babangida and Obasanjo recommended dialogue with the belligerent groups and what they called “grassroots engagement” as a way out.

The systemic dysfunctions the duo made references to are not entirely new. Perhaps, the only new thing in their intervention is the quarters it is emanating from. Before now, some people and sections of the country had given the impression that it is their bounden responsibility to wield the nation together irrespective of the cost of that on other constituents. For these people and the likes of Obasanjo and Babangida, Nigeria’s unity is not negotiable as everything even the most ignoble must be done to achieve that objective. Genuine feelings of the people requiring attention so that the task of national unity can progress unhindered were treated with utter disdain. The erroneous impression was given that national unity is an end rather than a means to general good, resulting in the scoffing at genuine feelings of discomfort, alienation and marginalization. The feeling we got then was that all was well with us as a nation. National integration was not given the desired attention even as it holds the prospects for our survival as a corporate entity. It is one thing to recognize the desideratum of our continued unity and entirely a different kettle of fish to make the necessary sacrifices and cooperative accommodation that guarantee the success and survival of such a construct. Yes, the unity of the country is paramount. But unity per se is a means to an end and not an end onto itself. It is a means to the approximation of the collective good of the constituents. It is only relevant as long as it serves this common goal. The systemic stress the country is currently passing through is largely on account of years of neglect of those irreducible minimum that make for unity in diversity.

We have over the years failed to reckon that as a federation, the constituents ought to march in an ambience of accommodation, trust, equality and mutual respect. The questions which the frustrations of Obasanjo and Babangida as past leaders have thrown up are: what is it that has happened that led millions of patriotic Nigerians to lose hope in the platform on which the unity of the country was erected? When and at what point did these manifestations become visible to the point that they had to cry out? And what is to be done to renew and reinforce the confidence of these millions of patriots and non patriots in the unity of the country? These are the real issues to contend with as the country turns 52. And unless we admit and find realistic answers to them, the task of building a united nation may turn out a mirage.

At the root of it all, is the defective federal structure- a structure that has placed sections into undue disadvantage as the disproportionate resources at the disposal of the centre is appropriated and apportioned by those who have been opportune to capture state power. It is not surprising that as soon as power left that segment of the country, the so called millions of patriots began to question the basis for the unity of the country. What manner of patriots are these people really? And why is it only now they are coming to terms with the imperfections of our federal order? These are the real issues. We must therefore restructure this country such that no section is any longer in a position to lord it over others, dispensing state patronage and punishment at its whims and caprices. Only then, will the real patriots that will push further the frontiers of our national unity emerge.

October 1, 2012
Out of Golgotha

We need a constitution for the varied peoples of Nigeria. But we need the varied peoples of Nigeria first. That is the conundrum in the search for a document that will tell us how to engage ourselves. But what we are looking for is not a constitution, but a formula for success.

I recall years ago when Hilla Liman was the leader of Ghana and the country was in a constitutional ferment. The thick-set man with a professorial air purred: “No document, no constitution can govern a people if the people are not ready to govern themselves.”

So while we have debated, sparred, issued petitions and memoranda over how to shape our new laws, we should consider whether what we have will redound to a society of legitimate hubris, the sort that produced the United States of America after contentious hours of cerebral exchanges. Or the French constitutions from republic to republic even as Charles de Gaulle saw his ego bruised. Or the British whose unwritten model continues to marvel although the country had to see itself decline. It was once the empire where the sun never set but now a shrinking island. Its finest hour came in the era of the man who coined the phrase with his courageous growl: Winston Churchill in the Second World War

But no one can doubt the conjuncture of the two requirements in today’s Nigeria. We have a fractious people, debating the most trivial obsessions with as much zeal as the earthquake matters. These tell us that we are as far apart as we are close. We also need a template that will make these heterogeneous challenges worth the sweat and blood of the past few years.

If the Niger Delta States seek one thing, and the Southeast neighbours seek another in the midst of a rampaging North, what shall we say of the Southwest cousins who are working out a coherent document of internal engagement? This tells us that we are not discussing as yet other important ingredients of this formula: how do we educate our children to engage a technological world where even a cutting-edge nation like the United States is feeling left behind? How do we get our healthcare into a high gear where its brightest do not have to travel abroad to be doctors and its sick cannot get cure unless they travel abroad? Most of the country is not covered by infrastructure development even when the extant ones are in a state of terminal decay.

We produce a lot of food but most of it rots away while we go to a foreign country to launch an export product – palm produce – that we once taught others how to seed.

We are still in the early days, in the morning of Genesis where to identify anything we have to point because many things in Nigeria do not have a name yet, to adapt Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s classic novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude.

So what is the constitution going to do for us if we are not ready to do it on our own? We have been calling for a truly federal state, for fiscal discipline, for the extirpation of corruption, for the rebirth of education, for a return to the agrarian glories of the palm oil days, the cocoa boom and the groundnut pyramid. We do not do these with any sense of togetherness but only with a sort of wistful impotence.

The northerner wants oil in the Chad for revenge as much as the oil-laced Niger Delta denizen basks and gloats. But for us to have a true constitution we must be aware of who we are and how we relate to the others. We have not done a good job of that yet, except the Southwest that has come together with its integration strategy. The South-South will have to do something, but it has a greater challenge than the South west, the north and the Southeast, which enjoy greater degrees of cultural symmetry. In the Southsouth, the people are not one, in spite of the impression given outside. Contiguity does not amount to homogeneity. Given the histories of inter-ethnic conflicts and suspicions in the region, sometimes the relationship of the groups reminds one of playwright Jean Paul Satre’s famous quote: “Hell is other people.” It will take a personage of Obafemi Awolowo’s image to construct such an alignment in the region. The concept of the South-south as a region is still arbitrary, just as Okoi Aripko described Nigeria as a mere geographical expression. Goodluck Jonathan does not have the moral heft or charismatic aura to do that because he thinks more like a Bayelsan than a South-south faithful.

The North did well in that front in the past, but only as a hegemonic project. The ebullient Governor Babangida Aliyu, as leader of the Northern Governors’ Forum, is investing his region with a sunny look while pushing positions that bring the North together as a force. Outside the Northern Governors Forum, the North has become fractured and it requires an outsize figure like the Saudauna to string the various tendencies together.

The Southeast has the potential but only the potential. Its elite have lofted a mercantile opportunism above the practical good of an industrious race. Not long ago there was little outrage when some of its leaders dared to sell its presidential rights away of a bridge that was their right any way. That was when President Goodluck Jonathan remembered that his middle name was Azikiwe. It seems to me that only the memories of the civil war draw the Igbo together and that is a tragedy. But the people suffer month after month from the ravages of another civil war, which comes in the way of slow lynching.

The Southwest provides the best example. With the exception of Ondo State because of a Judas governor, the rest of the Southwest is framing what is truly a formula for success. It wants to work together in the areas of infrastructure, trade, education and seeks autonomy rights within a federal structure. Where I differ with them is their call for a parliamentary system. The problem with presidentialism is not its expensiveness. Corruption suffocated the First Republic. A corrupt people cannot ennoble a good system, and vice versa. It is what we bring into the system that will make it what it becomes.

That brings me to where this article begins. Is it the society that makes the law or the law that makes the society? The society makes the law so that the society can become itself.

When constitution monger Abbe Sieyes wanted to fashion a constitution for France in the Napoleonic era, the dictator wanted to insert many clauses that would make him a czar of France. Sieyes theSn asked Napoleon: Do you want to be a king then? We reject the present constitution because the military made it. Constitutions do not come out of vacuums. Prophet Isaiah wrote about the connection between law and experience: “To the law and to the testimony, if they speak not according to this word, it is because the light is not in them.” There is no law without a testimony and vice versa. We need to see episodes of our lives in the law before we can make it work, or else it will set us up for rigmarole.

“The revolution was in the hearts and minds of the American people,” asserted Benjamin Franklin in the high noon of the American Revolution. The 13 colonies saw themselves as different countries. But under the charisma of George Washington, they framed a constitution. They saw themselves in it. Even at that it was not perfect. The people lived with it and have made several amendments, fought a civil war, accommodated the minorities and women, Catholics, etc . That is because they loved the country before they loved the document.

So as we contend to make a new law, we have to show if the document is just a theatre of war or a way out of Golgotha.

September 24, 2012
The compassionate state

Before he became governor, Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola always let the world know that he was a communist. That is yesterday’s ideology, even if North Korea and Cuba still latch on to the fragile and terminal gasps of the idea.

Yet students of history know that communism saved capitalism after the Second World War. The welfare state enjoyed a rebirth when countries, especially those in Europe lying prostrate after the conflagrations, kindled a romance with the idea Marx and Lenin wrought. The liberal canons of democracy and free market became lost in the cloud when the ordinary citizen craved the heres and nows of food and shelter.

The West, including the United States, strengthened the social buoy of the poor and vulnerable although the idea dated back to the years of German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck in the 19th century. That way, the countries kept the communists on the fringes while the Soviet Union glamorised the fantasy in the so-called Third world with champions like Cabral, Ortega, Lumumba and Castro.

Yet, the capitalists could not deny the idea of compassion for the poor. You cannot joy in the spoils of capitalism while the poor gnashed their teeth. In The Secret Agent, Joseph Conrad observes that the condition for luxury and opulence is security.

Long before either capitalism or socialism became organized ideas, Shakespeare expressed the philosophy of compassion in his play, Coriolanus: “that distribution undo excess and each man have enough.”
What Ogbeni is practising in the State of Osun is not communism, but the beginnings of what the Western countries did to save their system: protecting the vulnerable.
In his world, the vulnerable are those in the underbelly of a rabid capitalist system.

They are the old who cannot earn any more money, the young and old who cannot get healing, the children too poor to afford books and food at schools, the disenfranchised business person who cannot get seed money to pursue the dreams of independence. They are the people whom Abraham Lincoln referred to as the reason for government: those who cannot stand well on their own.

I had an opportunity to sit as an observer at the state of Osun’s executive council recently and observed the essence of his style. The meeting lasted about eight hours, and two main commissioners were asked to present their stewardships in the past two years. One of them impressed me: the deputy governor who also doubles as the commissioner for education, Titilayo Laoye-Tomori.

Its uniform and feeding projects in schools were the most telling. As Laoye-Tomori showed in her power-point presentation, in the past year the inflow into schools had leaped from between 25 percent and 30 percent. The students would now have school uniforms, spinning an industry and a jobs spur that locals are taking advantage of to tailor and provide the uniforms all over the state.

This narrative is touching in that education is perhaps the greatest driver of development in the modern world. American dominance has been attributed to education as the supreme driver. The world we know today is American, whether it is the car, airplane, the internet, the cell phone, the ipad, the movie, the suburb, the radio, television, the electric bulb, etc.

They did it because they drove innovation. It is a country that makes things because it knows things. The thousands of children in Osun who are abandoning idleness at home and on the streets for school are witnessing the greatest liberation: of the human mind.

At one stage at the meeting, when he referred to the ambitious education programme, he burst into a Sunny Ade song “aiye nreti eleya mi o…”. He stood up in his characteristic soulfulness and some of his executives wafted along with him. It was a song of irony. It meant his detractors were waiting for his failure, but it was also a caution to his team not to disappoint.

It costs N30 billion, the biggest project in the country.
The tablet of knowledge, a computer that would have all the lessons and books for the students is a new thing, and the deputy governor said it was close to readiness. I anticipate that as it combines modernity with the potential for commerce and jobs.

The other point of compassion is Agba Osun, and it is not its N10, 000 a month to elders that so touched me as the medical system that provides treatment to the vulnerable, especially the elderly and handicapped, in their homes. This cannot work without having all of them in a data base, and the young of the OYES programme built the data base.

This is what the youth are doing but interlopers, in their willful ignorance, said they are militias for secession. The state has obviously a mobile medical system where communication between the deprived and the caregiver is streamlined. It is not perfect, and I am not sure everyone has enjoyed this even if the government is impressed with what it has done so far. I recall, too, that in the number of intakes in schools, the deputy governor’s figures were questioned in one of the districts, if for a negligible discrepancy.

What is being done for the elderly in terms of free healthcare in some states, like Lagos, Delta, Rivers, Akwa Ibom, Ekiti, will help improve life expectancy. But personalised care in Osun raises the stakes.

A peep into his style was his conversation with permanent secretary. Ogbeni had accused the ministry of not making an input into the education programme. It is a tribute to his open-mindedness that the permanent secretary was at ease to lash back in her courteous way. She said they actually offered their proposals but the governor did not implement.

It turned out she was right. But ever the irrepressible Ogbeni with his tuft of beard, lean face, eyes alert, he asked the ministry to express the ideas and they were debated. I learnt that the Aregbesola administration in less than two years has convened more executive meetings than the seven and a half years of Oyinlola’s Gestapo era.

After the U.S. won the war of independence, Jefferson accused President Washington of apostasy for creating an elite society with Alexander Hamilton when he set up institutions for a strong federal state. This tension led to the birth of the two-party system with Jefferson breaking away from the Federalists to form the Republicans that protected the weak.

That tension exists today with those who believe that anyone who is poor and fails is necessarily lazy. Philosopher Herbert Spencer says welfare institutionalises indolence. From the droves of children going to school in Osuns now, we know that is not true.
It takes an Ogbeni to prove that.

September 17, 2012
Fashola’s way of life

In one of his sermons, the numinous Christ differentiated the broad way from the narrow way. The narrow way leads to life, the broad way to destruction.

That was my thought when the Lagos State Government introduced the new traffic law, the most ambitious and comprehensive of such legislation in the history of this country. And who else to do so but the governor of example, Babatunde Raji Fashola (SAN). When the news made the rounds, I also anticipated a row, the voices of dissent and resistance.

It has been called draconian, ruthless, inhuman. I call it the law of the narrow gate. Back to the numinous Christ. He said the broad way attracts all sorts of people, the wicked, the good, the fools, the heartless and the lawless. A cocktail of such human types would lead to destruction. It is the way of indiscipline, the albatross of chaos.
So the law says: don’t eat, don’t drink, don’t beat the red light, don’t bring your okada to the major spines and arteries of the cities, don’t ride okada with two persons, keep away your cell phones, don’t drive the danfo with nonfunctional lamps, drive your heavy trucks only at night, et cetera.

And I say why not! Go to the Lagos road and you will know why. A man in suit navigates a one-way street with the reckless gusto of the shirtless danfo driver. The rabble has converted the dove. It is time to reverse that. Recently, the streets were lined again, and the purpose is to keep commuters on their lanes. Only on Saturday, I watched a man in a new Honda Accord hug the street, as though he could not see the border between my lane and his.
The road fines are heavy, and that is how it should be. When I first started driving in the United States, I was almost tempted to throw out the foil wrap of a cake I had just consumed on my way from Denver to Boulder in the state of Colorado. It then occurred to me that there was a sign that a fine of $1,000 loomed. For a cake that cost me about one dollar? That is the discipline we need to abide by the law.

The road is not just the road. It is the place where we all meet. The President’s siren blares when he commutes, CEOs and the drivers are forced into the same space. The driver can hear some of the conversational intimacies of the most powerful man in town when even the wife is as far away as Madagascar. The road accommodates the slouch and the efficient, the rascal and the devotee, the sinner and preacher, the drunk and the sober, the virile and impotent, the blessed and the cursed, the damned jalopy and the chariot of the Lord. The road, whether it is as thin as needle or wide as the heavens, becomes a broad way. Broad is the gate and wide is the road that leads to destruction, many there are who find it.

Wole Soyinka wrote a play at our Independence in 1960 and it was aptly called The Road. The Nobel Laureate, ever a traveler, is a devotee of the road. He has shown this in his marquee plays, poems, memoirs and novels. In real life, he became the boss of the Federal Road Safety Corps. The phrase Aksident Store haunts me from The Road. It is the store where all the vehicular scraps from around town are kept by a sort of tout called Professor.

The new law is to avoid the accidents and pare the rate of scraps of tragedy on our roads. Obedience of the law is better than the sacrifice of the limbs and health of our commuters.

As a reporter in the United States, I once visited the Denver jail for a night, and what struck me was the number of people behind bars for what is designated as DUI – driving under the influence. Of alchohol, that is. That was Denver, a tranquil cow town of low blood pressure with minimal traffic infractions.

The road is the place of all human activities. There many wars are fought, many peace treaties signed, many lovers consummated. There children are born , David beat Goliath on the road, Samson mauled a lion barehanded. Also: Ija Ore in the Nigerian Civil war, the walk of Moremi into myth, the pogroms and festivals of our people, the Battle of the Bulge in the Second World War when Germans ensnared Americans by changing road signs, the conversion of Paul, the road to Golgotha, Mohammed’s trip between Mecca and Medina, Budda’s nights of solitude as shown in Nobel Prize-winning novel Siddhartha by Herman Hesse, the young wooer of big words in Soyinka’s play whose bag got empty and sent for a bigger dictionary, the actions in Death and The King’s Horse man, the mad man in Achebe’s short story, the slaying of Ikemefuna in Things Fall Apart, the assassination of Murtala Muhammed and John Kennedy. Every day when we wake up, we might as well remember the song of the American rock star, Bob Seger: Here I am/ on the road again/ there I am/ up on the stage.

In the movie, The Great American Traffic Jam, everything happens from the birth of a baby to the pursuit of a criminal to the glitter of a band with guitars blaring.
The American novelist, Jack Kerouac dramatised the rebellion of the young and restless in the 1950’s with the novel On The Road where a group of lads travel all over America in search of meaning they cannot not find. The road is nothing but a process. It is not where we are going to but where we are going through. Just like searching for regular power supply, real federalism as well as end to armed robbery, ethnic and religious bigotry, rigged elections, etc. We are forced on it whether it is well travelled or not. That was Christ’s point.

If we don’t make it a good one, the road becomes the end of the road. Another novel, The Road, by Cormac McCarthy tells of its apocalyptic potential. We neither want to make the road an endless search nor the finisher of our souls.

No law is perfect. When the Americans developed their constitution, they admitted it would be improved along the way. That is why they have several amendments. Somebody asked me how she could carry her baby from her home to the main street without Okada since there are only Okada. While the spirit of the law is to save the child, the convenience of mother and child may not enjoy infrastructure as yet. That is the challenge to make more roads open to such families. It is work in progress.
The spirit of the law is in the right place, and most of it is right. That is where we should focus. Governor Fashola wants a way of life in which a narrow gate leads to life, not to death and destruction.

We follow Ebenezer Obey’s line, “ Irin ajo la wa yi o/ ori gbe wa de le…” That is the high way, which Prophet Isaiah says the unclean will not take. That is Fashola’s way of life for Lagosians, a road pruned of dirt and deaths. It is in that spirit that Soyinka writes, “Traveller, you must set forth at dawn/I promise marvels of the holy hour.”

September 10, 2012