The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sam Omatseye

  • The Emir of Kano attack

    The Emir of Kano attack

    Then Sambo Dasuki was appointed the national security adviser, his first mission was to visit and solicit the support of the emirs and royal fathers of the North over the surge of militancy. In my column titled: A Prince and the Pauper, I mused that the problem went beyond the royal fathers since class inspired the crisis. The underclass militants looked askance at the northern traditional elite, and the emirs are also targets of their rage. They had no solution to the problem.

    So I thought Sambo’s pick and approach did not address the matter. The unfortunate attack at such a lofty and apparently impregnable position of the Emir of Kano only puts my column in perspective. If the Emir of Kano is vulnerable, then we must understand that the royal fathers of the North also cannot offer the kind of intelligence that Sambo or any other top flyer of Jonathan’s regime needs to stop the problem.

  • Shut up, Orubebe!

    Shut up, Orubebe!

    The exchange of brickbats between Rivers State Governor Rotimi Amaechi and the Niger Delta Minister Godsday Orubebe reflects the larger picture of the implosion in the Peoples Democratic Party.

    We can see it clearly as a contest between two tendencies within the party. Orubebe, who loves to be called elder, represents what the Yoruba call the agbaya tendency of the party. Agbaya stands for the elder who does not appreciate the wisdom of age but only the rascality. So such an elder torpedoes the wise counsel. Governor Amaechi, the younger, has evinced a brilliance that baffles the elder. So the elder resorts to the impunity of accusation that takes away attention from his superlative bumbling.

    So, while Amaechi, a working chief executive with something to show for his performance, is the target of an Orubebe whose colossal ineptitude is responsible for the terrible image we have of the Niger Delta. He is one of the reasons it is a region of waste without guilt, ineptitude with bravado, plenty submerged by scarcity.

    While Amaechi speaks from the platform of performance in office, Orubebe rants from the frivolity of politics. We can bring this up to the larger centre of PDP politics where the forces on Jonathan’s side are at loggerheads with the governors over party leadership, Jonathan is jousting Obasanjo over the leader of the board of trustees and, in Adamawa State, two dinosaur politicians want to initiate dynasties by imposing their sons on their state.

    In all the imbroglio in the PDP, no one has brandished the idea of performance or values. It is a Hobbesian battle today when Jonathan wants to impose Tukur on all the party faithful. The next day, it is a Machiavellian fest when an Oyinlola, no hero by any account, is ousted as party scribe.

    It is in that context you can locate the exchange between Amaechi and Orubebe. Orubebe lashed out on the ground that Amaechi, and the head of the Governors Forum, was eyeing the presidency and therefore undermining the boss of all, Goodluck Jonathan. He charged that Amaechi “feel(s) that he is bigger than the president.” He waxed spiritual as an elder and attributed the elevation of Amaechi as governor to the grace of God. “He has forgotten so soon. He has arrogated to himself powers that he does not have. It is God that has powers,” sniped the elder.

    I should say to the elder, “smile while you say that.” What does he know about the grace of God? Orubebe only understands the grace of man. No one was sure that Amaechi would become governor because the all-powerful, all-knowing Olusegun Obasanjo had inflicted a K-leg on him and he was at the mercy of the judiciary which, as a man out of power, he was not in a position to influence. So, if Amaechi got it, it was because, as Orubebe said, by the grace of God and the integrity and erudition of the judges. But on whose grace does Orubebe rely? That of man, and the man is Goodluck Jonathan. The elder can also say that he relies on good luck, not divine grace.

    If it was by grace and by competence, Orubebe should not be minister. That is why he is taking on Amaechi. He has nothing concrete to go on as minister but the politics of sycophancy. He is not a performing minister. He is a grovelling cheerleader and a Rottweiler on an errand. Amaechi responded by saying that he has performed, but let the elder tell us what he has done. He has been challenged to deliver on the East-West road. That road is the eyesore of the Niger Delta. We have had many dead, fire tankers exploded, billions of Naira incinerated. But the elder knows that not much has been done on that road. One of the reasons, perhaps that a helicopter crashed with the fatalities of the former Kaduna State Governor and the former National Security Adviser, was that many dignitaries did not want to ply the road between Port Harcourt and Yenagoa, with its ominous craters and snaky traps. He has not performed.

    Rather the elder has turned himself into a culvert minister, inspecting projects of dubious significance.

    That is why I say the jousting between Amaechi and Orubebe represents, in its micro punches, the fight between a minority of doers like Amaechi and the majority of crafty never-do-well politicians with eyes for the spoils.

    For instance, the Nyako versus Tukur battle in Adamawa has not raised any issue of significance to the ordinary voter. It has not even raised the question of morality in that Tukur’s son, who is now in the furnace of subsidy allegations, has the bravado to want public office. Should he not clear himself first? Even the same Bamanga Tukur who, in the past, dissociated himself from his son’s business entanglements easily entangles him in his dream to become the Saraki of Adamawa. Nyako cannot even recoil with shame that the only quality he sees in his son is that his boy’s blood flows ruddier than his but from his. In none of this conversation do we hear about how Adamawa will advance from poverty, from its suffocating lack of health services, from infrastructural nadir and educational sewers.

    We see the same thing in the politics of Jonathan and 2015. As for the omniscient and omnipotent Obasanjo, we know that the man is fighting for relevance in his hoary years. He does not want to live idly in his Ota retreat. He abounds with energy for a septuagenarian but no useful work for it. Since Jonathan does not pick his calls and he could not flex his brawn of old, he quit the BOT position so as to fight from outside with looser limbs and surer punches. So far, no one is bleeding. Jonathan is having the upper hand. It still remains dicey whether the Southwest PDP can coalesce with the core North PDP to asphyxiate Jonathan out of the party ticket.

    The Presidency shies away from Jonathan’s performance. They know they cannot win on that. Only last Friday, Jonathan paid a shock visit to the Police College in Lagos in the aftermath of the Channels Television expose. The president, after seeing the mess, was only interested in the image of his government. He showed himself the snake again. He pretended he was visiting out of interest. He wanted to know how the television crew penetrated the place. The word “penetrated” struck me. It had a sneaky quality to it, the sort you associate with snakes. He did not get any answers. So he concluded an insider organised it to embarrass the image of his government.

    I beg you, readers. What image does Jonathan’s government have? Of non-performance. So how does the wreck of a police college change anything? He only wanted to see whether the Channels expose was a lie so as to attack the station for exaggeration. Now that he had nothing to prove that scheme, he decided to come out in true colours out of frustration with conspiracy charge.

    That is the PDP to which Orubebe belongs. He loathes performance but luxuriates in witch-hunting. His master, Jonathan, is not performing, so a man like Amaechi, who is doing well, becomes a pariah. If Orubebe wants some respect, he should perform, or shut up.

  • 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?”

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

     

  • ‘Our president has no shoes’

    ‘Our president has no shoes’

    No one can forget President Goodluck Jonathan’s shoe speech of seduction. We remember it not for its rhetorical distinction. Jonathan has not delivered any speech that stuns except for playing games with facts. But the shoe speech distinguished itself by its bare bones fact, its evocative familiarity. He said he did not have shoes as a little boy and walked barefoot to school.

    It was a seduction speech because he tapped the experience of many who grew up in his days, whether in the Niger Delta, in the Southeast, in the Southwest or all parts of the North. In the 1970’s in Warri, we called it “tearing ten toes.”

    Most people did not buy shoes. They could not afford it, and it did not seem then like a big deal if you did not have shoes because many did not. That was the point President Jonathan did not make. He was not alone without shoes. He grew up in a generation of shoeless school goers. He was not an isolated poor. We all had that foot deficiency with blisters, petrified soles and toes, limping over wounds coming and going.

    He delivered the speech when he declared he wanted to run for president after he survived the plots and ululations of the so-called cabal or kitchen cabinet. Those were the men and woman who would not give him the right to which providence and the law entitled him, and he broke a law on his own called zoning in his party in order to declare his “I did not have a shoe” speech. It was perhaps the most resonant appeal in all speeches declaring a presidential ambition in Nigerian history. I might also say it was the most opportunistic.

    But that is not the point today. It is because President Jonathan has spent one hundred days in office and he seemed to bask in false glory in an organised media chat in which he failed to elevate his thoughts. He was incapable of generating an enthusiasm among Nigerians about whether he had a direction. Editors found it hard to cast any good headline because in the two-hour exposure he did not make any meaningful exposition. Not on security, not on the federal question or power or infrastructure development or on the vexing bugbear of education did he utter any succinct line of policy. As a PHD, he did not sound coherent. As a former teacher he did not inspire one to take notes. As a past technocrat, he showed no sign of the policy wonk.

    Yet, the nation is in dire pains. Poverty worsens by the hour, and all the challenges we face in the areas of Boko Haram eruptions, the failure of power, the exodus of businesses, the rising illiteracy levels, all show how poverty continues to grow like an ominous monster feeding fat in the sewer.

    In all of these, I don’t think he knows the significance of his shoe speech. It was not just an emotive moment. It was a challenge, a potentially inspirational moment. It was a pact with all those who live at the level he lived in the shoeless era. He vowed – if he did not realise it on that incandescent stage that Abuja afternoon – to ensure that those who could not afford shoes in 2011 should be able to afford them by the time he is done in office.

    It was a very simple pledge. It was an IOU. It is time to start paying up. But from how he has performed since he took over as a substantive president- though he has been president for over a year now- I see no signal of progress. No one is asking him to set up a shoe factory. That will not cut it. And no one is asking him to go on a charity spree, buy shoes in their millions and distribute them to the poor of subaltern Nigerian or even in the city.

    That will be phony. In fact Nigerians have become so adept at second-hand shoes that even the very poor afford threadbare varieties of footwear. What Jonathan should focus on now is to create conditions that will make it easy for the poor to afford shoes. It sounds simplistic. But that is the power he needs to tap for a successful presidency.

    Before a boy of school age whose parents cannot afford shoes can afford them, certain things have to happen. The parents have to be able to have enough money, and not just enough to feed, but also for shelter, for school fees, and other essentials. Shoes were seen as luxuries in those days. You had to afford the basics and later go to the level of footwear. Footwear was at the bottom of the list. Shoes are still a luxury today. For the parents to get money, they have to have jobs and jobs do not spring from lumbering economies.

    What this means is that Jonathan should make it possible for the poor to rise out of their present state of misery. But for a presidency that has not narrowed its objectives and set a coherent strategy for implementation, the story of all those with shoeless lifestyles remain endangered.

    In his first duty as president, which is security, he has proved out of sync. Jos has become a cauldron of weekly and sometimes daily tragedies. In the approach to the Boko Haram eruptions, he is engaging in counterterrorism without intelligence. Nobody wages a war without intelligence. If knowledge is power, how can you fight without knowledge? This is a typical Nigerian paradox.

    How can businesses flourish, or education standards rise and infrastructure develop in the absence of security? That is what Nigeria is today.

    This is not the time to allow himself to dither. This is not the time to be distracted by the issue of a six-year term. He made it clear it was not six years he was proposing but seven. He said Nigerians presumed he was going to benefit from it. He did not make any categorical statement about whether he was going to exploit it. Not that any such categorical word was going to mean anything. Zoning is an example.

    Agriculture is still behind, and Nigerians live on less than a dollar a day. Yet the value of the Naira to the dollar has dropped about N15 in only three months. The banks do not show the real values. Go to the Bureaus de change to find out the truth. The Nigerian is devaluated like our currency and that does not presage good things for those without shoes.

    The worse the situation, the more likely it will be for those with shoeless boys and girls to afford shoes. The president ought to take this seriously. How marvelous it would be though if the president does well and at the end of four years, we are able to pick those whose lots have so improved that they can afford shoes for their children to go to school.

    If not, that rhetoric of seduction on that gleeful stage of intention would be a big waste, a grandiloquent lie. The president could protest his failure by taking off his shoes. But we cannot have that of our president because people will say our president has no shoes.

     

    •This article, first published on September 19, 2011, was one of four articles with which Omatseye won the NMMA Columnist of the Year.

     

  • Traveller’s nightmare

    I arrived Nigeria only to be reminded I was home on Saturday with items missing from my luggage at our international airport in Lagos. The first sign was that the lock was off. I opened the bag, and found it was without some items. I reported to a young man in charge of such matters and he said the locks were removed by United States security. But when they did such things they put the locks back in the bag. Not in my bag.

    Good news though. The thieves may have loved the glitzy stuff but were too illiterate to know the value of books. They left my books intact. Thank God for small mercies.