The Nation Newspaper

Category: Columnists

  • MANDELA: The great Nigerian snub

    The mere suggestion by the Presidency that it was not a snub further rubs pepper on the injury. It is to tell us that we don’t even know when we are insulted. It is like someone giving you a backhanded compliment and then turns around to try proving to you that he did not mean to insult you. In order words, you are so thick to decipher a put down. This is where our government and the people in charge of our affairs are. How can we properly analyse the situation, learn the lessons there-from and make sure it never happens again if we do not see the situation for what it is?

    I speak of course about the Nelson Mandela memorial service of Tuesday in South Africa in which Nigeria attended as an on-looker while six selected heads of governments across continents rendered eulogies in honour of the great African leader and icon of the modern world, Mandela. President Barack Obama of the United States represented the western world; Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff stood in for South America; India spoke for Asia and Namibia could be said to have taken up the slot of Africa. Other speakers included President Jacob Zuma of South Africa; President Raul Castro of Cuba and the UN Secretary-General, Mr. Ban Ki-Moon.

    People have argued that on account of Nigeria’s frontline activism during the apartheid era alone, she deserved a spot at the podium during the memorial rites of Nelson Mandela. That may be true for Nigeria provided streams of funding, was an operational base; imbued the struggle with strategic training and logistical support. Nigeria was also in the vanguard of the Organization of African Unity’s boycotts and economic blockade of the apartheid regime. She boycotted the 1976 Olympics Games on account of the South African situation and British Petroleum (BP) was thrown out of Nigeria and its assets confiscated. These are just samples of actions taken by Nigeria in her drive to free the people of South Africa and help them regain their freedom from white oppression.

    But one thinks it would be far-fetched and presumptuous to expect the events of about three decades ago to govern the moment. Nigeria needed not have played roles in ending apartheid to deserve a special place at the memorial of Nelson Mandela. Nigeria was ignored simply because she has not lived up to her stature and eminence in the scheme of things in Africa and the world at large. Nigeria’s sheer size in the continent, her political and economic magnitude if well harnessed, ought to give her an unassailable pre-eminence in Africa.

    But because leadership has failed increasingly in the last few years, she has not lived up to her dominant and influential roles on the continent. If we had got our acts right, Nigeria ought to supply the bulk of critical manpower in tertiary institutions, finance, judiciary, defence and security across most of black Africa. And by virtue of our abundant oil and gas resources, we ought to supply the entire continent with fuel energy, bitumen, gas, electricity and other industrial by-products of crude oil. These are natural influencers that go with our sheer size and natural endowment but which lack of vision has deprived us.

    Lastly, the extremely poor quality leadership of the last two decades has completely reduced Nigeria in the esteem of the peoples of Africa and the world that we are no longer worthy to be mentioned in the gathering of the best of the world. We must face the harsh fact that Nigeria’s leadership has become so leprous today that the world would conspire to ensure that it does not take the same podium of honor taken by world leaders of note; by our unremitting malfeasance, we have alienated ourselves. Nigeria moves inexorably south when the rest of the world faces north.

    Year-on-year, we are rated among the most corrupt people in the world, among the most diseased and the most poor; they note the cash stash of our presidents, ministers, legislators and politically exposed people in all parts of the world with quiet disdain. They see us regress in all human development indices like child mortality, education enrolment, diminishing per capita and the inability to conduct elections. All the fundaments of human civilization are in recession in Nigeria and they know that we are inexorably a dying country. When our matter is raised among the comity of nations, they sigh resignedly fearing that Nigeria is bound to end up as the last big, basket case of the 21st century.

    Snubbing Nigeria at the Mandela memorial was neither a mistake nor a chance happening; it was a well reasoned, calculated and pre-meditated action designed to save the face of the world from a Nigerian embarrassment. But true to type, our leaders miss even this point.

    Is PIB the be all and end all?

    I have never given a damn about the Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB) in all the years of its roundabout trips between that National Assembly and the Petroleum Ministry. First I had the natural inclination to suspect that something must be wrong with a legal document that is a tome of 223 pages. What the heck? Second, I hold the oil ministry and its key subsidiary, the Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC, as currently constituted, in eternal disdain seeing how other national oil firms have grown over the year and lifted the economy of countries. Third, I never thought a legal framework or the lack thereof is the bane of Nigeria’s oil sector – the stunted growth, the rabid corruption and the unrestrained madness in that quarter cannot be as a result of an absence of a particular piece of legislation.

    But in the heat of a debate over our blighted oil industry recently, a respected colleague availed me a copy of the PIB insisting that my perspective would change should I endeavor to go through the rather rumbustious tome. If it has such redeeming values, how come the National Assembly has kept it in its underground cellar for over a decade; how will it clean the Augean stable that the NNPC has become? Still skeptical though, I have promised to give it a shot some good day when the weather is sunny and there are glimmers of hope in the horizon.

     

    NOTE: EXPRESSO proceeds on vacation till January 2014. This is wishing you dear reader a song-filled season and may you wake with a bright new sun on the other side of this annal.

  • Jonathan’s thoughts on Mandela’s apotheosis

    Jonathan’s thoughts on Mandela’s apotheosis

    They were expecting a moving elegy. Then the tears would come cascading down their chubby cheeks. They would cling to one another in a desperate search for temporary comfort and mumble those soothing words of reassurance that the darkness that had fallen upon the land would soon give way to a clear, sunny sky. After all, it was the funeral of a great man, a giant whose deification many would not contest.

    President Goodluck Jonathan disappointed them all. He chose the occasion of the funeral service for the late Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, anti-apartheid icon, lawyer and former South African President, to lash out last Sunday at his fellow politicians at the Aso Villa Chapel.

    Many were restless in their seats as His Excellency spoke strongly on the virtues of a good politician, particularly the ABC of communication. It was a long extemporaneous speech, dripping with bile and vile, drawing images from the holy book –”it will be easy for a politician to be great than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle” – and analysis of “greatness”. Vitriol? Not quite, but so close.

    The speech was delivered with the fury of a pentecostal preacher, the gesticulations and drama of a Nollywood star and the magisterial postulations of a judge. Who and what provoked such diatribe? In the audience were respected men and women, lawmakers and lawbreakers hiding under the umbrella – sorry, dear reader, no prize for guessing whose umbrella this is – contractors and detractors as well as palace jesters and pranksters.

    “If you listen to those of us who are politicians… some of us speak as if Nigeria is their personal bedrooms that they have control over,” Dr Jonathan said, adding: “Read the papers, listen to the radio… and see how politicians talk; we intimidate, we threaten, show force in our communication. This, definitely, is not the virtue of great men. They are certainly the vices of tiny men.”

    No. Not quite right sir. Politicians talk according to the dictates of the events in the polity. They also study the body language – how they love the phrase – of the leadership and comment accordingly. If elections are rigged, will politicians not deploy the foulest of language to condemn the malfeasance? They will.

    Besides, to me, what the President may have seen as bad communication may not really be. I, like many others, enjoy the creativity and oratory of some of our leaders. The repartee. The sardonic humour. They really know how to choose their words and use them to the fullest effect. Precision.

    The other day in Dutse, Jigawa State, when former Head of State Gen. Abdulsalami Abubakar came visiting, Governor Sule Lamido spoke on the crisis in the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). Party Chairman Bamanga Tukur “is worse than polio virus”, Lamido said. Can you beat that?

    I take it, dear reader, that you know what polio is, its devastating exploits in Nigeria, particularly in the North, and the seemingly endless controversial battle to stop the virus that cripples its victims right from birth.

    When five PDP governors quit the party to join the All Progressives Congress (APC), one of them, Adamawa’s Murtala Nyako, got a tumultuous welcome from his supporters. He reflected on his days in the ruling party and said: “We were like Israelites under the Pharaoh.” The similitude is so striking. It says a lot about the workings of the ruling party.

    After the defection of the five governors, the chairman of the New PDP, Alhaji Kawu Baraje, advised Jonathan to start writing his handover notes. That common expression, which is like a yellow card in soccer, sparked an uncommon debate about the import of the advice. What will such notes contain? Who will draft the all-important document, the cerebral Dr Reuben Abati or the garrulous Ahmed Gulak or the rumbustious Dr Doyin Okupe?

    What will such notes contain? The Under-17 World Cup victory? The Super Eagles triumph at the African Cup of Nations? Privatisation of the power sector? Free and fair elections, as in Ondo State and, most recently, in Anambra State? The well fought anti-corruption battle?

    A committee set up to probe the N255m cars scandal successfully did the job and submitted a report – a feat that would have been impossible if the Jonathan presidency had not vowed to keep its anti-graft war on track, against all odds. Another administration would have simply looked the other way. Not this. Now, the report is safe, filed away in the inner recess of the Villa where no saboteur can tamper with it.

    How about the fight against Boko Haram? If not for the government’s ingenuity, wouldn’t the sect have taken over more states? And SURE-P, the anti-poverty elixir that has become the toast of the country, especially among the multitudes who have been snatched away from the jaws of hunger and swept into eternal prosperity, which is well assured by their pepper grinding machines, okada motorcycles, Keke NAPEP tricycles and donkeys, the very symptoms of the disease that the programme set out to fight. Never mind those critics of the highly successful, but widely maligned programme who say some N500billion of its fortune is missing.

    The Anambra State governorship election sparked a big row. All attempts by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to patch it up ended in more cracks. Despite the popular outcry for the cancellation of the exercise, INEC Chairman Prof Attahiru Jega went on to conduct a supplementary election. In other words, rather than apologise, he repeated the offence. An angry politician remarked that with the Anambra election, Jega had become jagajaga – an onomatopoeic contraption of Jega’s name, signifying an irredeemable confusion. Isn’t that great?

    When the university lecturers’ strike defied all solutions, including an all-night meeting at the Villa, the President came up with a great idea – thanks to his fecund imagination. Why not brand the stubborn fellows with a terrible name and turn the table against them? He called them subversives.

    For long, Niger State Governor Babangida Aliyu shouted that Jonathan signed an agreement to spend one term in office. One term he must spend, he insisted. Asked to produce the agreement, he at first said he would not entertain any question on the matter. Later, he said the paper was with a Southsouth governor. Now Aliyu is no longer talking about that. Neither is he still threatening to defect to the APC – remember he was the leader of the G7, which gave birth to the G-5 after he and Lamido jumped ship. So much for shakara leadership.

    Jonathan, at the service aforementioned, recalled that Mandela refused to yield to pressure to go for a second term. A cheeky fellow, one of the ardent readers of this newspaper whose name I won’t mention so as not to expose him to charges of subversion or a more serious crime in these inventive days, remarked derisively: “See who is talking. Why don’t you, Jonathan, do one term, paint your name on the canvass of greatness and give us some peace? We all talk about 2015 with trepidation? C’mon, you too can be a Mandela.”

    Another fellow recalled that the last time a Nigerian leader was asked to follow Mandela’s example, he did not only reject the unsolicited advice, but he went after the bearer of such a treasonable idea, seized him by the throat and stifled him politically. He then went on to do a second term. He fought a do-or-die battle for a third term, but his well funded design was doomed to fail. It failed.

    Jonathan spoke about Mandela’s spirit of forgiveness. The disgruntled fellow who I had earlier referred to sniggered and said derisively: “Nowadays, we are wiser. We don’t let people commit offences and go through the painful act of forgiveness; we stop them so that when there is no offence, there is no need for forgiveness. Meetings, even of governors, are smashed up and anti-corruption seminars are invaded by the police.

    “And when people go to jail for corruption, we pardon them. So much for forgiveness.”

    Jonathan probably forgot to talk about Mandela’s humility, perhaps the most important of his virtues. From humility flows forgiveness and patience, courage and the kind of stoicism required to endure 27 years incarceration and come out of it all smiling.

    May God give us humble leaders.

    Obasanjo writes Jonathan

    Just as I was writing the last line of this article last night, I got a copy of former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s bitter letter to President Goodluck Jonathan. It is so far the most draconian picture of the Jonathan presidency, a knife driven deep into its heart.

    It will not be wrong to say this is why Jonathan launched into that diatribe on Sunday. He is said to be preparing his response to those huge allegations. I can’t wait to read it.

  • The Mandela years

    Everything he did he did forthrightly and he was always conscious of his place in history. Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was not just a man, he was a special being. His life was inspiring; a life that was full of ups and downs. He took things as they came, believing in his own conviction that at the appropriate time, he will be vindicated. History will surely vindicate this rare human being, who gave as much as he could take. ”The struggle is my life”, he said at the height of his travails in South Africa.

    It was a statement he lived up to in his lifetime. There was no time in his eventful life that he forgot this mantra. He never deviated from it, whether in prison or out of prison. That was what made the man; his associates and followers knew that they could take him for his words. He put others first and himself last. Just as Julius Caesar said in the Shakespeare work of the same title : ”What touches us most shall last be served”. No wonder, the late Madiba fell in love with the book when he read it in prison.

    Mandela was a legend, a hero and an icon all rolled into one. He came ahead of his time. Many may say he should not have been of this earth, but God knew what he was doing by placing him here. The Almighty, perhaps, wanted the world to see Him in Mandela and so sent him to earth and a country where he would be initially treated like a second class citizen before becoming the first citizen. There is a lot to learn from Mandela’s life. His life tells us that it is not over until it is all over. Even Mandela himself, while alive, would have been stunned by the turn of events in his life.

    When he was jailed for life in 1964, the apartheid regime in South Africa then did not mean well for him. The plan was to get him out of the way for life. It was not intended that he would come out of jail. He was meant to rot away there, with his carcasses probably thrown to the dogs after his death. Unknowing to them, Providence had other plans for him because as we have come to see Mandela was the apple of the Lord’s eyes. Like the biblical Joseph, he survived all human antics to achieve God’s purpose for his life. He was beaten, battered, brutalised and tortured, he survived it all to outlive many of his tormentors.

    Indeed, when God has plans for a person, there is no Jupiter on earth that can alter them, except if that person wishes to perish in his foolhardiness. Mandela was the beloved of the Lord, if he was not, he would not have spent 27 years in jail and come out to spend another 23 years in freedom before his death last Thursday. He fought to the end like the true activist that he was. For over one year, he engaged death face to face before succumbing to the master reaper on December 5. He was first hospitalised in December, last year, for lung infections. This recurring ailment saw him in and out of the hospital. The world never gave him a chance of coming out of the hospital alive.

    We had all given up on Madiba that if it was God’s time for him to go then, so be it. After all, he had done his beat. He had beaten a path for not only his compatriots in South Africa, but for the world to follow. Today, the global community is hailing this great citizen of the world because he was a moral compass. No doubt, he had his own foibles, who does not, but Mandela’s goodness and forbearance were out of this world. He was extraordinary human specie. God does not seem to create them like that anymore. How many of us in Mandela’s shoes would have acted the way he did after he regained his freedom from the Victor Verster Prison in 1990? Wouldn’t we have gone after all those that we perceived to be behind our predicament? On becoming president like he did four years after his freedom, wouldn’t we have perpetuated ourselves in office believing that the position is our birthright having ‘suffered’ in jail for 27 years?

    This man did not do that. He was focused on laying the foundation for a stronger South Africa led by blacks. He was an advocate for the young taking up the leadership of their countries in Africa. At the age of 76 when he became South Africa’s president, he felt he was too old for the office, but buckled under pressure to lead his country because the people considered him the natural choice for the exalted seat after all he went through during the apartheid years. South Africa may not have reached there yet, but considering what the country went through in recent memory can we say it has not tried for itself? Today, South Africa is, arguably, the leading country on the continent. The country has Mandela to thank for where it is today.

    Even though a tree does not make a forest, a man can make the difference in the affairs of his country, team or school and we have seen this in the role Mandela played in the struggle to free his people from the yoke of apartheid. The world mourns because he stood for peace, for which he jointly won the Nobel Peace Prize with F.W. de Klerk , respect for human rights and gender balance. It was hard to find fault with Mandela not because he was a saint but because he had this God given grace to win people to his side. His compatriots knew he had his faults but they tolerated him because he was a trusted leader. Whatever Mandela did, he considered his people first. If he had played Tom Quisling, Mandela may not have spent 27 years in jail, but today who will be remembering him?

    Nobody, he would have long been forgotten like other sell – outs in history. Because he had the courage of his conviction and stood to the end, Mandela did not only make history, he was history. Beyond all the outpouring of emotions, the essence of Mandela is best captured in this stanza of Henry Longfellow’s poem, A Psalm of Life : ”Lives of great men remind us we can make our lives sublime, and departing, leave behind us footprints on the sands of time”. If there ever was a great man, here was one. Our leaders have the life of Mandela to learn from so that on their death they can be praised as the late anti – apartheid is being eulogised worldwide today. Here was a Mandela! When comes such another?

  • Black Africa’s deadly curse – 2

    I ended this column last week with a promise to answer some questions today: “First, what is at the root of the Black man’s incapability to hold and properly manage the countries that European colonialists created and bequeathed to us? And second, what does the future hold in store for the Black man in Africa, and for these countries that we are messing around with?”

    Usually, we Black Africans attribute the political failure of our countries to the fact that each of the countries bequeathed to us by European colonialists is made up of many different nationalities. But when we say that, we should remember that inter-ethnic violence and horrendous blood-letting are not commonly characteristic of multi-nation countries in the rest of the world. The United Kingdom, Canada, Switzerland, and India (after the secession of the Islamic peoples of Pakistan and Bangladesh) are multi-nation countries – the United Kingdom since over 500 years, Canada nearly 300 years, Switzerland some 400 years, and India since about 1950 – and none of them is perpetually wracked by inter-ethnic tensions and conflicts.

    So why are our countries in Black Africa almost uniformly different? Why are our nationalities in each country more or less always hostile to one another? The answer is in our chosen method of managing the differences among our many nationalities in each country. That is where we should look. While most multi-nation countries in the rest of the world make it a point to pay due respect to their different nationalities, we in each Black African country try determinedly to suppress our nationalities – in the misguided belief that that is how we can build and unify our countries.

    In the United Kingdom in modern times (starting from about 1603), though the English nation has been the largest nationality, the policy and tradition have been to pay respect to all nationalities, especially the smaller nationalities (the Scotts, the Irish and the Welsh). In constitution making, that policy has gradually translated to granting more and more autonomy to each nationality. And when it became the worldwide trend, since about the beginning of the past century that nationalities wish to have separate countries of their own, the government of the United Kingdom responded in a sensibly respectful manner. First they let the Irish, who were the most eager to have their own country, go and found a Republic of Ireland. Then they granted separate national governments to the Scotts and Welsh in the United Kingdom. And when the Scotts decided that they would want to have a separate country of their own, the British government allowed the Scotts to go on and hold a referendum on the matter. That referendum is now scheduled for September 2014. Countless citizens of the United Kingdom live outside their own particular nation in the country, and do business and have investments where they live. Nobody is threatening or attacking anybody. The United Kingdom continues to run smoothly, and continues to be a great world power. The foundation of it all is the tradition and policy of respect for each nation in the context of the United Kingdom.

    The country of Switzerland frankly acknowledges, and proclaims, that it is not one nation but a country of many nations – many nations that “consent” to live together as a country. In everything – in constitution making, internal constitution and politics of each nation, composition of the federal government, allocation of resources, etc – Switzerland follows that principle diligently. Therefore, Switzerland is stable, peaceful, and prosperous. Virtually the same is true of Canada.

    In India (after the secession of the Islamic northern peoples of Pakistan and Bangladesh), the Indians entered into a big argument about how to organize their country, a country still comprising about 2000 nationalities. Finally, and fortunately, they agreed to pay respect to their nationalities in organizing their country. The large nations became states in the federation, and the small nations that were territorially contiguous were assisted to join and become states. This resulted in 28 states in all. Then the Indians agreed to limit the powers of their federal government to certain common duties, to give a lot of more powers over development and the economy to the states, and to give more to the states than the federal government in revenue allocations (now 85% to the states and 15% to the federal government). Incredibly, this huge country (the largest in territory and the second largest in population in the world) settled down, and began to grow and prosper.

    In contrast, how do we Black Africans try to build our countries? For us “nation building” means refusing to accept the fact that our nationalities are real. And that means creating constitutions, policies and traditions aimed at reducing, subduing and suppressing our nationalities. It means loading as much power as possible, and as much resources and revenue as possible, into the hands of our central governments. In some of our countries where there were federations at independence (such as Kenya), our leaders eliminated federations and established unitary governments. In countries where the nationalities began to demand a federation or some local autonomy after independence (as in Ghana, Uganda, etc), the governments forcibly stamped out the voices making such demands. In countries which are so large territorially and so diverse ethnically as to be impossible to govern from any one centre (such as Congo, Chad, Sudan, Central African Republic, etc), the governments over-ambitiously, recklessly, and foolishly, set out to control everything. The consequence, in nearly all our countries, has been inefficiency, corruption, poverty, failure, conflicts , pogroms, genocide, masses of displaced citizens, the largest and most wretched refugee camps in the world.

    In our country, Nigeria, it was obvious from the very day of independence that the people who controlled our federal government were not prepared to live with the amount of autonomy that our regions were enjoying. In particular, the hostility against the Western Region was immense – all because the Western Region was capable of developing strongly on its own. From the government benches in the Nigerian House of Representatives, threats against the Western Region were heard almost from day one of independence. Finally, the crusade to crush and subdue the Western Region was started in 1962. And since then, the resolute direction of Nigeria’s nation-building has been to pile all power and resources in the hands of the federal government, and to make all states and local governments impotent vassals of the federal government. The policy of breaking up the largest nations and creating more and more states was designed to make the peripheries impotent and the federal government all-powerful. We even reached a stage at which some of the ideologues of federal omnipotence began to preach that our nationalities are myths and that Nigeria, as represented by the federal government, is the only thing that is real.

    This policy of imposing the federal government over everything in our large and ethnically diverse Nigeria has resulted in all sorts of terrible evils –in serious weakness of our states and local governments, deepening poverty, terrible social malaise, crimes, inter-ethnic and religious conflicts, mass killings, foolish claims by some nationalities that they are conquering others, and now a strong possibility that our country will break up.

    If we refuse to learn a lesson from India, Switzerland, Britain, etc, we shall surely lose Nigeria – may be very soon. Some other Black African countries are heading the same way. The coming national conference offers us Nigerians a chance to change our country’s direction. Will we sincerely and sensibly grab that chance?

  • ASUU Vs. smart alecs in government

    That non implementation of an agreement government voluntarily signed with ASUU way back in 2009 following three years of negotiation has led to a strike action now in its fifth month only confirms the fears of most Nigerians- absence of governance and usurpation of power by smart alecs who in the opinion of our God-fearing president can do no wrong. This perhaps explains why the current ASUU crisis has defied solution in spite of intervention of the president, vice president, the federal executive council, the council of state, all of whom we were told had expressed sadness about the state of our university education and canvassed for a radical change.

    But opposed to change is a powerful group made up of the president’s confidants consisting of Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the all powerful minister of finance and the coordinating minister of the economy, secretary to government of the federation, (SGF) Anyim, Pius Anyim, Nyesom Wike, the president’s man Friday and leader of Niger Delta militants fighting the president’s war in Rivers who also doubles as supervising minister of education. We can also add Gabriel Suswam, the chairman of implementation committee of NEEDS Assessment Report.

    Before ASUU embarked on the ongoing strike on July 1, the body, according to Professor Festus Iyayi, late former ASUU president and a patriot, who unfortunately lost his life on his way to Kano in search of solution to the crisis, had written over 200 letters to government. There was also a warning strike in December 2011 which was apprehended by Anyim, who after a meeting in his office, dictated a Memorandum of Understanding to the effect that “instead of N1.5 trillion for the 24 federal universities that had been captured in the 2009 agreement, government will instead provide N1.3 trillion for 61 public universities, covering both federal and state universities.” The said Memorandum also indicated that N100 billion was immediately available, and that N400 billion will be provided for each of the three years beginning in 2013 and ending in 2015″.

    Iyayi also revealed during his last interview before his tragic end in the service of the nation that the NEEDS Assessment exercise was the brain child of the SGF. The report which confirmed how “students use kerosene stoves instead of Bunsen burners in their laboratories, how students excrete into polyethylene bags and throw them through the window, how students stand under trees to receive lectures, evidence of laboratories without water” was later presented to a crest-fallen federal executive council presided over by President Jonathan.

    Again, on the directive of the president, the same embarrassing report was also presented to the National Economic Council chaired by the Vice President, Namadi Sambo”. Arising from this, a technical committee set up with Governor Godswill Akpabio as chairman later presented its report to the Federal Executive Council and the recommendations were approved and then endorsed by the President who directed they should be implemented. That was in February of 2013. The presidential order was ignored by those he has delegated the running of the country to.

    When ASUU finally went on strike on July 1, the government set up a committee headed by Governor Suswam. Others members like the SGF and minister of finance were no strangers to the crisis. But these government officials demonstrated their lack of commitment to the future of our nation by frustrating all ASUU’s patriotic crusade to force government to start rebuilding the educational structure destroyed by the political class during the Babangida, Abacha and Obasanjo years. This self-serving mafia tries to demonise ASUU for pointing out that it is the primary responsibility of the ruling class to lay a solid foundation for education as it is in Europe since the 1600s and old Western Nigeria since the 1950s.

    But tragically, Suswam, Iyayi said was “trying to be a contractor instead of implementing the NEEDS Assessment Report”. Anyim, was said to have “ridiculed the memorandum of Understanding he dictated in his office” On her part, Okonjo-Iweala, the all powerful minister of finance, was reported to have said “I have cash; 30 billion naira cash, I am putting it on the table, take it or leave it. If you don’t take it you can be on strike for the next two or three years”. She talked down on patriotic ASUU leaders and refused to implement a directive fully endorsed by the FEC, the Council of State and the presidency.

    But it is on record that this is the same minister of finance who supervised the deployment of huge government resources to electricity generating firms that have since been sold to members of the political governing elite including leading light of PDP; who had no objection to government expenditure of about three trillions on bail-out of banks that were later sold to some of those who wrecked them; and who approved government expenditure of about 500 billion naira as bailout to the airlines as well as N100 billion for the textile industry, expenditures government recently admitted had gone down the drains.

    Four months into the ASUU strike, the president took time off his tight schedule of foreign trips and managing his PDP family’s vicious war over 2015 to once again intervene in the crisis. Curiously, the intervention led to a 13 hours meeting with ASUU. We will never know what the president discussed for 13 hours but it was obvious it could not have been about a new deal as what came out at the end was not different from existing ASUU 2009 codified agreement with government.

    But if Nigerians had expected the president to descend heavily on those who defied his directive, they were in for a surprise. It is ASUU got the raw end of the president’s anger for demanding proper documentation of the agreement arrived at during the 13 hours marathon meeting. Miffed that ASUU would not take him for his words, our angry president has decreed the university teachers call off the strike, resume work or count themselves sacked with effect from December 9.

    If the president momentarily forgot he is an elected president and not Jerry Rawlings of Ghana who he probably envies for shutting down his country universities for a year, or despicable dictator like Abacha who insisted his words must be law, one would have thought those paid through the public purse to prevent the president from becoming a threat to himself and the state, would come to his assistance. But sadly they are in fact the ones fuelling the crisis that was about to end.

    A Wike, acting minister of education, who as a round peg in a square hole is not expected to give what he has not got, predictably merely dusted up the strategy he had successfully used to mobilize ex-Niger Delta militants and workers of his dissolved LGA to prevent Governor Rotimi Amaechi, his former benefactor from ‘sleeping with his two eyes closed’. He is trying to adopt the same strategy to force university professors and their vice chancellors back to work. For good measure, he has been deploying the language of militants to get his message across. Had Wike been able to rise beyond being just the president’s ‘man Friday’, he would have shielded the president by allaying the fears of ASUU. His sole objective would have been getting ASUU to call off the strike.

    Then Dr Doyin Okupe was brought in to do what he knows how to do best, boasting, blowing hot and cold, and verbally assaulting the president’s perceived enemies with his caustic tongue. Were Okupe to be competent, sincere and not an accessory to federal government politics of subterfuge, his objective would have been getting the information he claimed to have to ASUU, leaving it with no choice but to call off the strike.

    And finally if we are still looking for evidence of absence of governance in our country, the president himself provided that. He woke up one morning and in one fell swoop sacked 10 ministers including that of education sector which remains the only key to our future. Three months down the line, the president carries on as if to confirm the fears of Nigerians that our nation is managed by a small group of conmen who have by their antecedents demonstrated they care for anyone but themselves.

     

  • New trends in higher education

    In October, I attended the centenary celebration of the Association of Commonwealth Universities in London, England and for four-days we were engaged in discussing current and future trends as well as problems of higher education. Everybody seemed to have agreed that a universal problem confronting higher education was adequate funding. If this is true of developed countries, one can imagine the problems in developing countries. It is common knowledge that the British and the American governments have been cutting back on funding of higher education in an attempt to balance their budget or reduce their deficits as the case may be. But most universities in the western world are almost self-financing without relying solely on government. In Great Britain, the grants committee still largely funds universities, but substantial amount of funding is derived from school fees and recently, from expensive tuition fees charged on foreign students.

    In the largely market driven economies of the United States and Canada, states’ intervention in funding even though substantial is not proportionately on the scale of that of Great Britain. Famous universities in the U.S like Harvard, Yale, MIT, Columbia, Cornell and the Californian University system, particularly, UCLA and Berkeley charge as much as $45,000-$60, 000 a year. Most famous universities in the Western world like Oxford, Cambridge and the American counterparts gets generous donations from Corporations, successful alumni and bequests from public-spirited capitalists. But in spite of these, many poor people still find it difficult sending their children to universities without bankrupting themselves and sometimes, young graduates have to spend years in payment of debts accumulated during their undergraduate days. In these days of global unemployment, this has become a serious challenge to young people as well as a cause for frustration. This led the Governors of Florida and Texas on two separate occasions to call on their university communities to reduce the cost of higher education to not more than $10,000 a year per student and they went ahead to suggest the way this can be done was by making many of the courses available on-line and that where necessary, students can then go in to write exams or do practicals at minimal cost at existing colleges. There is no doubt in my mind that the future of higher education lies in e-learning and the Americans are already showing the way for all others to follow. The challenge for us in the developing world would of course be infrastructure. We would need electricity and ICT infrastructure to do e-learning.

    This then takes me back to the conference in London where there was a presentation on this particular issue and we were told that within the next decade, there would only be a few mega-universities with famous brands from which most people in the world would want their degrees. It is obvious that most of these universities may be American universities and that present campuses of other universities all over the world may be turned into examination halls and laboratories for practical training necessary to earn the degrees of these mega-universities. We were told that most young people in the world if they have the opportunity would want to have the degrees of Harvard, Yale, Cambridge or Oxford. This does not seem so far-fetched because after all, up till 1963, students at the University College, Ibadan were earning London degrees with their papers being partly marked in Nigeria and London. If this were to happen, would this lead to a drastic reduction in the cost of higher education? Of course the answer is yes because many of the current overheads would be radically reduced, but I have a feeling, that if this were to happen, it would first happen in the developed world and it would take a few decades before it happens in Nigeria.

    One of the most startling revelations that I want to share with my reading public was what the former Minister of Higher Education in Pakistan told the Conference. He said that when President Pervez Musharraf invited him to his cabinet to take care of higher education, he asked him pointedly whether the President would give him a free hand, he said, the President said he has his word of honour to revolutionize higher education in Pakistan. He said the first thing he did was to look at the salary structure and recommended to the president that the salary of a professor should be five times the salary of a cabinet minister and the President agreed. With this kind of comfortable salary, he said the contribution of Pakistanis to higher education rose by geometric proportion and that the world this through recognises through the scientific publications and innovations of Pakistani academics.

    Those of us who are old enough know that what our colleague from Pakistan was saying was not unheard of even in Nigeria. At the time of my youth, Professors at the University of Ibadan were earning the same salary as federal ministers, which means that they were earning more money than regional ministers. Vice-Chancellors were in a different world and were administering Nigerian universities here at home and whenever they went on heir statutory three-month vacation in England, they had offices in London from where they administered Nigerian universities. Lecturers, even junior lecturers had opportunity to spend, apart from sabbatical leaves abroad, short study-leaves as well, all paid for by their universities. Those were the days. One cannot be too nostalgic about the past because the past is gone, but the present should be an improvement on the past. If conditions in Nigerian universities are bad today, we should ask ourselves why they should be so bad as to lead to the closure of Nigerian universities for five months. The reason for the bad situation may be connected to the attitude of our staff and students who want to cut corners and have money without working hard. It could also be due to the fact that there are too many universities and governments, both federal and states are not helping by the indiscriminate establishment of universities. Universities are now established as part of dividends of democracies and centres for development rather than need and national affordability.

    Perhaps in agreement with our London conference, we should be thinking of mega-universities in Nigeria offering courses online while the mushroom universities recently established become mere centres of examinations and laboratory practices. The time may have come for a summit on higher education in Nigeria in tandem with what is going on in many other parts of the world.

     

  • World, you have lost your leader. Mandela: Robben Island Prisoner 46664, RIP.

    World, you have lost your leader. Mandela: Robben Island Prisoner 46664, RIP.

    World, you have lost your leader. Nelson Mandela, Madiba, Rolihlahla aka troublemaker, 18-7-1918 to 5-12-2013, 95, laugh, dance, smile all the while, RIP=Robben Island Prisoner and Rest In Peace.

    Who does not know ‘That Name’? Yet Mandela is not a product of commercial advertisement for products for sale. Indeed Mandela has never been on sale or commercialised at the cost of billions like the ‘big brands’. But perhaps he has been on sale since the ‘Troublemaker’ days. The Mandela Price was unusual, not personal gain or 10 houses in different world capitals and billions in foreign bank dungeons. The Mandela Price has always been Freedom- for himself, his people black, his people white, his people South Africans, his people Africans, his people citizens of the world.

    World, you have lost your greatest most outstanding selfless leader. In our youth the memorable ones were Lumumba, JFKennedy, MLKing Jr, Che Guevara –the T-shirt silhouette icon- but they were sectional heroes, cut down in their struggle, loved or hated depending on your socialist or capitalist leanings. Mandela has been different. They could not, or dared not, cut him down. Mandela has been the closest thing we have had to a world leader, not country leader, we have had. In another age, Mandela could have so easily been the President of Africa or the President of the United Nations, meeting intergalactic legions. The people of the world and particularly the poor are the poorer for the lack of next generation Mandelas. Ever child-loving and humble, Mandela even lent his name to a Hand Washing and Toilet Use Campaign.

    How many Nigerian and African headmasters and principals and priests and Imams did what we saw their counterparts doing worldwide by teaching ‘Mandela-ism’ to their students and congregations? Following the Mandela-Rhodes Foundation successes at higher learning, every school in Africa and the world should have local ‘Mandela Prizes’ for the most Mandela-like student in each class, set, and an Annual Mandela Award. That way we may raise 200 million Mandelalets a year worldwide, just one in each school. The Mandela guidelines would include Love your enemy, Constructive engagement, sports/games for unity, inclusive government, exemplary honesty in office, quitting when the ovation is loudest.

    He led, with many others who suffered and have died, and won a war against a distinctly evil system of government apartheid. But apartheid is easily recognisable as evil because it is black and white, or colour based. There are many ‘apartheids’ which escape the media microscope because they are not colour but creed, domestic, gender, ethnic, age, work or wealth related. Mandela may have lived and left a legacy that ‘could’ change the world but ‘will’ it change the world? The answer is in your hands as president, politician, parliament, people, police. Mandela has shown the world how to walk the walk on the Long Road To Freedom.

    Now it is your turn to continue the journey. Are you up for it or in your case did Mandela waste the example of his life, sacrifice, 27 years in Robben Island breaking rocks and his upright leadership, modesty, honesty, dress code and smile? He has gone to rest. We loved the easy way he dressed. His struggle against apartheid was our life guide. He was always on our side. And all the while there has been that generation smile. Rolihlahla aka troublemaker, we have a saying in Nigeria –trouble de sleep, yanga come wake am. In death you have raised more questions and sent several billion people soul searching for more than just the funeral arrangements. Madiba, legacies, yours and ours, are exposed on the table of life by your death. RIP  Permit me to donate the rest of this column to excerpts from my work The Laterite Road related to relevant segments to our late revered Man-dela, Great Man, Good Man, Gi-normous Man whose shadow has fallen comfortingly across the peoples of many of the world’s nations.

    On The laterite road

    Mandela took his long walk to imprisonment

    Each prayer, working day and worrisome night

    Terminating in nightly dreams of death, Maturing into longevity granting him, Near immortality and immunity

    And 27 year Robben Island solitary sanctuary

    And finally a long walk to freedom. Paradoxically prison healthy living

    Found him his oppressors, outliving.

    The universities of hard knocks

    Mark tombstones for ‘trouble’ makers

    And risk takers.

    Maula, Luzira, Babati, Kamiti, Beitbridge, Robben Island,

    Kirikiri, Gula, African gulags, imprisoning isles

    For tears, torture, Terror and termination

    Of innocent and guilty

    On the laterite road

    On the laterite road

    See Chaka Zulu’s heel, Lumumba’s sandal,

    Mandela’s footprint, Slaves’ enchained toes.

    Look upwards, The shape of the clouds

    Our own cloud Rushmore. Use your mind’s eyes,

    See Mandela, Lumumba, See Sankara, Schweitzer,

    Look Tutu in the face. The laterite road

    Led to Robben Island Prisoner

    RIP, but alive, Number 46664.

    So few returned

    Parting the offshore sea

    With their wisdom wand

    Traversing sand and rock

    To walk the last steps

    Bridging the divide

    Between slavery chains

    Clinking around necks and ankles

    Linking Nubian mountain climbs

    To apartheid treks. ‘No blanks. Whites only’

    Obviously a ‘blank’ is not a white, On the laterite road

    Africa’s vine, a vascular system, Cardiac, pulsating, Connecting

    Cape to Horn, Alexanderia to Djibuti, Maghreb to Madagascar,

    Senegal’s Gory Gorée Isle to South Africa’s Robben Prison Island

    Rabat to Timbuktu, Lagos to Takoradi

    Bulaweyo to Soweto. World, you have lost your leader.

  • Madiba’s legacy

    Madiba’s legacy

    The name his father gave him at birth, he said in his engaging and inspiring 1995 autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, was Rolihlahla. In Xhosa, his native language, he said, the word literally meant “pulling the branch of a tree” but its colloquial meaning more accurately was “trouble maker”.

    “I do not believe,” he said of this name in the opening paragraphs of his book, “that names are destiny or that my father somehow divined my future, but in later years friends and relatives would ascribe to my birth name storms I have both caused and weathered.”

    Names may not be destiny and his father may not have divined his future by naming him Rolihlahla at birth, but Nelson Mandela, aka Madiba, who died at 95 last Thursday, December 5, could not have been given a more apt but, at the same time, a more self-contradictory nickname; in the eyes of those who invented and perpetrated apartheid as one of the world’s most obnoxious and heinous ideologies, the man was probably their worst nightmare but in the eyes of the rest of the world he was certainly one of its greatest TROUBLESHOOTERS of all time. For, all his adult life he fought more than most leaders in the world – and paid a higher price – for the dignity and humanity of all men regardless of colour, creed, nationality or gender.

    Mandela, at any rate, seemed an unlikely trouble maker growing up in Mveso countryside in Qunu district of the Transkei where he was born on July 8, 1918. “All I wanted as a child of 9 (the year he lost his royal father and had to move out of the village),” he said in his book, “was to be a champion stick fighter.” However, the indignities he suffered and which he saw all around him growing up under the system of apartheid, simply because he was black, left him with no choice but to forget the “luxury” of his literal stick fighting and champion the much more difficult fight against not just racism but any form of discrimination.

    As the world testified to yesterday when over a hundred dignitaries, celebrities and world leaders, including American President Barack Obama and our own, Dr Goodluck Jonathan, and thousands of ordinary folks gathered at the FNB Stadium in Johannesburg, in defiance of heavy rains, to pay him their last respect, the man proved himself the greatest champion of the fight against apartheid. And he did so not with modern day “fighting stick”, or the gun, if you will, but primarily through eschewing bigotry, hatred and reverse racism.

    The walk to freedom for all races in South Africa was indeed a long one and, of course, it began long before Mandela was born. In its most popular modern day manifestation as the African National Congress, however, the walk to freedom for all in his country begun in 1912, six years before he was born. Its key objective when it was founded on January 12 that year was the creation of a united, non-racial, non-sexist and democratic South African society.

    Soon enough the younger elements in the organisation led by Anton Lembede, Walter Sisulu, Oliver Tambo and himself, among others, felt the organisation was not militant and mass-oriented enough and consequently in 1944 they formed its Youth League.

    Four years after that, apartheid, which until then was only de facto government policy became official, following the defeat of the ruling Unity Party of mostly British whites by the National Party of the Boer settlers widely known as Afrikaans.

    Predictably, the NP proceeded post-haste to enact all manner of obnoxious and racist laws which restricted the movements of blacks who formed nearly 80% of the population, of Indians (3%) and of so-called Coloured, i.e. those of mixed races, (8%) and also restricted where they could live, work, play and worship and do whatever. These obnoxious laws climaxed in the Bantustan policy in1959, a policy which gave whites who constituted fewer than 10% of South Africa’s population nearly 90% of the land!

    Predictably, the ANC rejected these laws and organised peaceful protests against them. The racist government responded with both force and the law. In 1956, it charged Mandela, along with 155 other members – 105 Africans, 21 Indians, 23 whites and seven Coloured – with treason. The trial proper began three years later and lasted for about two years. Meantime, the government imposed a ban on the movement and public speaking of several of the organisation’s leaders, including, of course, Mandela.

    On March 21 1961, two days before the court was to deliver its verdict on the treason trial, a massacre by the South African police took place in Sharpeville, a small township 56 kilometres south of Johannesburg, the country’s commercial capital, in which 69 unarmed Africans were killed, many of them shot in the back as they fled from the scene of the demonstration they had gathered for. Government then declared a state of emergency and subsequently banned the ANC.

    The whole world was horrified by the massacre. On its part, the ANC now felt obliged to drop its peaceful resistance. It formed an armed wing, the Umkhonto we Sizwe (the Spear of the Nation), with Mandela as its first leader and Chris Hani as its commander, and took up arms in 1961. Not even the dismissal by the courts of the case against the defendants following a week’s delay occasioned by the Sharpeville massacre could persuade Mandela and his fellow comrades that the racists had become open to reason.

    The ANC knew their acquittal was only a temporary relief. Soon enough it was proved right when 19 of its leaders, including Mandela, were detained and subsequently charged for sabotage and attempt to overthrow the government in what became known as the Rivonia Trial between 1963 and 1964.

    The majority of them were convicted and sentenced to live at the end of the trial. Mandela served 27 years of his sentence, the first 18 of them in solitary confinement on the forbidding Roben Island, off the South African coast, before he was released on February 11, 1990.

    That release was perhaps the most symbolic moment in the long fight against apartheid. It is hard, if not impossible, to articulate that moment more graphically and more coherently than President Bill Clinton did in his 2004 autobiography, My Life. On that day, he said, he “witnessed the ultimate testimonial in human endurance.” He, his wife, Hillary, and their daughter, Chelsea, whom they had pulled out of bed especially for that moment, he said, watched Mandela on television “take the last step of his long walk to freedom.” Mandela, Clinton said, “had endured and triumphed, to end apartheid, liberate his own mind and heart from hatred and inspire the world.”

    In Mandela’s own words, he walked out of his prison that day with bitterness and malice to none. “The oppressor and the oppressed alike,” he said in his book, “are robbed of their humanity. When I walked out of the prison that was my mission, to liberate the oppressor and the oppressed both. Some say that has now been achieved. But I know that this is not the case. The true test of our devotion to freedom is just beginning.”

    Mandela’s legacy, however, was not only of the need to love even thy enemy. He also left a legacy of knowing when to let go of power as the first black president of South Africa when he promised in 1994 to serve for only one tem and kept his word. He also left behind a legacy of living a simple life, in and out of power, which shunned primitive accumulation of wealth. You can hardly say the same of many leaders, in and out of power today, who have been falling over themselves in singing praises for the man.

    When his friend and comrade in the struggle against apartheid, Oliver Tambo, died in April 1993, he had this to say of Tambo: “In Plato’s allegory of the metals, the philosopher classifies men into groups of gold, silver and lead. Oliver was pure gold.”

    Borrowing from his tribute to his friend, it would be an understatement to say Mandela was Platinum, with a capital P.

     

     

    Feedback

    Last week’s column on what I said was the persecution of Governor Sule Lamido by President Goodluck Jonathan received a 1,200-word rejoinder from EFCC, a couple of emails one of which I will publish next week, God willing, for the power of its logic, and 38 texts, mostly critical of my piece. I have since forwarded the EFCC reaction to the editors of this newspaper for publication for my lack of space. Below are a few of the texts.

     

    Sir,

    How much did Lamido pay you to publish this back-page foolishness you call an article? You deftly and deliberately ignored the real issue: did Lamido’s sons steal?

    +2348096571185

     

    Sir,

    Are you saying Lamido’s sons were not caught in the act or that they should be left off the hook simply because their father is a performing governor? Be objective for once.

    +2348033553191

     

    Sir,

    Governor Lamido was/is my man on performance. However, I won’t support indiscipline, corruption and law-breaking by any family member or governor. Journalists, cleanse our society.

    +2347064181043

     

    Only irredeemable fools and born cowards call the prosecution of politicians who use their children as conduit pipe to siphon public funds persecution. I urge Mr. President to fight corruption without fear and favour.

    +2348076823815

     

    Sir,

    Instead of condemning Lamido for the ‘alleged’ looting of d state treasury through his children, you would rather be contented comparing who loots more than the other in the country. And, of course, in your own brand of patriotism a Nigerian governor or leader who performs better than his predecessor in office should be free to help himself with the state money. Very unfortunate.

    +2348037921541

     

    Sir,

    Imagine this scenario. Tinubu’s son or Murtala Nyako’s daughter commits an offence and the government must look the other way so as not to be accused of selective fight. Warped logic! Why hasn’t the govt picked any of Buhari’s relations for crimes? Let’s stop this elite nepotism. A thief is a thief, whether he steals N184b or N10b.

    +2348037055027

  • The Mandela files (1): The legend lives

    The Mandela files (1): The legend lives

    As rumours of the imminent release of Nelson Mandela gained ground, several nagging questions must have assailed even his most ardent admirers.

    What if the man turned out to be but a shadow of the legend? What if he emerged stooped and walked with tentative steps and a shuffling gait after 27 years in prison, most of them in the unspeakably inhospitable conditions on Robben Island? What if his shoulders drooped and his clothes hung on him as if on a peg?

    What if his speech was slurred and he could not give the rousing orations to the crowds that were sure to gather wherever he stopped? What if his memory no longer served him well? What if he was wizened and could not even withstand the strain of a brief address to the teeming crowd of chanting admirers? What if he had to be helped up and down the dais?

    His remarkable strength of character and indomitable will are of course well known. But what if prison had sapped his will, his vigour and his spirit, and there was no fight left in him? And surely, he is not superior to the laws of biology?

    Questions, questions, and more questions.

    True, the Commonwealth Eminent Persons Group, of which our own General Olusegun Obasanjo was co-chairman, had reported some four years earlier that they found him in remarkably good physical shape, in full possession of his faculties and enormously well-informed. But anything could have happened since then to a person of Mandela’s age.

    Besides, sheer surprise at finding that the man was not so derelict as they had expected might have led them to exaggerate his condition. And, in any case, did they interact with him long enough to be able to make valid judgments about his physical and mental condition?

    Doubts, doubts, and more doubts.

    But the answers to the questions and the doubts came when he stepped out of the Victor Verster Prison, near Paarl, in the Western Cape, on February 11, 1990.

    Age and the prison regimen had taken their toll. The robust frame that once belonged to South Africa’s leading amateur middleweight boxer, the tireless people’s lawyer and guerrilla chieftain had yielded to a spare body. The cherubic face of the heydays of the resistance was now deeply lined. The hair was freckled with grey.

    But the gait was erect. His steps were measured, firm. His voice resonated with authority. He read from prepared texts with the unaided eye. The fighting spirit that had led his associates and admirers to call him the Black Pimpernel had not waned.

    Apartheid had got to go. The state of emergency must be lifted. The armed struggle would continue until conditions for meaningful negotiations were created. All political prisoners, including most of those whom the apartheid regime was holding on trumped-up charges, must be released. Sanctions must be sustained. Far too many people had died in communal violence. The killings must stop. Students should go back to their school; workers to their mines and factories

    White domination must end, but it would not be replaced by black domination. South Africa would be a home to all who want to live in a democratic, just, non-racial society.

    By one account, Mandela gave in a single day nine interviews to television crews from across the world. Nobody could have judged from his performance that he had never until a month or two before, seen a television camera. Without the slightest trace of unease, he responded calmly and confidently to questions that ranged from the personal to the public, and from the past to the future.

    Whether he was sitting in front of television cameras or addressing a huge crowd or receiving endless streams of visitors that poured into his Soweto home, he displaced, according to The New York Times, “the measured dignity” that the ancient Romans called “gravitas.” In a perceptive essay for The Observer, South Africa’s eminent journalist Allister Sparks described him as a “patriarch.”

    Even The Economist, that consummate master of the elegant putdown, especially of persons and institutions that do not regard capitalism in its rawest form as something divinely ordained, allowed that Mandela “turned out a finer man than South Africa” – by which it probably meant the racists “had a right to expect,”

    Mandela is an authentic martyr who chooses not to come across as one. He is the symbol of the struggle of justice and freedom in South Africa and without question its most authentic spokesman, but he insists that he is only a member of the African National Congress.

    Even when the rusty Iron Lady was again putting to ridicule whatever pretensions Britain still makes to greatness by calling for an end to sanctions, Mandela said he would have to clear with the ANC before answering her.

    Mandela’s travel plans also reflect a deliberate sunning of the limelight. His first port of call will be Liusaka, Zambia, to renew ties with ANC leadership and cadres. From there, he will proceed to Sweden to greet Oliver Tambo, his comrade-in-arms, who is recovering from stroke. While Mandela was in jail, it was Tambo who animated and kept the struggle alive from outside.

    Then, on to India and Canada, perhaps the two most unyielding protagonists of sanctions.

    A lesser man would have headed straight to Britain and the United States, for sumptuous banquets under glittering lights; he would have jumped at the opportunity to be photographed with those we have been conditioned to regard as the high and the mighty.

    Not Mandela.

    By now Mandela has shattered all the stereotypes, the fears, the greed, and all the ignorance that have sustained for almost half a century one of the most inhuman systems of government the world has ever known.

    I hope, for the sake of the apartheid regime that South African television has been presenting a faithful portrait of the man. The disciples of apartheid should study and understand and appreciate him. For, as matters now stand, he is probably the only person who can liberate them from the incomparable prison that is apartheid.

    First published in The Guardian (Lagos) on February 27, 1990, this is the first installment of a three-part retrospective on Nelson Mandela.

     

    Thumbs up for our GEJ

    Remembering especially his dismal performance in an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour and other unflattering outings, many Nigerians must have fretted when the BBC announced that President Goodluck Jonathan was going to favour its global audience with his reflections on Nelson Mandela’s legacy.

    They need not have worried.

    It was a lexical triumph for Dr Jonathan.  He delivered himself with semantic and syntactic aplomb, even taking a dig at those leaders who, instead of voluntarily relinquishing office like Mandela, sit tight and plunge their countries into chaos – no need for him to name them, said Dr Jonathan; you know them — and those leaders who leave office but continually lurk in the corridors of power.

    Is this perchance an indication that he intends to “play Mandela” by seeking neither a second term nor an elongation of his current term?

    In whatever case, I hope he is not scheduled to be in the same room anytime soon with Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe.  I can assure him that Mugabe, one of the most gifted polemicists in Africa and indeed anywhere, will respond in kind at the earliest opportunity,  and most likely with compound interest.

    When it came to naming an example of those who, according to Jonathan, vacated office but carry on as if they are still in power, I was stuck.  Can you help?

  • Mandela: Life walk to legend

    Mandela: Life walk to legend

    Long Walk to Freedom, that is the title of Nelson Mandela’s definitive autobiography that captures his life odyssey: a classic of exceptional suffering that cleared the Mandela essence of any dross of bitterness; and left only the purity of exceptional grace and magnanimity.

    Was Mandela human or divine? Were it to be the medieval ages in Europe, this question would have earned the asker a charge of apostasy, and probably a one-way ticket to damnation.

    Indeed, were Mandela to be native of the Yoruba nation in Nigeria, instead of his Thembu nation in South Africa, his deification would only be a matter of time.

    He would therefore be in the class of Ogun, Oya and Sango – phenomenal humans deified after their death for their great deeds, as distinct from Olodumare, the Yoruba Supreme Being, Obatala, god of creation and Orunmila, god of divinity: godheads, according to Yoruba cosmogony, that existed with Olodumare from the beginning; and Olokun, Osun, Olumo rock, Idanre hills etc, awesome natural phenomena that provide their communities with spring of life and security.

    Indeed, such is the infectious beauty of greatness that, at Mandela’s passage on December 5, the Nigerian ruling elite have joined, with their empty rhetoric, the band wagon to share in the matter of the moment.

    Doyin Okupe, the peculiar master of Okupe-istic cant, has swiftly canonised his boss, President Goodluck Jonathan as “Nigeria’s Mandela”! Even for the un-rigorous Jonathan presidency, that claim sounded particularly comical.

    And their Baba, former President Olusegun Obasanjo, weighed in with stunning self-indictment. He had gone to Mandela, he read out a statement with graveness and piety peculiarly Obasanjo’s, and urged him to go for second term.

    But Mandela had told him “Olu” [pronounced with distinctly un-Yoruba accent], “have you ever seen a nation where an 80-year ran the show?” – or something to that effect. Yet, Obasanjo did two terms and was plotting an illegal third, before political realities stripped him of the costly illusion! Of course, he denied the third term gambit. But he should tell that to Nasir El-Rufai, the no-nonsense, all-conquering hero of The Accidental Public Servant!

    Okupe’s roguish canonisation of his boss and Obasanjo’s holy self-indictment just prove one point: greatness is sweet. But only a few are willing and ready to pay the price.

    The Mandela-Obasanjo parallel is a classic study in greatness and non-greatness.

    The one went to jail for 27 years, under apartheid, perhaps the most evil political system ever imposed on any people, yet as president, after helping to kill that system with rare grace, he felt he owed his nation!

    The other went to jail, for a few years, despatched by the same post-12 June 1993 presidential election political contraption of convenience he helped to erect, but as president after, felt his country owed him!

    The one endured the harshest of cruelties to, with near-divine grace, forgive and forget. The other never lets pass a slight, with his graceless vindictiveness.

    As for Okupe and his laughable canonisation, it is the same story of court zealots leading their principals down the road of perdition. In the Nigerian power cosmos, so was it at the beginning, so is it now and so it ever shall be, except of course some drastic change happens. If Nigerian leaders cannot pay the price for greatness, how can they lead their country to greatness?

    Nelson Mandela never bothered about the trappings or gravy of power, the Genesis to Revelation for our leaders here. All he went for were fundaments of common humanity: irrespective of race, creed or colour. And that he did it as the most globally acclaimed victim of a hideous system that dignified or criminalised strictly on the basis of one’s colour, without betraying any bitterness, was the stuff of which legends are made.

    Mandela was such a force for universal good in the 20th century and beyond simply because he shattered the ingrained Western racial bigotry of the Joseph Conrad school: Africans were savages and Europeans were the guiding angels divined to bring — by cruel force, if necessary — Africans and other Black peoples of the world out of their savagery.

    Though the Afrikaner overlords of Apartheid South Africa would later develop Afrikaner Calvinism, a rogue theological ideology on the pedestal of the Dutch Reformed Church to justify their evil, anti-Black racial discrimination would appear to stem from sentiments from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which bigotry Chinua Achebe, in his famous 1977 essay, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” took apart.

    Though racism predated Conrad’s 1899 work, Heart of Darkness would come as noxious understanding, if not outright justification of the evil, with the matter-of-fact rendition style of a not altogether unsympathetic narrative voice.

    But even with all of these, Mandela’s sheer humanity and political sagacity came across with two principal statements, among others. He declared, in his post-Robben Island prison years, that never in South Africa would one race oppress the other. He also declared that what he fought for was not majority, but democratic rule.

    The race-neuter quality of the first statement was not lost on many, for it insisted on equity and mutual respect for all races, in South Africa’s rainbow coalition, which Mandela would inspire from 1990, after apartheid as state policy since 1948.

    The equity and justice of the second statement is even more telling. Majority rule would have consigned South Africa to reverse apartheid: perpetual Black rule, which nevertheless would not be undemocratic, for democracy, in its most cynical form, is a game of numbers.

    Still, Mandela’s stress on democratic rule, as against majority rule, is a muted promise that one day, even a white South African, hopeless minority though he might be, could rule the rainbow nation, so long as he gets the go-ahead of the Black majority.

    No wonder then that while other African leaders would virtually invest anything to get photo-ops with American, European and other global leaders, it was the other way with Mandela, as who was who in the world happily scrambled to land a photo-op with him.

    The African, hitherto a savage in the bigoted White eyes, had in Mandela turned a global icon, without whose aura none of these world figures was complete! An armada of these leaders would also be at his funeral on December 15.

    Nigerian leaders that fatally distract themselves with the dross of office, instead of seeking greatness, have the Mandela story to seek redemption and change their ruinous ways. But perhaps they are beyond redemption?

    In that case, Nigerians must seize the moment and stop suffering fools gladly, by ending the relay of selfish, arrogant and incompetent leaders.

    Meanwhile, Madiba’s was a glorious life walk to legend — and you could feel that the way common South Africans trooped to Mandela’s Johannesburg home, at the announcement of his passage, to celebrate his life. How many Nigerian leaders would enjoy such privilege after their passage?

    Adieu Madiba. When comes another?