The Nation Newspaper

Category: Columnists

  • Nigeria’s cup @53; half full or half empty?

    When students of College of Agriculture, Gujba in Yobe state went to bed Saturday night on September 28, 2013 at their hostel located within the school premises, 40 kilometres from Damaturu, the state capital, not a few among them expected to wake up to a bright, beautiful day the following morning. But agents of death operating under the umbrella (umbrella!) of Boko Haram decided to cut short their sleep and sent no fewer than 40 of them to their graves.

    Their massacre was shocking to say the least, but public reaction to the killings tends to paint a picture of a people growing thick skin to tragedies and related occurrences.

    Having grown accustomed to indiscriminate and unnecessary loss of lives in their hundreds, so to speak, Nigerians now react to such massacres as Boko Haram’s unrelenting killings of innocent people by mere shrug of the shoulder as if nothing serious had happened. Such is the situation in the country today that loss of human lives no matter the number, doesn’t seem to mean anything to us any longer.

    But it wasn’t like this before. A time there was when it was almost unheard of to see a dead body in public, no to talk of corpses littering the entire place. As children then, even if somebody died in the house we were kept away from the corpse, more out of respect for our own sensibilities as children than even the dignity of the dead. But what do we have today, mass killing, slaughter of even children under the guise of religion or ethnic purity/superiority.

    Some of our leaders have become ethnic champions, arming local militias from their ethnic group to fight ‘enemies’ from the other ethnic group, spilling innocent blood. The Police have been compromised. The military, hitherto a national institution is being corrupted, religious bigotry can now be found in barracks; religious zealots in uniform even open the armoury to their fellow fundamentalists to use public resources to prosecute their religious agenda,. It is that bad. But like I said earlier, it wasn’t like this before.

    Ninety days and we are still counting. Yes, the strike action embarked upon by academic staff of Nigerian university is in its third month now and there appears to be no end in sight soon. If the strike had not been called, the students would be rounding up another semester about now, preparing for the end of semester examinations. But they have been forced to stay at home doing nothing, at extra costs to their parents, in the immediate, but at a far greater cost to the nation on the long run.

    Yet those who put us in this trouble, those who are toying with the future of our youths, those who are putting Nigeria’s competitiveness in future in danger had the best of education anywhere in the Commonwealth here at home, uninterrupted. They had the Harmattan semester at its time and Rain semester when it was due. I am not talking about our leaders alone; the lecturers are equally as guilty as their counterpart in government. Yes, their counterpart in government. Don’t forget our president used to be a university lecturer.

    As head of the household, the man, if he is lucky to have a job, now sets aside a certain percentage of his meagre salary as budget for petrol to fuel his ‘I better pass my neighbour’ electricity generator just because public power supply is almost always not there. And yet he still has to settle his monthly electricity bill for power not supplied. Nine out of every ten times, there is no public power supply so most people go on generator, and so at night hardly sleeps because of the noise from the generators. 53 years after independence, we still don’t have uninterrupted power supply. It was better in the past, even under colonial rule.

    The few people amongst us who are lucky to own a house, the source of the funding for the house notwithstanding, have virtually built a prisonlike wall around the house to ward off robbers and burglars. People now secure their vehicles with all manner of security gadgets including ‘African Insurance’ to prevent them from thieves. Even when you honestly work hard to earn a decent living, you are afraid to spend the fruit of your sweat the way you want for fear of hoodlums’ attack. There is insecurity everywhere. Parents now keep extra watch on their children when they go to school, and are perpetually on their knees praying for their safe return. Why? There are kidnappers everywhere.

    Nobody is immune. Even men of God now go about with military-like security. What are they afraid of? Plenty. Most of them ride exotic cars, in fleet. Some even have private jets, majority of them are sole signatory or with spouse to their churches’ bank account. You see a jobless young man today, most likely a graduate, after a while, you see him again and he starts prefixing his name with Pastor, you ask him when he became one, he tells you he had just been called. By whom you ask? You know the answer.

    There are Pastors all over the place the same way some among the Islamic faithful call themselves Ustaz, yet the crime rate is multiplying, corruption is rising, Nigeria today is one of the worst destinations for investors, on paper, because of corruption, but the irony is that Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) into Nigeria is one of the highest, if not the highest in Africa (according to Abuja), why? They say Nigeria is the only country in the world with the highest return on investment. So, in spite of the risk, some people are ready to bring in their money, if they are lucky they make it in two years what ordinarily should take ten years. Look at the telecoms companies, internet providers, even pay per view television. I am not inferring anything, but here anything goes, you can go to bed a pauper and wake up a millionaire, without even sweating. This is our Nigeria. Dubious people all over the place, 419s, fraudsters, you name them. They are here.

    But this was not the way our forefathers conceptualised Nigeria, even though the British forced us to be together, our founding fathers accepted it, and they, in their wisdom chose federalism, where each federating unit is allowed to grow and move at its own pace within the limit of its own resources. Today we are only a federal republic in name, everything so to speak is centralised. Nothing happens anywhere in Nigeria without Abuja saying so. And we say there is problem, why wouldn’t there be problem?

    There are many of them, yes, but then everything cannot be said to be all gloomy. We’ve had some doses of sunshine here and there to make our cup half full, but then if one looks at the flip side one is likely to see a cup half empty. Whatever cup you are seeing is Nigeria, but look in the mirror first before making any judgement. HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY NIGERIA.

  • Probing Abuja killings

    By all indications, Nigeria is going through very dire straits. Things are not normal in many aspects of our national life. Suspicion and mutual distrust among the various cleavages are at an all time high and exert tremendous influence on perceptions and actions. This is a sad commentary for a country that is about to mark 53years of independence in a couple of hours from now.

    Under this circumstance, it is the minimum expectation that those in authority should be alive to extant sensibilities and refrain from actions that could give vent to blackmail, anger and frustration.

    In an environment where people have been sensitized to think in very self-serving and particularistic manner, actions or inactions of public officers that should ordinarily have been given the benefit of doubt are subjected to very serious scrutiny. The overall aim is to find excuses to get even with perceived adversaries. That is what you find where people are aggrieved for one reason or the other. And it sums up the current mood of the country.

    These sensibilities were evoked last week when officials of the State Security Services (SSS) announced their encounter with suspected Boko Haram members at an uncompleted building in the Apo area of Abuja in which nine of these suspects were killed and many injured. Deputy Director, Public Affairs of the SSS, Marilyn Ogar gave account of what transpired. According to her, some suspected Boko Haram members in their custody had disclosed that some arms were buried within the premises of the building which provided a meeting point for their members. Based on this information, a combined operation of the SSS and the Army stormed the building at night and as they were digging the ground for the arms, they came under the gun attack of the insurgents.

    Their counter response led to the dead and injured. But this account has been disputed by some of the residents who said they are migrant workers and less-privileged people who paid some token to the security man in charge of the building to sleep there. They also claimed the owner of the building, said to be a military officer, had given them notice to quit the place and that the allegation was part of the plan to call a dog a bad name in order to hang it.

    Expectedly, the turn of events has elicited resentment and anger from a large segment of the society. The feeling is that there seems to be more to the issue than ordinarily meets the eyes. There is the feeling that the account of the encounter presented by the SSS did not tie up. To add to this air of suspicion, the police have said they were not put on notice before the attack. Both the Senate and the Police have responded to this outcry by stepping up investigations to get at the root of the matter. But the SSS insists its account is a true representation of the matter. The Army also corroborates SSS account as its position on the matter. Ogar has made spirited efforts to persuade the public that the attack followed rules of engagement and the services stand to gain nothing by killing innocent people. She said their action was based on credible security reports at their disposal and would therefore want the public to believe their account of the circumstances of the encounter.

    Ordinarily, there would have been the temptation to reason along with the SSS. This is more so as the service is not known to post shoddy records in handling issues of this nature. Again, the very sensitive and difficult nature of the fight against terrorism ought to count in their favour in resolving the misunderstanding arising from the incident.

    Yet, there are issues that have been brought to the front burner by the killings that cannot be allowed to be swept under the carpet. And they account for the outcry.

    Much of the suspicion is informed in part by the handling of the matter by the SSS both before the encounter and after the subsequent killings. There are yawning gaps to be filled. There are also questions to be answered. Though one cannot claim expertise in the rules of military warfare and strategy, there are commonsensical procedural flaws in the SSS account of the encounter. And much of the crisis of confidence they are now battling with, stem largely from these. The immediate impression one gets is that the first thing they did on getting to the building was to commence the digging of the ground for the arms their informant said were buried under ground. As they were digging the ground, they came under the gun fire of the terrorists and had to respond in self-defence culminating in the casualty figure.

    Now, the searing posers: if the SSS and the Army detachment were detailed to hunt Boko Haram suspects in the building, what should constitute the standard entry behaviour on getting to their target? Is it not a standard safety rule that they should anticipate some resistance and prepare well ahead of time for that eventuality? This is more so when they had prior information that some arms were buried there. Should they not have cordoned off the area and then selectively commence arresting those they suspect to have links with Boko Haram? These questions arise because, the immediate impression we get from the SSS account is that as soon as the security agencies got to the site they commenced the digging of the ground for the supposedly buried arms. By this account, it was as they were digging that they came under the heavy gun fire of the insurgents and had to counter resulting to the killings. This account looks somewhat untidy and unprofessional. The minimum expectation is that all those living in the building should first have been under the safe custody of the security operatives. Having done that, the entire premises will then be searched before the digging to recover whatever arms were supposedly hidden there. Had this precautionary measure been adhered to, perhaps those who supposedly shot at the security operatives would have been apprehended earlier and disarmed. And where that proves difficult, the agencies would then consider maximum force such that led to the high death toll.

    Again, the case of the SSS is not remedied by their inability to show evidence of the digging, the arms recovered and possible victims of the attack on their side. By just bandying claims without substantive evidence to corroborate them, they left room for the raging suspicion that has become the lot of the ill-fated encounter.

    Matters are not helped by the testimonies of some of the injured. The allegation that the incident was a subterfuge to get the squatters out of the building since the owner had become uncomfortable with them is another issue. Even as the SSS would want us to resolve the doubts created by these lapses in their favour, it will be difficult to do so under the foregoing circumstances.

    Admittedly, the war on terrorism is a very daunting and risky one that has cost the lives of security operatives and civilians alike. Even at that, no room should be left for doubts to creep into the enormous sacrifice that has been the fate of the war against terrorism. Neither should the fight constitute an alibi for extra judicial killings. It is a very critical and sensitive challenge that must be handled in the most professional manner. Boko Haram has some support from within. And no room should be given to these anarchists to ridicule the war against terror. The current probes must get at the root of the matter. It is in the overall good of the continuing struggles to tame the scourge.

  • Between bread and God

    Between bread and God

    Hooded and defiant, Kelvin Oniara held a community down below his knees and swagger. For those who knew him or knew of him, he was identified simply as Kelvin. There was an innocuous quality to this identification. He did not carry such names with frightening cacophonies or onomatopoeia, or the metaphor of a bellowing cat, or the sort of Niger Delta aliases that invoked the fear of the Maker.

    But Kelvin was all Kelvin needed to strike terror. He knew all dreaded him. He knew he could kidnap anyone. He knew he could slay any police officer or maim a soldier on the run. He knew he could cuckold any man, or best any village belle. He knew he could threaten President Goodluck Jonathan with an ultimatum. Until barely a week ago, when he knew he could not. There in Port Harcourt, where he was nesting, he fell into the trap of the security forces.

    Barely three days after, Kelvin, the gun-toting lord unto himself, reminds all of us of a coward barely two decades ago called Anini, who embarrassed a military president and an inspector general of police. Kelvin is now begging for his life and pleading with the authorities not to kill him. That falls into the stereotype of tyrants documented in literature, folklore and literature: that they are ultimately cowards projecting their fears in savagery, bloodletting and terror.

    But that is not what obsesses one about the recent development. It is that the man, with his gang, came outside in a parade to issue an ultimatum. He had children and old women surrounding him, and had them speak on his behalf, too, as though he was the new folk hero of Nigeria. They made him into a rustic Adaka Boro new-minted in the sultry quiet of Kokori village in Delta State.

    What should bother us is the possibility that a man like that could be a hero of sorts. But that is the reality where a never-do-well can abduct a rich man, especially a government type, extort at least N10 million, retreat to a backwoods society, buy more guns, and lord it over the village of poor people. He enwraps the village with a cocktail of threats and largesse. He could buy them food, pay the school fees of some of their wards, ply the old and vulnerable with medication, provide them with security. He wins their love instantly. He, a benevolent brute, becomes their provider and protector. So anyone who dares challenge him or blows the whistle is violating the integrity of their new welfare system. He or she becomes a traitor, especially when Kelvin enlists the support of a juju priest, whose first name Michael loses its irony in their soul. Michael Omonigho, the priest, could not save the hero. The gods may be to blame for losing the charm of prophesy to anticipate the arrest, or do we blame the priest, who bears the name of the angel of another deity, the God of the Bible? Michael means “like God.”

    The spiritual component of Kelvin’s system may be real, but the power of the man lay in guns and bread, fear and food. The twin worked well among the vulnerable in history. Food fuels artificial love.

    But this contrasts with another folk person in recent Nigerian history, the author and founder of the Boko Haram sect. When government failed, he provided what sociologists call the alternative society. He gave the young and vulnerable what the government could not provide. He gave them food, shelter, medication, wives and security. He became their god representative on earth when he gave them school. He gave them not the schooling of the Western world but the one inspired from heaven. That was the difference between Yusuf’s welfare society and that of persons like Kelvin.

    Very soon, when the largesse and physical security of Kevin fade, the people can return to the humility of their deprivation. But when Yusuf left, and because he left, the followers grew more potent. The followers latch on to the intangible, the something no one can hold and destroy, the something called faith. They had God.

    Men like Kelvin are gods that are earthy, evanescent and vain. But let us not think that this phenomenon began today. Persons like Yusuf and kelvin were created by a failure of government that has been with us for too long. If we can remember when self-help replaced government help, we can make sense of the origins of the Kelvins and Yusufs. When did we start to arrange vigilantes for security, buy generators for electricity, arrange sands to make our roads hold cars and feet, consult herbalists instead of pharmacists, dig boreholes for water, bribe to get passports, redefine miracles for success of our children by inventing fraudulent exam breakthroughs, etc?

    So the Yusufs and Kelvins only tapped into a tradition of dubious self-help, reflecting a perverted society lost to its mock genius. The individual has come to terms with the alternative society that filled the vacuum of government.

    So the Kelvin and Yusuf stories leave us the question as to what is stronger, God or bread? Kelvin gave bread but Yusuf gave the bread of life, according to the receivers. One illusion outlasts the other. The SSS, in collaboration with Governor Emmanuel Uduaghan, who has quietly and openly griped over the scourge of kidnap with significant success in Delta State with consistent onslaught on the distraction, has dislodged Kelvin. He must get the plaudits for Kelvin’s ouster and preserves one of his legacies of security.

    But the issue of the other giver of bread of life remains. Boko Haram, that is. The question has been asked whether poverty is enough to trigger such relentless massacres that we see in the Northeast. The answer is simple: No. But without poverty, it cannot stand for long. The rich and powerful with perverse education exploit and indoctrinate the poor. Nowhere in the opulent world do we see such sustained attack fuelled by belief. In Spain, we had the Basque separatists. We also had the case of Northern Ireland, but they were fuelled by the rich but they were purely political. They yielded to political settlements. But where politics masks faith, like in the Middle East, settlement cannot come from the genius of man.

    That is why the hardest gift to erase is what the takers see as the bread of life. It is hard to recruit a well-fed man to fight for a cause. To recruit, give the poor bread, and to sustain them, give them bread of life.

    The horror they inflict with deaths and fear reminds one of the short line of the Austrian poet Georg Trakl about the place of God in all of this human suffering, which he experienced during the First World War. He wrote, “The silence of God/ I drink from spring in the forest.”

    My question is, shall we eat bread to live or the bread of life to die?

  • Economic lessons from France

    Last week, I attended a Positive Economy Forum in Le Harve, France.

    I was invited to be among the about 3000 participants at the LH Forum due to The Nation Newspapers participation in the Impact Journalism Day project initiated by Sparknews observed globally in June this year.

    I and other journalists, however, had time to attend some of the sessions during which various speakers made a good case for a positive economy in the present world which, the organisers noted, seems fraught with dangers of recurring economic crises, high youth unemployment, poverty for many, environmental tensions and extremes of all sorts.

    Instead of the present short-term, individualistic and negative impact on the people and the environment, the promoters of Positive Economy believe that there is need for a new paradigm that is fairer, better balanced and more responsible.

    Among others, the concept proposes the creation of wealth to serve ethical and altruistic values, a long-term vision that takes the future generations into account and a model that includes people, for a real economy.

    By our standard, Europe, America and others are considered developed economies, but the main speakers at the forum are quick to admit that the good old days are over and something urgent should be done to prevent the deterioration of the global economic depression.

    Economics Nobel laureate, Joseph Stiglitz, was very critical of the American economy which he noted is unfortunately the model for some other nations.

    What I found very intriguing about his speech was that though his focus was the USA and European economy, his observations fitted the Nigeria situation perfectly.

    In an attempt to find solutions to the problem with the American economy, he lamented that the same persons who caused the problems are being called to fix it.  He spoke of regulators who didn’t believe in regulation, flawed corporate governance and economic policies and alarming youth employment that can jeopardise the future of the young generation and even those yet to be born.

    Stiglitz maintained that contrary to the claim that the US economy is getting better, it is still in recession.

    While the Gross Domestic Product, GDP, may appear to be growing, the Economist noted that the lot of the average American is getting worse, adding that the economic indicator is no longer sufficient to determine how well a country’s economy is doing.

    “ What we have is a rich country with a majority of the people being poor. A country where the minority control majority of the wealth, “Stiglitz declared, as I tried to reassure myself he was not listening to a review of the Nigerian economy.

    Since he seems his diagnosis is similar to ours, his recommendation should interest the managers of our economy.

    “First and foremost, there is need to regulate the financial sector and restore banks in what they are supposed to do, which is money lending.

    “ We must think in the long term and evolve alternative ways to manage the economy. We must fight the growing inequality and break away from the past.

    “The economic crisis we have is man-made, it is not a tsunami. We have the resources and the knowledge to reverse the dangerous trend and we must seize the opportunity now.”

  • Consider this an Emergency: We need Emergency numbers in this country now!

    Last week, dear reader, I regaled you with accounts of how I attempted to fight a fire with my, err… spittle, repeatedly spat through my screams at a fire. And I’m sure you laughed. Believe me, it was no laughing matter though. Being confronted by water-licking flames, gun-slinging robbers, chest-constricting heart attack, heart failure or heartbreak are never things to laugh at. You can cry, scream, shout for help, even faint, but, sir, you may not laugh. The reason is that when it is happening to you, you never can collect your wits fast enough to act reasonably and safely. This is why you always want the government to step in at that point. It is supposed that, at that point, the government is more reasonable than you are.

    That’s right. When some arrant, undisciplined knave of a fire steps into my sitting room unbidden, I want the government to step in. (Well, if I were an arsonist, I would not invite the government now, would I?). Anyway, if some sacrilegious robber were to be so inconsiderate as to interrupt my sleep, I certainly would want GEJ to step in. After all, I am entitled, under the long arms of the constitution, to a full night’s rest, ain’t I? And God forbid, if an unholy thing – such as a blocked artery from worrying too much about Nigeria or an insufficient housekeeping allowance – were to attack my heart in the middle of the night, I would holler for GEJ! Why? Why ever not? Is he not the cause of everything now – PHCN not working (fact), chickens not laying (fiction), women not giving birth without pain (faction), women not quite getting the style of gele they want (fiction), housekeeping allowance not being sufficient (fact)? Well, is he not responsible for these things?

    It is one thing to holler for the government though; it is another thing for the government to respond to your hollering. No, it isn’t that the government does not want to come; it’s just that many obstacles are standing in its way right now. For one thing, many of its members have these large juicy pieces of uninterrupted chicken thigh between their teeth; so they cannot prise apart the different noises reaching their ears. Are the people praying? Crunch-crunch. Are the people singing the government’s praises? Crunch-crunch-crunch. Are the people crying loudly? Crunch-crunch-crunch. Are the people chattering, gritting or gnashing their teeth? Spit-splat. Now, where were we?

    For quite another thing, the government cannot come to our aid because the mechanisms of people-repair need some serious repairs themselves. How can a sick hospital hope to help a sick person? How can a sick PHCN, scrambled or unscrambled, ever hope to deliver the goods? How can a Nigerian be stopped from being a Nigerian – an organ of disruption, disrepair and destruction?

    More plausibly though, the government cannot come to our aid because it does not get to hear we are in trouble until long after the trouble has come and gone. After all, detectives would not have any work if crimes do not first take place. Yeah, yeah, I hear you; we pay the government so that it would foresee trouble and plug the hole, like. I know that; you know that; but does the government know that? In short, the government, as usual, can get to talk to us whenever it wants to talk to us. Well, there are the billboards telling us to pay our taxes. However, it does not get to hear us when we want to talk to it. There are no billboards addressed to the government from the people saying things like ‘GEJ, No money to pay taxes. Can I get a loan from you?’; or ‘GEJ, Foot hurts; is Aso Rock clinic open?’ or ‘GEJ, stop the country, I’m getting off here’. I imagine such billboards will be torn down hey-pronto by the Men-In-Brown-French-Suits. And there you were thinking they did not exist.

    Sadly, reader, we the people cannot express our hurts because there are no emergency numbers to press. Imagine that; a country of over a hundred million people cannot call for any of the formal emergency services at all on the phone. At the moment, the only emergency number that people have is ‘E gba mi o’ (literally ‘Save me’); and the only emergency services come from the neighbours nearest to them with whom they are on talking terms. So God help the trouble maker. It’s the neighbours who have age-old, time-tested remedies that will save on expenses. Fell down on your head from a tall tree? ‘Ah, use my great-grandmother’s back remedy; let me just fetch it from the farm!’ Seized by epilepsy? ‘Ah, my great-great-grandfather used to treat that; he was the greatest medicine man that ever lived. Here, use his black soap; it washes everything away.’ Having a heart attack? ‘Ah, my great-great-great-grandmother…

    There is no denying that our formal social engineering efforts are not only warped, they are incomprehensible to say the least. How is it possible to boast that if there are only three copies of a rare car brand in the world, one or two will be in Nigeria, yet the people cannot summon the police for emergency purposes? I am stumped in this, very stumped. Where the deuce are our priorities? I know, we have these large juicy pieces of uninterrupted chicken thigh between our teeth. That’s one reason. The other has been staring us in the face for so long we no longer notice it: we do not have emergency response units in this country – fire alarms, health problems, police for domestic disturbances caused by insufficient housekeeping allowances, etc.; we have nothing. So, how can we have telephone numbers leading us to nothing?

    Listen as I tell you this story again. Once, a drunken fellow, deep in his cups, took it into his head to climb a tree. Well, he got so high up on both the tree and his ego that all entreaties to him to come down fell on deaf ears till everyone realised the problem. The drunk had climbed the tall tree to the very top from which no mortal could safely come down, let alone a drunken one. The police had to be summoned which in turn called in the fire brigade which in turn called in the ambulance services which in turn brought in the air ambulance services. They all responded within minutes to save a drunken man who was oblivious of all their efforts. Now, that is what is called a society.

    The time has come for you and me to give this government – and all others – a wake-up call to establish emergency numbers. We want emergency numbers that can easily be recalled for use by all so that the government can step in when we feel pain, and also when we are drunk. I understand that the police have emergency numbers which are no different from the normal or abnormal numbers you and I use daily to talk to our friends; you know those 11-digit numbers beginning with 080…., and so on. Now, who on earth ever expects anyone to remember such numbers in emergency situations? Only the government obviously; the rest of us do not.

    THE NCC SHOULD BE COMPELLED TO TWIST THE ARMS OF THE GSM PROVIDERS IN THIS COUNTRY TO GIVE US EMERGENCY NUMBERS THAT ARE FEW AND EASY TO PRESS, EVEN BY CHILDREN. Reports say many children have used those numbers to save the lives of many adults around them. It is time the government began to think of adding value to our lives ON THIS MONKEY ISLAND. GIVING US EMERGENCY NUMBERS IS NOW AN EMERGENCY.

  • Energy policy: Comparing the UK with Nigeria

    Energy policy: Comparing the UK with Nigeria

    If only for the ferocity of Al Shabaab’s man’s inhumanity  to man, as witnessed by the 21, September  horrendous  attack at the  Westgate Shopping Mall in  Kenya – that  heart-rending event,  which should be a wake-up call for mall owners in Nigeria, deserves a pride of place as our topic of interrogation this Sunday.  However, given that life has become generally short and brutish in Nigeria, no thanks to Boko Haram and the unceasing group assassinations in Plateau and Kaduna South, we can very well pay our respects to the victims of the Kenya attack, empathise with their relations and move on with our numbing insecurity, praying that our own number is not yet up.

    My current vacation in the UK coincides with the conferences of the various political parties – both the Liberal Democrats and Labour have had theirs, and that of the Conservative Party is slated for September 29 – 0ctober 2,  and  apart from seeing a bit of the Labour Dem’s, I have watched a live coverage of Labour’s  literally all week and together with what I have seen and read of the  Conservative Carty, I have come to observe a major difference in the politics of developed and so-called developing economies, namely: the fact that  governments  in the former put the people at the centre of their policies, while those in the latter are mostly concerned with selves. I am, in this article, taking Nigeria as archetypical of developing countries and I shall zero in strictly on energy policy in both the U.K and Nigeria. Incidentally, and fortunately, the federal government has complete monopoly over energy in Nigeria. This, I must say, however, has a lot to do with the level of enlightenment in each society and the increased activism of civil societies. For instance, at the party conferences, I saw NGO contributions, especially from women and equality groups, I have never witnessed in Nigeria.

    Ed Milliband’s bombshell on energy at the Labour Conference has clearly shown the fact that in their various ways, the political parties always hoist their policies on what they consider best for the people. Only this way can they win elections.

    According to the party leader, a Labour government, come 2015, ”will freeze gas and electricity prices until the start of 2017. Your bills will not rise. It will benefit millions of families and millions of businesses. It’s time to reset the market. So we will pass legislation in our first year in office to do that and have a regulator that will genuinely be on the customers’ side but also enable the investment we need. The price freeze would save a typical household £120 and an average business £1,800 over the 20-month period and would cost the energy firms an estimated £4.5bn.”

    The Nigerian reader of this article may wish to mentally imagine President  Jonathan  or any of his policy wonks say that of our oil companies and off  goes the billions of campaign funds expected from that sector, come 2015. Of course, you will never see them make that mistake.

    Blindsided by Miliband’s radical stance, Ed Davey, the Energy and Climate Change Secretary quickly replied, PDP-speak, and I quote; ‘everyone wants to help with the cost of rising bills but we need to be sensible. The best way to keep everyone’s bills down is to help people to save energy, ensure fair tariffs and encourage competition’. He would go on, like your typical Diezani Allison-Madueke, to line behind the operators and say: ‘they do not seem to be making excess profits,’ while they now make an average of 105 pounds profit per customer where it was zero per average customer this time last year.

    It is obvious, though, that the Conservative Party is working for the high and mighty in society.

    Given the Lib’s far less possibility of ever forming the government – indeed, Mr Clegg says he is ready to work with either party come 2015, it has a more nuanced energy policy. According to him, ‘Climate change is getting worse and could destroy the British way of life. Our children will suffer most if we don’t act now. He says further: ‘I believe that there is a huge opportunity to get out of this recession by going green, strengthening the economy, creating new jobs and improving the quality of people’s lives and that companies should simplify the complicated tangle of different tariffs, requiring them to charge families less for a basic amount of energy used, to encourage responsible use. We believe there should also be a fair social tariff system for disadvantaged families, smart meters should be rolled out to all households within five years and all of Britain’s homes should be insulated to a decent standard within 10 years.’ Although each of these policy positions has been subjected to withering criticisms, what is obvious is that each party considers the place of the people in its policy formulations unlike what obtains in our country where those in government not only share money meant for increased energy, but also work hand in gloves with those responsible for privatisation to enable them buy our common patrimony for almost nothing.

    And what is the situation in Nigeria?

    Thinking only of those in their class, officials of the Nigerian Energy Commission have increased energy bills from year to year but nothing can be more nauseating than Sam Amadi’s claim that what they have is not an increase but a ‘Multi-Year-Tariff Order’ which provided a 15-year tariff path for the Nigerian electricity industry. He further claimed, irritatingly, that they are only charging for services they provide. But where is the electricity? Has he noticed that in cases where cables are cut from poor homes and carried to their ramshackle offices for weeks, monthly bills still come unerringly, even higher? What type of operators are these?

    In a well-researched article in the journal of International Association for Energy Economics, Akin Iwayemi recently showed that Nigerian energy industry is ‘probably one of the most inefficient globally’. This, he says, is most evident in the persistent disequilibrium in the markets for electricity and petroleum products, especially kerosene and diesel.  According to him ‘the dismal energy service provision has adversely affected living standards of the population and exacerbated income and energy poverty in an economy where the majority of the people live on less than $2 a day’. Continuing, he wrote: ‘Yet, though energy and income poor, Nigeria is energy resource rich, ranked, as it is, the sixth largest exporter of crude oil in the world.’  In his view, ‘Nigeria’s persistent energy crisis has weakened the industrialisation  process,  and significantly  undermined the effort to achieve sustained economic growth, increased competitiveness of domestic industries in domestic, regional and  global markets and employment generation’.

    And to imagine that it is for this same resource a harebrained, reconstructed militant now wants to dismember Nigeria, urging President Jonathan to imprison everybody in sight, as if he were the courts.

    The above questions may be out of place now that they say they have privatised the PHCN. So what happens to the fixed bill and the 15-year tariff order? Or was that put in place so they and their friends who they knew would buy the power discos can maximise profit? What should the average Nigerian electricity consumer expect now with regard to the fixed rates?

    Unfortunately, unlike in Britain where campaign funding is regulated and listed companies cannot be found on the list of such donors, the Neighbour to Neighbour of Nigeria have been found to be nothing more than veritable sources of attracting campaign funds from individuals as well as corporate bodies that have benefited maximally from the federal government.

    As long as this immoral practice continues unabated, our institutions and agencies will remain weak and corruption will remain the order of the day. INEC must therefore come up with an Electoral Law that will provide rules which can only be breached at the expense of very serious repercussions to political parties and the conniving individuals.

    This impunity must stop. It weakens government and will continue to see Nigeria sink lower in the comity of nations.

    There just has to be a limit to impunity.

  • The one man, one term brouhaha

    The one man, one term brouhaha

    A ‘shot of power’ is too little to intoxicate. Two or more will do

    It is fast becoming obvious that the wrangling in the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) is nowhere near solution, going by the recent declaration in the United States by President Goodluck Jonathan that he never signed any pact to the effect that he would not go for a second term. This is at the heart of the PDP crisis, with his opponents, even in the party saying he should not run because of the alleged pact.. Jonathan had, during a media chat last year, declared that he was yet to decide whether or not to contest in 2015. He said his decision on the subject would be made public next year because making a definite pronouncement on the subject then would distract his administration from delivering on its campaign promises. But, is this what is on ground?

    Be that as it may, neither the President nor those who claimed he signed a one-term pact has rested since the Niger State Governor, Dr. Babangida Aliyu, made the allegation early this year. ”I recall that that some of us said given the circumstances of the death of President Yar’Adua, and given the PDP zoning arrangement, it was expected that the North was to produce the President for a given number of years. I recall that at that discussion, it was agreed that Jonathan would serve only one term of four years and we all signed the agreement. Even when Jonathan went to Kampala, in Uganda, he also said he was going to serve a single term …” Aliyu made the revelation during a live broadcast of Guest of the Week, on Kaduna-based FM radio station, Liberty Radio (91.7).

    But one of the things that usually baffle me in this kind of situation is the way the aides of those concerned speak authoritatively as if they were party to the actions in question. Some of President Jonathan’s aides have denied categorically that the president never signed any one term pact with anybody. Unfortunately, not all of them who are now defending him, and vehemently so, as if they were there when the purported agreement was signed or not signed, are competent to speak on the matter. For instance, his spokesman, Dr Reuben Abati, has no ‘locus standi’ in it. As at the time in question, Abati was not yet in government. I guess that was when he still saw the ruling PDP as Papa Deceive Pikin. Today, (since he cannot beat them he has joined them) it is either papa is no longer deceiving pikin or he has joined the party so that they can deceive pikin together.

    The same applies to the Special Adviser to the President on Political Matters, Ahmed Gulak, who has also insisted that there was no time President Jonathan entered into a single-term pact. “Rather than insisting on an agreement that does not exist – since anybody can contest for the highest office in the land, those who are so interested should declare their interest and contest”, he was once quoted to have said. I know these people have a job to do, but I would be comfortable if they had said the President said he never did this or that, instead of speaking authoritatively on a matter they were least competent to speak on. I started pitying people doing such jobs since the time former Governor James Ibori’s corruption saga began and his press secretary denied that his boss was not a thief. We now know better.

    However, the fact is, constitutionally speaking, the President as well as governors are entitled to a second term, provided that is the wish of Nigerians or the citizens of their states; that is to say if they give the incumbents their nod in the election. Therefore, if anything would stand between President Jonathan and his second term ambition; that should not be any group of governors but the collective wish of Nigerians.

    The matter is even made worse by the report that, in the characteristic Nigerian manner, the document that the President allegedly signed with the 23 PDP governors on the pact is now missing. In Nigeria, anything can be missing, without anybody being called to account for it. We were told the other day that the Okigbo report on the $12billion Gulf oil windfall feared to have been squandered by the Babangida regime was missing. That is Nigeria for you. But if the governors would leave such a vital document in the custody of a south south governor (the president’s geo-political zone), and they do not have any other copy, that is their cup of tea. It shows how naïve they were. I only hope this is another dummy they have sold to the Presidency because there is one saving grace that they still have; if they make the document public at any time and convince Nigerians about its authenticity, then, they can compound the President’s problems by claiming that he is unreliable. And who wants an unreliable President? But the G7 Governors should not make their intra-party affair a cause of mayhem in the country.

    If they truly have fallen out of the PDP, they should not behave like the Bamanga Tukur-led PDP that can neither throw the G7 Governors and their supporters away, nor fully accede to their terms for ceasefire. In other words, when Tukur and Co. were told to eat something, they say it is bone, and when told to throw it away, they still claim there is some meat in it. The G7 Governors should be resolute about their plan. Like most other concerned Nigerians, they also have a right to say the President has not done well and therefore cannot be reelected. But this is not by threatening fire and brimstone; otherwise, they would be meeting the President’s forces on the turf that the latter are familiar with; brawn where brain will do.

    My argument is that the governors know what to do legitimately if they want to stop the President from running for second term: they should team up with people with similar objective (that I am sure are in the legion, and still counting) and bring the strategy and tactics as well as the ingenuity the ruling party had been using to ‘win’ elections to the alliance. That is the only way to pull the rug off the feet of the PDP.

    But if anybody thinks the battle to wrest Nigeria from the ruling party will be easy, that person is mistaken. Nigeria’s presidency is, to many Nigerian politicians, like the kingdom of God which suffereth violence and only the violent taketh it by force. This has nothing to do with whether the aspirant had no shoes as a child or whether he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. The fact is that there is so much power in the Presidency just as there is so much money in it. So, how can anyone be talking about one man, one term, when there is so much at stake? Even Chief Olusegun Obasanjo who had been military head of state before he became president did not want to leave after serving the constitutionally approved two terms. The man simply played the deaf when some people asked him to adopt the ‘Mandela option’. Nigerians denied him a third shot at the office that he craved, the same way they denied General Ibrahim Babangida a chance to return to the seat of power to retrieve whatever it was that he forgot there.

    Tell me, if there is nothing in the place, why would most of the people that have ever got there, including our revered General Yakubu Gowon, be shifting handover dates over the flimsiest of excuses? When even those who are not from the part of the country where President Jonathan hails from were not satisfied with just a ‘shot of power’; (like the Eb..ra man, they always wanted more tomflers (tumblers)), how can we expect the president who comes from a place where they drink like fish to be? A shot? No. Only two or more will do, Baba ta ni’se wu? (Who is at home with poverty?) Agreement my foot! One term! One term!

  • Southwest governors’ unfinished agenda

    Southwest governors’ unfinished agenda

    In spite of the massive and commendable efforts by the progressive governors of the Southwest political zone to reclaim and redo their region in line with the civilising vision of their iconic past, they have proved strangely deficient in focusing on a few key issues necessary to safeguard their legacies and forge a great society out of the perverted crucible bequeathed to them by their wanton predecessors. The governors, working on the platform of the All Progressives Congress (APC), must now gradually begin to complement their fixation with infrastructural development with an equal or greater than normal fixation with creating a new social ethos. If the work of the governors is to endure, if their legacies should not be claimed by others or bastardised, they must be undergirded by a fundamental set of values by which the region is to be known and differentiated.

    I absolutely do not get the impression, by their works, utterances and dispositions, that the progressive governors of the region are quite able to draw the line between the development or recreation of the region’s broken infrastructure and the values necessary for the regeneration and refinement of the region’s essence. Somehow – I do not know how – Obafemi Awolowo had an instinctive feel for the ingredients necessary for the embodiment of the Western Region essence. Perhaps because he had a metaphysical grasp of the interrelationship between man and matter, he knew as a social alchemist how to balance economic development with human development. He knew, indeed, how to build the man and imbue him with definable and noble essence while anchoring those efforts on the foundations of physical and economic development.

    The Southwest governors have done substantial work, far more than necessary to win the next elections, in rebuilding the region’s infrastructure destroyed by decades of military rule and incompetent elected governments. Now, they will need to dig deep and show a greater appreciation of the interconnectedness between man and material things, and just how the two, in measured proportions, produce a great society. For in the end, it is not just schools, roads and hospitals that conduce to a great society, as indispensable as they may seem.

    I single out the progressive governors of the Southwest for mention in this piece because they seem to have at least a vague understanding of why it is important to build a great society. And they also seem eager to tackle one of the constituent blocks of building a great society – the troublous matter of infrastructure. But they seem baffled that in spite of their best efforts, not only are they still being heavily criticised, their states have neither changed fundamentally when put side by side other states nor have attitudes been reengineered in such a way as to create the desirable outcomes they are familiar with in foreign sojourns. They may make definite and perceptible efforts to rebuild their states’ infrastructure, but they unhappily discover for instance that in spite of their better efforts they still play politics the same enervating way other unaccomplished or even failing states in the country do. This failure is a reflection of the things they have either de-emphasised or are not doing at all.

    The progressive governors may not have noticed, but it is becoming increasingly clear, in the face of almost universal breakdown of law and order in the country, that the Southwest seems to be the last oasis of order and stability. While other regions have virtually broken down under the weight of religious cum ethnic and social revolts, with some even manifesting extreme and dehumanising forms of trade in human beings (or kidnapping), the Southwest has managed to maintain a semblance – only a semblance – of peace and civilisation. It is time the region’s governors began to take steps that are consistent with the desired fundamental changes in values in order to consciously build a society immune to the madness around them. Already, their insulator is being gradually eroded, as religious acrimony is creeping into social and political discourses in some of the states. Rather than seek to appease sectarian activists, the states must find ways to firmly and publicly distance government from religion. Appeasement of any kind will be counterproductive.

    While the Southwest has produced an integration agenda, an action that has inspired at least one other region, it has been unable to pursue its implementation with the same enthusiasm that informed the agenda’s formulation. This shortcoming is unlikely to be due to rivalry between the governors, for state boundaries are clearly delineated, and boundary disputes in the region are few and far between. I suspect, as I said earlier, that the governors themselves are not clear about what should be done to create a great society, or how and why a great society transcends roads, schools and hospitals. They do not seem to understand why they must enunciate different paradigms for democracy, for electoral contest, for the justice system, for taxation, for law enforcement, etc. In fact they need to appreciate why there should be some form of uniformity in these areas, in order to build or restore the civilisation that has stood them out for more than a century.

    It must be acknowledged that the Southwest will find it difficult to stand aloof from the morass around them, especially given the massive decline in competence and standards at the federal level and the erosion of values in high places. It is doubly difficult for the region, or any state for that matter, to be differentiated when the federal government itself, particularly through its electoral, security and law enforcement agencies, stands as a dangerous, if not insane, counterpoise to orderly and peaceful governance. But except the region makes conscious effort in creating a new social ethos, notwithstanding the countervailing forces around it, it will find itself drawn deeper and ineluctably into the vortex of mediocrity, confusion, examination malpractices, chaos and decay that have undermined the country in general.

  • Education and democracy: training the future generation (4)

    Education and democracy: training the future generation (4)

    Apart from periodic panelbeating of the education sector, far-reaching reforms of this sector cannot be achieved without a national dialogue 

    In a six-part essay, today’s piece is still on primary and secondary education, for obvious reasons. Without a solid background in these two levels of schooling, all efforts to advance and achieve competitiveness in a knowledge-driven universe will come to naught, regardless of how prestigious tertiary education institutions appear to be. I, therefore, crave indulgence from readers who may be tired about reading my opinion on how to prepare Nigeria for the new world that is staring it in the face.

    We said, among other things, last week, that reforming education in our country will involve new strategies to ensure highly motivated learners/teachers, conducive learning conditions; qualified teachers; dedicated school administrators; etc. There is the tendency to think (the way most federal politicians and their administrators do) that promising to throw money at these challenges may be enough to keep citizens inspired to learn. Some may even argue that spending up to 24% of the country’s annual budget on education as recommended by UNESCO, instead of the paltry 4% that is usually allocated to the education sector will transform the nation’s education landscape. Given the parlous state of governance over the years, giving 24% of the nation’s budget to education is not likely to create a sufficient condition for improving the quality of education. Doing just that is likely to fuel the culture of corruption within the circles of politicians and bureaucrats put in charge of the sector.

    What must happen before the right percentage of annual budget is allocated to education is to have the right ideological framework for governing the country at all levels: federal, state, and local. Put simply, there is a need for political parties and their leaders to provide leadership in creating development vision and mission that can inspire and mobilise citizens. Such vision must include measurable and visible milestones that citizens can identify with. Using the mantra of unity and transformation to inspire citizens is too vague and devoid of measurable milestones for citizens to identify with. Leaders of other nations have in recent times created visions that have helped to transform their countries. South Korea, Singapore, Brazil, India, Mexico, and even United Arab Emirates have all created national goals that have kept both their governors and citizens moving towards progress, not only in education but in other sectors.

    Nigeria had even done something like that in the past. According to LadipoAdamolekun, BisiAdesola, and Chief BisiAkande in Legacy of Educational Excellence, the Universal Free Education Programme of Western Nigeria in the years before Nigeria’s independence and civil war would not have succeeded if there was no synergy between the government and the civil service that served it and without the mobilisation of the citizens done by the Action Group in the 1950s. With an ideological mission that set out to improve freedom and quality of life of citizens in the Western Region, the Action Group used the motto of “Freedom for all, Life moreAbundant” to mobilise citizens to support all its developmental projects including education. This explained why it was possible for Western Nigeria to create the Partnership Model for education provision almost half a century before it became popular in many countries today. The Partnership Model in Western Nigeria then recognised the government as the agency with superintending responsibility for education and of citizens, communities, and religious institutions as partners in a vineyard that was directed by politicians and administrators at both state and local government levels. Local governments, under the nose of parents with children in the schools, managed the schools while the state government provided financial support through revenue from taxation. The success in provision of primary and secondary education in Western Nigeria later turned into failure under the auspices of military dictatorships, as Adamolekun pointedly observed : “The unitary and centralised command structures of the military contrasted with the ‘true’ federalist arrangements within which the Western Nigerian ‘success story’ was incubated and implemented.”

    The institutional decay and educational decline that started with increased unitary governance under the military and that appears to have become an abiding aspect of federal governance in the post-military era have created a situation where states and local governments no longer have the powers to raise taxes to fund their own development. By depending on handouts from the federal government, many states and local governments have also sought and obtained support from the federal government in their direct and indirect efforts to alienate citizens. The result of decades of institutional decay and a national journey without destination under post-military rule is the failure that abounds in all levels of education, particularly in the most seminal level: primary/secondary education.

    Apart from periodic panelbeating of the education sector, far-reaching reforms of this sector cannot be achieved without a national dialogue that allows each part of the country to spell out what it hopes to achieve for its citizens in a highly competitive global market. Throwing money periodically and grudgingly at tertiary education and after long periods of strikes may not lead to meaningful education reform. We may not know what type of education to give citizens and how to do so effectively until we know where we want our nation to be in the future and what capacities we want our citizens to have.

    As Adamolekun has aptly observed, our citizens have been demobilised for over three decades. The demobilisation has arisen from an ethos of increased unitary rule and the disjuncture between government and citizens created by a system of funding through allocation of funds from a central purse constituted by rents collected from extractive industries and the spoils system that this has engendered during and after military rule. Local governments and states need to be autonomous enough to raise funds for their own development. This is not in the sense intended by lawmakers (now engaged in some form of constitutional amendment) to allow local governments to spend money donated to them by the federal government without any oversight by the states that compose them; it is in the sense of giving states and local governments autonomy to raise the taxes they need from citizens, the real owners of the country and its parts, and to collaboratively engage citizens in creating a functional education system from primary to postgraduate training.

    In other words, the ethos of nation building that was evident in Western Nigeria in the 1950s and that is evident in most federal states in the world today needs to be retrieved by those who make it their calling to rule Nigeria and its parts. Just as Chief Akande once observed, “At present, Nigeria has no educational system with adequate philosophical objectives as a backbone. It can be seen therefore that the major purpose of most Nigerian educational institutions is administration of an examination orientation.” Primary and secondary education has to be reformed urgently and given a goal that is larger than running elaborate examination boards. Creating good philosophers and plumbers (used here as metaphors for effective academic and vocational training) depends on agreeing on what kind of Nigeria and Nigerians the country and its parts desire to produce to ensure sustainable unity and development. Doing this requires paying more attention to primary/secondary education.

    To be continued

  • A wariness of being be-clouded: cloud, twitter, facebook, texting and other inducements of the digital age

    A wariness of being be-clouded: cloud, twitter, facebook, texting and other inducements of the digital age

    Becloud: verb (used with objects) – 1.to darken or obscure with clouds.
    2. to confuse or muddle: to becloud the issues.
    Dictionary.com (Online)

    I think it was about two years ago that my mind began to focus on the appearance of the words “the cloud” and “cloud computing” on the screen of my laptop computer. I use the term focus deliberately for as soon as I began to pay attention to these words, I realised that for quite some time, my mind had been slowly registering their appearance on my laptop screen and pondering what they meant. At any rate, eventually my slight, semi-conscious curiosity became a very active need to know and that was when I began to focus on those words, “the cloud” and “cloud computing”.

    I should perhaps add at this point that the first thing that came to my mind with this focus was a vague intimation that I felt between these words and one of my favourite plays from Greek antiquity, The Clouds of Aristophanes. The play is a powerful and rambunctiously funny satire on the school of classical Athenian philosophy known as the Sophists. As we all know, it is from this school of philosophers that the word “sophistry” has come down to us. Famously or notoriously, sophistry beclouds issues by a show of brilliance that initially promises to be illuminating but actually turns out to be muddled and confounding.

    Astonishingly, when I searched for the meaning of “the cloud” and “cloud computing” on the internet and even asked people who knew what the words meant, my vague intimations of Aristophanes’ play were confirmed. “The cloud”, it turns out, refers to a range of services on the worldwide web that seem to be provided by real internet servers or providers when in fact they are served up by virtual or simulated software applications (apps) running on one or more real machines. Since these virtual servers of “the cloud” do not physically exist, they can be moved around and scaled up and down endlessly in the manner in which a cloud – an insubstantial cloud that appears to the naked eye like a weighty mass – can be blown about in the wind. Another thing that I found out about “cloud computing” is that it involves a large number of computers and users that are connected in a seemingly real time communication when in actual fact they may be located at opposite ends of the planet.

    To date, I have not tried “the cloud”, even though it intrigues me a lot. And it is this very fact that links it with all those other services and inducements of the internet and the digital age that I also have not tried or tried rather half-heartedly. These include but are not limited to twitter, facebook and text messaging. Obviously, my hesitation, my reservation about text messaging needs an explanation and, dear reader, I am happy to give one. I come from an age in which the only form of “texting” that we knew was the telegram. To send a message by the telegram you of course had to go to a post office. You filled out a form with your message on it and took great care to be economical with the number of words in your message because each word cost quite a bit. I forget now how long it took for your message to be delivered to whom you wanted it sent, but it certainly was not the same day, talk less of the same instant. From this brief account it can be seen that the telegram is to text messaging on a cell phone as travelling in the horse drawn carriages of the past is to traveling in the futuristic “bullet trains” of China.

    Does my reservation about text messaging on the cell phone have anything to do with my having once been a user of the telegram? Yes and no. Let me take the no first: I have no nostalgia, none whatsoever, for the telegram. This is because even back then, long before the arrival of computers, smart phones and text messaging, using the telegram was a cumbersome and rather joyless affair! You not only stood in line for a long time at the post office but when you got to the service counter you often found out that you had to go and prune down the number of words in your message because you did not have enough money on you to pay for the number of words in your message. And that sent you right back to the end of the long line in which you had stood for perhaps more than thirty minutes!

    Now for the yes part. Coming from the age of the slow and laborious rituals connected with sending telegrams predisposes one to being economical, being prudent with one’s time and one’s dispositions. Here I must make a confession: the longest, the absolute longest, that I can go on a text messaging spree is, at the very most, ten messages each way. Imagine this admittedly spartan regimen to the unlimited temporal freedom of the enthusiasts, the champions of marathon text messaging sessions that can spend a whole day sending messages back and forth, most of them quite inane! I do not make this comment self-righteously, sitting in judgment over the aficionados of cell phone text messaging. But if it seems that I am being judgmental, being haughtily dismissive of what other people find joyful and fulfilling, do accept my apologies. To each person his or her own inclinations and disinclinations. Only, please, please do not force your own inclinations on me as a denizen of the new brave and buoyant 21st century age of a digitality that promises so many inducements!

    In all seriousness, though I affect a light, playful tone in these ruminations, these are very serious matters. In this new age of a virtual digital paradise in a real world that has not successfully tackled some of the oldest and most enduring problems of survival for us as individuals, nations and the species, we are all, in our diverse and often conflicting ways, consumers of an endless range of services that confound the distinction between our wants and our needs and between products and services that can sustain us and those that are meant only to entertain us or even distract us from the hard, difficult choices we have to make. Let me elaborate a little on this observation.

    I spend an inordinately large part of my daily life on the internet. For the most part, these are hours well spent, hours in which I am working on things I must do in order either to enhance my professional competencies or get a better and fuller sense of the world we live in. There is also the odd hour or two in which I am hunting down or chasing after humorous or entertaining posts and blogs on the internet. In all, it means that I have to be extremely mindful, first, that I am not distracted from important things by the surfeit of mirages on the internet and second, that the recreational inducements of the internet do not overwhelm my real or potential capacity to intervene, to make a difference for the better in the conditions of my life and the lives of others close to me. This, I confess, is the source of my hesitation, my reservation concerning things like twitter, facebook, LinkedIn and, yes, the newfound intriguing inducement of “the cloud”. The deluge is upon us and growing. Unless of course you among the hundreds of millions of the poor and the marginalised of the world who have no access to the internet.

    If you are not among these multitudes and if you are not an incurious person, you cannot go surfing on the internet without discovering new things that catch your fancy, that send powerful impulses of wonder, delight and discovery. It can be both exhilarating and very tiring and confounding.

    How do you react wisely and productively to this cornucopia of elixir and poison, uplift and confusion? What are the signposts for separating the wheat from the chaff, the wine froth from the dregs? Drawing a lesson from the time in my childhood when I taught myself how to swim at Alalubosa Lake in Ibadan and discovered that when you were tiring and the shore was still a long distance away, you could regain your strength and your composure by treading water on the same spot, I take a pause, a long pause, before taking the bait of each new product, each new inducement thrown up by the profligate supermarkets of digitality on the internet and elsewhere. Let me state a few of these “treading water” pauses of mine with regard to one particularly ubiquitous product or service of digitality, phone calls.

    Phone calls. I am very wary, perhaps even very resentful of just how massively and crazily phone calls have become intrusive into our daily lives. Without a doubt, this comes from the instant connectedness that the cell phone has established between friends, families, acquaintances and even total strangers in our world. Moreover, some of us remember the time not too long ago when you had to be rich and well connected to own landline phones. At any rate, who among us can now leave home without his or her cell phone? Well, consciously and deliberately, most times I do! And I cannot believe that there are not a few others like me who also feel completely unperturbed to leave their phones at home when they step out into the outside world. If you sometimes feel inclined to do so but feel unsure that it is a wise thing to do, try it a few times and you will discover that your daily life has not become impoverished on account of that simple act. Yes, I miss many calls but I return the missed calls when I can. Yes, I am haunted by the thought that one day a call might come that might have to do with a life and death emergency, but that is a contingency that is there all the time anyway, cell phone or no cell phone.

    I readily admit the fact that many of my friends were initially quite upset by the constancy of the missed calls they got from me. However, in time they have become used to the discrete distance I have established between my cell phone and my daily life. What are friends but those who are willing to take you for who you are as long as they know that your idiosyncrasies do not negate your love, your respect for them? There are long stretches of daily life that I try to keep free of any and all intrusion; and there is a corresponding pool of inner concentration that I try to preserve from the incessant, endless barrage of phone calls. And on a far more mundane level, I never take phone calls when I am walking in the streets, never!

    To conclude, perhaps rather inconclusively. Facebook, twitter, LinkedIn, they all interest me but so far, I have stayed away from them. This has not stemmed the flow of invitations to wade in, to join them, to tune in on the waves of their allegedly very ebullient social networking. Concerning “the cloud”, something tells me that sooner or later, I will try it, I will get in on the act. But if and when I do so, I hope that I shall not be be-clouded.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu