The Nation Newspaper

Category: Columnists

Our hearts are broken

The last four months of the year or the ‘ember months as we call them in Nigeria are perceived here as wicked and blood thirsty, especially December. Not only do we usually witness an upsurge in the number of road traffic accidents and the attendant fatalities recorded, some other evil things like kidnapping, armed robbery, burglary and carjacking also take place during this period thus driving fear into Nigerians at the approach of December.

Such evil acts as kidnapping are now so lucrative that the evil men and women behind them no longer wait for December before striking. In the past it used to be that people mysteriously disappear around December/Christmas time and most ended up in the hands of ritualists working for their principals who wanted quick money which they could flaunt and squander during Christmas and New Year festivities to show their community that “they’ve arrived” as we like to say here.

If that was kidnapping for money making ritual, the in thing now is kidnapping for ransom and it is very lucrative and highly rewarding. In the South East region, the headquarters of kidnapping in Nigeria, the crime is now big business fetching the kidnappers an average of N750m (seven hundred and fifty million Naira) monthly.

Relations of the rich and influential members of the society, including politicians, top government functionaries and even Nollywood stars are always their target and there is no age limit; young, old or aged, no problem, as long as their victim can bring in the ransom.

The most vulnerable are children and the aged who are often defenceless and powerless. Each time these evil men strike our hearts break as was the case penultimate weekend when the 82-year old mother of Nigeria’s Finance Minister and Co-ordinating Minister for the Economy Mrs. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala was kidnapped at Ogwuashi-Uku, Delta State. Professor Kamene Okonjo, a professor of Medicine was kidnapped by gunmen at the palace of the traditional ruler of the town. She spent five days with the kidnappers before she was rescued by security agents. To secure her release or rescue, whichever way you want to put it, the kidnappers, according to unconfirmed reports were paid N9 million.

As usual nobody confirms this kind of payment but we all know it happens. Even the police do at times advise families of victims to pay the ransom to secure the release of their loved ones. More often than not we only hear that the victims have been set free by their abductors and not rescued by the police.

Just as the nation was still adjusting to the reality of the kidnapping Professor Okonjo another old woman was being abducted in Ibadan, Oyo State. The wife of a former Military Governor of old Western State Gen. Oluwole Rotimi, Titilayo, was kidnapped in front of her haulage company, AOP Logistics Limited, on the new Ibadan-Ife Expressway at about 6.30 pm last Monday. And just over the weekend a Nollywood actress and Special Assistant to the Governor of Imo State on Public Affairs, Nkiru Sylvanus was kidnapped on the street in Owerri, the state capital. Her abductors want N100m. Though they are not likely to get paid in full, something substantial will be paid as ransom; so the business continues.

It is quite surprising and annoying that the police still have not found a solution to this problem in spite of the numerous shake ups and reshuffles that usually take place after each case of high profile kidnapping. Some are even insinuating that some elements in the force are working together with these kidnappers. Considering the unenviable record of the Nigeria Police, this cannot be ruled out. Remember the Iyamu story in the Benin robbery ring of Lawrence Aninih and Monday Osunbor during General Ibrahim Babangida presidency? Iyamu, a police officer was later discovered to be part of the notorious armed robbery gang when Aninih and co stated ‘singing’ when they were arrested. Promises of radical changes to the Police were made then but nothing changed. Recall that a one time Assistant Inspector General of Police in charge of the Southeast zone at the height of kidnapping in the area who failed woefully to curb the menace was instead of being fired promoted as the Inspector General of Police after the then IG who hails from the area was fired for incompetence.

The tragedies we often associate with the ‘ember months are not peculiar to Nigeria. Last Friday in far away United States of America, a 20-year old man, Adam Lanza walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, dressed in black battle fatigue and a military vest and began firing. By the time he was done, 26 were dead- 20 of them young students between ages six and seven. The nation with a notorious gun culture was not only shocked but also broken-hearted following the tragedy. We also share in the grieve of the families of the victims including that of a 27-year old female teacher in the school who hid her students inside the cupboards when Lanza, the agent of death came calling in her class, telling him the children were in the gym. He shot her dead. What a brave woman. I hope we have teachers like that in Nigeria who in the face of death would be ready to protect their students. I doubt.

In the midst of all these, the curse of aviation descended on Nigeria again when a military helicopter conveying VIPs from Nembe in Bayelsa State to Port-Harcourt, Rivers State crashed into the creeks killing all on board. Among the dead were the Governor of Kaduna State Patrick Yakowa, former National Security Adviser Gen. Owoye Azazi, their aides and the two-man crew.

Our hearts are broken and bleed as yet another accident from the sky has claimed lives in this country. Recall that some years back another military helicopter crashed in Makurdi killing some Generals. Have you forgotten the Nigeria Air Force Hercules C-130 crash in Lagos during the Babangida era that killed whole generation of middle ranking military officers from the Army, Navy and Air Force? Too many accidents involving our military aircraft are becoming worrisome. And this call for urgent action on the part of the military high command.

President Goodluck Jonathan as the Commander-In-Chief must take more than a passive interest in what is going on in our military aviation. Just as attention is being focused on civil aviation by the Federal Government the military arm, especially the Air Force, Navy and even the Police deserve similar attention. We cannot afford to continue to lose lives like this.

December 18, 2012
‘Our president has no shoes’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

December 18, 2012
Sege’s agony

Just as well the ever-preening Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, former president of the Federal Republic, just gobbled his vomit on the iconic Bola Ige, former justice minister and federal attorney-general, that assassins killed in his Ibadan home on 23 December 2001.

He, on December 10, declared the late Ige one of the most accomplished Yoruba, nay Nigerians, that ever lived – which Chief Ige, no doubt, was. His glowing praise came at the unveiling of a life-size Ige statue, in front of Bola Ige House, the State of Osun Governor’s Office, at the Osun Government Secretariat Complex, Osogbo.

At the unveiling were the Osun Governor, Rauf Aregbesola, and his deputy, Grace Titi Laoye-Tomori. Also there was Ige’s son, Muyiwa, one of Aregbesola’s commissioners and other government high officials.

The Obasanjo high praise bounced from an earlier savage put-down, in which the former president dismissed his slain former power minister as not knowing his left from his right, at the time he was in the Power ministry; suggesting Ige’s alleged incompetence caused much of the present power debacle.

But before the extremity of high praise and low knock, had come a 1999 presidential carte blanche: a ministerial offer that gave Chief Ige a free hand to choose whatever portfolio that tickled his ability, in the new Obasanjo Presidency.

It was indeed a sweet danger of a symbiotic deal. Obasanjo needed Ige to thumb his nose at the Afenifere hegemony in Yoruba politics; that the Alliance for Democracy (AD) sweeping victory in the six South West states, in the 1999 elections, had just confirmed.

On the other hand, Ige needed Obasanjo to “deal” with the Afenifere grandees, whose conclave preferred Olu Falae to him (though Ige was Deputy Leader, and Falae an IBB-era SAP zealot turned progressive), as AD presidential candidate, in a closed primary at D’Rovans Hotel, Ibadan.

That sweet danger ended in mutual tragedy: the iconic Ige lost his life – many say because his hubris allowed an evil lizard to creep under the cracked walls of his political fort – but never his honour and mystique.

Obasanjo, on the other hand, kept his presidency, and even rigged a phony South West base, after wrong-footing Afenifere into some political cul-de-sac, with the once-upon-a-time battle-tested and trusted titans floundering; and wondering, with self-loathing, how they could ever have fallen for Obasanjo’s Trojan horse.

But Obasanjo himself ended his presidential power adventure with a terrible unravelling, only reminiscent of the tortoise in the folktale that swore never to return from his journey until he was thoroughly disgraced!

So, if the great Uncle Sege has suddenly turned a posthumous Ige admirer, after his rather insensitive he-knew-not-his-left-from-his-right earlier comment, it is because political irrelevance savagely stares him in the face, a logical sequel to his tragic presidential unravelling – and he verily believed the Osun grandstanding would win him some plaudits. Only political fools would fall for such cheap tricks!

Still, the Bola Ige House setting is gripping: and Ige’s son, Muyiwa, Governor Aregbesola and even former Governor Bisi Akande must especially savour that sweet irony.

Many say, to “capture” the South West, by hook or by crook, Ige had to go, hit-the-shepherd-and-scatter-the-sheep fashion. As collateral damage, Governor Akande had to go too, even if Obasanjo had earlier damned him with faint praise, as one of the few 1999-2003-class governors that passed his solo anti-corruption screening.

Worse still, Olagunsoye Oyinlola, to the ruin of Osun citizens, must usurp Akande, the visionary that built that futuristic Osun secretariat. Oyinlola’s parlous performance has become his eternal damnation – and ample proof of Obasanjo’s sterile mainstreaming, in a politically progressive and assertive South West.

So, even as Obasanjo screamed “Ogbeni ambush”, his body, veteran of countless empty grandstanding, tightly hugged Ige’s Osun canonisation. With that canonisation, he must have reasoned, may come his own political redemption, with the doors of Aso Villa firmly barred against his meddling! Talk of the once rejected pillar becoming the cornerstone! That this canonisation-redemption drama unfolded in the House that Akande built, and in the full glare of the younger Ige, is indicative of who, between Ige and Obasanjo, is having the last laugh!

This latter-day activism, a campaign against a crony lost and an investment gone awry, is a classic Obasanjo soap. At President Umaru Musa Yar’adua’s greatest hour of need, when he lingered between life and death, the thundering Sege downed him with his verbal staccato. The health-challenged must give way for fitter limbs to do the job! Yet, the late president was the darling Umoru, who Obasanjo, “do-or-die”, crowned president in the worst election in Nigerian history!

Now Goodluck Jonathan, for who Obasanjo callously repudiated the political zoning formula that made him, has stepped out of line! His estranged godfather is therefore getting on the overdrive to unhorse him.

To the starry-eyed, it is Obasanjo’s idea of a patriotic duty to retrieve the polity from the shifty hands of Captain Incompetent. But really, as it was with Yar’adua before Jonathan, it is Obasanjo’s Plot Perpetual for political relevance, having blown his golden chance, with his wayward eight-year presidency.

Still, the usually feckless Jonathan seems to have developed a satanic sense of humour at Obasanjo’s expense. To the discerning Tony Anenih, the ruthless fixer who was himself ruthlessly fixed at home during the Edo gubernatorial election, may well be on his way back as chairman, Board of Trustees (BOT), of the Peoples Democratic Party – the same political durable Obasanjo elbowed out of office, at the tail-end of his imperial presidency. A sardonic joke never gets merrier!

Author Obasanjo, in his books, boasts special talents at revealing his future anti-climax, while piously condemning others. In his Not My Will, he knocked Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, the famed Nigerian nationalist, for starting life as Zik of Africa but ending it as Owelle of Onitsha!

Well now, the self-proclaimed father of modern Nigeria and African eminent statesman is messing around with Owu chieftaincy disputes! At least, that was the publicised reason for his Osun shuttle! How time changes!

Somehow, the agony of the former president is so reminiscent of Barabas, in Christopher Marlowe’s play, Jew of Malta. Barabas the Jew, never regarded anything sacrosanct. So, he built his life on free and wilful double-cross. But the first time he was ever earnest, the Malta gentry double-crossed him. He lost both his life and his wealth for the ransom of Malta.

Obasanjo, of course, is no Barabas; and always insists his word is his bond – which could well be. But whoever wants to do a deal with him to stave off his looming irrelevance had better be careful.

Let therefore Osun Governor, Rauf Aregbesola, take tutorials from Chief Akande and Aremo Olusegun Osoba, about a certain agreement in 2003, before getting too comfy with this man. Let history not repeat itself – for after the tragedy of that first blunder, the South West, and indeed Nigeria, can do without the sure farce of a possible second!

Obasanjo richly deserves his looming irrelevance. He worked hard for it all his long public life. Besides, the republic is better off for it.

December 18, 2012
Same old story

With barely two weeks to the end of 2102, Nigerians should have just enough time to ponder again on the bizarre econometrics of fuel consumption and its associated Ponzi scheme dubbed subsidy-gate. As if to confirm the degree to which the rentier enterprise has defied gravity, President Goodluck Jonathan last week made a request for supplementary appropriation of N161 billion to take the subsidy payout for the 2012 fiscal year well beyond the trillion naira mark.

Eleven months after the debilitating strikes over the removal of petrol subsidy, the question is whether anything has changed since then.

I do not think that anyone needs to look far for an answer. The indices seem as clear as daylight.

First, the fuel supply situation has remained as fragile and unstable as it was pre-January 1. Secondly, the request for supplementary appropriation has confirmed that the nation is nowhere near solving the riddle of how much fuel it consumes. If anything, the indication is that the shadow- boxing and the posturing by our high-minded reformers have been comical show, a waste of time – a colossal chasing after the wind.

No doubt, the substance of subsidy-gate has been confirmed, beyond any iota of doubt. The nation is said to have been fleeced to the tune of N232 billion. Of course, the inquiries also produced an interesting derivative now better known as Farouk-gate (or is it Ote-Dollar gate) involving an alleged giving and/or taking a $620,000 in bribe in full glare of camera.

Howbeit, depending on how much stock one places on the value of the naming and shaming of the alleged subsidy thieves and their comical arraignments with the full photo-op sessions, to the extent that the nation cannot be said to be near getting out of the fuel supply conundrum anytime soon, the so-called progress cannot be anything but imaginary.

There is a fourth, signal – a disturbing one at that –the increasing possibility that the promises on the new refineries are unlikely to be kept.

Where do we go from here? The future is certainly scary as it is.

Indeed, the atmosphere of incapacitation/abdication under which the conundrum has become intractable must itself be seen as worrisome. Government’s unquestioning faith in market orthodoxies and by extension, the fixation with the removal of subsidy on petrol has unfortunately endured to the point of constituting the sole plank of its liberalisation mantra. Newspaper reports last week suggesting that the federal government may have junked the idea of building new refineries have since reinforced the view of a government ill-prepared to show leadership in a sector that continues to drain not just the national till but the nation’s store of foreign reserves.

At the moment, it seems out of the question that the ordinary citizen will tolerate any further tinkering with fuel prices under any circumstances especially if it has to do with subsidy removal.

Does anyone yet see the bind? Obviously, we are back in circles, preparing perhaps for the next cycle of subsidy removal and, you guessed right, mass resistance!

That is the way we are, and perhaps that is how things will continue.

It used to be said that when there is the will, there will be a way. This is no doubt a truism for our federal government to the extent that it is bogged down by the specious mantra of liberalisation that precludes its participation either directly or by way of partnership in business. As for the government’s claim that the trillion naira subsidy has become unsustainable, I think we are nowhere there yet – at least not while the current inflows into the piggy bank called excess crude account remains guaranteed.

By the way, is it not the same federal government owned Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) that has proposed to build some 30 retail outlets under the 2013 fiscal plans? So what is the difference between building service stations and refineries? It seems in the character of the morally-challenged government to make exceptions when it suits it.

Sanusi lays an egg

Readers of this column should by now be familiar with my views on the wave of sanitisation that have swept the financial sector since 2009. Clearly, whatever misgivings anyone may have of the management of the aftermath of the sweeping reforms embarked upon by Malam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi and crew, the exercise was clearly inevitable. One area I considered disturbing was the failure of the CBN management to accord forbearance to the hordes of shareholders that were not found to have been culpable in the bazaar which plunged their financial institutions into ruin. Against all entreaties, the CBN insisted that the shareholders knew of the risks, and like any investor, should have expected to bite the bullet when the bubble burst. That to me was legalistic particularly as I felt that some accommodation could have been extended to these shareholders.

Now, that was then.

Today, a new scenario seems to be playing out which, unfortunately suggests that CBN regulations are not necessarily cast in stone. The issue concerns the Savannah Bank and Societe General Bank which the courts granted reprieve some years ago. Here is my concern. I must say that I have no problem with the apex bank warehousing the licences for the duo. However, I have had a bit of a headache understanding the regulatory abracadabra which forbade forbearance for one set of players while denying same for another.

The two banks are planning to stage a comeback. That seems fine. What I cannot understand is the idea of a lifeline from the apex bank to them. Can somebody explain what is going on?

December 18, 2012
Fayemi the challenge of change

Recently, while on an official visit to the United Kingdom, the Ekiti State Governor, Dr Kayode Fayemi delivered a lecture at the Royal Institute of International Affairs popularly known as ‘Chatham House’ London.

Governor Fayemi, a globally recognised leading resource on matters relating to governance, democratisation, security and economic development had in recent times honoured a number of speaking engagements focusing on socio- political developments in Nigeria and internationally.

At the Chatham House, he spoke on the topic ‘The Challenge of Change: Democracy and Development in Ekiti State, Nigeria’. He started his lecture by relating a striking personal experience. He narrated that the elders of his “small but scenic hometown, Isan-Ekiti,” had come to see him to express certain displeasure with him shortly after he was sworn-in as the Governor of Ekiti State in late 2010.

“At this point,” he recounted further, “while the Government House in the state capital was being renovated, I was driving to the Governor’s office from my hometown daily. The elders told me that they found it disappointing and sorely disconcerting that the people in the town were hardly aware of when I drove out of, and back into town every day.”

Why was this a problem, Fayemi said he was forced to ask them?

Reporting their response, the governor said: “Well, they understood my credentials as a scholar, they were also aware that I had been an activist for many years. But now I was the Governor of the Ekiti State, and this would be the first and, perhaps, the only time in a long while, that the Governor would come from their hometown.

“Why then was I denying them the opportunity of enjoying the pomp and circumstance of power by driving in and out of town without using the siren – if only to remind the people of the adjoining towns that their own son is the Governor of the state?”

Fayemi said he gave the narration to illustrate both the challenges and the opportunities for change in the ethos and practices of power and governance in Nigeria.

He then proceeded to lay out the key issues, including the fundaments, the ethos and the practices which he believed were significant in examining the challenges facing state, governance, democratisation and development in Nigeria.

He avowed that “change is central in all these, because social transformation is an indispensable factor in any society – even in the most developed ones. Because society is a permanent work-in- progress, continuity and change must be in a constant struggle so as to find the best direction and methods of social progress. However, no lasting social change starts outside the minds of human beings.”

To buttress his argument, he cited Albert Einstein’s statement that “The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.”

Based on his narrated personal experience, Fayemi observed: “If a political culture encourages people to think that a state governor is not “governor enough” if he does not announce his going and coming with blaring sirens, even when there is no obstructing traffic, then we have to realise that the challenges of change is multi-dimensional.

Expatiating more on ‘The Fundaments of the African State’, he looked back at the last two decades of democratisation in Africa, which he declared, has brought to bear significant social, economic and political changes on the African continent. He said with several years he had spent in the civil society, working with social forces in Africa and development agencies across the world to encourage change in the continent, he could confirm that Africa is changing for the better.

He, however, made an allusion to “a lot” of that had been “written by Western scholars on the African predicament which oscillates between hope and despair and described in various dark grammars – failed states, collapsed states, incapable states, proforma democracies to mention but a few of such epithets.”

He added that some African scholars have equally responded to many of the dark prognoses on the African State by describing them as “collapse thesis.” Some Western scholars, he said, have even gone further, adept at what they consider to be the most sinister manifestations of the State in Africa since it fits a convenient and popular narrative, to announce that, despite all its “illogicality,” “Africa [actually] Works” – because as they conclude, “Disorder [acts] as Political Instrument” in the continent.

While avoiding, as he said, to indulge in philosophical and/or theoretical postulations about the continent, Fayemi turned to a Marxian dictum to react to what he termed “the (prevailing) restrictive and (popular) constraining attitude both in the academy and the international development community toward the African State.”

Karl Mark, in The German Ideology, had said: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point, however, is to change it.” Governor Fayemi argued that the same view can be extended to the African situation.

Not many, I believe, will contend with Fayemi’s argument, as he put it, that: “The philosophers have only interpreted Africa, the point, however, is to change it.”

As Fayemi has constantly postulated in many of his talks, we all need a typology of Africa’s democratization that further interrogates the broad categories away from the Manichean divide – of success and failure, pessimism and optimism, sub-optimal performance and unprecedented progress – which is possible and indeed, necessary because of its practical implications for policy choices by African citizens, their governments and development partners.

As accurate as this typology is, it remains incomplete in its inadequate analyses of the process and dynamics of change and in its focus on outcomes. As Fayemi would always argue: “Both optimists and pessimists of the African condition focus on outcomes, linking these outcomes in a linear relationship with particular reforms and assuming static environments.”

I agree with him that what is needed – is an understanding of the relationship between evolving economic and political contexts of reform – of how and why reforms proceed. I equally believe with him, as he argued further, that we must move away from a focus on judgments pegged on macro- reforms, that is country level analyses and big ticket issues – democratisation, privatisation, anti-corruption, insecurity – that are often measured by large, dramatic shifts – technically appropriate but often lacking in political fit.

Opportunities to accelerate change and strengthen governance structures, as he said, are often missed in the context of this exclusive focus, or worse they may accelerate the challenges, inherent in the process of change, by withdrawing, for example, in the wake of partial reform. Rather than focus on short term gains, it is important to understand social change in Africa in a longer term perspective rather than through the typical binaries of success and failure.

It is in this way, along the line of Fayemi’s postulation, that it would become clear that societal transformation in Africa in the past two decades of democratisation has led to the emergence of new social forces, changed the importance of others and consequently altered the relationships among various social and political actors whilst fostering new coalitions between the state and society.

• Omobude wrote from Ibadan, Oyo State.

December 18, 2012
Traveller’s nightmare

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

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

December 17, 2012
Redeeming Ibadan

A city is a people. More than the village that encases a monolithic world view, a city embraces the world. That is why the village has collapsed as a barometer of a civilisation, especially since the city began its rise on the back of that great idea called capitalism.

But the city has also become a cynosure of disgrace, the repository of filth and psychic decay, where the criminal rumbles and the politician cons and the businessman profiteers and the child expires on the cheap.

The city of London today is celebrated for its order and even beauty, but it once groveled under Hitler’s bombardments. However, it was that same tragedy that threw up the genius of the great Winston Churchill with his speeches of inspirational growl.

Before that, Charles Dickens expended his gifts to depict the squalour of that city, with novels like Oliver Twist and The Great Expectation. The British Prime minister at the time decided to work the city to glory after reading of the terrible want and desperation of the character Oliver Twist.

No city in the world, whether it is London, New York, Tokyo or Paris that did not pass through the foul rhythm of grime and crime before surging to a place of envy.

All of them were inspired by leaders, just like the case of London. New York is on the rise again after a decade of decline.

Lagos fell to such a bad place in the military era. It is a different story today. On this page, I lamented the city of Ibadan where Obafemi Awolowo patented his genius, where the old west preened.

It fell, like unfortunate cities do, on the hands of a bumbler. The man, Alao-Akala, preferred the vanity of his sartorial splendour to the environment. Leaders inspire cities. Alao-Akala committed the extraordinary act of narcissism. He loved himself so much that there was not much love left for the city he governed.

What I lamented was the filth of Ibadan, where at every turn you saw heaps of refuse intimidating traffic into paralysis. Rather than inspire Ibadan, he inspired filth. So bad was the situation that it was declared in 2008 one of the dirtiest cities on God’s green earth. The man did not understand the meaning of green.

In the past year, I have had reasons to visit the city, and it is clear that the city is in the hands of a man who has the wherewithal to inspire it. The evidence abounds of Ibadan as a city on the rebound.

All those places where dirt compounded like natural habitats are gone, and they used to swagger in different colours of green, blue, red, brown. But they were not good green, or colourful brown, or bewitching red. They were mock colours. They were the colours of stench rising with impunity to you, even if you were ensconced in an air-conditioned car.

There is a strategy to Governor Abiola Ajimobi’s approach to the filth and decay of the city. One of his first preoccupations was to keep the flood at bay. This meant attacking the drainage challenges. Ibadan has been a graveyard as floods after floods pummeled during rainy seasons. Homes caved in as lives drowned.

He has built a number of bridges, cleared many a water path so that no stagnant pool accumulates so much dirt that the rains can unleash flood. This is the way to attack the root of the problem. It is still work in progress. They call him the bridge builder.

This is accompanied with regular work by refuse disposal units that cart away bags and drums of refuse. I could have gone with the impression that the people of Ibadan loved filth. But that is not the case. I grew up in Ibadan and recall the images of the city, even during the imperial days of the army. I lived in Oke-Ado.

Ibadan was not what it became under the bejeweled, half-literate chief executive that steered it into the age of unclean.

The third leg of the strategy is the beautification. We cannot appreciate what is clean until we develop what is beautiful inside. To beautify is a painful exercise always, but it is a thing that ought to be done.

Entering Ibadan from Lagos invites you to work already going on beautifying the Iwo Road. The work is not done yet, and for it to be appreciated Governor Ajimobi has promised to expand the road. It is still experiencing traffic discomfort, which though has reduced. It will entail massive demolitions, which he plans to do. But the work has to be done. Beauty cannot be enjoyed when traffic snarls.

But around Ibadan in such places as Ring Road, Dugbe, Bere, Oje roads, the beauty of the city is coming to view in picturesque green projects.

When a city is clean, the people are creative. That was why novelist Dostoyevsky proclaimed that beauty will save the world.

Ajimobi has shown himself equal to the task. We can recall that just a few years ago, Ibadan was a hotbed of violence and insecurity. Partisans of the road workers union terrorised citizens, robbers prowled and the general sense was that of unfathomable devilry.

Things have changed and it is taken for granted. Just as it was taken for granted in Lagos State until a spasm of robbery a few months ago reminded us of what good times had fallen on the country’s most populous city.

The first task of a government is the security of the people. Oyo State has eased out of the vice grip of inept men, and Governor Ajimobi epitomises that liberation with his clever, methodical touch.

With a city vastly more secure and cleaner with better aesthetic outlook, Ibadan and Oyo State can face the larger challenge of attracting more investment. This is an impressive showing in less than two years Ajimobi ascended the throne.

He has also done well with roads, rehabilitating and constructing about 250 roads. He has streamlined the finance, raising the internally generated revenue and paying salary even in the 13th month and engaging 20,000 youths in creative jobs.

In his play Coriolanus, Shakespeare quips, “what’s a city but the people?”

That is the governor’s main task: to set the people away from fear and want. He is on the right track.

December 17, 2012
Media and sustainable democracy

The oldest definition of democracy is one in which it is conceptualized as, government of the people by the people and for the people.

In ancient Greek city states, it was possible for the people to gather in a square and directly take decisions on issues affecting their common wellbeing.

Overtime, the concept of representative democracy evolved in the fashion of the Kuhnian revolution to supplant direct democracy.

Central to this concept is that government is a social contract between the people and the rulers and the people as the ultimate sovereign, exercise the right of control on their elected representatives.

Periodic elections and separation of powers are necessary conditions for democracy. It is through periodic elections and the checks and balances attendant to separation of powers that democracy derives its greatest attraction over other governance forms. Through periodic elections, the people keep a check on leaders’ activities ensuring that the bad ones among them are voted out at the next round.

Almond and Verba in their classification of political socialization identified three variants of political culture: parochial, subject and participant. For them, the political culture of democracy-civic culture is a combination of the three with the participant variant being the most dominant. By way of contrast, the subject political culture in which the individual makes no input into the system but enjoys the benefit of its output is more easily located in totalitarian states. In the participant variant, the individual has some idea of what the political system is and very well disposed to it. He makes inputs into it and enjoys the benefits from it.

One point that has been bought to the fore is that there are ordered attitudes, orientations, dispositions and roles that must be played by the people for democracy to survive. And in these, the media have an indispensable role to play.

The 1999 constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria in chapter (1) 4(1and 2) vested the legislative powers of the Federal Republic of Nigeria in the National Assembly which shall have the powers to make laws for the peace, order and good government of the federation or any part thereof.

Section 14 (2a) stated that sovereignty belongs to the people of Nigeria from whom government through this constitution derives its powers and authority; while (2c) guarantees the participation by the people in their government.

It went further in section 22 to state that the press, radio, television and other agencies of the mass media shall at all times be free to uphold the fundamental objectives contained in this chapter and uphold the responsibility and accountability of the government to the people.

One recurring issue so far is that government is an institution of the people and exists in the main, for their collective good. An essential element of representative government is the legislature through which elected leaders make laws for the general wellbeing of the people.

Through periodic elections, the people constantly ensure that those who exercise mandate on their behalf use them for public good. This entails regular monitoring of the activities of elected representatives through reports, write-ups and analysis in the media. Monitoring could also be direct or through other informal means. And in this monitoring and keeping a tab on their activities, the media have a very indispensable role to play. Through the media, the people get to know what their representatives do in the national Assembly; their contributions to debate and how reflective of their wishes and aspirations they are. Through the media also, they are able to articulate their preferences on the conduct of legislative activities thereby contributing to the law making process. Misuse of power is expected to attract reprisals- rejection of that representative at the next round of elections. There is also the power of recall of errant lawmakers which is vested on the people of the constituency. These key powers of the people act as a check against the excesses of law makers and work in the direction of responsible conduct which in turn, strengthens democratic practices. For these to happen, there must be free and unhindered flow of information. That is where the freedom of information Act cues in. For the media to play this role very effectively, it must be driven by public interest. The media could also become an impediment to this role especially if money and muscle power get control over it to the point of becoming an economic exercise rather than driven by public good. It is in this regard that some authorities have come up with the term Media Democracy. The driving idea here is that the media must be independent, plural and democratic in its ownership and role perception for it to effectively discharge these functions without which democracy cannot survive.

Information being the basis for decision-making, there is no doubt that the amount of it available to the people bears direct correlation to their ability to influence legislative outcome. It is a three directional thing involving input, output and feedback. The media convey relevant information on the feelings of the people to the legislature. It also conveys to the general public happenings at the legislature thus increasing their awareness on such events. These in turn, influence action and elicit response from the public which is conveyed back to elected leaders through a feedback system.

Access to information is essential to the health of democracy for at least two basic reasons. First, it ensures that people make responsible, informed decisions rather than act in ignorance or misinformation.

Second, information serves as “checking function” by ensuring that elected representatives uphold their oath of office and carry out the wishes of those who elected them.

In some societies, an antagonistic relationship between the media and the government represents a vital and healthy element of full functioning democracy.

The national assembly through its oversight functions interfaces with other critical institutions of government.

Through it, elected leaders ensure that public institutions are run in the overall public good. Since the new dispensation, we have seen such probe committees as the ones on fuel subsidy scandal and the capital market as well as those on constitutional amendment.

These are responses to concerns by the people on the fraudulent manner fuel subsidy payments and the Capital Market have been managed in this country. The constitutional amendment process is responding to public agitations for a constitution that represents their wishes and aspirations. Most of the issues slated for discussion: state creation, residency clause, State police, local government autonomy and immunity clause have been in the public domain for sometime now.

The essence of the public hearings is to give the people a say in the amendment process given that the 1999 constitution being a product of the military did not have inputs from the people.

In this desire to give the people a say in the constitutional amendment process, the media have a pivotal role in providing the necessary information and education that will aid decision.

But the media must be credible, objective, independent and responsible for it to positively influence public perception and action.

Excerpts from a paper at a UNDP capacity workshop for the press corps of the Senate held in Makurdi, Benue State.

December 17, 2012
Titans and the Titanic

AS the political space in Nigeria opens up to fresh possibilities, intense political jockeying has also commenced all over the country. Across the length and breadth of Nigeria , the usual actors are at it again, forging fresh alliances and trying to weld together a shattered national consensus. It is a party of giants. Political titans are on the march again. But the great river of human affairs flows on endlessly and ceaselessly. This time around, impersonal titanic forces also abound, ready to overturn the apple cart.

It is in the nature of political ferment to generate their own controversies. We have received numerous responses to last week’s piece titled Four Yoruba and Nigerian Avatars. While many hailed the piece for its captivating logic and flair, a few described it as a seminal analysis of four of the problematic personages who have dominated Yoruba and Nigerian history in the past sixty years. For snooper, what is intriguing and interesting is how most of the commentaries came to agree with our evaluation, particularly of the Owu-born retired general.

This morning, we publish two sample commentaries, one from a professor of Communication Theory and the other from a reverend gentleman. Once again, they both end up with the same posers. But since former president General Olusegun Obasanjo is quite in the news these days as a result of the ongoing political permutations and realignment of forces, we republish this morning a piece first published in very early 2006 just as the Third Term fiasco was about to explode in the general’s face.

This piece, once again, confirms why the imaginative projection of a fiction writer is sometimes superior to the late insight of political scientists. It is not for nothing that Sigmund Freud regarded Fyodor Dostoevsky, the great Russian novelist, as the master and mentor who saw it all before him. Although almost seven years old, the following piece resonates with the dynamics of power play and the futility of clinging to power in a country with a microplurality of contending and mutually contradictory power-centres.

December 16, 2012
Just before dusk in Nigeria

(An evening embedded with Babalegba)

Anarchy, the natural successor to democratic regression, had arrived dressed like a five-star general. The mood of the nation was foul and filthy. There was a murky intemperance everywhere. Colourful things were happening which stretch the boundary between reality and fiction to its elastic limits. A constitutional mayhem was unfolding in the old “wild, wild” West. Insurgents in the Delta had dramatically raised the stakes: oil spilled and so did blood. The north had become ominously sullen, the kind of sullenness presaging desperation. The entire south was in noisy ferment. The ruling chief himself was a study in volcanic distemper, erupting at short notice with the pristine violence of a bear at bay.

Things could not just go on as usual. Everybody was expecting something to give. If it was a question of aborted hopes, the country could live with that. In its short existence, the ill-starred nation has had to cope with many betrayals and aborted hopes. Somehow, and like a stumped lover, it had always found the strength, the fierce energy to move on. But this time the omens of national regeneration were not very bright. While the naira was being carted away from the treasury, something fundamental had also taken place. The spirit of the nation appeared to have decayed, too. Having passed the point of morphine-assisted rebirth, Lugard’s contraption was expiring before our very eyes.

I told an old acquaintance who was quite familiar with the routes to the old Yoruba interior that I needed to see the chief with immediate effect——as they say in the military. I was bearing an important message from a great crony of his. All my friend had to do was to deposit me somewhere around Wasinmi. I will find my way to the chief’s palatial enclave by routes known and unknown. .

Ibogun-Olaogun is an idyllic rural village, a hanging orchard of palm fruits, oranges, bananas, plantain and semi-wild breadfruits running riot in prolific and prolix progeny. The only paved road in the community had been hurriedly rehabilitated for the umpteenth time and it looked like an aberration of modernity in a rustic paradise. I hardly had time to take in the expansive sitting room with its mementoes of global conquests and capitulations to crude vanity when the old man barged in. We had not seen in about eight years, not since he decided to return to the palace, and not since he triumphed against all popular odds.

As he charged past me, he stopped dead in his track as a whiff of belated recognition overtook him and his drawn exhausted visage lit up with contempt superimposed on panic. Bitter resentment welled up inside him as he eyed me with angry disdain.

“Ta l’omu omo were yi wa sibi?” he growled in Yoruba. (Who brought this lunatic here?)

“I have not come here to be insulted. I have a message for you”, I snapped, determined to carry the battle to him as usual. He had been startled by the vehemence and shrill ferocity of my response. But the old soldier, a past master of psychological warfare, was unfazed.

“I say who brought this lunatic here? So you have finished writing all your rubbish, abi?”

“And I say I have not come here to be insulted. First, your friend said I should tell you that each time in your career that you alienated your true friends and surrounded yourself with sycophants and palace jesters you have always paid dearly for it. And this time will not be different”, I shouted back.

I could see that he had suffered a serious deflation. Ever since he barricaded himself in within a wall of unreality and monomaniac delusions, nobody had taken him to the cleaners like that. He mumbled something and then mused half-aloud to himself.

“That one, I sent some money to his wife in lieu”, he mumbled to himself.

“In lieu of friendship?” I asked with a sarcastic leer as I leveraged my psychological dividends.

“Were ni e se. A foolish and unwise professor. Professor my foot!!!” he screamed.

“Listen, you told a friend of mine that I am a stupid man, a professor of idiocy….ojogbon ti ko gbon paapaa”. I shouted at him.

“And am I lying? Am I not right? All the rubbish you have been writing, where has it taken you? All the stupid things the likes of you have been saying in your papers, am I still not the leader? Am I still not here? All of you cannot remove one piece of hair from my body. The termite only plans but it cannot eat stone. Wo, let me tell you, you are`all doing yourself, not me”.

Buoyed by this self-induced myth of invincibility, he seemed to have regained his devilish sense of humor. He began to sing a famous juju song and to canter round the expansive sitting room like a victorious local generalissimo , giving me the occasional satanic look of triumph.

Bi eni bi eni

Ara yin le nda loro

Ara yin le nda loro, emi ko

Bi eji bi eji

Ara yin le nda loro

Ara yin le nda loro, emi ko……….

“Temi deni” I called out to him with disarming familiarity and by his childhood nickname as a way of reminding him of his humble beginnings as a gravel-loading yokel. He gave me a curious look of disbelief and concern.

“Kilowi?” (“What did you say?”) “Ani omo ale ni e se”, ( you are a rogue of ambiguous paternity), he raved with affable relish. I now saw an opening and chose to press home my advantage.

“The last time we were both here, this palace was not there. I understand things are also very rosy in Otta. You seem to have done well for yourself oo”, I observed.

“Siddon there. Those who partake in the cooking of pepe must eat a bit of pepe”, he replied cautiously, looking for a trap.

“So what was the grouse against IBB then?”

“Ha, that one, that one”, he began warily, “ that one, na dede nde’ku. Iku nde dede,” a famous Yoruba saying which suggested a duel unto death between two formidable adversaries.

The great chief is a man of famously mercurial temperament and even more notorious for sudden and abrupt shifts of moods. He was now eyeing me with towering distrust, as if he had been admonishing himself for being rather too friendly with a traitor, an enemy combatant. He was about to raise the stakes but I beat him to the offensive.

“You know looking back, my only regret is that I didn’t allow that boy to rough you up in London when you first got out of jail”, I said looking at him directly.

“Don’t we know who sent him? “he began with malicious relish, “ your NADECO professors, OPC stalwarts, Odua thugs, Afenifere infidels, ignorant Nobel Lawrence(sic). Mo siti fo epon gbogbo yin!!” ( I have smashed your testicles)

“But…” I began, but allowed convulsive laughter to overtake me.

“Shut up. Are you not one of them? In fact why am I talking to this idiot?” His mood shifted suddenly again from adversarial violence to cunning deflation and sadistic baiting. He eyed me with a look of superior disregard.

“By the way, awon baba re Afenifere nko?” (How about your Afenifere fathers?)

“Don’t even go there!!” I snapped. He began to laugh uncontrollably at my obvious discomfiture. He eyed me with paternalistic and patronising contempt.

“When I heard that they named you secretary, I said foolish boy see where all the grammar, all the grand theory have led him, a seer who cannot see his own future, kai , kai”. He began to sing and canter about again, a very ominous native song about the fatal entrapment of the elephant.

“A o merin joba

erekuewele

“A o merin joba

erekuewele

Gbogbo wa pata ka lo merin joba

erekuewele.

Then he stopped abruptly again. He eyed me with savage amusement.

“You know those old men who call themselves Afenifere. Ijo ti mola ti nfun won legba nilu yi (since the malams have been oppressing them in this country) For the first time you have somebody who has brought their tormentors really to heels, and they are not grateful. All they know is gra gra; no strategy. Without ever saying so, I have avenged all the humiliations of the tribe. Now they find themselves in league with people like Gambo Jimeta”

He had pronounced the name of the former Inspector General with such spite and contempt, and with such a curious native inflection which suggested something completely different. I pointed his attention to this, but he pointedly ignored me.

“When I ask Nuhu Ribadu to open the book on that one, he will run to Futa Jallon.”

There was a momentary pause as I watched him completely consumed by hatred and vindictiveness. He reminded one of some malignant self-indulgent deity; an aberrant personality, but a truly magnificent aberration with an elemental force of personality.

“You have so many enemies and not much time left”, I observed.

“Who told you”, he snapped

“So, this third term thing is not dead!” I lamented.

“Ti nba tun gbo to lenu re, o si gbo tam tam laiya re.”he snarled.(If I hear any word beginning with “t” from your mouth, you will hear something exploding in your chest with the sound tam, tam.)

He was by now, a menacing sight to behold. Towering frustration compounded by impotence was written all over him. Something must have been telling him that his time was up. But here was a man who had wrestled with history before and was determined to have another go, his very strength becoming a profound weakness and a source of potentially fatal tragedy for the nation he owes so much. I moved for the kill.

“A wise man should have known that a nation is a permanent work in progress. Even if you stay for fifty years, there is only so much that can be done. A great leader focuses on a specific project and then cultivates a cult of heroic example to serve as a benchmark for coming generations. You did that in your first coming. Unfortunately, this time around circumstances have overwhelmed you.”

He lurched forward in an attempt to grab me, and as I briskly side-stepped him, I hit my head against something. I opened my eyes to a sepulchre-white world. It had begun to snow heavily in New York.

December 16, 2012