The Nation Newspaper

Category: Columnists

  • Bayo Oguntuase’s critique (2)

    IN the same vein, the Americans talked about building “a more perfect union” while George Orwell wrote that “some animals are more equal than others.” We all know that “perfect” and “equal” are absolute superlatives. Some writers even write or refer to “editorial comment” of a newspaper or magazine. Hence grammarians say that “the adjective is the enemy of the noun while the adverb is the enemy of the adjective”. Copy and sub–editors use words of strong impact and dramatic significance, all for special effect and strong drama. Hence journalists write about “bombshell” instead of “shocker” or “nasty shock” or “surprise packet”. This reminds me of what Louis Turner and Jon Ash wrote in their interesting book entitled “The Golden Hordes” (on page 200): “The financial backers of Haiti’s Habitation Leclerc (a pleasure reserve) include Mick Jagger, Alain Delon, the late Aristotle Onassis and other multinational business tycoons.” Last year you also argued that “business tycoon” is tautologous. I disagreed—it is not. In strict grammar, “end” is correct. But “month–end” is not. “Weekend” is also correct. “End of the year” is allowed but “year–end” is not. Language can be fun but it is not always logical.

    Another special note: “annals of history” is correct too. Example: “A great deal has been left unwritten in the annals of history.” But these phrases and words are incorrect: “I can’t remember”, “very great”, “alright”, “monies”, “Moslem”, “Quoran”, “machineries”, “very best/level best/possible best”, etc. “Annals of history”, like a “living witness” or “consensus of opinion”, is not pleonastic. They are set-phrases.

    Let me take this opportunity to restate the fact that “centre round” is incorrect. To make ourselves understood clearly, we must first make sure that each one of our words makes the right “dictionary” sense. And, if we can think of more than one word that makes the right “dictionary” sense, then we can choose the one that we consider to be the most vivid and precise. “Centre on/upon” or “centre in” (for precision or exactness) is the correct phrase known to Standard English. We also correctly say or write: “World War I”,” World War II” (not “First World War”, “Second World War”).

    You must try to read Andrew Fergus’ book entitled “What they are doing to your child at school”. It is an interesting, educative book. Fergus made it known that all over the United Kingdom, traditionalists (trads) and trendies are fighting in classrooms over correct usage. I am a traditionalist and “l love everything that is old”. I am very happy when you remarked: “I have found out, overtime, that you have a deep attachment to some expressions especially those of celebrated and often archival authors and speakers.” The truth of the matter is that Dr. Samuel Johnson, through his Dictionary, published in 1755, removed all improprieties and absurdities from the English language. In short, he (like a number of current priests of usage and literary sophisticates) became a linguistic legislator attempting to perform for English those offices performed for French by the French Academy.

    The current generation of collegians and university graduates are just literate– literate enough to be dangerous! They are not educated in the broad sense of the word. Besides, they are killingly monolingual. It is sad and saddening. An awful lot of them can’t write grammatical paragraphs.

    “As and when”, “if and when” are tautologous or pleonastic. In these phrases, one of the words in the pairs can be omitted. However, “as at when” is a piece of journalese. Besides, it is the height of illiteracy to write “as at when”.

    “Congrats” is used in spoken or informal English. “Congratulations on your success” is correct.

    ‘White elephants’ are also called ‘loop projects’: useless/senseless/crazy/silly projects.

    Concluded. Baba Oguntuase is a septuagenarian language activist based in Lagos.

     

    …Media gaffes

    “That the must-read ‘Wordsworth’ is a two-year column in this medium is unbelievable! I join my fellow beneficiaries of the column in saluting your efforts. We await more from you. (08062925996)

    “Good day and bravo for the good work you are doing. What do you make of Nigerian coinages like ‘pick my call’, ‘trafficator’, ‘forkaniser’…? (Prof. Okolie, University of Benin/070316677944)” My views: you either answer or make a call. ‘Trafficator’ and ‘vulcaniser’ (forkaniser!) do not exist.

    “Please, correct the view that ‘severally’ is the adverb of ‘several’ rather than the opposite of ‘jointly’/’collectively’ (THE NATION, Pages 21 & 52, October 7) Kudos for your good work. (Komolafe G. O. /08037277985)”

    Two headline errors from DAILY SUN of November 7 weakened The Voice of the Nation: “Kaduna bomb victims for burial in (on) church premises”

    “Ahead South Africa 2013: Lobbists (Lobbyists) will ruin your Eagles”

    “We most certainly have not heard the last about the governor’s convoy crash and the woes and blood it left in (on) its trail.”

    “…the huge confidence reposed on (in) them by the populace.”

    “They are the products of what some people did or did not do over a period of time but whose climatic effect culminated into (in a) catastrophe.”

    “But, while the former south-south governor may have been a rebel among the army of Jonathan’s political faithfuls.…” Sylva—a rebel without a strategy: political faithful (not faithfuls).

    “He stuck to his gun (guns) and propped himself up as one of the candidates in the election.”

    “Ward chairmen pass ‘no confidence’ vote on (in) councillors”

  • Fairy prince who stole the world

    Fairy prince who stole the world

    (First published in November, 2008)

    Elf-like and exuding supreme confidence and self-assurance, Barack Hussein Obama has seized global imagination by the jugular. In the end, nothing, perhaps, can match the laconic irony of the description of Obama’s spectacular ascension as a fairy tale. A fairy tale combines magic and superstition with savage and exacting reality. Savage because it belongs in the realm of primitive rituals of coronation. Exacting because it is actual history unfolding as a communal fantasy; a spectacle of the tribe. Like a fairy prince, Obama has dangled magical possibilities before the world. Things may never be the same again.

    For America, and perhaps the rest of the world, it was a truly defining moment. For comparison, we have to reach back to almost fifty years earlier in 1959 when the dazzling, youthful and charismatic John F. Kennedy was elected president of the United States. It was also a watershed election. America had elected its first catholic president, and a handsome, rich and glamorous one at that. The whole world took note. Camelot was back.

    It was always going to be difficult for a man who claimed religious allegiance to the papacy in Rome to become America’s leader and Commander in Chief. Although founded on secular authority, there has always been a deeply religious strain to the American nation anchored on the Puritan and Calvinist ethos of its ancient founding fathers.

    But if Kennedy was a victim of intra-elite rivalry and conspiracy, particularly the long face-off between the East coast WASP elite, the Boston Brahmins and the Irish descendants, Obama’s ascendancy was borne on the cusp of a grand assault on the centre from the margins and from below. This is why it resonates more with the wider world than Kennedy’s earlier triumph.

    It was a democratic revolution. But it is even better and more ennobling than the real thing. Unlike the typical revolution which pits one class against the other in an orgy of hate and bloodletting, this one demands a unity of purpose that cuts across class, race and creed under a supreme unifying symbol. The American people rose as one against the tormenting excesses of the warrior super-state and its plutocratic tyrants.

    Once again, America has shown the way forward for the civilised world. A truly democratic nation can negotiate its way out of any political quagmire. Whatever its imperfections as a nation, America has a unique capacity for ceaseless self-invention. In the process, it often manages to correct the toxic side-effects of its own self-projection and hubristic swaggering. To that extent, the emergence of an Obama-like figure of redemptive possibilities is a historic inevitability.

    It may appear curious and even bizarre that the same nation that voted for George Bush junior twice is also the nation that rooted for Obama’s more transformational leadership qualities. The irony of it all is that without the younger Bush, there would have been no Obama presidency at this point at least. America needed a man of spontaneous mayhem and clueless briskness like George Bush to drive the super-security state to the extreme of its unilateralist logic and the summit of its murderous ferocity before it can come to its senses. For any nation founded on rational principles, nothing concentrates the mind more than looming political disaster and fiscal anarchy.

    Yet in fairness to George Bush and much as we may rant and rail against him, much as low as his popular stock may have fallen, it is useful to remember that he did not create the American warrior-state. He merely inherited it. The American super-security state was ironically the creation of starry-eyed intellectuals with an exaggerated and romantic notion of America and its place in the world. Obama should take note. As it has been convincingly advanced by David Halberstam in his classic, the best and the brightest of America’s political establishment pushed the nation in the direction of permanent and perpetual war-mongering.

    Unfortunately, America was not founded on a warrior’s code or by a warrior caste. America was founded by starry-eyed intellectuals who wanted to create the world anew based on the ideals of freedom, liberty and equality. But just as the much-rhapsodised Athenian democracy was based on a slave-holding economy, equally brutal realities underpinned the American project. These are the realities of slave-holding and the brutal expropriation of the original owners of the land.

    Famously, L’Ouverture Toussaint, the great black revolutionist and Haitian hero, had cautioned his French persecutors not to replace the aristocracy of class they had overthrown with an aristocracy of race. It was a lesson lost on the American founding fathers, and it was to lead directly to a civil war and decades of civil strife. It was to lead eventually to the Obama presidency and the historic denouement of November, 2008. Every inch gained, every elbow room created as the heroic civil rights campaigners slogged their way through the obdurate detritus of the American political establishment was to provide the incremental building block for the Obama presidency.

    But as it is said, men make history but not under the circumstances of their choice. In one of history’s great ironies when the hour eventually dawned for an African American president of the US, the honour fell on the son of an African who had come to the country of his own will and volition and not on a descendant of enslaved Africans. The cunning of history indeed.

    Perhaps if Obama had grown up in a ghetto or one of the feral downtown slums of urban America, he would have been consumed by implacable hatred and bitterness, his self-confidence and self-belief hobbled, his spirit dampened, his radical optimism and appetite for glory sullied, and his infectious enthusiasm destroyed. It is also possible that he would have been picked up by the radar as an intelligent but subversive trouble maker and effectively demobilised.

    It is to the eternal credit of the system, to Obama’s own Olympian fortitude and self-belief and his lucky insertion into the system as the much adored and adorable grandson of doting white upper middle class grandparents that the president-elect of America survived unscathed. The audacity of hope is premised on the hope of audacity that all will be well. In another milieu after being repeatedly clobbered audacity will disappear and hope will diminish, leaving in their wake the sheer hopelessness of audacity.

    Let us leave things to a footballing trope. In an infamous gloss on Diego Maradona’s audacious run through the entire English defence which culminated in Argentina’s second goal in the 1986 World Cup, Maldini, one of the hard men of the remarkable Italian national team of the early eighties, noted tersely that if Maradona had begun that run in an Italian Football league he would surely have ended it in a hospital.

    It is impossible to imagine an Obama surviving in the continent of his father. There would have been a long queue for his head that is if he doesn’t succumb to “friendly” fire. It has proved easier to send a Luo to the White House than to the presidential castle in Nairobi. This is why one finds it so strange and bizarre that some of the shameless autocrats who have turned Africa into an undemocratic hell-hole have been falling over themselves to hail the Obama phenomenon.

    It is too early in the day to affirm that Obama would make a great president. The odds are greatly in his favour. Old Abe Lincoln who was both a great man and a great president had his character steeled in the furnace of unrelenting adversity and repeated failures. Obama has emerged relatively unscathed and closeted from the buffeting gale of human perversity. Hence a tendency to overconfidence and hubris. This is the twin-disease of the American nation itself and we can see how in both nation and latest political hero, they are a source of profound strength as well as potential disaster.

    Nothing, however, can discount from the profoundly symbolic nature of Obama’s victory. The victory has redrawn the race map of America forever and shattered its stratified hierarchies. After the horrors of Vietnam, Mogadishu, Iraq, Bosnia and Kigali, it feels good to be a human being again. After wandering in the jungle for almost three hundred years, America has finally reconnected with the dream of its founding fathers who were themselves torn between harsh reality and idealistic posturing. It takes a true dreamer and an exceptional individual to unite the entire world in Graceland. It is a magical moment and the magician is of African extraction. Something new always comes out of Africa indeed.

     

  • Can Justin Welby save Anglican Communion?

    Can Justin Welby save Anglican Communion?

    It’s a familiar story of privilege in Britain: a well-connected man receives a top-notch, prestigious education before making his name in the high-paying business sector and is eventually selected to fill one of the most prominent roles in British society. But this version of the story has a twist: the man in question, Justin Welby, quit the life of a business executive in 1987 and became a village parish priest in the Church of England instead—and in remarkably short order has risen to be on the verge of being officially named the Archbishop of Canterbury, the spiritual leader of 80 million Anglicans around the world.

    After weeks of speculation from the British media and Anglicans around the world, Downing Street announced Friday on Twitter that a group of clergy and lay people known as the Crown Nominations Committee (CNC) had chosen the 56-year-old to be the head of the Church of England. Beyond his background in business, Welby may seem like a surprising choice for the top job for other reasons. Although he was rumored to be a possibility for the leadership of the Church in September when the 16-member CNC met in a secret location to deliberate on their choices, many felt that he was too young and new to the Church. A bit “undercooked”, as Reverend George Pitcher put it when speaking to TIME before the selection was announced. A bishop for less than a year, Welby’s background seems more in line with that of a top political advisor or a flashy CEO rather than the spiritual guide to millions.

    Born in London in 1956, Welby has always had well-heeled connections. His father, Gavin Welby, worked as a bootlegger in the United States in the 1920s, was friendly with the Kennedys and once dated the actress Vanessa Redgrave. His mother, Jane Portal Welby, once worked as a secretary for Winston Churchill. Welby was educated at Eton College, the same elite private boys school attended by Princes William and Harry, London Mayor Boris Johnson and 19 British Prime Ministers including the current incumbent David Cameron. He went on to study law and economic history at Cambridge University before starting a career in the oil industry, first on the international finance team for a French oil company in Paris and then as an executive for Enterprise Oil Plc in London. In 1979, he married his wife Caroline and they started a family.

    But Welby’s career path took a sharp pivot after the death of his baby daughter Johanna, who was killed in a car accident in France in 1983. Though devastated by the loss, Welby later said, “in a strange way it actually brought [my wife and I] closer to God.” A few years later, Welby quit his job and enrolled at St. John’s College at Durham University to study theology and become a priest. He quickly climbed the ranks of the Church and was appointed the Bishop of Durham—the fourth most senior bishop in the Church of England— in November 2012. His appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury marks another huge promotion—but it’s an elevation to a post that promises to be extremely challenging.

    Worldwide, the Anglican community is made up of dozens of different churches, each with their own autonomy. More than half of all Anglicans are members of conservative African churches. In the U.S., the Episcopal Church has only about two million members and an outlook markedly more liberal than their African co-religionists. On issues such as gay marriage, women bishops and even the economy, Anglican churches can seem as far apart from each other in their beliefs as they are geographically. The diverse network of churches is, however, unified through the Communion, which, for the last ten years, has been led by the liberal-minded Rowan Williams, who announced his resignation as Archbishop earlier this year after a decade of struggling to resolve clashes within his flock.

    It will now be up to Welby to manage the Church’s conflicts, the most severe of which have sometimes threatened to cause schisms. Many in the Church fear that a move too far to the right or too far to the left by one faction of Anglicans could lead to another faction breaking away entirely. Conservative Anglican groups such as the Convention of Anglicans in North America (CANA) are adamantly opposed to views they feel are contrary to the teachings of the gospels—particularly gay marriage and ordaining women as bishops. Julian Dobbs, a Bishop of CANA, says that such conflicts over theology are “causing huge divisions in the Anglican Communion.” He adds that to prevent irreparable divides, Welby “will need to work hard to establish those historic faith principles that the communion was founded.”

    On the other side of the debate are Anglicans who believe that such a move toward codifying the Anglican faith would be at odds with what the Church fundamentally stands for. “Trying to force us into a common belief system is contrary to being an Anglican,” says Pitcher.

    Welby clearly has daunting task ahead, but many feel that if anyone is capable of uniting the liberal and conservative factions of the Communion, it’s him. Church insiders describe Welby as a people-person who’s skilled at seeing all sides of an issue and negotiating with both wings of the Church. He’s also traveled extensively in Africa and worked behind the scenes with many churches there, encouraging communication between them and more liberal churches in the West.

    That’s not to say he hasn’t taken stands on certain issues. Welby is on the record as being in favor of ordaining women as bishops and he’s just as outspokenly opposed to gay marriage. And yet he has largely managed to avoid being characterized as either of the right or the left in the Church’s political spectrum. In business and as a leader in the Church, Welby is perhaps most commonly described as a mediator. Vivian Gibney, a former colleague of Welby’s, told the BBC that “one of his main strengths is to find the way forward in negotiation.”

    Never mind the elite education and business-savvy; that’s the skill most likely to make Welby the Communion’s saving grace.

    Courtesy: TIME

  • Of our ‘dumbing-down’ culture (1)

    Of our ‘dumbing-down’ culture (1)

    Citizens need to get angry to insist that governments do the right thing

    Any of us in this country, particularly in the Lagos area are surprised at the reaction of employers and employees of Okada Mass Transit System to the Lagos State traffic law. Why should anyone be surprised that okada businessmen and some of the respectable citizens that have to rely on this mode of transport are up in arms against a law that is designed to bring sanity to vehicular movement in a city that can pass as the most clogged urban space in the universe?

    Why should anyone be amazed at the amount of noise by politics-for-the sake-of-power-and-privilege-only advocates calling for fire and brimstones on the governor of Lagos State duly elected by citizens to facilitate development in the state? The ubiquity of low taste and absence of long-term planning on the part of most of the middleclass men that have managed the country should be enough to disabuse the minds of okadaphiles of the belief that okada transport system is necessary or inevitable.

    The story of okada and of many other aspects of our country’s banalisation of important aspects of modern life is similar to that of a physically-challenged person being criticised by a casual critic. The casual critic said to the physically-challenged that the load on his head was not properly placed. The man in return admonished the critic to look down (instead of up at the load on his head) for the root of the problem. The root of the noise against the good people of the Lagos State House of Assembly and Governor Fashola who made and signed the recent traffic law is an outcome of decades of Nigeria’s trivialization of values that drive and sustain modernity elsewhere.

    Okada did not just spring up at a time when there was no government. It is one of the regrettable legacies of military dictatorship. Like the current constitution that emptied the country of its federal values, okada came into being under the nose of military dictators. In most countries with forward-looking rulers – military or civilian—okada as a mode of mass transit would have been prevented through right policies and legislations from surfacing in the first instance. The care-free attitude of military rulers when okada transportation emerged and of succeeding governments until Abuja and Port Harcourt blazed the trail of legislating against okada is still at work in other areas of our national life. The recent effort by the government of Lagos State to push the lever of transformation from primitivism to modernity is expected to be resisted not only by okada transporters but also by opportunistic politicians and even honest professionals who are not conversant with the historic duty of the middle class in modern times.

    The role of the middle class since the Renaissance and more especially since the Industrial Revolution is to work to improve the quality of life of the individual and of the society through establishment of standards and practices that are capable of refining the life of the citizenry. Since governance moved from feudal lords to members of the middle class, standards have improved generally at the hands of middle-class men and women in government and society. Such time-honoured middle-class values as commitment to personal security and safety; promoting intersection between individual’s success and the success of society as a whole; and acceptance by government of responsibility to provide transportation and communication infrastructures have been overlooked or ignored by government and cultural leaders in our country for too long, until a few governments recently started to take the risk of restoring some of these values. The scapegoating of Lagos State government for taking bold and brave steps to restore order to the transportation sector in the state is understandable. It is the result of decades of dumbing down of values that are central to sustaining modern life.

    Why would people who grow up not having safe roads to travel within and between towns in most states of the union not feel bad that Lagos State is trying to move the country’s most populous city from chaos to order? Why would citizens with no regular access to train or bus feel uncomfortable about okada mode of transportation? Why would citizens that migrate from villages without any trace of modern means of livelihood and living not feel angry that okada is being demonized in Lagos, the city that they have come to see as an anything-goes city that belongs to nobody?

    Why would citizens who migrate from villages where governments have no interest in how they get to their farms and places of work not feel scandalized that Lagos State feels obliged to regulate a chaotic transport system in the city? Why would citizens who travel on unsafe roads in 14-seater buses named Federal Government Assisted Mass Transit System not feel out of sort in a Lagos that says okada transporters must do their business in a way that is safe for majority of the citizens and residents of Lagos? People who have been degraded over the years cannot but feel cheated that any government in the country, particularly in what they think is a free-for-all state, certainly need help and re-education to grow out of the cultural inferiority they have been thrown into over the years.

    But the way out of the problem created by okada business is not to look for reasons to justify keeping okada as an acceptable mode of transporting citizens across the state. Okada should not have happened in the first place, but it is never too late or too risky to put an end to an unsafe business for citizens at large. Lagos State Government should be congratulated for embarking on a national project that is long overdue for remediation. If legislating against indiscriminate use of okada makes citizens angry, it may not be a bad thing at the end of the day. Citizens need to get sufficiently incensed to pluck the courage to insist that federal and state governments across the country should do the right thing: provide proper infrastructure for proper mass transportation. It is senseless to expect any responsible state government to feel good about an inherited policy to move over 17 million people by okada. Citizens need to be angered to the point that they are ready to tell their governments to do the right thing: provide transportation and communication infrastructure to encourage entrepreneurs to put more buses and taxis on the roads, to convey citizens in a dignified and safe manner.

    That Keke Marwa or Keke NAPEP is used in India or okada is used in Benin Republic is not a sufficient reason to rely on this mode of transportation in Nigeria. Trains, buses, and taxis are used in most countries of the world to transport citizens. Civilisation or modernisation is about copying good practices, not bad ones. Encouraging okada as a mode of transporting the masses in one of the most populous cities in the world is an illustration of a culture and government that have lost the will to protect citizens.

    To be continued next week.

  • Ali Mazrui and the challenge of Africa’s triple heritage

    Ali Mazrui and the challenge of Africa’s triple heritage

    The choice of our intellectual-hero for celebration in this contribution would obviously ignite some curiosity. The curiosity will arise given our stated objective for this enterprise at its commencement, and it bears restating. Given that today’s global cultural supermarket might be making it difficult for Nigerian youths to harness their national mentors and the pool of endogenous ideas and ideals as they prepare mentally for their inevitable task of leadership, political education focused public service is becoming a compelling responsibility.

    Such political education would be one way of promoting human understanding and cooperation given the lingering issues around the national question that makes it look as though there is no value in our diversity. Besides, profiling the achievement and intervention of these heroes and national figures is meant to contribute to raising the level of public awareness and discourse. Furthermore, in spite of the availability of global ideas and best practices, these ones constitute a reservoir of endogenous ideas and beliefs that could be harnessed to interrogate and interact with the global pool for national transformation.

    And this brings us to the subject matter of Africa’s triple heritage, which Nigeria shares, and which is a specific contribution of Prof. Ali Mazrui. Of course, it is obvious that Mazrui does not readily fit into my Nigerian framework of achievers. I agree, but only at a superficial level of assessing Mazrui’s achievements and intellectual and filial genealogy. Let me quote him for his own justification of inclusion:

    In one sense, I identify with all African countries and with the African Diaspora. But it is true that there are some particular African countries which have intersected with my own life more than others. Kenya is the birth place of my academic career and the initial engine of my rise to professional pre-eminence; Nigeria is the land of my African wife’s birth [Pauline Uti] and the country which inspired the emotions of my only novel, The Trial of Christopher Okigbo. Nigeria is also the country which made it possible for me to combine an appointment in Africa (University of Jos) with an appointment in the Western world (University of Michigan). The Nigerian Television Authority also joined forces with the BBC in Britain and the PBS in the US to produce my television series, “The Africans: A Triple Heritage”. Ghana was the country which had a greater impact on my Oxford doctoral dissertation, and Tanzania is the vanguard of my own Swahili culture. Kiswahili is my mother tongue.

    Mazrui therefore comes forward as a diasporan whose ideas are generated within the context of Africa’s multifaceted cultural, socio-political and economic challenges. Yet, it is not difficult to confer the honour of a Nigerian citizenship on him less for his marriage to a Nigerian, but more for his contributions as a political scientist to the understanding, resolution and revival of Africa nay Nigeria as a force in global affairs.

    The triple heritage thesis, first proposed by Kwame Nkrumah, but given its most powerful espousal by Mazrui, resonates with a forcefulness that speaks to Africa’s and Nigeria’s postcolonial predicament. The thesis simply states that Africa’s future lies within the framework by which we are able to navigate the dynamics of our Euro-Christian, Islamic and traditional heritage. Due largely to the Arab and European colonialism in the 18th and 19th centuries, Africa inherited a combustive mix of non-traditional religious ideals and sentiments that has done a lot to colour its sociological and continental futures.

    Let me illustrate this thesis with the sociological point of my personal experience growing up in the village. I was born in the little town of Awe in Oyo state. Awe is a typical African community which embodies the convivial values of a normal village. My grandfather, a Christian convert, got married to the daughter of an acclaimed local Muslim chieftain. Before the birth of my father, the expected religious crisis had erupted between the two families: “My daughter will not marry a kiriyo [the derisive term for a Christian]. It will only happen over my dead body!” However, Mama Muniratu, my grandmother, later had my dad for my Christian grandfather. She then remarried along the preference of her Muslim parents and bore about half a dozen other children. Whereas the discriminating attitude was somewhat deeply ingrained even within our spatial limitation in the village, there were strong mitigating factors which are the substance of the triple heritage thesis.

    In spite of this religious difference, we had the good fortune of achieving the harmonious relationship between the two religions around the framework of tradition and culture. In other words, as the two religious faiths got more entrenched within our communal space, adherents began defining their relationship to the traditional beliefs around the imperative of values and culture but excluding the “idolatrous” practices defined by traditional rituals. I therefore grew up in a community of other loved ones and the dynamics of shared values which the triple heritage thesis encapsulate. For instance, I “religiously” carried my Grandma’s mat to the mosque every Friday, and would stay outside until the prayer ended and we returned home. And Grandma, as a mark of respect for my father who raised his other siblings in love, paid her tithe equally “religiously” in church and sent her regular gifts to the church ministers. Whereas the church preached that we were not to eat Sallah meals, it was simply impracticable in our home as my Muslim cousins were the only brothers and sisters I knew. We slept in the same room, grew up with a bond that never created the crack for us to see that we were different until we were intellectually matured to interrogate the doctrines of our shared faiths.

    I therefore grew up within the dynamics of the Yoruba adage that: “Enikan ni o ma nbi’mo, sugbon igba eniyan ni o ma to o” (Only one person gives birth to a child, but the community trains him/her). The communally shared values and restraints within which I developed as a child were incredibly social and spiritual; they coalesce around the dictum: “Ranti omo eniti iwo nse!” (Remember the child of whom you are) and its attendant duties and obligations not only to the family and the society, but also to some “Heavenly Father” we had a very dim understanding of then, but ably represented by my earthly father who kept the faiths in harmony, without allowance for a relapse into fundamentalism!

    At the national level, the advantage of living harmoniously together, especially within the context of the foisted triple heritage all but disappears. Most African plural states have all been struggling for fifty-something years now to come to term with this heritage and convert it to a wholesome platform for moral reorientation and institutional/national transformation. A typical African state or society is therefore a mesh of warring political, social, religious, gender and ethnic sentiments motivated by the struggle for the scarce resources within the ambit of the state. The population and the distribution of these three elements of the heritage in Nigeria make our case a largely frightening one. However, it also gives Nigeria the possibility of living up to its reputation as the giant of Africa, if we can undermine the virulence of the elements working out of synchronisation with one another.

    The need to find a solution to the virulence of the Euro-Christian and Islamic elements in Africa’s triple heritage raises significant questions for the urgency of moving forward beyond our present crippling circumstances. First, is it impossible for people, otherwise distinguished by ethnic, cultural and religious affiliations, to live together? If we manage an affirmative, in what sense then would that hope not be truncated by an absolute conception of faith that necessarily exclude the others from religious, and national, communion? What role does self-understanding play in our attempts to come to term with our differences and similarities? How does the knowledge of the Infinite moderate our conscience in the world where other consciences inhabit?

    What makes us human is our ability to live together with others who are simultaneously different and the same with us. “Don’t you see that that blessed conscience of yours,” proclaimed Luigi Pirandello, the Italian dramatist, “is nothing but other people inside you?” Yet, as we have encountered over and again, recognising the simple truth is such a difficult thing that we must work at it with all hands on deck. Religious fundamentalism, ethnic triumphalism, gender chauvinism, and many others are all dimensions of the dynamics and contradictions of the triple heritage in disequilibrium. The dream of national integration is however hinged around the imperative of harnessing the energy flow seeping off through cracks in our inability to enlarge our civility and social interaction.

    In the integrative process, according to Mazrui, we move from bare coexistence to contact which precipitate competition arising from social and economic interpenetration. The two other stages include the compromise and coalescence stages. The former requires that the diverse people have found a means of living together with minimal conflict; the latter signifies a form of cultural synthesis in which the diversity has finally achieved unity. Nigeria, for sure, is presently in a pre-compromise stage, and the prospect of coalescence seems like a receding horizon.Yet, that horizon can be achieved. I have never flinched from the prospect of national compromise in Nigeria. And my optimism is premised on the tantalising fact that Nigeria will eventually evolve into a land of promise, one way or the other, in which our interests as Nigerians supersedes every other consideration. As Mahatma Gandhi notes, “Willing submission to social restraint for the sake of the well-being of the whole of society, enriches both the individual and the society of which he is a member.”

    Compromise and national integration therefore require a robust sensibility, an enlarged mind, and an empathetic consciousness that can tolerate a wide range of human experience without flinching in self-righteousness. This requires a process of reciprocity and self-respect that allows others to hold onto what John Rawls, the American philosopher, calls their “comprehensive doctrines” while equally respecting the right of others to hold onto theirs and the need to achieve what Rawls, again, calls a “reasonable overlapping consensus” amongst these doctrines. This consensus then becomes the template for a national conversation that turns the dynamics of the triple heritage into a unique source of strength.

    Furthermore, compromise also requires a proactive policy initiative around concrete programmes like the resuscitation of the idea of civics education in our schools as well as a veritable cultural/linguistic policy that ensures that the knowledge of other cultures is not far from the our consciousness. These are already issues receiving the utmost attention within the transformation agenda of government. The challenge however is to strengthen them by taking the policy to its logical conclusion. If Ali Mazrui could become a quintessential scholar within the context of his immersion in that heritage, Nigeria equally can, through its large intellectual capital among who is Mazrui himself.

    •Dr. Tunji Olaopa is a Federal Permanent Secretary in Abuja

  • Let’s take it easy on Super Eagles

    Here we go again. We seem to think that all football competitions must be won by Nigeria, no matter how ill-prepared we are for such tournaments. We raise the bar for our coaches, based on sentiments and a patriotic rating of our players who, unlike in the past, warm benches for their foreign clubs.

    Our players’ bench-warming status affects the way the Eagles play such that we tremble, fast and do all manner of permutations to pick qualification tickets that look like a piece of cake whenever the draws for such competitions are announced before the tournaments begin.

    We pile pressure on our players and coaches, forgetting that other countries learn lessons from uneventful tournaments without destroying the teams. Nigeria lost the chance to become a world soccer power when we failed to defend the Africa Cup of Nations in South Africa. Providence brought another opportunity when we clinched the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta. Yet, the garrulous sports minister, who was there when the goggled one stopped us from going to Johannesburg, refused to allow the Dream Team 1 leverage on the Olympic gold victory by playing the bigger football nations. Our clock of development stopped after that kindergarten decision and we have since tottered, using discipline to witch-hunt those who we don’t like.

    Playing at the finals of the 2000 Africa Cup of Nations in Lagos gave us another opportunity to rebuild, but we missed it, largely because of our administrators’ mindset. Johannes Bonfrere could do nothing wrong. We celebrated the Dutch- rightly, many would say. We do this always because we like celebrating the past. Burkina Faso 2002 Africa Nations Cup afforded us another chance to build on the gains of the past, following the country’s qualification for the 2002 World Cup co-hosted by Japan and Korea. Yet, our administrators had their perception of the Eagles. As they say, the rest is history.

    The Eagles’ death knell in global football competition was toilet at the Japan/Korea World Cup when we failed to go to battle with our best. We emasculated the coach who took us. We asked him to rebuild, using devious instrument to eliminate players who we didn’t like. Yet, we humiliated the coach by dispensing with his services. That coach holds the record of taking us to the worst World Cup even though this writer knows that he would have done better, if he was allowed to do his job.

    I have chosen to go down memory lane to highlight why we cannot compete with the best. At the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, France was the worst in terms of results, players’ conduct and the odium they brought to their country. The French have rebuilt their team, using some of the stars who misbehaved in South Africa. Today, France is rated as one of the countries to do well at the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. In our usual style, the administrators struck. This time, they misled President Goodluck Jonathan to announce the country’s withdrawal from big competitions. The President did a recant on his decision but the damage had been done to our football, in terms of how others relate to us in playing friendly games or doing serious football business.

    This hail them today- kill-them-tomorrow syndrome in the Eagles starts with setting ambitious heights for our team, despite the rebuilding toga every new coach wears. We have since 1999 being rebuilding the Eagles. I wonder when we will complete this structure. Truth be said, our administrators don’t want this game to grow, knowing that if it does, freebies from the government will be stopped. It is only in Nigeria that football is not big business.

    It is true that Nigeria, given our players’ exploits in Europe, America and the Diaspora, should always be the default winner of any soccer competition in Africa. Things don’t work that way anymore because our successes of yesteryears were not hinged on enduring plans that would produce replacements for fading stars. That is our dilemma, the old factory has dried up and the talents have been lost to age and the absence of nurseries to nurture rookies at the grassroots.

    We have perpetually built the Super Eagles on discoveries from outside our shores. Playing for the senior team is guaranteed when a player plies his trade outside, no matter the quality of the league in which he features. Yet we expect bench-warmers to excel in South Africa next year. It surely doesn’t add up.

    When we glittered on the African scene, our boys played regularly for the best teams. They made the headlines, scoring goals with aplomb and thrilling their audience with silky skills that left their markers kissing the turf in awe.

    Our players dominated the Africa Footballer of the Year list. They won awards for excellence in Belgium, France, England, Germany etc. Not so now. We have no team. We keep changing garbs, making it impossible for European teams to scout for our players.

    Must we continue this way? Do we need a seer to tell us that our FIFA ranking is a true reflection of our soccer status? Cote D’ Ivoire are the favourites for the 2013 Africa Cup of Nations. I know that they will lift the trophy this time. I’m drawing my belief from what happened to Nigeria at the Senegal’92 Africa Cup of Nations. We were the team to beat. We played very well against Ghana, but lost-painfully. Many still argue that our equaliser crossed the line. But that wasn’t our year. We returned to win in 1994 in Tunisia, where we lost the crown in 1990. But that is not my argument. What happened at the 2012 Africa Cup of Nations was God’s act. He played a big role in Zambia’s victory, although the East Africans fought for their feat.

    Cote d’ Ivoire gave the game their best, but bowed to providence. This time, is their turn to shine. Need we put pressure on our coaches and players to lift the 2013 edition? Eagles can lift the cup, but it is a long shot (more like a mirage), given the way the Ivoirens are playing in the European clubs. They remind one of the Nigerians of yore: Rashidi Yekini, Setphen Keshi, Sunday Oliseh, Austin Okocha, Emmanuel Amuneke, George Findi, Mutiu Adepoju, Daniel Amokachi, Samson Siasia, Austin Eguavoen et al. They were regulars in Europe. The Eagles bench was star-studded. The Ivoriens are in that mould now. We can return to win the trophy in 2014, after we would have evaluated our exploits in South Africa.

    In South Africa, what should interest us is how Keshi blends the players. We want to see how he reads the matches. We want to see how his substitutions improve the team’s play. We want to see how our players fight. We should use the matches to know those who shouldn’t return to the team. We must be able to identify our problem areas and know who to pick as replacement.

    The major plank for our 2014 World Cup qualifiers should be those who excelled at the Africa Cup of Nations. The gambling with new players should stop after the Nations Cup. Keshi should at the end of the Nations Cup be able to invite players to solve the problems with the team and not for screening. At the end of the Nations Cup, we will have less than 13 months to prepare for the Mundial in Brazil.

    We are feeling the heat, but we must be very careful if we don’t want to destroy our 2014 World Cup qualification campaign. Let us see how the team evolves instead of setting benchmarks which could undo us. This Eagles side cannot lift the diadem in South Africa. That is the truth. Our target should be doing well in Brazil and South Africa 2013 is the stepping stone. If we lift the trophy, that will be fine. If we don’t, we should leave the place with great prospect, not return home to apportion blames.

  • Snatching hope from the jaws of defeat

    The reelection of US President Barak Obama was the climax of a close fight between him and the defeated presidential candidate Mitt Romney of the opposing Republican Party. To  say that Obama  fought furiously for his political life in this battle he won will be an understatement.  To add that in terms of suspense and uncertainty, the election compares favorably with epoch, close,  contemporary electoral battles  in US history,  like that of Kennedy/Nixon in 1960 or that of Bush /Al Gore in 2000  will be stating the obvious.

    However,  it is in Obama’s acceptance speech that he reached to the stars to excel in matchless oratory to lift the spirit of his nation and country men and women at his moment of victory. In that speech Barack Obama atoned for a poor economic performance record, showed sincere gratitude to an electorate that had amply rewarded such performance with his reelection, and gave America a new vision of shared destiny, based as he said so eloquently, on love, duty and patriotism. Barak Obama in his reelection virtually snatched victory from the jaws of defeat after a disastrous first debate that gave grit and confidence to an hesitant  and fearful opponent who had come to battle initially with feet of clay. But the such is the stuff of history and  grand political drama.

    At  the end,  both the challenger and the victor at the re election of the 44th US president,  strengthened the concept of  popular democracy   as the ascendant democracy of our time and elections as the engine room of that ideology. Of  course I am talking of free and fair election and that was what the US president was referring to in his  inspiring speech when he said that in some climes,  people and nations still struggle over elections that Americans have come to take for granted. Mitt Romney on his part  conceded defeat graciously and thanked his wife who he said would have made an excellent   first lady.

    He lamented his lack of opportunity to lead as Americans have elected a different leader. Obama too was magnanimous in defeat and thanked his wife Michelle, his Vice President and  millions of his volunteer campaign workers, noting they made his victory happen. I  confess to being carried away by Obama’s acceptance speech,   especially his redefinition of hope in the light of his reelection,  as that stubborn human trait that makes you never to give up in the face of adversity  and daunting odds. At  that moment he paid homage to the twin virtues   of empathy and sharing, the very ‘secret‘ weapons that have ensured his reelection in a nation that has never rewarded poor economic  record by any president with success at  elections.

    In practical terms too Obama  ‘reset‘ his relations with the American people domestically over the stubborn economy and its travails for them even though ‘reset ‘and  ‘engagement‘ are terms he had used to map out the direction of the US foreign policy at his first coming in 2008.

    In  diplomacy and international relations the world can heave a sigh of relief . Britain and Russia were the first to react. British PM David Cameron said he looked forward to continuing his talk on global trade with his friend Barak Obama,  while Russian strong man and President Vladmir Putin  expressed his happiness at Obama’s reelection. Obviously Mitt Romney had jagged a few powerful nerves globally on his utterances on  Israel, Iran, China and other world issues. Initially,  I  had thought that a diplomatic challenge  or  foreign matter – like Israel attacking Iran and forcing the US to support Israel – will be the undoing of Obama’s reelection effort. Fortunately,  that did not happen but a more dangerous natural disaster Super  Storm Sandy threw spanner in the works at  the home front in New York and New  Jersey.

    Ironically however the wild  Hurricane   Sandy did a lot to bring out the best  in the incumbent US   president, to the joy and happiness of his party supporters  and to the chagrin and vexation of Romney and his team,  who could only wring their hands helplessly as the US president acted like the real angel of mercy elected by the American people to look after them in any crises, natural  and man made. Brilliant and bipartisan management of Hurricane Sandy reminded Americans that they have a compassionate and committed leader that can salvage them in any crises – including the  much advertised economic one, hence their reelection of Barak Obama on November 6.

    It  is in the light  of Obama’s redefinition of hope that I  look at events this week in Mali  and  Nigeria. In  Mali  the Islamist group Ansar Dine  that has destroyed Islamic Shrines in Timbuctoo and which is in control of Northern Mali  has agreed to allow aid agencies to bring relief materials and to negotiate as ECOWAS mass  a 3000 man strong military contingent to drive out  the invaders. In  Nigeria there is some relief as the party of General Buhari deny that he knew of any plan to make him a negotiator nominated by Boko Haram, the terrorist group bombing churches on a weekly  basis in Nigeria. In Nigeria too the Anglican Communion held a conference called Divinity Commonwealth Conference  -DIVCOOMM-in Abuja in which it asked its members to confront the dangers facing it from within and without especially the bombing of Churches in the Northern part of the nation.

    In  Mali, Burkina Fasso‘s President Blaise Compraore is the ECOWAS leader in charge of the regional negotiation  with the northern invaders. Compraore has experience in such matters having helped ECOWAS in nipping in the  bud an earlier military coup in Guinea Conakry by seizing the coup leader on his way home after medical treatment in Morocco  and marooning him in Ouagadougou the capital of Burkina  Fasso  while elections were being held in Guinea Conakry. The Ansar Dine have taken over northern Mali from the Tuaregs who defeated the Malian army sent to contain them, leading to a military coup on the ground that the civilian regime in Mali then, had not given sufficient ammunition to the army to contain the rebellion. ECOWAS leaders however put down their feet that the era of coups was over in the region and since Mali was landlocked, starved the military of fuel whereby they agreed to  form a diarchy  of sorts while ECOWAS gave a Coordinator’s role to the Nigerian Head of State President Goodluck Jonathan to get a force to rescue Mali from the Ansar Dine occupying the north.

    The fact that Ansar Dine is ready to negotiate gives sign that the crisis may not be protracted as it is known that some militant groups have promised to launch a jihad from the Sahel on ECOWAS nations once the Islamists in Mali are attacked or dislodged from that nation  by the ECOWAS force. This  is to be taken seriously in the light of information gathered that Boko Haram  group has connection and  are being trained  by the invaders of Mali.

    Similarly  the Anglican Church seem to have taken a stand on defending it devotees who have been subjected to the terror of Boko Haram which says it does not recognize western education and wants Christians to leave the north. At  a welcome address to Anglican faithful attending the second Divcom  Conference in Abuja  the Anglican Primate  Nicholas  Okoh  lamented the bombing of Churches as wicked. The theme  of the conference is ‘Contending for the faith‘ and according to the Primate  – ‘Contending for the faith handed   over to us is not a tea party. It takes sacrifice, denial, focus, even at the risk of taking one’s life‘. To me the Primate’s admonition is one of self- defence at a time when it has become fashionable for Boko Haram to bomb churches even during Holy Communion. The call   should also create  a sort of  adeterrence for Boko Haram to redress or abandon  its impunity of killing Christians at will without any punishment from any quarters. It reminds me of the principles of mutual deterrence or balance of terror during the Cold War when knowledge  of the arsenal of both the US  and then USSR ensured mutual peace and respect   and strengthened global peace. The theme of this year’s Divcomm is a step in the right direction for peace in the north from Boko Haram terrorism.

    Similarly the fact that General Muhammadu Buhari has been absolved by his party  the Congress  For Progressive Change -CPC – of collusion with the   Boko Haram,  inherent in his purported  nomination as a mediator  with the Federal Government  by Boko Haram  showed  that hope is not lost in containing terrorism in Nigeria especially in the North. The CPC  was up in arms in righteous indignation at the suggestion and put the blame and mischief  at the door step of the ruling PDP as being ever  ready to embarrass the CPC leader.  Reportedly,  the President of the nation,   Goodluck Jonathan  called the Boko Haram  a  barbaric organization for bombing churches and it is difficult to see the same government negotiating with a barbaric organisation. It  is my belief that to dine with the devil one must have a long spoon and in killing innocent people Boko Haram should be dealt with summarily in the interest of peace in Nigeria, and before so called global  Human Rights group,   who value the rights of terrorists more than the lives of their victims, turn Nigeria into another Somalia, right before our eyes.

  • Snatching hope  from the jaws of defeat

    Snatching hope  from the jaws of defeat

    The reelection of US President Barak Obama was the climax of a close fight between him and the defeated presidential candidate Mitt Romney of the opposing Republican Party. To  say that Obama  fought furiously for his political life in this battle he won will be an understatement.  To add that in terms of suspense and uncertainty, the election compares favorably with epoch, close,  contemporary electoral battles  in US history,  like that of Kennedy/Nixon in 1960 or that of Bush /Al Gore in 2000  will be stating the obvious.

    However,  it is in Obama’s acceptance speech that he reached to the stars to excel in matchless oratory to lift the spirit of his nation and country men and women at his moment of victory. In that speech Barack Obama atoned for a poor economic performance record, showed sincere gratitude to an electorate that had amply rewarded such performance with his reelection, and gave America a new vision of shared destiny, based as he said so eloquently, on love, duty and patriotism. Barak Obama in his reelection virtually snatched victory from the jaws of defeat after a disastrous first debate that gave grit and confidence to an hesitant  and fearful opponent who had come to battle initially with feet of clay. But the such is the stuff of history and  grand political drama.

    At  the end,  both the challenger and the victor at the re election of the 44th US president,  strengthened the concept of  popular democracy   as the ascendant democracy of our time and elections as the engine room of that ideology. Of  course I am talking of free and fair election and that was what the US president was referring to in his  inspiring speech when he said that in some climes,  people and nations still struggle over elections that Americans have come to take for granted. Mitt Romney on his part  conceded defeat graciously and thanked his wife who he said would have made an excellent   first lady.

    He lamented his lack of opportunity to lead as Americans have elected a different leader. Obama too was magnanimous in defeat and thanked his wife Michelle, his Vice President and  millions of his volunteer campaign workers, noting they made his victory happen. I  confess to being carried away by Obama’s acceptance speech,   especially his redefinition of hope in the light of his reelection,  as that stubborn human trait that makes you never to give up in the face of adversity  and daunting odds. At  that moment he paid homage to the twin virtues   of empathy and sharing, the very ‘secret‘ weapons that have ensured his reelection in a nation that has never rewarded poor economic  record by any president with success at  elections.

    In practical terms too Obama  ‘reset‘ his relations with the American people domestically over the stubborn economy and its travails for them even though ‘reset ‘and  ‘engagement‘ are terms he had used to map out the direction of the US foreign policy at his first coming in 2008.

    In  diplomacy and international relations the world can heave a sigh of relief . Britain and Russia were the first to react. British PM David Cameron said he looked forward to continuing his talk on global trade with his friend Barak Obama,  while Russian strong man and President Vladmir Putin  expressed his happiness at Obama’s reelection. Obviously Mitt Romney had jagged a few powerful nerves globally on his utterances on  Israel, Iran, China and other world issues. Initially,  I  had thought that a diplomatic challenge  or  foreign matter – like Israel attacking Iran and forcing the US to support Israel – will be the undoing of Obama’s reelection effort. Fortunately,  that did not happen but a more dangerous natural disaster Super  Storm Sandy threw spanner in the works at  the home front in New York and New  Jersey.

    Ironically however the wild  Hurricane   Sandy did a lot to bring out the best  in the incumbent US   president, to the joy and happiness of his party supporters  and to the chagrin and vexation of Romney and his team,  who could only wring their hands helplessly as the US president acted like the real angel of mercy elected by the American people to look after them in any crises, natural  and man made. Brilliant and bipartisan management of Hurricane Sandy reminded Americans that they have a compassionate and committed leader that can salvage them in any crises – including the  much advertised economic one, hence their reelection of Barak Obama on November 6.

    It  is in the light  of Obama’s redefinition of hope that I  look at events this week in Mali  and  Nigeria. In  Mali  the Islamist group Ansar Dine  that has destroyed Islamic Shrines in Timbuctoo and which is in control of Northern Mali  has agreed to allow aid agencies to bring relief materials and to negotiate as ECOWAS mass  a 3000 man strong military contingent to drive out  the invaders. In  Nigeria there is some relief as the party of General Buhari deny that he knew of any plan to make him a negotiator nominated by Boko Haram, the terrorist group bombing churches on a weekly  basis in Nigeria. In Nigeria too the Anglican Communion held a conference called Divinity Commonwealth Conference  -DIVCOOMM-in Abuja in which it asked its members to confront the dangers facing it from within and without especially the bombing of Churches in the Northern part of the nation.

    In  Mali, Burkina Fasso‘s President Blaise Compraore is the ECOWAS leader in charge of the regional negotiation  with the northern invaders. Compraore has experience in such matters having helped ECOWAS in nipping in the  bud an earlier military coup in Guinea Conakry by seizing the coup leader on his way home after medical treatment in Morocco  and marooning him in Ouagadougou the capital of Burkina  Fasso  while elections were being held in Guinea Conakry. The Ansar Dine have taken over northern Mali from the Tuaregs who defeated the Malian army sent to contain them, leading to a military coup on the ground that the civilian regime in Mali then, had not given sufficient ammunition to the army to contain the rebellion. ECOWAS leaders however put down their feet that the era of coups was over in the region and since Mali was landlocked, starved the military of fuel whereby they agreed to  form a diarchy  of sorts while ECOWAS gave a Coordinator’s role to the Nigerian Head of State President Goodluck Jonathan to get a force to rescue Mali from the Ansar Dine occupying the north.

    The fact that Ansar Dine is ready to negotiate gives sign that the crisis may not be protracted as it is known that some militant groups have promised to launch a jihad from the Sahel on ECOWAS nations once the Islamists in Mali are attacked or dislodged from that nation  by the ECOWAS force. This  is to be taken seriously in the light of information gathered that Boko Haram  group has connection and  are being trained  by the invaders of Mali.

    Similarly  the Anglican Church seem to have taken a stand on defending it devotees who have been subjected to the terror of Boko Haram which says it does not recognize western education and wants Christians to leave the north. At  a welcome address to Anglican faithful attending the second Divcom  Conference in Abuja  the Anglican Primate  Nicholas  Okoh  lamented the bombing of Churches as wicked. The theme  of the conference is ‘Contending for the faith‘ and according to the Primate  – ‘Contending for the faith handed   over to us is not a tea party. It takes sacrifice, denial, focus, even at the risk of taking one’s life‘. To me the Primate’s admonition is one of self- defence at a time when it has become fashionable for Boko Haram to bomb churches even during Holy Communion. The call   should also create  a sort of  adeterrence for Boko Haram to redress or abandon  its impunity of killing Christians at will without any punishment from any quarters. It reminds me of the principles of mutual deterrence or balance of terror during the Cold War when knowledge  of the arsenal of both the US  and then USSR ensured mutual peace and respect   and strengthened global peace. The theme of this year’s Divcomm is a step in the right direction for peace in the north from Boko Haram terrorism.

    Similarly the fact that General Muhammadu Buhari has been absolved by his party  the Congress  For Progressive Change -CPC – of collusion with the   Boko Haram,  inherent in his purported  nomination as a mediator  with the Federal Government  by Boko Haram  showed  that hope is not lost in containing terrorism in Nigeria especially in the North. The CPC  was up in arms in righteous indignation at the suggestion and put the blame and mischief  at the door step of the ruling PDP as being ever  ready to embarrass the CPC leader.  Reportedly,  the President of the nation,   Goodluck Jonathan  called the Boko Haram  a  barbaric organization for bombing churches and it is difficult to see the same government negotiating with a barbaric organisation. It  is my belief that to dine with the devil one must have a long spoon and in killing innocent people Boko Haram should be dealt with summarily in the interest of peace in Nigeria, and before so called global  Human Rights group,   who value the rights of terrorists more than the lives of their victims, turn Nigeria into another Somalia, right before our eyes.

  • Doctoral degree holders as truck drivers

    I got the shock of my life as an employee of a newspaper house sometime in 2007. I had interacted with one of the security guards at the company for some time and grew to like him because of the mature and responsible way he conducted himself. I marvelled at his courteous mien and kept wondering how a security guard could speak the English language with such flawless skill. I could not bring myself to ask him about his academic background because I suspected that he could have taken up the job as a last resort. Asking such a question in such a circumstance therefore could cause him some distress.

    But an opportunity to ask the question came the day I found him with a copy of William Shakepeare’s classic, Antony and Cleopatra. It was one of the texts I used while studying Literature in English for the Higher School Certificate (HSC). Wondering what business a security guard could have with a highly sophisticated Elizabethan book whose study nearly drained my blood as an advanced level student, I engaged him in a conversation only to discover that he had also read the book as an advanced level student and was trying to refresh his memories of it. More shockingly, I discovered that the security guard was not only a graduate of Political Science, he also held a master’s degree from a popular university in the north!

    I was reminded of the shocking experience during the week with the news that no fewer than 13,000 people had responded to 2,000 vacancies announced by a subsidiary of the Dangote Group of Companies for intending truck drivers. Numbered among the applicants were six doctoral degree (PhD) holders. Sixty-five of the applicants had master’s degrees in Business Administration (MBA) while 649 others were master’s degrees holders in other disciplines. A whopping 8, 460 respondents to the advertisement were degree holders!

    For sure, many would hold up the development as an indication of the level to which the unemployment situation in the country has degenerated. More and more graduates are being churned out simultaneously as companies are folding up or relocating from Nigeria to Ghana and other neighbouring countries. For instance, the northern cities of Kaduna and Kano, which once brimmed with industries that employed millions of people, are now reputed more as graveyards of businesses and outposts of the dreaded Boko Haram and other insurgency groups. Even in Lagos, the nation’s commercial nerve centre, there has been a mass exodus of companies like Dunlop and Michelin which were once the havens of graduate employees.

    The biggest problems have been lack of security and infrastructural facilities like good roads and electricity which would have provided the kind of environment needed for businesses to thrive. In spite of ‘threats’ by successive administrations to declare an emergency in the power sector, the nation remains largely in darkness. Barbers, tailors, welders and other artisans whose jobs are electricity-dependent are swelling the ranks of robbers, assassins and okada (commercial motorcycle) operators. They have constituted themselves into security threats to the nation after years of frustrating encounters with the agency responsible for the supply of public power.

    Public office holders who are saddled with the responsibility of building infrastructure that would serve the public interest are busy diverting the funds into their private pockets. They are so engrossed in their craze for material acquisition to realise that the people they had denied the public utilities could constitute a threat to their ill-gotten wealth. I once lived in a part of Ogun State where the road that led to the mansion of a commissioner for works was not passable. So, each weekend he came home from his base in Abeokuta, he rode in his exotic SUV to his mansion on the extremely bad road, squeezing his face as the car dipped into one ditch after the other.

    Rather than initiate policies that could generate jobs, our policy makers have been busy playing politics with the issue of employment generation. Sometime in June, the Minister of Trade and Investment, Dr. Olusegun Aganga announced to the world that his ministry had created more than 1.4 million jobs in less than one year. Not a few commentators faulted the claim, but the minister and his aides stuck to their guns until Dele Sobowale, an imaginative columnist with the Vanguard , pulled the rug off their feet.

    With the minister’s claim that about 1.3 million of the jobs in question were generated at the Bank of Industries, Sobowale wrote an open letter to the Managing Director of the bank for confirmation. But he said that the bank promptly responded to his enquiry, saying: “The attached summarises the highlights of BOI’s operations and their developmental impact over a ten-year period (2001-2011). As indicated during our brief conversation, the number of direct and indirect jobs created under reference are cumulative; not for one year.”

    But all these are not to absolve the minders of our educational sector as well as individual applicants of blame. Sometimes, the quality of our graduates is so low that you wonder if truly they entered the four walls of any university. Their conduct is disgraceful. Their mode of dressing is embarrassing. Their spoken English is appalling. More often than not, they are products of glorified secondary schools and other mushroom institutions that parade themselves as universities. Hence their products emerge not just as unemployed graduates but unemployable ones. It won’t come as a shock if some of the applicants who parade themselves as master’s or even doctoral degree holders can barely spell their names and could have been going from one establishment to another in endless search for jobs.

    There is also the problem of poor remuneration by rapacious employers of labour. Many employers of labour are so greedy that they would rather corner all their excess profits than increase the wages of their employees to motivate them for better productivity. It is not certain how much Dangote intends to pay his graduate drivers as wages. But it is possible that the prospect of owning the trucks after driving them for four years alone is bigger remuneration than some of the doctor applicants are earning in their current employments.

    Yet nothing detracts from the fact that the unemployment situation in the country is alarming. And there is nothing now to suggest that things will get better for the growing army of unemployed graduates in the near future. If anything, the future appears even bleaker as the population keeps growing and more and more graduates are rolled out every year. There is need for renewed focus on technical education and back-to-land agricultural programmes for the unemployed youth. The earlier the government realises the danger the current situation portends, the better for us all.

  • Revolutionary rascals (2)

    The gecko thinks if it quits the roof to live in the forest long enough, it will become an alligator. Will practice make the cat’s meow boom like a lion’s roar? Let us accord our leaders their rights to everlasting madness, Nigeria shall soon be rid of them. Until then, we will get the quality of leadership that we deserve.

    I have seen all sorts of revolutionary marches and I’ve come to the conclusion that the Nigerian revolutionary is an incurable idiot. It doesn’t make a darn bit of difference what his causes are. It’s worse if he’s in his youth –because then he fully immerses into the backwardness into which he has been born…evolving quite brazenly like a barbarian, badgering onto the stage for acclaim through the trap-door.

    The conscientious and the just, the honorable, gracious and humane; the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a movement—but soon it slips from their grasp turning them from leaders of the revolution into victims of the revolt; thus their seemingly desperate inclinations to distance themselves from every revolutionary march.

    However, the Nigerian youth believes himself staggeringly capable of revolt, although he does not know how to revolt. In his desperate bid to rebel against the established and much dreaded order, he propagates the contradiction of that lifestyle which cultivates sincerity and at once frustrates it. Thus the Nigerian youth remains his own greatest enemy and the most inimitable adversary to the Nigerian dream.

    No revolution can be successful if the human elements serving as its force of change are wholly incapacitated to see to the fruitful end, the ideals of the insurrection; which brings me to the quality of youth mooting the revolt.

    Revolution is never the rebellion against a pre-existing order, but the setting-up of a new order contradictory to the traditional one. How different could an order anchored by the current crop of Nigerian youth be? They are not yet the patriots they are meant to become. This citizenship business confounds them. They have learnt too little and they have too little to pass on, save quackery, insolence, incompetence and greed.

    In the daily lives of our youth, fear plays a greater part than hope: they are more filled with the thoughts of possessions they may acquire and that others may take from them. Russell would say “It is not so that life should be lived”but the Nigerian youth could not be bothered even if they knew that much.

    Many whose lives ought to be fruitful to them, to their friends, and to the world in entirety are hardly inspired by hope and sustained by joy; they seek in imagination the vanities that might be and the way in which they are to be brought into existence. Ultimately they choose the path of decadence. In their private relations they are pre-occupied with the vacuous lest they should lose such affection and respect as they receive; they are engaged in giving affection and respect at a price and the reward often comes by their desperate quests. In their work they are haunted by jealousy of competitors, and are least concerned with the actual task that has to be done. In politics, they spend time and passion defending unjust privileges of their benefactors, godfathers, class or ethnicity, even as they make their world less happy, less compassionate, less peaceful, more full of greed and compatriots whose growth is perpetually dwarfed and stunted by oppression.

    A spectre is haunting the Nigerian youth. Knowingly and unabashedly, they have entered an unholy alliance with the ruling class. They do not constitute formidable opposition to keep the ruling class on its toes neither do they offer invaluable support to keep our leaders on track.

    Their approach to politics complicates the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is splitting up more and more into two great hostile camps, the ruling class and the working class; the proverbial middle class got lost somewhere at the crossroads where the bourgeoisie swallows up the proletariat.

    Though youth does not really have the means to stop the economy, the ruling class dreads the youth, as was discernible when a wave of panic seized the Nigerian government by the jugular in the wake of the Occupy Nigeria protests. What do they fear? It’s without doubt the frequency and the potentials of youth mobilizations. Massive youth mobilizations were taking place across the globe and with often grievous and far-reaching consequences in the affected nations; the Nigerian leadership no doubt dreaded a Nigerian manifestation of the Arab Spring.

    The fear of the Nigerian leadership was however hardly far-fetched given the radicalism of the Occupy Nigeria movement. In a violent society that has no future to offer them, the Nigerian youth have very little to lose; thus their lack of hesitancy in confronting the State. The wish to abolish status quo was widespread among the nation’s youth as they romanticized the idea of a revolution as the protests dragged.

    In spite of the youth’s passionate struggle against the incumbent leadership’s utter insensitivity and cluelessness, the eventual result was basically, an opportunistic contract between the exploiters (the government) and a part of the exploited (labour leadership), at the expense of the rest of the exploited (you, me and everyone) – something Noel Ignatin would call “the original sweetheart agreement.”

    Says a lot of the Nigerian youth’s revolutionary potential. Eventually, the nation’s youth were written off and their grievances dismissed as the crazed rant of a pathetic mass of revolutionary impostors. The youth were eventually dismissed as essentially hopeless and misdirected. Despite the fervor of the Occupy Nigeria movement, the youth remain exploited and perpetually exploitable –victims of what George Bernard Shaw, terms “the stupid system of violence and robbery which we call Law and Industry.”

    Most of the time, youth mobilizations and revolutionary movements attract sympathy from the workers and the population, as if the youth were saying loudly what the majority couldn’t afford to say. Thus, in many instances, youth mobilizations restore to the social camp the confidence in the masses’ ability to resist; and in some cases other working sectors engage in mobilization, following the youth. The Nigerian youth however, presents a contradiction to the benefits of such relationship of trust.

    He is accustomed to keep his head down like one eternally doomed to be adept in all the arts of the beggar. He even presumes a little upon the possession of talents which, as he ought to know, can never compete with cringing mediocrity; in the long run he comes to recognize the inferiority of those who are placed over his head, and when they inflict greater hurt upon him, he becomes refractory and shy, turning round to crawl into the wall when he is backed against it. This is hardly the way to get on in the world but very few Nigerian youths are conversant with the words of Voltaire: “We have only two days to live; it is not worth our while to spend them in cringing to contemptible rascals.” But what if”contemptible rascals” also qualifies a greater percentage of the nation’s youth?

    • To be continued…