The Nation Newspaper

Category: Columnists

Politicians must take potholes seriously. They kill people and business and taxes!

Let the deaf hear. Potholes are a yardstick of political success. It is official. Do you know why we talk about potholes so annoyingly frequently in the column? It is because potholes are the symbol of national failure, destroying lives and businesses and making a mockery of going to school to learn about good governance, Internally Generated Revenue, Foreign Direct investment and tourism proposals and repositioning Nigeria using 20-2020 vision. Potholes are a simple assessment of the commitment of politicians, political parties and individual governments to a social and moral contract with the citizens. The ‘Politics of Potholes’ is not about ‘making straight’ the path to an LGA chairman’s country home or to a particular governor’s son’s wedding venue. Potholes are about failed responsibility to the people and about abuse or non-use of power. Potholes are not a game of ‘guess how many potholes are in my LGA, state or country’.

Potholes are murderous and about human suffering and blood, human blood, not contracts. Are politicians and civil servants blind, misinformed or totally incompetent? The people bleed and see the blood on roads, cars, danfos and buses and staining the operating uniforms in Nigeria’s operating theatres where we remove the ruptured spleens and broken limbs of ‘Pothole Attack Victims’. Potholes are not about ‘excuses’ and inflated non-executed contracts and delayed budget. Potholes are about societal decay, incompetence and delay and the abdication of government’s responsibility to the citizenry. Nigeria is just one big ‘Government Neglect’ pothole in spite of sufficient funds to fix every road within one dry season since it refuses to work during the rainy season out of mental and engineering laziness not due to a lack of civil engineering capacity.

Unfortunately, the most powerful ‘road user’ voices in the land are silent. We do not hear of the Nigerian Society of Engineers, NMA, NURTW etcetera, market women at their AGMs catching ‘anti-pothole fever’ and shouting about potholes. No country with our pothole achievements should have travel and entrepreneurship programmes. We are all held hostage in our own country, confined by the strictures of our potholed roads. For millions, daily travel is a nightmare for which serious prayers are needed to avert a disaster. Often prayers are not enough. And our government seems powerless to prevent the continued infliction of massive unnecessary pain on the collective psyche and physical bodies of the population. The deliberate clogging of the Ogere traffic artery on the Lagos-Ibadan road is a case in point and a recurrent national shame and security disaster waiting to happen. The trailers used to commit these terrible crimes are owned and registered by the high and mighty in the petroleum industry who are now donating to flood relief almost nationwide.

That Ogere park is too often strangled by tanker and trailer drivers is not news, nor is it news about the impunity with which they do it. Only in Nigeria would that be a two or less lane road. Even Ikorodu road should and can easily be six lanes each side. No one will be brought to book for holding the nation to ransom for 11 hours. Since all the major players in the Ogere hold up are known, they should be fined by the federal government to act as a deterrent to their staff repeating such a crime against the citizens of Nigeria in future. We are used to students shutting down trunk ‘A’ roads for perceived transgressions. This new one where adults embark on similar activities is an unwelcome event that puts at risk millions of lives and billions of naira. A Boko Haramic conflagration in that circumstance would have had catastrophic repercussions. Only God can quantify the losses caused by such a decision. But who cares. It reminds us of the danger of putting police with ‘big shots’ to attempt to drive roughshod over the rest of us. We must also remember that in all likelihood, the shot tanker was probably wrongly parked causing unnecessary go-slow or full stop. Remember that the Ogere is notorious for indiscipline and obstruction just like its predecessor Sagamu. It was these same people’s fathers who blocked Sagamu to the extent that it prompted the building of the expressway in the first place. This was typical knee-jerk reaction and no long term plan to anticipate problems and build additional lanes in advance. Since then, 40 years the road has not improved, but it has deteriorated and in fact narrowed to its present sorry state where one tanker can paralyse the key artery out of the port city of Lagos. What a shame and we are not at war. By now in any forward looking country, there would be five major and several minor roads out of Lagos. But like they say, there are more bridges in river-less Abuja than in the whole of the rest of the country put together. Na wa O! Such selfish politicians cannot build a great Nigeria which is as weak as the smallest pothole.

Now that potholes at federal level have been declared wanted dead or alive on or before December, let us pursue with equal vigour the execution of potholes on state and LGA roads. All Nigerians must renew ‘The Great Nigeria Anti-Pothole War’ and fight it to its logical conclusion-no more deaths. Nigerians must no longer accept rough and rubbish roads. Nigeria can afford and must provide standard roads.

October 17, 2012
PHCN privatisation: Now that Nnaji is gone

When Prof Barth Nnaji left as Minister of Power in late August, it was not clear whether he jumped or was pushed. Most guesses including mine, however, was that he was pushed, if only because his departure was rather too sudden.

The terse two paragraph announcement of his departure by the spokesman for President Goodluck Jonathan, Dr. Reuben Abati, hardly suggested the minister left on his own. “President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan,” Abati said, “has accepted the resignation WITH IMMEDIATE EFFECT of the Minister of Power, Prof. Barth Nnaji.

President Jonathan thanks Prof Nnaji for his services to the nation under the present administration and wishes him well in his future endeavours.” (Emphasis mine)

Presidents don’t go about accepting the resignations of their sidekicks with immediate effect and without saying why.

In this case, the President did say why eventually but his reason hardly suggested that Nnaji jumped. In any case, sudden resignations are very unusual ways to depart lucrative jobs like ministering to a country’s electricity power supply.

Nnaji left on August 28. It took the President two days to say why. This was on August 30 during a town hall meeting in Onitsha after he’d inaugurated the town’s inland river port complex. “Barth Nnaji,” he reportedly said, “has not committed any offence. He is a very competent and seasoned professional.”

However, before seemingly exonerating the minister, the president made an oblique reference to the issue of conflict of interest involving not just the minister but probably other senior government officials as well. “Before we started this privatisation,” Thisday (August 31) reported him as telling his distinguished guests, “some major stakeholders who had access to me, came to me and said, ‘Mr President, we heard all these privatisation of projects in the power sector had already been shared among the people and we want the president to assure us so that we do not waste our time.’ I said, ‘no you can keep faith in the process.’”

The minister, the President reportedly said, had willingly declared his interest in two companies that had bid for Afam Power Station and for Enugu Distribution Company. This, he said, was what gave rise to a conflict of interest that made the minister resign in order to safeguard the privatisation exercise. Obviously, it was contradictory for the President to say his minister did nothing wrong and yet point at the conflict between his private interest and his public duty as the reason why he “resigned.”

The President did not say when Nnaji declared his private interest in the privatisation of the Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN), but anyone familiar with the exercise knows the minister’s conflict of interest did not arise yesterday. It goes all the way back to the time of the President’s immediate predecessor, the late Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, when the minister was his special adviser on energy. That conflict of interest had been a source of serious, and a times violent, conflict between Nnaji and both management and workers of the PHCN.

The minister could, therefore, not have resigned simply because the President suddenly discovered his private interest was in conflict with his public duty; the conflict had been there all along. From the President’s oblique talk about some VIP stakeholders’ worry about the integrity of the exercise, a more likely explanation could be that the private interest in the exercise of some officials more powerful than the minister simply trumped the minister’s.

In which case it should be obvious that Nnaji’s resignation alone has hardly solved the problem of the conflict of interest of government officials responsible for the exercise.

When the president announced on August 28 that he had accepted the “resignation” of his minister, he said he would replace him quickly and with another Igbo. It’s now mid-October and Nnaji is yet to be replaced at all, never mind with an Igbo compatriot. This undue delay suggests the politics of PHCN’s privatisation has complicated matters for the President.

If this is the case, the President has only himself to blame; he ought to have known that a policy of allocating portfolios by ethnicity – or for that matter, by state, as seems to be the case with the ministry of defence which has remained vacant since he sacked the last minister, who is from Kebbi State, months ago – is as wrongheaded as it is untenable in a world where competence has no tribe, creed or colour. Not that there are no other Igbos even more competent than Nnaji. There are. But to insist on an Igbo replacement was clearly restricting his choice.

In announcing Nnaji’s departure as minister, the President praised him for his competence and professionalism. Few would or can question the President’s judgement about the ex-minister’s credentials. However, it misses the main issue which is the integrity of the exercise. The fact is that competence and professionalism are no substitutes for integrity. And it is the dubious integrity of the exercise that has left the country as poorly served today by its power utility company as it was nearly 13 years ago when President Olusegun Obasanjo promised he will turn the sector around.

Nnaji did little to enhance the integrity of the exercise which, by the president’s own admission, was why the gentleman had to leave.

The question is would his departure make any difference? It is doubtful that it would, for the simple reason that Nnaji is probably not the only senior government official whose private interest ran counter to his public duty. The evidence is there in the history of privatisation in this country where the commonwealth has largely ended in the hands of senior government officials and their cronies and kins. It is also there in the fact that, as with previous exercises, perhaps the most notorious of which was that of NITEL, the country’s telecommunication company, the assets of PHCN have probably been grossly understated.

Government ownership of companies may have been discredited in this country but the record of the private ownership in sectors like banking and aviation has given little cause to believe that privatisation is the only solution.

Elsewhere, among the Asian Tigers – South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, etc – and in China the world’s emerging economic super power, there is ample evidence that efficiency and profitability is not the preserve of privately owned companies. The evidence is also right here on our continent, where the publicly owned Ethiopian Airline, for example, has shown that public ownership is not necessarily an obstacle to commercial success.

By all means let’s go ahead and privatise our public companies since they have proved unviable. However, as we do so we must remember that their problem was less the nature of their ownership than the lack of integrity with which they were run.

Unless the authorities do all they can to guarantee such integrity in the sale of the public companies, their privatised offsprings can only bring even more pain to consumers than was the case before.

October 17, 2012
Why Mimiko can’t win Ondo election

As the clock ticks daily to the D-Day for the Ondo State gubernatorial election and the flurry of political activities and intrigues that accompany it, the question on the lips of observers is; can Mimiko win? The answer is hanging in the air but the reason for asking the question is not far-fetched. Olusegun Rahman Mimiko, Governor of Ondo State and until recently, the candidate to beat in the October 20, gubernatorial election in the state, is the candidate of the Labour Party. He is the only governor produced by Labour Party in Nigeria. His major contenders are Olusola Oke of the PDP and Rotimi Akeredolu of the ACN.

Watching the debate of the candidates on AIT last Thursday, Mimiko looked troubled, emaciated and forlorn. Olusola Oke of the PDP was in his best element while Rotimi Akeredolu did not do badly. Recently, a poll watch that gave victory to Akeredolu popularly called Aketi with 40.28 percent; Mimiko came a distant second with 24.84 while Olusole Oke came third with 22.84. This may be correct considering the turn of events in Ondo State in the last few weeks. What led to the turn of events for Mimiko who three months ago was sure to beat other candidates silly in a free and fair election?

Mimiko rode to power with a lot of goodwill arising from the 2009 landmark judgment of the Court of Appeal, Benin division which returned him as the duly elected governor of the state while stripping the then incumbent, Olusegun Agagu of the PDP the certificate of return already issued by INEC. Mimiko was so popular that his inauguration witnessed multitudes of supporters from within and outside the state. Overwhelmed with the crowd and level of support, he wept. He promised to work for them and they believed him. But shortly after he assumed the reins of power, the real Mimiko manifested. He reduced governance in Ondo State to a family affair by alienating leaders of his party and his close aides in major decisions of government.

The first sign of trouble was when a Senator from his party defected to the ACN. But when the state chairman of the party, Olaiya Oni resigned, it was a sign that all is not well with Mimiko. Recently, five of his closed aides resigned in a day while others followed in quick succession. His party members have left in droves. The trouble was however temporarily mitigated by the seeming performance of Mimiko especially the N5billon street lighting of Oba Adesida road and the water dispensing roundabout. This soon pale into insignificance when the scale fell off the eyes of Ondo people that Mimiko only did the grandiose project on Oba Adesida road and nowhere else in the state capital not to talk of other major towns like Ikare, Owo, Okitipupa and Ore. He ought to have taken a cue from neighbouring Ekiti and Osun states where construction work is going on in other local governments in the states.

The Mega school project of Mimiko is a colossal waste of money as a general renovation of schools as recently done in neighbouring Ekiti State would have been more cost effective and result oriented. He embarked on a dome project of N2.9 billion which is now abandoned. On health, his N4 billion Kaadi Igbeayo project has been abandoned. Agagu claimed he left a sum of N38 billion naira in the treasury but Mimiko claimed he met a debt of N117 billion. He was alleged to have thrown the state into huge indebtedness to the tune of about N100 billion naira by borrowing and yet he has received in three and a half years about 300 billion from the federation account. He owes many contractors without any hope of paying back if he does not secure a second term. The Sunshine Liberation Movement has exposed many shady deals of the Mimiko administration and they have provided documents to back this up which the government has not been able to debunk till date. The sharp practices include contract inflation, over invoicing and frivolous awards of non-existing contracts to family members and cronies.

What observers regard as the greatest undoing of Mimiko is his treacherous nature. He was alleged to have betrayed Ajasin, Adefarati, Agagu, Obasanjo and Tinubu. He had a pact with Tinubu who bankrolled his bid to reclaim his mandate with the understanding that he would join ACN thereafter but reneged on the agreement and even castigated Tinubu his benefactor. Mimiko could not be trusted. He once shocked a colleague governor from a neighbouring state when he sponsored hoodlums to disrupt the venue of a lecture for late Adefarati after he has assured his colleague that there would be no problem.

Another problem confronting Mimiko is that he is in the midst of performing governors in the South-west from Lagos to Edo State. Like a bad dream, his popularity has drastically waned in the last one month when Ondo State people started comparing the state which earns an average of N6 billion from the federation account monthly as an oil producing state to Ekiti, a non-oil producing state with just N2.5 billion. The level of work in Ekiti’s 16 local government areas is stupendous and this made Mimiko’s supposed achievement juxtaposed with the resources available to him pale into insignificance.

Governor Raji Fashola recently took him to the cleaners when he gingered Ondo State people to wake up from their slumber and chase Mimiko out. He said it is shameful that Ondo had not fared better than when Mimiko took over more than three years ago despite the resources available to him. As if Ondo people have been waiting for Governor Fashola to show them the way, they turned the table against Mimiko. The first sign that Mimiko is no longer the candidate to beat was the Ikare rally that was well attended to the chagrin of Mimiko. The crowd at Ore rally of the ACN was more than that of Ikare. Ondo rally of the ACN was an embarrassment to Mimiko who hails from the town. It was a mammoth crowd. From that moment, it was clear that Mimiko is in trouble.

In Akure last week, 400 members of his Labour Party defected to the ACN saying Mimiko would lose the election this Saturday. We all know huge crowds at rallies don’t win elections but for ACN to record such a huge crowd, the signs are bad for the government of the day. Ondo State people also wanted to be part of development in the rest of the South-west states and would not want to be left out in the impending greater benefits that would come with the regional integration of the region which Mimiko has shunned.

The analysis of the election proper is also a cause of worry for Mimiko and his genuine supporters. In Ondo Central which has the largest number of voters and where Mimiko has the strongest support base, he is not sure of total victory except in Ondo town. Akure, Ile-Oluji and Iju Ita Ogbolu is likely to be won by the ACN. Ondo South comprising of Ore, Odigbo, the riverine areas of Ilaje, Ikale and the Mahin and Arogbo clans is for former Governor Agagu and by extension, the PDP but the ACN will have a good showing having made in-roads into the area recently.

Ondo North comprising of Akoko and Owo is Akeredolu’s base and he is sure of victory. Mimiko is in for a shocker as most of his trusted aides and friends are working for the opposition and are still the men he relies on to deliver votes for him on October 20. It is so for Mimiko because of his politics of exclusion. He does not trust his aides and his aides don’t trust him but are only waiting to collect whatever he has to offer before bolting. The Mimiko ship is already leaking and it is a matter of time before it sinks. Only the Nigerian factor can ensure victory for Mimiko on Saturday given the fact that it is near impossible for him to win in a free and fair election. With this scenario, the question comes up again, can Mimiko win?

• Ibraheem writes from Ore.

October 17, 2012
The Hajj conundrum

Going on pilgrimage is a religious obligation that every Muslim is expected to perform, at least, once in his or her lifetime if he/she has the means. For the Christians, it is Jerusalem, in Israel, that they head to every year to perform their pilgrimage. The Muslims go to Mecca and Medina to observe theirs.

But by far, it is the Muslim pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia that attracts the highest number of faithful all over the world every year. With this also comes the high publicity that is attached to the yearly ritual. Apart from the yearly pilgrimage, many Muslim faithful also visit the Holy land for Umrah or “Lesser Hajj”. However, this is done at anytime of the year without really engaging the attention or the probing eyes of journalists and other media commentators.

The popular yearly hajj, which culminates in ram-slaughtering, the Id-El- Kabir festival, is undertaken two months and a few days after the Muslim’s 30-day fasting period known as Ramadan. This yearly hajj is a very big event as so many activities are involved in it. Good enough, the Saudi Arabian government has put several measures in place to accommodate the large influx of Muslims to the country on the annual religious ritual. But in spite of all the measures put in place to ensure hitch-free hajj operations, some of the pilgrims have run into one problem or another while in the Holy Land. In most cases, the Saudi Arabian government has always risen up to the occasion by attending to any issues that may arise during the annual pilgrimage.

Surprisingly, this year’s pilgrimage by Nigerian pilgrims has attracted a huge controversy because of the forced deportation of some female pilgrims. The dust raised by the action taken by the Saudis is just about to settle with the flurry of diplomatic meetings and shuttles embarked upon by the Nigerian government, particularly the Foreign Affairs Ministry. Aminu Tambuwal, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, and his team also dashed to the Kingdom on a one-day fence-mending visit. Finally, the Saudi government softened its stand on some of the pilgrims who had earlier been repatriated to Nigeria. That incident itself is the crux of this discourse.

The first thing is that, side-by-side our generally accepted Western attitudes and values that lay emphasis on the freedom of the individual adult to act according to his or her own needs and general personal desires, Islam is a different ball game, especially with regards to women. Simply put, women are generally seen as minors who require permission from their husbands or father or the adult male equivalent in the family. Generally speaking, choices for women in Islam on a lot of things simply follow a well-guarded path with little or no room for any ‘creativity’ on the part of the woman. Of course, this tradition is most jealously upheld and guarded in Islamic environments were Wahabism – a stricter, more extreme version of Islam – is practised such as you find in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Taliban-controlled-Afghanistan and a few other places, including among many Muslims in northern Nigeria.

This is where, in hajj, the issue of mahram (chaperon/guardian) comes into the picture. One thing though, it is not true that the issue of a chaperon has only just come to be recognised in hajj. It’s just that the practice has, over the decades, been bent to accommodate modern political and social nuances. In short, the practice of mahram for women on hajj has merely learned to recognise the fact that because of the peculiarity regarding the number of pilgrims of various backgrounds from even one country, it cannot be practical for every single woman going on hajj to necessarily have access to a family member who is an adult male to act as chaperon. Hence the waiver that had been in existence for Nigeria’s female pilgrims since the 1980s. Under this arrangement, the leader of the delegation (the Amir-ul Hajj) from each country is sufficient to act as the chaperon/guardian of all female pilgrims from that country.

So, what went wrong this time? Well, an exhaustive answer may only be provided by both the Saudi authorities and their Nigerian counterparts. But it is first worthy to note that even by the regulations on hajj and the chaperon/guardian issue, it is permissible for any woman who is 45 years old or older to go on hajj without a mahram. This also brings us to the issue of the category of women who have so far been denied entry into Saudi Arabia in the current controversy. It is, perhaps, not ordinary happenstance that while some older women have been granted entry with the minimum of fuss, most of the ones who have been denied entry are young women all under 34 years of age and even much younger. In the case of one contingent from Kano, it was allegedly discovered that a whole plane only had three male passengers, with all the other passengers being female.

And it certainly begets curiosity as to why a passenger plane could have such a lopsided composition of passengers. It becomes more interesting when we throw into the fray Nigeria’s history with regards to the behaviour of some members of our contingents at such gatherings of mass proportions abroad. It is a well-documented development that it is usually a hard battle preventing some members of our contingents from absconding during sports meets anywhere in the world. And unless we are bent on calling a spade by some other name, we cannot feign ignorance of such incidents often taking place with our contingents on pilgrimage whether to Jerusalem or Mecca. Even where some of these people – in this case, the women – do not abscond outright, there have been alleged cases of various unwholesome activities on their parts such as prostitution, begging and the like. And unless we insist on wallowing in self-denial, many such stories abound about our pilgrims’ conduct in Saudi Arabia.

Therefore, it might be safe to assume that in the case of the current controversy, our legacy has simply preceded us. In essence, the Saudis may have finally caught on to the antics of our people and decided to try and put a stop to it, starting, of course, with the crackdown on that (in)famous three-male-out-of-hundreds aeroplane incident from Kano.

If this is the case, then perhaps the Saudi authorities are absolved of all blame, right? Well, not quite. Firstly, it is highly implausible that the Saudis have only recently caught on to this attitude and have, even more belatedly, found a noose to throw around the problem. In addition, as a retort to a question on why more and more men are becoming adulterous around the world, a psychologist once asked: “Who do you think these men are sleeping with?” Perhaps, it is similarly legitimate for us to ask: After all other pilgrims have returned to their countries, which men then patronise the Nigerian women who often decide to stay behind and hawk their bodies for money in Saudi Arabia? What usually happens to the hordes of women who are reportedly ‘arrested’ by Saudi security forces for breaches of the social and moral rule only to be off the streets for the night or a couple of days and be back ‘doing their thing’ afterwards? Could the possible answers to these questions be the main reason the Saudis have allegedly not given any reason for their new-found brazenness in injuring their country’s diplomatic ties with Nigeria while not offering any explanation for the sudden aggressive treatment of Nigeria’s female pilgrims this year? Well, maybe, as they say in Yoruba, oro p’esije (too serious beyond response).

October 17, 2012
Another view on onshore-offshore oil debate

One regrettable thing about not speaking out on issues that have the potentials of defining the direction, quality of life, development and growth of society, is that one lives with the burden of failing to act right and on time, too, forever. Over the years, this has been the lot of poor majority Nigerians, who seem always comfortable to either sit on the fence or act as bystanders and impartial arbiters in issues that affect them. The consequence has been that politicians smart enough to identify this weakness have continued to brew subversive policies and live large while the people suffer steady decline in fortunes.

Today, the issue of the abrogation of onshore-offshore oil dichotomy, which has maintained an increasingly delicate presence on the controversy table, is challenging the peoples’ will to determine their future, organize and achieve their personal and collective goals in life. The bill, which provides adequate financial reward and compensation for oil producing communities or states where oil is drilled whether offshore or onshore, has since pitched the North against the South. With tempers running high and fingers pointed at key politicians, particularly former President Olusegun Obasanjo and Honourable Ghali Na’ Abba, former Speaker, Federal House of Representatives, in whose administration and leadership of the House, respectively, the controversial bill was introduced, the president has since added salt to injury by pronouncing the issue settled.

While Obasanjo is accused of introducing the bill to divide the House and as well as scuttle an impeachment moves by the National Assembly, Na’Abba is accused of doing little or nothing to protect the north, which today, is on the receiving end of the bill. The former Speaker, his traducers insist, was blinded by greed, an alleged gubernatorial ambition and hate for the then Kano State Governor, Rabiu Kwakwanso, with whom he never enjoyed the best of relationships, to permit the bill, to spite him.

However, in an interview, recently, the former Speaker dismissed his accusers, saying that he did his best to prevent the bill from sailing through and protect the interest of the north. But rather than assuage frayed nerves, Na’Abba’s reaction has since deepened the controversy surrounding the matter. Indeed, to keen followers of politics in the National Assembly and Kano State at the time, Na’Abba’s belated defence possibly qualifies as warped tales from dream lands. Equally coming close to the typical situation of a drowning man desperate for survival, Na’ Abba in his bid to wriggle out of a condition, which he watched as the north walked into, deliberately decided to twist bare facts out of shape. Seeming like the proverbial monkey that clapped and jumped, while his house, the trees, were being felled by the enemy, Na’Abba’s mind, perhaps, was set on other things while Obasanjo acted his scripts to the hurt of the north.

But assuming, without conceding, there was any meat in his argument that no northern governor raised a finger in opposition to the abrogation of the onshore-offshore dichotomy bill, why would he settle for a strange ‘clause’ to, according to him, discourage Obasanjo from signing the bill, when an open and outright opposition and condemnation of the bill would have settled the matter pronto? This featherweight defence, for the discerning, further gives away the deceitful manner in which the matter was handled by Na’Abba’s leadership. This is why one considers his finger-pointing to northern governors annoying and ridiculous, to say the least.

Bad as it were, it is never too late to make amends since lessons have been learnt from the action and inaction of those who should know better, just as its practice has manifested grave inadequacies in the distribution of national wealth for growth and development of the nation. This is why not a few people were shocked when signs emerged that President Goodluck Ebere Jonathan was not disposed to revisiting the issue.

While one is constrained by the volatility of this issue, it would spell doom not to speak out against stay of review for an issue that is potentially strategic in achieving the Nigeria of our dreams where everyone irrespective of creed or class can grow together and enjoy equal opportunities in all spheres of human endeavour.

There is no disputing the fact that until the discovery of oil on land and sea, the nation had found life in other money-yields such as cocoa, palm oil, groundnut, among others. Even at the discovery of oil, money made from these sources was deployed to develop it, just as natives of oil communities had benefited immensely from these revenue sources before oil became the main source of sustenance.

There is no doubt, therefore, that there are apparent disparities in revenue sharing formula, which leaves a sour taste in the mouth particularly as it negates the spirit of brotherhood and unity that reigned before the abrogation of the dichotomy.

One clear sign today is the slow pace of development in most of the non-oil producing states. The abrogation has equally widened the poverty grid and also weakened the capital base of non-oil producing states, thus making it difficult to deliver democracy dividends without so much struggle. Most of the non-oil producing states find it difficult to evenly grow as their oil producing counterparts.

As currently obtains, South-south and people of the oil-producing littoral states are at prime position with 13 per cent allocation, thus underscoring the urgent need for a review. Funny enough, while this has weighed negatively on the north, governors of South-south states, typical of the literary character, Oliver Twist, want more!

The position of governors of ‘Prince’ States, who are opposed to the dichotomy is understandable. They hinge their argument on the fact that the matter had long been decided by the nation’s apex court, the Supreme Court, in favour of the subsisting sharing formula. But truth, however, is that the Supreme Court ruling like a sticky plaster, has simply continued to provide a temporary cover for an already nourished oil producing states, while for the non-oil producing states, challenging economic conditions have since drifted from a prickly state to a growing cancerous sore needing urgent medication.

I believe fervently that Nigeria is a country destined to stay glued by the creator. Our forebears made no error in their judgement that we share a common destiny. The kind of security challenges we are sailing through could only have happened in a society that offers no hope for its coming generation. Increasing the current revenue allocation in favour of the non-oil producing states, could no doubt restore hope to the hopeless, but thousands of kilometers away from solving the mirage of problems confronting, especially the North. It may be a temporary succour, more importantly the kind of relief needed to cruise to the next level.

It is not time immemorial when agriculture sustained the nation. In the early 60s. agriculture constituted more than 75% of this country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and foreign earnings. So, where and how did things go awry? Maybe, we say, the oil boom. But it is not a curse that we discovered oil. The tragedy is the failure to invest the earnings to develop other natural endowments, especially agriculture. God forbid, what happens if “our oil” dries off? It is a common knowledge that our foreign earnings from agriculture, expectedly but regrettably, began to fall when we discovered oil in 1956 and abandoned the farm. Agriculture related industries like cotton industries, leather factories also plummeted. Unemployement, poverty and other vices followed.

My verdicts: the oil producing states, in the spirit of neighborliness should let up the issue of a revisit of the dichotomy. Yes, it is a common sense to benefit from one’s resources, but more common and apt is to be one’s brothers keeper.

• Aiyekooto writes in from Ilorin, Kwara State

October 17, 2012
Welcome, dual society

In a society where dastardly occurences have virtually become daily menu, it is safe to bet that the current rage over the bestial killings of the four undegraduates of University of Port Harcourt in Omuokere-Aluu Community, Rivers State would fizzle out in no time. In other words, the rage would endure – only for as long as it takes the next cycle of horror of greater scale or dimension to occur – after which citizens so minded would again resort to taking stock of how far down the slope we have sunk on the human regression index.

After all, it was not even nearly 14 days after the nation endured a similar horror of gruesome murder of 40 students at Mubi Polytechnic, in Adamawa State. On that particular occassion, the names of victims were said to have been called out from a register only to be shot at point blank! It can hardly get more macabre. Coincidentally, the gory incident happened on a day regarded as sacred on the nation’s calendar – the 52nd Independence Anniversary!

Three weeks on, all manners of theories have popped up on the possible suspects and motives; the missing link is the suggestion that a breakthrough is near the corner. The police have neither found helpful clues nor the communities been helpful in tracking the killers. They may well have come from any of those mountainous tribes close to the Afghan border!

Of course, the case of 16 innocent worshipers mowed down by gunmen during their service on August 6 is still fresh. True, arrests were made; beyond that, nothing has been heard about whether those held are the real killers of the worshippers or not.

A lot has been said about the failing Nigerian state. But the murder of the lads stands apart in its savagery even in the worst of times. Last weekend, I finally summoned the courage to watch the video on You Tube. Let me confes: I regretted the experience. Of course, I detected something eerily disturbing – suggesting perhaps a new phase, if you like, in the nation’s descent into the abyss. Although the virus of impunity has been with us for some time now, what I saw “live” in the lynching of Messrs Biringa Chiadika Lordson, Ugonna Kelechi Obuzor, Mike Lloyd Toku and Tekena Erikena – the so-called Uniport Four – is a completely new malignancy, a madness that speaks to the final internmnent of the community as a normative order.

To begin with, how could I, for the life of me, imagine that a human being actually held that camera to record the gory spectacles of those young men being marched through the community after being stripped naked for alleged stealing a phone and laptop? All in the course of a job? Good heavens! Or, for the pleasure of filming an event for the world to see?

What about the emergency jury of young men, women and even children, conscripted in the course of the the rite of summary trial and death? Did anyone notice how they cheered the jury on, perhaps from the love of the spectacle of watching those young boys die a most agonising death in instalments? I could imagine among the mob – fathers, mothers, brothers, uncles, aunties, nephews and nieces; did they get “high” watching their victims suffer pains?

And the final act: the roasting of those bodies after pulverising and reducing them to vegetative states? It is a measure of how sick a people, nay a nation can get.

There were reports that a detachment of the Nigeria Police actually stood by while the gory events lasted. True or false; it changes nothing. The Nigerian state failed the youths; it failed itself most shamefully. Neither the DPO covering the area or his men have any business remaining in the police force. They have earned their place among the vigilantes!

True, Aluu may well represent the final testament, the internment of the notion of the orderly society to which we pretend to aspire, the seal of our descent to the Hobbesian state of nature, it did not chance upon us. Our march to that jungle may have been slow and halting, it has been incremental and steady. It began a long time ago.

Today, the talk is that the Nigerian state is failing. It seems so given that we do not even pretend anymore about that. At least, not with evidences in the countless militias ruling our lives, the laws that have been rendered inoperable and unworkable; the impunity writ large that is now the order of the day; the public sphere that daily spew hate; a hopelesly inept government and a pathetic citizenry plus of course the thieving mob now running some government houses in the country.

Welcome to the dual society – a society of we versus them; indigene versus outsider (or settler); the rich versus the commoner; the faithful versus the unbelieving, etc.

Whereas the rich can afford to mock the law; the poor insists on his version of law. The rich can afford a battery of lawyers to twist and bend the process to save his skin; the poor has his therapy in summary justice. The rich has the police; the poor has the vigilante. Whereas the rich has the temperament to indulge in all manners of theatrics in the courtroom, the poor has a ready-made solution: instance justice.

Where do these lead? Your guess is as good as mine.

Feedback

I take interest in reading your Policy column every Tuesday. I’m happy that someone like you takes time to analyse the lip service paid to economic and social development by both the executive and those with oversight responsibility. We are over-governed in this country. The federating units in terms of the number of states are too many. Unless we can return to not more than six geo-political zones with each having control of the resources within her domain and contributing to the centre as in the First Republic, the groundwork for real economic development will not be laid.

Right now, the states are weak; rather than look inwards for internal revenue generation, they all look towards Abuja for monthly allocation that is largely shared or spent on recurrent expenditure. This leaves little or nothing for capital expenditure. Until we reduce the number of states that will become competitive again, development will continue to elude this country. Please find time to point attention to this. Sincerely, we need to move from Presidential to parliamentary where the ministers will be responsible both to their constituency and to parliament. We shall then have true federalism. Thank you.

Chief M.A. Olorunfemi

October 16, 2012
After the deluge

Despite the solemn warnings of the weather experts, I am hoping that the title of this comment is not a forlorn hope but an expression of actuality; that the deluge is well and truly over, and that the problem ahead is how to deal with the destructive aftermath and the discontinuities it has wrought on the lives of millions of Nigerians in its ravenous wake.

This column came down rather heavily on it what it saw as its lethargic response to a disaster foretold, the greatest natural disaster to have struck Nigeria in recent memory. Few Nigerians under 60 years of age can recall witnessing anything on the scale of the floods that have overtaken large swathes of 27 of the country’s 36 states.

Disaster struck well before President Goodluck Jonathan headed to New York to perform yet another ritual of addressing the General Assembly of the United Nations, and to try, with help from Tony Blair (ha!) to cajole all those disobliging foreign investors into setting out without further delay to multiply their fortunes in Nigeria.

It was therefore understandable that he did not cancel his engagements and return home to take charge of the situation. Yes, take charge. He is the nation’s chief executive. And it is not for nothing that he is also the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, a designation he takes quite seriously, never missing an opportunity to deck himself out in the ceremonial garb of the office.

But even after his return, Dr Jonathan did not swing into action. Government business continued at the usual slow tempo. It was as if the nation was not in a state of siege.

It would now seem that, in the deep recesses of the federal bureaucracy, far removed from the prying eyes of the usual meddlers, officials were busy fashioning out a robust and comprehensive response to the disaster. The plan, outlined last week in Jonathan’s national broadcast and later spelled out in detail, is a product of hard and imaginative thinking, for which the Administration deserves praise.

Even if the Federal Government were to commit one-half of its 2013 budget to rehabilitating the damaged infrastructure and re-settling the hundreds of thousands — more likely millions — of displaced persons, the task would still not be done. So, it was wise to co-opt the private sector, faith-based, and civil society organisations into the endeavor, and to charge those leading it to seek international assistance.

Nigeria’s private sector is no longer what it used to be. Military president Ibrahim Babangida’s Structural Adjustment Programme virtually de-industrialised Northern Nigeria. The flight of major manufacturing companies to neighbouring countries where steady electricity is guaranteed and there is a greater sense of personal safety has further denuded the ranks of major private sector players. So has an economy that seems sluggish if not stagnant, despite a reported growth of more than 7 percent for the second or third year running.

Still, what remains of the private sector should be expected to contribute handsomely to the effort.

International assistance for disaster relief, I gather, is less constrained by donor fatigue than is Official Development Assistance, or ODA, in the language of the business. Still, with the global recession that is threatening the very architecture of the European Union and convulsing the world’s major economies, expectations from that source should be tempered with realism.

In the final analysis, the judgment and the prudence that prominent political actors demonstrate in this crisis, and the sacrifices they are prepared to make, will to a significant extent determine the scale and content of international assistance. For that reason, the Federal Government should take another look at its 2013 budget proposals.

Consider, for a start, the “welfare package” in unspecified items of expenditure by the president, vice president and secretary to the government of the Federation that will cost the exchequer 1.5 billion in fiscal 2013.

What does each package consist in? Does any of these high officers whose basic needs and much more are supplied by the state really need a “welfare package” in a country where there is no social safety net for a growing army of the unemployed and those driven into destitution by sheer adversity?

Then there is the roughly one billion Naira provided in the budget proposals as stipend for food and ancillary expenses for the president and vice president over the same period, and this in a country where millions go to bed hungry each day. Does cassava bread and fish pepper-soup cost that much? In whatever case, can’t the president and the vice president pay for their food and catering from their welfare packages?

Then again, there is the N3.7 billion for overseas trips, a substantial increase over the figure for the current year that the President had promised to cut in the wake of the “subsidy” protests. How necessary are many of the trips usually undertaken under this rubric? Why do so many officials flying Business or First Class and drawing heavy estacodes withal undertake such trips at the slightest provocation, and oftentimes with no provocation at all? What benefits does the nation derive from these jamborees?

No less worthy of attention is the N2.8 billion for “upgrading “ and maintenance in the Presidential Villa, not forgetting the N120 million in small change earmarked for “modeling” the vice president’s guest house in Abuja.

And there are other expenditure items that add up to several billion of Naira for landscaping, upgrading or refurbishing structures that were landscaped, upgraded or rehabilitated the previous year.

Surely, given the disaster encircling the country and the general misery, these projected expenditures can be trimmed substantially, deferred, or even eliminated altogether? Surely, a great chunk of the vast sums set aside for “security” can be diverted to the rehabilitation and re-settlement effort without imperiling the existing security situation? What, in any case, can be a greater priority than the security of the people?

Members of the National Assembly will also have to make considerable sacrifices if the call for international disaster relief assistance is to win any sympathy abroad.

In financial matters, that body is as secretive as The Vatican. Nobody knows for sure how much the legislators earn, or rather, how much they choose to pay themselves.

At a time tens of thousands of beleaguered Nigerians have no clothes other than the ones on their backs, shouldn’t the legislators consider donating their “wardrobe allowance,” reportedly in the amount of N60, 000 a month, toward the rehabilitation of their displaced compatriots?

And as hundreds of thousands face grinding hardship daily with prospects of more of the same,

should the legislators not consider donating their “hardship allowance” — the hefty sums they pay themselves each month for subjecting themselves to the arduous task of rubberstamping proposals from the Executive Branch and passing vacuous resolutions and harassing state officials –should they not now donate their hardship allowance toward the resettlement of those to whom hardship has become a constant companion?

As it is with the Presidency and the National Assembly, so also should it be the state governors and members of state assemblies. There is no better time than now to trim to trim those allowance and commit the proceeds to the daunting task of rehabilitation and resettlement ahead.

Charity must be seen to begin at home.

October 16, 2012
Idle funds, idle minds

•Billions of education funds languish in Nigeria’s banks

IN a country where barely half of the population is literate, the news that N44 billion belonging to the Universal Basic Education (UBE) programme has not been utilised is truly disheartening. The revelation was made recently by the Acting Executive Secretary of the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC), Professor Charles Onocha, when the House of Representatives Committee on Education visited the commission.

According to Onocha, the situation arose as an apparent result of the inability of state governments to provide the required counterpart funding that is essential to obtaining funds under the programme. In 2009, N1.3 billion was not accessed, a figure which rose to N3.5 billion in 2010. This year, about N22 billion has not been touched by states that are supposed to benefit from it.

This is just another of the many anomalies that continue to trouble Nigeria and hamper the attainment of national progress and development. Primary and secondary schools all across the country are in dire need of rehabilitation and facilities. Pupils and students are subject to all kinds of impositions levied upon them to defray the costs of providing chalk, dusters, furnishing and other inputs. In spite of this dire situation, the funds that could have helped to resolve these pressing difficulties are lying unutilised in banks.

The crux of the problem is the counterpart funding requirement. If a state wishes to access funds from the UBE, it has to provide funds which are either equivalent to the sum desired, or a specified percentage of such funds. While such intentions may be honourable, they do not appear to work effectively in practice, as the current UBE debacle shows. It is obvious that the emphasis on counterpart funding should have been replaced by an emphasis on transparency and efficient utilisation of funds.

This issue harks back to the skewed structural arrangement of the country. A federation in which the central government is overly powerful is a contradiction in terms. The UBE programme is clearly demonstrative of federal overreach; its involvement in basic education amounts to an unnecessary intervention in an aspect of national life that should have been left to states and local governments. Apart from the counterpart funding requirement, it is almost certain that federal bureaucratic bottlenecks also make it difficult for states to access UBE funds, thereby providing opportunities for corruption that the counterpart funding condition is supposed to prevent.

The tragedy is that problems like the UBE fiasco have become recurrent decimals running through all aspects of Nigerian life. The Federal Government holds tenaciously to the control of the nation’s police force when it is becoming increasingly clearer that the devolution of policing duties to the states is the way to go. Federal agencies insist on issuing vehicle licences and number plates, regardless of the fact that states are capable of doing it with greater efficiency.

Instead of taking an objective look at the question of fiscal federalism and related issues, the Federal Government and its ministries, agencies and parastatals persist in continuing with a thoroughly-discredited process riddled with inefficiency and corruption. In the UBE situation, it is obvious that government simply does not have the administrative capacity to effectively utilise the funds at its disposal. This inability is to be contrasted with the governments of states like Lagos, Osun, Edo, Delta, Ekiti and Anambra, all of whom have highly-innovative educational policies which have transformed their states.

If Nigeria is to move beyond the current situation of federal paralysis, its citizens must look again at the way in which their country is structured so that it can be run with greater efficiency and equity. It is only then that the UBE will cease to create idle minds the way it has generated idle funds.

October 16, 2012
History! What history?

History is often written by victors but losers could also have their own version, but then who listens to them. Wrong? I doubt if there is or there will ever be a universal agreement of the account of a particular event especially where there were winners and losers or merely a truce (no victor no vanquished) as in the case of a war or ordinary (armed) conflict.

History is more complicated where there was no clear cut winner as in the case of a war or where a truce was imposed by a superior but interested power. The warring but subdued parties tend to maintain their different positions, lie low and wait for the next available opportunity to restate their claim or strike again. And God helps such a society if there are recalcitrant elements who strongly believe in the cause.

Even where there were clear cut winners but the losers were not vanquished, the tendency is there for the die-hards on the losers’ side to either reject the history as presented by the victors and write their own version or see the majority account from a jaundiced perspective. Whichever side the historian was coming from, I am of the strong view that when history is written by a participant observer or an active participant facts are often presented from a subjective point of view. Don’t you think so? But then is it possible to have an unbiased observer present the story of an event as divisive as a war without compromising the truth/facts and fairness/justice?

I can not claim to know the rules of writing history as I am just a professional journalist, but then even as journalists, we are historians, only that we write history in a hurry. In our everyday reports we write about and document events of the day as they happen in the most objective manner prescribed by the ethics of journalism. In journalism facts are sacred just as objectivity and fairness are paramount. When facts are being presented as in the case of a news story, there is no room for personal opinion and the writer must be fair to all concerned and objective in his/her presentation. Even in interpreting the facts and commenting on the event, the writer has to be objective and fair taking in all the parameters and the circumstances.

Because whatever we write as journalists form part of the raw materials ‘real’ historians will use in future while reporting and analyzing the events of the present, care is always taken to include all the above stated elements in our everyday reports. I believe no less is expected of an historian, who, with the benefit of hindsight, time and access to other sources apart from media reports should be able to present a more balanced and objective view of history.

So when renowned Professor of Literature and world acclaimed novelist Professor Chinua Achebe decided to put pen to paper recently and write on his recollections of events as they happened between 1967 and 1970 when Nigeria fought a bitter 30-month civil war to remain one, one would have expected the literary giant to be fair to history, the participants in that unfortunate episode in the life of our country and the future generation of Nigerians by presenting events as they happened not just from his point of view but THE WAY THEY WERE without bias, especially as he was a participant observer (active participant?) in the failed project called Biafra.

To refresh our memory, Biafra was an attempt by the then South east region of Nigeria to secede from the country following wide spread killings of mainly Igbos and other South easterners in northern Nigeria by some elements in the north in the mid/late 60s, partly in retaliation for the murder of the mainstream political leadership in the north in the first military coup, believed to have been spear headed by military officers of Igbo extraction and which in execution, deliberately or inadvertently spared main stream Igbo political leaders including then Nigeria’s president Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe.

Following the failure of the Igbos under their charismatic leader late Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu to break away from Nigeria, Ndigbo, both young and old, dead or alive have been made to believe that the failure of that project was due largely to Yoruba betrayal and in particular Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s refusal to make true his purported promise to Ojukwu that once the south east secedes Yoruba would also pull out western Nigeria. This is not only not true but Ojukwu also admitted before his death that there was no such pact between Awolowo and himself, but some mischief makers among Ndigbo would rather sustain this for whatever reason.

And as if this anti-Yoruba feeling among Nidigbo was not enough, some of the policies of the then Federal Military Government of General Yakubu Gowon that brought the war to an end and which were unpalatable to Biafra and Ndigbo both during and after the war were blamed on Chief Awolowo who served in that administration as vice chairman, Federal Executive Council and Federal Commissioner for Finance.

Two of such policies, stopping food delivery to Biafra and currency change/pegging the amount payable to bank depositors from the south east after the war affected Ndigbo badly both during and after the war. Awolowo being at the centre of implementation of the policies had been blamed severally for this setback by Ndigbo leaders then and even now, but we know that the man couldn’t have done it alone, at least not without the knowledge and support of Gowon as Head of State and Commader-In-Chief. But nobody is blaming Gowon.

And following the furore generated by the implementation of these policies and its adverse effect on his political career/fortune, especially in the run up to the second republic, Awolowo had repeatedly explained his role during the war and the government policies of that time as far as he was concerned both in one of his books as well as in media interviews. His position on this matter as well as other issues are well documented in different forms for any well meaning historian interested in truth, justice and fairness and most importantly in the unity and well being of this country to consult before putting pen to paper to write on such a sensitive topic as the Nigerian civil war.

Professor Achebe the great writer decided to follow the trend by blaming Chief Awolowo in his new book on the civil war, for the so called starvation policy of the Gowon administration that prevented food aid delivery to Biafra and thus ‘starved’ millions of Ndigbo to death during the war, without looking at the overall picture of the main objective of the Nigerian government then and most importantly Awolowo’s explanation.

Whether Awolowo was right or wrong is not even my position here, I am worried that as a writer/historian, Achebe had conveniently ignored some facts which he could have access to if he wanted or in fact had access to but chose not to use, to present history the way he wanted it and not necessarily the way it is. This is unfortunate and could end up creating more problems for us as a people and a nation than solve.

In a country with intense ethnic rivalry, reopening old wounds in the name of history or putting the record straight will do more damage than good. For the children of that period on both sides of the war who are now in their 40s and 50s trying to extend handshakes across the Niger, Achebe’s memoir will make such an effort difficult and if we ( I am in that generation) can’t do it then how do we convince our children to see Nigeria as one and be their brother’s keeper irrespective of where they found themselves.

If we continue to write this kind of history there would be no end to such and the division and bitterness will continue. There are serious questions that could be asked on both sides, especially Biafra even on this so called starvation policy. It is convenient to blame the other side always for our failure or problem without looking inward first. Why were the initial food convoys to Biafra hijacked and diverted by Ojukwu to feed his soldiers at the expense of the ordinary Biafrans? Why did Ojukwu and in general, Biafra go to war when they were either not ready or prepared for the consequences of failure. The atrocities of Biafra on Nigeria have been documented and nobody is talking about that. Shouldn’t Achebe spare a thought also for those who suffered under Biafra both in Nigeria and even inside Biafra? There are so many whys, ifs and whats that could be asked but they will lead us to no where and they are better forgotten.

History as I said here last week is good to the extent that it will serve as a useful guide to a better future. If the history will divide or destroy us why remind us? See what history has done and is doing to Israelis and Palestinians and other Arabs in the Middle East. The history of imperialist Japan is still causing trouble with China and the Koreans north and south. So as fathers of our nation Achebe and co should sow seeds of a united and prosperous Nigeria before they leave us. We wish them long live and prosperity. Awolowo is gone, let him rest in perfect peace. Enough of this kind of history.

October 16, 2012
Nothing is impossible

The last decade has marked Africa’s highest level of growth in history. Businesses have experienced increasing returns on their investments, proving that investing in Africa today can yield high returns compared to most regions around the world. Although foreign investment is still low, a collective decision by Africans to take advantage of this opportunity can stimulate the push required to bring the region into the forefront of the global economy. We have the knowledge, skills, know-how and capital to build a new future for Africa and by investing in our people, we can make large strides towards eradicating poverty and closing the development gap.

Creating a business climate that will attract investment also requires the creation of an environment where human capital can flourish. Businesses need people who are empowered, well-educated and can think critically in an environment that is stable, peaceful and values diversity. The continent needs healthy, curious children and youth who have the stimulation, education and training needed, starting at an early age, to become change agents and entrepreneurs capable of driving economic and social growth. For these reasons, I am a founding member of the Global Business Coalition for Education, which is focused on enabling businesses to support efforts to achieve education for all.

I first became interested in a career in business when I was still in primary school. I remember buying cartons of sugar and selling them to make a small profit. Even at that age, people told me I had a flair for business – but without the literacy, math and interpersonal skills I learned in school, I would not have been able to tap into this talent. It is therefore sad to see so many young children in my country, Nigeria,who are not able to gain these basic skills at an early age.

The current statistics paint a gloomy picture. According to UNESCO 2012 figures, over 10 million school-aged children are not attending primary school in Nigeria – and this number has increased over the past three years. The number of out-of-school children in Nigeria is approaching 20 percent of the world’s total and makes up over one-third of the 30 million children in sub-Saharan Africa who receive no education whatsoever. In Africa as a whole, another 21.6 million children are out of lower-secondary school.

While getting every child into school is vitally important, the quality of education they receive must also be addressed. In Nigeria, for example, we see children pass through school without learning the basic skills expected from primary level education. I recently read a study conducted by USAID in two states in Northern Nigeria last year indicating that nearly 70 percent of primary three students could not read a single word of simple text. This is yet another reminder that the potential of our country and region is in jeopardy if we fail to have every child in school and learning.

My company, Dangote Group, continues to address issues on education through our corporate social responsibility efforts and the Dangote Foundation. Dangote Academy, for example, has two programmes for vocational and management training. The vocational program provides a one-year scholarship for technical and vocational skills training for students from polytechnics around Nigeria. This year, we absorbed 87 percent of the students into our existing operations. But we know more needs to be done – singular efforts cannot change the trajectory of a nation, let alone a continent. Our governments need to make education and learning a priority. Educational budgets must exceed their current numbers. Civil society must continue to hold government accountable and as the private sector continues to drive growth, businesses need to support these efforts strongly. With the Global Business Coalition for Education, I am committed to bringing more national and global businesses together to support efforts to expand educational opportunities across Nigeria.

Without a global push to achieve universal education by 2015, supported by the Secretary-General and his newly-appointed Special Envoy, Gordon Brown, we will remain a continent that will fail to unlock our potential and instead continue to be bound to conflict, poverty and limited development. Repeating the growth of the previous decade will be impossible without ambitious investments in the people of Africa. Quality education is the right of every child and the obligation of every country. Businesses cannot be bystanders – we must do our part to be active, collaborative, and supportive participants.

On my desk I have a mounted quote that says, “Nothing is impossible.” That is how I feel about the future of the African continent. Nothing is impossible if we make sure every child – and adult – has the opportunity to unleash their potential through an inclusive, high-quality education that prepares each individual to succeed and propel Africa into the league of global economic champions.

• Dangote is the President/Chief Executive of the Dangote Group

October 16, 2012