Category: Segun Ayobolu

He is a battle tested politician who is not unfamiliar with the complex intrigues and manoeuvrings of party and electoral competition. It is thus surprising that the campaign of the presidential candidate of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, continues to be dogged by some of the poor decision making that plagued his earlier failed attempts to be elected to the country’s apex political office of President. As a veteran in the game, one would have expected Atiku to pursue what is evidently his last bid for the coveted office with a lot more tact and wisdom. He projects himself as a ‘unifier-in-chief’ with the capacity, if elected, of forging greater cohesion in a country admittedly badly fragmented along primordial lines. Yet, Atiku has given the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) the opportunity to brand him as a ‘divider-in-chief’ given the virtual civil war that rages in his party since his emergence as its presidential flag bearer raising questions as regards his ability to unite the country if he cannot offer cohesive leadership to his party.

Atiku’s emergence as the PDP’s presidential candidate was in violation of the party’s constitutional provision for rotation of presidential power between the northern and southern parts of the country although the presidential primary was ostensibly free, fair and transparent. Incidentally, his choice as Vice-Presidential candidate, Delta State governor, Dr. Ifeanyi Okowa, was an active participant in meetings of the Southern Governors Forum (SGF) at which it was resolved that the presidency shift back to the South after eight years in power of President Muhammadu Buhari from the North. Of course, the power rotation principle is neither a creation of the SGF nor is it simply an intra-party provision of the PDP constitution. It is an unwritten elite compact among dominant factions of the political class cutting across party lines since 1999 having its roots in the unjust annulment of the June 1993, presidential election won by the late Chief MKO Abiola on the platform of the defunct Social Democratic Party (SDP).

Prior to Abiola’s electoral victory in 1993, widely acknowledged as the freest and fairest polls in the country’s history, apex executive power had been domiciled in the north between the beginning of the second republic in 1979 under one civilian administration and two military regimes and the historic election.  It was inevitable that the annulment of the election of a Yoruba President-elect by a northern-led military regime further strained inter- ethnic relations with regard to power sharing in the country. The protracted struggle against military dictatorship spurred by the annulment led to the consequent retreat of the military from the political space and the democratic restoration of 1999. In compensation for the injustice of the annulment, the presidency was conceded to the South- West by hegemonic factions of the political class resulting in General Olusegun Obasanjo and Chief Olu Falae of the PDP and Alliance for Democracy (AD) respectively being the only contestants for the office in 1999 with Obasanjo winning an emphatic victory with the support of the dominant political elite of the North, South-South and South-East.

After eight years of the Obasanjo presidency between 1999 and 2007, presidential power rotated back to the North with the election of the late President Umaru Yar’Adua. The latter’s untimely death in 2009 led to the constitutional ascension to office of his Deputy, Dr. Goodluck Jonathan from the South, who completed his late boss’s tenure and successfully ran for his own full term and won in the 2011 election. It is instructive that, despite being from a minority ethnic group, Jonathan achieved victory in 2011 with the support of the dominant political elite of parts of the North, the South-East, South-South and even the South-West following the collapse of the working relationship between Buhari’s defunct Congress of Progressive Change (CPC) and Asiwaju Tinubu’s Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) and the latter supporting Jonathan.

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Dr. Jonathan’s decision to contest for a second term in 2015 split the PDP down the middle with prominent northern leaders of the party including Atiku insisting that it was the turn of the North to produce the President. That crack was a key contributory factor to the victory of the then nascent APC in 2015 with the opposition party displacing an incumbent government at the centre for the first time in the country’s history. It is thus astonishing that after eight years of Buhari’s tenure, Atiku, another Fulani, sees nothing wrong in his seeking to wield presidential power for possibly another eight years until 2031! The argument that the last PDP President, Dr. Jonathan, was from the South and that this justifies an Atiku presidency is self-serving and unconvincing. The rotational presidency principle transcends party demarcations and applies to the nation as a whole. Given the current fragile state of Nigeria’s cohesion, a part of the country cannot monopolize presidential power for sixteen years without negative implications for national harmony. There must first and foremost be a stable, united and peaceful country before there can be a functional and effective political party.

Atiku’s strategists contend that his choice as the PDP presidential candidate is only a matter of pragmatic electoral strategizing as of all the contenders within the party, he has the best stature and structure to win a nationwide election. Yet, they criticize and deride the APC’s Muslim-Muslim ticket disregarding the party’ argument that the pairing provides the most tactical and strategic choice to guarantee its victory in the presidential election. Speaking at a stakeholders meeting of his party in Enugu last week, Atiku described himself as a “stepping stone” for the South-East to produce a president. He gave no rational explanation why this is so. According to him, “I’ve had a close relationship with the Igbo and this influenced my choices of Senator Ben Obi and Mr. Peter Obi as my running mates in my two previous outings as a presidential candidate…I have three children with Igbo blood flowing in them. I am saying this for the very first time in public. So, my relationship with Ndigbo did not start today”.

True, the Igbo have put all their political eggs in the PDP basket since 1999. The South-East has been the most solid and consistent electoral support base of the PDP in this dispensation. The region deserves the PDP’s presidential ticket. If he is indeed the unifier and patriot that he projects, why couldn’t Atiku support an Igbo presidential candidate and back such a person with his perceived influence and structure? Perhaps in that case, a Peter Obi would have remained in the party. As it is now, the strong possibility of Obi’s Labour Party (LP) understandably eating deeply into the PDP’s support base in the South-East is one of the reasons why The Economist Intelligence Unit has projected victory for the APC in the presidential election. Taking a dig at the APC during the Enugu meeting, Atiku stated that the second Niger Bridge about being completed by the Buhari administration is not a favour to the South-East but to Nigeria as the country as a whole will benefit from the facility. But if Atiku loves the South-East so much, why did the administration in which he served for eight years as Vice President do absolutely nothing to actualize the second Niger Bridge and other infrastructure projects in the region being implemented by the APC government?

Given his presumed political experience, it is surprising that Atiku is handling in a most cavalier manner the continued disaffection and dissension of the governor Nyesom Wike tendency in the party over the jettisoning of the zoning principle, his choice of running mate and the non-resignation of Dr. Iyorchia Ayu as National Chairman following the emergence of a northerner as presidential candidate. Atiku insists that Ayu’s continuation as party Chairman will no longer be tenable only if he wins the election and becomes President since both key positions cannot be occupied by persons from the same region. This not only negates the ordinarily principled Ayu’s promise to quit the position if a northerner became the presidential candidate before his election as Chairman, it creates the impression that Atiku is himself lacking in confidence as regards the probability of his winning the election. A National Chairman of southern extraction to succeed Ayu and achieve the regional balance being demanded can easily be actualized and necessary personnel changes effected to meet intra-party constitutional stipulations if Atiku possesses the political acumen and astuteness he is often credited with.

In any case, this is a completely avoidable crisis and a recurring pattern in Atiku’s leadership style. In 2007, he picked Senator Ben Obi as his running mate on the platform of the Action Congress (AC) without consultations with critical stakeholders of the party resulting in grievances that negatively affected the party’s performance in the election. PDP governors in the South-East were largely indifferent to Atiku’s campaign in 2019 because they were reportedly not carried along in the choice of Peter Obi as is running mate. And this time around, he could surely have handled his choice of Okowa as his running mate much better bending over backwards to carry along the diverse tendencies in the party particularly the not insubstantial Wike sympathizers.

But then, Atiku is not daft. He deliberately and consciously went all out to get the PDP presidential ticket despite the party’s zoning principle benefitting from Governor Aminu Tambuwal’s cynical skewed regional antics in the process. His support for the three critical offices/roles of National Chairman, Presidential Candidate and Director General of the Presidential Campaign to be allotted to northerners is deliberate. Asked during his last Arise TV interview how he would be affected by the choice of the APC Vice presidential candidate, Mr. Kashim Shettima, from the North-East, Atiku responded that Shettima is a minority Kanuri with presence in two states while he is Fulani with support base in more states. Atiku’s strategy is to sell himself as the candidate of the North in general and the Hausa-Fulani in particular in the hope that the South will be divided between the APC and LP. It is a divisive strategy but unlikely to fly.

It was the Northern governors in the APC who insisted that the party’s presidential ticket be zoned to the South in the interest of fair play and justice. Their support was pivotal to the emergence of Tinubu as the party’s presidential flag bearer. President Buhari could have used the power and influence of his office to steer the APC presidential primaries towards a different outcome. He did not and is the Chairman of the party’s Presidential Campaign Council. Whatever anybody may say, Buhari remains a political cult figure among teeming millions in the north. Tinubu himself has cultivated and maintained enduring close relationships with prominent stakeholders in northern politics over the last three decades. It is not for nothing that he is the Jagaban of Borgu. The APC northern governors have far more to gain working for the APC to retain power after Buhari than for the victory of an Atiku who cannot be relied upon to keep promises or abide by pledges. The Waziri Adamawa’s divisive northern strategy is from all indications Dead on Arrival (DOA).

The sheer splendor and grandeur that characterized activities marking her burial ceremonies reflected the opulence and effortless glamour of her life as royalty for over seven decades. I speak of no other than the just departed Queen Elizabeth 11 of England. She was born great by luck of birth although she magnified the prestige and fame conferred by her royal heritage through a personal charm, modesty and grace that have been widely acknowledged across the world at her passing. Although the immense wealth of the royal family prominently advertised during the burial sharply reinforces in the public consciousness the sharp contrast between the stupendous riches of a microscopic few and the want and deprivation of the vast majority of humanity in our current capitalist epoch, the late Queen was obviously deeply adored by millions of her country men and women across class stratifications. They thronged various venues of the monarch’s lying in state waiting for hours to pay tribute to her memory.

Many have perhaps inevitably made reference to the linkage between the opulence of the ruling classes of the west and the mass poverty of the underdeveloped regions of the world largely as a result of the historical ravages of the slave trade, colonial imperialism and continuing neo-colonial exploitation. The Queen is seen by many as symbolizing these historical crimes as monarch of a Britain that once wielded colonial suzerainty over large swathes of mankind. In his ‘Communist Manifesto’, Karl Marx, paid glowing tribute to the inherent capacities of capitalism through profit-driven continuous and unceasing improvement in and development of society’s means of production to create wealth beyond what could ever be contemplated under preceding modes of production – communalism, slavery and feudalism. Capitalism has surely not disappointed in this regard as it has created by its prodigious productive capacities the conditions for the abolition of poverty on earth. Yet, growing affluence in a part of the globe continues to be accompanied by increasing poverty and inequality in other parts.

Professor John Holloway in his 2010 luminous revolutionary book, ‘Crack Capitalism’ vents his frustration on the avoidable contradictions of capitalism when he writes, “Break. We want to break the world as it is. A world of injustice, of war, of violence, of discrimination, of Gaza and Guantanamo. A world of billionaires and a billion people who live and die in hunger. A world in which humanity is annihilating itself, massacring non-human forms of life, destroying the conditions of its own existence. A world ruled by money, ruled by capital. A world of frustration, of wasted potential…We want to create a different world. We protest, of course we protest. We protest against the war, we protest against the growing use of torture in the world, we protest against the turning of all life into a commodity to be bought and sold, we protest against the inhuman treatment of immigrants, we protest against the destruction of the world in the interests of profit”.

A Nigerian professor teaching in the United States was vicious and vehement in denouncing the queen and her legacy wishing her excruciating pain even as the world awaited the formal announcement of her passing. One of the reasons for the professor’s fury at the queen was what she described as the monarch’s responsibility for the perceived ‘genocide’ against her people, the Igbos, during the Nigerian civil war. This is a superficial and hollow analysis of the war and the role of Britain in the tragedy. Surely, the former colonial overlord could not have been expected to support the breakup of the ex-colony fashioned after its Lugardian image. What were the remote and immediate causes of the war? Could the tragedy have been averted? Did Colonel Odumegwu Ojwuku and other secessionist leaders unjustifiably lead their people into a war for which they were so obviously ill-prepared particularly in terms of military capability and preparedness? In any case, the queen reigns. She does not rule and could not be personally held responsible credibly for the actions of a government in effective control of power and policy.

But then, Britain’s colonial territories including Nigeria were conquered, acquired and ruled in the name of the queen. The monarchy itself participated in and profited from the depredations of the slave trade while even conferring knighthoods on notorious slave traders. Walter Rodney in his immortal ‘How Europe Underdeveloped Africa’ has documented meticulously how Africa’s current pitiable socio-economic and political deformity and mal-development is deeply rooted in the continent’s historical encounter with imperialism via the slave trade, colonialism and the prevailing neo-colonialism that grew out of these historical atrocities. It is estimated that the population loss to Africa as a result of the slave trade was most likely to the tune of 159 million people in addition to the physical destruction of properties and infrastructure, psychological demoralization, technological incapacitation and dysfunctional perversion of pre-colonial economies to serve colonial interests.

Expatiating on Rodney’s insights, the late Professor Bade Onimode writes, “These horrendous losses from slavery bled African countries so terribly that by the time of the next European onslaught in the form of colonial invasion, Africa was already prostrate. It had almost lost the will to fight after some 425 years of continuous slave raids, physical destruction, depopulation, technological de-mobilization and the most unimaginable destitution in human history. It was this thoroughly dispossessed, paralyzed and traumatized Africa that was forcibly incorporated into the international capitalist economy from about 1850 on the basis of extreme inequality”. But some have wondered why Africa was so weak that she could not contain and even defeat the colonial intrusion.

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Professor Onimode argues that it was the industrial revolution, which started in England at about 1750 that reversed the hitherto near- technological parity between Europe and Africa as well as other parts of the world pointing out that “Like Asia  and Latin America (and the USA before them), Africa lost the colonial wars not only because of the superior fire-power of the colonial invaders, but because 425 years of slavery had left the continent pathetically paralyzed and bleeding in every vein. What was remarkable, therefore, was not that Africa was subjugated, but that she could muster the strength and resilience to resist the colonial predators so fiercely and for so long”. In the debate between scholars who perceived colonialism in Africa as a mere episode and those who saw the phenomenon as epochal in its consequences for the continent, the latter appear to have been proved right.

Let’s take the enduring political implications of the colonial intrusion as an example. One of the admirable features of the British political system, for instance, is the distinction between the elected government which effectively rules and the monarchy which only wields symbolic and nominal power. There was a natural evolution over time from the absolute and dictatorial monarchism in Britain to the contemporary constitutional monarchical democracy in which real power resides in elected institutions while the monarchy lends its historic prestige, age-long ethos and traditional authority to strengthen the legitimacy and stability of the state. Before the advent of colonialism, there were relatively well developed traditional political systems in the diverse kingdoms and empires that made up pre-colonial Nigeria. Many of these such as the Yoruba pre-colonial states had in-built systems of checks and balances that helped prevent absolute tyranny and maintain a modicum of democracy no matter how tentative and indirect. These pre-colonial political institutions such as in Benin, Oyo, Ile-Ife, Itsekiri, Ijebu-Ode, Sokoto, Kano, Igala-land, the Tiv among several others enjoyed profound reverence and respect among their people.

But what was the colonial imprint on these evolving pre-colonial political institutions? According to Dr. Nse Etim Akpan, “One of the greatest disadvantages of the system was the damage it did to the traditional authorities who were subject to the checks and balances and other necessary safeguards. But the indirect rule system destroyed these checks and created new powers for the chiefs who abdicated their traditional roles, thus a democratic traditional system became an autocratic one”. In the East where the people were not accustomed to control by traditional rulers and governance was based on families, clans and age grades, the colonialists created warrant chiefs, which were dysfunctional, unacceptable to the people and the experiment was a colossal disaster. Would the content, direction and character of Africa’s pre-colonial patterns of governance and state formation as well as consolidation not been far different and probably more effective and productive without the colonial intrusion?

In his book, ‘The Black Man’s Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State’, the late Basil Davidson, lamented that the natural evolution of pre-colonial traditional political systems and patterns of state formation and consolidation were aborted by colonialism and imported political institutions of the colonial power imposed on the continent as if Africa had no worthwhile political governance systems prior to colonialism. This may be at the root of what continues to be a crisis of governance in post-colonial Africa with neither various forms of liberal democracy nor diversities of dictatorship being effective vehicles for accelerated development and meaningful progress. Referring to what he described as a system of ‘dual authority’ in Nigeria with the co-existence of elected governments at various levels and monarchical traditional authorities, Professor Richard Sklar wonders if the deep cultural roots of the latter and the historical prestige they enjoy among their people cannot be tapped as a source of legitimation for elected authorities and the democratic process.

But that seems too late in the day. Although a few highly revered monarchs can still be found, much of the reverence and prestige of the traditional institutions has been eroded by the same moral degeneracy and venality characteristic of virtually every aspect of life in pre-colonial Africa. Africa’s gaze must be to the future and not the past. Neither does it serve much useful purpose lamenting the depredations of slavery, colonialism and neo-colonialism when the continent has attained political independence for over six decades now and indigenous African rulers have perhaps been even more corrupt and oppressive than the colonial overlords with the consequent deepening of underdevelopment on the continent.

Our post-independence history has also shown that there can be no magical short cut to genuine liberation and development through illusory revolution or deceptive military messiahs. The only viable path open to Africa is to strengthen and deepen the practice of democracy through which governments can increasingly become more accountable, governments more transparent and the leadership more patriotic, visionary and competent. Progressive forces and parties must strive to ensure that the capacity of the democratic process to produce leaders who can think creatively outside the box and conceptualize as well as implement policies that can help break the chains of dependency and underdevelopment in Africa is systematically enhanced.

Given his oft-demonstrated intellectual and professional hollowness, Steve Osuji, does not see that he cannot credibly accuse his fellow journalists, who he perceives as writing in support of other presidential aspirants in the race for the 2023 presidency, as writing for monetary gratification while he wields his own pen with venom, hatred, intolerance and barely hidden ethnic jingoism on behalf of Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP) for altruistic reasons. The latest offering from the pen of Osuji is titled ‘Femi Fani-Kayode and Tinubu’s hollow strategists”. While ostensibly reacting to a recent characteristically pungent and exhaustive widely publicized piece by Chief Femi Fani-Kayode in defence of the candidacy of Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, and why he stands far above his main contenders from other parties in terms of capacity to deliver as an elected President of Nigeria, Osuji descends to the gutter of cheap abuse and insults against those he describes as ‘Tinubu’s media strategists’.

It does not appear evident to Osuji that he cannot plausibly be offering advice to Tinubu’s assumed strategists on how to market the APC presidential candidate and thus, ironically, defeat his own principal, Peter Obi, in the forthcoming elections. The intense anger and undisguised hostility with which he writes, suggest that those handling Tinubu’s campaign must be doing something right to the detriment of the chances of Obi and Osuji feels a need to attack and pull down these ‘strategists’ at all costs and by all means. Let us put aside for now the fact that Osuji does not even have the slightest inkling of the dynamics of the workings of Tinubu’s inner circle and most of those who constitute the critical members of his think tank.

Osuji cannot even respond to Femi Fani-Kayode’s piece at the level of intellectualism, verifiable facts and logic.  He thus resorts to hurling invectives at the writer, questioning his motives and impugning his style of politics. He does not refute even one of the many factors adduced by Fani-Kayode to justify and rationalize Tinubu’s capacity and competence for the job. Rather, he berates Fani-Kayode for moving from one party to the other perhaps forgetting that his principal, Peter Obi, in his checkered political career has moved at various times from the PDP to the late Ikemba’s All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) back to the PDP and has presently landed on the shores of the Labour Party (LP) all in pursuit of personal ambition rather than the common good.

Writers like Osuji  who try in futility to adorn Obi in the robes of a revolutionary out to change ‘the system’ do not tell us what would have happened had their candidate’s party, the PDP, won the 2019 elections in which he ran as Vice-Presidential candidate to Alhaji Atiku Abubakar. He would most likely have been in office today and planning for a second term tenure with his boss. Did Obi leave the PDP out of any differences in political philosophy or ideological convictions with members of that party? The answer is an emphatic no. He left the PDP when it dawned on him that his chances of winning at the presidential primaries were slim and there was even no assurance that he would be offered the Vice-Presidential slot this time around.

The media offers a forum and platform for vigorous contestation of ideas, views and opinions. But while opinions are free, the fidelity to facts must always be held sacred by media professionals. Osuji names Mr. Dele Alake and Mr. Bayo Onanuga as members of Tinubu’s ‘media strategists’. These are very senior and experienced journalists who head different media Directorates of the Tinubu-Shettima Campaign Organization. Across the world, that is the role that leading, competent and successful journalists play during campaigns particularly in liberal democracies. It is thus no crime. In their roles in the campaign organization, Messrs. Alake and Onanuga are expected to market the strong points of their candidate while also pointing out the weaknesses, failings and demerits of opposing candidates. The two gentlemen have performed credibly in this regard without resorting to Osuji’s tactics of heaping insults, abuse and invectives, which is a great disservice to the journalism profession.

Osuji names Mr. Sam Omatseye and I as other members of ‘Tinubu’s media strategists’. It is flattering but untrue. We do not hold any positions in the Asiwaju’s campaign structure and thus play no formal roles in the campaign. Similarly, he names Chief Dele Momodu as another of the ‘media strategists’ he is so obsessed with. The Publisher of the popular Ovation magazine has since debunked this falsehood. He was a presidential aspirant on the platform of the PDP and remains a member of that party till date. Osuji asserts that there was a strategic retreat organized by the Tinubu camp all with the aim of pulling down Obi and denigrating the Igbo. This is a figment of his fertile imagination. Osuji obviously overrates Obi’s political weight and relevance and thus fantasizes that the Tinubu campaign would devote time, energy and resources to the task of stopping Obi. The truth is that given the realities on ground, past experience of electioneering campaigns in Nigeria and the all too obvious structural deficiencies of the LP, Obi should be one of the least worries of the Tinubu camp even as the countdown to the formal commencement of campaigns begin.

In his write up, Osuji demonstrates all the venom, hate, verbal violence, ethnic jingoism and intolerance that the ‘Obidients’ are known for. I incurred his wrath because I insisted in my column ‘Peter Obi, The Igbo and 2023’ that the sheer extremism of his supporters and the perverse passion with which the Igbo have embraced his candidacy may box Obi into a sectional corner and make his narrow chances in next year’s polls even slimmer. A regional candidate cannot win a presidential election in a complex polity like Nigeria where you need to build a pan-Nigeria consensus to win elections. Incidentally, Peter Obi himself has had cause at least on two occasions to call his supporters to order, urging them to focus on issues and leave the task of responding to his political opponents to him. Osuji appears to be ignorant of his principal’s plea in this regard.

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Even though he made a vigorous defence of the Igbo as regards a perceived tendency to clannishness on their part and insisted that the competiveness and independent outlook of this ethnic group, which are responsible for their successes, are factors that can be valuable to Nigeria in her quest for rapid modernization, the great novelist, Chinua Achebe, was not blind to some excesses in the Igbo persona in his slim but powerful book, ‘The Trouble with Nigeria’. Writing on ‘The Igbo Problem’ in the book, Achebe stresses that “But this kind of success can carry a deadly penalty: the danger of hubris, over-weening pride and thoughtlessness, which invites envy and hatred; or even worse, which can obsess the mind with material success and dispose it to all kinds of crude showiness”.

Achebe continued, “There is no doubt at all that there is a strand in contemporary Igbo behavior which can offend by its noisy exhibitionism and disregard for humility and quietness. If you walk into the crowded waiting-room at the Ikeja Airport on one of those days when all flights are delayed or cancelled ‘for operational reasons’ and you hear one man’s voice high over a subdued and despondent multitude the chances are he will be an Igbo man who ‘has made it’ and is desperate to be noticed and admired”.

These words written nearly four decades ago by a great Igbo intellectual are no less true today but even more; this perceived disposition may make it difficult for the emergence of an Igbo President in a Nigeria in which a sustained democratic culture is being systematically institutionalized. This disposition that also manifests in aggressive Igbo expansionism outside Igbo land is largely responsible for the problems that the Igbo often have with indigenous groups not only in Lagos but even in Abuja, Port Harcourt or Kano and outside the country in South Africa or Dubai.

Osuji avers that my ‘Agatu’ grandparents in Kogi State were still probably still going about clad in leaves in the 1920s and 1930s when the likes of Sir Louis Odumegwu Ojukwu was investing in Apapa Wharf and old Ikoyi. I am unconcerned about the underlying insult. It is more a reflection of Osuji’s character and sense of decency. But I pity this senior journalist who does not know that the Agatu belong to the Idoma ethnic extraction in Benue State. I am of the ‘Okun’, Yoruba-speaking part of Kogi State. In my piece, which set Osuji’s blood boiling, I stressed that not even the Yoruba-Speaking non-indigenous, residents of Lagos make the claim that Lagos is a no-man’s land as members of his ethnic group routinely and insultingly do. Sir Louis Odumegwu Ojukwu was able, like other notable Igbos, to invest massively in Lagos because they were warmly received, accommodated and given a receptive climate to invest by the indigenes. Can the Yoruba or even members of other ethnic groups be given the same opportunities across the South-East? The answer is all too obvious.

Let me here quote extensively from a lecture titled ‘The Igboman in the Political Economy of the Fourth Republic’ delivered to the Imo Forum in Abuja in May, 1999, by the renowned Professor of Finance, Professor Green Onyekaba Nwankwo. According to this reputable scholar, “As long as he continues to migrate, settle and invest massively to develop his resident state without bothering, seeking or asking for reciprocal deals from residents of other states, so long will the Igbo man’s home state remain denuded, undeveloped and unattractive for settlement and investment. Has the Igbo man, for instance, ever paused to ask and find out how many other Nigerians – non Igbos – reside in the Igbo states? Has he ever poised to wonder why the few who “manage” to reside perch as birds ready to flee at any time? Has he ever wondered why the few who reside scarcely invest in real estate and/or contribute to the development of Igbo land?”

Professor Green Nwankwo continues, “As long as the Igboman continues to sink money to reclaim swamps and clear forests, construct shopping malls, sky scrappers and posh houses in his resident states while gullies and erosion continue to  sap and wash away roads and destroy the environment in his home states, so long will he continue to be marginalized as life chances elude him in his home state…As long as he does not really invest to develop his home state and as long as he fails really to attract federal presence in his home state, so long will foreigners shun investment in the home states; and so long will real development continue to elude the Igbo in his home state”.

Is it not even preposterous that Steve Osuji will dare to attempt to tutor a man like Mr. Dele Alake on the rudiments of political strategy? Does he know that Mr. Alake and Mr. Tunji Bello along with Mr. Segun Babatope were some of the key strategists around the late Chief MKO Abiola and were also veterans of the struggle to actualize the annulled June 12, 1993, mandate of Abiola? Is he aware that Mr. Alake is a veteran strategist of several successful elections since the commencement of this dispensation in 1999 in addition to his deft and expert management of the Information and Strategy portfolio in Lagos State for eight years between 1999 and 2007?

Osuji pays fraudulent and hypocritical lip service to MKO to score cheap debating points. But how many Igbo states voted for Abiola in the historic June 12 election? He wonders why Tinubu has not a set up a foundation to pursue worthy causes. How many of such foundations has Peter Obi established? In any case, is he aware of Senator (Mrs) Oluremi Tinubu’s New Era Foundation and how much good it has done for youth from across the country? Is he ignorant of Mrs Tinubu’s contributions to sickle cell research in Nigeria?

All over the country, diverse individuals and groups are setting up campaign organizations mostly at their own cost to help achieve electoral victory for Tinubu next year. Most of them are doing this in gratitude for how much impact he has made in their lives over time. How many lives have Obi touched over the years and how many people has he mentored to achieve success in life as leaders in their own right as Tinubu has done?

For the humanistic scholar and thinker, man is the be-all and end-all of existence. Only that which is material, that which can be seen, heard, touched, tasted, smelled and felt is real. The spiritual is thus mere fantasy and thus no more than the creation of the fertility of the human imagination. This is perhaps what Marxists mean when they describe consciousness as a creation and reflection of matter and not vice-versa. Of course, not all radical academics are of the humanistic philosophical persuasion. Thus, the late Marxist political scientist, Professor Aaron Gana, for instance, started his Convocation lecture at the University of Jos with the famous declaration, “Let me start this lecture with two apologies. One is that because I am a “Jesus person” I am giving this lecture in Jesus name (Amen). My apology here is to those who might be offended by this declaration”. In giving this apology, Professor Gana obviously had in mind not only those who were not of a Christian religious persuasion but even more so those who are of a humanistic, materialistic, disposition particularly in an academic environment.

Many humanistic thinkers reject the notion that man is essentially and fundamentally flawed as a result of sin and thus hopelessly and helplessly in need of a savior and redeemer to reconcile him to God and salvage him from an innate disposition to evil leading to eternal damnation. ‘I am the captain of my soul and the master of my destiny’ is the enduring credo of the humanistic ideologue. For him, man is a perfect creation with no spiritual flaws. If so, however, how then do we explain the evil we can see all around us transcending social classes, levels of educational attainment, socio-economic status as well as across all categorizations of nations – developing, underdeveloped or developed? The humanist has no answer to the problem of prevalent and persistent evil in human nature and society. Is it any wonder then that such humanist ‘saviours’ of man as Lenin, Stalin or Mao Tse Tung, for example, did not flinch from slaughtering large numbers of people in striving to salvage society and promote what they perceive as the common good of mankind in their respective societies even though the means towards the achievement of their goals were manifestly evil?

Like Professor Gana, Professor Diji Aina comes across in his inaugural lecture under focus here as essentially a ‘Jesus person’. Thus, for him, factionalism has its roots in the inherent spiritually flawed nature of man that predisposes the individual to pervasive selfishness and self-centeredness thus fostering negative and dysfunctional factionalism across diverse sectors of society. As he put it, “The implication of the foregoing is that factionalism is the outward manifestation of a sinful (rebellious) heart, covetousness and of fallen humanity…In the biblical context, factions are outcomes of rebellious acts and are often created via subtle persuasion to upturn natural order and events. In Genesis 3:1-6, the serpent, portrayed as “more crafty than man” asked, “Did God really say you must not eat from any tree in the garden?” From this spiritual analytic paradigm, Professor Aina concludes that “The moral lesson here is that it is only by allowing the indwelling Holy Spirit that we can have eternal peace, one that propels cooperative rather than degenerative spirit that results in factions and its attendant consequences of conflict and violence”.

After a detailed and exhaustive excursion into the manifestations of factionalism in Nigeria right from the colonial era through to the first, second, aborted third and now fourth Republic, Professor Aina posits that “It was not until the advent of crude oil as a major, national, income-earning source that the personal lust over state resources became so evident. Hitherto, it had been shrouded in a regional, economic interest-driven struggle for the political soul of the nation”. It is instructive in this regard that in the first republic, the most progressive, rapidly modernizing and prosperous part of the country, the Western Region, was the most affected by a fierce destructive factionalism within the ruling party, the Action Group, that split the party down the middle, fostered the massive rigging of regional elections, degenerated into widespread anarchic violence that ultimately resulted in the January, 1966 coup and the collapse of democratic rule only six years after independence.

Although the military was initially welcomed by large sections of the populace as a redeeming political Messiah which intervened to save the country from the misrule and venality of the politicians, it took little time before the intervening military itself became the victims of divisive organizational factionalism that deepened ethno-regional mistrust, bred widespread instability and severely threatened the country’s cohesion and continued existence. As Professor Aina pungently and lucidly put it, “Resources accruable from crude oil are largely administered by those who are located outside the terrain of crude oil exploitation thereby creating factions and struggle for control. This resulted in separatist agitations, which eventually led to recurring military coups and transition governments in what Oyediran and others documented as “Transition Without End”.

Read Also: Professor Diji Aina on factionalism, Economic Parasitism and State Fragility (1)

Professor Aina continues by depicting the linkage among militarism, crude oil, economic parasitism of the elite and state fragility. In his words, “Military insurgency and counter-insurgency took the odious dimension, not only truncating the development of civilian rule but the destruction of the socio-political and economic fabric of the nation. Corruption became ubiquitous, evil and malignant. Even the clergy that once served as distant echo of “voice of reason” got engulfed in the greasing of palms and monetary inducement to gain public endorsement…Nigeria is evidently at crossroads. As I have documented in a number of publications, and as many other scholars have confirmed, the factions have multiplied, metamorphosed and transmogrified becoming malignant and inimical to national progress. They have left in their wake multifaceted fragmentations that have resulted in over one million people killed in just 30 months of a civil war and scores of other people most recently in the Niger-Delta insurgency and an international terror-induced hydra-headed insurgency known as Boko Haram”.

The lecturer documents the pervasive and persistent factionalization of political parties and groups in the current fourth republic since 1999, the deepening of corrupt elite enrichment through access to state power, rampant political vagrancy of the polite elite from one party to the other in desperate quest for platforms to contest for public office with scant regard for fidelity to party ideology, philosophy or principles. Just as intra-party factionalism was partly responsible for the loss of the PDP’s control of power at the centre to the emergent APC in 2015, no sooner had the new party assumed office than it became bogged down with fragmentation and factionalism leading not only to organizational immobility but also competing cabals in government resulting in state paralysis on diverse fronts.

According to the author, “Assessing the new ruling party, (APC), as more or less a replica of the former ruling party (PDP), Schineider (2015), dubbed the APC as “an opportunistic coalition of interests.” In  the scenario that ended the seventh assembly, “cross carpeting”, which was the buzzword of of the politics of the 1960s was replaced with “defection”. All it took to decamp or defect in Nigeria’s puerile political ecology was to feel shortchanged in the sharing of the national cake at any point time”. As the countdown to next year’s elections continues, the political elite in control of state power persist in behaving like economic vampires, sucking the resources that should be the lifeblood of providing for the wellbeing of the generality of the people, and rendering the state even more fragile as manifested by pervasive criminality, kidnapping, banditry, rape, incompetent economic management and the contestation of the very sovereignty of the state by criminal gangs and terroristic elements.

Even then, with the evidently increasing autonomy of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), and the intensification of the utilization of technology to enhance the credibility and transparency of the electoral process, the electorate may increasingly begin to more effectively utilize the power of the ballot to effect positive change in the efficacy and quality of governance in the country.

Although Professor Aina proposes no less than ten recommendations to deal with and minimize the dysfunctional effects of degenerative factionalism in society, I will conclude by citing only one of these because it brings us right back to the spiritual underpinning of his lecture, with which we began the second part of this review. In his words, “The political society should be re-oriented towards cooperative and competitive rather than degenerative factionalism. This can be achieved if there is a deliberate effort/program towards minimizing crass materialism in the national psyche of the citizenry, using the East Asian “tiger” and Scandinavian countries’ experiences as benchmarks. I call for a return to primitive godliness, a lifestyle that aligns with the biblical aphorism “righteousness exalts a nation, sin is a reproach”. Factionalism is rooted in self and sin”.

Although his inaugural lecture interestingly delivered on the ninth day of March in the ninth year of his promotion to the rank of professor at the Babcock University some six years ago in 2016, Professor Diji Aina’s dissection of the phenomenon of factionalism, economic parasitism and state fragility with particular reference to Africa and Nigeria specifically is one of the most exhaustive and insightful searchlights on the subject that I have read. The issues raised in the lecture are ever so refreshingly relevant to the push and pull of communal life in diverse polities across time and space. Titled ‘Factionalism, Economic Vampires and the Fragile State’, the discourse analyses diverse forms of cooperative and thus healthy factionalism as well as competitive, conflict-laden and thus dysfunctional  factionalism in polities ranging from South Korea, Eastern Europe and Latin America, Western Europe, the United States of America and of course Africa.

Although some scholars have an essentially atomistic view of man as an isolated individual fundamentally preoccupied with the selfish pursuit particularly of his existential material interest at the expense of others, the philosophical basis of the ‘economic man’ of capitalist society, man is basically a social or political animal in Aristotelian terms whose life can only be meaningful in his relationship with other fellow homo sapiens. The imperative of living in society since man is not created to live a Robinson Crusoe-type of self-reliant existence makes the interaction of individuals with others in society inevitable essentially through the formation of groups which may be economic, religious, cultural, military, professional, educational, ethnic, leisure-related or, of course, political in nature.

The political association in the form of the political party in democratic polities’ is perhaps the pre-eminent group in society since it competes with other like groups for the control of state power and the legitimate authority to coordinate and allocate values as well as determine, in the formulation of the political scientist, Harold Lasswell, who gets what, when and how in the societal distribution of resources even though he is criticized for not paying sufficient attention to the production of those resources as well as how much goes to the constitutive classes of society.

Stressing the inevitability of factionalism in organized society, Professor Aina notes that the phenomenon “is an integral part of the political process whether in corporate political settings, autocracy or democracy. Party politics globally has served only as a tool of factional strategy in order to achieve political power. In other words, party politics depended on factionalism because the goal of party politics has been about access to power, the route to economic resources”. He sheds further light on the concept of factionalism stating that “Whereas in the cooperative and competitive typologies, the State is strengthened; in the degenerative model, the fragility of the state is seriously highlighted. For instance, factionalism contributed to political paralysis of the Soviet Union in the late 1970s, delayed Gorbachev’s political reforms in the 1980s, made the prospect of Obama’s last two years dull, and created an ugly scenario in 2015 in Nigeria’s national politics, thereby stultifying the change mantra”.

Incidentally, for the first phase of governance in post-colonial Africa, the fractious character of democratic politics as captured by Professor Aina’s conception of factionalism bred a distrust for liberal democracy with some of the modernization theorists such as Samuel Huntington at the time in the early 60s and 70s,  perceiving and promoting the military, for instance, with its supposed organizational attributes of discipline, efficiency, primacy on order, hierarchy and promptness as a modernizing agent through what was described as ‘developmental dictatorship’. It was this same kind of rationalization that sought to justify the rash of military, one-party and one-man dictatorships across Africa at the time that was perceived as more suited for the attainment of Africa’s desired rapid development than the rancorous debates, noisy disputations, intra-party disputes and inter-party conflicts and protracted legislative deliberations characteristic of liberal democracy, a scenario vividly captured by Professor Aina’s conception of factionalism, which was seen as unduly distracting and obstructive of accelerated transformation in underdeveloped societies needing fast-paced transformation.

It took bitter experience for African and other underdeveloped countries to see that imposing the peace and seeming order of the graveyard on a polity in the quest for development, rather than being a sure and speedy route to development, bred pervasive corruption, drove grievance, dissension and faction underground, inevitably nurtured political persecution, oppression and pernicious human rights abuse while worsening instability and deepening underdevelopment. In Nigeria since 1999, for instance, the most intense forms of intra-party disputations, political disagreements, poor governance, degenerative violence, unbridled corruption among other perverse manifestations of the political process have not tempted Nigerians to desire a return to military or any other form of dictatorship. Sometimes chaotic factionalism is increasingly being seen as an integral part of political contestation in a free and plural society and society must incrementally and systematically develop the capacity to manage such within the prism of democratic culture, institutions and processes.

Illustrated throughout Professsor Aina’s lecture is the thesis that “Factions are ubiquitous aspects of life. From the Caudillos of Latin America where, according to Lewis (2006) strong colorful personalities impose their will on the people through the “hyper-presidential” system to political paralysis leading to Mikhail Gorbachev reform politics of the 1980s in the defunct Soviet Union to the gridlock cum divided government of the United States, factions have either strengthened or weakened the state”. But while relatively strong institutions as well as restraining moral or cultural values have been able to help contain the dysfunctional and disruptive consequences of governmental gridlock or democratic decay in advanced democracies such as Donald Trump’s America or Boris Johnson’s United Kingdom, factionalism has had more devastating and destructive consequences in underdeveloped polities like Nigeria.

As Professor Aina explains, “Unlike in the United States where the political system is confronted by a gridlock and a divided government arising from multiplicity of interest groups and policy options, the Nigerian space is perforated by rampaging economic vampires, predatory elite gangs and a disoriented civic populace whose mind is sold to a complex web of patrons”. The economic parasitism of the political elite described by the professor as ‘rampaging political vampires’ is thus the key explanatory variable that links extreme and divisive factional contestations in Nigeria to state fragility and debilitating underdevelopment.

As he pungently makes the point, “The concept of vampire is mythological. It conveys the idea of an entity or being whose goal is sucking out the life essence (i.e. blood or life sustaining fluid) of other living beings. In this lecture, we use economic vampires to represent all agents of the State and non-State actors who fuel factional flames and fan the embers of degenerative politics with the ultimate goal of preying on the economy. They come as political and economic entrepreneurs, multi-national corporation actors as well as other entities and persons whose apotheosis is putting profit ahead of all other goals and to the exclusion of ethical and moral considerations”.   In the concluding part of this essay, we will relate Professor Aina’s ideas to the character of politics, paralysis of governance, decay of values, heightened state fragility and developmental degeneracy in Nigeria’s fourth Republic with particular attention on the forthcoming general elections.

It is all too rare for good or hopeful news to emanate from our public tertiary institution system at this time. The decrepit facilities including lecture halls, libraries, hostels and laboratories, demotivated lecturers, disoriented and often distracted students and the chronic underfunding that lies at the root of most of these challenges in these institution are too well known. What is baffling is the seeming sheer arrogance, criminal indifference, inexplicable paralysis of will and so obvious cluelessness of successive governments in dealing decisively and creatively with the debilitating, multifarious crises of tertiary education in Nigeria. It is not a peculiar problem of the President Muhammadu Buhari administration as a shamelessly hypocritical opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) would seek, for instance, to portray the persisting 7-month old ongoing strike by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) as if it was any less clueless and inept in handling the problems confronting the sector in its 16 years in power at the centre.

Rather, the crisis of higher education in postcolonial Nigeria is largely a function of the venality, lack of vision, patriotism and capacity of a decadent, incompetent and hopelessly indolent ruling class comprising functionaries of diverse governments and parties across time. Unfortunately, the ranks of Nigerian academia itself including the higher echelon of university administration in the public sector, is also hobbled by the same industrial-scale corruption, inefficiency and ineffectiveness that characterize the ruling class as a whole not excluding substantial sections of the all too often hypocritical media elite I must hasten to add. But then, this piece is not about the gloom around tertiary education especially public universities in Nigeria but rather focuses on a glimmer of hope as regards the bright future that can be for this sector as indicated by a recent seemingly trivial but really significant event.

Recently, graduate and final year students of foreign policy from the Department of Political Science of the Lagos State University (LASU), undertook a field study visit to the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA), Victoria Island, Lagos, where they interacted with the specialists of the reputable research institute on various aspects of Nigeria and Africa’s foreign policy and the dynamics of international relations in general. The initiative I am told was necessitated by the need to expose the students to the foreign policy formulation process and is part of an evolving culture at LASU of encouraging its researchers, lecturers and students to engage productively with ministries, agencies, industries and other institutions through brainstorming, cross-fertilization of ideas, enriching the learning process and fostering greater synergy between theory and relevant practice.

This initiative surely would not have been possible if the Lagos State government-owned LASU had also been on strike like the federal and some state universities across the country. It is all too easy to forget now that LASU once used to be a hot bed of rabid and rancid, militant academic unionism which, coupled with rampant cultism, moral depravity, frequent strikes among other ills made the institution’s academic and social environment anarchic and chaotic. Sanity has, however, been gradually restored to the institution and normalcy regained over the last few years, a situation that I am told has been substantially improved upon by the incumbent Vice-Chancellor, Professor Mrs. Ibiyemi-Olatunji Bello, within her short duration in office thus far. This is indeed not surprising as, before her current appointment, Professor Bello had previously served at various times as Deputy Vice Chancellor and Acting Vice Chancellor and had been a key Actor in the gradual restoration of normalcy to LASU with a predictable academic calendar for the school and the continuing systematic enhancement of its institutional prestige.

When I asked an academic at the school what the social and academic climate looked like now, he was optimistic and upbeat. “Staff morale is high. Salaries are paid not later than 22nd or 23rd of every month. Outstanding promotions have mostly been effected and current promotions are routinely done accordingly. Members of staff are encouraged to go on their annual vacations and undertake sabbaticals. If you visit the university, you will see numerous ongoing structures at various stages construction springing up. The credit goes not just to the VC but also to the governor, Mr. Babajide Sanwo-Olu, who obviously accords high priority to the accelerated transformation of the institution”.

The study visit by students of LASU to the NIIA was evidently a function of the cooperative, collegial spirit prevalent in the institution. It is significant that the team was led by Professor Kayode Soremekun, a former Vice Chancellor of the Federal University, Oye-Ekiti (FUOYE) and a renowned scholar in politics and international relations with specialization in the domestic and global politics of the oil industry. He was accompanied by Dr. Abdul-Wasi Moshood, an accomplished political scientist who has published extensively in the areas of international relations, peace, conflict and governance issues. Of course, the inter-institutional collaboration would not have been possible without the support of the Head of the Department of Political Science, Dr. Paul Sewa-Thoevetin, a well- regarded authority on development and governance issues, as well as the Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences, Professor Omobitan Olufunsho Abayomi, who obtained his M.Sc and PhD degrees from the University of Vienna, Austria and was a co-winner along with Professor Adeniyi Harrison also of LASU of the Y2020 Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) national research fund.

Incidentally, this column has a number of times interrogated the often provocative ideas of the rhythmical journalistic prose stylist and engaging international relations scholar, Dr. Dapo Thomas, whose authoritative work, ‘The Political Economy of Nigeria-United States Relations’ was published in 2018. LASU no doubt reflects the depth of talent and expertise that still abound in Nigeria’s university system despite the myriad challenges confronting tertiary education in the country. But then, would the NIIA have been an attractive institution for students of Nigerian universities to undertake a study visit to just a few years ago? The answer is a categorical no. But under its new Director-General, Professor Eghosa Osaghae, the country’s premier and most prestigious foreign policy research and formulation think-tank, has undergone a veritable organizational and intellectual renaissance.

In the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s, the famous main auditorium of the NIIA was the venue for the delivery of critical public lectures and the hosting of diverse symposia, conferences and colloquia that vigorously dissected national issues and proffered creative and insightful solutions. I recall, for instance, a lecture titled ‘Religion and National Integration’ delivered at the NIIA by the former Prime Minister of the Sudan, Al Sadiq El-Madhi, sometime in 2001. It foresees and addresses many of what have become intractable religious problems in Nigeria and other parts of Africa today. If his call on the west at the time not to equate westernization with human civilization and not to adopt a superior disposition to other religions and cultures, would we have avoided one of the backlashes such as the diverse forms of Islamic extremism? El-Mahdi in that lecture called on the West to make three adjustments: “To recognize that its civilization is indebted to others. A point made by Martin Bernal in his book, Black Athena, and by Montgomery Watt in his book, ,The Influence of Islamic civilization on Medieval Europe. To recognize that other cultures have a valuable contribution to make. To accept the fact that as other cultures borrow from the West, they will do so voluntarily and in terms acceptable to them”.

Once again, under the watch of Professor Osaghae, one of Africa’s most distinguished and widely published political scientists who lectured at the University of Ibadan for several years, a former Vice-Chancellor of Nigeria’s premier private university, Igbinedion University, Okada, and Visiting Emeka Anyaoku Chair of Commonwealth Studies at the University of London for 2013/2014, the NIIA has bounced back as a boiling cauldron of intellectual versatility and robust public discourse on national issues and foreign policy. Earlier this year, to cite just one instance, the NIIA collaborated with the Federal Ministry of Youth and Sports Development to organize the first ever conference on Sports Diplomacy as a driver of Nigeria’s foreign policy agenda for Africa, highlighting the power of sports to promote peace and positive change in the world.

Incidentally, on the day the LASU students visited the NIIA, the institution’s interns and senior interns were having their seminar and group debate on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Some of the visiting students were assembled into two groups and offered their perspectives on the issue to the admiration of the management and staff of the NIIA as regards their impressive acquaintance with current and international affairs. Addressing the visiting students, the Research Fellow, Division of Strategic and Security Studies of the NIIA, Dr. Sunday Olubejide, explained the dialectical relationship between a country’s foreign policy and the dynamic interaction of domestic and external factors in international relations.

It is a measure of the depth of the NIIA’s human resource base that renowned Professor of Comparative Politics and International Relations, Professor Femi Otubanjo, who taught for several years at the University of Ibadan and is a respected authority on foreign policy, is a Senior Fellow at the Institute and the students ought to know that they were indeed privileged to interact with such a profound and experienced mind. Perhaps noticing the assorted and sophisticated phones that many of the students carried, Professor Otunbanjo advised them that the phones were not just useful for engaging in conversations or indulging in entertainment but that they were indeed veritable storehouses of valuable information and vast mobile libraries. Reinforcing this, Professor Osaghae stressed the need for the students to read and study widely beyond their recommended texts in class while also acquainting themselves with the works of leading authorities in their fields.

However dismal the situation may appear, there are so many brilliant minds still doing quality and productive work in our higher institutions and research institutes across the country. They are the ones producing the brilliant minds who then travel out of the country to perform exceptionally in post-graduate and other professional studies abroad. A few years ago, this writer stumbled across a six-volume collection of the academic essays of Professor Eghosa Osaghae published in various reputable political science journals between 1986 and 2010 at a bookshop here in Lagos. Although, it made a heavy dent on the pocket, I did not hesitate to acquire the veritable treasure trove which is an invaluable part of my modest library today. This is an example of the uncommon brilliance and industry of many a Nigerian academic. Surely, they deserve their reward right here on earth and government has a responsibility to create the requisite environment and provide the motivation for their talents to flower and flourish for the benefit of accelerated national development. The LASU-NIIA example suggests that there is indeed hope for a thriving intellectual enterprise in Nigeria.

When he spoke on the then appalling Apapa traffic gridlock that hitherto defied all attempts at an enduring solution at the formal handing over of three new improved traffic-prone junctions along the Lagos-Expressway over a year ago, Governor Babajide Olusola Sanwo-Olu (BOS) of Lagos State sounded tentative and somewhat hesitant. In his words on that occasion, “What we are seeing is the beginning of the lasting solution we have brought to Apapa. Our appeal is that we are not out of the problem yet. Our citizens can now see that a journey that took three hours can, indeed, take between 15 and 20 minutes to commute. Everyone can now see that when we work together, indeed we can solve our problems internally. We have taken some troublesome people are benefitting from the gridlock out of the way. We know they will want to fight back. We will not stop at anything to ensure that anybody that tries to retract the progress or wants to take us back to gridlock in Apapa will be fought against”.

Answering a question from Seun Okinbaloye in his recent interview on Channels Television, however, BOS sounded a more confident, upbeat and optimistic note as he enthused on his administration’s record in resolving one of the most notorious and intractable neighbourhood traffic, environmental, public health and urban planning conundrums in Lagos State. According to the governor on that programme, “I am looking straight into the camera and I can boldly say that I have fixed Apapa gridlock. NPA has written letters to commend us. All of the major businesses in Apapa have equally written. I get daily video recording of what is happening in Apapa. I have gotten one for today and I am sure I will get more between seven o’clock and nine o’clock, between one o’clock and three o’clock on a daily basis”. Incidentally, having personally been held up in the horrendous Apapa traffic gridlock for hours a number of times I had avoided the area like a plague for years. Extensive enquiries however revealed that the governor is right and sanity has been restored on the highways in huge swathes of the area particularly the approaches to the ports.

On assumption of office, BOS had approached the Federal Government for the disbandment of the Presidential Task force on Apapa gridlock set up to find a lasting solution to the protracted challenge. The state government then set up a Special Traffic Management Team to take over the responsibility of restoring normalcy in Apapa. BOS is honest and modest enough to readily admit that the success recorded on the issue thus far is not a solo effort of his administration but a function of collaboration with several stakeholders including the Nigeria Ports Authority (NPA), Federal Ministry of Transportation, Maritime operators, seaport unions and security agencies. A key factor in this collaborative effort at finding solutions was the inauguration by the NPA of its Electronic Truck Call-Up system, operated by Truck Transit Park Limited (TTP), which has largely eliminated manual management of truck movement and access to and from the Lagos ports by employing technology to ease the traffic gridlock in the axis.

In a recent interview, the Special Adviser to the governor on Transportation and Chairman of Apapa Traffic Management and Enforcement Committee, Mr. Oluwatoyin Fayinka, said “Before now, for you to move a truck during the TTP time people pay as much as N150,000 to N200,000 to move a truck from Ijora-Olopa to Apapa Port because it was based on manual operations and anything that is manual has human interference”. An official of the company responsible for operating the Electronic Truck Call-Up system, estimated that the cost of moving containers from Apapa Port to warehouses has drastically reduced by over 62.5% depending on the location of the importers’ warehouses. But has the Apapa traffic gridlock been completely solved? BOS does not pretend so. As he told Okinbaloye, “What used to take two hours, three hours, now takes 15 to 20 minutes. But what is the remainder of the problem? The Federal Government is doing the route from Sunrise in MTN from Mile 2 end and going towards Apapa. That is the portion that has not been completed. I think it is a stretch less than a kilometer. That stretch needs to be completed for you to have a complete cleanup of it”.

BOS also noted that there are still trailers on some of these roads because of some internal sabotage of the NPA’s Electronic Truck Call-Up system although the initiative has worked reasonably well. To assist the NPA with additional trailer parks to take trucks off the roads, he said the state government is building a trailer park for the agency in Orile to accommodate about 2000 trucks “and with an effective call-up system in place, trucks that have not been called  up would have no business coming to Apapa”.  According to the governor, “There are the little glitches we have to finalize with them, but in terms of blockages to citizens, we have done a good job”. Indeed, the achievement of the administration in Apapa is no less momentous than the much applauded success of the Mr. Babatunde Raji Fashola administration in salvaging, upgrading and transforming Oshodi from the veritable urban jungle it used to be.

As the BOS administration sustains and improves on its salvage efforts in Apapa, scores of residents and businesses that had relocated from the axis will no doubt gradually begin to return, the quality of the environment will be elevated, property values will be enhanced, new enterprises will spring up creating jobs and boosting prosperity while Apapa will once again begin to realize its hitherto trapped economic potentials to the benefit of Lagos State and Nigeria. During the week, the BOS administration had the opportunity to appraise the impact so far of the total ban announced by the governor on 18th May, 2022, of Okada motorcycle operations in six Local Government Councils and the respective nine Local Council Development Areas under them at a Stakeholders’ Forum organized by the Ministry of Information and Strategy as well as the Ministry of Transportation with the theme: ‘Okada Ban – What Next’. This ban being enforced by the Lagos State Anti-Okada Squad in collaboration with the police and the military was in response to rampant violation of traffic regulations by the Okada riders, the high injury and death rates caused by the frequent accidents of the motorcycles on the highways as well as the widespread implication of the Okadas in criminal activities across the state.

Speaking on the effects of the Okada ban in the affected areas on the Channels Television interview referred to earlier, BOS had said: “Not only are we seeing a drop in issues around security, traffic, robberies and so on, we do not see people maimed or limbs being cut in hospitals again. These were things that terminated people’s lives unexpectedly. Therefore, we have seen tremendous improvements in that area. In terms of rate of mortality in the last two months, at the peak of it, we were seeing about 550 Okada related accidents per month in January-February. Now, it is down to 100 direct accidents that we have seen from our hospitals. It has significantly gone down”. Participants at the Stakeholders’ Forum, which included traditional rulers, residents and Community Development Associations among others, unanimously agreed that the ban had been positive and beneficial and urged that it should be extended to other parts of the state.

A communique issued at the end of the event stated that “The enforcement of the ban should be sustained to ensure that the gains of the ban are not reversed. The pockets of riders still found operating on forbidden routes, especially highways, should be arrested and made to face the consequences of their actions. The Lagos State Government should enforce a total ban on Okada to further improve safety and security in Lagos”. It was obviously in accordance with the public mood and sentiments that the government has extended the ban to additional four Local Government Areas and six Local Development Areas in the State. Speaking on television this week, the Commissioner for Information and Strategy, Mr.Gbenga Omotosho, said the former Okada riders were being encouraged to undergo training in various trades in the 19 Skills Acquisition and Vocational Training Centres across the state after which they will be empowered and equipped to set up small businesses as part of alternative means for them to earn a living.

It will be recalled that last year BOS had launched 500 units of locally assembled First and Last Mile seven and eleven- Seater buses (FLM) for deployment to 286 community routes in the state as alternative means of transportation to Okada. The fleet which comes with a premium insurance cover on the lives of passengers and drivers is to be gradually increased to 5000 buses ultimately. And according to the Managing Director of the Lagos State Ferry Services (LAGFERRY), Mr. Abdoulbaq Ladi Balogun, the BOS administration has invested heavily in water transportation over the last three years in accordance with the modal transportation component of its THEMES agenda. Its efforts in this regard include the procurement of 15 state-of-art boats to enhance water transportation in the state bringing the total fleet to 20 operating daily across 14 routes in all divisions within the state, aggressive dredging of the waterways, removal of wreckages along the coastline, construction and rehabilitation of terminals/jetties to open new areas to water transportation and investment security and safety equipment through the construction of Real-Time Command and Control Centres to safeguard the waterways and ensure quick emergency response. Of course, this is work in progress as so much still needs to be done to eliminate incidences of boats capsizing and lives being lost on the state’s waterways.

Also this week, BOS personally flagged off the laying of the last track beam (T-beam), which signals the final phase of the journey towards the actualization of the 27km Lagos Blue Line Rail Mass Transit at the Marina station of the rail project. The governor announced that the Blue Line, which will run from Lagos Marina-Orile Iganmu-Mile 2 – Okokomaiko and ultimately down to Badagry will commence commercial shuttles in January 2023 while the Red Line started from scratch by the BOS administration and which will run from Agbado to Lagos Marina will come on stream later in the first quarter of next year. The governor also said that the state government would soon reveal feasibility studies on four new rail lines that are already in the rail master plan that produced the Blue and Rail Lines.

As the Commissioner for The Environment noted in his contribution on an online platform recently, “Asiwaju Tinubu designed seven rail lines for Lagos in 2005 and I was a member of his cabinet as well as a member of the committee that designed it including the present governor. First was a cabinet team sent to three South American countries that came back and we decided through modifications that Lagos needed what we saw. Out of our committee came seven rail lines out of which Fashola who succeeded him and a member of the team at that time started the Blue Line. And Sanwo-Olu who was also a member of the team started the Red Line. The Green Line is for Lekki corridor all the way to Epe and from Epe to connect the Purple Line to Ikorodu”. Surely, under BOS, Lagos continues her steady and steadfast match towards her rendezvous with her historic destiny as a model, smart African megacity.