By Segun Ayobolu

 

Media reportage of deliberations of an event tagged the ‘Northern Summit’, which held on Wednesday, April 5, at the Arewa House, Kaduna, indicate that the Northern Elders Forum (NEF), Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF) and a former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Honourable Ghali Umar Na’Abba, perceive some kind of grand conspiracy against the North by the South. There seems to be little empirical or logical basis to come to this kind of conclusion. In his submission at the event, Honourable Na’Abba alleged that a former President from the South had an agenda to destroy the North in 1999. According to him,  “In 1999, when I realized that there was an agenda against the North, I did everything possible to ensure it doesn’t succeed but it’s among our governors that I met one of the stiffest oppositions. Some of them because they want to come back, some because they want to become president, worked with the president who wants (sic) to destroy the north”.

Unfortunately, the reports did not quote Na’Abba in further and more helpful detail. It is not clear why Na’Abba chose to raise this issue at this time. This column is unaware that former President Olusegun Obasanjo, obviously referred to by the former Speaker, ever had an agenda to destroy the north. My reading of Obasanjo’s politics is that he is more pro-Nigeria than he is either pro-North or pro-South. Obasanjo perceives himself as a super patriot and even considers himself, if I am not mistaken, a Nigerian first before he is a Yoruba man. The failure of the bid to impeach Obasanjo in his first term, during Na’Abba’s tenure as Speaker, was simply because the move lacked merit.

On his part, the Deputy Chairman of the ACF, Senator Ibrahim Ida, described the North as “the fabric holding Nigeria together” and lamented that “We are being provoked by the incessant attacks on Northerners in the South. We must therefore ensure that nobody takes us for granted or underestimate us…The North is at crossroad. We really need internal cohesion of what the North stands for, the resources available and what we want to achieve”. Senator Ida can plausibly and justifiably make a case for developmental collaboration by components within the region to promote the accelerated transformation of the North without making it sound as if he is mobilizing the North against the South.

In the first place, there is neither a cohesive North nor a cohesive South, which can jointly and successfully plan and actualize any agenda against the other and this is infinitely more difficult now than in the past. Secondly, contrary to his assertion, neither the North nor the South is the fabric holding Nigeria together. Despite current grave security challenges, Nigeria is being held together by a complex web of intricate, interwoven economic networks and linkages, millions of cross cultural intermarriages, diverse forms of cultural interpenetration across regions and zones, patterns of shared religious faiths and social confraternities as well as the intangible but not insubstantial, mutual psycho-emotional feelings Nigerians share across primordial boundaries when, for instance, the Nigerian football team at any level is playing against other nations.

In his submission at the event, the leader of the NEF, Professor Ango Abdullahi, accused Southern leaders of utilizing the threat of restructuring as a bargaining chip to secure the zoning of the presidency to the South come 2023. In his words, “Using restructuring as a threat or bargaining tool for accepting zoning will destroy the imperatives of restructuring and imperil the country”. What one can read into Professor Abdullahi’s submission is that restructuring as being advocated mostly by southern socio-cultural and political pressure groups, but also increasingly supported by some northern elements, will benefit the south to the detriment of the north or that key groups or political figures in the north do not feel bound by any reported informal power rotation agreement with the South.

Firstly, there is no unanimity or even meaningful consensus in the South on what is meant or desired by restructuring. It seems, however, that there is emerging a broad pan-Nigerian consensus around effecting constitutional amendments to strengthen the decentralizing, federal features of the current excessively rigid and centralized constitution. What an esteemed Northerner like Professor Abdullahi should realize, however, is that the current structure of the Nigerian polity hurts the North as much as, if not more, than the South.

Ironically, for instance, despite the current widespread perceived unfair skewing of the ethno-regional composition of the higher echelon of the country’s security architecture in favour of the North, that region, plagued by protracted insurgency, rampant banditry, kidnapping, communal upheavals and other assorted forms of criminality in vast swathes of its territory, is the greatest victim of the insecurity plaguing the country. Thousands of lives are being wasted across the North daily. Thus, the Northern Governors Forum (NGF) has not hesitated in joining governors in the South in advocating for a decentralization of the country’s security architecture and the establishment, specifically, of state-controlled police commands.

In the same vein, reviewing the revenue allocation formula to guarantee more revenue to the sub-national units or amending the constitution to enable states own and exploit mineral resources within their jurisdictions for the benefit of their people while paying appropriate taxes to the centre will probably benefit the north more than the south. It is thus untenable to claim that advocacy for restructuring in the south is an instrument of threat for the 2023 presidency to be zoned to the region.

On the issue of zoning, Professor Abdullahi makes three points. One, that northern voters had supported Chief MKO Abiola, General Olusegun Obasanjo and Dr Goodluck Jonathan to win presidential elections in the past even when these candidates competed against Northerners. Thus, he submits, voters from the north are not parochial but “enlightened and conscious of their responsibilities”. Second, he states that no aspirant of northern extraction should expect support from the north “simply because he is one of us”. Rather, “Those politicians who want northerners to vote in a particular manner should soil their boots and convince northerners how their candidates will improve security, economy and society in the north and the country”.

Professor Abdullahi’s submissions in this regard illustrate the complexity of zoning as a power rotation mechanism for ensuring equity, maintaining stability and fostering harmony and cohesion in a complex, plural society like ours. This is particularly so in a multi-party system like Nigeria’s where parties cannot legally be prohibited from fielding candidates from any part of the country irrespective of whatever power sharing pacts exist among intra-party elite factions and fractions. What is thus of utmost importance, in my view, is the level of maturity and fidelity among the hegemonic factions of the dominant political parties to ensure that whatever zoning arrangement is followed does not compromise the key requirement of merit and competence, but also recognizing that prolonged domination of key offices by either the South or the North will have serious detrimental implications for democratic sustainability, political stability and national cohesion.

The third point made by Professor Abdullahi is more controversial and subtly threatening. In his words, “Politicians who cannot impose their influence on irredentists that threaten our corporate existence and the lives and livelihoods of our fellow northerners stand on very thin ground in our estimation. Politicians who want the support and the vote of the Northerner, but will not raise their voices and act to protect them against undeserved treatment in areas where they have power and influence, should not expect to find our people with open arms when they ask for our support”. Here, the professor is subtly echoing Senator Ida’s allegation of widespread attacks on northerners in the south. This allegation is based on isolated and largely spontaneous, accidental clashes between herdsmen and sedentary communities in a few areas in the South.

It is not surprising that a seasoned academic and statesman like Professor Abdullahi is more restrained and circumspect in expressing his views so as not to unduly inflame passions in an easily combustible situation. Governors like Bello Matawalle and Bello Mohammed of Zamfara and Bauchi, respectively, would do well to learn from this example. But is it true that northerners are being widely attacked in the South? These claims are grossly exaggerated. There are millions of people of northern extraction peacefully earning their living in the South and vice versa in the North. Luckily, a consensus is gradually emerging around solutions to herdsmen-farmers clashes in the south: In the north, radically modernize the cattle business to make open grazing of cattle across long distances unattractive, unnecessary and unprofitable. In the South, organize ill-equipped, poor and isolated, peasant farmers into thriving, modern, secure cooperative communities.

Contrary to the assertions of some of these northern elders, mainstream political and traditional leaders in the south do not support secession as a solution to problems that, with maturity and wisdom, can be resolved through peaceful dialogue. Indeed, many of them do not disagree with Professor Ango Abdullahi’s assertion that “It is not acceptable that any Northerner should protect criminal Fulani, whether he operates in the North or South, and it is equally unacceptable that Fulanis who are not involved in criminal activities should be profiled, demonized, murdered or expelled from communities”. The Buhari administration will considerably help ameliorate matters if it quickly and decisively addresses the perceived insularity and lack of national outlook, particularly in its key security appointments, that, among others, trigger separatist agitations and inclinations in the South.

By Segun Ayobolu

 

Nigeria is today confronted with an existential crisis of multidimensional proportions. Not only are her peace and stability gravely imperiled but her continuous existence as a cohesive territorial entity faces severe stresses and strains. Even as the situation degenerates daily, both the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) and the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) are preoccupied with ruinous inanities and flimsy distractions. Yet, this is at a time when all hands should be on deck and focused on redirecting the ship of state away from an imminent disastrous shipwreck and back to a saner and safer course. The grave security crisis, which has made the entire country a veritable killing field as a result of religious extremism, intolerance and violence; communal clashes, banditry, kidnapping, rape, cattle rustling, herdsmen terrorism among others has whittled into insignificance the President Muhammadu administration’s modest accomplishments on the socioeconomic terrain.

Yet, as the vast majority of Nigerians endure the pains and pangs of hunger, joblessness, avoidable diseases, homelessness and other indices of poverty, individuals, tendencies and factions within the APC are preoccupied with the 2023 general elections. They are embroiled in energy-sapping intrigues and maneuvers to seize control of the party structures at all levels so as to place them in a vantage position to fly the party’s flag for various offices come 2023. Thus, rather than being focused and exerting all efforts at confronting and transcending the current socioeconomic, political and security crises, the APC does not even have a stable leadership presently. It is being run by the Extra-Ordinary National Caretaker and Convention Planning Committee headed by Yobe State governor, Mr. Mai Mala Buni, which is currently superintending what it describes as a membership registration and revalidation exercise.

If as is being speculated the party is unable to hold its congresses and National Convention in June as previously scheduled, it means that members of the APC, including public office holders at all levels, will continue to be distracted by preparations for the intra-party elections with no definitive dates in mind as regards when they will hold. Unfortunately, the opposition PDP is no less distracted and faced with serious internal organizational schisms arising from conflicting interests with respect to the 2023 elections.  Rather than learn from its calamitous loss in the 2015 elections and its defeat again n 2019, the PDP is obsessively preoccupied with returning to power in 2023 without undertaking the necessary task of rejuvenating itself organizationally, ideologically and morally.

Hence some of its governors are warring against each other while others are in bitter conflict with the Prince Uche Secondus-led National Working Committee (NWC) of the party. The PDP has so far been unable to play the role of an effective, credible and productive opposition, which offers an attractive alternative programmatic agenda to the policy direction of the ruling party. Even from the example of states governed by the PDP, there is no indication that, if the party returns to power at the centre in 2023, it will offer better governance than it did during its earlier 16 years in office.

For both the APC and the PDP, the preoccupation appears to be with where the next President will come from rather than on how power will be utilized to rescue the country from the humiliating grip of protracted underdevelopment. True, where the next President comes from is important given the geo-ethnic and religious realities of Nigeria but even more critical, perhaps, is the socio-economic agenda of political parties and their capability to productively utilize power to achieve accelerated national development. Neither the APC nor the PDP, in my view, has demonstrated any inclination towards the seriousness of purpose, discipline and hard work necessary for charting a new, purposive, result-oriented policy direction for the country.

It is against this background that the convening this week in Abuja of 30 groups representing labour, civil society, peasants, farmers, students, academia and other interests across the country to chart an alternative policy discourse and praxis for Nigeria is welcome. Out of this summit was born a new organization, ‘The Peoples’ Alternative Movement’, which intends to metamorphose into a mass workers and laboring peoples’ political party. A statement signed on behalf of the new organization by Professor Toye Olorode, Mr. Femi Falana (SAN) and comrade Jaiye Gaskiya, indicated that its purpose is to work towards “wrestling the country from the grip of a rainbow coalition of dishonest, corrupt and reactionary politicians currently driving the country to a shipwreck through mass corruption and exploitation of the primordial fault lines for personal fortune”.

In a refreshing departure from the prevalent discourse of divisive ethno-religious rhetoric, the emergent group promised to “replace despair with hope by uniting the working people and the masses beyond the narrow prism of ethnicity and religion with the hope of attaining a new Nigerian renaissance”. This, the movement plans to achieve through “a socialist ideology tailored to transform the neo-colonial Nigerian economy” that will lead to the building “of a new country based on justice, equity and protection of the dignity of mankind irrespective of ethnicity, faith or creed. We shall make Nigeria great again and put the country back on her status as the giant of Africa”.

The prime motivation of the movement is portrayed by its lamentation that Nigeria today is characterized by “extreme poverty, arms proliferation, religious intolerance, the rise of hate and ethnic nationalism” and consequently “moving towards social upheavals, due to exploitation of the people, greed and avarice of a spineless political class that has reached its wits end”.  Does the group not sound utopian and its goals unrealizable given the sordid realities of contemporary Nigerian politics? To that poser, I would refer the reader to the declaration by the late political economist, Paul Baran, that “But each idea not yet realized curiously resembles a utopia; one would never do anything if one thought that nothing is possible except that which exists”.

But have attempts to form a third force to confront both the PDP and APC not floundered in the past? Reference here can be made to the effort by former President Olusegun Obasanjo before the 2019 election, which came to nothing or the coalition of presidential aspirants – Dr Oby Ezekwesili, Omoyele Sowore, Fela Durotoye, George Moghalu etc – which also failed abysmally. These were based on personalities or such amorphous and concretely meaningless factors as age. This emergent movement is based on ideology and a concrete socioeconomic agenda. Others would say that efforts by such progressive, mass oriented groups failed to make an impact when they sought to organize politically in the past. They can learn from past errors and aim at succeeding this time around. The point is that an ideologically focused and disciplined group should be encouraged to challenge the sheer complacency, ineptitude and arrogance of the current dominant parties.

In a lecture he delivered to commemorate fifty years of Nigeria’s independence in 2010 at the University of Lagos, the renowned political scientist, Professor Okwudiba Nnoli, denounced what he described as “the tyranny of petty bourgeois discourse in post-colonial Nigeria”. He pointed out that the dominant discourse in Nigeria has focused almost solely on issues such as revenue allocation, federalism, religion, military rule, Creation of states, federal character, ethno-regional conflicts and zoning among others.

According to him, “Hence one never hears of any discussion of how to modernize production that is based on local Nigerian need and traditional consumption pattern. No questions are asked about the lack of improvement in the implements like the hoes used by the vast majority in spite of the tremendous strides in science and technology since these instruments were used by our great, great grandfathers. Similarly, the vast majority of our people live in the same type of houses as their great, great grandfathers in spite of advances in architecture and building technology”.

Professor Nnoli asks further, “Is it not the responsibility of politics and the state to assist the people in the rural areas and elsewhere in the country to apply science, technology and creativity in the production of food to satisfy their needs and traditional consumption habits at increasing levels of modernity using local and, therefore, available resources; construction of shelters for self and family, using local and, therefore, available resources; and the creation of modern health products, again using local and, therefore, affordable resources? How to carry out all these tasks certainly deserves political discussion”.

These questions posed by Professor Nnoli go right to the root of Nigeria’s protracted crisis of poverty and underdevelopment. If the emergent ‘Peoples Alternative Political Movement’ helps tilt public debate towards such alternative, problem-solving discourse, it would profit the polity immensely. The path ahead of the movement is indeed a tasking and arduous one demanding hard, backbreaking work as well as immense organizational capacity. One can only wish them well.

By Segun Ayobolu

 

IN the concluding part of the first installment of this piece, last week, we illustrated and buttressed Professor Samuel Egwu’s nuanced class analysis of politicized ethnicity, democracy and development in Nigeria by reference to the ongoing herdsmen-farmers clashes in large swathes of the country, which has become the single most easily combustible issue in contemporary Nigeria. The extent to which this problem has worsened since the emergence of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) in 2015 is vividly demonstrated by the assassination attempt on the governor of Benue state, Mr. Samuel Ortom, during the week and the arbitrary and unilateral recent declarations of Biafra and Oduduwa republics in the South-East and South-West by the likes of ex-Niger Delta militant, Asari Dokubo, and emergent South-West insurrectionist, Sunday Igboho, respectively.

Unfortunately, these instinctual and emotive separatist eruptions have attracted not insubstantial appeal in parts of the country as largely pauperized, unemployed and long-suffering segments of the population see the emergence of such idealized and romanticized republics as the gateway to their much desired Eldorado and life more abundant. It is a testimony to the strong emotive appeal of the ethno-regional pull that even highly educated and articulate individuals support these separatist agitations rather than transcend superficial analyses of the Nigerian crisis and shine the light of their intellect on dissecting and proffering concrete solutions to the challenges of democracy, federalism and development in this dispensation.

How come, for example, as we pointed out last week, that there are hardly any political organizations and civil society groups following in the footsteps of the Academic Staff Union of Universities, (ASUU), in educating herders, peasant farmers and millions of other underclass Nigerians that they are all victims of the gross misrule of the various ethno-regional factions of the ruling class? Is it not obvious that the latter is responsible for the mass poverty in which millions of Nigerians live across horizontal ethno-regional divides in sharp contradistinction to the wealth and obscene opulence of a microscopic minority again comprising of the elite from various ethnic, cultural and religious groups?

Ever since Professor Egwu delivered this lecture in 2015, the challenges of insecurity in particular have worsened throughout the country. This has distracted attention from some of the impressive strides the President Muhammadu Buhari administration has made in redressing the country’s huge infrastructure deficit especially in the acceleration of work on key road and rail projects, diversification of the economy and massive social intervention programmes to transfer resources to the most vulnerable sections of the populace despite unanticipated severe declines in oil revenues and the economic disruptions occasioned by the Coronavirus pandemic.

The legacy of the administration will surely depend, substantially, on its ability to summon the requisite will to implement solutions that even tendencies and interests within the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) have proffered to stem the multidimensional crises of the Nigerian state and the current dangerous degeneration of the polity from vulnerable fragility to outright failure. What we have on our hands, in my view, is not a problem, fundamentally, of the constitution or the failings of democratic practice. It is a challenge which is well within the capacity of the ruling party to meaningfully address and this it should make haste to do in its own interest particularly as the 2023 elections approach. For instance, the APC committee on constitutional reform headed by governor Nasir’el-Rufai of Kaduna state has not only recommended radical re-federalization of the Nigeria Police Force (NPF), and the creation of decentralized state police commands to meet the peculiarities of sub-national units of government, it has also suggested several measures to devolve greater powers, responsibilities and resources to the states including control of mineral resources within the latter’s sphere of jurisdiction.

The Nigerian Governors Forum (NGF) as well as several other influential individuals and interest groups across the country have supported these proposals.  It should, therefore, not be difficult for the governors, National Assembly members and members of the various Houses of Assembly to work in harmony and with a sense of urgency to effect the necessary constitutional amendments to actualize these recommendations. What is at stake is the very survival of the polity. If Nigeria unravels under its watch, the responsibility for the monumental disaster will lie on the APC and its leader, President Muhammadu Buhari. The only way for the party to regain its credibility and rescue its legacy is to find a way back to its constitutional pact with the people and utilize the remainder of its tenure to actualize its neglected federalist agenda.

Luckily, it has the requisite legislative majority to achieve this.

But should the current security and socio-political challenges justify calls either for the outright scrapping of the extant constitution and the adoption of a completely new governing instrument or the reconstitution of the country into separate, independent republics? This column has consistently answered this question in the negative. As Professor Egwu notes in this inaugural lecture, there has been commendable progress in the procedural aspects of democracy in Nigeria since 1999. The country has witnessed uninterrupted civilian, democratic governance during this period. The ‘electoral authoritarianism’, which desecrated the 2003 and 2007 general elections, was rolled back with significantly more credible and transparent elections in 2011 and 2015. Similarly, the 2015 elections diminished the capacity of incumbents from crippling the opposition electorally.

Other indications of the progress of ‘procedural democracy’ in this dispensation, the lecturer notes, include evident institutional growth of the legislature especially at the national level and the emergence of a robust and increasingly mobilized civil society “which plays to a large extent the role of manufacturing moral consent for governance, serves as rallying point in demanding for accountable governance, respect for constitutional terms of office, the reform of the constitution and setting the governance agenda for the whole society”. He nevertheless points out that the legislature still has a long way to go in exercising stronger oversight capacity over the executive, the electoral commission must still aspire to greater structural independence while the judiciary is still weak particularly at the lower levels and widely perceived as being prone to corruption.

Yet, these institutional deficits, it is implicit in his submission, can only be addressed through continued democratic practice and unceasing improvements rather than wholesale discontinuation with current institutional structures and political processes. Thus, his submission that “But democracy is a long haul, and is open to reversal if democratic institutions are not strong enough to sustain its tempo. It is even more so in the Nigerian context where democratization has proceeded without democrats. It is the realization that democracy is a process that makes the notion of democratization useful when relating to the experiences of new democracies”.

In sharp contrast to the progress made in the sphere of procedural democracy, Professor Egwu argues, is the negligible impact of electoral democracy in promoting the substantive welfare and wellbeing of the masses of the Nigerian people in the socioeconomic realm. As he put it, “The rising levels of unemployment and poverty for an economy said to be the largest in Africa and amongst the fastest growing economies in the world leave much to be said about Nigeria’s progress in the realm of substantive democracy. The failure of democracy in this regard has thrown up forces that can undermine the entrenchment of democratic values and cultures as evident in the rise of insurgency, protracted ethno-religious violence and the swelling of a reserved army of the unemployed that is often recruited as private soldiers to prosecute election war”.

At the root of the fragility and poverty of substantive democracy in post-1999 Nigeria, he submits is the perpetuation of the post-colonial political economy, a legacy of the colonial model of development, defined by “a state-led approach to capitalist modernization; a dependent strategy, which a emphasized a significant role for foreign capital (even at the height of oil boom); a heavily import-dependent, import substitution industrialization strategy; and a philosophy of development which excluded most ordinary people”.

An insightful aspect of the lecture with instructive insights for national politics is his depiction of what he describes as the collapse at the University of Jos “of national and patriotic platforms that united people across ethnic and regional divide, and united them around the vision of a great country and a great university”. He continued: “But it was the collapse of the left at the University of Jos, a local manifestation of a national crisis that became even more traumatic. Again, not peculiar to the University of Jos, was what turned out to be the consequence of the vacuum created by the departure of popular nationalist platforms – the takeover of university politics by ethno-regional platforms and movements”.

The lesson for Nigeria is evident. When patriotic, progressive, nationalist organizations such as the labour movement, radical academic unions, civil society groups and political parties vacate the political space and fail to enlighten, mobilize and organize the masses of the people for meaningful political intervention through the democratic process, personal, ethno-regional, religious and other primordial agendas take centre-stage and any alternative discourse of a transformational socio-economic agenda is marginalized and demobilized.

By Segun Ayobolu

 

 

If we take as an instance the current prevalent destructive invasion of forests, farmlands and rural communities in many parts of Yoruba land by nomadic herdsmen and the seeming lukewarm response of the President Muhammadu Buhari administration to the situation, will it not be appropriate to explicate Nigeria’s current socio-economic and political travails from the prism of ethnicity? In the 1960s and 1970s the modernization theory paradigm, then dominant in the social sciences, sought to explain the multidimensional crises of instability and disorder in most of the new post-colonial African polities with reference to the coexistence of plural ethnic groups within artificially defined boundaries, which was the legacy of colonialism.

This ethnic framework for analyzing and situating the challenges of socio-economic and political underdevelopment in Africa, including Nigeria, was, however, soon widely seen as inadequate as many scholars began to utilize socio-economic categories such as class in seeking to understand and proffer solutions to the problems of these societies. It would, however, appear that the ethnic explanatory schema has gained the ascendancy once more in the popular imagination. Seek ye first the kingdom of ethno-regional restructuring and all things shall be added unto you seems to be the prevalent conventional wisdom.

I listened to a social media post a few days ago in which a distinguished and accomplished Yoruba Professor of history adumbrated passionately and brilliantly about the urgent necessity for the creation of an Oduduwa republic. This, for him, and for a large number of those who belong to this school of thought, is the ultimate solution not just to the security challenge posed by strange, crude and arrogant herdsmen ravaging Yoruba territory with impunity but also to the socio-economic challenges of underdevelopment.

Indeed, the easiest route to popular acclaim in different parts of the country today is to become an ethnic champion. This week, for instance, Ex-Niger Delta militant, Alhaji Mujahid Asari Dokubo, reportedly declared a new “Biafra de facto customary government” and listed multiple communities throughout the South-East and South-South geo-political zones as being parts of his new dream sovereign entity. It is instructive that several groups such as the South-South Elders Forum (SEF), Ikwerre Peoples Congress (IPC), Pan Niger Delta Forum (PANDEF), Ibibio Youth Council (IYC) Worldwide and Order of Egbesu Brotherhood all promptly dissociated themselves from Dokubo’s Biafra.

Advocates of a Biafra or Oduduwa Republic assume that there is unanimity of opinion among the Igbo or Yoruba for the creation of such entities. Such assumption may be misleading. They do not appear to take into account the millions of Igbo or Yoruba, for instance, who were born and have lived outside their ethnic territories for generations. How about those indissolubly bound together by inter-ethnic marriages, shared religious beliefs across regions or whose businesses and economic fortunes are tied to territories where they are not indigenes?

In his first press conference after his release from prison, which held at Ikenne on 4th August 1966, the indefatigable and unbending federalist, Chief Obafemi Awolowo said with characteristic perspicacity, “In concrete terms, it is my firm belief that until we provide (1) full employment, (2) free education from primary to university level and (3) health services for all our citizens, the problem of unity will continue to plague us. And in this connection I hasten to predict that the breaking up of Nigeria into a number of sovereign states will not only do permanent damage to the reputation of contemporary Nigerian leaders, but will usher in terrible disasters which will bedevil us and many generations to come”. These words remain as true as ever.

Delivering the 72nd in the series of inaugural lectures of the University of Jos on Thursday, July 9, 2015, the noted Marxist political scientist, Professor Samuel Egwu, focused on ethnicity and the problem this phenomenon poses for political stability and development in Nigeria. Titled ‘Technology of Power and Dramaturgy of Politics: Ethnicity and Democracy in Nigeria’s Fourth Republic’, the lecture situates ethnicity within the context of Nigeria’s dependent and underdeveloped political economy, an over-centralized and distorted federal structure, fragile political institutions, feeble civil society and the emergence of what he calls ‘uncivil’ associational groups that utilize and manipulate ethnicity in ways that undermine democracy and national cohesion.

Although Professor Egwu identifies with the Marxist perception and deconstruction of ethnicity as a form of “false consciousness”, which plays an “essentially obscurantist role in the social process”, he disagrees with “the mechanical interpretation of the materialist method and the “economic reductionism” of many Marxist scholars which dismissed or wished away non-economic categories in the explanation of the course of human history”.

Without discounting the class character of Nigerian society and the primacy of the economic substructure in determining social forces, he submits that “while ethnicity would not be the primary contradiction for a society like Nigeria, it has through historical force and the political practices of the ruling class become the fundamental contradiction in shaping the construction of state power and democracy”.

Read Also: IPOB backs Dokubo’s declaration of Biafra

 

Utilizing the tool of Marxist methodology as a light to dispel the fog that beclouds popular conceptions of ethnicity, Professor Ugwu notes that “The choice of the ethnic weapon as technology of power has the consequence of obfuscating social realities from the common people, tends to reify ethnicity as the desiderata of political and social behavior among the people, and ultimately prevents the ordinary people from realizing that they are victims of ethnic manipulation”. It is unfortunate that the widely perceived nepotistic inclinations of the President Buhari administration, particularly the skewed nature of appointments in the security sector as well as the reluctance to forcefully reign in killer herdsmen, plays into the hands of political manipulators of ethnicity. That is why, for instance, Sunday Ighoho’s reported unilateral declaration of a sovereign republic of Oduduwa would resonate with large numbers of the poor, marginalized and unemployed Yoruba underclass.

Political messages deliberately constructed around ethno-regional and religious appeals, Professor Ugwu avers, show how ethnicity is employed as a tool to acquire and keep state power in Nigeria. In his words, “The sheer bellicosity, adversarial politics, and the kind of political grandstanding or the politics of brinksmanship promoted by political parties, candidates and ethno-regional groupings who claim to speak on behalf of ethnic constituencies bring out tellingly the dramaturgy associated with ethnic politics in Nigeria”.

He continues, “However, there is a strong element of self-destruction that is associated with this form of political mobilization and, more recently, the disturbing trend of playing on deep emotions and ethno-regional fault lines, including the most bizarre of hate speeches capable of fuelling violence that could sound the death knell of democracy and Nigerian nationhood”.

To underscore the underlying class character of ethnic relations in Nigeria, I recall that the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU),  a few years ago, published a two-page newspaper advertorial in which they shed light on crucial national issues including the incessant herdsmen attacks on farming communities. The union pointed out that, just like majority of peasant farmers, the herdsmen are members of Nigeria’s teeming underclass. They are mostly hired hands who herd cattle owned by members of the wealthy class. It is unlikely that the herdsmen could afford to buy the AK-47 rifles we are now accustomed to seeing them carry. This means they are armed by the same wealthy cattle owners they work for.

The herdsmen continue to follow archaic cattle rearing practices that see them seeking pasture and water for their animals across the country because of the sheer irresponsibility of the northern ruling class, which has neglected to modernize the cattle business, construct ranches or vigorously tackle desertification and climate change. But the peasant farmers too, again due to the sheer incompetence of the ruling class factions, mostly still utilize the rudimentary farming implements used by their forefathers. They have not been organized into modern cooperatives and equipped to run their farms as thriving and fully secured businesses.

In a lecture titled ‘Co-operation as Means to Accelerated Rural Development’ delivered in Akure on Saturday, 23rd August, 1980, Chief Obafemi Awolowo declared, “…in the present economic context of Nigeria, particularly in relation to agricultural development along modern lines, individual efforts are of no avail, and, as far as possible, should be discouraged, not in a negative way by showing hostility to such efforts, but in a positive manner by the deliberate promotion of co-operative efforts”.

The vulnerability of poor peasant farmers to herdsmen attacks is a function, largely, of incompetent and visionless governance. In truth, the northern factions of the ruling class are as venal and inept as their southern colleagues despite flashes of occasional brilliance in some states. An Oduduwa, Biafra or any other imagined republic will be as disastrously ruled as Nigeria is today for as long as the ruling class remains mindlessly corrupt, intellectually slavish and lazy.

How can farmers, herders and millions of other underclass elements be united under a viable and vibrant political platform to bring to power, through the democratic process, a new, genuinely progressive and forward-looking ruling class? The answer is implicit in Professor Egwu’s lecture.

By Segun Ayobolu

A rather angry and clearly exasperated reader reacted, through a text message, to the first part of this piece thus, “Truth be told, I have forgotten how to read ‘Petals of thought!’. Why are you people so shy of saying Africans are inferior to the whites, if not genetically, because such has not been proven; at least be bold and courageous enough to say that socially, politically and technologically etc, Africans are totally inferior to the whites. That’s the whole truth. We must stop verbalizing social progressivism verbiage in advancing Africa’s cause, which in any case the provenance is Western/Euro-American…Externalizing our travails is cheap scapegoatism, cheap escapism, cheap shit-holism”. This may sound alarmingly self-deprecating, but there is some justification in the piqued reader’s brutally frank vituperation. It is unfortunate, indeed absurd, that six decades after the attainment of ‘nominal’ independence, we can still have cause to bemoan the debilitating impact of slavery, colonialism and neo-colonialism in the perpetuation and continuous deepening of underdevelopment on the continent.

This tendency has, in fact, also been deplored by progressive and radical scholars who share Professor John Saul’s materialist, political economy approach to socio-political analysis. For instance, in a lecture delivered at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA), Lagos, in 1989 titled ‘The Prospects for African Development and Self-Reliance in the 1990s’ the late Marxist economist, Professor Eskor Toyo, said, “We reject as well a certain kind of dependencist scholarship which is very prevalent today. It sees African underdevelopment one-sidedly as resulting from the afflictions of colonialism or of the incorporation of African countries within the system of capitalist imperialism. It ignores the fact that for twenty-seven years, for instance, it is Africans that have ruled the countries of West Africa and helped to sustain this incorporation. A scholarship that conveniently turns its eyes from the responsibility of African bourgeois and petty-bourgeois leadership has become evasive and ceased to be honest”.

In his “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa”, Walter Rodney located the responsibility for the underdevelopment of the continent at two levels. He argues that, firstly, “the operation of the colonial system bears major responsibility for African economic retardation by draining African wealth and by making it impossible to develop more rapidly the development of the continent” and, secondly, that “one has to deal with those who manipulated the system and those who are their agents or unwitting accomplices of the said system”. Even then, Rodney submits that “None of these remarks are intended to remove the ultimate responsibility for development from the shoulders of Africans. Not only are there are African accomplices inside the imperialist system, but every African has a responsibility to understand the system and work for its overthrow”.

The critical significance of the mode of analysis adopted by Professor John Saul in his writings, including this book, ‘Development after Globalization: Theory and Practice for the Embattled South in anew Imperial Age’, is that it does not ignore history in contemplating and proffering solutions to the challenge of the protracted crisis of poverty and underdevelopment in the Third World particularly Africa. Much of the mainstream writing in the received social sciences dominant in Africa, as many radical African scholars such as Claude Ake, Samir Amin, Bade Onimonde, Julius Ihonvbere and others have severally noted, may indeed be methodologically sophisticated and theoretically elegant but they tend to be superficial and only tangentially relevant to the African reality.

As Claude Ake put it with characteristic clarity, “In much of the Western social science that prevails in African institutions of higher learning, there is an unfortunate tendency towards abstraction in the explanation of phenomena” and that “it is unfortunate, though not perhaps so surprising, that social science in Africa is so much in the grip of the methodology of Western social science, unfortunate because to all appearances the concerns of Western social science, particularly the maintenance of social order, is quite different from the concerns of a continent in a hurry to develop, and so, interested less in how to maintain the existing order than how to change it”.

A critical question that people like the angry correspondent that I quoted at the beginning of this piece must think about is if events and phenomena like the slave trade, colonialism and now neocolonialism, were fictional fabrications or did they really occur and even still subsisting even if in mutated forms? If they were really lived experiences of Africans, did they have salutary and beneficial effects on Africans as theorists of the ‘civilizing mission’ of colonialism contend or did they have corrosive, deleterious and deeply embedded negative implications for the self-confidence, psychological wholeness, cultural coherence and self-esteem of Africans? Is there any linkage between Africa’s encounter with imperialism, her enforced incorporation into the imperialist, global, capitalist economy on an unequal and dependent basis and the continent’s continued immersion in the mire of poverty and underdevelopment despite her superfluity of natural and mineral resources?

Let’s take the phenomenon of corruption, for instance, which is a significant causal factor of Africa’s underdevelopment. Can this just be attributed to sheer ingrained and instinctual greed as well as moral perversion on the part of morally perverse African leaders? That may be true to some extent. But the late Professor Peter Ekeh, one of Africa’s most profound social theorists, in his acclaimed ‘theory of the two publics’, links the prevalence of corruption in Africa to the bifurcation of the African public sphere into two mutually  antipathetic spheres – the primordial and the civic publics – as a result of the colonial encounter. Thus, Africans tend to operate as members, first, of the primordial public – their tribal, ethnic, communal, regional, cultural or religious associations where moral norms prevail. As members of these primary groups that predated the colonial intrusion, Ekeh observes, embezzlement of the association’s funds by its officers would be perceived as criminal and immoral.

However, as members of groups in the civic public sphere such as the civil service and other public bureaucracies, the universities, multinational corporations and other corporate entities legislatures etc, it is considered quite normal for the African to steal the funds of these organizations that emerged after colonialism to support the primordial groups to which he belongs. Many Africans continue to have an amoral disposition to the post-colonial state such that members of an ethnic group, for instance, who corruptly enrich themselves when they hold public office, are perceived and celebrated as heroes in their communities. This kind of theoretical articulation by Ekeh enable us to ask such pertinent questions as to what strategies and policies can be utilized to help transform the individual’s moral disposition and attitude to the civic public in such a way that occupants of public office who corruptly enrich themselves will be seen and treated as criminals by members of their communal, religious or ethnic groups.

There are those who argue, for instance, that utilizing concepts like dependency as a handle for analyzing and understanding underdevelopment, like John Saul does, has become outdated and archaic in our contemporary world of globalized neo-liberalism. But the author argues in his chapter on Dependency that the continuing relevance of the approach “lies above all in the analyses it produced of the impact of imperialism, past and present, on the former colonies. Their economic structures tend to reflect the original reason for making them colonies: the production of primary commodities for export and the creation of an infrastructure of railways, roads, ports, and telecommunications oriented to exports, not the promotion of an integrated national economy offering viable internal markets for more than basic goods”. However, he is quick to warn that third world elites can easily plead ‘dependency’ to divert attention from their own misrule and corrupt practices that worsen the plight of their people.

Professor Saul firmly holds on to his view that the present neoliberal, capitalist path trod by most third world countries in this era, where it is claimed there are no developmental alternatives, offer little hope for the liberation and rapid transformation of these countries. He is unshaken in his vision of an alternative radical and socialist developmental agenda for the third world and his disputations with some of his former ideological comrades – in- arms such as Giovanni Arrighi and Collin Leys, who seem to have resigned themselves to the inevitability and irresistibility of the prevalent neoliberal capitalist developmental path, make delightful reading.

 

By Segun Ayobolu

Given the alarming deterioration of the country’s steadily deepening security crisis, it is understandable that advocates of restructuring or the adoption of a new constitution as the cure all for Nigeria’s complex national problems, have intensified their agitations in recent times. It was widely reported in the media mid-last month, that socio-cultural groups such as the Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF), Middle Belt Forum (MBF), Ohanaeze Ndigbo and Afenifere have, once more, backed restructuring and a new constitution as panaceas to Nigeria’s security challenges even though they naturally differ on the details and specifics of their proposed constitutional and structural changes.

As Convener of the MBF, Ibrahim Bunu, put it, “You see what we are looking at the moment is far beyond restructuring; what will salvage this country now is a brand new constitution and it might be a peoples constitution because what we are using is long overdue even our colonial masters won’t be happy with what is written in the constitution”. A respected Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), Chief Wole Olanipekun, also echoed this perspective a few weeks ago in a national newspaper contending that the 1999 constitution is an imposed and incurably flawed document, which is not a product of ‘we the people’ as it claims. These views are, of course, completely misplaced, misguided and misbegotten.

If countries were to change constitutions each time they experience political crises, there would be no enduring democratic constitutions anywhere. Indeed, a country like the United States would be on the way right now to casting aside huge chunks of their over 200-year old constitution following the traumatic four- year  tenure of President Donald Trump and the severe stresses and shocks experienced by the country’s institutional structures. No constitution can guarantee any country immunity from crises and the consequences of human frailty. Given the complex dynamics of human institutions and societies, many future socio-political crises cannot even be foreseen by drafters of new constitutions.

Thus, rather than abandon extant constitutions wholesale, they can be continually amended, modified and adjusted to adapt to ever changing human circumstances. The 1999 constitution does not have its roots in the military authoritarian institution as erroneously inferred all too often. Rather, it traces its genealogy to the 1979 constitution, which was a product of the Constitution Drafting Committee (CDC) set up by the Murtala-Obasanjo regime on October 4, 1975.

According to Professor Eghosa Osaghe in his magisterial ‘Crippled Giant’, the membership of the CDC, admittedly all-male, as he notes, “was drawn from the professions and academic disciplines relevant to constitution-making (political science, law, history, economics), and from the ranks of administrators with relevance experience. It was headed by Chief Rotimi Williams, the renowned constitutional lawyer who had earlier been appointed to head the constitution review committee under Ironsi”. The military never pretended that they had any competence or expertise to write a constitution for the country. The exception to this was the Abacha regime and the succeeding government of General Abdulsalami Abubakar completely ignored his predecessor’s 1995 draft constitution altogether. The current 1999 constitution is, in essence, the 1979 constitution with a few modifications.

A nationwide debate on the draft constitutional proposals, mediated by the defunct Daily Times, was then undertaken and the various inputs deliberated on and adopted by a Constituent Assembly comprised of 190 elected state representatives based on local government areas and 20 members nominated by the federal government to represent special interests such as students and labour among others. The so-called military-imposed constitution is utterly mythical.

Despite the severity of the current security crisis and the attendant socio-economic implications, this column still believes that it is far better and wiser to address these problems within the framework of the extant constitution. True, it is not a perfect document. It contains many flaws. But no document drafted by man can aspire to flawlessness. Surely, neither is it the absolutely irredeemable governance instrument that many of its detractors portray it as. It would be a great pity if the merits and demerits of the constitution, including the cumulative practical lessons and experiences of the past 20 years, are cast aside in a flush of excitable emotiveness while we seek to embark on a needless constitutional adventurism of indeterminate destination.

Let us not forget that Nigeria adopted the current presidential constitution as a result of the country’s unsavoury experiences with the parliamentary constitution and four-regional structure of the first republic. Today, many commentators, even renowned academics and senior lawyers, paint the first republic as a political and constitutional paradise from which the country was derailed by the military, which then imposed the present unitary, pseudo-federal structure on us.

But the largely prevalent conventional wisdom, after the collapse of the first republic in January 1966, was that the excessive regional autonomy of the immediate post-independence era, within a context of fierce ethno-regional contestation for control of state power and resources, as well as an overly weak centre, were responsible for the collapse of the democratic order and ultimately the descent to the tragic civil war. These factors influenced Nigerian constitutional thought in the post-1966 era even though it is true that the centralized hierarchical organizational structure under military rule had some influence on the evolution of Nigeria’s federalism.

In his classic, ‘Class, Ethnicity and Democracy in Nigeria’, Professor Larry Diamond, writing on the collapse of the first republic, stressed that Nigerians “had become disgusted on the one hand with the ‘ten wasted years’ of corruption, incompetence, and gross abuse of office, and on the other, with the incessant political crisis and internal strife, the political violence and repression, and finally the descent into political chaos…The disillusionment with corruption and waste spread like a cancer through the body politic, steadily but gradually for many years, then with a vengeance when the 1964 General Strike thrust the gathering resentment to the centre of national politics, where it boiled over into rage at the government’s arrogance and intransigence”.

Professor Diamond quotes an article in the influential Nigerian intellectual journal,’ Nigerian Opinion,’ published in February 1966 after the coup thus: “In short, the rulers used power that they held constitutionally to do unconstitutional things. In the process they destroyed themselves. Nigeria had censuses that were not censuses, elections that were not elections, and finally governments that were not governments”. That was five and a half decades ago.

Unfortunately, the vices that resulted in the collapse of the first republic manifested even more virulently and destructively under subsequent ‘corrective’ military regimes, during the second republic from 1979 to 1983 and continue apace today even in the current fourth republic. It is thus obvious that without a fundamental moral re-orientation and value-rejuvenation both on the part of the leadership and the led, the country’s socio-political system will always be doomed no matter what constitutional modes or political structures we adopt.

True, Nigeria today sits atop a veritable security time bomb. But for the commendable proactive steps of a number of governors and their deft diplomatic shuttles, recent flashes of violence in Oyo, Ogun and Ondo states, for instance, could have easily erupted in a national conflagration. The ultimately futile attempt by the Amalgamated Union of Foodstuff and Cattle Dealers of Nigeria (AUFCDN) to impose a blockade on movement of food from the north to the south shows how frayed and worn the chords of national cohesion have become. But is the 1999 constitution to blame for this state of affairs? I do not think so.

The constitution is certainly not responsible, for example, for the perceived skewed and nepotistic appointments particularly into the ruling administration’s security high command; a factor which has undoubtedly exacerbated ethno-regional suspicions and tensions. Indeed, the constitution prescribes adherence to the federal character principle to ensure healthy all inclusiveness at all levels of governance.

Today, the ordinarily patriotic and gallant officers and men of the Nigerian military are overstretched as they are not only involved in defending the country’s territorial integrity against protracted and vicious insurgency, they also have task forces in virtually every state of the federation undertaking what are essentially police responsibilities. And the constitution can surely not be blamed for the pathetic state of an underfunded, undermanned, ill-equipped and poorly motivated Nigerian Police Force (NPF).

In recent times, many governors, notably Dr Kayode Fayemi and Mallam Nasir ‘el –Rufaia of Ekiti and Kaduna states, respectively, have called for devolution of powers, responsibilities, and resources to the sub-national units of government thereby reducing the current dysfunctional overburdening of the federal government. An increasing number of governors have advocated the urgent imperative of having state-controlled police commands to enable each state more effectively secure its territory in our complex, plural polity.

Indeed, the All Progressive Congress (APC)’s committee on the implementation of the federalist plank of its manifesto, headed by el-Rufai, has reportedly made provisions for all these proposed amendments to the constitution even with draft bills ready to be forwarded to the National Assembly. The current constitution can certainly not be blamed if these recommendations remain hidden in inexplicable obscurity rather being passed on to the legislature for necessary action long after the committee submitted its report.

During the week, the presidency issued, curiously through a presidential spokesman, a strong directive that bandit and criminal elements carrying AK-47 rifles be shot at sight from henceforth. Surely, if this kind of tough stance had been adopted long before now, the security situation would not have degenerated this badly. We can only hope that this signals a decisive change in the Buhari administration’s attitudinal disposition to the treatment of all criminals no matter where they come from. What we confront is not a constitutional crisis. It is a leadership challenge.

By Segun Ayobolu

 

The revival of Nigerian universities and other institutions of higher learning to transform them into flourishing centres of academic excellence, research and knowledge production is certainly a necessary condition for the country to transcend her humiliating condition of protracted underdevelopment. Walter Rodney, in his immortal ‘How Europe Underdeveloped Africa’, defined economic development as man’s continually increasing mastery of his environment which, he says, “is dependent on the extent to which they understand the laws of nature (science), the extent to which they put that understanding into practice by devising tools (technology) and on the manner in which work is organized”. Constant and never ending improvement in a polity’s mode of social organization, including her political structures and processes, as well as the underlying philosophical and moral values are critical to any country’s rate and level of development and the role of the intellectual is indispensable in this regard.

This is probably why the late economist and polyvalent scholar, Dr Jimanze Ego-Alowes, who died late last year at 62, in his 2018 book, ‘The University-Media Complex: (As Nigeria’s foremost Amusement Chain)’, vehemently disputed Professor Chinua Achebe’s 1983 thesis that the problem with Nigeria is squarely a failure of leadership. In Jimanze’s view, “…the failure of Nigeria as “a work in progress” is squarely a failure of her intellectualisms and not her leaderships…”. With characteristic bluntness, he writes, “By educated Nigerians, we mean just about any Nigerian with a B.SC/BA diploma degree. To this group, the leaders have failed Nigeria. However, we hold that this is not true. It is the Nigerian scholar who has failed the Nigerian nation the most”.

Although he refers to what he calls “the entire network of Nigeria’s intellectuals”, which does not exclude the media, for instance, Dr Ego-Alowes, is more focused on the academic scholar, whose place in the social stratification of labour is the production of new and original knowledge and path-breaking ideas. As he put it, “…our duty as scholars is to produce new culture and new knowledge; it is not to consume extant knowledge no matter how brilliantly”. Jimanze frowns at what he perceives as the penchant for Nigerian scholars to parrot received ideas and theories rather than breaking new frontiers of Knowledge and attainment in their areas of specialization declaring that “…it is a scandal that there are no economic theories made or manufactured in Nigeria and by Nigerians”.

Echoing Claude Ake’s ‘Social Science as Imperialism’, Dr Ego-Alowes, laments that “The education we were given is wrong, and we lack the gift and intrepidity to change it to suit us, to change it to the universal order. It is this failure of scholarship that has invariably led to other failures including those of leadership, so called”. Jimanze is disdainful of scholars who are more known for their political commentaries and activism in the media than breakthroughs in their fields of specialization. In the same way, he is not persuaded by the argument that lack of funds and the requisite equipment is responsible for the perceived lack of productivity on the part of Nigerian scholars as well as their failure to tackle real life problems in their spheres of expertise.

The issue of adequate funding of the country’s universities came up again when Professor Kayode Soremekun handed over to his successor on Thursday, February 11, 2021, at the end of his five-year tenure as Vice Chancellor of the Federal University, Oye-Ekiti, (FUOYE). He reiterated that the greatest challenge facing Nigeria’s public universities is inadequate funding. Paucity of funds, for instance, is at the root of the incessant strikes by aggrieved university workers’ unions and Professor Soremekun had his own share of brushes with the unions during his tenure. Yet, the significance of his tenure at FUOYE was that Professor Soremekun did not allow poor funding or trade union militancy to deter his administration from making impressive and indelible imprints in different spheres of the university’s life.

The most important factor in actualizing our universities’ potentials would thus appear to be effective, efficient and proactive leadership that utilizes available resources prudently and wins the support of critical stakeholders in the university system. Professor Soremekun readily admits that the landmarks recorded during his tenure could not have been possible without the support of the federal government, the senate and university management, teaching and non-teaching staff as well as students and the various unions.

FUOYE was established in 2011 along with eight other federal universities by the President Goodluck Jonathan administration. This columnist was one of those who considered the establishment of these universities as essentially politically motivated and utterly unnecessary given the severe crisis of funding that had crippled Nigeria’s public university system. But then, if the strides taken at FUOYE during Professor Soremekun’s tenure are a yardstick, and if similar progress is being made in the other universities established at the same time, then the initiative is bearing fruit after all, whatever may have been the motive. Under Soremekun, no less than 81 infrastructural projects were completed at FUOYE thereby considerably boosting teaching, learning and the institution’s research capability.

The construction of an access road network linking FUOYE’s two campuses in Ikole and Oye, previously impassable, was one of the abandoned projects completed under Soremekun. Other inherited projects completed by the Soremekun administration include the Central Administrative Building and the institution’s main library complex. Projects initiated and completed during this period include the ultra-modern structures that house the Faculty of Pharmacy, Faculty of Agriculture, Faculty of Basic Sciences and the Faculty of Management Science as well as academic buildings for the Faculty of Sciences among others. This is in addition to a new fully equipped Multi-Media studio for the Faculty of Mass Communication. It is noteworthy that, under Soremekun, the university’s student population grew from about 6,000 to over 24,000 enrolled in various faculties, departments and programmes.

Other achievements of the Soremekun administration include connecting FUOYE to the National Grid to improve power supply to the institution, introduction and commencement of Distance Learning and online teaching programmes; partnership with some polytechnics across the country on various entrepreneurship and skill development programmes as well as the take- off of the university’s Law Faculty while full academic status was attained for all academic programmes of the university. Apart from the introduction of inaugural lectures, FUOYE was the first among its peers to establish its Postgraduate school.

Speaking on his tenure, Professor Soremekun enthused, “The university can presently boast of peaceful academic calendar, and introduction of new faculties such as pharmacy, Management Sciences, Basic Sciences, Law and Environmental studies, which were established to complement the existing faculties, which were less than seven when I assumed office. Besides, four years ago, FUOYE could not claim to have 50 per cent of the infrastructural and learning facilities that the university now enjoys in terms of well-equipped classrooms, offices, faculty buildings, sports complex, regular power supply, hostel accommodation for students and other social amenities, but today the bar of infrastructure of the university has been raised”.

After the country’s public university system was grounded for ten months last year as a result of the strike by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), most federal universities were paralyzed for about three weeks this year due to the strike by the non-academic staff unions, which were only called off on Thursday. At the root of the incessant strikes and union militancy in public universities is insufficiency of funds. While governments at all levels must prioritize university funding, Professor Soremekun has demonstrated that much can still be accomplished with prudent management of available resources.

It is heartwarming that his successor, Professor Abayome Fasina, a Professor of Soil Sciences, in his inaugural address, promised to enhance the wealth-creating capacity of the university through what he calls ‘Risk to Wealth Initiative’. To demonstrate his seriousness, he said two eminent professors of the university will be assigned the responsibility of attracting consultancy for the institution.

Dr Jimanze Ego-Alowes contention that the fundamental problem with Nigeria is more of a failure of intellectualism than a failure of leadership has much to recommend it. But even if those in leadership positions do not fall into the category of Plato’s philosopher-King ideal, they must at least respect intellectuals and enthusiastically court liberating knowledge and ideas. An organic linkage between those in power and the intellectual elite is thus a necessary condition for good governance and rapid development. It is no coincidence that Nigeria’s most result-oriented and impactful transformational leader so far, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, forged a close relationship with progressive intellectuals who shared his ideological worldview.

In a wide –ranging interview with the late eminent academic philosopher, Professor Moses Makinde, on Saturday, April 4, 1987, Awo said, “My respect for intellectuals, lies in their ability to see things differently and objectively, and comprehend salient details apart from their research capability”. As Professor Soremekun moves on after an outstanding tenure as Vice Chancellor of FUOYE, the Minister of Education, Mallam Adamu Adamu, certainly deserves credit for the appointment of an academic and university administrator of the political scientist’s stature and pedigree as the institution’s third Vice Chancellor.

By Segun Ayobolu

Not being a legal mind, I am in no position to pronounce meaningfully on the validity of the poser raised by erstwhile National Chairman of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Comrade Adams Oshiomhole, as regards the legality of the party’s ongoing membership registration and revalidation exercise though his argument sounds logical. Explaining that he only participated in the exercise in the interest of peace in the party, Oshiomhole declared after revalidating his membership at his ward in Edo state that “There is nothing in the APC constitution that says a member shall revalidate his membership. Once you registered when you joined the party and you have not decamped, you are a member. So, revalidation is strange to our constitution”.

Oshiomhole made a distinction between revalidation of membership as directed by the National Caretaker committee and update or review of the register as provided for in the party’s constitution. While stressing that it makes eminent sense to periodically update the membership register due to the new members that have joined and those that had exited the party, Oshiomhole noted that the APC had been doing that from time to time pointing out that “most of the governors under the party today became members following membership register update, hence they were able to contest governorship elections under the party”.

The APC constitution provides for an update of the membership register every six months. What does this mean? It certainly cannot be that every member goes back to their wards to revalidate their membership every six months. The logistical implications would be daunting. Rather, entry and registration of new members is supposed to be a routine exercise at the ward level just as names of former members are supposed to be struck off the register as soon as they quit the party. Updated membership registers will then be forwarded periodically, every six months, from the ward to the Local Government Area, State, and National executives of the party.

There is absolutely no complication as to how to become a member of the party. Article 9 subsection ii of the APC constitution states: “Application for membership shall be made to and cleared by the Ward Executives of the party in the Ward of the Local Government Area where the person was born, resides, works or originates. On-line registration shall also be acceptable provided that it is cleared by the National Working Committee (NWC) of the Party”. Subsection iv of Article 9 provides that “Upon enrolment, every member shall pay the prescribed fees and shall be issued a Membership Card and a Dues Card”.

The ongoing membership registration and revalidation exercise of the APC is not a carefully conceptualized, planned and organized event. Rather, it is a function of the arbitrary, abrupt and legally questionable dissolution of the immediate past National Working Committee by ambitious elements determined to take over the party structure with future elections in mind. Thus, the party finds itself saddled with an unanticipated and unplanned National Convention scheduled for June. It is obviously the intra-party politics of the forthcoming convention that has informed the membership registration and revalidation exercise at a time that is most incongruous and inappropriate.

Since the commencement of the exercise, for example, elective office holders of the APC at all levels have been trooping to their wards to revalidate their membership. These are not normal times in Nigeria. Kidnappings, banditry, rape, communal and ethnic clashes, herdsmen criminality and other assorted forms of violence destroy lives on a daily basis across the country. The National Executive of the ruling party or its elective and appointive public office holders should not at this time be preoccupied with membership registration/revalidation exercise or planning an unscheduled National Convention in June, which will inevitably be distracting for governance across the country as intra-party factions and tendencies in various states scheme and battle for the control of party structures. Rather, all hands should be on deck to ensure adequate response by government, through efficient policies and focused governance, to the grave existential challenges of the moment.

Commenting on the membership registration and revalidation exercise, the former interim National Chairman of the APC, Chief Bisi Akande, said: “I see the present APC membership registration within less than a decade after the original register as an indefensible aberration leading to certain ugly perceptions that the APC leadership might be wasteful of the proper use of money in a kind of economy in which Nigeria now finds itself”. Chief Akande’s words can best be appreciated against the background of the industry, organization and indeed substantial resources that went into the first membership registration exercise of the APC in 2014. A news report widely published in the media on February 5, 2014, stated, “The All Progressives Congress (APC) has deployed personnel and materials to all the 36 states of the federation and Abuja for the take off of its membership registration which begins today. Special Assistant to the interim national secretary of the party, Abdullahi Gashua, stated that the exercise will take place in all INEC designated polling units in the country, adding that the party has sent a chairman and secretary to each state and the FCT except Anambra to oversee the exercise. He added that depending on the peculiarities of some places and other considerations, a more suitable place will be provided for people as an alternative to the designated polling units”.

The report continued, “Gashua said that the exercise had already taken place in Anambra state before the election that took place in the state some months ago. He therefore said Anambra has been exempted from the current exercise as a result of the registration for the last election. He said the party is targeting as many members as possible not the 12 million earlier targeted for congresses and conventions as stated by the party before. The APC membership registration exercise will end on February 10th, 2014”.

The APC membership registration exercise in 2014 was no fluke. It was an elaborate and meticulously planned and managed exercise. Indeed, the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), which was at the time reeling from intra-party crises caused by its carrying out the kind of membership registration and revalidation exercise that the APC is currently undertaking, was sufficiently disturbed by the success of the APC exercise. Emmanuel Aziken, Political Editor of Vanguard newspaper, in a feature article titled “APC’s membership registration: Is PDP unsettled?” published on February 10, 2014, quoted the National Publicity Secretary of the PDP, Chief Olisa Metuh, thus: “The APC is sadly and currently using every foul means at its disposal to build a particular membership figure, running into tens of millions, which it intends to use as a justification to fault, dispute, reject and subsequently take to violence when it loses the 2015 general elections”, Metuh told newsmen on Friday.

According to Aziken’s report, “Metuh also noted other alleged infringements of the APC in its ongoing membership registration exercise, including allegations of the use of structures of the INEC, deliberate misinformation of the citizenry of the purposes of the registration and compulsion of unwilling persons in states controlled by the APC to partake in the registration exercise. Traders and okada riders according to critics of the APC have been compelled to register for the APC. But beyond hearsay, no evidence of such compulsions has been produced”.

Continuing his report, Aziken wrote: “Alhaji Lai Mohammed, the interim national publicity secretary of the APC, however, quipped back in a telephone interview with Vanguard yesterday saying the PDP was clearly intimidated by the turnout for the registration by APC members. On Metuh’s allegation that the APC was deceiving the citizenry by using INEC polling centres as a way of luring unwary people to register with the party, Lai Mohammed said: “What we are witnessing today has never been seen in the history of Nigeria and we were very proactive and very creative in deciding to use INEC polling centres for the venues of our registration. Don’t forget that our party is made up of some parts of the PDP, the ANPP, CPC and ACN and if we had used any other venue apart from the polling booths it would have led to confusion. If you say ward, would it be the former ANPP ward, the former CPC ward or the former ACN ward? Secondly, we recognized that all politics is local and at the end of the day everybody reports at his polling booth. So why don’t you get registered in your polling booth?”

Although he raised questions about the internal democracy credentials of the legacy parties including the ACN in his report, Aziken noted that “The accusation and counter accusations nonetheless, the attempt by the APC in opening up registration is an innovation that even reformists in the PDP had in the past attempted to do but were shot down”.

It is unfortunate that ambitious elements in the APC are prepared to discredit and destroy the credibility of the 2014 membership registration exercise, which is an impressive, historic and commendable foundational legacy of the party and a testimony to organizational efficiency all for self-serving purposes. Is the ongoing party membership registration and revalidation exercise of the APC the wisest and best use of time, energy and money given the industry and considerable resources that went into the foundational registration exercise and the attempt to ensure a level playing ground in that exercise for all the legacy parties? That is the core of Chief Bisi Akande’s question and the answer, in my view, is an emphatic no. This exercise is an avoidable distraction particularly given the more urgent priorities of the moment.

By Segun Ayobolu

Hitting the ground running with characteristic decisiveness and seriousness of purpose, the newly appointed Chairman/CEO of the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA), Brigadier-General Buba Marwa, on assumption of office immediately summoned a meeting of all commanders of the agency in the 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Abuja. Setting out his agenda and strategies to combat the truly terrifying menace of drug abuse and addiction in Nigeria, particularly among the youths, Marwa told his commanders that it could no more be business as usual. Reading the riot act to drug cartels across the country, Marwa stressed that the NDLEA under his leadership would spare no effort to dismantle them and make them face the legal consequences of their violation of the law. Of course, Marwa does not come unprepared for this new assignment. Before now, he was Chairman, Presidential Advisory Committee for the Elimination of Drug Abuse (PACEDA).

If the morning is an indication of what the day will ultimately look like, it is not unsafe to surmise that Marwa’s tenure at the NDLEA will be action packed and impactful. Should a former two-time military governor of Borno and Lagos states, have agreed to be Chairman/CEO of the NDLEA? I don’t see why not. Those who reason this way clearly underestimate the enormity of the drug menace in Nigeria today and its corrosive effects on the very fabric of society. In any case, Marwa’s antecedents as a high performing military governor in the two states mentioned as well as his service as Military and Defence attaché at the Nigerian Embassy in Washington DC and the United Nations in New York, respectively, have raised expectations of renewed vigour in the war against drug abuse under his watch at the NDLEA.

In the very short time he has been at the helm of affairs at the NDLEA, various commands of the agency have reported remarkable breakthroughs in intercepting and aborting efforts to import huge quantities of illegal drugs into the country. For instance, last week, the Lagos command of the agency made large illegal drug seizures at the Murtala Muhammed International Airport (MMIA). One of the seizures, 26.840 kg of cocaine has been described by officials of the agency as the biggest single seizure from an individual in the last 15 years. The illegal commodity was reportedly recovered from a female passenger, Onyejbu Ifesinachi, who arrived in Nigeria from Brazil via Addis Ababa.

Two days earlier, precisely on January 15, a red luggage was delivered as a leftover at the E arrival hall of the MMIA, after the inward clearance of passengers on a foreign airline. On examination and testing, the contents of the red bag were discovered to be a banned drug substance with substantial market value. One Emmanuel Iyke Ariebonaw, who was to receive the bag, was arrested at the airport while an NDLEA undercover agent successfully lured another drug dealer involved in this case to the cargo terminal of the MMIA where he was arrested.

On February 1, another cocaine cartel was busted at the MMIA when one Bright Onyekachi was nabbed with 3.30 kilogrammes of an illicit drug. The drug dealer reportedly arrived in Nigeria aboard an airline from Sao Paulo, Brazil also via Addis Ababa. Even though the hard drug was concealed cleverly in T-shirts stickers, they were still discovered by Eagle-eyed NDLEA detectives. In another incident, the agency’s officials intercepted 40 parcels of cocaine weighing 43.1 Kg and valued at over N32 billion at the Tin Can port in Lagos. The Commander of the Tin Can command of the NDLEA, Sumaila Ethan, reported that the consignment was put under surveillance for some days until two clearing agents, who showed up to clear it on February 8, were arrested. The vessel carrying the consignment reportedly arrived in Nigeria from Brazil on board a vessel marked SPAR SCORPIO. According to the NDLEA Commander at the port, “After a thorough search, we discovered 40 compressed parcels, which after laboratory investigations tested positive for cocaine. The two clearing agents have been taken into custody while we continue with the investigation. The seizure is no doubt an attestation to the renewed vigour in the operations of the agency. We appreciate our Chairman, rtd Brigadier-General Marwa, who provided guidance throughout the operation”.

At the Nnamdi Azikwe International Airport, Abuja, the NDLEA recently uncovered new methods used by drug traffickers to evade detection and apprehension by the agency’s detectives. In the first operation, according to the NDLEA spokesman, Jonah Achema, the agency intercepted a consignment of four packets of chocolate sweets of white substances weighing 7.2kg, which tested positive for cocaine. This involved a Brazilian, aged 23, who was arrested with a suitcase containing the packets of the chocolate sweet. In the second operation, a Nigerian, Elechi Adendu Kingsley, was arrested with a bag containing cellophane bags in which the illicit substance was concealed.

In Nasarawa state, the NDLEA reported the discovery of a cannabis warehouse in Lafia, the state capital, where 45 bags of the illegal drug weighing 47kg were recovered. According to the state commander of the agency, Justice Arinze, “the recovery was the biggest single seizure since the inception of the command in 1999. We’re grateful to our new chairman, General Marwa, who made the feat possible by empowering us with the needed logistics to go all out”. These, of course, are only a few of the recent triumphs of the NDLEA in the anti-drug war with various commands seemingly trying to outperform each other in the new spirit of the agency. An understandably elated Marwa enthused, “I have told the commanders in my meeting with them that our maxim is offensive action and I’m glad they are following up on the strategies discussed with them”.

The NDLEA under Marwa is likely to get more verve with the renewed declaration of support for the agency by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). During a visit to the agency’s headquarters in Abuja, the UNODC Country Representative in Nigeria, Oliver Stolpe, told the Chairman, “We have every confidence in your ability to deliver. As a technical assistance provider which liases with donor countries and agencies, we look forward to working with you in a more different way that will bring results. We appreciate the fact that the agency is operating in a very difficult situation but the future of international cooperation is very bright. There are a whole lot of resources that will be invested in international cooperation and Nigeria is one of the beneficiaries”.

Of Course, the UNODC is not unaware of the extent of the drug challenge in Nigeria. In a 2018 61 –page report on drug use in Nigeria, the organization had reported some important findings. For instance its survey showed that in the time under consideration, which was 2017, one in seven persons aged 15-64 years had used a drug (other than tobacco and alcohol). This corresponded to at least 14.3 million in this age category who had used a psychoactive substance for non-medical purposes. Again, it discovered that among every four drug users in Nigeria, one is a woman and that one in five persons who had used drugs during the period of the survey suffered from drug use disorders. The UNOC also found that cannabis is the most commonly used drug in the country and the average age of initiation of cannabis use is 19 years old. Also of note is that at least 4.7% of the population (4.6 million people) had used opiods such as tramadol, codeine or morphine for non-medical purposes in the year under consideration.

The UNODC noted that “The social consequences of drug use are also evident in Nigeria. Key informants considered that there were social problems such as disruption in family lives, loss in productivity and legal problems as a result of drug use in their communities. Also, nearly 1 in 8 persons in the general population had experienced consequences due to other people’s drug use in their families, workplace and communities”. When we consider the destructive effects of illegal drug use particularly on the most productive segments of the society, the youth, we cannot but wish the new NDLEA boss success in his assignment. To achieve this, the NDLEA must surely cultivate a harmonious working relationship with other agencies such as the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration (NAFDAC), the Nigerian Customs Service and security agencies among others. NDLEA should also consider partnering with the National Orientation Agency (NOA) to launch a massive behavioral change communication campaign against drug use.

In the same vein, the agency can utilize the services of credible celebrities and social influencers with large following to convey its anti-drug use message to target audiences. Beyond this, NDLEA staff work under very dangerous situations considering the nature of the illicit drug trade and the desperation of its perpetrators. They are also susceptible to pecuniary temptation by drug traffickers who often have huge funds to dispense. This means that ensuring an attractive, adequate and competitive remuneration structure for the NDLEA should be one of General Marwa’s prime objectives. In the final analysis, however, only a thoroughgoing overhauling of the society’s scale of values with less emphasis on material acquisition at all costs and by all mean can help ultimately to effectively mitigate Nigeria’s drug challenge.