Category: Segun Ayobolu

The statistics as regards the health of the Nigerian economy are grim.But there was absolutely nothing new or novel in the figures and facts reeled out by Professor Charles Soludo, former Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) at a lecture this week at the fourth Progressives Governors lecture series in Kaduna. According to the dismal but indisputable assertions of Professor Soludo, Nigeria’s economy is in deep trouble as a result of the substantial decline in per capital income and our dwindling Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

The ex CBN governor’s lecture to the Progressive Governor’s Forum was titled ‘Building the Economies of States: Challenges of Developing Inclusive Sustainable Growth’. Soludo posited that the country’s GDP compressed to 50 per cent from $578 billion after the famous rebasing Program of 2014 to $290 due to huge deterioration in key economic indicators. Consequently capita income has also dropped to $1,500 from $3,100. The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) has also confirmed this despairing and frightening portrait of the national economy.

According to the NBS, the economy contracted by 2.06 per cent to record the lowest growth rate in three decades. The economy, the bureau also found, shrank by 0.36 percent in the first quarter of 2016 to hit its lowest point in the year, while unemployment grew from 12.1 percent per capita in the first quarter to a record of 13.3 per cent unemployed in the second quarter.

No less a personage than the Minister of Finance, Mrs Kemi Adeosun, admitted as much when she appeared before the National Assembly. Cautiously describing the economy as being in a state of ‘technical recession’, however, the Minister has continued to sound optimistic about the prospects for quick economic recovery. Of course, it is difficult to understand what a technical recession is against the background of the mass unemployment, pervasive hunger, deaths from easily curable diseases, teeming number of out of school youths, high maternal and infant mortality rates and the stratospheric rise of sundry crimes that can be traced to widespread and deep rooted poverty and  endemic economic dislocation.

Proffering his solutions for the country’s chronic economic ailments with the confident authority of a skilled economic physician, Soludo contended that agriculture, which is currently receiving massive attention from the federal and state governments, may not, after all, serve as a means of economic diversification, because many people will be forced out of the business when mechanical farming is fully in place. As he rightly notes, no state can develop sustainably if overall governance and the economy are in crisis.

I think the professor is right when he avers, if I read him correctly, that diversification of the economy through boosting agriculture as an alternative foreign exchange earner to oil will not necessarily address the structural distortions responsible for our protracted foreign exchange dependency. The same can be said of mineral resources if our aim is limited simply to develop them into alternative foreign exchange earners.

Such a limited goal will only deepen our technological, economic and cultural dependency making us nothing but pathetic mimics of those countries which, according to the late scholar, Eqbal Ahmed, “are addicted to armaments and dependence on suppliers. All are littered with machines but command no technology…They lack the will no less the Know-how to transform wealth into capital, importance into influence, resource into power”.

In Soludo’s words, “Nigeria is facing unprecedented and tremendous political and economic challenges with global and local dynamics. The key to achieving this is to have a development plan that is anchored on achieving inclusive growth”. It is on this basis that he strongly recommends “a restructuring of the economy from consumption-driven to production-based” and consistent micro economic policies. Not only is he silent, however, on the historical trajectory that produced this kind of debilitating, esteem eroding socio-cultural, economic and technological dependency, he offers us no clue for transforming the country into a genuinely productive and self-sustaining political entity.

The radical political scientist, Professor Okwudiba Nnoli, hit the nail on the head when he noted that “Colonial occupation put an end to the economy as most people had known it in pre-colonial times. Most importantly, the new economy replaced production with commerce. It was an import-export economy not based on the satisfaction of the basic needs, traditional consumption habits, or the use of local resources in manufacturing”.

Professor Soludo surely is an accomplished economist with wide local and international experience. But his brand of ‘Soludonomis’, which is nothing but a rehash for a country like Nigeria of worn and jaded World Bank/ International Monetary  Fund (IMF) Neo Liberal  ideas can hardly help Nigeria out of the woods. Of course, Soludo’s blueprint for the country’s economic redemption with its grandiose projections and objectives, the National Economic Empowerment and Development Strategy (NEEDS) was dead on arrival and has since been jettisoned. So incompetent and lax were his banking consolidation policy that his successor, Alhaji Lamido Sanusi was forced to bail out failing banks with over 400 billion Naira of public funds. This was despite Soludo’s policy of forcing incompatible banks to merge so as to meet up with his arbitrary N25 billion capital base.

Most astonishing is Soludo’s calling on the Buhari administration to stop what he calls the blame game against the Dr Goodluck Jonathan presidency and start on a clean slate. Here, he sounds like a former Head of State who declared at a public forum that to get to a desired destination, you must study where you are and begin moving forward towards your objective. The late Dr Bala Usman later retorted that if you don’t carefully study how you got to where you are, you will simply move about in circles and may soon find yourself in an worse predicament. Yes, the Buhari administration was not elected to lament endlessly about the past. But on the anti-corruption war, however, it is necessary to continuously remind Nigerians of the terrible venality of the immediate past so that we will know how we got here and hopefully not find ourselves in such a disastrous pass ever again.

Also speaking this week at a form in Kano, another former Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) governor, who is also now the Emir of Kano, Alhaji Lamido Muhammed Sanusi II also warned the Buhari administration against toeing the non-listening footsteps of former Dr Jonathan’ s administration. An accomplished economist and investment banker, Alhaji Lamido Sanusi surely knows his onions. According to the Emir, “We should not just keep blaming the the previous administration. We also made some mistakes in the present administration. They have to retrace those steps all the way. We should not fall into the same trap we fell the last time when the government was always right”. Most disturbingly, Alhaji Sanusi stated that “We have created another set of millionaires since 2015 from foreign exchange”.

The Buhari administration cannot afford to turn a deaf ear to a credible voice like the Emir. It is important not to forget that Sanusi blew the whistle on the missing $20 billion that was not remitted to the Federation Account by the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC); a public disclosure that led to his ouster from office by President Jonathan. Today, Emir Lamido Sanusi is being proved right. No wise leadership should trifle with such consistent and courageous voices.

It was exactly 50 years yesterday since the cold-blooded murder in Ibadan, capital of the former Western Region, of the country’s first military Head of State, Major General Thoma Aguiyi-Ironsi, and the military governor of the Western Region, Colonel Adekunle Fajuyi. The day was July 29, 1966, when rebel troops of northern origin staged a counter coup to avenge the earlier January 15, 1966, coup of the majors. Ironsi who was in Ibadan to address a meeting of the country’s traditional rulers was the target of the mutineers. Fajuyi the host insisted they would have to kill him along with his guest.

Five decades after, the fears, distrust, resentments, suspicions, misunderstandings, differences and recriminations responsible for the coup and counter coups of January and July, 1966, persist. Contemporary Nigeria is a seething cauldron of competing mutual ill will, frustrations and grievances.

Those who killed Ironsi saw him as the most prominent face of a perceived Igbo conspiracy to seize control of and dominate the country. For them the January 15, 1966, putsch was an Igbo coup pure and simple. This perception spurred the organized massacre of Igbos in the North culminating in the revenge coup that claimed Ironsi and Fajuyi among others.

True, the key planners and executors of the  majors’ coup were Igbo. There were only two Yoruba and no northern officers among them. Again, the casualties of the coup were solely from the North and the West.  Political leaders who lost their lives in the coup included Premier of the North, Sir Ahmadu Bello, the Prime Minister, Alhaji Tafawa Balewa and the Premier of the west, Chief Samuel Ladoke Akintola.

The two Igbo Premiers of the East and Midwest regions were not touched. All the top military leaders killed in the coup were from the North and West. Lt-Colonel Arthur Unegbe, quartermaster general of the army, was the only Igbo officer who lost his life. But is this sufficient to validate the Igbo conspiracy thesis? I don’t think so.

The blunt truth is that those political leaders who lost their lives on Januray 15, 1966, were directly responsible for the descent to violence and anarchy in the West that ultimately led to the collapse of the First Republic. They plotted the unconstitutional and illegal sacking of the legitimate government of the West. They imposed a thoroughly detested Akintola on the West and brazenly rigged the 1965 Western regional elections to keep him in power against the popular will.

Indeed, the January 15 majors’ coup was a preemptive strike. It was no secret that Ahmadu Bello and Akintola planned a major military crackdown on the insurrectionary West. The major’s coup truncated the plan. The January 15, 1966, coup initially enjoyed widespread support. It was popularly perceived as a necessary displacement of a decadent, lawless and unjust order.  Only later were ethnic colorations mischievously read into the coup.

Was Ironsi complicit in the January 15 coup? Those who killed him believed so. They allege, for instance, that he did not bring the detained ring leaders of the aborted coup to trial. This is true but Ironsi had little room to maneuver. The major Kaduna Nzeogwu led executors of the coup were as popular in the south as they were detested in the north. However, Ironsi made no attempt to identify with the majors’ radical plans. Ironsi was no radical. He was an apolitical, professionally puritan military officer. Many even considered him politically naïve.

Thus, Ironsi appointed Colonel Yakubu Gowon as Chief of Army Staff and surrounded himself with personal security staff mostly made up of northerners. He did nothing about the predominance in the West of troops of northern origin. Ironsi trusted too much in the organizational ethos and espirit de corps of the military. This is why he and Fajuyi were sitting ducks when the vengeful mutineers’ struck in Ibadan.

Ironsi was accused of being overly reliant for counsel on an inner circle of Igbo intellectual and bureaucratic elite. This in itself is no crime. Any leader’s kitchen cabinet will necessarily comprise of his trusted aides. However, Ironsi’s tragic fate shows that in a complex polity like Nigeria, a leader should have an inner core of advisers that will encourage him to run an inclusive administration sensitive to ethno-regional diversities.

It is unfortunate that Ironsi’s inner core of advisers did not make him realize the dangers of the pattern of promotions he approved in the public service. For instance, 18 out of 20 military officers promoted to the rank of colonel under Ironsi were said to be Igbo and this against the advice of the Supreme Military Council. Even if this pattern of promotions was reflective of merit, it was dangerously insensitive to the political context within which it was carried out. It only lent credence to the Igbo domination thesis even if there was no such conscious conspiratorial agenda in reality.

The perception of a conspiratorial Igbo agenda informed the ferocity of the reaction in the North particularly to Ironsi’s decree No 34 of May 24, 1966, which transformed Nigeria instantaneously from a federation based on regions to a unitary state based on ‘Groups of Provinces’. That such sweeping structural changes, which included the abolition of regional public services and their replacement with a single, centralized public service, was effected without wide consultation in a country as diverse as Nigeria, shows how removed from reality Ironsi and his idealistic advisers had become.

In the north particularly, the regional federal structure was seen as imperative to enable each region develop at its own pace without fear of domination by those more advanced educationally or socio-economically. The grand irony is that the same forces opposed to Ironsi’s unification decrees which abolished the regions, later broke the four regions into 12 states and this process of fragmentation has introduced their own variant of centralization under which the ‘federatingentities’ have been balkanised into the present 36-state structure that is only federal in name. They have also stoutly resisted any attempt to revert to a region-based federation. Was Ironsi then prescient and thus deserving of an apology?

Colonel Adekunle Fajuyi’s critical significance in history was his heroic refusal to bargain for his life at the expense of his guest and Commander-In-Chief. This is particularly noteworthy given the political and ideological differences between both men. Fajuyi was as progressive and radical as Ironsi was apolitical and conservative. However, he exhibited exemplary courage, valor, honor, decency and dignity by opting to die rather than betray Ironsi. This is in tandem with the Yoruba aphorism: Iku ya ju esin (Better death than a life denuded of honor).  May the souls of these great gentlemen/officers continue to rest in peace.

Opeyemi Bamidele @ 53

He first burst into public consciousness in the early to mid eighties as a vibrant, ideologically conscious and committed students’ union leader when he served first as Public Relations Officer of the Students Union Government of the university of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), then Chairman of the University of Benin Students Union and ultimately National President of the National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS) in 1989. For Honourable Opeyemi Bamidele, who turned 53 yesterday, it has been an eventful five and three decades of dedicated and selfless service to humanity. It is impossible to write the history of the spirited resistance struggles of Nigerian students against  the Structural Adjustment  Programme (SAP) and military dictatorship in the eighties without acknowledging Opeyemi Bamidele’s leadership.

He equally played a frontline role in the pro-democratic struggles that ushered in this political dispensation even suffering the deprivations of exile in the process. Bamidele was a key player in the administrations of Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu and Mr Babatunde Raji Fashola (SAN) in Lagos State serving with distinction at various times as Senior Special Assistant, Chief of Staff to the Deputy Governor, Commissioner for Sports and Youth Development as well as Commissioner for Information and Strategy between 1999 and 2007. He was elected to the House of Representatives from Ekiti state in 2011 and served as Chairman, Legislative Budget and Research Committee of the House.

A disagreement with some leaders of the defunct Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) in Ekiti forced him to contest for the governorship of the state on the platform of the Labor Party in 2014 coming third in the election. Today, Bamidele is back in his natural political habitat contributing his quota to the growth and consolidation of the APC. Although he is presently preoccupied with his extensive legal practice, Opeyemi Bamidele’s rich political and managerial experience, wide network and organizational dexterity qualify him for a frontline role in the struggle to extricate Ekiti State from the current stranglehold of visionless political vagabonds. Surely, for this dynamic progressive, the best is yet to come. Happy birthday my dear friend and brother.

Is Nigeria’s unity non- negotiable and the country’s territorial integrity cast in unalterable stone for all time? President Muhammdu Buhari’ s answer to this question is emphatically affirmative. The President has consistently admonished the growing cacophony of voices, not just calling for the dismemberment of the country but taking precipitate actions, to actualize their objective to come to terms with the ultimate futility of their plans. Implicit in this stance is the president’s determination if need be to use the immense powers, responsibilities and resources of his office to enforce and demonstrate the Nigerian state’s legitimate monopoly of the instruments and techniques of violence within its area of territorial jurisdiction. In other words from the president’s perspective, those insurgent groups that seek to dismember Nigeria and constitute themselves into separate sovereign entities must be prepared to achieve their aim through the demonstration of overwhelming and compelling superiority of force over Nigeria’s military.

In a way, Buhari’s logic and sentiments are understandable. As president and Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, he holds the sacred mandate of the majority of the Nigerian electorate. The essence of that mandate is to defend and protect the constitution as well as preserve the country’s territorial integrity. Buhari holds no mandate to preside over Nigeria’s disintegration or dismember. Every part of the country, including the now belligerent South-South and the ever increasingly restless South-East, participated in the 2015 election. Incidentally the two regions voted emphatically for the continuation of the PDP and former President Goodluck Jonathan’s stay in power. The rest of the country voted with no less conviction for the change that propelled Buhari and the APC to power. Can aggrieved groups in the South-South or South-East justifiably seek to get through destructive militancy or separatist agitations, what they failed to achieve through the ballot in the last election? Should parts of the country that do not have their way in future elections also resort to self help through disruptive activities that seek to indirectly nullify the will of the majority?

Confronted with the threatened secession of seven slave owning southern states, the 16th president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, in his first inaugural address on March 4, 1861, reiterated the legal and moral obligation of an electoral minority to respect the decision of a constitutional majority if democracy is to be sustained. In Lincoln’s words “Plainly the central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy. A majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, always changing easily with deliberate change of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects it does of necessity fly to anarchy or despotism. The rule of a minority as a permanent arrangement is wholly impossible so that rejecting the majority principle, anarchism or despotism in some form is all that is left”. Stressing that all his authority as President derived from the people, Lincoln affirmed that his sacred  duty was to administer his government and “transmit it unimpaired to his successor”. Buhari can also logically make this claim.

There are those who will seek to justify the economy crippling militancy in the South-South and South-East and resurgent pro-Biafra sentiments in the South-East with reference to the extremist Boko Haram insurgency perceived as a ploy to make the country ungovernable for Jonathan. Suffice it to say that the former President and his military high command had the wherewithal to effectively and decisively check the Boko Haram menace if they applied their minds to it. Shocking revelations of the looting of funds meant to procure weapons for prosecuting the anti-terrorism war by top military brass and ruling party politicians explains the psychological, professional and logistical incapacitation of a once potent Nigerian military to contain a rampaging Boko Haram ragtag army. The Jonathan administration thus can blame no one for its self-inflicted organizational debility and incoherence in this regard.

This column does not support the school of thought that government should enter into dialogue with every group that challenges the authority of the Nigerian state and expresses separatist aspiration for any number of real or imagined grieviances. It is, however, instructive that despite his tough stance on the non negotiability of Nigeria’s unity, President Muhammadu Buhari has demonstrated eagerness to dialogue with the Niger Delta avengers. On one occasion Buhari even begged the militants in the name of God to stop their destruction of oil facilities in the Niger Delta with catastrophic consequences for the economy. This was after the initial deployment of massive force to contain the resurgent Niger Delta militancy. Nevertheless, the bombing of oil facilities in the Niger Delta remains unabated thus exposing the weak underbelly of the Nigerian state. Perceiving the government’s readiness for dialogue as a sign of weakness, the number of militant groups in the Niger Delta has mushroomed rapidly and the most ridiculous and humbling terms are being given as conditions for dialogue. That is the drawback of attempting to engage even rabidly criminal elements in dialogue from a position of weakness. But then the Nigerian state has no choice as years of insidious corruption, poor governance and lack of vision has hobbled its institutional efficacy and emboldened rogue elements to taunt and thwart its authority.

Each time President Buhari talks of the non negotiability of the Nigeria’s unity, he does so within the historical context of the tragic civil war that clost between two and three million lives. This is understandable. He fought in the war and he is right that we should never desire to witness such a disaster ever again. Buhari insists that the wartime slogan ‘Go On with One Nigeria’ is still relevant today. However, the war was fought to keep Nigeria one by force. Four and a half decades after, the non-negotiability of Nigeria’s unity can no more be a matter of force and compulsion. It must be a function of persuasion, rationality, wise statesmanship as well as creative and productive leadership. Nigeria’s unity and stability is non- negotiable if we do not want the vast territory that comprises the country to degenerate to sheer chaos and anarchy far worse than the ills we argue about within the existing structure. The borders of the component parts of the country are fluid and the interconnections and interpenetrations of our diverse peoples intricate and complex. The number of diverse kinds of weapons circulating in informal and undetected channels across the country is so immense that it will be difficult maintaining any semblance of meaningful authority in a dismembered Nigeria.

Here again, I find the words of Lincoln to his country’s secessionists relevant to our country’s present circumstances. In his words: “We cannot remove our respective sections from each other nor build an impassable wall between them. A husband and wife may be divorced and go out of the presence of each other, but the different parts of our country cannot do this. They cannot but remain face to face and intercourse, either amicable or hostile must continue between them”.     However, in the case of Nigeria, a critical condition for making the country’s unity non negotiable is to eschew and expunge from our vocabulary the phrase that the country’s unity is non- negotiable. That language must no longer be part of the grammar of Nigerian politics.

For close to one hour last Sunday, July 3rd, the Lagos State Governor, Mr Akinwunmi Ambode, was on his feet as he spoke to invited journalists about his last one year in office as well as his plans for the state in the immediate future. The venue was the banquet hall of the Government House, Ikeja. Mr Ambode exuded confidence and optimism. He recalled the achievements of his administration towards actualizing his promised ‘continuity with improvement’ in diverse sectors ranging from security, education, health; law, order and justice to massive electrification of the metropolis and roads rehabilitation/reconstruction among others.

The governor is confident that Lagosians will, in the next one year, witness more of the development dividends they voted for when they opted for him and the APC at the last polls. He promises that there will be even more massive investment in security with the ultimate objective of ensuring that every street in Lagos is effectively policed and safe. This he says will be complemented by an increased aggressiveness in the ‘Operation Light up Lagos’ project and other policies deliberately targeted at making Lagos a 24 hour economy befitting a model Mega city.

His administration’s Employment Trust Fund, he avers, will also take off fully offering entrepreneurial opportunities to large numbers of jobless youth. He assures that Lagosians will witness even more massive investment in education and health particularly with the creation of a medical park in Ikoyi that will take optimum advantage of the country’s bounteous medical specialists abroad, boost medical tourism and save scarce foreign exchange.

Governor Ambode’s vision of Lagos transcends the borders of Nigeria. He envisages Lagos as a model African Mega city. He enjoins the support of the media and the generality of Lagosians in ensuring that Lagos plays her destined leadership role in Africa. This mood of confidence and optimism in Lagos contrasts sharply with that of dejection, despair and helplessness in the majority of other states in the country. At least 27 states owe their workers arrears of salaries of several months. A recent study indicates that no less than 15 states are technically insolvent as they will be unable to survive without monthly allocation from the Federation Account. Yet, not only is Lagos State paying workers’   salaries as well as allowances, pensions and subventions as and at when due, the state is also systematically increasing its Internally Generated Revenue to the extent that she is practically able to subsist independent of federal allocation.

Mr Ambode gives an insight into his administration’s philosophy of public finance. There is absolutely nothing like government money he insists. What is popularly tagged government money in Nigeria is in fact tax payers’ money rightly belonging to the people. The key to the financial buoyancy of Lagos he explains lies in the sense of responsibility and accountability of government in utilizing public resources to deliver identifiable and verifiable services. The consequence is the steady and systematic widening of the tax net as an ever increasing number of citizens voluntarily pay their taxes.

It is all too easy to attribute the prosperity of Lagos in a vast wasteland of national poverty and stagnation to a favorable geographical location, huge population or other fortuitous factors. The truth, however, is that there is nothing inevitable about the commercial nerve centre’s current financial solidity that contrasts sharply with the national narrative of impoverishment and deepening underdevelopment. Today’s Lagos is the product of deliberate leadership and policy choices right from the democratic restoration of 1999 through to the incumbent Ambode administration.

Apart from the solid fiscal foundation laid for the state by the Tinubu administration, there has been a positive philosophical and ideological continuity that has seen Mr Babatunde Raji Fashola (SAN) and now governor Ambode building constructively on the legacy they inherited. This type of continuity has been absent at the national level in the last 16 years. We will recollect that President Olusegun Obasanjo’s administration had the National Economic and Employment Development Strategy (NEEDS).

Rather than build on this, the late President Umaru Yar’ Adua launched his 7-point Agenda. President Goodluck Jonathan in turn initiated his Transformation Agenda, which had little or nothing to do with the policy initiatives of his predecessors. Governance at the centre has thus been characterized by radical discontinuities with negative consequences for incremental and steady development. This is unlike Lagos which has been carefully and systematically implementing a carefully thought out 10-Point Agenda over the last one and a half decades.

Lagos State was to all intents and purposes practically insolvent as at 1999. The state’s monthly Internally Generated Revenue was approximately 600 million Naira barely sufficient to pay its workers and grossly inadequate to fund qualitative social services and critical infrastructure. The City-state was widely depicted and perceived as a veritable jungle with decrepit roads, decayed public schools, chronic water shortage, traffic chaos and mountains of refuse on major highways among others.

The poverty and disorderliness fuelled several bloody inter ethnic and communal conflicts at Mile 12, Mile 2, Agege and Ajegunle. Eight years later, thanks to bold, courageous and imaginative reforms, Lagos State’s Internally Generated Revenue had increased to at least 6 billion Naira monthly and the foundation had been laid for the environmental transformation and radical modernization of infrastructure in the state.

A man of details and methods, former governor Fashola built impressively on this legacy while his first year in office shows that Mr. Ambode is taking the vision to greater heights to the glory of Lagos. But this story of success in Lagos awaits a replication at the national level. Nigeria awaits a pathfinder that can lay a foundation for developmental democracy which others can build on. Restructuring and decentralization as being vociferously advocated in some quarters may indeed be a necessary condition for liberating the developmental potentials of Nigeria. The Lagos example, however, shows that they do not constitute a sufficient condition for national transformation. Equally critical are visionary and competent leaders capable of navigating the ship of state from turbulent waters of stagnation and lack to more steady weather of ever increasing prosperity, stability and development.