Category: Segun Ayobolu

What exactly is the defining essence, the manifest characteristic of the Boko Haram insurgency that in the last three years has laid large swathes of the North-East socially, politically and economically prostrate? There are those who perceive the incendiary Boko Haram uprising in essentially regional terms. For those of this school of thought, the enigmatic sect’s mindless blood- letting is nothing but a carefully calculated effort to make the country ungovernable for President Goodluck Jonathan and ensure a return of power to the North come 2015. Articulate Boko Haram ideologues will no doubt be quite pleased with this reading of its activities. Any perspective that helps widen the country’s delicate North-South fault lines will go a long way in helping to achieve its ultimate goal of national disintegration.

Yes, the North-East has been Boko Haram’s main theatre of operation with occasional forays to other parts of the North including the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja. But the effects of the sect’s terroristic enterprise reverberate across the country. When bombs are detonated in crowded motor parks, entertainment spots or churches; when school children are indiscriminately slaughtered or abducted in horrendous circumstances, the implications go far beyond the North. If the economy of any part of the country is being systematically crippled the way that of the North-East is, the entire country is the casualty.

The more southerners, many of whom have lived all their lives in the North flee back to their states of origin in the south, the more fulfilled Boko Haram will be that its nefarious organisational goals are being achieved. Any notion that there is some unbridgeable chasm between the North and the South exists only in the fevered and misguided imagination of Boko Haram. The truth of the matter is that those factors that unite Nigerians across regional boundaries far outweigh those that divide them. The danger is that otherwise well- meaning Nigerians may subliminally begin to adopt Boko Haram’s mind-set and exhibit hostile attitudes to those from other regions without any objective basis.

There are also those who perceive the Boko Haram menace from the prism of a fundamental confrontation between Islam and Christianity. True, Boko Haram claims that the institution of an Islamic state in Northern Nigeria is one of its key objectives. However, perhaps due to external influences such as its affiliation with al Qaeda, the sect has increasingly assumed an anarchic, utterly nihilistic character. There is neither rhyme nor method to its madness. For, there is absolutely nothing in Islam to justify or rationalise Boko Haram’s random murder of innocent school children, the aged, women or men. And in its barbaric onslaught against the sanctity of human life, Boko Haram spares neither Christians nor Muslims. How then by any stretch of the imagination can the perverse sect be seen as hoisting aloft the banner of Islam?

What we thus have on our hands is a veritable war between a blood-thirsty, criminal and irredeemably deluded Boko Haram sect and the vast majority of decent, law abiding and God-fearing Nigerian Christians and Muslims both in the North and the South. Boko Haram believes in senseless murder, hate mongering, sexual perversion and the desecration of the most sacred human values. But the majority of sane Nigerian Christians and Muslims believe (1) in the inevitability and irreversibility of Nigeria as a multi-religious society (2) the tolerance and respect for diverse faiths necessary for the harmonious co-existence of a multi-religious community and (3) the necessity of a secular state as an impartial arbiter in the context of a multi-religious society.

Unfortunately, the poisonous Boko Haram virus has insidiously and dangerously seeped into the most unexpected and unsuspecting quarters. For instance, when the All Progressives Congress (APC) recently launched its far reaching roadmap, Chief Olisa Metuh, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) spokesman simply dismissed it as a Janjaweed road map without the slightest attempt at rational analysis. That is Boko Haram mentality. Even though he may mean well, President Jonathan’s continuous and well publicised gravitation from one church service to another; his recent elaborate and ostentatious pilgrimage to Israel or his visit to the Vatican in the midst of the serious Boko Haram religious insurrection at home portray him more as a Christian President rather than the leader of a secular state that he is. This is indirectly playing into the hands of Boko Haram which aspires to abolish the secularity of the Nigerian state.

In the same vein, reacting to unconfirmed speculations that the APC may field a Muslim-Muslim presidential ticket for the 2015 election, the brilliantly boisterous Femi Fani-Kayode has been up in arms waving aloft the banner of his Christian faith. The otherwise astute polemicist ignores the fact that in our extant constitution, neither the President nor the Vice President represents any religious faith. Indeed, it would be a gross violation of their oaths of office for any of them to exhibit religious bias in the discharge of their duties. Many of those who have supported Femi Fani-Kayode’s position argue that Nigeria of today is not that of 1993 when an Abiola-Kingibe ticket won a landslide electoral victory. The question is: have we grown better or worse?

I believe that the vast majority of Nigerians remain as sophisticated as ever in making political choices devoid of sentimental religious colouration. We have had Christian Presidents for at least 12 years since 1999. What impact has that had on the welfare and well-being of Christians? The problem is that we have allowed Boko Haram’s poisoned mentality to colour our perceptions and devalue our standards. The reality is that the impact of the religious beliefs of public office holders on performance and good governance has been grossly exaggerated.

Now, let us briefly examine the electoral assets of the two personalities frequently speculated with regard to the APC ticket. First, General Muhammadu Buhari. He was once military governor of an area that today spans five or six states. He was a one- time minister of petroleum. Yet, he does not boast any spectacular wealth. He is a man of modest means. He enjoys an almost cult-like following across the North-East and North-West. Even in those parts of the country where he has been most venomously, viciously and unfairly demonised, Buhari is respected for his ascetic and disciplined outlook on life. He comes across to me as more of a Christ-like figure than those Christians who flaunt opulent wealth in the midst of abject mass poverty.

And what about Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu? By dint of hard work, brilliant governance and courage, he has become a veritable colossus in the South-West. Beyond this he has a vast and useful political network throughout the length and breadth of Nigeria. As Governor of Lagos State between 1999 and 2007 some of the Christians in his star-studded Cabinet include: Professor Yemi Osinbajo (Attorney General), Dele Alake (Information), Leke Pitan (Health), Professor Idowu Sobowale (Education), Wale Edun (Finance), Yemi Cardoso (Economic Planning), Akin Doherty (Science & Technology), Architect Lanre Towry Coker (Housing), Mrs Kemi Nelson (Establishment & Job Creation), Mrs Teju Phillips (Special Duties), Mrs Eniola Fadayomi (Women Affairs & Poverty Alleviation), Ben Akabueze (Economic Planning), Opeyemi Bamidele (Sports and Youth Development), Professor Samuel Adewole (Education) and Fola Arthur Worrey (Lands) to name a few.

Tinubu ensured a befitting chapel was built at the State House, Marina, to enable Christian workers worship conveniently. His administration returned mission schools to their original owners with Christian missions being the greatest beneficiaries. He instituted the annual New Year thanksgiving service at the State House presided over by the respected Pastor Enoch Adeboye and this has remained an enduring tradition. Of course, it is no secret that his wife is an ordained pastor of the Redeemed Christian Church of God. I know of no contemporary politician – Christian or Muslim- with a closer relationship with the Christian community. Surely, this is not the profile of a religious bigot.

Of course, the political climate has been so poisoned that it may be unwise for the APC to present a Muslim-Muslim ticket. But the earlier we cast off the bewitchment of Boko Haram thinking and clearly demarcate between religion and politics, the better for our polity.

What exactly are the root causes of Nigeria’s persistent and even deepening crisis of underdevelopment despite her abundant human, material and natural resources endowment? Why has Nigeria over half a decade after independence been unable to actualize her potentials, promote the welfare and well- being of the vast majority of her populace and meaningfully assert her status as the fabled giant of Africa and an influential force in world politics? These are the issues that engage Professor Chibuzo Nnate Nwoke’s mind in his inaugural lecture titled “Rich Land; Poor People: The Political Economy of Mineral Resources in a Peripheral Capitalist State” delivered at the Leed City University, Ibadan, on November 7, 2013. A lecturer at the Leed City University’s Department of Politics and International Relations, Professor Nwoke has over the last three decades researched exhaustively, written extensively and taught in the area of the role of mineral resources in the contemporary global political economy.

His lecture demonstrates vividly that, despite the travails of university education in Nigeria, a lot of quality work is still being done by gifted and dedicated academics both in the country’s private and public universities. He also shows that there are indeed refreshing perspectives on the challenge of underdevelopment in Nigeria and Africa and that there are viable alternatives to the neo-liberal policy orthodoxy that has been foisted on the continent with dire consequences in the last three decades. Professor Nwoke’s inaugural lecture is particularly relevant and useful at this time when there are intense debates on the best way to liberate Nigeria’s potentials and set her firmly and irreversibly on the path of accelerated development.

While exhaustively documenting Nigeria’s huge mineral endowments in diverse sectors, Professor Nwoke also argues that there is absolutely no reason why, with a visionary, competent and patriotic leadership, these resources could not be utilised to achieve self-reliant industrialization for the country as well as uplift the quality of life of the Nigerian people. He rigorously and ruthlessly challenges received orthodoxies such as the oft-cited ‘resource curse’ as being the root cause of the country’s backwardness. His wide ranging discourse examines the political economy of mineral resources, demonstrates the crucial significance of mineral resources in human civilisation while also x-raying ‘the internal and external factors of minerals-related underdevelopment’.

His detailed catalogue of the variety and spread of untapped mineral resources throughout the length and breadth of the country prove that there is no excuse for Nigeria’s sustained dependence on oil, which is responsible for over 90% of the country’s revenues. Most of the states, which are dependent on oil revenues from the centre, are shown to have untapped mineral deposits that could have enriched the country’s resource base and facilitated their socio-economic development. A most interesting aspect of the inaugural major is Professor Nwoke’s tracing of the trajectory of the ‘resource curse’ debate in the development/underdevelopment literature.

In the early 1950s, he notes, most mainstream development economists theorised that mineral resource abundance of backward or underdeveloped countries was indeed an asset. These resources it was argued would help such countries, who were seen as enjoying surplus labour but suffering from severe shortages of investible capital, to earn revenues through the export of primary commodities and attraction of investment. These revenues would in turn be utilised to provide critical public goods for their people. This predominant view at the time seemed to have been reinforced by the formation in the 1970s of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) as well as other third world producer’s associations for such commodities as copper, bauxite, tin, groundnuts, cocoa and coffee among others. Indeed, the shock caused in the global economy by OPEC’s hike in oil prices in the 1970s led some scholars to speculate on the transition from a bi-polar to a tri-polar world in which the resource rich Third World countries constituted the third power bloc.

“Unfortunately, however”, Professor Nwoke notes “I have also observed the gradual and subsequent erosion of the Third World’s “resource power” up to the point where, today, several scholars now speak of “the paradox of plenty” or the “resource curse”, which they say has afflicted Third World countries that God has blessed with abundant resources”. He explains the so-called ‘paradox of plenty’ as referring to the perceived inverse relationship between abundant resource availability and the economic performance of countries possessing such resources. Those who espouse this view contend that there is evidence that states with abundant resource wealth tend to post poorer economic performance than those who are resource poor.

Writing from the perspective of radical political economy informed by the works of scholars and thinkers such as Kwame Nkrumah, V.I. Lenin, Samir Amin, Walter Rodney, Bade Onimode, Claude Ake, Paul Baran etc, Nwoke offers a fundamentally different view opposed to the mainstream capital shortage or resource curse thesis. He argues that Africa’s resource endowment problems must be understood not as a curse but situated within the context of the organisation and functioning of the world capitalist system and Africa’s historically conditioned role in that structure as a supplier of raw materials. He points out that a thinker like Kwame Nkrumah had recognised this as far back as the 1960s when he wrote in his book, ‘Neo-colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism’ that “…If Africa’s multiple resources were used in her own development, they would place her among the modernised continents of the world. But the resources have been, and are still being used for the greater development of overseas interests”.

Contending that the validity of Nkrumah’s thesis still endures, Nwoke insists that the origin of the so called resource curse and much of Africa’s underdevelopment is due to the continent’s engagement predominantly in primary resource production, which is controlled by foreign transnational entities merely for export to metropolitan countries. Thus, the “contrived and structural development of underdevelopment is, therefore, largely externally-induced”. Nwoke criticises the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) for focussing on internal factors perceived to be responsible for Africa’s social, economic and political problems while ignoring the critical external variables. Hence the ‘resource curse’ argument seems to imply that the abundance of mineral resources inevitably induces moral laxity, lethargy and corruption among African socio-political and economic elites that are the causes of underdevelopment.

Nwoke faults this perspective for neglecting the structural, dependent and unequal incorporation of Africa into the global capitalist economy as supplier of raw materials and importer of finished goods, a factor which is indispensable to comprehending the challenge of underdevelopment and backwardness in Africa. As a result of this misdiagnosis, the neo-liberal prescriptions for Africa’s development have been ineffective and even worsened the country’s plight. In his words “Their answer to the crisis in Africa is for us to develop agriculture, but again, with a view to export; and for us to abandon protection of domestic industry, to dismantle the public sector and make greater efforts to attract foreign capital. In short, they recommend policies the effect of which would be to aggravate the problem inherent in the specialization in raw materials exports and foreign control over the economy, which are, in fact, among the major factors causing the country’s crisis”. And this position is compounded by the fact that “within the world trade regime, despite its mantra of trade liberalisation, every effort is made, through Western protectionism, to discourage attempts to process, and add value to Africa’s raw materials export”.

There is an undeniably and infinitely wide gulf between the President Goodluck Jonathan National Conference (JNC) recently inaugurated in Abuja and the Sovereign National Conference (SNC), which pro-democracy and federalist advocates had demanded for decades. The proposed SNC would derive its mandate from the people. It would be made up of their duly elected representatives. Its decisions, which would bring about a fundamental change in the extant political order, would be binding and unalterable by a subsisting regime.

Many ardent advocates of a SNC have enthusiastically jumped on the Naira-laden band wagon of the JNC. Of course, a sprinkling of them is motivated by a patriotic and ardent desire for radical structural changes that can impel accelerated national progress. But the majority see it as another opportunity for pecuniary primitive accumulation – another occasion to ‘come and eat’ on behalf of ‘their people’.

The Yoruba Diaspora group, Oodua Foundation, in a statement signed by Dr Dejo Ogunwande, Professor Adeniran Adeboye and Professor Banji Akitoye expressed enthusiastic support for the JNC. They strongly opposed the position of the Northern Elders Forum (NEF) after a meeting in Kano on March 10 and 11 that “The planned National Conference has no basis, or any form of legitimacy or authority to speak for the people of the North or other Nigerians. Its proceedings, conclusions and recommendations are therefore of no consequence and will not be accepted by the people of the North”.

Of course, I have my problems with groups like the NEF, Afenifere, Ohaneze or others which arrogantly assume the right to speak for the North or other ethno-regional and cultural groups. For one, many members of the NEF are complicit in the crass corruption, venality and arrant irresponsibility of the pan-Nigeria political elite that has brought us to the present quagmire. Secondly, they affect the supercilious posturing of many members of the Northern elite that can be so offensive. Thirdly, it is illogical to claim that the North will not accept the conclusions and recommendations of the JNC when these are yet to be known.

Yet, I do not think that the NEF can be faulted when they claim that the JNC has “no basis or any form of legitimacy or authority” to speak for the people of Nigeria. I challenge the Oodua Foundation to tell the world the legal or constitutional basis on which the JNC stands. Some have claimed quite absurdly that Nigerians have the constitutional right to freedom of expression and association. The JNC could as well be a Town Hall meeting in that case. It does not stand on any legal foundation.

 Yes, there are some excellent delegates- politically, professionally and ethically- at the conference. But generally, the representativeness of the body is quite hollow and diluted since the members are wholly handpicked. In a free and fair election, many of the delegates would not have the slightest chance of being chosen to represent ‘their people’. In the JNC is an assortment of groups parading sectional agendas purportedly drawn up on behalf of people who had absolutely no say in their determination.

According to the Oodua Foundation, “In the history of the constitutional development of Nigeria, the present National Conference is perfectly in line with all previous Nigerian constitutional conferences and it is by no means inferior to any in legitimacy”. Now, there is a problem if the JNC is “perfectly in line” with “all” such previous exercises. For, Nigeria is in her present predicament in spite of all those conferences – about ten in all. Why continue to do the same thing and expect a different outcome? Again, if N7 billion is being expended on the JNC, shouldn’t it strive to be superior in legitimacy to all previous exercises since it has the benefit of learning from the limitations of all others?

Like the Obasanjo 2005 National Political Reforms Conference, not a single member of the JNC is elected. The body exists at the pleasure of the Jonathan presidency. Even the venal Abacha dictatorship did slightly better than this. At least it made some pretence of electing a certain percentage of members to its 1995 conference.  If at the end of the day either the presidency or the National Assembly dumps the JNC’s recommendations, the heavens will not fall. And the delegates would have no excuse to cry foul since they partook of the uncertain adventure knowing fully well that the resolutions of the JNC have no force of law whatsoever.

Now, what if against all odds the JNC succeeds in achieving its stated objectives and laying a firm foundation for the resurrection and revitalisation of Nigeria? In that case, all genuine patriots should be happy for the country and give President Jonathan his due plaudits for the feat. There must be a limit to partisanship in the process of nation-building.  Indeed, I would be quite glad if in the words of Gbogungboro, this newspaper’s passionately patriotic columnist “President Jonathan does indeed see this National Conference successfully to the remaking of our federation” and thus becoming “one of the greatest Nigerians, one of the greatest Africans of our time”.

GbogunGboro is confident that this could very well be the case. And the basis of this optimism? His words: “I was highly impressed when he said in his speech to the inaugural meeting of the National Conference: Let me again repeat what I have been saying that Goodluck Jonathan has no personal agenda in convening this National Conference”. Now, I would be exceedingly hesitant to base my optimism on the success of this critical national exercise on such a very fragile premise. Not even General Abacha claimed that he had a hidden agenda when inaugurating the 1995 conference. And neither did Obasanjo do the same thing when he inaugurated the 2005 conference. Really, did anyone realistically expect Jonathan to tell Nigerians that he was convening the conference to pursue a personal agenda?

Yes, I pray that by all means the JNC succeeds. That should be the hope and wish of all Nigerians. But our expectations must be based on realistic analysis and not romantic wishes. The undisguised reality is that Jonathan indeed has a personal agenda. Only someone who has been on vacation on Planet Mars will not know that Jonathan is fervently and feverishly working towards a second term in 2015. Of course, this is his constitutional right. But let us not deceive ourselves that Jonathan can be serious about radically changing a constitution which is the very basis of his seeking re-election for a second term. This is a fundamental contradiction. It is unrealistic and inexcusably idealistic to expect that the JNC can be dissociated and insulated from the on-going struggle for power in 2015. We cannot have a depoliticised National Conference in an intensely politicised context.

Those who genuinely want radical structural change in Nigeria are understandably impressed with Jonathan’s born again stance on convening a National Conference. This suggests that he believes the country must move in a new direction away from the present path the PDP has taken the nation since 1999. But his campaign for re-election in 2015, which has begun in earnest, is predicated on continuity and assumes that the PDP has posted a stellar performance and deserves to continue managing the country’s affairs.

In the past few weeks Jonathan has addressed PDP ‘unity rallies’ in Kano, Sokoto, Kwara, Kaduna, Katsina and Imo states. His words in Kano: “Come 2015, PDP is going to retain this zone. We will continue to retain Jigawa, Katsina, Kaduna and Kebbi states. Kano is a PDP state but some people want to take the state from us. We don’t know where they are taking Kano state to. But with Shekarau and others joining PDP, we will take Kano back”. Let no one be fooled. The JNC is not about change. It is about 2015 and Jonathan’s continuity.