The Nation Newspaper

Category: Adebayo Lamikanra

  • The time for talking is over

    The time for talking is over

    On the first Sunday morning in February 1990, I got a big surprise when as was usual for me I turned to the Sunday Guardian. On one side of the centre page was an article which I had submitted to the Guardian a few days before through Jide Oluwanuyitan for consideration for publication in the newspaper which at the time was the acclaimed flagship of the Nigerian press. The title of that piece was ‘Transit or perish’, at a time when the cost of petrol had just been increased to sixty kobo per litre and I was sure that there was a conspiracy to keep us home bound. Now that we have to cough up an unimaginable sum in excess of six hundred Naira per litre, a sum which is a thousand times more, I am struck dumb with amazement, disbelief and more than a dash of justifiable anger. At this point in time, we have no wriggle room left and we have been propelled into the anteroom of a raging monster hell bent on destroying us all, our insensitive ruling elite included. I am appalled that this simple consequence of where we are is still eluding the best majority of Nigerians who are hurling rocks all over the place, obstinately oblivious of the fact that we all live in fragile glass houses.

    Since that day in 1990, at the height of rascally military rule, I have written a thousand articles and more in several newspapers, enough to fool a large number of people into thinking that I was a trained journalist and columnist. It was not until last year, a couple of years after retiring from my day job as a university lecturer that I finally became a columnist in The nation, albeit still an outsider in the field of journalism. For the avoidance of doubt, I confess that I am a pharmacist and have papers to prove it even if there are far too many people in this country who are claiming to be one thing or the other on the strength of fake credentials craftily produced by talented but bent printers. These days it is even not out of place to doubt the authenticity of the currency notes in our pockets given the official as well as unofficial strength of the battered and unloved Naira.

    Since 1999, I have engaged Nigerians in a wide variety of topics and published two volumes of my earliest journalistic adventures. I skirted very close to the wind of military (governmental) displeasure that no less an erudite scholar and lawyer than the late Professor M.I. Jegede jocularly advised me to let him know what I was writing about, just in case he had to use his legal expertise to extricate me from the clutches of a government which by nature was devoid of any sense of humour. Fortunately, the government was apparently too busy with existential matters to bother with the musings of an obscure lecturer of Pharmacy masquerading as an opinion moulder in a highbrow publication dishing out fares that were presumably too rich for the consumption of that mythical man in the street.

    A few days after that first article was published, I was in Jide Oluwanuyitan’s office when Tunji Dare, one of my favourite columnists of all time and Editor of the Guardian’s Op-Ed page at the time, walked in larger than life. I was thrilled to see him and thanked him for publishing my piece. If I was thrilled by simply meeting him, I was launched into the lunar orbit when he told me that it was he who needed to thank me for submitting that article to the Guardian. According to him he loved the article so much that he published it in violation of house rules simply by publishing it as there was a rule which insisted that all authors had to be acknowledged by their full names and not by their initials. I had submitted the article as A. Lamikanra and he wanted to know what the A stood for. Adebayo, I replied, with perhaps a little more gusto than the occasion demanded and by doing so, Adebayo Lamikanra joined the Guardian family through thick and thin as I came to find out when the newspaper was locked down for a long period by a petulant and particularly rascally military government.

    After the opening salvo of that first article, there was no stopping me as article after article was published and this gave me so much name recognition that a lot of people greeted me with uncommon familiarity as soon as they knew that they were in the presence of Adebayo Lamikanra. Some of them it has to be said, were at least a little disappointed to see me in the flesh. That feeling can be summed up in the comment of one such person who had through my writings imagined that I was some oversized human being with an uncommonly large head. Seeing that I was of pretty average size with only a slightly bigger head than most people was a shock to his system and he could not resist letting me know this.

    When I started this journey of bothering Nigerians with my thoughts, I really did think that I could make a difference, just a little difference to the way the country was being run or rather being driven into the ground. Now that I am much older and presumably wiser, I have come to the realisation that I was just dreaming. The so called leaders of Nigeria are uniformly hard headed men and increasingly frequently, women, who have no time for dreamers or their infantile dreams. They live in a sordid world of the all too real world of certainty, a place where dreams are annoying distractions not to be entertained or even acknowledged. People like me are like pestilential mosquitoes with a loud whine but certainly no bite. We could even be amusing from time to time but who under no circumstances were to be taken seriously. In any case, they hardly have any time for distraction from their primary business of studiously pulling Nigeria apart piece by piece. Taking time out to sample the opinion of the minions under their heel is certainly a bridge too far. It cannot be accommodated within their busy schedule, official political and social.

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    We are confronted with formidable problems which we need to confront in return. Our population is ballooning in front of our eyes and our discomfort is growing in the same proportion. There are many otherwise sensible people who talk about a large market within which all manner of goods can be traded by our huge population. That can only be true when there are goods to be traded. Here, we are all voracious consumers who produce next to nothing. We are all dependent on a resource which was fortuitously laid down deep under our feet over billions of years and have no clue as to how it can be profitably extracted. We depend on avaricious strangers to do that. The crude oil we have been abusing over the last sixty years will be exhausted within the life time of most Nigerians living today. And there will be nothing but a few rusting structures to show for a century of wantonness. Every additional mouth adds to our discomfiture as each mouth must consume and gorge on a wide range of articles none of which we have the capacity to produce. This cannot end well as the time will come for the chickens to come home to roost to find nothing to sustain them.

    Now is the time to knuckle down seriously to begin to produce at least some of the articles of consumption beginning with the food we eat. There is this wide spread belief that it is easy to coax the soil into producing abundant harvests of a broad range of crops. Nothing could be further from the truth. For a start, we have abused our soils over many years, to the point of tiredness and we have now arrived at a point of diminishing returns. Our towns are spreading out with astonishing ferocity and land available for cultivation is disappearing under concrete foundations.

    In addition, farming is a combination of art and science and authentic practitioners are disappearing and not replaced. How long can this situation last when fathers are not handing over farms to their children who are sunning themselves under bright city lights? Your guess is as good as mine.

    Most of our young people are functional illiterates as our educational system is in tatters. Teachers are suffering from a severe case of invisibility as we have turned our schools into markets of sorts where teachers are fetchers and carriers, their authority having been usurped by wily entrepreneurs with an eagle eye on the bottom line. Under prevailing circumstances, teachers are just victims with very little to offer. After all said and done, we still have an identifiable educational system but for how much longer?

    Some notorious coup plotter, in justifying the coup in which he was involved claimed that our doctors were practising in clinics which had no drugs for patients. Today, forty years later, doctors are fleeing in droves and those clinics are bereft of both drugs and doctors. In the modern world, with all its distractions, a functional healthcare system must be a prominent fixture and so, our clinics must be fixed now if we are to be regarded as being part of the world.

    Above all, corruption sits like a vulture on top of a tall tree, waiting for us to expire so that it can devour our giant carcass. It is only a question of time before the inevitable happens. Among all the chaos, there are too many Nigerians gloating over our collective predicaments. They love nothing better than to dance to the sound of any failure and these days they have plenty to crow over. Like lepers who cannot milk a cow, they love nothing better than to dip leprous fingers into the little milk that has been squeezed out of our much emaciated national cow forgetting that in the end, they cannot escape from the terminal calamity waiting round the corner. The time for talking is now over as there is a lot of work to be done, the time for procrastination having long been passed.

  • Energy deficit

    Energy deficit

    The Lagos municipality was first electrified in 1886, long before our country came into being.

    That is certainly impressive but much so is the fact that New York, now known to the world as the city of lights was first electrified in 1882,  a mere four years before Lagos was connected to the modern miracle of municipally supplied electricity. Lagos was, in the beginning juiced up with electrify provided by two generators with a combined capacity of 60 Kw and must have generated a great buzz among the Lagosians who were alive at the time.

    I spent my early years in the provinces and was witness to the arrival of electricity in Osogbo in 1957 where it generated great excitement, not least in our household. We had just arrived from Oyo at the time where we were familiar with the brightness of the electric light bulb. This is because we lived on the premises of the famous St Andrew’s College which had a generator which was operational until 10 pm and so we were very excited at the prospect of resuming our acquaintance with the wonders of electricity. By the time we arrived in Lagos in 1960, Lagos had a steady supply of electricity from the coal powered station at Ijora and from the point of view of electricity, life could not be better as power supply could, at that time be taken for granted at all times. The streets of Lagos were brightly lit by electric lamps which everywhere banished the oppression of darkness and turned Lagos into a twenty four hour city which never slept. The lights went off during the Civil War and never really came back again so that today, landing at the Lagos airport at night is like landing in another century, one that existed before the world knew the wonders of electricity. This is in sharp contrast to other more fortunate cities whose welcoming lights could be seen a long way off before your plane begins its descent into the sea of lights which they represented.

    Now, there are not too many places in Nigeria where there is no supply of electricity, at least nominally. The vast majority of houses are wired for electricity even if the supply is at best, only fitful. But long after the miracle of 1886, electricity is no longer about light but power, power to do so many things that to be without it is to descend into the hell of the Middle ages and before. Now, the modern household will feel terribly deprived if electricity supply lasts only until 10 pm because fans, television sets,  fridges, not to talk of those mobile phones waiting to be charged and all those other  wonderful gadgets which keep us constantly in touch with modernity and life itself, need a constant all round supply of electricity.  This is a far cry from what it was in 1886 when the mere provision of light was enough to send the citizenry into undiluted ecstasy. And there is no limit to the boundaries which electricity can cross at will.

    This is a far cry from 1831 when Michael Faraday first created an electric current. This was a marvellous invention which caused such great excitement that Prince Albert, consort to Queen Victoria had to come to see for himself what all the fuss was about. Apparently, he was more puzzled than impressed by the demonstration of the existence of electric currents because after seeing the demonstration of this phenomenon he asked the expectant scientist what was the point of the electric current . As far as the royal visitor was concerned, the infant current was no more than a gimmick, something to provide some short lived entertainment for the multitudes of the great unwashed. The inventor, taken aback by the question replied with a question of his own. ‘Your Majesty, what is the point of a new born baby?’ That particular new born baby, treated by the prince with a distinct lack of enthusiasm has grown and is growing  in so many directions that life on this planet would simply be impossible without it. In fact any debate about the usefulness of electricity to the world would be like the argument about the chicken and the egg as to which came first because in terms of the modern world, can there be a world, any world at all, without electricity? All round the world the materials which we consume in vast quantities are coming off all kinds of conveyor belts all driven by electricity without which nothing is made that was made. These days, you cannot even get a hair cut or clean your teeth without the involvement of electricity and we carry the badge of our serious underdevelopment in our inability to generate enough electricity to power the machines which produce all those artefacts which give meaning to our lives. And this is in spite of the fact that Lagos, the so called economic capital of Nigeria was electrified only four years after New York entered her own electrical age.

    Lagos was dragged into her electrical age but unlike New York, the industrial revolution which ensured the phenomenal growth of that city did not come to Lagos and therefore, to be honest, no pre-industrial society has any real need of electricity. This is why Lagos can be said to have very little, if any need of electricity. Were the lights to go off completely in New York today, that city would be dead within twenty-four torrid hours. All the millions of lifts which keep those sky scrapers for which the city is famous operational will stop moving in an instant and for how long will the hundreds of thousands of people trapped in them survive? Navigating the streets will become impossible as all the street lights would be decommissioned with immediate effect and traffic snarled up for thousands of city miles. And what about the hospitals, tied as they are to the life support of continuous electricity supply? Those patients on life support would be dead in minutes and those undergoing any form of surgical intervention for whatever ails them would follow shortly thereafter. As for Lagos, if the lights were to go off for any length of time, the primitive beat of life in the city will go on, perhaps indefinitely and the situation, at least in the first few days, will excite nothing more than snide remarks or some form of gallows humour to make the situation bearable. There are precious few conveyor belts to be halted in Lagos and babies can be born in the feeble glow of torch lights. Under those conditions, life would go on and a lot more babies will be conceived. Humourous Lagosians would notice the bump and come up with a nickname for the cohort of babies born during the period covered by the extended power outage. In time, the dark days will be relegated so far back that it would be completely forgotten much sooner than later. For New York, life without electricity for twenty-four hours will be like a massive heart attack whereas for Lagos, it will maybe register as a little blip, not worthy of mention.

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    For all that, the most single topic of conversation in Nigeria is electricity or to be more specific, the lack of it. I went to a secondary school in Lagos in the sixties, more than seventy years after the electrification of the city. I spent seven memorable years in that school and throughout that period, the school routine was disturbed on less than six occasions by a power cut and this was brought about by the general strike of 1964 when workers walked off their places at Ijora. As a result of this, evening prep had to be suspended, much to the delight of the student body which savoured the unexpected but most welcome  suspension of engagement with dull school books. We gathered in little groups to tell tall tails and waited for normalcy to be restored. Now, even with generators and other backup facilities, I wonder if there are schools in Lagos that can guarantee that power cuts will not disrupt their activities at some point in time throughout the school year. This sign of a regression to the distant past is unmistakeable.

    In the intervening years between my experience in a Lagos in which electricity supply could be taken for granted and now, electricity has taken on a new and disturbing meaning in Nigeria.  A vast and expanding sum of money has been spent  only to be incinerated in the search for the provision of electricity to the expanding population of a country that has become bogged down in a morass of underdevelopment and an insane expansion in population. More and more people are facing the contradiction of dwindling resources amidst the rigours of galloping inflation and rising demands for a better life even as the possibility of meaningful employment receded on a more or less daily basis forcing the indefinite postponement of life goals, a postponement that is threatening to become a termination. We are confronted with myriad problems but right at the bottom of the pile is that of productivity. There is a lack of the means of production and so we are unemployed, misemployed or underemployed and those that are lucky enough to be employed are underpaid and disgruntled. There is a shortage, an acute shortage of power in this country and as our population grows, our ability to cope diminishes to the same extent as the number of people needing any form of service increases.

    For close to eight months now, we have been scratching our heads as to solve the pressing problem of how to afford the cost of diesel, petrol, aviation fuel, cooking gas, charcoal and even fire wood. When we factor in the uncertain supply of electricity, it becomes clear that we are in the fierce grip of an acute shortage of power to produce anything. This is why we are forced to import virtually everything from other countries where the problem of any shortage of productive power has been solved. At various times in history, certain countries have stepped forward to claim the title of workshop to the world. Following the Industrial Revolution in the middle years of the eighteenth century, the global workshop was centred in Birmingham, England. At that time, coal provided power for production and so much coal was burnt in the area around Birmingham that that area acquired the name of Black country because the whole place was blackened by the smoke from burning coal. Since then, other parts of the globe have taken up the challenge of producing the industrial goods consumed all over the world. The USA, Germany, Japan have at various times provided the world with finished goods. Today, India and more strongly, China are the leaders of consumer goods production and their respective economies are booming which is why their peoples are being promoted into a comfortable global middle class.

    Over in Nigeria, we have not yet arrived at the starting point of industrial production because we are in the grip of a suffocating energy shortage. This is in spite of the fact that  even though for more than half a decade Nigeria has been one of the leading producers of the greatest source of energy, crude oil from which other countries have extracted vast quantities of energy. They are using the energy availm produced all sorts of wonderful goods for which we have developed an unhealthy appetite. All we have done is set up a rentier economy which has bred nothing other than rank corruption for which we are justly famous of if you like, infamous. More and more Nigerians are falling into intractable poverty and terror stalks the land with a ferocity which is destroying our joys and well being. Nigeria is slowly roasting in the unquenchable fires of crude oil and it is becoming apparent that there is nothing we can do about it.

  • A piece of social engineering

    A piece of social engineering

    I got into the habit of listening to national budgets during my brief period of exile in Britain, at a time when I was a postgraduate student there. This is partly because of the fan-fare attached to the presentation of the budget by the Chancellor to the British parliament. Weeks before the event, the newspapers were awash with speculation as to the character of the next budget and It appeared as if all  the serious discussions on the three available television channels at the time had something to do with the intriguing subject of the budget. Days before the big event, every little comment about anything at all by the Chancellor was eagerly seized upon and minutely dissected just in case it had something to do with the upcoming budget. The budget was prepared or rather, was put together by the office of the Chancellor, of course with relevant inputs from all ministries making up Her Majesty’s, as it then was, government. Each government spoke to the budget from basically, an ideological point of view with the Labour Party leaning closely to the left of the political spectrum and trying as much as possible to secure a few crumbs of comfort for their constituents, majority of who, at least in principle, were card carrying members of the working class. The other party, the Tories were of course entrenched, some of them truculently so, to the right of the political spectrum and was interested in winning economic concessions to their more privileged supporters whose primary interest was to shore up as many of their class privileges as they could without alienating the majority working class too much. Both sides looked at the budget from their respective class interests knowing very well that their political fortunes depended very much on what the budget had to offer, with some of them losing power after a particularly disastrous budget presentation. In this regard the ousting of the short lived government of Liz Truss immediately comes to mind. Her more illustrious and one of her long lived predecessors in office, the Iron lady herself, Margaret Hilda Thatcher contacted rust poisoning and did not survive matters connected with budget matters long before Truss crossed the carpet from the left and became a born again Tory. There is no doubt that there is a lesson to be learnt about the British budget here.

    Immediately after the Second World War, with the sounds of bomb detonations still echoing in the air above the country, perhaps the most important general elections in the history of Britain took place. With many of the war regulations such as food rationing still in place, the country went to the polls to decide how their country was to be governed for the next five years.

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    The outgoing government had been dominated by Winston Churchill of the Conservative party, the face and voice of Britain throughout the turbulent years of the war and without his combativeness and determination, the war would, in all probability would have been lost. On the other side was Clement Attlee, leader of the Labour party, a self effacing man ruled by his strongly held socialist principles which had helped him to climb the very slippery slopes of Labour party leadership over a period of many years. He might have grown to become the eloquent spokesman for the working class later in his life but he himself was born into considerable wealth and affluence. His father, a property owning barrister was a nailed on member of the upper middle class and his children were brought up more or less in the lap of luxury. It was from this position of privilege within a mercilessly stratified society that Attlee developed a social conscience and decided to pitch his tent with the suffering underclass of his society. In other words, he became a traitor to his class in all matters economic and political.

    Having just won the war, Churchill must have been quietly if not deeply confident that his Tory party was going to win the imminent elections. He probably did not remember that almost from the beginning of the war and indeed for several years during the thirties,  Britain was ruled by a National government which contained personnel from both sides  of the political divide for the simple reason that the country needed the people in government to put their differences aside and make a spirited attempt to confront the myriad problems that stood between most of the people and their aspirations to a halfway decent quality of life. And this was at a time when Britain ruled nearly half the world whilst the vast majority of her citizens were trying to eke out a precarious existence most of them working like moles extracting coal from seams reaching more than a thousand feet under ground in order  to eat. Not to eat to the point of satiation but just enough to fuel the drive, if one can call it that, to return to the coal face on each of six days a week in order to create fabulous wealth for the benefit and totally immoderate enjoyment of the entitled minority of people who were embedded in the very thin upper crust of a patently unjust society.

    At this point a wise old bird chirped its way into my consciousness to remind me of the fact that my original intention was to write about the budget or at least, the issues surrounding the presentation of that budget to Parliament. I thought I should get back on track immediately but then, I reckoned that without an identifiable economy, there can be no budget, at least not one that could be described as viable and worthy of any reasonable discussion.

    The point to be made here is that, beginning from the end of the First World War, to pick an arbitrary point in history, Britain was a real basket case, rather like Nigeria is today. The only point of departure between the two countries being the quality of those selected to provide leadership. Britain was fortunate to have a steely man of principle in Clement Attlee whilst   Nigeria cannot boast of anyone that can stand on a pedestal beside him. The driving force at the heart of our rulers is cold and calculating avarice standing between them and a capacity to provide selfless service. The British economy of the time worked very well for a few people in the same way that today, the so called economy of Nigeria is working only too well for only a handful of Nigerians who are totally oblivious of the precarious existence of the battered majority of their compatriots.

    To return to the British general elections of 1945. The senior partner in the war time coalition government, the Conservative government was confident of winning and all objective indices pointed to that probability. But fortunately, there was an alternative unlike in contemporary Nigeria where the alternative is between Twiddledee and Twiddledum. Against frightful odds, the Labour Party won and through legislative means and her control of the power of the economy, changed the face of Britain forever. It was that government which held power for only five years that built the foundation of the modern British society that is now irresistibly attractive to hordes of Nigerians seeking the green pastures that elude them in the unfortunate land of their birth, the land in which their grandfathers are buried for all time.

    It was the Attlee government that provided the social security system that has tried to give all the people of Britain some access to whatever wealth their country can put within the reach of her citizens however rich or poor. They did this without changing a comma in the British constitution which in any case is unwritten but very powerful and effective as an article of societal regulation for all that. Here, our governments are held, bound hand and foot by a bastard document prepared by dummies whose only excuse is that they were caught in a cloud of ignorance as they wrote it. Our constitution is plainly bad but for all that, it can be made to work for us provided that our motives are driven by sincerity of purpose. The deafening calls for constitutional amendments is no more than a distraction from  doing the work of government. Take the example of the budget. Every year as stipulated by the constitution, somebody presents something called a budget to the nation knowing fully well that the provisions of the budget are to put it mildly, fictitious. As expected the dishonourable opposition both inside and outside the houses of legislation oppose every aspect of the budget only because they think that that is what they are expected to do. The budget is presented but it means little or nothing to that proverbial man in the street who is only interested in finding some food to tide him and his unfortunate dependants over for a few days. In the meantime, the budget informs him that the food to be consumed in Aso Rock for the next one year will cost the tax payers of this country billions of Naira. It must make that poor man on the street wonder if they do anything but eat on the fabled corridors of power in the bowels of the lair in the belly of Aso rock.

    I was interested in the contents of the British budget because it meant something to the way the people in Britain lived their lives. Because of the budget, the man in the street could start to pay more or less tax, pay more or less for the beer he drowns his sorrows in or the cigarette he smokes himself to hell with. The contents of that famous briefcase from which the Chancellor dramatically pulls out the budget in Westminster will have a significant impact on his life over the next one year. In Nigeria, the budget means absolutely nothing. It is no more than a guarantee of more suffering in the coming year. Let nobody talk to me about any budget in Nigeria as I have no time for horse manure.

  • Home town things

    Home town things

    Some years ago, I wrote a paper in an international journal and had to describe Ile-Ife in a way that would be understood by people outside Nigeria. In the end, I chose to describe the town as semi-urban because I reasoned that the town was neither classically urban nor rural in the sense that it lacked those facilities which one would expect to find within an urban environment. It was also clear that it was not situated in a rural setting complete with trees, and fields in which livestock were blissfully chewing the cud. I decided to situate it in between the two areas as the town satisfied the expectation of both urban and rural settlements. That description was made a long time ago and I would still describe Ile-Ife exactly the same way today and for good measure would describe my hometown of Ilesa with exactly the same hyphenated word, it not being rural but not exactly urban even if it is home to two Local Government Area headquarters. The complete absence of municipal services such as a central water distribution system and reliable public transport facilities confirms the rural/urban status of the town.

    Many of those reading this may have no more than a hazy idea  where Ilésà is or what its status is as a human settlement. Some would even have considerable difficulty in locating the place on a standard map of Nigeria. With Google maps however, anyone would call the place up on a map with a touch of a button or two. All that notwithstanding, most people would be surprised as I was, to learn that Ilesa was rated as one of the largest ten towns in Nigeria by the 1963 census, with only two towns in Western Region; Ibadan and Ogbomosho being larger in terms of population at that time. Suffice to say, with all those jumped up state capitals littering the present landscape, Ilésà has dropped precipitously on the national population league table. Unfortunately, the on and off census which should arbitrate in matters such as this is, given the current situation, not likely to provide reliable figures. We just have to live with that.

    It is still something of a surprise to me that I now live in Ilesa but come to think of it, after what is more or less a lifetime at Ile-Ife where else can I choose sensibly to spend my retirement years? It is apparent to me that I would be something of a fish out of water anywhere else, especially in Lagos from where I went into forever exile more than fifty years ago when even Lagos was almost as rural as it was urban. Since then, Lagos has mushroomed into an unruly and therefore bewildering conurbation, one of the largest cities in the whole wide world even if it lacks in many places, the facilities of a modern city. Still, Lagos wears the cloak of a very large city with something close to aplomb and what, with all that hustle and bustle, it would demand too much of my powers of accommodation for me to really feel at home within the city boundaries, if such boundaries existed that is. Whatever description I attach to Ilésà, the truth is that my hometown has been a metropolis since the early years of the sixteenth century when the reigning Owa or paramount ruler of Ìjèsàland of the time, Owálùse shifted the capital of his kingdom to Ilesa from Ibokun. As befitting the capital of a kingdom, Ilésà attracted migrants from, not only within the kingdom but from other parts of Yorubaland so that today, there are several quarters within the town which were first settled by people from Oyo, Ondo, Ìgbómìnà, parts of Ekiti and so on. They came to what was a thrusting polity with their various skills and talents with a view to contributing their respective quota to the continued development of their new settlement. In the same manner men of talent and ambition from other parts of the Ìjèsà kingdom migrated to Ilesa to seek their fame and fortune. The prime example of one such person was Ogedengbe, the man who more than any other, epitomised the warrior instincts which are associated with the Ijesas right down to the present. He lived in very dangerous times and spent virtually all his life on the battlefield  but not before he learnt the art of war in the enemy camp at Ibadan. That new Oyo settlement was more or less dedicated to war as in reality it was little more than a war camp. It was therefore something of a military school from where that legendary Ìjèsà man learnt his trade so very well that his contribution to ending Ibadan’s hegemony in the region was immense and unmatched.

    Whilst it was Owaluse that moved the capital of Ijesaland to Ilesa, it was Atakumosa, his successor that laid the foundation for the town’s future metropolitan success. Owaluse’s mother was an Oyo woman and quite understandably, he forged close ties with Oyo and for example orientated the palace to face the direction of Oyo. Atakumosa however was brought up in the court of the Oba of Benin, a fact that I was made to understand has been confirmed from Benin sources. He came to the throne of Ilesa with a strong bias for Benin and not only modelled the his new capital after Benin City of the time but re-orientated his palace to face Benin as it still does today. He is also said to have invited  blacksmiths from Benin and quartered them quite close to the palace and the market which still bears his name at Ìsídà. Atakumosa made his mark by founding many quarters in the town and by the time that the Ibadan soldiers managed to sack Ilesa more than three hundred years later, Ilesa had grown to more than fifty quarters each with it’s own signature  tree  under which the ruling council of elders met periodically to manage the affairs of their quarter in a way that mirrored the Athenian democratic model in that the heads of each recognised household in each quarter had a seat in this parliament. These trees, some of them up to three centuries old were cut down in 1956 when Ilesa was electrified to enhance the development of the town within the ambience of a modern metropolis. That those trees were living historical artefacts was of no consequence. They were standing in the face of modernity and had to go and today, only one of them, a gnarled iroko tree is still standing, the position occupied by some of those trees is marked by some triangular structures, the most prominent of them being at Egbéidì on the spot where a tree stood proudly for centuries to mark the seat of a local government assembly point.

    The last of the quarters into which Ilésà was divided was established in 1857 just before the peace of the town was shattered by a series of conflicts with the rising power of Ibadan. This situation eventually led to the occupation of the town by Ibadan in 1870 at the height of what has come down to us as the Yoruba civil wars which attended the process by which the raw, new power of Ibadan tried to establish its authority over the much older power centres, the most powerful at the time being Ilésà. From that point in time, Ilésà became a nett exporter of people instead of the destination of migrants that she had been for centuries. Many of the people who left Ilésà at this time were taken away as slaves and ended up in Brazil and courtesy of the British navy in the established haven of Sierra Leone. Those that were taken left with the love of Ijesaland in their heart. Some of them were however fated to return to play a crucial role in Kiriji, the war that ended all the wars that were ravaging the whole of Yorubaland. The Ijesas fought that war with sophisticated weapons purchased and sent back home as a sort of diaspora remittance by Ìjèsàs in Lagos, some of them returnees from slavery. The most prominent of these was Haastrup, a prince of Ijesaland who returned home to Ilésà as Owá Obòkùn Ajímókó l, put on the throne by the soldiers he supplied with arms at Kiriji. The current Owa Obokun, Oba Aromolaran ll is the first Yoruba Oba to have earned a doctorate degree but long before him, in the nineteenth century  no less, Oba Ajimoko l became the first Yoruba Oba to be educated in the Western tradition of scholarship. No wonder then that the first town in Nigeria to have built and equipped a secondary school through local community effort was Ilésà where the first secondary school in Ìjèsàland, Ilesa Grammar School was opened to students from all over Nigeria in 1934.

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    Ìjèsàland lost her independence after the treaty which brought the Kírìjì war to an end and became incorporated against the wishes of the people into the emergent British Empire. Having become used to running a kingdom for several centuries, the people did not take the loss of their independence lightly and reacted as if they had been stung when the British moved in their colonial apparatus into Ilésà. They made life so uncomfortable for the British that those foreign interlopers abandoned their seat of government on Ìmò Hill for a friendlier environment and abandoned the people of Ìjèsàland to their fate. Successive governments since then have pointedly ignored that area with the result that there is hardly a sign of Federal presence in the whole of Ìjēsàland. Well, that is not entirely true as the first significant structure you see as you enter Ilesa from Ibodi is the massive yellow wall of a Federal correctional centre.

    It is instructive that the year 1963 marked the highest point in the postcolonial period of Ilésà. This is because the axis of travel in that region shifted decisively away from Ilésa  towards Ore and on to Ijebu-Ode. Before then, the recognised East-West highway was the Asaba – Ilésa -Lagos, Trunk A road on which people from Eastern Nigeria travelled to get to Lagos. The trade brought to Ilésà by the road simply disappeared and the ancient town slowly receded into the backwoods from which deliverance is doubtful. Ilésà, from a powerful metropolis is now a town dominated by the very old, the very young and small scale artesans like barbers, brick layers and carpenters. This being the case, a great deal of hope has been placed on the new University of Ilésà to inject some life into the ancient town. There are no signs at this time that the hope desperately reposed in the university is not misplaced.

    Odún Ogún coincides or overlaps Christmas in Ilésa and so there is a mesh of the ancient and modern celebration of life in the town at this time of the year. To add to the heady mix of tradition is the annual celebration of Ìwúde when Ìjèsàs from all over the world come back home to celebrate with and pay homage to Owá Obòkun, embodiment of the spirit of Ìjèsàland. Even in these celebrations, the damp spirit of Nigeria is deciding matters. The boisterousness associated with this period has been drowned by the deluge of economic woes unleashed on Nigerians especially this year that petrol has become a decisive factor in the determination of what to live with. This is not to talk of the inability for all but the most strategically placed to have more than a few currency notes in their pocket. The spirit of Christmas past is wearing a heavy frown this year, removing from our living space, the emaciated spirit of  Christmas present. Given the prevailing circumstances, what is in store for the spirit of Christmas future in these parts is anybody’s guess.

    This article is dedicated to all those semi-urban settlements, decaying slowly in the sun all over the territorial space occupied by Nigeria.

  • Aftermath of the Great War

    Aftermath of the Great War

    Long before the referee blew the final whistle on the Great war, it was clear that the war was at a stalemate. Each of the combatant nations was barely hanging on for dear life even as the carnage escalated as each army devised ever more sophisticated means of killing each other. Over in the Eastern front, the Germans had routed the Russians in a series of brilliant offensives but their victory was hollow as the Russian empire collapsed upon itself in a bloody revolution which marked the emergence of the Soviet Union, a motley collection of ‘socialist’ republics which for seventy years constituted a thorn in the side of Europe. In the meantime, all parties were bogged down on the soggy fields of the Western front as they killed each other with single minded purpose and alarming efficiency. There is no knowing what would have happened to the armies huddled in their trenches but for the fact that the USA entered the fray on the side of Britain and France in 1917 holding out the excuse that  German submarines were attacking and sinking ships on the Northern Atlantic route.  It has since been suggested however that the Americans were simply defending their investments. The allies were so heavily indebted to the USA that a German victory which could not be ruled out at that point in time could not be sustained by the Americans. With the entry of the Americans into the war, the bloody European war was transformed into a proper world war, with soldiers drawn from French and British empires which of course spanned the world in any case.

    At the time the USA  entered the war, she did not, unlike the Europeans, have many men to throw into the conflict but she had a great deal of war material which was quickly deployed and ultimately used to break the stalemate on the Western front. In any case, American intervention proved critical and the Germans and their allies were not able to mount a credible response and the road to Berlin was open. Given the number of men already lost, the Germans had no choice but to surrender to save themselves from annihilation, a fate with which the allied armies, who were not in much better shape were quite willing to oblige them with. And so the war came to a swift but weary end and the next step was to win the peace.

    At the end of the war, the victorious European powers were determined to crush Germany completely, to make it impossible for any German army to ever threaten the peace of Europe ever again. The Germans knew that they had been well beaten and knew that they were at the mercy of their conquerors who were in no mood to be magnanimous. The Americans on their own side were open to some reason, after all there were millions of ethnic Germans who lived in the USA and were full blooded Americans. Woodrow  Wilson, the American President also fancied himself to be something of a world statesman and wanted to make a substantial contribution to winning the peace. For example, it was his idea that a League of Nations, the precursor body to the United Nations be formed with the expressed purpose of preventing any future war. That his initiative in this direction was bound to fail was shown when the US Senate refused to ratify that aspect of the treaty which brought the war to an end officially. Although the League of Nations was formed, the USA was not a member. When later on and push came to shove, the League of Nations failed dismally to prevent the outbreak of the dangerous skirmishes which led to the outbreak of World War ll.

    At the end of the Great war, all sides met in Versailles to beat out a treaty which was to end the war. In the end, the victors, in no mood to be magnanimous, extracted more than their pound of flesh from their prostrate erstwhile enemies. Germany was to be defanged, made impotent and inconsequential and so they restricted the strength of the German army to one hundred thousand men and fifteen thousand in the navy. After all, as far as those short sighted men were concerned, the Great war had shown that you needed millions of men to fight a modern war with any expectation of victory. Besides they created a demilitarised zone to protect the French from any form of cross border aggression and for good measure regained the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine which had been annexed by Germany after the Franco-German war of 1870. Still paranoid about war at sea, the British forced the Germans to surrender what was left of their navy, the ships of which were interred at Scapa Flow off the coast of Scotland. In one final act of defiance, the commander of the Imperial German Navy ordered his men to scuttle all the ships in service and they all sank into the sea. In addition, hefty reparations were inflicted and all German overseas territories were distributed between the British and the French with Cameroon divided between the two colonial powers. Both the German and Austro- Hungarian empires were dismembered and the Ottoman Empire simply disappeared. New countries emerged and Europe appeared to be changed forever.

    The Great war can be said to have been qualified to have the title of a World War because all the extant European empires were involved with it on one side or the other. It is interesting that of all the empires involved in it only the British and the French empires survived the war. The German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman and Russian empires all expired by the end of the war. The Germans lost all their overseas territories and the Ottomans lost all their territories in the Middle East including Palestine to both France and Britain. During the war, both countries used their colonial subjects to bolster their armies. Britain not only recruited soldiers from the so called dominions; Canada, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand but were able to throw nearly a million Indians into the war in Europe and also in the Middle East to confront the forces of the Ottoman Empire. They were however wary of recruiting and arming soldiers from their new colony of Nigeria and although a few soldiers from Nigeria took part in the fighting in the German colonies of Cameroon, Togo and Tanganyika, it was not until the Second World War that a large number of Nigerians were involved mainly in fighting in the jungles of Burma. The cenotaph sited at the Carter bridge head at Idumota in 1948 was therefore more in commemoration of Nigerians who fought in Burma than those who fought in the Great war. Not being comfortable with permanence, that statue has been uprooted by Nigerian authorities and transferred across country far away from the multitude of eyes which feasted on Soja Idumota when it welcomed all comers to Lagos island in the days of it’s pomp and glory.

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    As for the French, they have never been wary of using their colonial troops in their wars from far back as 1853 when they mobilised troops from Senegal and North Africa to fight in the Crimea War. As many as two hundred Senegalese troops fought from the trenches in Verdun and other areas around the Western front where all those bloody battles were fought in WW I.

    Both Britain and France not only held on to their colonies but gained new territories after the war. However, whatever satisfaction they gained from this was short lived. All those soldiers who fought in the war went home knowing that their colonial masters were ordinary human beings after all. They bled when they were shot, cried for their mothers when they were dying and ran away from danger, real or merely perceived. Knowing that those godlike masters were human after all, their colonial lackeys went back home to put some fire under the nascent agitation for independence nowhere more so than in India, the jewel in the British crown. Within a year of the end of the war, the British were calling out their troops to discourage the Indians from  setting the country on fire as they fought to throw off the yoke of colonialism. Their effort in this direction led on to one truly tragic occasion in what has come to be known as the Amritsar massacre in which hundreds of Indians were wantonly slaughtered in the city of Amritsar during a demonstration against the arrest of two Indian nationalists. If this was an attempt at heading the Indians away from the fight for independence, it failed and did so miserably. It only became the impetus which was needed to put the fight for independence on the front burner. It may however have convinced the Indians of the futility of confronting the British in armed combat after all, the British had all those powerful weapons which they had tested out to such devastating effect in several theatres of a shooting war.  No wonder they were receptive to the non-violent principle enunciated by Mahatma Ghandi. However, it took another destructive war before the colonialists were convinced to let our people go. The Great war prepared the ground for the Second World War at the end of which only the rather backward Portuguese held on tenaciously to their colonial possessions. But, even they were forced to see the error of their ways and the age of colonialism was brought to an end.

  • Eleventh hour, eleventh day, eleventh month (II)

    Eleventh hour, eleventh day, eleventh month (II)

    The immediate cause of the Great War was the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo but the remote causes could be traced back more than fifty years with the rise and rise of a unified German state in the middle of Europe. This unification which brought all ethnic Germans, except those in Austria and Switzerland together, under the leadership of the militaristic Prussian state was painstakingly put together under the uncompromising hand of Otto von Bismarck, also known to the world as the Iron Chancellor. Even before this unification was complete, the military fettle of the new nation was tested against France, the only country which had the military clout to stand against the new German Empire. They had been contemptuously swatted aside in a short sharp war which put the French in their place. The war, short as it was, struck such a blow at French morale and national integrity that it was the subject of a bitter novel, The debacle, by the eminent French writer Emile Zola. To make matters worse, the seeds of another round of fighting were sown by the annexation of the French provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. Had this annexation not been reversed at the end of the Great war, the former Arsenal manager, Arsene Wenger would have been born a German and not French as we have come to know him to be.

    The Germans did not go through the pain of unification for sentimental reasons but for the purpose of building a thrusting productive country in the heart of Europe; a new country with the capacity to compete with Britain and her empire for global markets and diplomatic influence. Up until that time, the British under the protection of the Royal Navy extended their influence all over the world making it difficult for other nations to threaten the monopoly which Britain exercised over global trade and diplomacy at that time. It has to be said that Britain had been dominant at sea for close to a century and was determined to hold on to her pre-eminent status at all cost if necessary. To this end, the British Parliament passed the Naval Defence Act, which formally adopted the ‘two-power standard’. This stipulated that the Royal Navy should maintain a number of battleships at least equal to the combined strength of the next two largest navies in the world. The first sign that the Germans were determined to challenge British hegemony was that she started a spate of warship building which threatened to produce enough ships to close the gap in naval power with Britain. The British were not amused and had to build up their naval capacity to such an extent that the Royal Navy remained the most powerful navy at the beginning of WW I. But, this came at great cost.

    The Germans arrived late, very late at the European table where the rest of the world, especially Africa was on the menu. It was in an attempt to gather something for themselves that Germany was at the front of efforts to partition Africa. They were determined to ‘have their own place in the sun’ and this is why it fell to Bismarck to invite the statesmen of Europe to Berlin, there to carve up Africa like a turkey to the satisfaction of European interests. At the end of the conference however, Germany came away with small portions of African real estate which could not have satisfied her ‘legitimate’ yearning for a place in the sun. What she could not win at the Conference table, Germany confidently expected to win in battle and so, the squabble over Africa which Bismarck wanted to prevent was only postponed.

    The period before WW I was one of a great industrial leap forward and in each country in Europe, it was full steam ahead as they produced a broad spectrum of industrial goods at the rate of knots. The factories were not only producing domestic appliances and bicycles but were turning their attention to the production of arms, ammunition and powerful explosives with which to force their influence over their neighbours, some of them like Germany and Italy which had just been forged and therefore ready to defend their new status with blood if necessary.

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    The situation in Europe was such that their kings, statesmen, generals and the general populace which had no idea what a straggly little machine gun could do to human flesh clamoured for war. When war was declared, the news was welcomed with jubilation and uncontrolled excitement. The young men were fairly giddy with expectation as they went off or were carried to the war front by speedy railways which criss-crossed the continent like blood vessels through muscles. Even the ladies prepared for a desirable phase in their lives, the thought of losing their loved ones in the war very far from their minds. It was as if the whole of Europe was preparing for a grand picnic by the sea side.

    When the guns began to bellow and machine guns began to stutter, it was clear that in the words of General Sherman during the American civil war, war was hell as all those caught up in it began to howl in the manner of demented wolves. Millions of men were thrown into the conflict and they were led into it by insensate generals who saw their men as nothing more than cannon fodder to be slaughtered at will for the achievement of minor military objectives. The armies stood toe to toe and let loose barrage after barrage of deadly munitions at the practically unprotected positions of the enemy. At the battle of the Somme in a five month period, the British army sustained more than 400,000 casualties with sixty thousand young men mown down like grass in the first morning of the battle; the largest single casualty figure for a day’s fighting in the history of the British army. Their commander, Douglas Haig was unperturbed by this scale of slaughter for which he was christened ‘Butcher’ by his men who bore the brunt of his strategy of fighting a war of attrition. So many men were lost that some working class men in Britain began to wonder if their officers were deliberately using the war as a means of decimating the working class. The only argument against this was that the officers drawn from the middle and ruling classes were losing their members in similar proportion. The men continued to bleed out into the mud of Flanders without any perceptible shift in territorial control. At the end of the battle of the Somme for example, the British had gained six miles of a muddy patch of ground for the loss of 420,000 men whilst their allies, the French lost 200,000 men. German casualty figures showed that they lost 450,000 men and their failure to replace such a large number of experienced fighting men in this and subsequent battles eventually led to their defeat in 1918. Thus, the Butcher won the war but at what cost.

    In the end, the whole of Europe lost the war and I for one am awed by the severally demonstrated European capacity for the slaughter of men and the wanton destruction of material. It is a capacity totally unmatched and unmatchable by Africans, with the exception of those that had been trained in European war schools. The first field of technological development was in the development and production of weapons of mass destruction. It was during the Great war that tanks and aircraft were first used in battle and by the Second World War both had been converted into excellent killing machines but at least aircraft flying all over the world today have revolutionised human movement and is set to do even more. It appears that war, total war is a spur to the development of technology. Can it be that our lack of appetite for the large scale slaughter of human beings is at least partly responsible for our inability with coming to terms with the handling of cutting edge technology at this point in time?

    A truly astounding post-script to the Great war is that three months short of the 31st anniversary of the Armistice, armed with infinitely more murderous weapons, the antagonists were back at their old game; slaughtering men, women and children with apparent joyful abandon, this time all over the world. The condition for growing poppies did not arise this time around and the highlight of this war were the mushroom clouds which covered Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the Japanese were fed a diet of atomic bombs to finally bring them to their collective knees.

  • Eleventh hour, eleventh day, eleventh month

    Eleventh hour, eleventh day, eleventh month

    There seems to be something strange about dates which have a symmetry to them. Many people attach some significance to them even though nothing of historical interest has been associated with for example, 2/2/22 or 5/5/55 unless an event has been engineered to fall on any of those days. One of such events was the Armistice which commanded hostilities to be halted thus bringing the First World War to its weary end. That hostilities were resumed only thirty-one years later with roughly the same antagonists shows that the end of what the Europeans call the Great War was simply a cooling off period. The story of that Armistice of 1918 is that the guns which had been blasting away for four torrid years fell silent all across the battle fields mainly in Northern France and Belgium on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of the year 1918. So insistent were the silly generals who signed the papers bringing the war to an end on rounding things off neatly that they continued to fire their infernal guns for six hours after they agreed that the war was over. This made it possible for that neat end to be engineered but it led to 13,000 needless deaths which occurred between the time the Armistice was signed and the time fighting stopped all across the war front.

    That 13,000 men were sacrificed on the altar of ego in the six hours leading to the officially sanctioned end of that war epitomises the mind set of the murderous men who led the armies which were engaged in that war. As far as those men were concerned, millions of young men had been wasted up to the point of signing the Armistice and so, what could be the significance of only a few thousands more?

    The Great war as it was known to all the Europeans of that period was the first large scale war to be fought in Europe since the  new age which was brought about by the Industrial Revolution was established. The time before then when wars raged through Europe was some hundred years earlier when Napoleon was trying to establish what he called the European System designed to control the combined economy of Europe under French leadership. War at that time consisted of a few thousand men ranged against each other across a conveniently flat field and exchanging desultory fire from a few artillery pieces whilst waiting for the opportunity to unleash their respective gentlemen soldiers mounted on large horses in thunderous Calvary charges in which rather more horses than riders were killed. In effect they were indulged in extensive war games, the most skilful of the generals being Napoleon who for almost fifteen years brought the ancient European regimes to their collective knees until he went one battle too far and the combined armies of Europe halted his progress in the small Belgian village of Waterloo in 1815. From that time until 1914, there was no major battle not to talk of a war in Europe except for the Franco-Prussian War which led to the establishment of the German Empire in the heart of Europe. This brought a new power to the concert of European powers and the disruption which this caused led to the First World War and the immense slaughter of the innocents on the Western front.

    The starting pistol for this conflict was fired in June 1914, at the height of what has gone down in history as a glorious summer all over Europe. The shots which were fired by a Bosnian nationalist killed Archduke Ferdinand and his wife Sophie on the streets of Sarajevo and set in motion a series of what at the time were an inevitable series of events which culminated in the frenzied mobilisation of armies all over Europe and the commencement of the Great war which was ostensibly fought to end all wars in Europe.

    Archduke Ferdinand was heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian empire at the time of his murder. At that time, Serbia had just been annexed against the wishes of the Serbs by the Austro-Hungarian empire at a time when powerful winds of nationalism were sweeping through Europe especially in the Balkans. All throughout that region, the various sub-nationalities which inhabited the region wanted to be free of control by any of the big nations including the Ottoman Empire and sharply resented the control which the Austro-Hungarians had on them. At the same time, the various Slavic peoples placed themselves under the protection of Russia, the largest and most powerful Slavic country and so when the Archduke was assassinated and the mighty Austro- Hungarian Empire declared war on Serbia, that declaration applied to Russia as well and straightaway, Russia was also at war with Austro-Hungary which in turn had an alliance with Germany which in turn declared war on Russia as a member of the Triple Alliance. To thicken the stew further, both France and  Britain were in the Entente cordiale with Russia and were bound by that treaty to declare war on Germany and her allies. However Britain did not invoke the titles of their alliance until the Germans, in order to attack Paris and knock the French out of the war violated the neutrality of Belgium in order to get to grips with the French defenders. In no time at all, virtually all European countries had mobilised their armies and were at war on one side or the other.

    What should have frightened all the belligerents at the beginning of the war was how easy it was to mobilise all their armies and get them to the war fronts which were separated by thousands of miles. The point was that unlike when Napoleon was rampaging through Europe on horseback a hundred years before, they had the benefit of railways which made army movements very easy. That was the first sign that technology was going to play a major part in that war and that was very bad news for the poor soldiers who had been called up to die and how they died; blown up by very high explosives, blasted to hell by machine gun fire, poisoned with highly toxic gasses, afflicted with a plethora of awful diseases and exposed to the brutal stupidity of their befuddled generals. The recruits who sang lustily as they went off to war were soon acquainted with the horrors of a war they were sure would be over by Christmas. Those who survived had the rest of their lives to regret their ill-advised youthful enthusiasm.

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    Very early in the war, it was soon appreciated that human beings were simply not designed to stand up to high velocity bullets and a constant barrage of artillery shells fired by guns manufactured with unyielding steel. Their response was to dig mazes of trenches in which they took shelter from the deadly projectiles slung at their positions from their enemies from whom they were separated by what they called no man’s land. Many of those poor young men did not live to feel the freedom of getting out of those trenches as they were mown down by machine gun fire whenever they were ordered to go over the top to get to grips with the enemy. There certainly was very little hiding place from extreme danger in those awful trenches.

    Members of my generation would be familiar with the poppy days of our childhood when we bought and displayed on our persons red paper poppies with a black centre. This was in remembrance of those that had died in British wars fought in the twentieth century at a time when we were part of the now defunct British Empire. Monies collected from the sale of the poppies were supposedly used for the welfare of the veterans of those wars who needed financial support. For further information, the poppy was chosen as an emblem of that endeavour because that blood red flower bloomed with uncommon vigour on the battle fields as it did on other disturbed pastures and with all the disturbances caused by the millions of shells detonated all over the battlefields, there was no wonder that those fields were fairly overlaid with a carpet of poppies which suggested that all the blood spilt on that area which has come down to us as the Western front germinated and grew into blood-red flowers in memory of those that perished fighting a war they did not really understand.

    To be continued.

  • Money matters

    Money matters

    I Really thought that I had finished my treatment of various aspects of money on this platform with my last article. However, it seems that there are a few loose ends that need to be tightened hence, another article about this interesting subject.

    There is no doubt that the subject of money is so broad that it is a difficult to do justice to it. To make matters worse, I made what I now see as the more or less fatal error of straying into the truly nebulous territory of happiness in my last article, can money buy happiness? My contention is that money can buy a lot of things which can create a state of happiness. The problem here is to come up with a universally acceptable definition of happiness. Everyone is sure that they know the meaning of the word but I doubt that everyone is reading from the same page and were we to interrogate the meaning of happiness, we are not likely to advance from first base as it is a word that is used all the time. This is even if it’s precise meaning  differs from one person to another.

    A cursory examination of the state of happiness shows that it is a combination of emotions; joy, pleasure, satisfaction born of achievement, bliss and I am sure several other words are associated with happiness without any one of them covering the meaning of happiness satisfactorily. One thing is sure however and that is, everyone wants to be happy and consciously or even unconsciously engage themselves in those things which promote happiness or create situations that will lead to the attainment of happiness. But, is it possible, given the human condition that a permanent state of happiness can be achieved?

    I am happy, agh, that word again, that I came to the conclusion rather early in life that happiness is a state that is always tantalisingly just beyond the reach of the normal human being. And reaching out for it may be an exercise in futility comparable to the torture of Tantalus who was condemned never to slake his thirst or satisfy his hunger even though he was knee deep in clear, running water and luscious fruits were hanging just out his reach. We all want to be happy without really knowing what it is to be happy.

    The sad truth is that happiness is like that mythical moving finger which having written moves on, never to come back to make any amendment. The Yoruba qualify happiness with the word, tiny because any state of happiness is frustratingly fleeting. You can only be happy for a short while before the feeling of euphoria engendered by an event or an achievement before you are brought back down to earth by other realities. The Yoruba also warn unequivocally that you are most vulnerable to danger and unpleasantness when you are in the state of being happy. This suggests that happiness travels in tandem with its opposite, sorrow. Where you find one, you can be sure that the other is lurking with intent.

    Now, to the vexed issue of the contribution of money to happiness. It is clear that there are many issues and problems which can be redressed with money and this is not to be sneezed at. It is said that a hungry man is an angry man and since the rich hardly ever go hungry, they are protected from the anger which frequently blights the lives of those who cannot for the life of them guess where their next meal is coming from.

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    Life is full of choices and we all have to take decisions virtually everyday of our lives. Some of those decisions determine the trajectory of our lives and some of them we take more in hope than on the reality that we are confronted with. Money can make it possible for you to take the right decision in the same way that poverty can blind you to a lot of possibilities. Even more important are the temptations we have to confront from time to time. For example, it is easier for a rich man to resist the temptation of selling his conscience for the proverbial mess of pottage. On the other hand, money may inflame the ego of those who are backed by vast sums of money and this may drive to take decisions which may not be in their favour. For those who cannot be described as rich, their pecuniary situation may be so crushing that it is the single most important determinant of how life unfolds for them. That is because they may have to spend a great deal of their time trying to make the money with which they can buy bodily comforts both for themselves and for their offspring whose basic needs they are unable to provide. Thus the status imposed by poverty is inheritable, often for several generations in the same way that a wealthy man can pass down his wealth to familial generations yet unborn. These conditions must weigh heavily on both the poor and the rich heirs to  such an extent their respective characters as human beings are determined by their different backgrounds.

    The burning question and one on which I was burnt earlier is if money can buy happiness. I feel more confident about putting an answer now than before because I am at least clearer in my mind about how to describe the meaning of happiness.

    Having money can allow one to buy those things from which it is possible to derive some joy, satisfaction or pleasure all of which can be added up to give happiness. From this point alone, it is suggested that money can indeed buy happiness but that is only part of the story as a legion of things, none of them remotely connected to the source of happiness. It is indeed possible that the Ferrari, the purchase of which is being celebrated may veer off the open road to hold a lamentable congress with an inconveniently positioned gnarled tree bringing celebrations to an abrupt and painful end. After all, we are most vulnerable to various calamities in our moments of joy.

    Only yesterday, the results of a fascinating study which has been going on since 1935 was brought to my notice. Over that period, the lived of thousands of men from all strata of society were minutely studied. This was with a view to finding out what made them tick. In the final analysis, it was found that indeed money could buy happiness to the limit of $100,000. After that, rather modest sum, if you lived in the USA, it did not matter how much money you had, the overload of cash did not make you any happier than those who were more modesty endowed with money. This implies that those who continue to work, sometimes relentlessly, to pile up the cash are not necessarily looking for greater happiness. They simply enjoy making money to satisfy a craving for it. In other words, they are turned on by the sheer pleasure of making money and it is the pleasure derived from the process of making money that drives them on to make even more money than they can spend in a million life times like the robber barons. Or perhaps in the manner of Silas Marner, a simple weaver in the eponymous novel by George Elliot. In the days before power looms were invented, master craftsmen like Silas could make a great deal of money from their craft and because of his dexterity, Silas made a great deal of money in gold coins but the only pleasure he derived from his money was to simply look at the money and revel in the knowledge that he was rich. When a chance thief deprived him of his money, he was heart broken over his loss even though the money up till the time of his loss was spectacularly useless, at least in terms of buying things to gladden his heart or make him happy. This story is perhaps no longer possible first, because unlike gold coins which have a beguiling beauty of their own, the paper money which we all spend now do not have that intrinsic beauty which will compel us to stare at them for hours on end as Silas Mariner did with his gold coins. However, there is a story which tells of the compelling physicality of money. The story concerns Dangote (your fame is secured when you are known everywhere by one name; such as Pele, Messi Beyoncé etc). According to the story, Dangote was described as a rich man by friends, acquaintances and even his detractors as a rich man. But the man did not see himself as such. To test his hypothesis, he went to his bank and presented a cheque for ten million dollars. To his surprise, that sum of money was released to him, no questions asked. When he got home he spread the money out on a table and it was seeing all that money spread out in front of him in his own home and under his absolute control that finally convinced him that he was a rich man.

    This brings to the contemplation of another character of money, it’s lack of attachment to anyone including the one that has propriety rights over it. You cannot patent your money such that you and only you can spend it. A thief who has no idea of how the money in any purse he stole was gotten, is instantly conferred with the power to spend that money on anything that catches his fancy and frequently does so at his earliest convenience. This means that apart from making any money, you have to fence it round in such a way that the random thief cannot have access to it. In the end anyway, most fortunes are passed on to other persons who no matter how closely related they are to the original owner of the money may have absolutely no idea about how the money was made, their only consideration being how to spend it.

    Taking everything into consideration, it is perhaps tragic that money is the universal badge of worth as it is a determinant factor for virtually everything. I once asked a young man what the importance of his education had been to him. Without a moment’s hesitation, he replied that it was his education that made it possible for him to get a good job which paid him enough money to marry a fine young lady. Without the lift which his salary gave him, he would have had to settle for someone beneath the quality of his wife. The lesson here is that his genealogy from that point was dependent on the availability of the money he spent on the pursuit of his wife. I suppose that everything considered, the young man of this story considered the money spent on courtship as money very well spent. From this point of view, who says that money can’t  but you love? It surely can which is why you can say,  Money – that’s what I want!

  • Money can’t buy me love

    Money can’t buy me love

    It is often said these days that what goes round, comes around. A few Sundays ago, the series of articles about money began with the title of a song which was made popular on a global scale and because many things go round, it is appropriate to at least complete the circle with another song about money which again the Beatles turned into a monster hit. After saying Money – that’s what I want, they turned round to dismiss the very idea of money by saying that Money can’t buy me love. It is pertinent to point out that like the other song, this song also came out of Tamla Motown and is not a Beatles original. Anyway, for all our love of money, we are reminded that after all said  and done, money cannot buy love. That saying is open to contention but whichever way you stand in the matter, it has to be said that money cannot take you all the way all the time. Another musical icon who had something weighty to say about money was the evergreen Bob Marley who on his deathbed declared with great authority that money cannot buy life. He certainly knew what he was talking about because if money could buy his life, he certainly had enough of it to buy just one life, his own.

    There are many, especially those who have very little money of their own who confidently declare that money cannot buy happiness and since in the final analysis what we all want is happiness, then the limit of money can never be regarded as being far enough to justify all the effort that people make to lay hands on a large store of money. An appropriate riposte to the argument about money and happiness is that money can buy you a lot of things that can make you happy. At the very least, it can make it possible for you to make other people deliriously happy by giving them enough money to make it possible for some of their wishes to come true. From personal experience, I know that my generousity index goes up in tandem with the amount of money in my pockets. Ask me for any amount, however small of money at the wrong time of the month and I am likely to react as if I have been stung by a particularly unfriendly insect in the category of a wasp. On the other hand, when I can hear the jingling of money in my pockets, I am likely to part with some of it with a tight little smile on my lips. Ladies married to impecunious Nigerian professors such as I have been for far too long will nod their collective head in agreement with the point I have made here. I am of the opinion that money can buy you love, happiness and many other things beside. Try persuading a geriatric multimillionaire of the truth of this statement and you will be barking up the wrong tree. You may think that the young supermodel with a figure to die for hanging on his ancient arm is just an item of decoration but the small army of doctors at his beck and call may, but for patient -doctor confidentiality consideration, disabuse your mind of that error. There really is no end to what money can buy under the right set of circumstances. That is why it is true to say, money, that’s what I want as the Beatles most famously affirmed in that song.

    It is often said that money is the root of all evil and there are so many examples of the veracity of this statement that it is not worth arguing over. This is why the men who built their fortunes in what has now been described as the Gilded Age in the USA will, for all time be referred to as robber barons, ruthless early capitalists who accumulated stupendous wealth through the brutal exploitation of prevailing circumstances and their fellow men. In an age when money in individual pockets was as scarce as hen’s teeth, these men appropriated to themselves more millions of dollars than they could be reasonably expected to spend in a million life times. The men who made up this caste were a small handful and were represented in popular folk lore by Andrew Carnegie, John Rockefeller and Cornelius Vanderbilt. They built up huge fortunes which are still being enlarged more than a century after they died. Ironically, they all gave away so much of their fortunes to charitable causes that they are now known more for the charitable foundations which bear their names than for their rapaciousness as business men. For all their charity however, they still epitomise the Yoruba assertion to the effect that great wealth is built on a foundation of filth. The validity of this assertion is so strong that you can assume that the extravagant wealth being displayed by your neighbour is camouflage for a shameful secret or indeed a catalogue of shameful deeds for which penance should be done.

    It has to be said however that some people just have a talent or a penchant for making money. Indeed, everything they touch turns to gold in the manner of the mythical King Midas who was so far captivated by the beauty of gold that he could not get enough of this precious metal. In his desperation for more and more gold, he prayed for the power to turn everything he touched into gold. To his great delight, his wish was granted and he was transported into his own version of heaven when he discovered that he could turn anything to gold with a touch. He enjoyed himself immensely until the time came for him to eat and the food placed in front of him turned into gold as soon as he touched it and instantly became inedible. Just as the seriousness of his condition dawned on him his daughter whom he loved even more than gold came into his golden presence but as soon as he returned her hug, she was instantly turned into a gold statue! His previous elation was instantly wiped away and he prayed that his power be revoked so that he could eat and have his precious daughter back. This may be the reason why the robber barons strongly felt the need to make restitution for the way and manner by which they acquired their enormous wealth and were impelled to give most of it away. It is in keeping true to type that Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, two of the richest men in the world today have declared their resolve to give most of their wealth to charity. After all, there is only so much that an individual, however profligate can consume in one lifetime however long it is. In the end, when confronted with their impending mortality, hardly anyone will depart the world with the thoughts of their wealth on their mind. The rest is vanity, as empty as the vacuum into which they are being sucked and where they are forgotten distressingly sooner rather than later.

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    When the colonialists arrived in Africa to take over their respective inheritance from the infamous Berlin conference, they were dismayed to find a rudimentary currency system. This was not to their liking as their primary mission was to exploit their colonies maximally and without a currency with which to run their economy, their intentions were likely to be thwarted. It was therefore imperative that those cowries and manilas with which the colonised people carried on their trade be phased out as soon as possible. Unfortunately, the colonial coins which were to replace local currency were in very short supply. Indeed, those foreign coins circulated only within restricted government circles which meant that only those who dealt directly colonial institutions had any real money. Such people; court officials, teachers, railway workers, clerks and other minor actors were paid in the new coins and were instantly elevated far above the common herd who had  to navigate somehow, the mine field of colonial officialdom. These people formed the nascent elite class, playing both sides against the middle and making off with as much of the money available as they could without landing in jail. These formed the first members of the elite class which has expanded relentlessly to include the multitude that have, in present circumstances, become so disillusioned by their dwindling share of what is sharable in Nigeria that they are packing their bags and going off in continuous search for coins to places where they perceive the grass to be greener. On the same scale, the underclass, those who do not have two coins to rub together, are having to deal with the shortage of everything that make lives tolerable. In other words, our so called economy is in tatters and countless lives are being rubbished by a shortage of funds. Surely, a little more money will expand their happiness index to the level of the inflow of money into their pockets.

    With money in such short supply and inflation, rampant inflation for that matter making a mockery of whatever sum is in your pocket, people are concerned more than ever to grab unto themselves more than their fair share of the money available. Just as it was at the dawn of the colonial age. It is now a case of the end justifying the means. Many of the fortunes, if not the overwhelming majority were created by corruption, so much so that this is the fuel which powers the engine that runs this country. Virtually everyone, especially those operating within the public domain are corrupt but the private system is not far behind. Think of any group of Nigerians including those in the so called liberal professions and you will find that corruption rules. Each one is corrupt to the limit of their opportunity to loot the public treasury. Funds which are meant for societal development are simply looted and in some cases buried in a convenient soak-away  pit, now instantly converted into a bank vault. Were just half of such monies to be retrieved from wherever they are concealed, our economy would rise from the ashes. After all, the sum of $12 billion has been known to simply disappear from government account  in those heydays of the first Gulf War. Were such a sum of money to be injected into our economy today, the precipitous slide in the value of the Naira would not only be halted but reversed promptly.

    Not too long ago, ladies in certain parts of the country had to mount guard on their laundry spread out to dry. This was because their underwear had suddenly become a target for thieves who had somehow come to the bizarre conclusion that it was possible to use lacy underwear to create money. The craze of stealing freshly laundered underwear has quietly faded away as suddenly as it cropped up and young ladies can now go back to the days when their underwear were not a target for the attention of petty thieves.

    On the other hand, there is the far more serious matter of stealing and killing people in the unfathomable belief that body parts can be made to conjure up money, lots of currency notes to convert yesterday’s pauper into a fabulously wealthy person today. Now, that is a depth of nastiness to which no member of a modern society should stoop to. But unfortunately, this is a reality with which we have to grapple a quarter of the way through the twenty-first century. It is a grisly reality which is fatal to far too many young ladies. In other parts of the world, people are killed to provide body parts; kidneys, lungs, livers and eyes to be transplanted into ailing but rich people who need these parts, no questions asked. Here, people are simply butchered, some choice parts especially breasts and genitalia removed and the rest of the body buried in the proverbial shallow graves which are now being discovered with distressing frequency all over the place. People are now having to take stern precaution to prevent grave robbers from digging up their recently dead relatives so that their organs would not be harvested and somehow  be converted into currency notes. These truly alarming beliefs and practices stem from ignorance of the dynamics of money and unfortunately, the practitioners of these evil practices would not have availed themselves of the opportunity of reading these articles on money, to disabuse their evil, little minds of the error of their ways.

  • Money money money II

    Money money money II

    Gold has been used as currency for more than six millennia and is regarded as a repository of value virtually wherever you go in the world. But long before gold became the final arbiter of wealth in the world, the humble cowry had been used as currency in many parts of the world, stretching from parts of Africa to the Antipodes. The illustrious career of the cowry as an item of currency has come to an end but it still continues to have cultural and spiritual significance, especially within our immediate environment. This is to the extent that were people to be asked to name anything that they consider to be of cultural significance, the cowry is one of those things that would feature prominently on the list of such recognised culture icons. On the reverse side however, perhaps there is no other thing that screams fetish as loudly as the cowry, especially for adherents of those Abrahamic religions amongst us who imbue anything considered African with satanic powers, to be feared and avoided like the plague. Put a string of cowries, especially strung together with fresh palm fronds across a doorway and only the brave or even fool hardy will step across the threshold. And yet, every single cowry that has been used for whatever purpose including the sacred rite of divination has been imported into Africa, meaning that the prominence given to the cowry in these parts is as a result of cultural appropriation. The cowry is as foreign to our part of the world as any other thing that has been imported, especially over the past six centuries or so.

    Every cowry that has been used for any purpose in Africa has been imported from the Maldives, a group of islands off the South west coast of India. It is no more than the dried shell of some species of  sea snails indigenous to that region. Cowries can be sourced from some other parts of the world but the type which has come to be associated with our part of the world came from this particular location.

     The cowry is prepared by collecting the relevant snails from the ocean and exposed to the sun which kills the snail over a short period. The snails are then carefully washed and the empty shells are dried to form cowries which are then used as currency; not within the area of their preparation but thousands of kilometres away from there. It has been estimated that any particular batch of cowries did not arrive on our shores until one full year after their preparation given the vast distance they had to travel, including their journey across the Sahara desert.

    Unfortunately, as with other articles associated with West Africa, the impetus for the use of cowries as currency was the slave trade. The Portuguese, in the course of their world wide peregrination discovered the source of the cowries which was used as currency in West Africa and it was as if they had been presented with a jackpot. They acted to control the availability of cowries in West Africa and began to use it as payment for slaves. They shipped in cowries and shipped out slaves, as ever a win-win situation as could be exploited. The cost of a slave in the interior of the continent was very low, less than two hundred shells. The individual slave could then be sold on through a chain of buyers as they were sent to the coastal regions from where they were exported, by which time, they were exchanged for thousands of cowries. The ferocious beauty of this process is unmatched as several people along this chain gained something until the Europeans on the coast gained the only valuable thing in this chain; a living, breathing human being with all their incalculable potential. It is often imagined that those transported across the Atlantic were only used as labourers but it is clear that some of them were exploited for their knowledge and skills which were lost to the region of their birth.

    The cowry was most suited to be used as currency for several reasons, not the least being the ease with which it’s availability could be controlled. The shells were each identical to the other and so each of them had the same value and could not be counterfeited so that what you saw was what you got.

    This issue of counterfeit-proof currency is one of the most important things about the humble cowry and this gave it an advantage over other currencies which could be manipulated in all sorts of ways to derive some undeserved advantage from the point of view of the counterfeiter. The weight of a coin could be shaved and was usually shaved by counterfeiters wherever coins were legal tender. Also, a base metal could be substituted for the more valuable metal from which the coin was originally struck so that what was passed off to the buyer was much less valuable than it appeared to be. As for paper currency, all the forger needed to do was simply to print his own notes in the imitation of the genuine article. These practices struck at the very source of legitimate commerce and was everywhere taken very seriously, so seriously that the penalty for counterfeiting virtually everywhere was agonising death. The punishment reserved for counterfeiting in the Roman Empire was crucifixion, whilst in ancient China where paper money was first used,  convicted counterfeiters were either impaled or burnt at the stake. The profitability of counterfeiting money is shown by the fact that counterfeiters throughout the ages have not been deterred by the ferocity of the punishment which awaited them upon detection. And the widespread nature of this practice is shown by the fact that in practically every banking hall in Nigeria today, you will see counterfeit currency notes on display. As with most other phenomena, nobody has bothered to study just how much of the currency in circulation in Nigeria is fake but any reasonable guess will be on the high side.

    The people of West Africa found it convenient to use the cowry as currency because it could be used for purchasing small items, for example, salt. The level of exchange which went on within any community was quite small as members of each individual community had the same things although some members of the community had noticeably more of those things than others. Okonkwo in Chinua Achebe’s  Things fall apart was rich and successful not because he had many bags stuffed with cowries. He was rich because he had a big barn full of yams. He had wives for whom he paid handsome dowries in yams and palm wine, not to talk of kolanut and the occasional goat and poultry; and because he had several wives, he had many children who enlarged his farm holdings and contributed to his acclaimed wealth. His success was further confirmed by his wrestling prowess as well as his valour in the low grade skirmishes which in those days, passed for war with neighbouring communities. This was the limit of his fame and he was made to pay for his distinction by offering him titles the conferment of which severely depleted his store of wealth as he paid through the nose for the privilege of wearing the anklets of honour. This ensured that he did not garner enough resources to upset the delicate balance of worth within the society in which everyone delved and spun so that there were no lords of the land. The use of money as a means of gaining power and influence was left to the slave traders on the coast who bought and sold people and by doing so introduced a fatal decadence to their own society. A society built on the commodification of human beings is one that, for want of a better word, is cursed. It would be held accountable for those wrongs down the ages.

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    It is at this juncture necessary to turn once again to China Achebe to flesh out this discourse about the wealth of our traditional societies before colonisation. Then, wealth was believed to somehow be dispensed to those who had found favour with divine providence. This was shown by the experience of Obierika, the dissolute son of Ezeulu, the chief priest (echoes of the sons of Eli, the story with which any reader of the Bible is familiar) had a close and terrifying encounter with Eru, the god of wealth who bestowed his favours on anyone he fancied. Obierika might have come up close and personal with Eru as he wandered through the wilds on a dark night but the god did not consider him worthy of his favour. But the story of this encounter introduced us to the spiritual considerations associated with wealth in our traditional societies. In the riverine areas, the dispensers of wealth lived at the bottom of the large rivers which flowed through the land and they favoured whomsoever they fancied and in equal measure destroyed those who transgressed against them as narrated by Elechi Amadi. The Yoruba people also have something to say on this subject as Ajé the patron saint of commerce adopted people at random and awarded them riches, sometimes beyond their wildest imagination. These beliefs take us into the realms of superstition, even magic and muddies an issue that is plainly physical. Money is made through different forms of labour and the whole situation is skewed towards absurdity by wealth dispensing gods who could be propitiated by those who wanted to become rich. It is now left to such people to find a suitable means of clearing a path along which to approach the relevant god or goddess associated with wealth. In a place where human beings are bought and sold, reverence for human lives is diminished to such an extent that inanimate objects could be regarded as having a higher status than slaves and treated as such. In a society where human sacrifices are not only condoned but practised openly, the danger of human beings used in sacrifice to voracious gods in exchange for money is sanctioned by practice. It is therefore to be expected that even in this day and age, humans are still sacrificed in exchange for money. Such vile practices have, unfortunately been ingrained in us and getting rid of them has become impossible as too many of us have imbibed the culture of the slave trade in which the human body can be used to provide counterfeit currency all in a bid to be rich for what necessarily must be a very short period of time.

    The first stage of dealing in slaves is one of kidnapping the victim and this is what we see in contemporary times. Because of the shortage of legitimate currency plaguing us, many of us have regressed in both time and orientation and have taken up what used to be a profitable enterprise. The only difference being that ransom is now demanded in lieu of selling those that are kidnapped into slavery. Everything considered, It is quite clear that in this matter of trading in human flesh, the more things seem to have changed, the more they remain the same.