The Nation Newspaper

Category: Adebayo Lamikanra

  • A Rolls Royce moment

    A Rolls Royce moment

    A few weeks ago, I crawled out of my comfort zone and made a foray to the big city on the lagoon. Although I was once a Lagosian of sorts, I must confess that any trip to Lagos these days is an adventure as just about anything can happen at any stage of the journey even when you least anything out of the ordinary to happen. With the cost of fuel as it is, any journey to Lagos from Ilesa where I live in genteel retirement leaves a Lagos sized hole in my finances which even before the arrival of the no subsidy regime was tottering as it would be for most retired Nigerian professors such as I am. At the time I made that particular journey petrol was both scarce and scarily expensive. In addition, I am loath to risking my precious but definitely ageing vehicle on such a long journey and so there is the added consideration of renting a vehicle and driver for the trip. They don’t come cheap but worth the expense because the problem of navigating the length of that road between Ilesa and Ibadan in a car not my own is perhaps worthy of that added expense.

    A major consideration on traveling from Ilesa to Ibadan is the state of the road on which that journey is made. For anyone not yet familiar with the condition of that road, please rest assured that it is an experience that is not for the faint of heart. Long ago, the road was long, narrow and winding, passing through several towns and villages. As a child going on the occasional visit to Ilesa I remember crossing the what at that time was an impressive, always freshly painted bridge across River Ósun into Ìkirè, home of dòdò which in those days was modestly clad in brown leaves. Later, as an undergraduate at Ife, I travelled on that road which because of the frequency of accidents on it was something of an obstacle course, deserving of songs of praise after each successful passage. For all that the road was part of the famous or even iconic Trunk A road along which in days gone by everyone coming across the Niger from the East to Lagos had to pass.

    By the sixties, it was clear that the road was no longer fit for purpose as the many accidents on all parts of the road testified to the danger lurking beyond every bend on that road. Even as it was the only route to the eastern hinterland of the Western region, nothing was done to make the road any less dangerous. However, by the seventies it was clear that something had to be done especially when a Federal minister, no less, barely escaped with his life after an accident on the notorious Ife – Ibadan road. The new road which was built at the height of the oil boom was not just wide but was well paved and fairly straight. The road was so well built that many of the people driving on it mistook it for a race track and raced along it with a recklessness that bordered on madness. The result was that mortalities on that road continued unabated  By the turn of the century, the need to dualise the road had become compelling and it fell to the new PDP government to do the needful in this respect. To put it bluntly, they did a criminally if characteristic shoddy job and built a road deserving of shame but anyone expecting those hard nosed politicians to show any remorse waited in vain. Today, that road all the way to Ilesa from Ibadan is a mass of pot holes which have rendered most portions of the road an implacable obstacle course. The current APC regime is pretending that there is nothing wrong with the road and is trying mostly in vain to make the road passable by patching large portions of the road. This effort is tantamount to covering a mass of ulcers with strips of plaster in the vain hope of finding a lasting cure. Travellers on the road, in an attempt to conjure a smooth journey out of the mess have taken to driving against traffic on many parts of the road thereby putting everybody in considerable danger virtually every step of the way. Coming to Lagos from Ilesa is definitely not for the faint of heart and the situation is not about to change for a long while.

    The journey that brought me to Lagos could not be avoided and there was nothing else I could do but grit my teeth and I took to the road with considerable fear and trepidation as I do any time I have to venture forth on that road. The driver played his part admirably by driving less recklessly than usual but it was with a palpable sense of relief that we entered Lagos, just as the gloom of an early evening was descending on the city. We went about the business that brought us to Lagos but it was already inky dark in a city with few lights by the time we started heading towards our sleeping quarters. As we were turning to return to the mainland, the driver, his eyes peeled to take in any possibility of buying fuel saw the miracle of a petrol station dispensing fuel and promptly seized the heaven sent opportunity to buy some petrol but not enough to fill his tank, as that was simply beyond our combined financial capacity to do. We joined the queue in front of us and painfully inched towards one of the two or three pumps from which we could buy fuel. We had been engaged in this boring activity for a few minutes when out of the gloom surrounding the station, a huge form loomed out and dominated the scene completely. My first thought was that it was a truck but a second look revealed the distinctive grille and the figure of the spirit of ecstasy sitting proudly on top of that grille. There was no doubt about it, improbable as it was, a Rolls Royce had joined the queue. The situation was as incongruous as sighting a large ocean going ship on the sand dunes of the Sahara. From the moment I set eyes on that spectacular vehicle I knew without a shadow of doubt that what was before me was not just a car, it was also the subject of an article. All that remained to breathe life into that article was the opportunity to get to grips with writing it and today, several weeks later, I have somehow contrived to create that opportunity within my mind.

    There may not be a better time to write about a Rolls Royce than now as the newly unveiled Rolls Royce Phantom  Gold finger SUV has been in the news lately. This one of edition from the Rolls Royce stable offers the ultimate in style, power and performance. It is a tribute to Gold finger the James Bond film released in 1964 with the original James Bond, the legendary Sean Connery in the role of 007. With this background, the designers simply went mad on the gold motif as the car is reported to have wired into its unique frame various forms of pure gold valued at a cool half a million dollars US. I leave the reader to do the calculation to convert this sum into Naira at the current rate of exchange as the current rate would have changed by the time this article is printed. By my inexpert calculation, I am sure that given the sum of money to buy that car, an honest and capable engineering firm would be quite capable of building a well paved road from Ibadan to the front of my house in Ilesa! Maybe, I have exaggerated a little bit but I insist that my calculation may not be much outside the limits of error. At least that is my story and I am sticking to it.

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    My first thought when I saw that iconic vehicle was to wonder why it had arrived amongst us. I could not imagine that a Rolls Royce would  mingle with humble everyday cars on a petrol queue on an uneventful Saturday night in Lagos. I eventually convinced myself that being a car, a Rolls also had to have petrol in its tank if it was to act the part of a car. My next question was how much petrol this monster must consume in order to even get back home not to talk of going all the way to Ilesa as I was going to do in a few hours. This thought was quickly followed by how much the petrol would cost. With petrol retailing at just over a thousand Naira per litre, I thought that the cavernous belly of that beast would not be satisfied with less than a few hundred thousand Naira worth of the volatile stuff. I then concluded that that car for all its beauty and elegance was clearly out of place in a country in which many million people were going to bed with an empty belly on the night that the Rolls was eating up fuel enough in value to feed a thousand hungry souls and send them to bed satiated.

    The story of Rolls Royce is one of striving for mechanical engineering perfection but having to settle for excellence as close to perfection as to make no observable difference. The production of every Rolls Royce rolling off the factory floor is a lesson for the rulers of Nigeria and more than that a rebuke to them in their slap dash attempt at building a country for them to be proud of. This in all ways deepens the incongruity of an authentic Rolls Royce rolling down one of the broken roads on which Nigerians are forced to navigate through their country.

    The Rolls Royce is certainly not the product of some spirits or a band of extra-terrestrial aliens banding together for the stated purpose of creating an iconic car. On the contrary, it is the product of human ingenuity and endeavour, worthy of emulation by every member of our species. It is the brain child of Sir Henry Rolls and Sir Charles Royce. Both of them were engineers with a passion for cars. They met in Manchester in 1904 with Rolls promising to sell every car that Royce could produce after driving his latest car. He was as good as his word and one of the great partnerships the world has ever seen was born, forming Rolls Royce which has become a byword for mechanical perfection. Over the last one hundred and twenty years, the producers of Rolls Royce cars and aircraft engines have not compromised on that principle. This is why all over the world Rolls Royce has an unblemished and unassailable reputation for excellence which does not come cheap as whichever way you look at it, excellence carries a high price tag. It is reserved for men and women of means some of who find the Rolls Royce as a smoke screen for their maleficence so that, not everyone who owns a Rolls is a lover of excellence but that is another matter.

    Under our present circumstances a Nigerian at the wheels of a Rolls Royce is a parody of a genuine person, a masquerade that has been expelled from the underworld. This is because there a disconnect between the spirit of their iconic vehicle and the realities on ground in their country and emphasises the inequality within the country. Whilst one individual corners the wealth that will make life meaningful for close to or even more than a million of their compatriots, it is clear that the system that makes that possible is irretrievably broken. It is no longer fit for purpose and is not likely to be repaired any time soon by anything remotely superior. As I sat in our much more humble car, contemplating the uncertain future of our country, we took on board enough petrol to take us back to Ilesa with a little more to spare. My thoughts were soon switched back to the journey awaiting us on that broken stretch of road between Ibadan and Ilesa. Those thoughts did not make for sound sleep especially as the picture of the majestic Rolls gliding through traffic continued to slide in and out of my residual consciousness throughout the night.

  • Tax matters

    Tax matters

    Americans are frequently heard to equate death with taxes because as far as their expectations as Americans go, you must pay your taxes as surely as die at the appointed time. You even have to pay your taxes within a specified time frame. The consequences of not doing so are supposed to be so unpleasant as not to make the payment of tax very attractive. That holds true for most Americans but not for all Americans. This piece of knowledge we have been able to extract from the life and times of one Donald J. Trump who has managed to withhold his taxes for long periods and in the end paid derisory sums as tax. He has been able to do this with the connivance of his lawyers and accountants who by all accounts are as clever as a cartload of monkeys. That method will not work for the vast majority of Americans which is why it will not be discussed any further.

    I remember clearly my first encounter with the subject of tax. Not as you may have guessed from a lesson in Economics but as a topic in Religious Knowledge. Or, to quote the correct title, Christian Religious knowledge. As can be expected in a joint Anglican and Methodist owned secondary school which I attended, everyone who passed through the school in my time had to face the WAEC examiners in that subject and so, I did.

    In our study of the New Testament, we were informed that in the year when Quirinius was governor of Judea, the word went out from Caesar Augustus that each person be counted, each one in his own village. This is why a humble carpenter named Joseph loaded his pregnant  fiancée on a donkey which bore this heavy burden all the way from Nazareth where he lived and practiced his trade to Bethlehem on account of having descended from the house and lineage of David. How that story ended is known to everyone and is therefore not worth telling here. It is at this point that we have to veer off into the jungle of taxation.

    The census of Quirinius has been placed around the year 6BC, which means that it took place some two thousand and thirty years ago at a time when the nascent Roman empire was undergoing rapid expansion under Caesar Augustus. This demanded a great deal of money which was squeezed out of the conquered peoples who had just been brought under the umbrella of Pax Romana, which guarantee was provided by the sharp spears and sturdy shields of superbly trained Roman soldiers.

    Taxes are paid by living people and the rulers of the Roman empire were determined to collect the taxes from everyone living within their far flung empire hence the decree that everyone reported in their ancestral homes. There to be counted, meticulously no doubt, and be added to the tax roll. These taxes collected was the money used in providing equipment for the army and the building of those excellent roads along which the army moved swiftly whenever and wherever their intervention was required. It has to be pointed out that the army at that point was not only needed for the upkeep of empire, it was also to be made available for the expansion of empire so that even more taxes could be collected from newly conquered territories. Apart from the expenditure on the army, there were other items of other public works including, for example, the provision of potable water which were of course taken care of by the taxes which were extorted from the subjects of the Emperor on his throne in far away Rome.

    The people of Judea, like most red blooded people everywhere loathed the payment of taxes. This is not just because it deprived them of their hard earned money but in their special case, because it also forced them to work to acquire Roman coins on which the head of the emperor was stamped. This went violently against the tenets of Judaism which forbade the handling of graven images. The combination of these and other circumstances within the principality precipitated extremely brutal revolts which were no less ferociously confronted by the Romans who were not averse to the large scale crucifixion of all those who were found guilty of tax evasion in the course of these revolts. The need for Joseph to be captured in that famous census was all about the payment of tax and it was as compulsive as death itself. I must confess that the connection between the circumstances surrounding the birth of Jesus was not emphasised in the lessons that we were exposed to in those days. I made that connection in later years by which time, I had become exposed to books other than the Bible for further instruction.

    Later, much later, many thousand miles from Judea across the Atlantic, there was another iconic response to the issue of taxation. Then, the altercation was between the settlers in the original thirteen colonies which made up the nascent United States of America and the English king, George III who by the way, was German. This time, nobody was being counted and the conflict was upon a point of principle. The thirteen colonies which acquired statehood existed under the shadows of Great Britain to which as it befitted a budding empire, taxes had to be paid and they were duly collected. The colonies were directly controlled by governors who were responsible to the king and this being the case, those from whom taxes were being collected were excluded from the process by which tax assessments were carried out. In time this became a sore point with the people who had to pay those obnoxious taxes. They voiced their dissatisfaction with this arrangement but rather than try to find ways of reducing tax burdens, they were increased. The situation quickly spiralled out of control and the colonised people decided that since they were not represented in the councils of power, then they should not be taxed. They took up the cry, no tax without representation and went into rebellion which after years of bitter fighting led to the birth of the USA. This, the foundation of the Republic was built on the issue of tax and since they had no king or a hereditary aristocracy, nobody could be exempted from paying taxes and the principle of joining life taxes to life itself became firmly established. An example will suffice.

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    One of the most powerful but certainly the most colourful gangster in the USA in the turbulent Prohibition era was Al Capone, a ruthless but bloodily successful killer with the blood of many men on his hands. It is thought but never proved to be responsible for the Valentine day massacre, so called because it took place on February fourteen 1929. On that day seven mobsters were shot to death in a Chicago garage by gunmen, two of who were dressed as policemen. The men in the garage who were members  of a rival gang, the head of which was the prime target were lined up against a wall and cut down in a hail of submachine gun bullets. The operation lasted only a few minutes after which the gunmen coolly emerged from the garage with their hands up followed by the fake policemen with drawn guns. Although the target of this mayhem fortuitously escaped the massacre, this was a brazen show of force which showed the perpetrator’s contempt for all the rules of civilised behaviour, a monster who had put himself above all laws, human and divine. Al Capone was conveniently hundreds of miles away from the scene of the crime but a great deal of objective evidence pointed to his instigation of the crime. Almost a hundred years later, this involvement, as his involvement in many other murders has not been proved and could not be proved. Al Capone lived above the law in every way except one; he could not live and at the same time not pay his taxes.

    Al Capone had led a life of crime virtually all his life. He was steeped in prostitution, robbery, gambling, bootlegging, protection racketeering, drug trafficking, not to talk of countless murders. Still, he could not be touched by the law because nothing could be proved against him. There was no doubt however that he had a stream of income as proved by the lavishness of his lifestyle. His belief was that since all his income was illegitimate, he did not have to pay any tax. The ground was cut from under him however when a judge ruled in a separate case that illegitimate income was also subject to tax. The most casual investigation showed that Al Capone had no tax returns for many years. He was promptly charged with tax evasion and sentenced to a long term imprisonment equivalent to the crucifixion he would have been subjected to under the harsh laws of the Roman empire. He paid the penalty for living and not paying tax and found out the hard way that the only two things you could not escape in life were death and taxes.

    The issue of taxes continue to loom large in the consciousness of Americans which is why it featured prominently in the manifestoes of both Harris and Trump leading up to the lately concluded elections. It might have done but it does not seem to have mattered to the electorate in the end. This is because the net takeaways from the two candidates are that under Harris tax paid by all income groups except those in the highest 1% earning group was to be reduced. For Trump on the other hand, tax was going to be increased on all earning groups except for those in the highest 5% group. In other words, taxes were to go up across board except for the richest people and corporations who could look forward to increased income and higher profits. The poor on the other hand had little to gain but higher taxes. And this in a country where the only things that you cannot dodge are death and taxes. Times have indeed changed from the days of Augustus when some people were ready to put their lives into the real danger of excruciating torture and death by refusing to pay their tax. At least now, people do not have to go on any journey to be registered because it is the business of the government to make sure that you are tracked every step of the way from cradle, wherever that cradle may be, until death when you are released from the burden of paying tax even though there is still the small matter of death duties.

  • Colonial throwback

    Colonial throwback

    I spent the first eight years of my life learning to read and by now, I have come to the realisation that those years are the most rewarding period of my life. Because I could read so early in life, I have come to appreciate the company of men and women who were infinitely older, cleverer and much more articulate than I could ever hope to be. They are the ones that I met on the pages of those newspapers which kept me company in those days. Because of the erudite ghosts with which I have surrounded myself, I have discovered the beauty of solitude and introspection. I have found that there can be a great deal of joy in solitude as long as I have an entertaining book or some such item dispensing literature of any kind for company. Perhaps this is why I have been quick to note that the value which is now placed on books is diminishing all the time. My fascination with words was sparked by a newspaper, specifically, the Daily Times in those days of my growing up. There were other daily newspapers at that time but none of them came anywhere close to what was served up by the Daily Times. Other newspapers, especially the Guardian have of course come on board since the fifties when I am sure nobody in the Daily Times would have thought that there was a little boy in Ibadan poring through every section of their journal including the classified advert section where the films that could be watched on any day of the week in all the cinema houses in Lagos were advertised. And there were several of them on the island as well as the mainland so that everyone had a choice as to which theatre deserved their custom on any day. It goes without saying that I never got to watch any of those films but got a thrill just by knowing what fare was available for those who had the privilege of sitting through those cinematic experiences.

    There is no doubt in my mind that my interaction with the hundreds of newspaper columnists with whom I have held one sided conversations over a period of more than sixty-five years has shaped my current thinking. In my turn, I have been writing opinion columns, first in the Guardian and then in other newspapers, ending on the pages of the Nation where I have been domiciled for close to three years and counting. I have found that experience as stimulating as reading what other persons have put into the pages of those newspapers that held me in their grip when I was just a reader.

    Our social situation as a people has of course gone through a whole lot of changes over the several decades since I became more or less addicted to newspapers. In the first place, newspapers have been supplanted by first, the electronic media; radio and television, not to talk of the aggressively amorphous internet which is now living in the consciousness of the vast majority of people. The trend setters these days are called influencers. Unlike the columnists who held me in thrall in my late infancy, these influencers have neither time nor ability for introspection. Some of them can hardly string more than two coherent sentences together and speak in slangs which make for translation before they can be understood. Thus, they are only good for instant entertainment which to be honest, is what their followers demand from them.

    At the time my newspaper adventures began, Nigeria was a British colony albeit a dying one at that point in time. This is because by that time, the battle for independence had already been won. Some ten years before, the situation still hung in the balance and the newspapers were out on the frontline doing their bit to see off the colonialists who operated the machinery that ran the country. They were quick to call the colonial government to order at any time that such an admonition was necessary and they were the mouthpiece of the fiery young men who kept the pot of independence boiling over nicely. They constantly reminded the colonial masters that their time was up and they had better start packing.

    At that time, just like now, that mythical man in the street went about his business of gathering on to himself, the wherewithal to satisfy his needs and had little time to worry his head about what government was doing or not doing. One sore point about the colonial status of the day was the lowly status of the Nigerian Vis a Vis any young British puppy who had been sent out from the mother country to maintain law and order in the colony. The word colony had a much changed meaning at that time from what it was in Roman and even earlier times when groups of people left their place of origin and settled in other places with the intention of transferring themselves permanently into their new territory. Such colonisation was actually still taking place at the time the British seized Nigeria and made her a colony. In the century before, millions of people had voluntarily transported themselves or were forcibly transferred from all parts of Britain to America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The Dutch had founded their colony in South Africa several centuries before and had been fully developed as an apartheid state by the time the British arrived in Nigeria. By that time, there could be no large scale settlement of Europeans in Nigeria and other parts of what can be called the malaria belt which turned that part of the world to what was described as the white man’s grave. Many who came were dead within months and others wisely stayed away. It is ironic that by the time the British were packing up and leaving Nigeria, the problem of malaria had been solved through the availability of quinine and other antimalarial drugs. Suddenly, the entire length of the West African coast line had been made habitable for both white men and their black brothers by the wonders of modern pharmaceutical technology.

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    In Nigeria, the colonial masters were careful, very careful to keep the races separate from each other. To start with, at least in the South, they lived on the highest places they could find in their continuous attempts to get away from mosquitoes which occupied the lowest places, there to torment the natives with their viciousness. Effectively therefore, there was a system of apartheid which could not be maintained as soon as independence began to loom on the horizon. The system collapsed spectacularly in 1948 in the wake of what can be described as the Bristol Hotel incident.

    The Bristol Hotel was on Martins Street on Lagos Island and was owned by a Greek who did not allow black men to lodge in his hotel. One Mr. Ivor Cummings was booked into the hotel by the Colonial Office, no less. At that point, common sense dictated that with that name, Cummings was not only white but was a man of high official and social rank. When Mr. Cummings turned up at the hotel however, he confounded everybody by being black. On this account, he was not allowed to register in the hotel. By the next day, news of this arrived at the Island Club on the Marina where a group of young men were enjoying early evening breezes over bottles of beer. Enjoyment was instantly put aside and the enraged young men stopped on their way to Bristol Hotel only to recruit some area boys who at that time were called Boma boys. Yes, area boys were part of the Lagos landscape eighty years ago. This motley group had nothing but mayhem on their mind and this they visited on the hotel immediately on arrival. Twenty or maybe ten years before, the whole lot of them would have been arrested, speedily tried and locked up in the Broad street prison not far from the Island club. After all, they had been involved in assault, use of dangerous weapons, maybe even attempted murder. The newspapers of course spread the news over Nigeria at great speed and the country was boiling over with anger at the insult which had been visited on all red blooded black men everywhere. The situation teetered precariously on the lip of a precipice but mercifully not for long. The governor, a man of experience who had probably seen the light of reason and came to the conclusion that the artificial separation of races was utter nonsense saw the Bristol Hotel farce as an opportunity to right a wrong. Rather than coming down hard on the young hot heads, he announced the end of the fledgling apartheid policy which had kept the races apart. From then on, the European quarters became Government Reserved Areas, the European Hospital across the Five Cowry Creek Lane was transformed to Creek Hospital where African patients, elite African patients it has to be said, could be treated. This did not bring an end to petty apartheid in Nigeria but, whenever there were any episodes it, they were dutifully reported in the newspapers which were no less dutifully read and taken note of.

    Given the rise and rise of social media, newspapers are no longer what they used to be and so, a lot of news transmission is now through the agency of social media. Unlike the newspapers in the glorious days of their dominance, news from social media, colourful as they are must be taken with more than a pinch of salt. You can therefore imagine my shock when my first response to the video clip of a white man slapping a Nigerian was shock and disbelief. I had to do a double take and sure enough, a second look confirmed the veracity of the first one. What could the story behind the pictures be, I wondered. Then, I listened to the sound and heard the diligent slapper introduce himself as a member of the Nigerian senate and his accents confirmed that fact. What was before me was a member of the Nigerian ruling elite riding rough shod over one of the government owned serfs who have been summoned to his castle to perform some menial task. I was of course shocked at the level of violence being visited on the serf who, in the dead of night when only ghosts and spirits were abroad, had arrived at his castle to deliver a commissioned parcel. Stung to fury by the polite request that the lord of the manor should step outside so that he could be served, the poor man was slapped quite deliberately twice, the third slap arriving on the heels of the second to correct the record of the serf who had erroneously accused the aggressive senator who was actually not a senator but a congressman, of having slapped him three times.

    My first impression was that the lord and master was putting himself in the danger of an aneurysm or a stroke. There is only so much pressure you can put on the cardiovascular system before something gives. This man was clearly a man who had anger issues and is in urgent need of skilful counselling. But of course, there are so many other matters arising from this episode.

    My immediate reference was to the Bristol Hotel incident of 1948 when Nigerians resorted to violence when their racial sensitivity was aroused. A black man was refused service at a hotel on account of the colour of his skin. On this occasion it was a man wearing the mask of a white man beating up a black man who had not transgressed in any way. I expected all hell to break loose, not just because of the gratuitous violence inflicted but also because of the flood of invectives and expletives which accompanied the slaps. The level of impunity on display was enough to turn the stomach of people with a lower sensitivity than mine. It was a truly magnificent display of the power which no Nigerian should show in any dealing with another human not to talk of another Nigerian. We are now an independent nation and have been for sixty-four years but what we can learn from this incident is that we are still subject to the insults of a new breed of self imposed colonial masters even though any difference in their skin colour is purely accidental.

  • Democracy on trial (II)

    Democracy on trial (II)

    More than a week after the US presidential election, some people are still trying to come to terms with what is for them, the wholly unexpected result of that election. It was thought in many places that the choice of who would become president between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump was going to fall on Kamala Harris on account of, not just her manifest merits but on the multiple demerits of her opponent. My stand all along was that there would not be a clear winner with the votes being shared right down the middle in which case, a Trump induced chaos was going to leave an entanglement which was going to task the democratic resolve of the polity. A man who lost the last election and has cried foul without an iota of proof for all of four years and has been laying grounds for rejecting the present round even before voting began in this round cannot be expected to respect the results of an election obtained from an evenly divided electorate. Right until polling day, this was the result predicted by all those who were actively involved in the polling business. They were all wrong. Trump ran away with the election and all we are left with are the so called experts trying to wipe the egg from their bemused faces. They are not likely to recover from this debacle for a very long time.

    As expected, the post mortem has started, with people coming up with possible reasons why the Democrats were blown away in the manner they suffered at the hand of the electorate. As with most political parties especially with those on the left wing of the political spectrum, these parties can best be described as a coalition of interests. This means that parties of the left tend to have many varied interests and too often appear to be fighting too many internal battles. This is usually at the expense of their vote gathering potential. In extreme cases, these internal conflicts are so serious that some factions which are deemed to be too far to the left are expelled in the manner of cutting out a cancerous growth in order to restore the party to good health. The British Labour Party has been particularly plagued with this tendency in a way that cannot be associated with the right wing Conservative Party within which the overwhelming aim is to attain power and retain it by any means necessary. Such parties are run along military lines with a clear command structure and a ruthlessness to go along with it. The leader of the party tends to be a strong man or woman who lays down the law in such a way that the chances of any individual rising within the party are dependent on their personal relationship with the leader who wields the power to hire and fire entirely at will. The ability of parties cast in this mould depends very much, if not entirely on discipline when necessary by an allegiance to clearly defined religious principality or to a manufactured patriotism. Beware of those who stand to rigid attention, with the hint of tears in their eyes whenever the national anthem is being played or the flag in being saluted. More often than not, they are fanatics who are not averse to becoming martyrs for the cause, any cause that captures their fevered imagination.

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    One of the weaknesses associated with parties of the left is their tendency to pander too much to the perceived interests of the electorate, to the extent that they try to anticipate the wishes of the voters who are perceived as valued customers. In doing this, they cast themselves in the mould of do-gooders who unfortunately frequently misread the wishes of their constituents and in the end, have to impose policies of their own invention on the populace. They too often become wise after the election which they have lost to the other side which holds no truck with political niceties and are prepared to pull the electorate into their orbit in the wake of an identifiable leader who appears able to get things done.

    In the last US election, the Republicans had a clear leader whose every wish was a command. What Donald Trump wanted, he got, so that in the chaos of his campaign, it was apparent to his followers that there was a clearly defined path to power. In other words there was a clearly discernible method to his madness. He did not waste any time pandering to the wishes of elite component of the Republicans party which is why so many of them, Liz  Cheney and her father who, in spite of the atrocities associated with him, is surprisingly still alive;could not find it in their heart to associate themselves with what they saw as the excesses of Donald Trump, to whom everyone in that camp was required to bend the knee. As it was, the man had no defined policies to defend and so, could not be taken up on them through the process of civilised debate. You were required to toe the line or ship out into the political wilderness. Cheney and others decided to ship out in the mistaken belief that the formless nature of Trumpism was a fatal flaw but are now quietly licking their wounds in political limbo. It is unlikely that they would be welcome with open arms in the Democratic Party and there is absolutely no way back for them in the party of Trump. The only hope they can comfort themselves with is that Trump is no longer eligible to contest the next round of elections. In addition, at the age of seventy-eight, his pervasive political influence is very much dated and as things stand, there is no obvious successor to Trump within Republican ranks. Still, it will not be easy for those Republican rebels to fight their way back into the upper echelons of what used to be their party.

    Looking back now, it is apparent that the deciding issue in the US election is immigration which was also the main plank of Trump and his supporters. It is deeply ironic that this is the case since all Americans are immigrants from other parts of the world. But to be clear, Trump is not hostile to all immigrants, at least not to those of European descent who are blessed with a deficit of melanin in their skin. When he talks of immigrants eating dogs and cats, his target audience are whites who are afraid that Haitians, Mexicans, Muslims and members of other such groups have come to America with the sole intention of supplanting the white majority, taking over their jobs and privileges and mating with their daughters. One hundred years ago, the only immigration going on was of white but regrettably, mainly Southern European Catholics who have however been converted into American citizens. Before then, the Irish who also brought the Pope in their scanty luggage were the problem. Now, they have been integrated into the Republic and have even in the last sixty years produced two presidents including the incumbent. John F. Kennedy broke that glass ceiling in 1960.

    Ask any white American and he will tell you with no hint of equivocation that their country belongs to the white man and his descendants in perpetuity. All other people are interlopers who are to be tolerated for as long as they are useful to white interests. But, how strong is the claim of the European claim to any part of the Americas or what we refer to as the New World? To start with, nobody in Europe had any idea that such a large land mass existed west of any part of Europe even though a band of Vikings under the leadership of Leif Erikson had landed in North America some four hundred years before Christopher Columbus fetched up on the island of Bahamas. And, thinking that he had arrived in India, his intended destination, called indigenous people of the island, Indians. From then, the non-white people in the New World have been hunted down like vermin and their land blatantly stolen from them. This is the land that those hill billies call their own and have no wish to share with anyone. Trump has now promised a massive exportation of immigrants, the scale of which has never been seen before. These are people carrying out jobs which white American are lost to soil their hands with. These are the jobs which in the words of Trump are black jobs. The corollary being that as soon as those immigrants have been expelled, there will be an overflow of jobs for the black folk, many of whom are currently unemployed or in serious completion for them with those immigrants. There is therefore something in Trumpism for a whole lot of people. Unlike a vociferous minority of people waving blue flags, the words of Donald Trump promising to lead them to Eldorado. No wonder they came out in large numbers to support him with their votes.

    Trump was not talking only to the great unwashed millions alone. His listeners included the ultra rich who have been promised generous tax cuts so that they can become richer still even if it is at the expense of those poor saps who are hoping to step into the shoes vacated by the departed immigrants. The only people who did not appear to have a place at the Trump table are members of the middle class, those poor saps who have struggled to acquire an education worth boasting about. They have the comfort of their degrees and in any case are in a clear minority, not worth caring about in a system where no vote is more precious than the other. From this point of view, it can now be seen with the useless benefit of hindsight that Trump ran a diabolically clever campaign. What he will be able to do with his victory is anybody’s guess, including his own.

    Perhaps the most interesting aspect of  this saga is that Trump is not an unknown quantity. On the face of it, judging from his former presidency we should know what to expect from him this time around. I am a pharmacist even if I sometimes need to be reminded of it. From that point of view, I am not hopeful that Trump will display any sign of maturity or competence on his return to the White House. This assessment is based on his handling or rather, mishandling of the COVID crisis which he handled with incredible incompetence leading to a large number of deaths, hospitalisations and needless suffering. He had a battery of world acclaimed experts at his beck and call but chose to ignore them pointedly. Instead his ears were wide open to charlatans and conspiracy theorists who were sure that ivermectin, strong salt solutions, powerful rays of light were the cure for a viral infection which is refractive to any form of chemotherapy. In the end however, he somehow became convinced of the power of vaccines and threw his considerable weight behind the development and distribution of the vaccines which halted the virus in its tracks. That would have been cause for some hope that he has learnt a valuable experience from that episode but the hope of that has been dashed by his announcement that he was handing the responsibility for for the public health sector in the USA to a rabid vaccine denier who has expressed contempt for the efficacy of vaccines and the results of scientific research. From this point of view, I am convinced that we have exciting but mentally exhausting times ahead with the Donald at the wheel. Harold Wilson, one time British Prime Minister said with confidence that seven days is a long time in politics. From that point of view, four years is an eternity.

  • Democracy on trial (I)

    Democracy on trial (I)

    All over the world, people are waking up to the news that Donald J. Trump has completed the greatest political comeback in the history of politics, both American and global. He has, seemingly in the face of great odds been elected the forty-seventh president of the United States, only the second person to have been so re-elected after losing a previous battle for election for a second consecutive presidential term. The first man to be so elected was Grover Cleveland, the first Democrat to be elected President of the US since the end of the American civil war. This, it has to be made clear was at a time when the Democratic Party was the party of segregation and right wing extremism. Ironically, he too, like Donald Trump had entered the White house under a cloud of having raped a woman, an act he was accused of committing long before he became a candidate for the position of president. In his own case, he was not only accused of rape but was fingered by his victim as the father of the son who was born as a result of the enforced union. Grover did not deny having carnal knowledge of the woman involved but insisted that what happened between them was as a result of mutual consent. He then  flatly denied that he was the father of her child. When the accused continued to make a nuisance of herself to the future POTUS, he used his not inconsiderable powers to bring about her incarceration in a lunatic asylum and blithely went on his merry way to plot his way into the White House. The rest, as the saying goes is history but it shows that some of the people who have been president long before Trump have been far less than stellar characters. Indeed, it looks as if the more things change, the more they remain the same.

    Many of the people around the world who took the trouble to look into what was going on in the US over the last hundred days or so may be surprised by the result of the presidential election. They have observed how the entry of Kamala Harris into the presidential race raised the level of excitement associated with it. Before the visibly exhausted Joe Biden retired from the campaign, it was clear or, at least apparent that Trump was coasting to victory practically everywhere. With the coming of Harris however everything changed overnight. Money from multiple sources started flowing into her campaign at an unprecedented rate and voter registration shot up through the roof. She was not just a breath of fresh air, she was like a shot of oxygen into a furnace and was confidence personified. The endorsements started pouring in and life long Republicans from every neck of the woods began pledging their vote to a clearly resurgent Harris/Walz ticket. Trump, on his part appeared to have become increasingly unhinged as he issued a string of invectives against people he labelled lunatics and lowlifes. Everything seemed to be going swimmingly for the Democrats except that the bottom line was that the result of the election was always given as too close to call. And that was the greatest takeaway from all that was going on. What did Harris have to do to pull away from Trump and take a commanding lead? As long as this did not happen, Trump was ahead given that Trump had warned that the only result he was going to accept was victory for himself. If Harris was going to win, it had to be by a landslide and the possibility of that was clearly not on the cards.

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    I acquired a sharp consciousness of global events in the sixties, clearly the most iconic decade in recent human history. It was the first time that the world began to acquire the status of a global village, stitched together as it had become  through both print and electronic media. All over the world, young people were directly connected to each other as never before and my generation was the first to react as one to global trends and could go further to direct those trends as no previous generation had ever been able to do. Many of those trends were coming out of the USA and in many ways we were all becoming Americanised. Although I joined enthusiastically in that trend, my own focus was on the plight of those we called American negroes in those days.

    For me, more than anything else the sixties was the decade of the civil rights movement in the USA as it coincided neatly with the winds of charge which were sweeping all those colonial powers out of Africa. As far as I was concerned African independence was hollow as long as our brothers and sisters across the Atlantic were not accorded full human status which in fact they were not enjoying at the time. In many parts of the USA including all the country below the Mason-Dixon line, black people were strictly segregated from whites with whom they could not share any municipal amenities. On buses, they were restricted to the back and were excluded from restaurants, hotels, public swimming pools, decent schools and were in the main, not allowed to vote in any elections, local, state or national. The world seems to have forgotten that the 1964 presidential election was fought between Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater, an arch segregationist who was resolutely and bitterly opposed to any concession to black equality. As late as that period, it was still a crime for black and whites to marry across racial lines! It is now nearly unbearable that it was only in the sixties that things began to change slowly and that with a great deal of pain and effort on the part of black Americans.

    Perhaps the most promising period for blacks in America was immediately after the civil war when the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments freed the slaves, gave citizenship rights to all those born in the USA and conferred the right to vote on black people respectively. From 1865 to 1877, a big, beautiful window of opportunity opened for the blacks to exploit social, economic and political opportunities in a period which has come to be known as the Reconstruction. During this period, the newly freed blacks flourished as they have not done at any time since then. They were voted into political posts at local, state and national levels and were allowed to become part of what we now call the American dream. Hope broke out among them like a rash of boils and spread just as quickly at a time when their freedoms were being guaranteed under the shadows of guns wielded by the United States army. That army that had fought to liberate them from the tyranny of slavery. As things turned out, it was too good to last. After the 1876 presidential elections, a deal was struck between Northern Republicans and Southern Democrats which led to the withdrawal of the army from the South and the ascension of Rutherford Hayes to the presidency. With army protection withdrawn, blacks were left to the mercies of the former slave owners and their white lackeys who devised a life of living hell for the blacks in their midst. The tortures of that hell have since been ameliorated but those fires are yet to be extinguished which is why the fight is far from over.

    The situation for blacks in the South was excruciating as they were brutally periodically lynched by white mobs right down until the forties. Any black man who stepped out of line by as much as an inch paid with his life. Lynching was the linchpin of white policy towards blacks in the South whilst in the more sophisticated North, they frequently resorted to inter-racial riots in which many more blacks than whites were killed.

    By the middle years of the sixties, most of the news coming out of the US was about civil rights and my curiosity about that country was at fever pitch. At a time when most of my contemporaries were impressed by the music, Hollywood films and the glamour of American life as depicted in glossy magazines such as Life, I was consumed by empathy for my cousins across the Atlantic. They were represented in my consciousness by the incomparable Muhammed Ali who was not just a supreme athlete who demonstrated a performance excellence which shone with uncommon brilliance but demanded respect for black people everywhere. He had won a gold medal at the Rome Olympics but was not served in a restaurant in his hometown of Louisville in Kentucky on account of the colour of his skin. That is how backward America was in 1960 and I took notice of it. When Ali was banned from boxing for refusing to, as he put it, go ten thousand miles away from home to shoot some coloured people he had no quarrel with, I felt positively outraged on his behalf.

    The first Black slaves to disembark on American soil arrived in 1619, at a time when all the European colonies which had been founded in America were floundering badly, most of them on the verge of terminal collapse. It cannot be a coincidence that their fortunes changed thereafter and they began to prosper on the back of the free labour extracted under the most degrading conditions from enslaved Africans. From 1619, a caste system with whites at the top and blacks nowhere was instituted and it is this system which privileged whites are fighting tooth and nail to maintain more than four hundred years later. That is the enormity of the load which Harris, a black woman married to a Jew has been carrying on her back. It has  proved to be far too heavy for her to carry.

    One thing clear about this election is that issues and positions did not matter in the end and all the money spent on getting messages across to people was money wasted. Looking at the communications from both sides it seems that nobody was really listening to whatever it was that was being flung at them even when the information was coming directly from the candidates themselves. Harris was all for explaining her positions on different issues. The more she talked however, the more open to criticism she became. Trump, on the other hand traded in crude insults, casually throwing oral bombs in the general direction of those who has anything he considered to be against any one of the many things he did not approve of. He did this secure in the knowledge that he could get away with anything that popped into his head. One can say that he was impartial in the distribution of his insults. As for any sensitivity to truth, that was completely absent at every level of his rambling  discourses. The most memorable takeaways from his face to face encounter with Harris was his confident assertion that immigrants were eating the pets of the people who lived in Springfield. All normal people would have dismissed that with a negligent wave of the hand but not his avid, or perhaps rabid supporters who not only believed him but took steps to make life uncomfortable for the people who had been outed as dog eaters.

    The election was also not about personalities as the two candidates are worlds apart in terms of their exhibited personalities.  Trump portrayed himself as self centred and totally lacking in social values. The denigration of his opponent’s worth as a human being was as tasteless as it was remorseless even though there is probably no one who can step out to give him any character reference at any point in his life.

    The election was not about experience in any sphere of service. Trump has served in the highest office in the land but the record of his office is better forgotten and it seems that most people have forgotten his accomplishments or lack of them in his four year stint in the White House. His mismanagement of the COVID pandemic is enough to disqualify him from holding any responsible office anywhere. Given that record alone, it is impossible to guess correctly why he has once again been called upon to manage the affairs of the USA for another four years.

    This election was not fought on the grounds of moral principles because Trump has not demonstrated his respect for principle, moral of otherwise at any point in his careers and this being the case, he has never been held to account in respect of any of the promises he has made at any time.

    This election circle has come and gone and Americans on their own volition have decided to elect Trump to run their affairs for four years. Unfortunately for the rest of us, America is a superpower, the only superpower and so we are bound to be affected by whatever Trump decides to do with the enormous power at his disposal. He was impeached twice the last time he was in office. Who says he would not break that record this time around?

  • Democracy on trial

    Democracy on trial

    By the time you are reading this, the close of this election cycle in the USA would be about forty-eight hours away. In other words, the die would have been cast and the battle won and lost. The advertised date of the election is the fifth of November but since the nineteenth of October voters in no less than forty-seven of the fifty states of the Union have been sending in their ballots in order to register their votes early. It is calculated that as many as fifty million voters would have voted before the advertised voting date to take care of those who would be unavoidably absent on election day or people who do not wish to be bothered with the hassle of queuing up to vote on election day.

    The voting and subsequent announcement of the results will bring to an end an election cycle which started as it always does, in January when registered Democrats and Republicans in New Hampshire met to decide who the state’s delegates were going to vote for at the party conventions later on in the year. Since that date, ambitious US politicians have been crisscrossing the country going from one state to another trying to win the fight to be their candidate in this year’s presidential elections.

    This year, the Republican primaries have turned out to be a triumphant procession for former President Trump who just steam rolled his way through the process. You can even say that like an unstoppable force of nature he simply blew away all opposition within Republican ranks. True, Nikki Hailey who once served as the United States ambassador under Trump showed some fight early on in the primaries, she was in the end swatted aside with contemptuous ease by the relentless Trump who gathered delegate votes with the ease of honey bees gathering nectar in the middle of the flowering season. No other Republican could gain any traction and the party lined up meekly behind Donald Trump as he blithely led them like lambs to the slaughter. It was a coronation of sort.

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    In the Democratic camp, the situation was similar as there was no viable opposition to the incumbent Biden – Harris ticket. For a long time, it seemed that the  next election was going to be a straight fight between President  Biden and former President Trump as was the case the last time around in 2020. And we all remember clearly what the result of that matchup was. Biden, after due process was declared the winner. In a clear departure from the norm however, Trump refused to acknowledge defeat and began to whip up his supporters into a frenzy of denial of an election result which in the face of overwhelming evidence was truly incontestable. He claimed the election was rigged. That, as must be pointed out is the default reaction of defeated presidential candidates in Nigeria. That is the case and perhaps will always be the case in Nigeria given the chaos that has come to characterise our elections but the Trump reaction went against the grain of two hundred and forty years of practice in the United States. Not one to be deterred by the truly intimidating weight of history, Trump truculently rejected the result and in the time honoured tradition of any respectable state governorship candidate in Nigeria,  began the fight ,’to retrieve his stolen mandate’. But he did not make his appeal to any judicial body as there does not seem to be any such body to which such an appeal could be directed. Given extant realities, perhaps the United States may wish to look across the pond to see how we manage these things here but I digress. Given the situation, Trump appealed directly to the American people or at least to those of them who were his loyal supporters and they responded magnificently.

    On January 6 2021, there was a scheduled meeting of Senate and Congress in the Capitol and it was at this meeting that the votes of the electoral college were to be counted and the election result ratified under the chairmanship of the incumbent Vice-president, Mike Pence. However the sitting president, Donald Trump was not having any of this. He wanted Pence to use phantom powers to declare him the duly elected president and when it became apparent that Pence knew the limits of his constitutional authority, Trump challenged, no, even more than that, goaded the mob under his control to take over the Capitol and using a non-existent formula overturn the election results in order to save their country from what he described as the clutches of deranged left wing conspirators. From then on, it was the loudly declared intension of the mob which numbered close to two thousand people to hang Mike Pence on the gallows which had been erected within the premises of the Capitol. A full blown insurrection was underway in the seat of American democracy. When the Japanese carried out pre-emptive bombings of Pearl harbour on December 7 1941, Delano Roosevelt, the then president of the USA declared that day as a day which would live on in infamy and as far as a day on which the very idea of American democracy had come under a pre-emptive and hugely damaging attack. That day has to go down in history as a day of everlasting infamy too. In the end, National guard contingents drawn from Virginia and surrounding states had to be called out to suppress the insurrection and prevent the hanging of Mike Pence. All things considered, Pence is lucky to be alive but the same thing cannot be said of the spirit of American democracy which has been bruised, battered and trampled upon. The biggest blow is that nearly four years later, the Donald, far from admitting any wrong doing has continued to insist that his followers were well within their rights to right the wrongs which he suffered at the hands of fraudulent election officials. But there is worse on the ground this time around because he stubbornly insists just as he did the last time out that the only result acceptable to him is victory at the polls. That the Capitol debacle which ended with him being impeached (for the second time) has not acted as a deterrent this time around. The stage is definitely set for something which is bound to change the trajectory of American history in a way that is yet to be determined.

    Already, this election cycle has stood out for several reasons and it seems that we are only at the beginning. In 2016, the highly experienced and accomplished Hilary Clinton became the first woman to be nominated by either the Republicans or the Democrats to contest the post of the POTUS head to head. This was in a country in which women were not even allowed to vote until 1920 after an amendment of the constitution finally and grudgingly conferred the right to vote on them. In spite of winning the popular vote by a whopping margin of three million votes, she lost the election at the electoral college. This result, although disappointing shows a massive shift in the mind-set of the electorate and encouraged Joe Biden to offer the position of Vice president to Kamala Harris in the next cycle. This has paved the way for the Democrats to field Harris as their candidate in this cycle.

    In 2020, Americans had the choice of voting for either of two nonagenarian white men, neither of them at the peak of their physical or mental power. This time around, the competition was initially the eighty-three year old Biden and the seventy-eight year old Trump, both of them creaking alarmingly in every joint, Biden looking definitely the worse for wear. Still the old man plodded wearily on, determined to save American democracy from the clutches of the increasingly rampant Trump who appeared determined to return to the Oval office with the sole purpose of confounding an army of opponents real and imagined, but mostly imagined.

    Just before the Democratic convention however, there was a seismic shift in the conditions governing the elections at a time when Trump was leading comfortably in all polls. After a disastrous showing at a presidential debate between the two candidates it became clear that Biden was at the end of his tether. The old man had finally run out of steam and amid the clamour to step down, he duly did so. He then did what amounted to throwing a spanner in the works for Trump by throwing his weight behind the candidacy of his Vice president up till then derisively called laughing Kamala by the misogynist Trump. In the words of the immortal bard, nothing in his life became him as in leaving it as he reported the execution of the thane of Cawdor to Macbeth, his would be assassin. This description suited Biden to the ground as nothing became him in office as his vacating his candidacy to Kamala Harris thus giving his party the opportunity to give Trump a real fight. No other candidate from the Democratic party would have had access to the  Biden-Harris campaign fund and would have had to start putting their own campaign fund together thereby giving Trump a tremendous, if not uncatchable advantage. As it was, Harris not only had funds at her immediate advantage but began to build a massive war chest from small donors all over the country. Just as important, the polls began to announce the arrival of a rather scary new kid on the block. Suddenly, the polls could no longer separate the two candidates and the election became too close to call.

    With only a few days of campaigning left nobody is brave enough to put money on either candidate. Although Trump cannot be associated with any tangible political platform, he remains hugely popular with roughly half of the electorate with the other half looking up to Harris. They cannot be split at this point in time.

    Everything considered, it must be said that Trump is a new and perhaps deadly phenomenon in American politics. His political platform is bereft of any identifiable planks. He has not bothered to make any promises to the electorate. The first time he was president, he promised to build a big, beautiful wall on the southern border for which Mexico was going to pay. However eight years later, no such wall has been constructed. He promised to bring back to America all the jobs which had been lost to China. He did no such thing. This time around he has promised to surround the American economy with a high tariff wall but nobody including Trump himself quite understands what benefits this will bring. He has broken every moral rule in the book and yet, no observable consequences have been triggered. Instead, the only thing getting higher is the fanaticism of his loyal supporters. His support from  the great unwashed white supremacists as well as white Christian evangelicals is rock solid even though he is  incapable of quoting a single Bible verse correctly, not even ‘Jesus wept’. And yet, the election is still too close to call. The only thing echoing in my head right now is that the only result which is going to be acceptable to Trump is a Trump victory. This makes me wonder what will happen in the event of Harris being declared the next POTUS following a victory at the polls.

    What comes to mind at this time is the story of Captain Ahab and Moby Dick. The conclusion of that tragic story of the struggle between man and beast may be a pointer to what is waiting for the spirit of American democracy after the fifth of November. Something has to give.

  • A petroleum economy

    A petroleum economy

    I have always insisted that there is nothing that can be described as the Nigerian economy if only because all economic activities in this county defy the basic laws of Economics. One could argue however that Economics not being exactly a hard science would leave holes in its laws wide enough to drive a fully loaded tanker through. Also, unlike all those other scientific areas of study; mathematics, physics, chemistry and so on, economics is a fairly new area of study even though it’s origins have been traced back more than three thousand years, to Aristotle and his students.

    The acknowledged father of the study of modern economics is Adam Smith who in conformity with the Greek origins of the subject was a philosopher.  Several other early economists including Karl Marx were also philosophers who saw the world through different prisms and have scattered their light in several different directions and broken it into different colours so that observers see various versions of the same thing depending on which ground they choose to stand on. This has led to the development of different schools of economics. The point with Nigeria however is that wherever you stand in respect of our national economy you are never going to be able to see anything with the desired level of clarity.

     Over the years, there have been several schools of economics, perhaps the most influential at least for some time, the Chicago School under Milton Friedman, ardent supporters of the power of the market who swear by the purity of the forces unleashed by the blind folded market to push national economies into the plush oasis of prosperity. Such was the recognition given to these Chicagoans that joining the Department of Economics in Chicago was for a long while, a guarantee of the Nobel prize in Economics at no distant future. The fact that the Nobel Prize situation has changed suggests that the work coming out of Chicago at that time was no more than a fickle item of contemporary fashion supported at the time by the terrible economic twins, Reagan and Thatcher, who extolled the dubious virtue of human greed as a means of driving national economies to universal prosperity.

    Whilst it is true that market forces are clean, they bear little relations to the universal human condition, except for the few who are in a position to exploit the market in all forms that catch their fancy. It is instructive that the two prime promoters of the free market forces as the driver of individual prosperity, Reagan and Thatcher, both succumbed to dementia later on, suggesting that even at the height of their powers their mental powers such as they were, were already much diminished by the condition which was going to prove fatal later on.

    The popularity of the theory of growth could only have  been severely damaged when the main laboratory within which the seeds of market forces were germinated was Chile. This was a country under the iron heel of Augusto Pinochet who committed so many crimes against humanity that he was only saved from prison by ill health and death. It is not surprising that one of the choice epithets hauled at this man of violence was beast, if only because his support for the righteousness of market forces was deadly, to say the least. The lesson to be learnt from this is that political interventions into the affairs of any society must have a recognisable human face if only to appease the sensitivities of the human beings who live at the sharp end of those policies. After all the economy should be at the service of human beings and certainly should not be the other way round.

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    Having started this article with the admission that I am not convinced that there is anything to be neatly packaged as the Nigerian economy, I must qualify that by saying that at least there is a market in operation in Nigeria in which there is a great deal of buying and selling, even if there is no discernible pattern to the madness that runs that market. This is because the productive arm of a market economy in Nigeria is only conspicuous by it’s absence. We do not have people making things on an industrial scale which means that most of the goods in our market are produced overseas, separated from our chaotic market by vast distances. A prime example is what goes on in our oil and gas sector, the behemoth that drives what is supposed to be the Nigerian economy.

    For some forty years we have imported every drop of fuel with which to stoke the fires which have warmed our so called economy from a mythical land called Faraway. This means that we have been spending a fortune just to bring ashore what we need to power our so called economy. Furthermore, we have been paying vast sums of money in what has been described as subsidy to a gaggle of faceless people who have inserted  themselves into the unreachable crevices of our fuel equation.  They are referred to as a cabal but since they operate outside any government or government approved institution, they do not qualify to be called a cabal. I must leave their correct title to your imagination.

    The bottom line here is that for forty years or so, a tiny band of tape worms have attached themselves with  suckers of steel to our collective alimentary canal and had appropriated to themselves all the nourishment which could have been used to put some muscle on our emerging national economy. It is not too much to say that the likelihood of building an economy has been reduced to zero by the activity of those who are the modern equivalent of those who for many lifetimes were responsible for selling millions of Africans to what Bob Marley in his infinite wisdom decided to call merchant ships. The merchandise in this case being men, women and children most of them at the very prime of life. Like their criminal grandfathers these modern slave traders are fanning their outsized egos with baubles such as fancy garments and ridiculous vehicles including those that fly in the skies above. They leave these baubles to their children who have developed an insatiable appetite for things of little tangible value, leaving the rest of us to fend for ourselves as best we could but mainly unsuccessfully.

    Whatever you say of the Nigerian economy perhaps the most visible item within it is the petroleum industry. Nigeria is regarded as one of the largest producers of crude oil which in the good old days was injecting more than 2.4 million barrels of the black stuff into the world market everyday that God sent. We have mismanaged that process to such an extent that we are now producing and delivering less than half that volume, much of what is produced is simply blatantly stolen and cooked in makeshift refineries which are more dangerous than useful. The situation in the Middle East suggests that the price of crude oil is going up soon. However, we would not be able to benefit from this because in real terms we have little oil left to sell. We must not forget, painful as it is that the last time we had a windfall of twelve billion dollars under similar circumstances, the whole thing just went up in smoke, never to be seen or even heard of  any more. Crucially, that humongous sum of money never did land in the Nigerian market for the benefit of our economy.

    For forty years and more, we have been using scarce and increasingly precious foreign exchange to buy fuel from Faraway. Ships have been bringing in refined petroleum products from overseas even though we had  no less than three refineries which could have been refining crude oil for our benefit but for reasons known to the managers of the oil sector, they are still much more interested in importing petrol than making the product available for our consumption.  Even now with availability of a refinery capable of supplying all our fuel needs, some powerful people are still fighting a tenacious rear guard action in defence of the uneconomic status quo.

    Things get really interesting when the fuel lands in Nigeria. It is first, weather permitting, offloaded from the mother ship into smaller sister ships from where they are pumped into tanks. And then nearly half of it simply disappears, smuggled to neighbouring countries where it fetches a temptingly high price. The rest is pumped into tankers, many of them in vintage condition and then sent several thousand kilometres around the country. Our roads are fairly infested with these fully loaded contraptions most of them accidents waiting to happen and too many of them happening. There are too many of those trucks experiencing very inconvenient  brake failures which are the cause of what Nigerians call ghastly accidents leading to fatalities in the hundreds. This is an eventuality which becomes reality far too many times. Far too many times too, these tanker accidents are followed by conflagrations which lead to the incineration of people and a great deal of property. Unfortunately, that is the Nigerian way. Each accident in which a ridiculous number of people die is a photo opportunity for overdressed government officials. They arrive at the scene of the gory event, make sympathetic but ineffectual comments and are then wafted away from the scene in a whirl of rotating helicopter blades. The dead are swiftly buried and life goes back to normal if the conditions now governing our lives can be described as normal. A panel of investigation is set up to find out the remote and immediate causes of the accident. Their report, painstakingly cobbled together is lost in the bureaucratic swamp which surrounds such incidents.

    Close to two hundred  Nigerians were recently roasted to death in Jigawa state in the aftermath of a tanker accident. That accident is representative of the current Nigerian situation as it could have been avoided altogether or the effects could have been minimised. The tanker carrying a full load of petrol took off from Kano 110 kilometres away en route Nguru along a typically unlit expressway. Where else would you expect to have an expressway covered over completely with a pall of darkness outside of Nigeria? It is not only that the road is dark but it is also lavishly decorated with potholes that need to be avoided if the journey is not to come to an abrupt end. The driver, why is he on that dark road a little before midnight with only the fear of armed robbers for company? That is a personal question to which even he may not have an answer but under the circumstances, I feel justified in asking it. To return to the journey, the tanker is moving along at a fair clip, moving faster than it should be going when for some reason it has to avoid something on the road. The lethal combination of darkness, speed, obstacle on the road jamming with driver fatigue or loss of focus causes the driver to lose control of a tanker fully loaded with petrol and inevitably the tanker ends up on its side in a ditch, it’s volatile cargo liberated from its fractured tank. Alive to the danger of his situation, the driver, he thinks only about how to make a quick escape and he flees the cabin at great speed which he maintains as soon as his feet touch the ground in an attempt to put a great deal of distance between himself and the ticking bomb lying in the ditch.

    The next chapter in the tragedy follows as news of the accident reaches town and the inhabitants eager to make profit from the accident arrive on the scene of the accident bringing with them all kinds of vessels with which to cart away as much of the accessible fuel as possible. In their thinking, anything that can somehow be converted to liquid cash was not to be allowed to go to waste. In spite of the sensible cordon thrown around the stricken tanker, people trample over each other as they struggle to salvage precious fuel from the tanker. Inevitably a spark is somehow generated and everyone and everything around are engulfed in hot flames and nearly two hundred souls are companionably liberated from tortured bodies and pass into a body of unpleasant history. This is an occurrence we have to live with at this time in our dystopian communities.

    Thanks to Miss Abayomi Morolake Lamikanra who suggested that I write this story.

  • The road

    The road

    I went to primary school at a time when history was taken very seriously in schools all over Nigeria. This is why I developed an early interest in the subject and that interest has grown over that long period that now separates me from the time of my introduction to the subject which has influenced my overall career tremendously. You may say that there cannot be a connection between history and Pharmaceutical microbiology but, believe me, there is. Besides, I make bold to say that without my knowledge of history, I could not have been able to sustain my forays into the world of opinion writing in the various newspapers that I have been associated with over these many years.

    Basically, history is concerned with telling the story of what people as individuals and as a collective have interacted with each other to create in the past, leading up to the present. In other words, in order to understand the present and plan for the future, you need to understand the past and the roles which certain individuals and events have played in shaping that past.

    One historical figure who captured my imagination in those early days, as long ago as it is, was Marco Polo. Unlike most of the outstanding men mentioned in history, Marco Polo did not fight crucial military battles and did not rule over any empire. The man was just a merchant but not an ordinary merchant. He was a merchant who moved around a great deal and saw the world around him in real time. He was not the first European who went all the way to China and back. His father and uncle were but he was the first to tell the story, or if you like, the history of his journeys to the East over a period of more than twenty years. He spent a great deal of his life on the road, trading, acting as a royal emissary and other things besides these. This is why he is given prominence in this piece about the road.

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    One of the buzz words we now live with is globalisation; a word that we imagine describes our contemporary experience. But when you think of it, it is a word that describes human experience over many centuries. The thread of globalisation started over fifty thousand years ago when mankind began to spread out of Africa to all other parts of the world. Like today, people from distant areas of the world have been interacting with each other over the physical distances that separated them. It is not difficult to imagine that at the centre of this experience is the road, in one form or the other over land, sea, in the air and now over the world wide web which has created a means of instantaneous communication, reaching out to all corners of the world at the touch of a button. This is many worlds away from the experiences recounted by Marco Polo who felt the earth beneath his feet throughout his many journeys which covered fifteen thousand miles (twenty-four thousand kilometres) over a period of more than twenty years. Today, a journey of fifteen thousand miles can be covered in a day or two by air and would be described or even dismissed as unremarkable. That is how far man has come since Marco Polo wore out his shoe leather on the Silk road and it’s many tributaries.

    Even now, with all the journeys undertaken by man on the wings of modern technology, the lure of the road is still able to capture our collective imagination, maybe because just about anything is still liable to occur to anyone out there on the road. Not long ago, a modern day Marco Polo, a fresh faced young lady completed a solo journey by road all the way from England through France, into Morocco, through the desert and down through several West African countries before her triumphant entry into Lagos, Nigeria. Many people, young and old were so fascinated by the sheer weight of her ambition that they followed her virtually every step of her journey. I was not one of such people but in spite of my lukewarm attitude, I still tuned in to the journey from time to time. It was at the end of her journey when I saw the flimsy contraption she called a car in which the epic journey was made that I was bowled over by the size of her ambition and the dazzling quality of her achievement, or what can be described as her audacity. Personally, I would not have dared to put that car on the road, if you can call what we have there a car, from Ilesa to Ibadan, let alone anywhere further down the road. What we now have is a story of her achievement. One can only hope that she would turn that story into history by following up her journey with a written account which would be read any number of years into the future in the way that Marco Polo did so many centuries ago.

    The fabled Silk road along which Marco Polo travelled was a thread that connected China, or Cathay as it was known at the time, to virtually all parts of the known world; South Europe, many parts of Asia, the Middle East and East Africa. The Silk road or route joined vast areas of the world together as it enhanced the movement of men, goods, philosophies, religions and sundry ideas over a wide area. True, the Silk road was not along a straight line and there were parts of it which were less than narrow tracts in the desert but it was a conduit through which merchandise, armies and so many other things passed to and fro. The recognisable parts of the road measured more than five thousand kilometres but it is quite possible that nobody actually succeeded in traversing it from one end to the other. That did not really matter as goods travelled in relays. One group of merchants took their goods as far as they could go before exchanging those goods with merchants coming from the opposite direction who then moved the goods to the next point of exchange until it got to a final destination where it was utilised for whatever purpose it was designed to be used. Conditions along the Silk road were so uncertain in some places that it took a great deal of courage and determination to undertake any journey along it. As with all roads, people of diverse intentions did their business along the road and there were probably as many merchants as rough and ready men whose major preoccupation was to dispossess people of their goods and when necessary, their lives. There were others who needed live captives to sell into slavery so that as can be seen from this, venturing out onto the road could not have been for the faint hearted.

    For about fifteen centuries, trade and ideas moved up and down the Silk road simply because it was fulfilling a recognisable and constructive need for a large number of people. From China, the main article of trade was silk, the sensuous textile which for quite a long time was manufactured only in China. The Chinese had learnt to cultivate silk worms which extruded fine threads which were nevertheless stronger than steel. The threads were then woven into the exquisite silk textiles of which the Egyptians, Greeks and then the Romans could not have enough. For quite a while, the Chinese had a monopoly on silk and could therefore charge very high prices for their silk products. Even when the Europeans cracked the secret of silk manufacture, the quality of Chinese silk was so far ahead that their profits from the trade were hardly dented. Apart from silk, other products of Chinese manufacture were going down the Silk road in all directions. These included fine porcelain wares, dyes, tea and later on gun powder and paper. Going into China from all over the place were horses, camels, dates, wine and even frankincense from the area we now call Somalia.

    The Silk road knitted the old world together mainly for the better but also for ill as along with all those exotic goods, deadly microorganisms were also exchanged as disease spread from place to place, carried unconsciously on the bodies by those intrepid travellers. These organisms were exchanged in the same way that wares were exchanged and then taken a thousand miles to innocent populations far away from the point of primary exchange in a deadly relay. It is said that what later on came to be called the Black death came to Europe along the Silk road. Millions of souls perished in the plague and the demography of Europe was fundamentally reset for ever.

    The Silk road was not purposely built by anyone or group of people. It started out as an idea which grew to include a large area containing many people who over time developed a common interest in long distance economic relationships which turned out to be profitable all round. There was no blueprint drawn up anywhere by any government fiat. It simply developed a life of its own and began to spread in the same way as a cancer because all it could do was spread to fulfil its destiny.

    The Silk road was a template for other roads which existed at the same time but nowhere were roads as effective as those built by Roman engineers all round the massive Roman empire. Roads were of such massive importance to all aspects of Roman rule that without them the Roman empire would have remained a figment of an overactive imagination. Unlike the Silk road, the roads built by the Romans was built through public enterprise and purpose. It was along those roads that Roman authority flowed. Through those roads Rome sent her legions to maintain the Pax Romana, peace maintained by the sharp points of countless spears. Some of those roads, complete with bridges and drainages are not just visible today but are still in use, testament to the quality of the roads that Rome built.

    As with all roads, those Roman roads were multipurpose. First, they were lines of communication along which people, goods, ideas, law and a unity of purpose poured in an endless stream to create a common identity. The notion of unity within the Roman empire was so strong that all those roads were oriented towards Rome, so that all roads in the empire were said to lead to Rome in such a way that all the vanquished enemies were brought in chains to the city and entered it through the Appian way in the wake of their conquerors who entered the city, in triumph and great acclamation of countless multitudes come out to witness the triumph of Roman arms.

    The roads that Rome built survived the fall of the empire through the sheer quality of their construction. Unfortunately, the conquerors of Rome had not come to inherit an empire but to plunder what had been built over a long period of time. They showed the importance of road maintenance. Their neglect of the roads was part of what led to those unproductive years now called the Dark ages, a period of regression during which virtually all traces of civilisation were wiped off the map and anarchy was never far below the surface, a lesson that has not been learnt in many places including Nigeria where roads are regarded as lengthy nuisances which are built reluctantly and abandoned to wrack and ruin within a short while to the far from tender mercies of pot holes and bandits of every description. Kidnappers set their traps along roads which are pitch dark at night and are an obstacle track by day. This is why it is never safe to set out at dawn and the prayer on the lips of travellers is the supplication to diverse gods and divinities that one should not set out at all on those days when the road is hungry for human harvest and thirsty for blood. Forlorn prayers not answered distressingly frequently.

  • Gyrations in the Nigerian education system (III)

    Gyrations in the Nigerian education system (III)

    The first educational institution in Nigeria, a primary school was founded in 1843 in Badagry by Methodist missionaries from Cape Coast in modern day Ghana. The exercise was under the supervision of Thomas Birch Freeman, a mixed race English man, whose father was a formerly enslaved African. Coming to do missionary work in Africa was therefore something of a homecoming for him. Birch Freeman had arrived in Ghana in 1835 to begin missionary activities in the coastal area of Ghana and on to Kumasi, capital of the Ashanti kingdom. He was entirely self taught as there are no records of him attending any educational institution but made his mark as a botanist having started out as a gardener to a wealthy English family. However, his passion for education knew no bounds as he spread the gospel of his religion hand in hand with education, at least at the primary level. The pioneering work of Birch Freeman is therefore worthy of historical mention and deserves to be recognised as the starting point for education in the area that has come to be called Nigeria.

    Going back to this starting point is to establish the importance of religious bodies in laying the foundation for education in Nigeria because following on the heels of Freeman’s principals; the Methodists, into the field of education came the Anglicans, Baptists, Presbyterians and the Catholics, to mention the most prominent of them. They are all to be recognised as having put in a strong showing in the field of education. They did this as a means of attracting converts to their respective missions so their primary motive may not be as altruistic as it now sounds. Taking up this responsibility was especially important because there was no recognisable government to take a lead in this enterprise. After all, the only other recognisable organisations of the time were the traders, hard-headed men who were only interested in making profit from all types of activities including the slave trade which was still raging as fiercely as the civil wars which were making a mockery of life in the interior, away from the coast from where thousands of war captives were being exported. It was not until after the infamous Berlin Conference that a modicum of government intervention in the education and other affairs concerning the colonised people within their jurisdiction became apparent. Even then, it was not until 1909 when Kings College, Lagos was founded by colonial authorities that government as it could be recognised at the time began to show any interest in the field of education for the people who were referred to as natives. Putting them in this lowly category seemed to have absolved them of the responsibility of training their minds.

    The essence of this narrative is that the management of education in Nigeria was based on missionary activities. Over the years, the missions built up an impressive internal bureaucracy to take care of their educational institutions made up of primary, secondary and teacher training colleges, some of which were also responsible for producing the clergy men who were to continue to spread the gospel which after all was their primary interest. To the missions, the management of their educational institutions fell into the category of a business into which immense physical and mental energy were poured in order that success was achieved.

    Another aspect of missionary interest in education was teaching technical skills, carpentry, brick laying, farming and so on to bolster the earning capacity of their converts and in doing so, attract even more converts. It was at that point in time a question of number as success was measured in the number of converts who were making measured contributions to the growth of the various missions.

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    It must be established that education is an expensive enterprise for both providers and participants. Even the pieces of chalk used in every school was an item of purchase, not to talk of the impressive tomes of books which marked their owners as scholars. Above all, money to pay the rather modest salaries of the army of teachers who made the institutions tick had to be found at a time when salaries were promptly paid at the end of every month. This is unlike now when state governors who manage to pay teachers their salaries more or less on time use it as a plank on which their second term bids are built.

    From the outset therefore, the missions not only charged fees but solicited funds from their mother churches in their respective home countries. This is why for example the Church Missionary Society was in charge of those institutions with affiliation to the Anglican Church and the Wesleyan mission did the same for the Methodists. This made it possible to solicit for the funds which were needed for their schools in Nigeria. With money from the various sources available to them, the mission schools were able to educate their charges to an excellent standard. Besides, the missions attracted the best of their country to serve as teachers in their schools and the level of education on offer in those schools was superior to what was available in all but the very best schools in Britain in those days. By the time I became a ward of the Anglican and Methodist missions in 1962, the heydays of those missions had waned at the coming of independence but the residual quality was still high enough to ensure that what I got was excellent education. All throughout, I have basked in the radiance of the education I received from the secondary school at the height of my impressionable years. It gave me tools with which I have tackled the challenges which I have had to confront with a fair degree of confidence in my ability to do so successfully.

    Mission schools in those days were not just about academic matters. Their activities spilled into the sports fields to which the schools were invariably attached. For example, it was Anglican policy that each church school had to build a sports field before it could be recognised as a fully functional educational institution. It was perhaps the same mind-set with all other missions. This attitude to sports led to a fierce rivalry between all local schools. There were also opportunities for this rivalry to be extended beyond local boundaries to include institutions which were separated by considerable distances. This situation existed at all levels from the primary schools to secondary schools and on to all the institutions at the top of the educational pyramid. Both mind and body were trained to prepare for the challenges of life waiting beyond the confines of the school. Looking back, it is clear to me that the lessons that I learnt about socialisation through an active participation in sports are as important as the lessons I learnt in the classroom. Some may dismiss my judgement in this wise as subjective but I stand by it and always would because of the glow which suffuses my being at the thought of all those memories I acquired on the sporting fields of my youth and beyond.

    Even at independence, direct government involvement in education was limited to a supervisory role. True, there were some government owned institutions but they were so few as their number to be negligible. Government involvement was most visible in the area of supervision and the maintenance of the quality of education available within the colony. Schools had to conform to certain standards and were registered by the government in order to qualify for the subvention which kept the schools solvent. It was only in the period leading to independence that individuals were permitted to set up schools at both primary and secondary school level. Long before then however, community secondary schools sprang up as a result of community expression of their ambition to foster the growth of education within individual towns and a means of competing with their neighbours triggering a form of rivalry as to which community was progressing faster along the path of modernity.

    The ownership profile of our schools have changed drastically over the last sixty years or so. The first thing that changed in this respect after independence was the ousting of the missions from the ownership of schools. This brought to an abrupt end, more than a hundred years of missionary involvement in our educational system. It was a means of throwing away a hundred years of experience gathered step by step through thick and thin. The free education policy which was introduced just before independence rendered the missions impotent in the way of raising money with which to manage their schools and had no choice but to vacate the field which has since been invaded by both government and private entrepreneurs whose only motive is profit within a field in which profit has no place. As long as the free education policy was restricted to the primary schools, the missions continued to run their schools very much as before but not for long. In 1979, state governments invaded the secondary school arena and wrested those schools from the missions in their determination to make education free to everyone. It is now abundantly clear that education has to be paid for by someone as one by one those schools which in years past were providers of high quality education have now collapsed, some of them spectacularly into wrack and ruin. This situation makes me wonder how many of my contemporaries were able to send their children to the same schools that they attended. Our parents in their time struggled to pay our school fees and the best of us enjoyed the benefit of scholarships which they won on merit. As long as money was available within the school system, a large number of people were able to derive a great deal of benefit from our school system. The irony of a bad situation is that the free education policy has only succeeded in taking quality out of the reach of most people. This is because all the passably good institutions in the land are in the hands of entrepreneurs, some of whom do not have the benefit of good education themselves. They cannot give their clients what they don’t have and they have reduced the education of the present generation of learners to an expensive lottery. School fees have now become the single most expensive item for most families irrespective of class and there is little doubt that it is a powerful driver of corruption in the land. People who have access to go public funds at whatever level of government are diverting those funds into the education of their children and those who are forced by circumstances to send their children to public schools at whatever level live with the knowledge that they are simply wasting their children’s time. Unfortunately, those children would leave school with little if anything to show for their time in the custody of teachers in some dilapidated institution.

  • Gyrations in the education sector (II)

    Gyrations in the education sector (II)

    When in February 2023.   The then 98 year old Jimmy Carter was admitted into hospice care, many of those who were closest to him were sure that he had only a few days to live. I chose not to wait until he was dead to pay tribute to him and so I celebrated his life in an article. Almost two years on, Jimmy Carter may not be well but he is very much alive. I am writing this on the day of his one hundredth birthday and I am sending him hearty greetings and very best wishes for the rest of his life. Jimmy Carter, like other mortals, has had his fair share of triumphs, failures and even tragedies but through them all, he has remained true to the idles of a genuine human being, a man for all seasons. Since he entered hospice care, he has lost his wife of seventy seven years but he has not allowed this to kill his zest for life. One of his grand sons has been quoted as saying that his grand father is hopeful of living just long enough to cast his vote for his fellow Democrat, Kamala Harris in the up coming presidential elections. Georgia where he has spent his long life is a swing state and his vote may just be important to the outcome of the election. May he live long enough and more to see another Democrat in the White House.

    The First World War battles consumed so many men that conventional wisdom at the end of it was that any ambitious European country needed to have a humungous body of men under arms in order to even think of waging war. After all, the British lost sixty thousand men on the first day of the battle of the Somme and any loss on that scale was not sustainable over a long period. The victorious Allied nations especially France were determined to cripple Germany’s capacity for waging war forever. The ingenuous plan through which they intended to achieve this stern objective was to limit the size of the German army to such a number as to make it nothing more than a ceremonious force. Part of the treaty forced down the constricted throat of the defeated enemy was that her armed forces was to consist of a hundred thousand men only. The German response to this stifling restriction was to build an army in which every member had received advanced officer training of the highest calibre around which a formidable army could be built in a matter of a couple of months. Later on, Germany was able to build up a truly frightening war machine around the spine provided by her highly trained officer corps and had become a serious threat to Europe. This example proves the crucial importance of training to any body of people dedicated to the performance of any task. The purpose of education in any society is to produce that small but critical mass of people to provide leadership to the masses. In Nigeria however, it is apparent that we have dedicated our efforts to train a large body of rabble to provide the leadership needed in a modern, functional society. That choice is making it impossible for the country to build that critical mass needed for the take off which we so badly need to build a coherent society.

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    In the dim past, at a time when the Nigerian society had a well defined shape, emphasis was placed on giving education to those who have proved their worth, the benefit of outstandingly good education. Even then, the number of people who wanted an education, at least in the southern parts of the country was in considerable excess of available places in the few institutions available. The competition to secure a place in a secondary school for example was a figurative fight to the death as this was recognised as the first crucial step on the ladder to future success. In those days, pupils were attracted to certain primary schools which had acquired a solid reputation for placing their charges in a reputable secondary school. And in any case before the establishment of the Nigerian Colleges in Zaria, Ibadan and Enugu, there were no tertiary institutions in the country. Today, there are probably more institutions rejoicing in the name of university, polytechnic or College of Education than there were primary schools In the period immediately after the Second World War throughout the length and breadth of the country. This begs the question as to the quality of education available in the myriad schools and colleges which are in operation today.

    Those of my contemporaries who were in the primary school at the time of Nigerian independence would remember the drill we were put through throughout the period of our stay in the primary school. First, there were those weekly tests, the results of which were carefully written up into our report cards at the end of the week. We delivered up those cards to our parents who went through those reports and were brought up to date with our progress or the lack of it. Then, there were examinations at the end of every term. The end of year examination which arrived with dry harmattan winds were particularly intimidating as they were promotion exams. Those who failed were not promoted to the next class which also meant a miserable Christmas period bereft of any personal celebrations in the midst of general celebrations. The suffering attached to failure was painfully sharp and immediate but more serious on the long term as the avenue to future academic accomplishment was on the verge of terminal blockage. Passing through the primary school was a veritable obstacle course towards the secondary school or, in the Western Region, something called the Modern School.

    The biggest obstacle to a secondary was the entrance examination. In the last year of primary school, ambitious students began to attend lessons in preparation for entrance examinations to various secondary schools. Some teachers were famous for placing a considerable number of their clients into some of the top secondary schools and their afterschool institutions were oversubscribed. I was fortunate in having teacher parents who made sure that my nose was firmly pressed to the grinding stone throughout the period of my preparation for the entrance examination season because merit was the only consideration for success in the secondary school stakes. All my own study was in-house, a situation which I found to be almost intolerably irksome. I was woken up at the crack of dawn and confronted with unappetising exercises at a time when I thought I should still be asleep and when I came home from school, those exercises were waiting to greet me. There was no window of freedom from the grind and when I showed any signs of flagging, my mother reminded me of the dire consequences of failure to spur me on.

    I suppose that I now have the privilege of writing this piece because, in the end, I was able to navigate the formidable obstacle course which marked my admission to Igbobi College.

    Founded thirty years before I darkened her formidable doors in 1962, the school had acquired an intimidating reputation for elite level education for pupils who had shown that they had the innate ability to cope with the tough demands of the Igbobi College brand. The entrance examination demands were fiendish. The coveted entrance examination form to the school, unlike other schools, was not on open sale but no more than half a dozen forms but frequently fewer were sent to targeted reputable primary schools, to be completed for by the best pupils in the school. To lay hands on the form which qualified one to attend the entrance examination was therefore a little more than a minor triumph. In the language of today, it was a big deal.

    All the boys who turned up at various examination centres on examination day were local champions, those boys whose position in their school examinations were seldom south of third. At that point, they were hoping to score enough points to be invited to participate in the interview process. For most other schools, their interview was over in one day but not Igbobi College. Anxious candidates, about two hundred of them reported at the school on a Friday evening and did not regain their freedom until the following Tuesday morning. During that unforgettable weekend, they were subjected to rigorous tests in English and Arithmetic and a one on one interaction with the principal. High performance in these tests was not enough as the candidates had to show their prowess in athletics and football. Even today, I have not shaken off my belief that my admission to the school owed more to my ability to run very far and my dexterity with a football at my feet than to my rather limited ability to solve arithmetic problems. Whichever way I secured that precious admission, I still regard it as the greatest achievement of my career as it opened the door to a world ruled by merit. It has ingrained in me absolute contempt for mediocrity which is now a byword for the Nigerian education system.

    Unfortunately, there was a time when even Igbobi College could not escape being drawn into the maelstrom of the fraudulent Nigerian education system. Igbobi College, by an accident of geography is situated within that axis of Somolu, a suburb of Lagos famous for its slum character disposition and home to an army of small scale printers. There was a time when the Lagos State government decided in its lack of wisdom to dismantle iconic schools like Igbobi College in an attempt to give some form of education to everyone who so much as showed just a flicker of interest in acquiring a modicum of basic learning. That obstacle course which existed to sift the wheat from the chaff in those who chose the school was removed and the old school opened her gates to everyone who cared to enter them forcing the school to put on the mantle of her Somolu environment. This sad fate has been extended to many of those schools which had built up a solid reputation over several decades. The foundation of Igbobi College was however dug so deep that like the famous phoenix she has risen from the flames which had all but consumed her in that dark period of her exile from excellence. I wonder if that miracle could be extended beyond my old school but reality has dampened my expectations in this direction.