The Nation Newspaper

Category: Adebayo Lamikanra

They are eating the dogs!

I am sure that some people have tuned in today for a continuation of our discourse on education and I apologise sincerely for pivoting to another subject entirely. I can only hope that this week’s offering will be found acceptable, if only for its entertainment and interest value.

Not being an American, I really should not be bothered about the identity of who emerged from the four yearly circus that culminates in the selection, election, anointing or whatever other words that can justifiably be used to describe that process by which a new American president is inaugurated at the end of every four year cycle. Apart from anything else however, the so called presidential election offers a riveting spectacle if only from the point of view of the frenzy which attends it. Apart from this, every presidential election occupies a whole year during which a slew of candidates criss-cross the country mostly insulting each other in their attempts to attract attention to themselves and win, or perhaps squeeze out, is a more appropriate phrase, as much attention as they can from the electorate who are likely to have become fatigued by all the near madness to which they have been subjected over the election season.

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The first presidential elections in the USA took place in 1788 and was won by George Washington, the much acclaimed father of the nation. Although it was supposed to be a contest, the process was adroitly manipulated to ensure that the winner could only be George Washington who was more or less handed the post on a platter. That process was a far cry from what has followed over the last two hundred and thirty years. The population of the USA when Washington was elected as president was three million; six hundred thousand of them being slaves who had no business with the election as they were not even recognised as human beings by the extant constitution. In the same vein, women were not allowed to participate as they were not regarded as being responsible human beings who could be trusted to make any contribution to the running of society and this being so, were not and indeed, could not be invited to participate in the electoral process. So far the Americans of the day were closely following the process laid down more than two thousand years before by the citizens of Athens who were the originators of the practice of democracy. In ancient Athens all freeborn males were required by law yes, by law, to participate in the government of the city. In a departure from this practice in America, only men who had property worth a prescribed value could cast their vote and that vote was only good enough to vote for an elector who then voted directly in the election of the president. So much for one man, one vote.

The slaves who were almost inevitably black were not allowed to vote until the Fifteenth Amendment of the Constitution was passed in 1870 in the wake of the Thirteenth and Fourteen Amendments which freed them from slavery and granted them citizenship of the Republic respectively. As for the women, they did not acquire the right to vote until 1920 and not before a long and bitter fight. This shows the power of legislation in that the mores of governance of the country were continuously being recast, redrafted and reinvented to suit changing conditions within the polity. I am sure that there is a great deal to be learnt from this example. Constitutions are not to be set in stone but can, and indeed must be amended appropriately with the passage of time. Those demanding that the Nigerian constitution be scrapped and replaced with another one amenable to their preference are hereby invited to take note.

The American experience further shows that the executive arm of government could also be a powerful tool in nation building. American elections over the years have produced results which have led to changes out of all proportion to the power of any singular event. Such was the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. Such were the passions aroused by this election that by the time of his inauguration a couple of months later, eleven states, all of them situated south of the Mason-Dixon line had succeeded from the Union to form the Confederate States of America. With Lincoln determined to maintain the status of the Union, war was inevitable and it duly broke out three months later and raged on furiously for the next four years. At the heart of this vexed issue was the subject of slavery.

For two hundred years, the prosperity of the infant states of America depended on the unjust institution of slavery, the appropriation of labour provided by men and women who were excluded from society and served only one purpose, that is to create wealth for other men. But you cannot create an environment within which justice reigns under such circumstances and in one word, you cannot build a just and equitable society on injustice which is why the question of race continues to dominate the public space in the United States right down to this moment and perhaps it is no coincidence that the ongoing election is a straight fight between a black woman and a privileged white man bravely flying the flag of white supremacy. The irony of the situation is simply outrageously delectable.

The election of 1860 which brought Lincoln to power was pivotal as it led to the civil war which cleared the American augean stables of the filth of slavery. It needs be emphasised however that although Lincoln was personally opposed to slavery, his primary interest was to preserve the integrity of the union. If he could achieve this objective without freeing a single slave, he was quite prepared to do so. But as the war progressed, he came to realise that slavery was the cancer that was going to destroy the union from the inside if it was not excised. He may only have been pragmatic by freeing slaves but since then until now, this act has given him the tittle of Emancipator and the greatest president ever, even greater than the first president whose position as father of the nation is unassailable. To crown it all, Lincoln, who had just begun his second term as president did not survive to enjoy the peace he had worked so hard to forge and through his assassination he achieved the awe inspiring status of a martyr.

The war which Lincoln fought was followed by the period of Reconstruction which gave some hope to the newly freed slaves who, in spite of serious disadvantages were able to take some steps even as they learnt to walk in the new environment which their emancipation had created. They had to start from scratch, the rosy promise of a mule and forty acres of land to give a start having been largely set aside, they nevertheless began to make their presence felt. During Reconstruction, the newly freed slaves began to participate in the politics of their society and began to make their way in Local, State and National politics so much so that some of them were sent to Washington as members of Congress and some states had a black governor. But another round of presidential elections put paid to all that.

After the civil war, the South was occupied by Federal troops which were there primarily to protect the civil rights of the newly freed former slaves and whatever progress was made was achieved under the protection of their guns. Then came the election of 1876 which was not only characterised by extreme violence but gave an inconclusive result and this led to what has come down in history as the Rutherford Compromise. Victory in the election was conceded to the Northern Republican candidate, Rutherford Hayes on condition that the era of Reconstruction was brought to an end and Federal troops withdrawn from former Confederate territory. This done, slavery was more or less reinstituted in the South even though there were no slaves to answer to that name. For the next one hundred years a brutal regime of segregation was instituted, spoiling the lives of generations of black people permanently and profoundly.

I am a child of the sixties, perhaps the most iconic decade in the history of mankind. At the beginning of that decade, most of Africa was colonised and at the end most of the continent had attained the giddy heights of independence. Over in the States, black people were strictly segregated having to take the prone position of third class citizenship, with the combined weight of their white compatriots pressing them into the mud. By the end of that decade however, they had begun to drag the sweet air of freedom into lungs which had been compressed for more than three hundred years. Since then, we have had eight years of a black presidency and now, there is the possibility of a black and Asian woman occupying the White House after the current round of presidential elections. The white supremacists are however fighting a bitter rear-guard action to prevent this. The United States has been built on a foundation of lies and injustice but the time for readjustment has arrived and that country will never be the same again whatever is the result of the coming elections. Trump, the flag bearer of the white establishment has seen the hand writing on the wall but he is not giving up. He cannot give up. But he can only revert to type by using lies and bluster to stop the march of history. He is making a desperate attempt to rally his troops by feeding them with lies and propaganda such as claiming that the situation in the USA is so bad that black migrants had taken to eating the dogs of their white neighbours in Springfield, Ohio. A study has shown that a majority of his supporters believe this nonsense. There are forty days or so to election date. They are days to look forward to.

September 29, 2024
Gyrations in the education sector (I)

More than ten years ago, at the height of his not inconsiderate power as governor of Osun State, Mr? Engr? Ogbeni Aregbesola decided to renovate, rebuild or even build from scratch, much needed infrastructure in public educational institutions all over the state. Such a massive building project had never been seen in the state since her Inception and this laudable project attracted a great deal of favourable attention, so much so that the governor easily won a second term in office from an impressed electorate. On a personal note, the governor won my support especially when this effort was put side by side with what had passed for service before Aregbesola took up the reins of office. However this article is not about the politics of Osun State at that point in time. It is only a convenient starting point for public sector education, not just in Osun State but in Nigeria.

The sad point about those schools which were built with so much care and effort, not to talk of expenditure is that many of them are lying unused so many years after they were built. Although, I seldom stray from the well beaten path, I know of three different primary schools, one of them only a stone throw from where I live which have stood empty since they were rebuilt. This, coupled with the observation that no new public primary school has been built anywhere to my knowledge in the last forty years or so, convinces me of the collapse, the irredeemable collapse of the public primary school system in Osun State. The situation is worse, much worse in other parts of the country where no governor has bothered to do anything about the collapsed structures within which our children are required to receive some form of education at the primary school level. This brings us back to JAMB and the ongoing admissions exercise to the nation’s tertiary institutions.

There was a time, albeit quite a long time ago when the NCE certificate was a badge of honour and accomplishment. The qualification carried a great deal of weight as it opened many doors and many of those who later in their careers became professors of education started out with this qualification. Before the NCE became the prerequisite qualification, the required qualification for primary school teachers was the Grade II teachers certificate. And this could be obtained from one of the many teacher training colleges which dotted the landscape. Many successful professionals started their careers from this humble beginning and this alone speaks to the excellence of these institutions. The system did appear to be broken but the powers that be decided to fix it all the same but ended up not fixing it but scrapping it. One by one these fine colleges were closed down and governments began to build what they called Advanced Colleges of Education dedicated to minting NCE certificates. The rest as the saying goes is history.

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Anyone desirous of becoming a primary school teacher these days needs the much coveted NCE certificate after a course of study at one college of Education or the other but before then, there is the matter of securing admission to a College of Education by ‘passing’ the entrance examination conducted by JAMB. It is the business of JAMB to conduct this examination but admission is left to the Colleges to admit their students and this year the required pass mark is 25%. I am not good with figures but by my reckoning this figure is not much lower than what can be obtained by a candidate who knows nothing about his subject but just goes through the paper choosing any one of the answers which tickled his fancy. In other words, a totally ignorant student can score 25% of the marks on offer by guessing the correct answer to every question unless you lost marks for every wrong answer. Whatever the marking scheme, anyone who cannot score more than 25% is simply not blessed with the mental acuity to cope with the demands of any course at the tertiary level. This means that we are stocking our Colleges of Education with abject failures who have very little chance of understanding the basic principles of whatever is their chosen course of study.

That those who teach our children at the primary level of our education system have little grasp of the subject matter which they intend to pass on to their pupils is an unmitigated disaster. It is one from which there is little or no hope of escape. Some of these hapless NCE graduates are even saddled with teaching secondary school students some of who know more about the subject matter they are dealing with than their teachers in a case of the blind charting a course through a mine field for the partially blind. The word ridiculous does not quite cover this situation.

Teachers at whatever level of our education system they are operating, determine the quality of education available at every level of that system. No matter how gifted you are as a scholar, you must start your education in the primary school and your performance at that level is the foundation on which your education is built. Your personal level of achievement is critically dependent on who put you through your ABCs and I daresay, people who can only manage a mark of 25% are simply not qualified to pass on any useful quantum of education to their charges who are embarking on their own education Odyssey.

Of the nearly two million souls who turned up to take the JAMB examination earlier this year, as many as 8,400 of them scored more than 300 marks but you can bet that none of them chose Education as their preferred course of study. By now, JAMB statisticians should have crunched all the figures generated by this examination but even in the absence of that, I bet that each of those 8,000 and more students who rose to the top in that examination chose one of Law, Engineering and Medicine as their first choice of study. These are the so called lucrative courses guaranteed to lead to financial comfort if not abundance later on. I am intrigued to know how many of nearly two million JAMB candidates this year chose Education as their preferred course of study. Maybe it is too ambitious to expect to find prospective students of Education among those high scoring students. Well then, how many of them scored above 200? I am not a betting man but if I were, I would bet that no more than a few thousand of them would be in this category. In other words, we are not recruiting our better brains to oversee our education sector and have abandoned our primary schools to the far from tender mercies of those who choose to teach in our primary schools simply because they are not good enough to be competitive in other fields. Finland is now the world acclaimed leader in the field of education and the news coming out of that country is that the best brains are attracted to work in the field of education, probably because they are also the best paid whilst in Nigeria, the converse is true. Our best brains are enticed into prostituting their talents working at high paying jobs which at best can only be described as cosmetic employment, all glitter and little substance.

As for teachers in our public schools especially at the primary school level, what they earn can be described as slave wages and what more, those wages are seldom, if ever paid on time. His worshipful excellency of our story paid a healthy sum of money to contractors putting up all those beautiful school buildings. What he could not afford to do was pay the teachers on time. The teacher was entitled to be paid only a little but what they were paid collectively was a very tidy of money, too heavy for the governor to come up with on a regular monthly basis. How unpaid workers are supposed to live on the nothingness of air is well beyond my capacity to comprehend.

Judging from where I live, there is little or no problem with out of school children. There are not many children roaming around town during school hours suggesting that schools are being healthily patronised. It is just that the public institutions are being shunned. The slack generated by this is being taken up by private schools which appear to be sprouting out of the ground as if by magic. Virtually every empty house around where I live has been converted into a primary school of questionable quality. All the pupils do is learn by rote as they chant their lessons in the wake of their teacher. The language of instruction is supposed to be English but so mangled as to be barely recognisable as such. Yoruba is anathema in those schools so that the children are being brought up without fluency in any language. My takeaway from this is two fold. Parents are willing to pay for what they consider to be good education and our government are stuck with the expedience of providing free education. This equation can never be balanced which is why Aregbesola’s expensive primary school buildings are lying unused whilst children are pretending to learn in the hostile environment of hastily converted school premises.

It is pertinent to wonder at what the competence of the average primary school graduate is these days. Many years ago, long before my time, the primary school certificate qualified the holder to get a responsible job with government or some commercial enterprise. Those days are long gone and now the only thing that that qualification is good for is entry to the secondary school so as to be rendered even more incompetent to contribute in any significant way to societal development. It is as if you are required to climb a high mountain only because it exists and all you find at the top of the mountain is another mountain taller than the one you have just climbed. Your future is all about climbing mountains simply because they are there. There is no better description for the current state of our education system.

To be continued.

September 22, 2024
Gyrations in the education sector
I have an uncle, a grizzled veteran of countless political battles, albeit at the local level here in Ilésà. You are not likely therefore to have heard of him so you only have my word that the man is a verified legend on several fronts. Well into his eighties, he is still as feisty as ever and a good man to have beside you in a fight. The most significant thing about him is an abiding hope in a future which for quite a lot of people, is going dimmer almost by the minute. My uncle is the first to admit his lack of education having managed not to have spent a minute in any school as a scholar. In spite of this or perhaps because of it, his passion for education is boundless and to prove this assertion, he is currently the chairman of one primary and two secondary schools in Ilésà even though he has no children of his own in any of those schools. But there is a great deal more to him than politics and education. He is a raconteur par excellence and his store of Yoruba proverbs is, at least in my naturally jaundiced opinion, unmatchable.

Many times, more times than I care to count, my uncle has, in my presence sent a heart felt invocation to God to protect him from the wrath of government. This is because in his opinion, only God himself is in a position to exercise power for any purpose than government, any government. This is why he is desirous of being in the good books of government and why he has spent nearly seventy years working assiduously in his own little way towards the installation of God fearing governments all over the country. He freely admits to a raft of failures in this respect but according to him, if you fall off a horse, the only choice you have is to remount the beast again and quickly too. So, he continues pushing his own political agenda in the hope that something good will happen in his lifetime.

My uncle s passions are politics and education and have been inextricably linked in his mind since the days of the Action Group free education programme in the Western Region. He is a progressive personified and a rebuke to real life politicians who do not have a great deal, if anything, on a chameleon in the matter of changing their camouflage with every change in the direction of strength of the wind. It was therefore easy for me to use him as an anchor for this article on education, especially the lack of structure for meaningful education at all levels in Nigeria.

My first submission here is that various governments over the last fifty years and more have wilfully abdicated their responsibilities in this critical sector of human endeavour. I doubt that there are many people better qualified to discuss this subject than I am. In the first instance, both my parents were teachers, my father being the headmaster of the largest primary school in Owo when I was born and my mother being the headmistress of the largest primary school in Lagos at the height of her teaching career. As for me, I spent forty-seven committed years as a university lecturer, thirty-one of them as professor and gathered a whole lot of experience in the process. In other words, not only was I born with the silver spoon of education in my lips, I turned it to platinum over the long period of my involvement in teaching other people’s children for little reward save the satisfaction I got from having the opportunity of expressing myself maximally over a very long period of time.

The situation we have pushed ourselves into in terms of education in this country is dire but the people in charge of it at every level are not aware of the rot in the system which they claim to manage. I was moved to write this article as something of a response to the Honourable Minister of Education who has announced ex cathedral that as from now on no student who is yet to attain the grand age of eighteen would be allowed to darken the doors of any tertiary institution in the guise of a student. This is after those candidates have gone through the rigours of sitting for JAMB and the O level examinations and passing them well enough to secure admission on merit to one tertiary institution or the other. According to my uncle, government is all powerful and being so, cannot be challenged. Even so, government is not blessed with a sense of humour and should we out of unearned reverence for government refuse to challenge at least some of the excesses of that amorphous body will only be the sufferer when government policies attack where we live.

We have been told that there is an extent law which prevents persons under the age of eighteen from registering for courses in Nigerian universities and other tertiary institution I presume. That is quite well said but, it only begs the question as to why over the years that law has been de-fanged and made impotent but then we do not know the size of the breach because no figures were provided to allow us to comprehend the extent of the problem we are facing or even if indeed if we have a real problem on our hands. It is not as if relevant figures can not be provided to give us an idea of the character of the beast we are confronting. It is just that the almighty government represented on this occasion by the minister of education cannot be bothered to offer any explanation for engineering a policy which has a lot of people on the hop. After all, we are all so much in awe of government that we dare not look her in the face for fear of attracting her wrath.

It is not that figures for supporting the minister in this instance are not available. They are and in profusion too. But in this country, we have such disdain for figures that we, in the first instance can not be bothered to gather them with any degree of seriousness and when we make any attempt to gather any set of figures, the whole exercise descends into farce very quickly which is why we have never been able to provide any honest figure for the number of mouths which we need to feed. Depending on where you look, current population figures for Nigeria varies from 200 to 230 million and any self respecting statistician will throw up their hands in horror as to how to deal with the discrepancy revealed by the side variation we have here. Talking about human statisticians, do we have enough of them to cope with the large volume of data we need to generate and analyse? I know that there has been a department dedicated to human statistics for more than fifty years at OAU but in a country with phobia for figures many of those admitted to that department are those who have been shunted into it from other departments offering more glamorous courses.

In the matter under consideration, nobody can claim that relevant figures are not available. JAMB has been conducting entrance examinations, at least into all universities since 1978 and must, over that period have generated an awful volume of crushable figures from which a great deal of useful information can be extracted. But, we don’t have to go back that far to get information either to support or to castigate the minister over his abrupt realisation that there is a problem with underage students in our universities. It should be easy to find out how many students under sixteen took the last entrance examinations and how many of them passed well enough to be admitted.

What we know from JAMB sources is that 1,842,464 candidates who sat for the examination, only 24% scored 200 marks and above and should be adjudged to have passed the examination

Now, over to the universities which by law were to admit the students. Someone had kindly sent me a video clip of the meeting at which the pass mark for universities were set this year. As a professor, albeit retired myself, I was shocked and embarrassed when people who sported the tittle of professor got up, identified themselves as professors and proposed that those who scored 140 (35%) be admitted to Nigerian universities. By any standard, at least by the standard that I operated with in my days at the university, a score of 35% was not even a suitable grade. Indeed what I was used to as a pharmacy lecturer was a pass mark of 50%. Now, to score such as low a mark as 35%, people have suddenly been invested with a badge of honour, to be celebrated with fan fare and loud drums. Our university system has now been degraded to such an extent that morons certified by JAMB are now qualified for admission into Nigerian universities!

As far as I know, the honourable minister has not been moved to make a comment in respect of the abysmally low expectations that have been placed on potential undergraduates in Nigerian universities under his watch. Instead, he is excited by the desire to close the doors of his devalued paradise to those who have not yet attained the magical age of eighteen even though they passed the examination with a mark above the reasonable pass mark of 200 and well above. Indeed has there been any attempt to find out how many of those in this category are aged eighteen and below? The law of natural justice dictates that a sixteen year old who scored 240 marks is so much more qualified than a twenty six year old who could only muster 140 marks. That to me is simple common sense and I doubt that this situation has been looked out through this prism. But it is not too late to bring out this prism before an injustice has been perpetrated on an entire generation of potential students.

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Now, there many who have come out in support of the honourable minister who himself has pointed out that British, American and other developed countries do not allow children under eighteen to be admitted into their universities. That is all well and good. But in those countries everyone is made aware virtually from birth that they are only qualified to enter university when they turn eighteen just as they know that they cannot obtain a driving licence, vote in elections or be served alcohol in a public establishment until they are qualified by age. And that age is not left to the whims and caprices of any individual. In those countries mentioned by the minister, births and deaths are carefully recorded and proof of any claim must be provided at designated places in order to get any service. I knew when my first child was born that he would need to provide a birth certificate at certain stages of his career. As soon as he was born I went up to the nurse in the ward to ask about how to get the young man registered. The nurse gave me a bemused look before telling me that her duty was to assist in his birth and nothing more. For registration I had to go to the Local Government Area headquarters. I then asked where within the hospital I could be given as evidence to be presented to the local government authorities as confirmation that a child had been born on a particular date. The nurse gave me a second look more withering than the first before telling me that the hospital had no business whatsoever in the process of birth registration. With these rebukes ringing in my ears, I went to the LGA office not really believing that all that I needed was a word of mouth that a child had been born on a particular day. My fears were allayed when I informed the lady on seat that I wanted to register a birth. Her response was immediate.

‘How many children do you want to register? I shook my head ruefully as I handed her the sum of 50 kobo to complete the transaction. I could have registered any number of children that I wanted to register. That is how lax our registration regulations are. And you can also claim any date of birth by simply getting anyone prepared to perjure themselves by claiming that someone have been born on any particular date. I wonder how many such affidavits have been signed in the last few days.

The honourable minister has since rescinded his order concerning under aged undergraduates but this by no means invalidates the thrust of this article which points out other flaws in our educational system.
- To be continued.
September 15, 2024
A new dawn

I know that the above caption is not just unoriginal but inappropriate too. But out of a sense loyalty I have decided to use it as the title for this piece which has been fermenting in the vast, not to say dark recesses of my mind for more than twenty-four feverish hours. Even then, when I finally decided to tackle the subject, I still found some cob webs standing in the way of writing what could be considered the perfect article or at least, something close to it.

In the depths of my retirement, I find the time to respond to WhatsApp messages even if I quickly discard most of them especially the video clips, many of which I find irritating, even annoying. The wrath is especially reserved for those clips which are accompanied by some maniacal bouts of laughter in the background. Most times such clips are not even remotely funny. But I have gone in front of my story which is not about video clips at all and the only thing remotely connected to video clips is that the story which captured my imagination as no video clip has done for a long time was that the item of news which elicited my inappropriate caption was delivered through a video clip.

As everyone and their dog by now must know, the Dangote refinery will, at last soon, or maybe by the time you read this, be pumping high grade petroleum into motor vehicles all over the country. And for good measure to supply this commodity to petrol stations all over sub Saharan countries. I have no idea and I wonder if many people have any inkling of how much a litre of petrol will be sold for throughout the length and breadth of Nigeria. That, at this time is a secondary consideration if only because I recently had to cough up close to one thousand Naira for the dubious privilege of putting a litre of the volatile stuff in my car, which for some months now has strictly been restricted to local runs. Its powerful engine which requires a healthy quantity of petrol just to warm it lies comatose most of the time and if it had a memory would remember those long departed days of indulgence when a trip to Lagos nearly two hundred kilometres away was the work of a few rapid hours. What I know is that large volumes of petrol are consumed in Nigeria everyday and this being the case, a few Naira profit on each litre of petrol purchased will soon mount up to billions of Naira in profit. I had it on reliable authority that one of the most buoyant petroleum giants in Nigeria was satisfied with making just one penny on each gallon of petrol that she sold everyday. Today, the quantity of petrol sold everyday is perhaps a thousand times more than what was sold in those long gone days. It stands to reason therefore that we should not have to break the bank to buy fuel. My optimism on this point has however been hugely dented by the news that the NNPCL, the same organisation that has not produced any fuel for simply ages has done the magic of inserting itself into the supply chain for Dangote produced petrol. I fear that this debt ridden contraption will try to squeeze every ounce of advantage from her position and so I am sure that pump prices are not coming down any time soon. But, that is another story.

The politics of petrol sales in Nigeria over the last two decades or so has made it impossible for anyone to truthfully say how much fuel is consumed here on a daily basis. This is because the amount of money paid as subsidy to those hitherto amorphous if not anonymous importers of fuel into the country depends on the volume of fuel purportedly imported by them. This figure is justly shrouded in mystery because it is suspected that petrol meant for consumption here in Nigeria is simply transferred to other neighbouring states from where the wily importers now turned exporters, collect another round of subsidy payments.

In the new regime, the painful but lucrative business of preventing petrol produced in Lekki from straying across our notoriously porous borders is no longer within the purview of our hard working but lamentably underpaid Customs officers. Alhaji Aliko Dangote has staked a fortune on producing liquid energy with which to run our collective economy. Rich, no, fabulously wealthy as he is, his many financial commitments makes it incumbent on him to make a going concern of his refinery in as short a time possible so as to make his debt repayments as easy as he possibly can. This venture is not a charitable venture. That is restricted to the distribution of bags of rice and some deodourised palm oil as palliative to the very poor. For that he will give all kinds of satisfaction to a whole lot of people from different quarters. The refinery is however another matter entirely. It is a monstrously expensive business venture which must be more than capable of paying rich dividends from the shark infested waters of Nigerian industry. Every litre of fuel produced but unaccounted for is an irreparable loss to Dangote and he must ensure that apart from some level of evaporation every litre of fuel produced is accounted for and added to the bottom line. I have a feeling that all the worm holes through which hitherto, petroleum products escaped local utilisation will soon be blocked through the deployment of the latest available technology. Dangote has not only brought us up to the age of the state of the art energy production but has brought us kicking and screaming into the age of the latest monitoring technologies. Other industrialists have this example in front of them and they will no doubt rise up to the challenge.

Another example in front of us concerns quality control. To be fair to our industrial producers, they have always tried to build quality into their products but Dangote is taking this to a new high level. Only a few weeks ago we were informed by a cynical clear eyed official who stood in front of a nest of microphones to charge the Dangote refinery with negligence in the matter of the quality of her products. Dangote has come out boldly to announce to the world that for the first time in a very long while, virtually sulphur free petrol will be available on the Nigerian market, all of it produced onshore. Enhanced engine performance as well as pollution free environment are two of the advantages coming our way soon.

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Close to half of Forex allocations are for people to import petroleum products with. I am sure that with these products being pumped out of the refinery at Lekki, the demand for dollars will be pointedly reduced in such a way that the pressure on the Naira will ease, allowing it to taste the sweet air of freedom for goodness knows how long. The effect of this on the economy is both immense and incalculable making it possible for us to dare to dream of better times.

Only a few weeks ago, the news was that for the first time in his career, Dangote was not in the good books of the present government as he has been with all the governments that went before. Some were moved to applaud the situation because the charge has always been that Dangote’s outstanding financial success has been on the back of government handouts to the detriment of the rest of us. Strains of the applause for this situation were still floating around when news came that crude made available to all refineries operating in Nigeria would be paid for in Naira, taking out the dollar in our refining equation. The only company ready and waiting to take advantage of this decision in any meaningful fashion belongs to Dangote. The eternal government client has won out again even though there is absolutely nothing debarring any other businessman from taking advantage of this reasonable gateway to profitability. I can imagine that several groups and individuals are working their phones feverishly at this time, attempting to set up deals which will lead to building refineries. They will all follow in the wake of Dangote as they have tried to do with sugar and cement. And just as what happened to all the junks bringing in cement from all corners of the globe and clogging up our ports, the armada of petrol bearing mother, sister and daughter ships will soon be consigned as the saying goes to the unplumbed depths of the dustbin of history.

With the Dangote refinery fully operational, we stand on the threshold of a new beginning throughout the continent of Africa. By the time Europe collided with Africa back in the fifteenth century, many empires were flourishing furiously in the heart of the continent of Africa. Some of them, the Oyo, Benin, Kongo, Bornu, to mention only a few were at their apogee. They were not as technologically advanced as the Europeans but existed at a level which was astonishing to the Europeans, almost always the Portuguese who made first contact with these African empires. But there were Europeans from other countries who came and found a degree of civilisation which not only exceeded their expectations but found that they exceeded what existed in their own countries. Unfortunately for Africa, the Europeans from wherever they came had guns which were superior and vastly so to whichever weapons were available to the Africans and it was therefore easy for the Europeans to impose their will on Africans they interacted with. They formed selective alliances following the fault lines which had existed within African groups long before their coming and through this arrangement undermined the development of African units. From then until now, the relationships formed between Europe and Africa have been not just unequal but punishingly so for Africa. This has been especially so in the issue of trade. From that time Africa has always exported raw materials including human beings to Europe and the rest of the world and imported perishable goods in return. Those goods have disappeared with no trace. Whilst the Europeans steadily built up their countries on the backs of their African trading partners, the African units which existed before the coming of the Europeans began a long but steady state of implosion which hollowed them out so badly that the Europeans simply waltzed in at one point and colonised the whole continent. Since then Africa has been working for little returns to develop Europe to the detriment of her own development. This is how come Africa has settled into the mould of producers of raw materials and consumers of cheap manufactured goods from Europe. That has not changed and until we make concerted efforts to change the dynamics of our situation, it will not change.

Over the last fifty years or so, Nigeria and indeed, most parts of Africa has had to import all her petroleum products from Europe. The Dutch for example have no crude oil but they have built up a refining capacity which is able to supply refined petroleum products to all parts of Africa. Dangote has been able to set up a single facility to rival the Dutch masters at their game and broken a five hundred year mould which dictates that Africa must depend on other people to refine our raw materials. We now know that we can become masters at industrial production of virtually everything we put our mind to. We are capable of buying the technology we need for our own development as Dangote has done so painstakingly over the last decade. Besides that, we have now seen that apart from buying technology we can borrow or even steal technology from wherever it is available. We can even develop it whenever it is necessary. What Dangote has done with this refinery goes far beyond the production of refined petroleum products. Handled properly, it has opened our eyes to endless possibilities in the same way that he has done for cement and sugar. There was a time when sugar was squeezed out of the cruel and unpaid labour of millions of Africans but today we can produce sugar from scratch and export it to the rest of a sugar crazed world and we can do that for whatever we want. What we have lacked over the last five hundred years has been the confidence in our own ability to be industrial producers of the things we need. I am confident that in the next fifty years, if we boldly follow on the path hacked out of the jungle by the single expedient of that refinery, the largest single one of its kind on earth, we will become formidable exploiters of technology.

I have often wondered why a man would want to be a dollar billionaire when he cannot live long enough to actually spend a thousandth of that humongous sum of money. Now, I know that you can buy a slice of history and you need many billions of dollars to do that and that to me is what is so impressive about what Dangote has done. He has bought for himself a large slice of history. More than that he has set the world on a new path, if only we as Africans are ready to see the path which has been opened for us. Seen in this light, perhaps the heading of this article is appropriate after all, a new day has risen over Africa.

September 8, 2024
The British vote for change VI

The first time I made the media acquaintance of Boris Johnson, he was far from being on his best form. Indeed, he looked somewhat ridiculous, a clearly overweight, if not decidedly portly figure perched rather precariously on a bicycle which looked too fragile to carry the weight to which it was being subjected. At that time, Boris Johnson, a passionate cyclist was trying to convince the people of London to pick up the healthy habit of navigating the traffic choked streets of their city on a bicycle provided by the city of which he was mayor. Being mayor of the city of London was Johnson’s first major political post . Over the next few years, he not only won three London mayoral elections but was appointed to senior ministerial appointments by two Prime Ministers and topping the lot by becoming Prime Minister in his own right. Not finished with political stardom, Boris as Prime Minister won a general election and in the process gathered in 43% of votes cast; the highest percentage won by any Prime Minister in the long history of electoral contest in Britain. Johnson has aroused my interest as no modern politician, except perhaps Trump who appears to have been cut from the same cloth, so much so that when he had to resign from his post as British Prime Minister, I celebrated him in an article with the title, ‘The rise and rise of Boris Jobson’, not in tribute but in wonder as to how a man of his obviously deviant character could have climbed the political ladder, indeed any ladder to the dizzy heights which Boris had reached.

Like Cameron, Boris was born with some quite attractive privileges. He happens to be the first and indeed the only British Prime Minister who was born abroad; in the United States of America to be precise. He also spent enough of his childhood in Brussels to have learnt to speak French and acquiring a second language which is not something you associate with the British. Also, against the run of play, Boris had the early experience of living in Europe, the very capital of the European Union but as his career unfolded, he wasted this opportunity to cultivate an understanding or even appreciation of basic European feelings; preferring instead to live permanently in his restricted little England environment, albeit in his head. A less charitable observer may even describe him as living entirely within his mind which in spite of early exposure to salutary other world experiences, was as close to a closed mind as to make no difference. This would be an apt description of a bigot, misogynistic and racist, all adjectives which at one time or the other have justifiably been hurled at him from different quarters.

Boris was not only privileged by his upbringing, he, like David Cameron had a mind which suggested that it was eminently amenable to cultivation. He won various scholarships to Eton and Oxford and had the application to make sense out of Latin which made him an example of a scholar of the Classics but he was cynical enough to appreciate the value of the common touch which for him could not be separated from the vulgar. If Brown with all his studiousness could be said to lack people skills, Boris had these in spades and leveraged on these skills to overachieve in the field of politics. He had an instinctive knowledge of what people wanted to hear and made sure to give them only those things. Like Trump, his unlikely look alike, he was a media celebrity who won a whole lot of votes by pandering to the lowest public values. He was a journalist who attached little value to the truth as many other successful politicians have done and will continue to do until we find a way of accessing the real worth of people who from time to time come out to ask us for our votes. Boris Johnson occupied several important public posts during his glittering political career but left no lasting foot prints in any of those positions. It is as if he was just passing through without having been anywhere.

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Perhaps the greatest event in Johnson’s career was Brexit, even if this has been a disaster of huge proportions to other British politicians especially to David Cameron who supervised the original referendum as well as Theresa May who could not get Brexit done. Without Brexit however, it is unlikely that Boris would have got the chance of becoming British Prime Minister. It is doubtful that he wanted to be Prime Minister other than that he fancied to be Prime Minister. His performance during the Covid pandemic supports this contention and the fact that he could not survive the pandemic clinches the argument. The pandemic demanded masterful leadership, something which was beyond his capacity to deliver. His response to the pandemic was slow and indecisive and it is not surprising that the casualties reported from Britain was high, much higher than what was expected from a resource rich country like Britain. It is clear that those resources were not exploited by Johnson to ameliorate the effects of the virus on the people of Britain. It is not unlike Johnson that the seriousness of the situation was completely lost on a man who did not have the capacity of seeing the serious side of any situation. For a start, he could not be persuaded to respect the simple rules which were designed, reluctantly put in place by his own government to reduce the spread of the virus. Social distancing was anathema to him and masks were just a nuisance which should be discarded on a whim. He went around shaking hands with anyone within his visual range and did not allow the virus to curtail his enjoyment of a good but unnecessary party. As for rules, they were not to stand in the way of his personal enjoyment even when other members of the public were hibernating in various places of restricted confinement, waiting impatiently for the end of the pandemic. The British, faced with the austerity measures since the Tories came to power in 2010 when Cameron took over the captainship of the ship of state, were suddenly confronted with the harsh realities of the depleted status of their beloved National Healthcare System as well as other structures through which welfare benefits trickled down to that all important mythical man on that equally mythical street on which he lived.

Long before COVID became an issue, Johnson had his hands full with the matter of Brexit. It was something of poetic justice because even when Brexit was still in its gestation period, Boris had been one of those stoking the fire under its incubator. He was one of those who sold the idea of leaving the European Union in order to achieve an indefinable independence and freedom to exercise the sovereignty which they had supposedly surrendered to the faceless bureaucrats in Brussels. Boris staked his political future on an exit vote in the referendum and must have thought that he had hit a jackpot when, so to say, his number came up in the lottery of the Brexit referendum. When Theresa May appeared to be dithering over getting Brexit done, Boris was one of those demanding that the will of the people, those who had no time for remaining in Europe had to be respected. Under the pressure from many sides including Boris Johnson and other members of the May cabinet, the hapless Prime Minister had to call for an election which she won with very little to spare, after which she saw the hand writing on the board and threw in the towel, one of those who had stabbed her unmercifully was none other than her Foreign Minister, the golden haired Boris Johnson who had been calling for bringing an end to British membership of the European Union.

As Prime Minister, Boris tried everything including the use of bullying tactics to get Brexit done but even though he failed in getting good terms for getting out of Europe, he was, in the end undone by the weakness of his character. A liar, philanderer and rule breaker, his inability to respect truth and common decency lost him the support of his own party members of which began to see him as a political liability who was likely to make it impossible for the party to win the next general election. Given this situation, many senior members of his cabinet resigned their posts and having no leg to stand on, Boris had no choice but to resign his position as Prime Minister leaving the way clear for Liz Truss to become the third female Prime Minister of Britain.

The ascension of Truss to the office of British Prime Minister was the stuff of tragedy or comedy, depending on which side of the political divide one stood on. All that need be said about that debacle is that it lasted only forty-nine days and paved the way for Rishi Sunak to become the first ethnic Asian and Buddhist to become the British Prime Minister.

Sunak, the son of Indian immigrants through Kenya and Tanzania was born into a middle class family in which the father was a doctor and mother a community pharmacist who ran her pharmacy in Southampton. No extravagant privileges here but he was brought up in a household which demanded sterling academic achievement, a demand to which the young Sunak responded splendidly. No surprise he got a first from Oxford where he took the PPE course which has become the field of study for virtually all aspiring British politicians. He rounded up his education with an MBA from Stanford on a prestigious Fulbright scholarship. He certainly is brighter than most and must have intimidated many people with the power of his intellect. But he failed in the office of Prime Minister because he just could not make the necessary connection with the British public. There are several reasons why he failed. He could have alienated the people because he was young, only forty-two when he became PM, Asian, Buddhist or even a staunch supporter of the unfashionable Southampton FC. All these negative attributes paled into insignificance in the face of his academic prowess and his marriage to a billionaire’s daughter. Anyone richer than the king of England can’t be connected to the king’s subjects and so, he was an outsider looking in but not because his parents were immigrants from East Africa. Allied to these, he represented a group of people, the Conservatives who were seriously out of touch with the British people who in their turn were desperate for a change. Sir Keir Starmer of the Labour Party promised them a change and was swept into power on a land slide.

September 1, 2024
The British vote for change V

It is difficult to find another British Prime Minister who was better prepared than Gordon Brown to step into that office when he did in 2007. By that time, he had spent a little more than ten years as Chancellor of the Exchequer, the next person in rank to the Prime Minister and his neighbour on Downing Street. He was also by acclimation, the undisputed deputy leader of the Labour Party. His management of the British economy when he was chancellor has been described as masterful and effective, perhaps the best that had been seen in Britain in the modern era. Great things were expected of him but he was tufted out of office after only three years during which time the Labour Party lead in the polls after the 2005 elections had dwindled quite perceptibly over time until it was eroded to nothing.

Looking back at his career, it can be said that he was better suited to the hallowed cloisters of academia than the hurly burly of politics and yet he showed such devotion to politics that no woman, and at least two beautiful and accomplished ladies had tried to do so, had the stamina to woo him away from that distraction and was not persuaded to settle down to marriage until he was knocking on the doors of his fiftieth year.

Unlike his counterparts in the Conservative party at his time, Brown was born into the British middle class as his father was a minister in the Church of Scotland and was brought up on church premises. John Major left school with three O levels at sixteen, at which age Brown was entering the University of Edinburgh on a scholarship to study history. Nobody was surprised when he got a first class degree and went on to acquire a doctorate in his field. However, he was by no means a book worm as he showed noticeable skills on the sports field. Taking everything into consideration, he should have been successful if not outstanding in the office of Prime Minister. Unfortunately, a combination of a lack of people skills and the economic climate of the time ensured that his stay in office did not exceed a period of three years. It has now become apparent that he was not politically astute enough to seize his moment and set a date for a winnable election in 2009 when the odds were in his favour but chose to wait for another year which was expected to deliver a sure victory. Unfortunately, his tide had ebbed by 2010 when he had to call an election; it only led to a hung parliament. His efforts to form an electoral pact with the Liberal Democrats in order to engineer a majority in Parliament failed, consigning Britain to fourteen years of a Conservative comedy of errors which presented the country with no less than five Prime Ministers, one of whom was in office for forty-seven chaotic days!

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There was no party with a majority after the 2010 elections and this led to the formation of a coalition government led by David Cameron, another Prime Minister with Scottish origins, making him the third in a row after Blair and Brown. He was solidly upper middle class and was in fact on the fringes of minor aristocracy as he was descended from a long departed king even if this was through an ancestor whose birth was illegitimate. The stigma of illegitimacy was not recognised by the denizens of the upper crust and was a status that that could actually be flaunted. It is also worth noting that as late as 2015, the British government had just finished paying off the loan taken all those years ago to pay off the former slave owners who had their slaves taken from them when slavery was ended in British territories in 1834. Just to be clear. The slave owners were generously compensated for the loss of their human property whilst the slaves who had worked for no reward were abandoned and left to their limited fate. Two hundred years later, the descendants of those slaves are still suffering from serious economic disadvantages. On the other side of the coin, slave owners including the Camerons who had appropriated the labour of human beings supposedly created as they were in the image of God, had laughed all the way to the bank, their already exalted social standing having been further enhanced by a small pot of gold.

Unlike the three Tory Prime Ministers before him, he was not only born into wealth and privilege but was born with a brain which was better tuned to learning than most of his contemporaries. This being so and so, he breezed through Eton and Oxford with ease emerging from the later institution with a first class degree, almost inevitably in the amalgamated course of Politics, Philosophy and Economics (PPE), the preferred course of study for many successful British politicians since the Second World War. Together with his studies however, the young Cameron exhibited a streak of indulgent behaviour which in less privileged circles would have earned him stern censorship but appeared to enhance his reputation as a jolly good fellow of the social pull his exalted family put at his disposal.

Cameron came into the office of Prime Minister, at forty-three, the youngest to do so in modern times with a stern determination to fix what he regarded as ‘broken Britain’. With his background in economics, his main preoccupation was the economy which in the aftermath of the global crash of 2008 appeared to him to be fragile and dangerously so. He was determined to fix it through monetary control. This meant that he was looking for salvation from the market, the purest form of economic control. As much as possible, money was diverted into private control with government playing the role of indulgent umpire. This meant a savage cut in public spending and the privatisation of public enterprises including the Royal Post. Private holdings grew at the expense of the social responsibility of government and societal infrastructure began to crumble from neglect; roads, railways, schools and education in general began to totter and health services began a slow but perceptible decline which soon led to sustained crisis in the much vaunted National Health Service, the jewel in the crown of the British welfare system which had been laboriously and sometimes painfully stitched together by mainly successive Labour governments since the days of Clement Atlee.

The British electorate, educated through many generations to defer to those who were deemed to be socially superior had decided that the Tories were the natural party of government and perhaps not unexpectedly, the party under Cameron handily won the 2015 election and the Coalition government with the Liberal Democrats gave way to a Conservative government now free to pursue her own interests without reference to any junior partner.

Over the years, starting from the days of New Labour, it was clear that the British people had taken a pitch to the Right. They had come to see that their country which for so long had dominated the world was now, at best only a medium level world power, floundering in the wake which the USA created. Sad as it was, they were still clinging to the myth of being a nuclear power and to prove their military potency were still tagging along to any war in which the USA involved herself. This meant that British war planes were dropping bombs all over the place in Bosnia, Libya, Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and even in Sierra Leone where in addition they put boots on the ground as they did in a few other theatres of war. They also began to feel that they were not being given the respect they commanded in the hey days of their global domination. It became easy for them to think that they were being victimised by the evolving world order and that their problems had been imported into Britain by immigrants who were to be blamed for every affliction that held them in thrall. The official response was to create a hostile environment for immigrants especially those who did not have the legal status to remain in Britain. For example, the right of spouses of Britons to live with their partners in Britain could no longer be guaranteed under the prevailing climate of the country. What can be described as a lunatic right wing of the Conservative Party and a crazier group of people in UKIP were hell-bent on reclaiming Britain for the Britons. To appease these deranged people, Cameron decided to organise a referendum to decide if Britain should withdraw from the European Union in a movement described as Brexit. Cameron was so optimistic about victory for those who wanted Britain to remain in Europe that he neglected to make any contingency plans to cope with a withdrawal from the European Union. There were no plans to cope with this result and with his political career in ruins, Cameron had no option but to resign as Prime Minister in 2016. He was succeeded as Prime Minister and leader of the Conservative Party by Theresa May, a clergyman’s daughter. May had been a prominent member of the Cameron government and had been the Home secretary who had had been responsible in her own words for ‘creating a hostile environment in Britain for illegal immigrants’ . If she could not frighten illegal immigrants from fleeing Britain, it was not for lack of trying.

Unfortunately, May was perhaps even more confused than Cameron about what to do about Brexit, a policy which she had inherited. As was the case with Cameron, May had supported Britain’s continued membership of the European Union. In opposition to this, Britons had decided to withdraw from the European Union in order to exercise sovereignty over their affairs but apparently, they were bat ignorant about how the process of disengagement could be worked out. For example, they suddenly found out that unlike before, they could no longer hop across the English Channel without a visa as they used to do neither could they simply send whatever they wanted to anyone in Europe without extensive and complicated paper work. And yet there could be no going back on Brexit as the roving finger had written and having written had moved on. It was incumbent on May to get Brexit done but is was soon clear that she did not have the head for such complicated matters. A considerable number of people in her party were relentless in their pressure to get Brexit done come hell or high water. Unfortunately, May was not gifted with the flexibility required to navigate through the mine field which Brexit represented and eventually, she was hoist on that petard and after losing a string of confidence votes within her party and in Parliament, she had no option but to resign her positions as leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister of Britain. She was succeeded in both positions by Boris Johnson.

It is quite interesting to note that before those votes of no confidence, May had survived a general election which not surprisingly had produced a hung parliament.

Boris Johnson, the man who took over from May was a garrulous caricature of a human being, a serial divorcee who quite genuinely was not quite sure of the number of children be had fathered. He had been a contemporary of Cameron at Oxford and had indulged heartily in all the dastardly escapades with which he and his friends had amused themselves with. As a matter of fact, he did not appear to have grown out of those juvenile tendencies which bordered on the delinquent by the time he assumed the leadership of the Conservative Party as well as the office of British Prime Minister.

To be continued

August 25, 2024
Hurricane Kamala

I interrupt my series on British politics to bring you this article about Hurricane Kamala because that is what is going on in real time and in the way of hurricanes, nothing about them can be put off for the briefest second as they are not only extremely destructive but are also very fast. One minute they are doing their wild gyration far out to sea but in the next they are tearing off roofs far inland and depositing them much further inland. They come riding on the wings of fierce winds, followed by heavy rains which deposit tons of water on places where rains are not needed. They pass over very quickly leaving floods, broken houses and lot of tears in their wake. Above all, they are unforgettable which is why what is currently going on is in the category of a political hurricane. One minute, Kamala Harris was a dutiful, loyal deputy to the visibly ageing Joe Biden and presidential candidate for the Democratic Party. With the awesome speed of a hurricane, she was transformed into the president in waiting, depending on the result of an election taking place in less than eighty days. That is quick, very quick and is attracting attention not just within America but all over the world. It has even attracted my attention and that is of personal significance because I completely lost interest in the politics of the USA as soon as Donald Trump dragged everything into the sewer by winning the 2016 election. Until he was actually declared the winner of the 2016 election, I had dismissed him as a sick joke, a clown of Shakespearian quality guaranteed to provide cheap entertainment but not to be admitted into any polite society. That the keys of the city were entrusted to his care convinced me that the USA was just a country of hillbillies that had managed to acquire powerful nuclear weapons but lack the finesse to manage them safely. In other words, a great and pressing danger to the rest of the world. I shudder to think that for four years, the nuclear codes were in sole charge of a wilful infant who lived in a bizarre world of his own making, a man so unpredictable that a psychiatric examination should classify him as unfit to be in charge of any moving machinery. And yet, there he was, arguably the most powerful man in the world. There must be something frightening about democracy if after all the expenses of presidential elections in the USA, all that it throws up is a Trump. The rest of the world demands an apology for this egregious insult. That this certified buffoon is supported by roughly half of the US electorate beggars belief and is a pointer to serious danger ahead.

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The first round of the Trump presidency came to an end in a blaze of infamy when his supporters, full of unrighteous indignation invaded Congress with the expressed intention of hanging the colourless Vice President, Mike Pence who was almost as deranged as his principal in a different kind of way. The invaders were determined to hang Pence to prevent him from officially confirming the result of an election which Trump had lost but which loss he had truculently refused to acknowledge. For the first time in the two hundred and fifty year history of the USA, the loser in a presidential election did not accept defeat and refused to congratulate his victorious opponent. If you think that the threat to hang Pence was empty, you’d better think again. Those lunatics travelled many miles, some of them, hundreds of miles to get to Washington with the sole purpose of hanging Pence and would have done so had they managed to lay hands on him on that red letter day. Trump and his army of unhinged supporters have, for close to four years continued to throw tantrums in the manner of a spoilt brat who had been deprived of his favourite toy or just exhibiting signs of his own destructive bloody mindedness.

Outside looking in, it was clear to me that the Trump presidency was an unmitigated disaster in every way that it could be judged. He was hardly in office before he issued orders banning people he identified as coming to the USA from what he described as shit hole countries and his religious bias was as plain as the nose on his face as those shit hole countries were home to Muslims. That said, that statement has to be balanced by the fact that he was soon spitting venom against the re several st of the world including those countries which for decades had been allies to the USA in peace and war.

Since he left the office of the POTUS, Trump has been making a great deal of noise, mainly telling anyone who cared to listen what a great person he really is. This is so clearly untrue that what we are dealing with here is a man in the throes of a serious pathological condition. And yet this person is still asking stridently that he be returned to the White House for another term in office. Well, even if he has been twice impeached, he is still well within his right to contest another round of election. What boggles the mind is that as at now, he has an even chance of winning and getting the chance to be inflicted on the rest of the world. It would not have mattered if he was trying to become the president of some obscure banana republic somewhere in the back of beyond. But the POTUS has such an immense capacity for mischief all over the world that all the more than eight billion people on earth may, at some point in time be affected by what the man in the White House does, especially on the African continent. In the past, Eisenhower authorised the murder of Lumumba even if it was carried out by Mobutu. Reagan, from the depth of his incipient dementia bombed Gadhafi and the job was completed by Obama who oversaw the murder of Gadhafi and the dismemberment of Libya. Various American presidents propped up Mobutu who had DRC in his pocket for several decades looting the country almost as thoroughly as King Leopold, king of the Belgians had done in his prime. Unfortunately, who rules America is important to people all around the world. The situation is such that I think that somehow, the rest of the world should have a say as to who should be the president of the USA.

The fitness or otherwise of Donald Trump should not be decided by political considerations alone. He is loaded down with so much moral baggage that he should not be considered for the post of dog catcher in a rural town in the Appalachian mountains. This is a man who by his own admission, is not averse to ‘grabbing women by the pussy’. He has gone much further than that as some women have come out to accuse him of rape and other forms of sexual predation. Being a billionaire, at least by his own boastful admission, he should be so much attractive to women that he should not have any problem with having women swarming over him for the privilege of giving him all the sexual satisfaction he wants. What do we have instead? He was reduced to paying a porn star rejoicing in the theatrical name of Stormy Daniels for what she described as an all too brief roll in the hay. That in itself is not a crime but paying her a financial inducement for keeping quiet about it is not compatible with the dictates of the law. It becomes a crime when the money used to silence the otherwise garrulous Miss Daniels came out of campaign funds, it became a matter for judge and jury leading to an indictment on thirty-four counts. His guilt has been proved and he is awaiting sentencing. I wonder how many of his enthusiastic supporters would accept this mean man as a son in-law and yet they are all willing to vote for him to become the POTUS. Things just don’t add up! The man appears to be heavily coated with Teflon to which nothing can stick. This is clearly not a quality that is compatible with the exalted office of the President of the USA. It only points to the fact that there is something large and rotten in the land. Should Trump win the coming election that would serve as confirmation that the rot has become irreversible.

Given the job that he had to do, the POTUS is expected to be a man of at least above average intelligence. Whilst some of them had acquired formidable academic credentials some of them, we will not mention names here, some of them did not qualify to participate for any competition for intellectual gymnastics, only one in history can be described as ignorant. Donald Trump has not filed his tax returns neither has he allowed his academic transcripts to see the light of day. He has gone so far as to place an injunction against their release to the public. But, no transcripts are necessary to show that the man is as ignorant as a brush even if he boasts all the time of the awesome depth of his own mental acuity. There should be a competition to find the most egregious of his ignorant pronouncements but my own favourite is when he suggested that hurricanes could be nuked to prevent them from forming, displaying his ignorance of hurricanes and nuclear weapons in one short sentence. Other people are likely to remember other howlers that fell from the unguarded mouth of Donald Trump. In a world that is awash with information and the means of accessing it, there is no excuse for a man that stands within the glare of informed public scrutiny to remain wilfully ignorant and carry the burden of his ignorance with such aplomb.

Trump is man who is just bad and transparently so but he also commands the fanatical support and adulation of millions of his compatriots. So many of them talk about him only in tones that should be reserved for proven deities. These people are the oxygen tank keeps his fire burning bright giving him the encouragement to hope for another go at being president. However, we should not forget that even in the election in which he was declared the winner he scored fewer votes than his opponent and has the electoral college system to thank for his unlikely victory. In other words, he is nowhere near as popular as he thinks he is.

Throughout his life into which his political career is embedded, Trump has shown such contempt for women that I find it impossible to think that he could have demonstrated sufficient charm to convince one woman, let alone three of them to marry him and bear his children. It is therefore poetic justice that at this time, his greatest nemesis is a woman. In the same vein Trump has always shown his visceral hatred of black people and yet it is a plot of Shakespearian construction that one person who stubbornly stands between Trump and sweet repose is a black woman. Trump has always been vociferous in his condemnation of recent immigrants to America labelling them as murderers, rapists or both. It is therefore sweetly ironic that the figure he sees in his frequent nightmares these days is Kamala Harris, daughter of immigrants, one black, the other Indian, both of them with proven intellect with life long commitment to academic achievements. It is fitting that the person who now carries a visible and auditory threat of ending Trump’s political career is a second generation immigrant who through the power of the fourteenth amendment to the American constitution is 100% American. With all the rights and privileges of an American citizen. The point that seems to elude most of Trump’s bigoted supporters is that all Americans including the so called indigenous Indians are descended from immigrants, the only difference between them Nobeing the time and means of their arrival in America.

Kamala Harris has arrived on the shores of America with the force of a hurricane and although the ignorant Donald Trump will try to drop nuclear bombs in her party as time goes on, she has demonstrated enough destructive capacity to blow him out of the water and send him scurrying back to Mar A Largo or into a prison cell no later than November 5.

August 18, 2024
The British vote for change (IV)
John Major was the third Tory Prime Minister in a row who rose through the ranks, from a humble working class background in one of the most class conscious societies in the world. Even then Major was the first of them who was not an Oxbridge graduate. Both Heathe and Thatcher had acquired a coat of polish from Oxford but Major did not have the benefit of formal higher education. His was a case of being at the right place at the right time to reap benefits which were closed to his more privileged colleagues, those who had been born with one type of silver spoon or the other in their mouth. It is worth noting that Thatcher has been the only Oxford graduate Prime Minister that was not given an honourary degree of her university on account of the hostility of her policy towards the British educational system during her tenure in office. It was an ineffectual but significant gesture from Oxford University.

Predictably, one of the first major changes that Major initiated in office of the British Prime Minister was the scrapping of the poll tax on the horns of which his predecessor had come a cropper. Fortunately for him most of the policies enunciated by his predecessor were a reflection of her turbulent personality and could not be accommodated under the new management. And, although the lady, by her own admission could not be turned, Major understood the power of change and was not only ready to make necessary turns but made turning away from the abrasiveness of the past government a cornerstone of his own government policy.

Since after the First World War, the Conservative and Labour Parties have constituted themselves into the political alternatives in Britain politics, the once mighty Liberal Party having been effectively derailed by the rise of the Labour Party. For a brief period in the early eighties, it appeared that a third option could insert itself into the political mix but, any hope of this was soon dashed as it became clear that the two dominant parties had more or less covered the political spectrum from the extreme Left to the extreme Right. The SDP/Liberal alternative was therefore rendered superfluous to the demands of the British electorate.

Read Also: The British vote for change (II)

Thatcher, because she had all of eleven years of unbroken rule and was faced by a weakened opposition, was able to create a country in her own image and it was clear that the country had been shifted decisively to the right. For example she had managed to curtail the power of the unions so effectively that union membership had dropped, in some parts of the country quite precipitously. This, together with the deindustrialization of Britain which had been the result of Conservative Party policies as well as the promotion of many of the working class had reduced the influence of the Labour Party which could no longer make a call on the loyalty of it’s traditional support base. True, the Conservatives were not popular but at that point in time they appeared to be the obvious party of power in the land.

Another factor that had to be taken into consideration was that whilst the Conservative Party appeared to be a well oiled machine, the Labour Party was in near total disarray. Even before the start of the Tory hegemony, the conditions within the Labour Party were not conducive to growth. The 1979 election which brought Thatcher to power was fought by the Labour Party under the joint leadership of James Callaghan and Michael Foot, each of them representing the right and left wings of the party respectively but detracting from the ability of the party to confront the Conservatives with any hope of success. Major was a prime beneficiary of the lack of cohesion within the Labour ranks and he was able to win the 1992 general election in a land slide and an increased share of the popular vote. His opponent in this election was Neil Kinnock who had taken over the leadership of the Labour Party from Michael Foot, (older readers may remember that his brother Dingle Foot represented Tony Enahoro in his attempt to fight extradition from Britain to face treasonable felony charges in Nigeria). Foot had, within his brief tenure as leader of the Labour Party moved the party so far to the left that there was palpable fear in some quarters that the party had become unelectable in a country in which socialism was a dirty word. Given this situation, the first task that fell to Kinnock when he became leader was to pull the party as close to the political centre as possible. After several years of left wing dominance within the party, this task was going to be so difficult as to be labelled impossible. Slowly but surely however, the party, after a period of bitter, not to say bloody infighting, was rid of her most left wing elements, especially those of the Militant Tendency who subscribed to pure socialist principles and wanted Britain to give up her position as a nuclear power. In truth, the country was only a minor nuclear power at the time but the majority of the people were still seeking shelter under the delusion of a super power status and were not yet prepared to face the reality of their country’s vastly diminished capacity to mix with the big players who could reduce the British isles to a pile of rubble in a matter of minutes. In addition, to trying to match the Tories, Kinnock had to look over his shoulder at the SDP/Liberal coalition which was not only gathering steam but was threatening to relegate Labour into third place and replacing them as the opposition party in parliament. The election, when it came was a triumph for Major who led the Tories to a consecutive fourth election victory. The Tories did not expect such a crushing victory and the Labour Party members were relieved that their realistic fear of coming third did not materialise. In the end, the only real causality was Neil Kinnock who in the tradition of defeated generals figuratively fell on his sword by way of resigning from his position. This paved the way for the ascension of Tony Blair to the leadership of the Labour Party. On reflection, it is interesting to note that apart from Harold Wilson and Michael Foot, all the Labour Party leaders all the way to Gordon Brown were of either Welsh (Callaghan and Kinnock) or Scottish (Blair and Brown) ancestry. With the English in such a large majority, the significance of this should not be dismissed out of hand.

Tony Blair is made up of so many parts that he seems by far to be the most complex political figure in Britain for a long time. If we restrict our attention strictly to his politics there are a series of contradictions to keep us occupied for a very long time. By his own admission, he was initially drawn to socialism through the ideas of Trotsky, the man who was deputy to Lenin at the time of the Russian Revolution and a man of extreme and violent left wing persuasion. In time, he lost his faith in Trotsky. Subsequently he then moved on from being a Trotskyist to being a wide eyed Marxist but ended up being the man who pulled the Labour Party, the party of Keir Hardie to the right of centre of British politics to form what came to be known as New Labour. Ironically, in doing so, he made the Labour Party electable again so much so that the party won the 1997 general election and paved the way for fourteen years of Labour Party rule. In the end, it took a coalition of Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats to push New Labour out of power after the general election in 2012.

Tony Blair’s performance as Prime Minister has received unalloyed praise from many quarters and was the envy of the Conservatives who feared that they could be shut out of power for a very long time. Unlike the other Prime Ministers of the period, Blair had a solidly middle class background, his father being a Law lecturer. He was also exposed to life outside Britain as he spent a considerably portion of his childhood in Australia when his father taught Law there. It is no surprise that he is a lawyer, also married to a lawyer. Unfortunately for his career as British Prime Minister, be fell into bad company which led to his political demise.

Blair was fatally attracted to American Presidents; first, Bill Clinton and then George Bush II. It was he who convinced Clinton to send ground troops into Bosnia to put an end to the bloody career of Milosevic and his goons in that region. This intervention was a success as it brought peace to that region in the same way that he sent British troops into Sierra Leone to stop the civil war there. Everything went downhill after that.

When the twin towers in New York were brought down by terrorists in the infamous 9/11 incident, the American government of George Bush under the sinister influence of Dick Cheney the powerful Vice President declared war on terror, first on the Taliban in Afghanistan ostensibly for harbouring Osama bin Laden, the suspected mastermind behind 9/11. Next on the list of putative terrorists was Sadam Hussein who was accused of hoarding weapons of mass destruction. The Americans and their allies notably Tony Blair presented what turned out to be fabricated evidence for the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. On the strength of evidence presented to the UNO by the highly respected Secretary of State, General Colin Powell who was Chairman, Joint Chief of Staff of US forces during the First Iraq War, approval was given for the invasion of Iraq in an attempt to find and seize all weapons of mass destruction. The invasion was successful. Saddam was captured and banged for crimes against humanity and the George Bush wildly celebrated his victory over terror. But those celebrations were tainted by the failure to find any weapons of mass destruction for the simple reason that they did not exist. The fall of Saddam led to terrible sectarian war in Iraq in which hundreds of thousands of lives were lost and prepared the ground for the emergence of ISIS and other vicious groups which committed terrible crimes in many parts of the world including countries in Western Europe. Tony Blair was caught up in all the destruction unleashed by these events forcing him to resign his position of British Prime Minister. That position was passed on to Gordon Brown.

Actually, the foundation for Blair’s resignation was laid several years before, even before he became Prime Minister. Both Blair and Brown were the rising stars of the Labour Party and were the best of friends who shared an office in Westminster and the ambition to become leader of the Labour Party and ultimately, the Prime Minister. They were also the prime movers of New Labour, the vehicle through which they were to realise their ambition to become tenants in 10 Downing Street. Although Blair was slightly the younger of the two, they somehow came to the agreement that he was going to have the first bite of the cherry but that he was going to resign the posts of leader of the Labour Party and Prime Minister and pass them on to Brown in due course. However, no time was set for the changeover and in time, this led to some major disagreement between the two friends leading to an estrangement between them. Brown was perhaps the more cerebral of the two and it was he who as the Chancellor of the Exchequer masterminded the financial policies which served the Blair government well enough to maintain their supremacy over the Conservatives for fourteen years, the longest period of Labour rule in British history. Working in tandem, the two of them formed a formidable pair with the potential to keep their party in power indefinitely. Fortunately for the Conservatives, the glue which bound the two of them together weakened over time and this was the crack through which the Conservative lizard penetrated their wall.
- To be continued.
August 11, 2024
The British vote for change (III)

keir Hardie, the first Labour Party leader joined the work force as early as the age of seven and so, did not have the benefit of formal education. He was born at a time when education was neither free nor compulsory in Britain. In any case, he had to go out into the big bad world to contribute his own quota, small as it had to be to the family finances so that there just was no room for such niceties as education even if it was to be at the primary school level. In any case, what was the use of any level of education to a young man whose destiny was to dig coal until he succumbed to tuberculosis or scoliosis by the age of fifty or less? These antecedents dictated that if he was going to make anything of his life, be had to pull himself up by his own boot straps. That means that he was a self made man in every sense of the word. In addition to these difficulties, he was also brought up in a suite of two rooms which shows quite clearly that he was born with very little and grew up with less. But there was another side to this bent coin. This was at a time when the mine owners and freshly minted industrialists were making money hand over fist from their investments at home and abroad as British companies repatriated literally, mountains of gold and silver from the far flung Empire. It is just that the members of the British working class were being squeezed as ferociously as any British subject in India, Africa and the Caribbean. Indeed, my calculation is that for example, people living in Achebe’s fictional village of Umofia in their time got more out of life than the lowly Scottish miner or the young lady making so called safety matches in some infernal factory in London or Birmingham. Not to talk of those of them who were tied to the mechanised weaving looms in the dark mills of Manchester. With his nonconformist Methodist background and the drudgery in which his life was bound, Hardie was fiercely motivated to bring about a change in the lives of people around him. He was driven by a strong desire to make life better for others, not by waging war on any group or class of people but on the ideas which they gave voice to. Marx was also known in his time as having advised the workers of the world to unite against their oppressors which is why, contrary to popular opinion, Hardie refused to support the participation of British working men in the slaughter of workers from other lands who like their British counterparts were slaving in the service of their own local capitalists. He was therefore opposed to the very idea of British workers being turned into soldiers to be slaughtered on the killing fields of the First World War. To him, it was clear that workers were only sacrificial victims on the altar of rampant capitalism. He would have been extremely distressed had he lived to hear of the rivers of blood which were shed on the Western front during the war. He was spared that by dying in 1915 long before the meat grinder battles which were uselessly fought at Verdun, the Somme, Pachendale and indeed, other battle fields.

Starmer’s antecedents are by no means as humble as Hardie’s but without the foundation for social welfare laid by people like Hardie, the trajectory of Starmer’s life and career would have been much lower than they have been. His parents came from the massive British underclass working solidly at some lowly manufacturing or service job into which their children would have been absorbed in their turn. Starmer escaped this trap which was laid in his path by centuries of tradition when he passed his eleven plus examination and was admitted into a grammar school from where he acquired a solid education which ended at Oxford from where he finished his studies after his first class Law degree from the University of Leeds. His background is therefore quite similar to other post-war British Prime Ministers starting with Ted Heath in the seventies.

Perhaps the most memorable member of this group has been Margaret Thatcher, the green grocer’s daughter who through grit and determination, not to talk of sheer bloody mindedness, hacked her way through to the office of the British Prime Minister, the first female to accomplish this feat.

Following the colour of her political career it was obvious that Thatcher’s constituency did not include the majority underclass from which she herself had risen so spectacularly. As far as she was concerned, anyone with the determination to succeed could do so, prevailing circumstances notwithstanding. Anyone who did not succeed in life had no-one else to blame but themselves. All you needed to get on in life was a job and if you had no job, it was your duty to find one whichever way you could. Her father may have been self employed but her circumstances were no better or worse than they were for Starmer who also climbed out of the underclass in the same way that she did; by the way of the kind of education she received, not because she was born on the right side of the track but because she won a big prize in the genetic lottery which left her with the ability to process school lessons and pass examinations with greater ease than most of her contemporaries. Like Starmer, she was the first in her family to go to a university but whilst Starmer stayed more or less true to his working class roots, Thatcher turned away completely from the class within which she was raised as soon as she had acquired the required polish to do so. She became an archetypical Tory even if she would not have been comfortable in their company at least at the beginning of her political career. But she had a clear penchant for seizing the tide whenever it arose and riding the tide to eventual success. When Heath lost the 1974 election, she sensed his vulnerability and exploited it maximally, riding that tide to become the first female party leader in Britain.

As the leader of Opposition, Thatcher sensed the growing frustration of the country with the antics of the Labour unions and set herself up as the hammer of the unionists and in doing so, convinced majority of voters that she was capable of curbing the powers of the unions and being able to do so, move the country forward. By the end of her first term in office however, it was apparent that her honeymoon with Britons was over and their association was soon to be dissolved. Then again, a saving tide swelled up thousands of miles in the South Atlantic where the Argentine ruling junta annexed a group of islands which the British called Falklands and the Argentines referred to as Malvinas. Sensing an opportunity and the rising of another helpful tide, Thatcher sent an expeditionary force halfway round the world to chase the Argentines off the islands which had been colonised by less than a few hundred sheep farmers. This war which in reality registered nothing on the Richter scale of war acted to rally the country behind Thatcher and riding on the wave of popularity created, the Conservatives were returned to power at the next elections. Thatcher interpreted this to mean an endorsement of her union bashing policy. The immediate result of this was the long running battle with the coal miners led by Arthur Scargill. When the smoke cleared, the miners had lost the war and thousands of them lost their jobs and a way of life was brought to an abrupt end. Thatcher’s effect on the polity was electrifying as she controlled the economy as no Prime Minister had done before or since. She was one of the first disciples of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of monetary economics which spread the belief that money should not remain in government hands but must be stuffed in the private pockets of those with proven capacity to make money. According to the boys from Chicago, there was nothing in economics which was beyond the capacity of market forces to accomplish or at least brought under control.

Under Thatcher, people were encouraged or even more than that, exhorted in high blown language to make money and of course spend it whichever way they wanted. In Thatcher’s Britain, it was a case of privatisation gone mad as all previously nationalised companies including those involved in the mining and steel making industries were put up for sale to whoever had the wherewithal to buy them. People were given the option to buy council houses and millionaires were being created as fast as people were being pushed into poverty on the other end of the economic scale. Actually, I paid a couple of visits to Thatcher country at the height of her pomp and glory and came away with the feeling that palpable hunger was stalking the high streets of Britain even as no less palpable wealth was being flaunted by the yuppies, so called young upwardly mobile young persons who had been enriched by Thatchernomics. All those outside looking into Britain could see that the bubble created had no chance of achieving anything close to longevity and so it proved. Part of Thatchernomics dictated the lowering of income tax, a policy which suited the yuppies to the ground at the expense of people who had little disposable income. The loss of government income had to be made up through personal taxes. Matters came to a head with the introduction of the poll tax which was so unpopular that other Tories saw it as a stumbling block to vote gathering. They had no choice but to rebel against their leader. It fell to Geoffrey Howe, the Foreign Minister and deputy to the Prime Minister to deliver the speech in parliament which parodied the words of Oliver Cromwell who centuries earlier had dismissed parliament with the words, ‘in God’s name, go’. The Prime Minister had been told to go and Margie had to go but not before having held on to power for no less than eleven years, longer than anyone in British history, to be succeeded by John Major as unlikely a successor as anyone could be.

Read Also: The British vote for change (II)

John Major had a most interesting background for a politician, not to talk of member of the Conservative Party. His father was at least for part of his life a music performer and he was so unimpressed with school that he left as soon as he possibly could without breaking the law at an age just short of sixteen years with three O level subjects to his credit. Thereafter he tried his hands at several jobs but found none that was suitable for a boy of his rather limited academic qualifications. It was said that he could not even get a job as a bus conductor on account of his height. Eventually, he settled for being articled in the field of insurance and ended up in the employ of Standard Bank which brought him all the way to Standard Bank in Jos. He worked in Nigeria for a few months before he was involved in a serious motor accident which led to his being transferred back home to Britain for the treatment of his injuries.

As expected, one of his first acts in government was to repeal the poll tax law which had been the undoing of his predecessor in office. After all the excitement of the Thatcher years, Major tried to reduce the heat in the polity especially since Labour Party had a comfortable lead in the polls. To the surprise of many, including Major himself, the Conservatives won a clear majority over the Labour Party under the leadership of Neil Kinnock in the general election following the departure of Margaret Thatcher. Eventually, in 1997 the Labour Party now led by Tony Blair won the general election to bring an end to the eighteen year long rule of the Conservative Party.

To be continued.

August 4, 2024
The British vote for change (II)

The first part of this series closed with the Keirs; Hardie, not to be confused with the famous Welsh writer Thomas Hardy as I did last week and Starmer. And, it is fitting that this continuation piece starts with Keir Hardie the acknowledged first leader and one of the founders of the British Labour Party. Incidentally, it is probably no coincidence that the current leader of the party is also called Keir because his parents were staunch, life long members of the Labour Party. It is unlikely that his parents had any premonition of his eventual destiny but giving this rare but iconic name to their child is strongly indicative of their strong commitment to an institution which has not only loomed large in their consciousness but has become part of long lived family tradition. It must be said however that there is no direct evidence to support the supposition that the current Prime Minister of Britain was named after Hardie but at least, it is romantic to think that he was.

The Labour Party was formed by necessity under rather inauspicious circumstances at the turn of the last century. This means that the party has been in the business of gathering votes for all of one hundred and twenty-four years. At the beginning, it had to depend on the help from the Liberal Party, the main opposition party in the British Parliament of the day, in order to gain some political relevance at a time when the Conservatives and the Liberals were the only parties standing. It was this alliance which allowed the Labour Party to enter Parliament in considerable number for the first time in the general election of 1910. It is perhaps necessary to point out that the party was not formed by men with deep pockets or those that have cast themselves in the mould of godfathers. On the contrary, it was financed by the contributions of men who earned only a few pennies from the dangerous work they did deep underground in coal mines or poorly lit factory floors. It was this money that was used to canvass for votes with which to send a few of them to parliament, there to plead their case before the world.

The pre-election pact between the two parties was mutually beneficial as it allowed them to inflict a crushing defeat on the Conservatives. Then as now, the Conservatives were reduced to a rump in parliament and the Liberal Party ruled the roost all throughout the period of the First World War, until 1926 when post-war situations forced the formation of a Labour minority government making it the first time that the Labour Party formed any type of government in Britain. The next time that the Labour Party formed a government was in 1945 in the immediate period after the Second World War when to the surprise of all political analysts, the Conservative Party of Winston Churchill was tufted out, to be replaced by a Labour government which was led by the principled Clement Atlee who had been Churchill’s unsung deputy during the Second World War. Why the Conservatives who were the most visible party during the war were rejected at the polls as soon as victory was secured has never been satisfactorily explained but that certainly was the way it was.

Looking back after all those many years it can be said that it was the Atlee government that laid the foundation for the modern welfare state that Britain is today. Perhaps the most talked about creation of the Atlee government was the National Health Service (NHS). For the first time in British history, healthcare was provided free of charge at the point of service. It has to be pointed out however that although service was free, it was only technically free as all taxable adults paid something towards making the service free for those who needed treatment for whatever ailed them. In other words, this was an elaborate, universal insurance scheme which was operated by the government. This is unlike what we have in Nigeria where services which are touted as free are only nominally so because nobody actually pays anything towards the provision of the services which various governments claim to provide free of charge. Here, the only thing provided free of charge is the announcement that such and such services are free. The funds necessary for the provision of such services are only conspicuous by their being withheld. The difficulties associated with free communal services are shown by the current state of the NHS. The first is that such schemes demand heavy taxation, especially of those who earn more money than others as you will find in Scandinavian countries where taxation has been used successfully as a means of social engineering which has eliminated extreme poverty at one end and fabulous wealth on the other. This left wing politics have helped to push or pull society towards the centre. It is becoming quite clear that in Britain today, the welfare system is in serious decline as even the much vaunted NHS is under great stress as it has always been under the Conservatives’ various governments but then, the Party of government in Britain has always been and perhaps, will always be the Conservatives with Labour only filling in at periods of interregnum.

Judged by any standard, the Atlee government could point to some solid achievements within Britain in the five years in which he was in power. Equally important were his accomplishments in foreign affairs. His efforts in restoring peace to a battered global community was commendable but his efforts within what became the British Commonwealth was even more so. Britain emerged from the war, more or less intact but with many strains just under the surface. The important question was what was to be done with the unwieldy British Empire which had spread right around the globe. There was India, the jewel in the crown of the Empire; there were also the white ruled autonomous countries such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, which wanted independence as well as many countries in Africa and the Caribbean in which agitation for independence had begun. It is to his credit that Atlee began the systematic dismantling of the British Empire with such speed that India had been partitioned to give the independent nations of Pakistan and India as early as 1947 and conditions for granting independence to many African countries. Given these successes, it is a wonder that within five years the Conservatives under Churchill were back in power and the chaos caused by the Suez crisis of 1956 not to talk of the awful mess created by the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya. The only explanation for the loss of power by Labour at that point is that in a class ridden society such as Britain, the only party that could be trusted by the working class electorate was the party of those who had acquired the status of the privileged. In other words, the Conservative Party.

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When I arrived in Britain in 1973, the Conservative government was in charge but only nominally so as various Labour unions were making life very uncomfortable for the government. The most powerful union in this regard was the miners union which called out its members on strike making the generation of power next to impossible. It was soon clear that the government had lost all authority to rule and a general election could no longer be avoided. When it came very early in the New Year however, all that was achieved was a hung parliament in which the so called Labour majority was less than the fingers on one hand. The Tory government of the time tried to cobble together a new government with the Liberals but failed, thereby returning power to the Labour Party under the wily Harold Wilson, professor of Economics and consummate politician who once pointed out that a week in politics is a long time. How true this observation is is pointed out by the current state of American politics. This time last week, Donald Trump was still hauling insults at Joe Biden his putative opponent for the November election for the White House. Suddenly, the picture has changed dramatically and he is now scrambling around assembling insults with which to welcome the new Democratic Party nominee, the refreshingly effervescent Kamala Harris. Ask Trump and he will readily confirm that a week is certainly a long time in politics.

1974 was a year of two elections in Britain as another election had to be called in October to decide once and for all, which party could be trusted with the reins of power. This time the Labour Party came away with a substantial majority.

Edward (Ted) Heath who had led the Conservative Party to a quite unexpected victory in 1969 at a time when Wilson was at the height of his powers was still the leader of his party but, having led his party to two electoral defeats, his hold on the party slackened to such an extent that his leadership position was challenged by a young Margaret Thatcher who had earlier been promoted to a cabinet position by none other than Ted Heath. Under normal circumstances that challenge would have been swatted aside with something approaching contemptuous ease but those times were not normal and the young challenger was still standing after the first round of the leadership contest. Reading the writing on the wall, Ted Heath withdrew from the field leaving it open to Margaret Thatcher who became the first female leader of a political party in Britain.

As things stood in Britain at the time, the uncommonly cerebral Shirley Williams of the Labour Party had been favoured to become not just the leader of her party but the first female Prime Minister of the country. As things turned out however, those honourable distinctions fell to Margaret Thatcher. Interestingly, both women had an effect on the trajectory of British politics in the last fifty years and will continue to influence the same for many years to come. Whilst Thatcher moved the country to the right, Williams made a great effort to drag the polity to the centre even as forces of the left struggled to promote a left wing ideology. All those forces are still fighting for dominance and many would argue that Keir Starmer has been successful so far because he has adroitly promoted a centrist interest in the face of the right wing forces promoted by the Conservative Party. The annihilation of the right in the just concluded elections suggest that right now, there is a great deal of comfort to be found in centre politics but only time will tell for how long Starmer will continue to resist the pull of the left.

Whilst Margaret Thatcher succeeded in pushing Britain to the right as Prime Minister, Shirley Williams succeeded in her design by leaving Labour Party to help form the Social Democratic Party. By the time Thatcher became Prime Minister in 1979, the Labour Party under the leadership of Michael Foot had drifted so far to the left that people were talking of frank socialism which Williams and other members of the Gang of Four, Roy Jenkins, John Owen and Will Rogers could not support. They were all leading members holding very important posts within the Labour Party but in the face of their conviction, they gave up their positions within the Labour Party to form the Social Democratic Party which has formed an alliance with the Liberal Party. The alliance won 72 seats in the last elections suggesting that they are no longer on the fringes of British politics, testament to the quality of the vision of the Gang of Four.

To be continued.

July 28, 2024