Category: Barometer

IT is a relief to literary connoisseurs that the art of insult is alive and well on planet earth. Not just the art of insult, for this appears ubiquitous and has really never disappeared, but the specific and specialized art of name-calling. A few columns in Nigeria, including this one, had tried to keep the art of insult alive, but it takes special skills to delve into name-calling, the kind that fits and acts like a homing pigeon. The British and Americans are remarkable for hurling insults and luxuriating in name-calling, but if recent phone taps in Nigeria are anything to go by, some highly placed Nigerians may be in hot pursuit of the Americans and English, and are determined not to play second fiddle.

Here is an example of the aptness and skilfulness with which the Americans indulge their talent, an example recently illustrated by United States (U.S.) President Donald Trump’s voluble and cantankerous lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and former US National Security Adviser (NSA) John Bolton. Both used to be friends, and had a healthy respect for each other. But what friendship had brought together, Mr Trump seems determined to put asunder. Mr Giuliani, according to some reports, had been unorthodoxly dragged into the Ukraine imbroglio by Mr Trump who sought a clever way to pressure that country into taking former US Vice President Joe Biden down a notch or two in the ongoing US presidential election campaigns.

The US reports further indicated that Mr Bolton was worried about Mr Giuliani’s irreverent and unethically enthusiastic involvement, leading him to confide in an aide that Mr Trump’s lawyer, who was also New York mayor during the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on US, was “a hand grenade who’s going to blow everyone up”. Well, Mr Giuliani had been called many things in his public life, but to be likened to a hand grenade was, to his delicate image, plumbing a new low. Bemused and angry, Mr Giuliani had retorted: “I’m very disappointed that his bitterness drives him to attack a friend falsely and in a very personal way. It’s really ironic that John Bolton is calling anyone else a hand grenade. When John is described by many as an atomic bomb.”

Now, between a hand grenade and an atom bomb, is it really possible to settle the precedence? Perhaps it depends on whose side you are. For many Trumpian enthusiasts, Mr Bolton, who was cajoled out of Mr Trump’s cabinet after a little over a year of service, was the villain. Whatever he says, according to them, should be taken with a pinch of salt. Indeed, for falling out of favour with Mr Trump, Mr Bolton should be disbelieved, they said. But for the increasingly vociferous anti-Trump crowd, many of whom have made up their minds never to trust or like the American president, Mr Giuliani is an unmitigated, self-serving and ingratiating scoundrel.

As it has turned out, looking at recent Nigerian scenes, this exciting and boisterous African country is prepared to duel with the Americans in name-calling. A few months ago, by some incredible feat of phone tapping inspired by an unknown group or agency, a member of the cabal believed to have the ear of President Muhammadu Buhari was overheard gleefully describing someone very close to the president as “that suicide bomber from Yola”. That unflattering statement was allegedly made amidst raucous laughter, the kind novelists would describe as cynical and sarcastic. Whether true or not, or whether the phone tapping that unearthed that exquisite piece of Nigerian name-calling was ethical or not, it is now clear that Nigeria does not lack in that excruciating and excoriating department.

As democracy gets more entrenched, more insult and name-calling artists will be exposed. Describing someone, probably a woman, as a ‘suicide bomber’ takes some sort of inventiveness that is deep, uncommon and impressive. More expletives made with increasingly ferocious acerbity will be issuing forth from Nigeria as the years go by, as politics becomes more complicated and competitive, and as the legal and cultural strictures that constrain the rhetoricians and connoisseurs of insults dissipate. Compared with the rest of the world that has for centuries perfected the art of insult, particularly of the political variety, Nigerian insult artists will not be a pushover. The future is indeed pregnant with deft, ingenious use of language.

PRESIDENT Muhammadu Buhari once again indulged his fascination with philosophy and medicine by inappropriately linking weight loss with hard work. On Tuesday, while presenting the 2020 Appropriation Bill before a joint session of the National Assembly, the president apologised for his strained voice, an indication of the cold he was nursing, but suggested that it also meant he had worked hard to get the budget ready for presentation. Said he: “I will start by asking you to pardon my voice. As you can hear, I have a cold as a result of working hard to meet your (budget presentation) deadline.”

Last May, asked by reporters whether Nigerians should expect a change of strategy in the fight against insecurity, especially kidnapping, he had responded: “You know, I have just seen the IG, he is… I think he is losing weight; so, I think he is working very hard.” That presidential correlation is beguilingly simple, even though his motivation and fascination are difficult to understand. Why he keeps making the correlation, despite fierce criticism, may suggest that he was either oblivious of the criticism that followed his earlier conclusion suggesting a link between weight loss and hard work or he is too enamoured of his quaint logic to be deterred from voicing that fallacy a second time.

But the president is neither a medical practitioner to be able to establish a physiological link between hard work and lean weight nor a philosopher to prove the practical value of weight loss. Nor, in fact, did the president prove by any stretch that the so-called hard work he keeps talking about, whether by the country’s police boss or his distinguished self, also implied efficiency or guaranteed a positive outcome. At any rate, he seems to think the correlation exists. That correlation may be simplistic and erroneous; there is, however, no dissuading him from suggesting it, no, not by a mile.

THE clearest example of how badly led Nigeria is may be found in the disagreement over minimum wage. After a protracted negotiation, including at least one major strike, President Muhammadu Buhari finally signed the minimum wage bill into law in April, 2019. The federal government started to pay the new wage to workers on Grade Levels 1-6 in August, with a promise to pay the arrears sometime later. Most states have not started to pay the new wage increase because of some outstanding issues, thereby ensuring that peace between the unions and the governments remains elusive. The new minimum wage is about N30,000, up from about N18,500.

For the past few months, resolving the bone of contention between the unions and the federal and state governments have been difficult. Indeed, the main dispute centres on how to prorate the wage increase for workers on levels 7-17, with the government offering 11 percent for levels 7-14, and 6.5 percent for levels 15-17. On their own, the governors are offering nine percent as against the labour unions’ demand of between 24 percent and 29 percent. It is not clear how the disagreement would be resolved, but the unions have threatened to go on strike mid-October. However, it is a puzzle why Nigerian leaders are not fazed by decades of ding-dong over wages, much of the confusion and stasis caused by the warped interpretation and implementation of federalism.

The wage problem, in this case uncompetitive minimum wage that cannot sustain the average and most conservative family, fuels Nigeria’s corruption cancer. It was scandalous that it took years of industrial disputes to force the hand of the government to negotiate a new wage structure. That should have been done much earlier. It was not possible for a family to survive on N18,500; it still is not possible for the average family to live on N30,000. They must, therefore, seek ingenious ways of augmenting their family income, much of that augmentation coming at the expense of the country and work ethics. Corruption has not only ossified, it has festered badly from year to year, growing more pernicious and permeating every strata and sector of national life.

Labour unions insist that with prudent management of resources and less corruption, the government should be able to pay living wage. But the problem is actually much more complex. Nigeria is a country of about 200 million people, grappling with a population growth rate in excess of its economic growth rate. In the next three decades or so, Nigeria is projected to be among the three most populous countries in the world. Not only has the country failed to check that indefensible population growth, it has also appallingly failed to modernise its economy, and indeed, for reasons that are well known, cannot modernise that burdened and shackled economy. Paying living wage obviously goes beyond financial prudence of federal and state governments.

One of the major factors constraining the payment of a living wage and triggering the modernisation of the economy is the iniquitous political arrangement embraced by the country. Nigeria is not managed properly nor can it be, for its leaders have chosen to run a unitary system that is inimical to its peace and stability, a system which for decades has been configured to destabilise the polity and engender conflict. To worsen the problem, the country has expanded its administration structure so ungainly that it has become unduly large and inefficient. With a 36-state structure, it has become a gross and rapacious ogre getting worse virtually every few years. It may yet implode going by a youth population which the system has disadvantaged, ignored and alienated.

Rather than tackle the country’s wage and economic problem from the roots by restructuring the system, running a tight and efficient administration, and unleashing the creative potentials of its people in consonance with their cultural and political peculiarities, the governments that have ruled Nigeria since independence have closed up the system and accentuated a structure designed to leech on its component parts and deliver low output, high cost of living, and low wages. The current structure will not only fail to work, it will get worse until it explodes. Of course the labour unions are not so politically savvy as to campaign for political changes that would deliver a higher standard of living, lest they be accused of being a tool of vested political interests. And because there is no incentive to fight for the restructuring of the country, the present system will be sustained until it collapses. When that happens, it will be too late to put the clumsy structure together without fully dismantling it. That day is not too far away, despite all the rosy pictures the government and the people are painting.

The present structure will not deliver high wages or even living wage. It is not possible. The government and the unions are chasing shadows and ignoring the fundamentals. Corruption will continue to fester, and the people will prey on one another, just as the government and public officials will also prey on the people and the country. No one is sure that an agreement will be finally cobbled together between the government and unions before the mid-October strike date. But even when that is done, no one is sure that the states will be able to pay. If they could not pay the former atrocious minimum wage, and little has changed, what gives anybody the impression that they will be able to pay whatever new wage structure is agreed upon?

In the heat of the Afrophobia masterminded by South Africans against the citizens of many African countries, including Nigerians living in that country, Air Peace airline commendably offered to and actually evacuated distressed and fearful Nigerians back to Nigeria.

Stories and pictures of cornered and anxious and brutalised Nigerians had received wide circulation, making the Air Peace offer to be both meaningful and timely.

What surprised many Nigerians is that their government, which possessed the means to organise such an evacuation, merely sat on its hands and procrastinated. Other than feebly whine about the killing of Nigerians in South Africa and threaten diplomatic retaliation, the Nigerian government left the initiative to Air Peace.

Nigerians must by now be used to their government failing to defend them when the need arises. No amount of criticism will make the government behave otherwise, for in the past few years they have embraced the negative and extenuating narrative that suggests that some Nigerians living abroad are crooks.

Not too long ago, the Chief of Army Staff, Lt.-Gen. Tukur Buratai controversially questioned the commitment of his troops to the Boko Haram war. He tried to walk back his statement once it became obvious that it rubbed off badly on many people, including soldiers themselves. But after a while, as is often the case in such matters, the controversy petered out into nothingness.

Now critics are again bemused by the army chief’s almost despondent conclusion about the nature and course of the same vexatious Boko Haram war, a war that has now seemed to addle the wits of Nigeria’s political and military leaders. He may have done fairly well as an army chief, but too often he correspondingly stirs the hornet’s nest.

Speaking during a seminar inflammatorily entitled “Countering insurgency and violent extremism in Nigeria through spiritual warfare”, Gen Buratai suggested that in addition to the physical war being prosecuted by the military for all to see, it was also time to add into the mix the unseen dimension of spiritual war in order to counter the orthodoxies and ideologies of the insurgents.

Had his speech not been read by his representative, the Army’s chief of administration, Maj. Gen Sani Yusuf, it would have been difficult to accept that Gen Buratai vented his frustrations so numbingly. It is clear that he thinks there is a spiritual dimension to the insurgency, one needing the prayerful involvement of Christian and Islamic clerics in and outside the military.

Here is how he put it, as quoted by a few media organisations: “It is easier to defeat Boko Haram and ISWAP terrorists than their ideology because, while we degrade the terrorists and their havens, the narrative of the ideology grows the group. Therefore, communities, families, and groups should join in the fight and narratives to reject and prevent the ideologies of the terrorists and extremist groups. Religious bodies and organisations in particular who interface regularly with the grassroots should be at the forefront of this spiritual battle and fashion out ways of stepping up their roles. The fight against terrorism, Boko Haram and ISWAP, as well as other security threats, cannot be left to the troops in the battle field alone.”

Admitting that he was not advocating a total surrender of the war to prayer warriors alone, he continued: “Yes, we will do our duties, but the need to tackle groups through spiritual warfare and re-orientating the followers against the ideology is also a necessity. It is a well-known fact that terrorism and terrorist groups cannot be totally eliminated by mainly military actions. This means focusing our efforts on the underlying narratives through ideologies that are employed by these terrorists to lure innocent citizens to their fold. The need to defeat the ideologies of Boko Haram and ISWAP is based on the awareness that it is the ideologies that enhance their resources and help to recruit new fighters to their fold and as such; kill their ideology and the terrorist movement withers and dies.”

If Gen Buratai had subsumed his suggestion under the military’s psychological operations (PsyOps), without seeming to evoke Nigeria’s obsession with religious issues and explanations even in the glaring face of physical realities, his statement and conclusions would have been pardonable. So he wants sermons, counselling and prayers to combat Boko Haram ideology. That tactic is, however, very unlikely to succeed. On the surface, it is a popular notion that spiritual laws influence physical laws, and what is concluded in the spiritual realm manifests later in the physical realm. But armies all over the world exclude spiritual matters in their battle plans. Soldiers pray, and even armies and nations pray, but they do not include that subject in their battle plans, let alone hope it would influence or explain victory or defeat.

Nigeria needs a mixture of military and political inputs to eradicate extremism of any kind. But when a country itself promotes non-secular ways above secular culture, and obsesses and fawns over religion in the embarrassing and obsequious manner the Nigerian government periodically does — sometimes even deploying state resources in a manner that appears undisguisedly theocratic — it is but a stone’s throw from extremism.

Gen Buratai wants spiritual warfare? Has he and his men, not to talk of political leaders, pondered what the root causes of Boko Haram are? Have they at any time publicly enunciated these reasons, and matched them with the appropriate panaceas? Regardless of what the spiritualists tell the general and his troops, Boko Haram was caused essentially by a mix of social, political and economic reasons: poverty, inequality, injustice, foolish mix of religion and politics, as is being done in many states in the North, and short-sighted policies etc. These factors have not been addressed, and there does not seem to be any plan to address them. Even if the Boko Haram war were to end completely today, another revolt would break out sooner or later, given the existence of the predisposing factors that birthed the revolt,.

It does not help the image of the military, nor of Gen Buratai himself, that military officers now seem beguiled by non-physical means of ending the Boko Haram war. They are in effect admitting that the insurgency has lumbered into a stalemate laced with exotic labels like “degraded”, “technically defeated”, and other funny terms that jar against the reality on the ground. By all means let Gen Buratai and his men and spiritual supporters pray and engage in spiritual warfare as much as they desire, but let them leave these matters strictly out of public domain and their battle plans. They have a war to fight; rather than hastily declare victory, as they have done, or indirectly explain why there is a stalemate, as they are tempted to do, let them revisit their tactics, persuade the government to back them, and let them stop at nothing to end the war. But they must never lose sight of why the war began in the first place. If these reasons are not tackled, the war will not effectively end.