The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sunday

  • An ungrateful nation?

    An ungrateful nation?

    • Whether Frank Kokori was abandoned in his hour of need, or didn’t have adequate help; none was good enough.

    Former general secretary of the Nigeria Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers (NUPENG), Chief Frank Kokori, died on December 7, barely a month after he complained of abandonment in a ‘third class’ hospital in Warri, Delta State, where he had been admitted over kidney-related ailment. Kokori, one of the fighters for the nation’s freedom from the claws of military rule, was so bitter on his sick bed because never in his imagination could he have envisaged a situation where such abandonment would be his lot.

    The man sent a save our soul (SOS) message to Nigerians and the government to assist towards paying his hospital bills.

    Anyone who carefully analysed his message at the press briefing would know he was no longer coherent and was indeed getting nearer to his Creator. “I have something to tell this country, please. Please, do your best. Tell them that I can pay any amount, but let them switch on the AC for me because I am dying. The AC went off. Please do your best. Flash it. I can come alive again but I just want the world to know that if I survive, I will shame the leaders of this country.” Kokori said he was dying and at the same time said he would pay and things like that.

    If it was true that Kokori was abandoned in his most critical moments, then our so-called champions of democracy must be ashamed that they looked the other side as the man pinned away. The reactionaries may be rejoicing that one of their enemies is gone; not so the progressives because every gain for the reactionaries should be a loss to the progressives properly so-called.

    Nigeria may have failed Kokori and other older citizens, but the progressives ought to have done everything to make him live. If he still died after all said and done, it shall be said of them that they tried their best. Just that that best was not good enough.

    In saner climes, older citizens are government property. Governments support them with virtually everything they need to reduce the burden of old age on them. Not so here. People who diligently served the country in their prime are made to suffer when they can no longer fend for themselves, on interminable pension queues, whereas the leaders who worked for only a few years in public offices ensure they pay themselves off as soon as it is clear they are getting out of political office.

    I have always said it that part of why we have made little progress since the return to civil rule is because many of those that took over from the soldiers that we forced to retreat to their barracks from the political scene in 1999 never lifted a finger for democracy during the struggle. I have had cause to name some of them before, including those of them in the National Assembly, past and present. Even presidents. After fighting the soldiers to standstill, the civil society and other non-governmental organisations that actively participated in the struggle simply left the scene for all manner of characters to hijack power. The result is where we are today. I say where we are because I hate this idea of some people saying where we find ourselves. We did not just find ourselves in this state of  despondency, we are the very architects of it.

    If truly those in a position to do something about Kokori’s fate while it mattered did nothing, then we would be reinforcing the belief in some quarters that Nigeria is not worth dying for. And I am yet to see any country where this is the philosophy or attitude, that attained greatness.

    Countries that are great today are great largely because of the good deeds of their heroes past (to paraphrase our national anthem). From Great Britain to France, Russia, Germany, name it. Some people sacrificed at one time or the other to make them great. And there is no country that is not blessed with such people; just that the way we treat our own heroes is discouraging. That is why you can hardly see anybody that sees Nigeria as worth dying for. As a matter of fact, that is the prevalent expression here: Nigeria is not worth dying for. It is the little acts of compassion that we show to people like Kokori, the little gratitude that we extend to them while they are alive that would serve as a source of encouragement to others who want to follow their footsteps. But when we leave such people to their own device when they need help, we are invariably reinforcing the belief that it does not pay to be good to one’s fatherland.

    Come to think of it; Kokori had the option of selling out instead of taking the grave risks that he took, all in a bid to make Nigeria great. I was reading an interview that he granted sometime ago where he said he was number two, after Bashorun M.K.O. Abiola (winner of the June 12, 1993 presidential election), on the list of those that the late despot, General Sani Abacha, planned to eliminate. It couldn’t have been a lie. Those of us that were around during the June 12 struggle knew that Kokori should, in fact, be the number one on that list but for the fact that Abiola was the symbol of the struggle. If Abiola was eliminated, then there would be nothing for Kokori and others involved in the struggle to continue to agitate for. Which I think was what eventually happened.

    Kokori occupied a strategic position in the country as NUPENG’s general secretary and he made the best use of it in Nigeria’s interest. The Cable summarised it all: “Obituary: Frank Kokori, the ex-union leader who ground Nigeria to halt during June 12 struggle”. He ground Nigeria for good reasons.

    Whenever Kokori’s NUPENG sneezed during the struggle, the military dictators shivered. Kokori was locked up for about four years for his several successful strike actions that always crippled the nation. He realised the power of the oil sector and exploited it to the fullest in support of the struggle. Tinubu spoke of the man in a 1998 interview thus: “…Our own situation was even much better than him (pointing to Kokori) who we are here to pay tribute to today. A man (detained) in a dingy, six-by-six cell, blindfolded, not with cloth but there was no daylight in the prison; he was tortured mentally, physically and emotionally. Ours was only restricted to mental torture…”.

    Read Also: I remember Frank Kokori

    When some of us are recounting our experiences during the June 12 struggle to the younger generation, they hardly believe the stories. True, most of what happened was incredible. We would have reasoned like them if we were not witnesses to what happened in that dark era of the country’s history.

     As editor of ‘The Punch’ newspaper at some point in that era, I know what we went through in the hands, first of General Ibrahim Babangida, and later, General Sani Abacha. The paper, because of its uncompromising anti-military rule stance suffered proscription and de-proscription several times in the hands of both dictators. At a time we were proscribed (I think) for about 14 or so consecutive months! That was how callous Babangida and Abacha were, not in advancement of Nigeria’s cause but in their self-perpetuation bids. They did not care that families were by those proscriptions denied their means of livelihood. I remember how those of us who were lucky to be getting salaries throughout the periods shared our salaries with the other members of the staff that were suffering vicarious liability with us (editors) that were responsible for publications that the dictators considered distasteful.

    Indeed, if Kokori was number two on Abacha’s wanted list, ‘The Punch’ must have been its number one newspaper in that category. If the paper is standing tall and smiling to the bank ‘stress-free’ and ‘without borrowing a dime’ to perform the wonders it has performed, especially in the last two decades or so today, to borrow Bishop David Oyedepo’s words, it is because it has more than paid its dues.

     Some of these experiences are due for release to the public in a book, ‘Our Punch years’, to be launched on Wednesday, December 20 at NECA House, Plot A2, Hakeem Balogun Street, Alausa, Ikeja, Lagos.

    Be that as it may, Kokori is gone and whatever had been done or undone about him can no longer be changed. They remain indelible. But then, the only legacy we owe him and others who put their lives on the line for us to have the civil rule that we have is to ensure they did not die in vain. I can only imagine what would have been going on in his mind when he was on admission in the hospital before his death. He could not have believed that it was for real that he could not get the kind of priority attention that he deserved when he needed it most.

    Kokori was obviously not happy with NUPENG too: “I’ve called on NUPENG that this is what they’ve done to their leaders. That NUPENG could not even take care of me. It’s sad. God bless everybody,” he said. Ha!

    Today’s NUPENG leaders must do some soul-searching on the matter. Did they handle it well? Could it have been better handled? This is important because no one knows tomorrow. Years back when Arakunrin Rotimi Akeredolu was criticising the then ailing President Umaru Yar’Adua for not transmitting power to his deputy when he was away on medical treatment for months, Akeredolu did not realise that he would be in Yar’Adua’s shoes a few years later. Akeredolu himself has been down for several months and did not transmit power to his deputy until he was forced to do so. Such is life. My people will say, ‘atori la’ye, to ba fi siwaju, a tun fi seyin’ (the world is a cane; which swings back and forth). Or, better translated, what goes round comes around.

    The progressives properly so-called should immortalise one of their own.

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

    Eleventh hour, eleventh day, eleventh month (II)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Japa doctors: avoiding rash solutions

    Japa doctors: avoiding rash solutions

    The disruptive effects of Nigerian doctors and health workers migrating to greener pastures may lead the government to consider radical but perhaps counterproductive measures to stem the outflow. The temptation to seek extralegal and unconstitutional solutions should be resisted, notwithstanding the magnitude of the problem. So far, for instance, and by some estimates, over 12,000 Nigerian doctors are believed to have been licenced to practice in the United Kingdom. The figures were not always dire. From a low estimate of about two or three hundred doctors migrating abroad yearly, the estimate has soared to some 2,000 annually. It has led to disruptions on surgical waiting lists, closure of wards due to lack of personnel, unbearable pressures on health workers who stayed behind, and retardation of progress in healthcare delivery.

    As part of the solutions, there are indications that medical training institutions may be encouraged to expand admission quotas. But given the surging demand for healthcare workers in parts of the world, it is unlikely that Nigeria, with its rather retrogressive approach to sustaining and retaining doctors and nurses in its hospitals, will benefit from that expansion. There have also been some attempts to legislate the retention of healthcare workers by bonding them during training to include mandatory three or five years of service before being eligible for migration. This measure would be shortsighted, unconstitutional and discriminatory. Apart from worsening the migration of health workers by its insular economic and social policies, the Muahammadu Buhari presidency also attempted retrogressive and divisive measures to stem the flow of doctors and nurses abroad.

    Nigeria cannot wish the crisis away. So far, the Bola Tinubu administration has not attempted to directly grapple with the worsening crisis. It met a broken economy and to all intents and purposes, an empty and debt-ridden treasury. Its objective is to mend the economy, restore sanity to the country’s finances, and sensibly prioritise the problems. Ranking the crisis low is understandable. Yet, the problem cannot wait; and the longer the disease is left unattended, the greater the danger of it metastasizing. In some forms, the current administration must without delay attempt to restore order in the healthcare sector. But in finding a solution, or solutions, it must avoid the mistakes of its predecessors who either foolishly ignored the problem preferring it to resolve itself, which it didn’t because it couldn’t, or worsened it by administering conceited and heavy-handed measures such as splitting the unions in the healthcare sector.

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    The new administration must understand that the problem is not foreign countries poaching Nigeria’s health workers. Doctors and nurses cannot be singled out for discrimination when they seek greener pastures. And as desirable as expanding the training of healthcare workers is, this will make only a little dent on the crisis, and certainly not in the short run. If the administration is really as bothered as the rest of the country is, it must look for the low hanging fruits of enhanced pay and allowances, which it has been reluctant to pay on account of the distressed economy, while it must staff and equip the hospitals to a reasonable degree. This will mean declaring an emergency in the sector. Retaining the current regimen is nothing but an invitation to disaster. The administration should, therefore, urgently set up a committee to look at the problem with a view to suggesting realistic and manageable solutions. The short-term solutions will stretch the system a little beyond what the administration expects, but it really has no choice. The problem cannot wait.

    However, it is not only health workers that are migrating in droves, university teachers are also migrating with such intensity and severity that it qualifies for a veritable brain drain approximating a tragedy. The past administration mismanaged the university crisis that engulfed the nation in the closing months of 2022. The new administration has made some token concessions to the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) by offering to pay four months withheld salaries out of eight months impounded by the Buhari administration. The offer was condescending. If the Tinubu administration understands the problem as comprehensively as its election manifesto pretends, paying all the withheld salaries, maybe in tranches, is non-negotiable. More, the payment should be included in a package of panaceas to revivify tertiary education, stamp out strikes, and institute innovative ways of funding higher education and research and development. Government spokespersons have not given any indication that the administration has a grasp of the fundamentals and scope of the problem, let alone the far-reaching solutions the crisis calls for. The past administration broke up the unions, believing that hurting them and depriving them of unity would quench the desire for strikes. Balkanising the unions is meaningless when the issues predisposing the unions to strike have been left unattended.

    Neither the healthcare crisis nor the tertiary education imbroglio can wait for order to be restored in the country’s finances. The Tinubu administration must take meaningful and steady steps to address the crises and forge understanding and build confidence among stakeholders. The crises can no longer be ignored or left in abeyance. The time to act is now, and the action must be sensible, restrained, comprehensive and impactful.

  • Army’s error drone strike

    Army’s error drone strike

    The challenge before the Bola Tinubu administration in respect of the error drone strikes in Kaduna last Sunday is how to strike a balance between pacifying angry victims and their families and sustaining the morale and fighting spirit of Nigeria’s overstretched military in the war against bandits and terrorists. The Nigerian Army accepted responsibility for the drone attacks on Tudun Biri village in Igabi local government area of Kaduna State which left 86 people dead and 75 injured. It has instituted a probe and pledged to re-appraise its rules of engagement and improve on them. The federal government is also rightly instituting a probe. Neither probe is likely, ultimately, to recommend prosecution as some commentators have advocated and despite initial promise to punish erring soldiers. Investigations, not rhetoric, should determine what should be done.

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    In their preliminary assessment, the Army indicated where it thought the error came from: inaccurate intelligence. It has promised to improve significantly on its war tactics. But whether the country likes it or not, this mishap will probably make the military more cautious than it has been. Whether that caution would prove harmful or not to the anti-terror war remains to be seen. The error strike and the massive backlash it elicited will, however, unfortunately slow the hands of the military and strengthen the hands of terrorists in wreaking havoc. But if the anti-terror war is not to flag, the federal and state governments must intensify efforts to enable accurate intelligence gathering, especially in terrains like Igabi LGA where bandits had tended to roam fairly freely. It is not an easy task. But that balance must be found.

    The military will undoubtedly review its operations, which may lead to some reshuffling and movements in the ranks, and the federal government will deal with the issues of compensation and community rebuilding. The Igabi bombing is of course not the first time mistakes will be made, and despite hoping it will be the last, there is no guarantee it will be the last. The unsavoury and troubling fact is that no military in the world has yet found the formula to make collateral damage nonexistent.   

  • The Behemoth Stalled: Reimagining and repositioning university education in Nigeria

    The Behemoth Stalled: Reimagining and repositioning university education in Nigeria

    As a life-long subscriber to the ancient philosophy of the Stoics, I have never believed in self-gratification or self-commemoration. Whatever comes my way I take and whatever does not, I ignore.

      Individuals may strive for excellence but what builds great societies and nations are collective excellence and national distinctions. This is why societies peopled by wild and untamed egos always come a sad cropper when in competition with more disciplined and self-regulating communities. The greatest capacity of genius is the capacity to mask genius. 

    Nevertheless, there is curious convergence of national destiny and individual trajectory about the events that have brought me standing before you this morning that is a tad short of the miraculous and which cannot be ignored. There is a seamless symmetry and a perfect synchrony about the way the events unfolded that is absolutely confounding and which points at the possibility of humanity itself being nothing but mere pawns at the mercy of some Higher Order.

      Let me put it this way. Death has not been kind to many of my teachers in this great institution. Many of the great mentors who shaped the destiny of this illustrious institution with their academic sophistication and cutting edge intellect across various disciplines have since joined their maker. So many of my friends, acolytes and colleagues have disappeared, never to be seen again. Had this been a less brutal and more caring society, a few of them might have been here with us this morning.

      I begin this convocation lecture by paying tributes to these avatars whose contributions to the development of learning and culture in this nation will be better appreciated by future generations. I do not intend to bore you. I have been told that there is always a correlation between the decline of a society and the decline of attention span. So let us cut quickly to the chase.

      The Stalled Behemoth

    From the title of this convocation lecture, we can isolate three contending imageries that capture the current circumstances of the university system in Nigeria. A stalled behemoth evokes the images of a massive sea mammal trapped by adverse developments in the depth of the ocean, probing and thrashing in different directions but still unable to move forward or break through the labyrinth of oceanic adversities.

       But we must remember that this mammoth creature is not dead and is still very much alive. If it does not do something foolish or foolhardy, there is every possibility that it will be seaworthy again once it is able to figure out what has overwhelmed and trapped it in the icy shackles of the deep sea.

      The other two images, re-imagining and repositioning, are redemptive tropes and images of regeneration which speak to how the university system can refashion itself once it is able to free itself from the multi-dimensional debris which is at once cultural, colonial and epistemological.

      The fauna of failure can sometimes be located in the seeds of success. This is the paradox of human development. Even the great universities in other parts of the world that we sometimes look up to in awe and admiration did not crash on the global stage fully rehearsed. There was a lot of false dawns, stumbling, false cues and aborted dreams.

     Consequent upon this evaluation, no history of this great university can proceed without first paying tributes to its visionary builders. The founders of this university were great dreamers, visionary architects who dared nature and human possibility. Hewn out of the same pristine forest from where Oduduwa was said to have first gathered his disparate people together in a federal enterprise, the university was intended to make a statement about the developmental possibilities of the Black race.

       And it did. All over the world, this university is justly celebrated for its stunning landscape, its impressive architecture and majestic presence. It is what the Yoruba themselves call “a ri ma le lo” or something that arrests your attention on sighting. It is a pity that the sundry coalition of Yoruba talents which put all this together in the first progressive coalition of Yoruba people after the civil wars of the nineteenth century could not be sustained. That was perhaps inevitable.

      There were three things the great pioneers of this university put in place which set it on the path of becoming a world class institution. First, they adopted a policy of admitting only the best and the brightest irrespective of ethnic origin, religion or region. And they stuck to their guns no matter whose ox was gored. This was at a time others took to ethnic sourcing and religious recruitment.

      This policy was to provide a platform for elite bonding which would have served Nigeria well as post-independence contradictions and the fissiparous tendencies of a multi-ethnic nation took a firm grip of the polity. Decades later, the fruits of this nationalistic visionary policy became visible. There is no national institution, organization, multinational corporations both at home and abroad where you will not find an Ife product. Speaking the same language at that level makes social interaction much easier.

     The second policy pertains to the development of human capital. The Ife visionary pioneers put in place the best staff development programme that money could buy. All newly recruited members of staff were encouraged to go for the highest educational attainment possible in their fields. Internships were arranged abroad for those who needed international exposure in their various disciplines. I was a beneficiary of this scheme, having been sent to Sheffield and Buffalo for further training.

      It was not a question of free lunch or paid holiday abroad. The scheme was subjected to rigorous and exhaustive monitoring and constant evaluation at the highest level. A friend of mine who had made the highest grade in his class and had applied to be trained in bookshop management got the surprise of his life when he was ushered to the austere presence of the then Vice Chancellor, Professor H.A Oluwasanmi and  bluntly told to forget it.

      He would be going to one of the best universities in the world in his field of specialization instead. He later became one of the celebrated professors in the English Language Department until he relocated abroad.

     In their effort to secure the best teaching staff for the university, Oluwasanmi and his team sourced far and wide and scoured different corners of the globe. They were willing to make generous concessions to the exceptionally talented and no sacrifice was considered too great to bring the greatest brains to Ife.

    This great human scaffolding and capacity building at the highest level of human endeavour laid the foundation for this great university and was to continue after Oluwasanmi left the scene and as Aboyade, the recently departed Cyril Onwumechili and  Wande Abimbola took charge. They did not disappoint in terms of relentless capacity building. Ife is arguably the first Nigerian university consciously built to provide intellectual and cultural leadership for the Black race.

      The liberal and humane ethos of its founding leadership made it a natural Mecca for adventurous scholars from abroad who found its pristine setting and sizzling intellectual ferment quite an alluring combination. Ife also became a destination of choice for distressed international students fleeing from chaos abroad.

       At a point, Ife had students from India, Pakistan, Punjab, Eritrea, Somalia, Ethiopia, Namibia, Burundi, Rwanda, Zimbabwe and South Africa. This was in addition to many victims of internal persecution from the Nigerian university system who found solace and succour and a welcoming embrace from the university.

       The world began to take note. Something truly new was coming out of Africa at last. A cultural and intellectual renaissance was well under way in Nigeria. Powered by a massive influx of petrol dollars and a prudent management of the economy which saw Nigeria through a crippling civil war without the country borrowing a dime, the country was on its way to fulfilling its manifest destiny as the first black superpower.

       The glorious revival of a nation climaxed between the late seventies and the early eighties. As it usually happens in history, it was the moment that Nigeria reached the zenith of its glory that national contradictions that have been simmering under the surface began manifesting. The unresolved National Question began haunting the country again. The civil war turned out to be nothing but a battle for possession and occupation of the country among gun-toting military buccaneers.

      As corruption buried its fangs deep into the entrails of the country, the military stepped in once again ostensibly to curb the monster. But the disease and its pathologies seemed to have grown worse. The university system succumbed to a deep decline from its high noon of excellence to become a hotbed of revolt and insurrection.

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     From the 1978 “Ali Must Go” students’ protest, Nigerian universities witnessed periodic bloodbaths which turned higher institutions into a theatre of mayhem and maiming. The audit of death and destruction is sobering and shaming. In the north where the social anomalies manifested in sharper and more graphic relief, the toll was quite prohibitive.

      The reasons for these calamitous unrests in our higher institutions now appear in bold and damning relief.  As unregulated growth and the absence of scientific population control impacted on the demographics of the country, dwindling resources as a result of corruption and mismanagement of national patrimony became the lot of the university system.

       Unregulated growth and sharp increases in student population also became the norm in our university system as population explosion reflecting directly in an exponential increase in the number of students seeking university admission put pressure to bear on the university system.

    Unfortunately and unaccustomed to dealing with this novel development, university authorities are unable to think out of the box of the famous feeding bottle paradigm with reliance on federal hand-outs thwarting innovative funding and new modes of fund-sourcing. Even the so called strategic intervention funds are not targeted at addressing infrastructural deficits but preoccupied with white elephant projects.

      As the parlous economic condition bit harder and the university sank deeper into a cesspool of decay and detritus , the military authorities bared their fangs relying on the only method of control which they know very well. They had famously described themselves as professional managers of violence and the full weight of savage force was brought to bear on the university community.

      As the students’ populace came under the military hammer, it was perhaps inevitable that their teachers and professors would also find themselves within the optics of the telescopic rifle. The stage for confrontation was set when a high-ranking government official accused university lecturers of teaching what they were not paid to teach. Not long after this, massive retrenchments, mass sackings, summary dismissals and the odd deportation followed.

      This was straight out of some medieval script of authoritarian tyranny. It is unthinkable in a modern society. But it was a reflection of the hegemonic culture in the nation. In America, Noam Chomsky, the crusty old contrarian, continues to spew his anti-establishment expletives from his M.I.T redoubt with nobody disturbing his peace. When Charles de Gaulle was asked to put Jean Paul Sartre away for being an intellectual nuisance, the great man retorted that Sartre was also France.

       Consequently, as a result of the severe economic downturn, lack of job satisfaction and the culture of intolerance, university teachers began deserting their beat in droves. Today, it will be an understatement to say that the intellectual workforce of the university system is badly depleted. Morale is low. The system is in a bad shape.

    But it has managed to stay afloat. This is quite a remarkable achievement in the face of overwhelming adversity. We must single out for commendation the current set of youthful and energetic administrators who are keeping the old Ife can-do spirit alive.

    How then do we begin to slog our way back to universal reckoning and to the old civilization where the Nigerian university system was held in high esteem and where this iconic university was regarded as a citadel of higher learning and pedagogic excellence?

    The picture we have painted so far is of unrelieved gloom; a catastrophic systemic collapse with mutually reinforcing factors. In nautical terms it is known as a perfect storm where and when everything combines and conspires to take a system or an organization down. In a remarkable irony, not even the much lionized and universally rhapsodized Ife franchise escaped some fraying at the edges.

    There were allegations of a hegemonic sub-ethnic formation dominating every aspects of life in the university. Professor Ojetunji Aboyade was later to be accused of surrounding himself with a cabal of partridge-hunting cronies, an allegation which brought out the full umbrage of the old literary lion WS in a piece titled  “Of the Aparo Mafia”. (Aparo is the Yoruba word for partridge).

       As a result of its origins in war and numerous hostilities, the Yoruba faction of the Nigerian elite formation has always been less cohesive more brittle than its Igbo and Hausa/Fulani competitors. This fundamental handicap was also to play out in the politics of Ife. It is the way of all human groups in competition for increasingly scarce resources.

      In charting the way forward, let us remember that it has not been a tale of unremitting doom and gloom. Despite everything, let us recall with William Shakespeare that there is still some architecture in the ruins. There are many of our friends who insist that there can be no question of re-imagining and repositioning the university system until Nigeria itself is re-imagined and repositioned.

    Others maintain that until the Colonial Question is resolved, a situation in which our entire epistemological criteria particularly knowledge of our own history and our own culture are trapped within the discursive formation of the imperialist masters, there can no question of anything being reimagined not to talk of being repositioned.

       According to this school of thought, the Chinese, Indians and Japanese had a head start on us despite being equally subjugated because they refused to surrender their culture and civilization, particularly their religion, belief system and its fundamental worldview. The result is that these sturdy Orientals deal with the west with aplomb and superior flair, knowing fully well that civilizational advance is a revolving door and not the exclusive preserve of a particular people.

    To reimagine and reposition our university system

    First, there must be a wholesale revaluation and revalidation of our entire university curricular system to give it a cutting edge in an increasingly competitive and knowledge driven world. All colonial courses must give way to newer realities. Such newer realities suggest that emergent master-cultures and languages such as Chinese, Japanese, Javanese and modern Arabic should be incorporated into the curriculum for the purpose serious engagement.

        Second, universities must encourage the multi-disciplinary perspective, a situation in which several fields and their unusual insights converge on a single issue making it more amenable to greater understanding. The current narrow disciplines and the equally narrow specialism they foster can only yield fragmented and isolated insights which cannot be building blocks for any honest and holistic inquiry into the plight of the continent.

    These narrow subjects which are the offshoots of the constricted thought-process bequeathed to us by colonial masters and their facile philosophy of Empiricism do not allow the mind to exercise its full sovereignty over contending issues. Consequently, centres for multidisciplinary studies which are a rarity on our campuses must now be encouraged to flourish as a booster station for individual departments and for cutting edge research in global developments.

      Finally, scientific developments and technological innovations always require new disciplinary perspectives. For example, the development of drone technology and Artificial Intelligence both for offensive and agricultural purposes requires novel engineering directives from our various faculties of technology. If we need to recall, Computer Science as we know it today is a direct offshoot of military experimentation on the battle field.

    It is heart-warming to report that barely three years after one lamented the dearth of the deployment of Artificial Intelligence in current university experimentation in a convocation lecture at FUNNAB, the situation has improved considerably with several universities, including this one, latching on to the new frontiers of human civilization. It cannot be a perfect start, given the critical lack of resources and in the absence of the cross-fertilization of ideas that comes with global exposure. 

      With that, we now come to the contentious issue of adequate funding for the university system. Given the epic waste and mismanagement that has gone on, it should now be obvious to even the most starry-eyed idealists that we cannot return to the El Dorado of the past when the university was awash in cash and virtually everything was free including meal and tuition. In retrospect, it can now be seen that this was an unsustainable mirage based on the illusion of wealth.

      The reality has turned out to be more dismal and distressing for the nation. Given the parlous state of the country, this era is unlikely to return for the foreseeable future. But it is the bounden duty of every responsible state to guarantee maximum education for all its citizens while ameliorating the crushing financial burden particularly for the underprivileged.

      The question of adequate funding for the university has created an ethical conundrum for many older Nigerian citizens. There are many who bear the moral anguish of having to tell contemporary undergraduates to bear with the government and their straitened circumstances when they themselves passed through the same system a generation or two earlier with virtually all their needs provided for by the government.

      Yet there are others who could not be bothered by this moral quandary even where silence means complicity with the failure of the postcolonial state and the abdication of civic responsibility. But the impasse has to be resolved. While government must be nudged in the right direction to avoid ostentation and fiscal malfeasance, the university administration must recognize the fact that it is time to think out of the box and come up with a new paradigm of university funding. I will now enumerate a few of the steps that could be taken.

    ·               A means-tested loan scheme catering for the most indigent and the distressed middle class deportees must be immediately put in place. These loans must be backed by philanthropic organizations, churches, schools and even international bodies. Repayment must kick in immediately after graduation pending a period of humanitarian grace.

    ·               University authorities must revamp and expand the current consultancy units into a proper bureau of wealth creation. The mandate of this bureau which should be headed by a top university administrator is to aggressively create wealth for the institution through large scale farming, fishing, low-level industries and the manufacturing of modern agricultural implements, etc. The university can also act as a commodity purchasing board for local farmers.

    ·               Donations, funds, grants, international loans and subventions must be actively sought. The era of university administrators as salesmen is upon us. In this regard, the university must put its best foot forward. In America, the most decorated and garlanded professors are often recruited by their universities for this purpose. Paul de Man, the great Yale literary critic, once wrote of how he fell asleep on a sofa in a giant New York corporation while waiting to see the chairman as part of a university team.

    ·               The issue of Diaspora donations cannot be taken lightly. There are so many concerned alumni in the Diaspora who are willing to give something back to their beloved alma mater provided there is accountability and transparency. If each of these eager donors is made to pledge a thousand dollars each, that will be a cool one billion from a thousand of them. It may well be time for our university system to create a department of Diaspora Affairs. Fortuitously, the Chairman of the diaspora commission is an old student of this university and a proud alumnus at that.

    Mr chairman, distinguished audience and our graduands, I am happy to report that most of these measures are already in place in many of our universities. But they need to be deepened and intensified. The ebullience and resilience of the Nigerian spirit are such that it can survive any adversity and surmount any obstacle. It is with this redemptive trope of national durability that I sign off this morning. I thank you all.

  • ‘Kalokalo’ managers?

    ‘Kalokalo’ managers?

    National Lottery Trust fund earned billions, spent all, despite  being fully funded by government

    Fuji legend, the late Sikiru Ayinde Barrister it was who sang years back when he was literally drenched in ‘naira rain’ that Nigeria has a surfeit wealthy men! ‘Olowo nbe ni Nigeria yi’, he shouted at the top of his voice like someone whose finger was just trapped in the home-made door of a Danfo bus. ‘Barry Wonder’, as he was then called, was right. But it is not only that Nigeria is blessed with many wealthy people; the country itself is rich.

    Just that there are too many leakages. Euphemism for corruption? May be.

    Something happened last week that reinforced my belief that something has to be done to reduce the weight that the Federal Government is carrying. The government is unwieldy and there is more than enough evidence to support this assertion. I watched on television, last week, how the  Executive Secretary/Chief Executive Officer of the National Lottery Trust Fund, Bello Maigari, responded to questions on what has happened to the billions that the fund generated in the past few years. That was when he appeared before the House of Representatives Committee on Finance on Monday, during the  2024-2026 Medium Term Expenditure Framework and Fiscal Strategy Paper Interactive Session with Ministries, Departments, and Agencies (MDAs).

    Maigari’s response to enquiries on the fund’s activities was such a bundle of disappointment that the committee had to place the fund on status enquiry for spending all its internally generated revenue (IGR). Maigari said the N2.5bn it has so far generated from statutory remittances from licenses and permit holders in 2023, as well as the N6.8bn it generated last year, had all been spent on various critical sectoral interventions, including education, sports development, social services, public welfare and disaster management, across the country. Not only is the fund’s purse empty, it also had a deficit of about N255m in 2022 because they had a carryover of liabilities in 2021!

    Equally shocking to the committee was Maigari’s statement that the fund was expected to pay emoluments, allowances, and benefits of members of its board, as well as salaries and allowances of its members of staff! This is shocking because the fund is fully funded by the Federal Government and, as is usual with such agencies, they are expected to remit 100 per cent of their revenue to the  government.

    An apparently annoyed chairman of the committee, James Faleke, retorted: “, “It’s like the government opened this agency for you and your family. That is what you are saying. That is the meaning. You generated almost N2.5 billion and you spent the N2.5 billion on the last kobo…

    ”We are going to carry out a status enquiry on the Nigerian Lottery Trust Fund. Status enquiry means we are going to bring in an external auditor to audit your accounts, your books, all your income, and expenses from day one to date. We would send our report to the plenary and if you are found guilty, you will be made to refund all expenditure and any other punishment thereof,” he added.

     Let no one be deceived that the lottery fund is alone in this. There are countless other agencies doing the same thing. The fact of the matter is that there are too many Federal Government agencies such that keeping tabs of their activities is difficult, if not absolutely impossible. That is why so many of them don’t get audited for years when, in actual fact, they should be audited annually. Even for those that are audited, it is difficult to follow the process through unless something snaps somewhere and some of these lapses suddenly rear their ugly heads.

    Yet, it is taking eternity for the Federal Government to prune the number of these agencies. Yet, the government keeps complaining about its huge overhead costs. Yet, the government keeps borrowing to sustain the country when we can get virtually all we need if we are able to harness our resources properly. 

    Even in countries where public officials do things with the best of intentions, it is wrong for different agencies of government to embark on projects with their IGR or even the left-over of their annual budget. Where they must, it should be projects for the use of the respective agencies and these must be scrutinised by the appropriate agencies to ensure that the tax payer is not short-changed, not intervention programmes like the one Maigari talked about.

     If this can be permitted in saner climes, it is a different kettle of fish in our kind of country where corruption is endemic. Such a system does not give room for effective coordination of projects. Some sectors that are not particularly essential could be given priority attention for all kinds of reasons, including awarding the contracts to cronies of those managing the agencies that are awarding the contracts, for pecuniary gains. We may thus have situations of over-concentration of projects in some sectors at the expense of some other sectors.

    By the way, I used to think that an age-long practice in the MDAs; that is that of the ministries and agencies spending whatever was left of their allocation anyhow at the end of the year to enable them get a bigger allocation in the next budget, was over. But it seems the practice is still very much with us.

    What happens is that towards the end of the year, MDAs submit their requirements for capturing in the next budget. Money is then allocated based on those submissions. Somehow, despite the corruption and all in the system, some MDAs would still have some money left in their accounts.  Then the managers of such MDAs would start awarding all manner of frivolous contracts around early December so they could have zero balance. Suppliers would be asked to supply (and remove) things that they did not actually need. This was all that was required to raise their allocation in the next budget. Zero balance. This meant the previous allocation was not enough! Nobody bothered to check how the previous allocation was spent, or asked questions why millions or even billions that was not spent from January to November suddenly vamoosed in December.

    I heard the practice is still rife, despite theTreasury Single Account (TSA). This is because in Nigeria, public money is seen in the light of a mad man’s leg that everybody can just go to cut his or her piece from without anyone asking questions.

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    The fact of the matter is that many MDAs are viable; just that we did not know because we never bothered to find out. For so long, we had carried on as a nation where money is not the problem but how to spend it.

     Until Prof Ishaq Oloyede assumed office as the registrar and chief executive officer of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), not many knew the board was a cash cow in its own little way. As a matter of fact, one would have thought those posted there before him were sent to ‘Siberia’ to go and labour. But Oloyede came and changed the narrative. JAMB now remits billions to the Federal Government’s coffers every year. Oloyede has set a record which his successors must be ready to sustain if not improve on. As a matter of fact, I won’t be surprised if some people reject appointment as JAMB registrar after his tenure because taking it means work and self denial. Not many people in Nigeria look forward to such appointments. Oloyede has proved that appointment as JAMB’s registrar could be juicy, but many Nigerians prefer juicier appointments! Like the lottery fund thing.

    True, JAMB too is now encouraged to embark on intervention projects, but they are related to its sphere of responsibility. And it is only a fraction of its IGR that goes into such projects; not the entire amount.

    It would be interesting to see details of the intervention projects that Maigari’s lottery fund spent its entire earnings on and even incurred debt for the government in the course of undertaking those obviously self-appointed assignments.

     I hope by the time we have the breakdown of the expenditure, it won’t remind one of one of Baba Sala’s plays when he was asked what he did with a hefty sum of money that he collected. He replied that he bought popcorn, groundnut as well as a cart! ‘Mo ra guguru, mo r’epa, mo ra omolanke ninu e’.

    If the situation does not remind one exactly of the Baba Sala play, then it would remind  us of our military governors in those days who met their state treasuries empty and left them empty! Or a father who impregnates his daughter and tells people who want to know why he did that they have no locus: after all, ‘ na me born am, na me give am belle’! Or, is Maigari merely telling the Federal Government that it should not expect to reap where it has not sown? Meaning if he made the money, he should be free to spend it as he likes?

    Whatever it is, I can bet my life on it, even before the lottery fund probe reports are out: Baba Ijebu, with all his imperfections, would have managed the National Lottery Trust Fund better.

    All said, the fund’s case is another eye-opener; another wake-up call on the government to look critically inwards for money instead of overburdening Nigerians with the task of vomiting the billions and trillions that they only hear about being spent.

    As a Yoruba saying goes: ‘ai rin jina, lai r’abuke okere; ta ba wo’le daadaa, a ri eera to ya’ro’. Meaning literally, it is when we don’t go far that we don’t see a squirrel with hunchback; if we look well to the ground, we will see ants that are lame.

    Let the government sniff out similar MDAs like the lottery trust fund and recover our monies from their managers. Where necessary, send to jail those of them who have dipped their hands illegally into our common purse. The lottery trust fund is only a tip of the iceberg. It is set to be  only one of those little drops of water that make up the mighty ocean of corruption in Nigeria.

  • Restructuring as poisoned chalice

    Restructuring as poisoned chalice

    Barely five months after President Bola Tinubu assumed office, pressure groups began mounting pressure on him to lead efforts to restructure Nigeria. The groups are mostly Southern and Middle Belt socio-political organisations. The call will become more strident as he nears the end of his first term. Whether he will heed the call totally, respond to it piecemeal, or adopt a tokenistic approach to the controversial subject remains to be seen. Former president Goodluck Jonathan gestured in that direction close to the end of his first term, but his national conference effort, initially lost in a maze of nomenclatures, miscarried. Ex-president Olsuegun Obasanjo also dithered until the closing months of his presidency before kick-starting wide-ranging constitutional amendment that self-destructed on the altar of his third term ambition. For obvious reasons, former president Muhammadu Buhari was completely apathetic. If President Tinubu will heed the call, he will first agonise over its timing before occupying himself with the more salient issues of how to define restructuring and the even more difficult question of what shape it should take.

    Ultimately, restructuring is a subject that cannot be avoided for long. President Tinubu has demonstrated rare courage in grappling with needed and urgent economic reforms. He met a broken and empty treasury, and has begun clawing the administration’s way back to solvency. That has not been easy, for even presidential candidates in the last election, not to talk of the ordinary Nigerian, suffer from a gross lack of understanding of how the economy works, how badly broken President Buhari left it, and how long remediation will take in the face of a restive and impoverished public inured to logic and reasoning. Embarking on restructuring will not only require much more courage, it will also demand high-level perceptiveness and vision on a scale the country has never witnessed, no, not even during the constitutional conferences that predated independence.

    President Tinubu will be extremely lucky to start the restructuring journey in the middle or towards the end of his first term as campaigners want. Both he and his aides suggest that Nigeria’s economic crisis is being resolved and is projected to be stabilised in a year or two. The country shares their optimism; but it is doubtful whether the crisis can be as responsive as they romanticise, especially given a rentier state preyed upon by powerful, remorseless and entrenched forces who for decades had so dug themselves in that it would take cutting off their hands to rid the system of their predation. Without stabilising the economy and repositioning it on the path of growth, it is difficult to see any bold and courageous leader tinkering with the constitution, let alone restructuring the system. Nigeria’s controversial presidential system vests enormous and tantalising amount of power in the hands of the president. A stabilised economy and imperial presidency reinforce each other and inevitably promote complacency. Once growth begins to occur, the country may need to measure the integrity of the commitment of the president to restructuring. Entrenched interests are loth to give up the perks and perquisites of power, as President Tinubu himself opined during the campaigns.

    Assuming the president commits himself to restructuring in line with his longstanding worldview and can get his timing right, he will face the next hurdle of definitional differences bisecting regional and ethnic lines. Restructuring means different things to different people. British colonialists faced a herculean effort cobbling together a tentative parliamentary system that demanded from Nigerian political leaders discipline and know-how available only in very modest quantities. Four republics down the line and two bastardised presidential constitutions later, those differences have neither been bridged nor erased. While it is axiomatic that political elites with the wrong or inappropriate attitudes would fare badly with even the best constitutions, it is increasingly evident that both the parliamentary and presidential systems imposed on or borrowed from elsewhere and sewn onto a variegated and perhaps ossified cultural and political systems that predated independence have proved treacherously difficult to operate.

    It was perhaps the difficulty Nigerians encountered in operating borrowed systems that led Chief Obasanjo to advocate Afro-democracy, a nebulous and indeterminate system which even he could not fathom. His insincerity and leadership incompetence doomed his suggestions. Worse, by calling for an indigenous democratic model, he failed to appreciate the deep and stratified differences in civilisational experiences of Nigeria’s major ethnic groups. It seemed it would even be far easier and less complicated to borrow and engraft a borrowed system than to devise an original one. Should President Tinubu master those differences, he will next have to contend with how to inspire in a generally immiscible people a new and workable system, whether a menagerie of borrowed constitutions or a wholly in digenous system. The problem is who or which team will conceptualise it, and to what extent it could harmonise political differences over which Nigerians have hardened themselves and gone to war during decades of ethnic, regional and religious strife?

    The parliamentary system was midwifed by the British whose worldview is alien to Nigeria. The Nigerian presidential system was the most cursory and inexpert borrowing ever undertaken by any nation. To produce a workable model, as this column reflected on in this place two weeks ago, would require astute and competent leaders who possess intuitive understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of Nigeria’s native systems. Those leaders must not only have the ability to gaze far and deep into the future, they must also have an infinite and robust grasp of the country’s origins, where history and chemistry of races and indigenous empires and kingdoms cohere. Neither Chief Obasanjo in his first and second coming, nor Dr Jonathan, nor yet ex-president Buhari possesses such a grasp. President Tinubu is a dealmaker par excellence, his aides boast; but he will have to prove that in inspiring and envisioning a new constitution, he can be as quintessential as France’s Charles de Gaulle, the United States of America’s Gen. Douglas MacArthur, or German leaders who assembled 61 men and four women who drafted the still regnant German Basic Law of 1949, a constitution that anticipated and transcended Germany’s reunification in 1990.

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    At the moment, there are indications that a powerful section of the Nigerian political elite, hoping to strike a middle course between the indifference of the core North and the activism and feistiness of the South and Middle Belt, prefer to tinker with the constitution, perhaps to make it more federal as they imagine. It is not clear whether the patchwork will make sense, for Nigeria has since 1979 continued to tinker with its political system without achieving any of the balances they dreamt about. The fundamental and radical changes needed to shoot Nigeria into a higher and more stable trajectory have been avoided like a plague. Indeed, it is feared that the barriers of tribe, religion and other differences will make deep changes almost impossible, especially in the absence of a great motivator. Past leaders have been too fearful of calling the country to those changes, but became wiser either shortly before leaving office or shortly after.

    If the Tinubu administration has a vision for the future, far beyond the challenges of today and tomorrow, far beyond superhighways and bridges and schools, if it has a vision of the great and unassailable future the country needs, it must return to the basics by repairing the foundations. It must resist the temptation to engage superficial changes, the uncontroversial, safe and soft things of the moment, and must engineer a fateful leap to that esoteric and subliminal level where presidents are not just kings but also philosophers, combining the gift of the alchemist with the transcendence of the mystic. There are building blocks to national greatness, but those blocks can only emanate from hard and often unpopular decisions. If the president does not already have a vision for that future, he must find it, for he cannot give what he does not have; nor should he dare to leave the parliament, with their disparate interests, to conceive a vision for him and the country. Let him get scholars to distill the histories of great constitutions for him to reacquaint and inspire himself to dream great and big, to help him understand why empires rise and fall, and to determine that in his time, Nigeria must rise and expand to greatness.

    Restructuring should not be the poisoned chalice it has been made out to be. If President Tinubu gets the timing right, and also gets the theoretical direction and philosophy of the new constitution right, he should find the ingenuity to assemble the few men and women who will inspire a document for the ages. That document should be citable in the decades to come, and apart from forming the rubric of a new and powerful nation, will inspire generations to come. There are a thousand and one reasons for the president to be cautious, indecisive, and conservative even in his progressivism. If he is as hungry for greatness as he has given the impression, if he is determined to learn from history, he will resist the temptation to ‘manage’ Nigeria and pass it on to the next leader as a nuisance, having satisfied himself like his predecessor that he had at least risen to the presidency at a point in the nation’s history. He will be wise to resist being stampeded or to allow the initiative be taken away from him, but he will be much wiser not to leave the country the way he met it, even if a tad more prosperous.

  • When courts push back on lawyers filing frivolous cases: The Imo example

    The judiciary has set many states and institutions on fire. The judiciary has set Imo state on fire and up till now, people are wondering how a person who was not a candidate of his party be declared the governor”.

    “The judiciary has so many questions to answer. If they fail to answer those questions within a short time, we will create a hall of shame for those judges that come up with some judgments and that could happen soon” – Above is another perspiring, not even aspiring, ‘lawyer’;  the forever, ethnically-motivated politician, Joe Ajaero, always pretending to Labour Leadership as he gallivants  all over the country, spreading some partisan nonsense until he met more than his match in some no nonsense Imolites.

    It is interesting that matters pertaining to the same Imo state has claimed another victim with a member of the inner bar being fined for what the Supreme court described as his frivolous and vexacious motion. 

    Chief Mike Ozekhome (SAN) is, of course, far too rich to feel the pinch of a ‘mere N40M’ fine.  Being a senior lawyer, however, and a professor of Law,  to boot, those lawyers always eager to handle cases they should, otherwise, have advised their clients to run away from will, at least, see this as a learning curve.

    Had the courts, the Apex court in particular, made samples of some of those who specialise in  making lurid comments about the judiciary, an example being Joe Ajaero and his ‘hall of shame’ proposal, some sanity would have since been restored in this perennial war against the Nigerian judiciary.

    Yes granted that there has been some back and forth in the matter of whether or not the Apex court can reverse itself, it was obvious in this  particular case,  that what Chief Ozekhome was trying to do was  renew, in a  somewhat refined manner,  Obidients’ determined effort to mess up the judiciary. This he will deny, even laugh at, being who he is, but millions would see it as further delegitimising the apex court.

    But like the Yoruba would say:’ti omode ba gbon ku, iya e a gbon si’, meaning that if a devious child died cleverly, the mother will cleverly bury the remains. The supreme court has, through this case, proved that it will not help those who are eager to put it into disrepute.

    That is the lesson Professor Ozekhome should learn from this macabre case in which he claims that all he wants of the court is a consequential order.

    Even if the Supreme Court had cause to reverse its dismissal of  GTBank’s appeal against a N2.4 billion judgement given in favour of Innoson Motors Nigeria Limited by the Court of Appeal in Ibadan, Oyo State, the court, not eager to aid its traducers, found it advisable, this time around, to revert to its decision in the appeal filed by Chief Kanu Agabi, SAN, on the same Imo state governorship matter wherein Justice Ariwoola, with the concurence of the other seven panelists, minus one, held as follows:”A judgement or order shall not be varied when it correctly represents what the court decided nor shall the operative and supportive part of it be varied and a different form substituted,’  quoting Order 8 Rule 16 of the Supreme Court Rules. “It is settled law, he continued, that this court has no power to change or alter its own judgement or sit as an Appeal Court over its own judgement. It is clear from the tone and the wording of the instant application that what is being sought is asking the court to sit over its own judgement already delivered and executed. That is certainly beyond the competence of this court. It is not disputable that the jurisdiction of the court is derived from the Constitution and an Act of the National Assembly. There is no constitutional provision for the review of the judgement of the Supreme Court by itself. And, therefore, once it delivers its final judgement, the Supreme Court, subject, of course, to the slip rule principle, it becomes functus officio in respect thereof.”

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    A Daniel has, indeed, come to judgment. Otherwise, I would urge the reader to momentarily consider what amount of opprobrium would have descended on the court, and the Nigerian judiciary, in general, had Ozekhome had his way, and what helluva challenges an obviously,  security – challenged Imo state would have had to  contend with, having to navigate afresh, the debacle that would have been brought down on it.

    A sample of that opprobrium on the Nigerian judiciary is Kano state NNPP’s thoughtless petition to some foreign bodies claiming “that there are  moves to truncate the will of the majority of the people of the state regarding the mandate given freely to its governorship candidate on March 18, 2023”.

    If one may ask, what exactly are they afraid of, and why would they seek to intimidate the Supreme court rather than allow it decide on the two issues of its candidate’s eligibility and the number of votes not duly processed.

    With the respected Chief Wole Olanipekun, SAN, holding that only 1,886 ballots were without signature and stamp,  as against the 165,616 votes deducted from Governor Yusuf’s votes by the Appeal court, I cannot see any reason for scaremongering which was all the party resorted to by unnecessarily externalising an internal matter. Under no circumstances should Nigerians allow the judiciary to be turned to an object of derision as politicians would willingly do.

    I digress.

    While at this, I think we should spare a thought for the very poor job the National Assembly is making of its legislative function. Why, for instance, should a political party, any party at all, forfeit the right to present candidates in an election when the rightful person to  punish was the man who was out to create a political dynasty by making his son-in – law succeed him as Imo state governor?

    To worsen  matters, the same man was, in the same election cycle, heading to the Red chamber.

    While the National Assembly may not have  foreseen all this, it should, at least, have realised the oddity in punishing a whole political party for the sins, and capriciousness, of  an individual.  In this particular case, it is Uche Nwosu, Governor Rochas Okorocha’s ‘candidate’, who should have been barred from contesting the election, and not any other party or person.

    And who says that the eminent jurists of the Supreme Court, in their collective wisdom, did not advert their minds to this obvious  idiocy of  punishing  a political party, with millions of members, and rather opted for the more commonsensical option of deciding in favour of the candidate with the highest number of votes?

    It is safe to conclude this piece by saying that even this heavy quantum of the fine imposed on Mike Ozekhome, SAN, will not end this profitable business of  filing  frivolous and vexatious motions. After all, a certain Ambrose Owuru, a 2019 presidential candidate, was also fined N40M by the Court of Appeal, Abuja, for filing a frivolous suit,  seeking to prevent the swearing – in  of President – Elect, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, on May 29, 2023.

    All one can confidently say, however, is that lawyers who are hard of hearing, and would not relent, will always have their day in court.

  • COP28: Tinubu was in Dubai for ‘weightier things’

    The just concluded week, to many who are conversant with activities in the Aso Rock Presidential Villa, seemed rather lacklustre as there were not so many movements or activities streaming from the Number One Citizen’s office, at least from the media view of things. Since he returned to Abuja Tuesday evening, after his six-day outing in Dubai, capital of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), where he participated in the 28th United Nations Climate Change Conference (CoP28), not much of President Bola Tinubu has been seen in the public.

    His seeming scarcity in public’s eyes did not mean he was not seen at all. Besides the photo ops seen in the media, including those taken at the Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport, Abuja, on arrival from Dubai, and the ones taken with some of his guests, especially those on official businesses, a couple of very critical events and activities have done much to confirm his presence and that he remains committed to gradually relieving Nigeria and Nigerians of their multiple unpleasant baggage.

    He started the week offshore, in Dubai, where he coordinated Nigeria’s efforts at aligning with the global community’s climate and environmental solutions. He left for the CoP28 on the Wednesday of the week before the last, stayed the weekend and the earlier part of last week and returned on Tuesday. Of course, his activities and some of the multiple quantifiable gains of the outing were featured in the last edition of this column, what is, however, not highlighted yet will be the takeaways or significance of the event to the country and its people.

    There have been some hues, and definitely cries, about Nigeria’s ‘huge’ representation at the global event; 1,411 persons. Many Nigerians, including those who do not know, talk less of understand, the concept of the CoP, have come down hard on the federal government for sponsoring ‘a whooping 1,411 people’ to the world’s marketplace. Then emerged a horde of emergency analysts, especially on the social media space, adding and subtracting, calculating the cost of air travel and hotel accommodations for what many of them have termed a jamboree.

    Government, through Presidential Spokesman, Temitope Ajayi, and the Minister of Information and National Orientation, Mohammed Idris, has done much to separate facts from fictions by providing verifiable figures, but those who have determined not to be convinced and are looking for negative slants to viewing Nigeria and its government, have stuck to their narrative. Even when many of those recorded as Nigeria’s representatives, but with independent or other sponsorships than government have come out to clarify their circumstances, the horde has refused to be convinced or persuaded. They will not take Minister Idris’ figure of 422 for government’s sponsorship and they do not want anyone coming to tell them that the government should not be crucified for doing what it has been constituted to do; ensuring gains for Nigeria from all engagements.

    However, the truth that must be said, whether we like it or not, is that Nigeria was led to Dubai by President Tinubu for a serious business and not a jamboree, the President was focused on positioning Nigeria for an advantage to make away with as much of the cuts of the goods expected from the event as possible.

    Besides the meeting with the President of the UAE and King Charles III, the electricity improvement agreement signed with Germany, meeting with stakeholders and investors in the Nigerian Carbon Market, where he unveiled the Nigeria Carbon Market Activation Plan, President Tinubu also had his eyes on the big pie; the $250 billion ALTERRA Fund, to which the host country made a commitment of $30 billion. It is believed and expected that by virtue of size, being the largest black nation, Nigeria should be a major beneficiary of the fund.

    His thoughts were on solving the multitudes of environmental challenges facing the country in different parts of the country. Since climate change became a global issue, Nigeria has found herself dealing with ever-compounding social, economic and security vicissitudes in different parts. Desertification is creeping southwards, gradually driving people from their homes in the affected areas, igniting conflicts among peoples over land ownership and worsening food security along the way.

    Similarly, rising sea level in the coastal area is forcing people in the riverine areas out of their homelands, northwards. You can only imagine what will result from these developments and the interactions they will breed in a few years. These are serious concerns on Tinubu’s mind, then there is a forum that has been designed to proffer real solutions to these threats to the live and livelihoods of the people he leads, and we complain he has taken it as a serious business and decided to ensure Nigeria shows up there to stake her claim.

    We should only be angry if we are not found there because in today’s global interaction, it is “who nor dey, nor dey” and such person’s (or nation’s) bishopric, another is bound to take. If he was not there, who would have had the balls to stand in the face of the global powers to point their injustice and double standards to them. At least we know that it was Tinubu who called the attention of the super-powers to their unjust expectation from the least contributors to the cause of global environmental crisis to sacrifice same as, or even more than, those whose industrial activities robbed the earth of her pristinity.

    Thinking about all that Nigeria stands to gain from CoP28, added to the ones already set in motion from the various meetings and engagements by the President and his lieutenants at the outing, fighting the administration for this outing will be tantamount to spiting one’s face by cutting nose off. Government has attempted to give clarity by providing figures on sponsorships and that the whole 1,411 was just indicating where participants came from. This should suffice for anyone without an uglier motive than circumspection.

    He came back on Tuesday, but even while abroad, he kept his eyes fixed on goings-on at home. For instance, as early as 8am on that day, he had ordered an intervention into the sad development in Tundun Biri Village in Igabi council area of Kaduna State, where a military drone misfire had wreck havoc on innocent civilians, including women and children.

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    He directed an immediate and thorough investigation in the circumstances surrounding the incident, just as he ordered that relevant agencies of government should see to giving care, including medical treatment for the injured. He followed up on the intervention by sending representation for an on-sight assessment of the situation.

    Vice President Kashim Shettima, who delivered his principal’s message to the people of Kaduna State, especially the affected people, assured “the government will get to the root of the issue and anyone found culpable will be punished accordingly. We expect a report with immediate effect on the incident. The heart of the President is with the bereaved families. Rest assured that the Federal Government stands by the community and the government and people of Kaduna on this unfortunate incident”.

    It was not surprising that he had to sound so tough, the weight of the loss is too much to ignore. As at Friday, the number of recoded deaths had risen to 120 and the situation seemed to be raising serious heat in the some parts of the country. Besides, the frequency of military friendly fires has started raising concerns among citizens, it is believed government must watch it and Jagaban, considering his passion for the well being of every individual Nigerian, this last one and the ones before it should not have happened at all.

    Then on Wednesday, it was a time to reflect on relations with sister-West African countries. He hosted the President of Benin Republic, Patrice Talon, at the Villa. Jagaban’s philosophy of development is rather cooperative and that is what he has advocated at forums bringing leaders of the region together.

    “We are one. No other nation like ours should be worried. What is affecting us is a lack of synergy. We have not developed the necessary economic synergy that will develop our two nations. We must have common economic principles and priorities. The economic programme you are developing through inter-ministerial collaboration is welcomed by me”, he told his Beninois counterpart.

    He had other significant events and performed activities reflective of the continuing building process of the administration. For instance, on Thursday and Friday, he held meetings, results of which should yield positive fruits in coming days, weeks and months. He met the management of Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC) in Nigeria, led by Global Integrated Gas and Upstream Director, Ms Zoe Yujnovich, who informed him of new investment plans, involving an imminent $5 billion investment in Agbami North project and another $1 billion investment over the next few years into gas resources.

    On Friday, he received the report of Course 45 of the National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies (NIPSS) research, encouraging the institute and the colourful array of its participant. He highlighted the importance of the exercise being participated in by noting that Nigeria has what it takes to succeed, especially when the quality of the research and its recommendation are seriously considered.

    He approved new appointments in some agencies, including nine Board and Management members for the Nigerian Content Development and Monitoring Board (NCDMB) as well as four new members for the National Council on Privatization (NCP).

    This new week should come with new tasks as well. One such expected task is the Summit of the Heads of State and Government of the Economic Community of West African States, holding today. President Tinubu, as Chairman of the ECOWAS leaders, will host his colleagues and other authorities involved in the region’s affairs. They have so much to talk about, including the state of democracy in the region and their mutual socioeconomic concerns, so you can be assured of a something about ECOWAS this week. 

  • The time of Henry the K

    The time of Henry the K

    The human community is like a huge broomstick. The sticks keep falling off no matter what you do. And no matter how long you hang around, it will be your turn to fall off one day. This week, it was the turn of Henry Kissinger, the foremost American diplomat/statesman who bade us farewell this week at the ripe old age of one hundred years.

     It is a mark of his brilliance, prodigious intellect and sheer staying power that Kissinger was churning out books well past his nineties, long after the academic demise of those of his petty and jealous former colleagues who prevented him from resuming his academic career after his distinguished service to his nation ended in 1976 with the defeat of Henry Ford by Jimmy Carter. Thereafter, the Bavarian-born former refugee fleeing Hitler’s imminent holocaust with his parents re-established himself as a writer, consultant and freelance international trouble shooter.

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      Detested and deified in equal measure, Kissinger was a figure of international controversy and contention. Many hailed him as the most consequential American diplomat and statesman of the epoch, while many more dismiss him as a divisive and polarizing figure; a Zionist war-monger who never lived down the formative trauma of Nazi Germany.

      The truth must lie between the two. Kissinger himself once famously said that international diplomacy is often a choice between two contending evils. The third evil are those making the choice.  But for a man to rise from the seedy slums of Bavaria to the pinnacle of American statehood all in one generation is an  epic slog through adversity which is nothing short of heroic. Adieu, Henry.