The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sunday

  • Utomi’s restless, relentless opposition

    Utomi’s restless, relentless opposition

    Sometime in July 2020, the National Consultative Forum (NCFront) announced its formation and reeled out names of some prominent Nigerians as its founding members, but some of them denounced the organisation and declared they were not consulted. Prominent lawyers Olisa Agbakoba and Femi Falana insisted they knew nothing about the group, and so too did Abubakar Dangiwa Umar, a retired colonel. A little over five years after that organisational debacle, the same NCFront, speaking through Hamisu San Turaki, who is described as its spokesman, has again announced more than a dozen prominent Nigerians presumably bonding together under the aegis of the group to push, again, for electoral reforms. In both 2020 and now, Pat Utomi, a professor of political economy, has been prominent on the list, and is indeed, the numero uno. He seems to be the main inspiration, together, this time, with former Education minister Obiageli Ezekwesili, former INEC chairman Attahiru Jega, former presidential adviser Hakeem Baba-Ahmed, fiery NNPP ideologue Buba Galadima, and of course Messrs Falana and Agbakoba. The group aims to form another organisation called the Alliance for the Defence of Democracy (ADD) tasked with pursuing electoral reforms.

    It is not known to this writer whether any of the listed names has dissociated himself from the NCFront or ADD. But after the 2020 incident, Prof. Utomi went on in 2022 to join forces with Labour Party’s Peter Obi to fight for the presidency in the 2023 election. In 2020, the NCFront seemed like an association of the rejected embittered by the outcome of the 2019 presidential election won by President Muhammadu Buhari. Today, the group is insidiously Obidient and hopes to swing the 2027 election. As in 2020, the group’s goals are not as altruistic as they seem, that is if its leaders can overcome the suspicion that someone did not presumptuously assemble the prominent names and imbue them with noble and far-reaching goals. As for their battle cry of electoral reforms, they hinge their agitations on what they insist was the miscarriage of the last elections, and hope that civil society, the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) and the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) can create a collaborative template to drive the reforms or bring the administration to heel.

    They couched their mission elegantly thus: “…The initiators have decided to launch a new electoral reform platform to be known as Alliance for Defence of Democracy on October 1st as a popular alternative movement to drive and structure the campaign and mobilisation process for…critical electoral reform during the major national gathering on electoral reforms to be addressed by the President of the Nigerian Labour Congress, Comrade Joe Ajaero, among other leaders of conscience in Nigeria…(and launch a mass movement) to drive critical reforms in the electoral laws of Nigeria, especially those that dimmed the credibility of the 2023 elections namely; compulsory electronic transmission of election results, effective criminalisation of votes buying, enactment of early and diaspora voting as initiated by the House of Representatives, proportional representation in government, especially special seats for women and other vulnerable groups, among others.” They seem to think that without these elements, like the electronic transmission of results which has been proved by Nigerian examination bodies to be vulnerable, a fair election could not be delivered.

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    But perhaps the main plank of their agitation for reform rests on their curious and fallacious belief that the 2023 presidential election was rigged or unfair. They had few qualms about the governorship polls; what they find distressful was the presidential poll over which coincidentally the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and Labour Party (LP) have not stopped agitating. If the NCFront and ADD are not disconcerted by the coincidence of assigning themselves a mission indistinguishable from that of the Obidients in particular, it may be because they have thrown caution to the wind and become inured to facts and truth that assail their bloated presumptions. More than the PDP, the Obidients who champion the cause of their standard-bearer Mr Obi have continued to insist the elections were rigged despite the LP not having any path to victory, and indeed came third in the 2023 race. The assault on facts has, however, caught on and become a general delusion among many gullible but sometimes even educated Nigerians. There is of course no institution or policy or even paradigm that cannot benefit from one reform or the other, but the agitation for change must be well-grounded. It is dishonest to use the 2023 election outcome as the basis for their agitation. The integrity of that election was not vitiated by the non-transmission of the results electronically, which was their main grouse, or by any other fallacies insinuated into the presidential poll.

    The facts of the 2023 presidential poll are clear. Each of the three leading presidential candidates won in 12 states, with Mr Obi, however, winning in 11 and Federal Capital Territory. Where exactly did the purported rigging take place – in the 12 states out of 36 states won by the eventual winner, Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC)? Or in the 23 states plus FCT won by the candidates of the PDP and LP, especially the latter who won his Southeast region through a voter turnout troublingly out of sync with the national turnout? How more credible could an election be where there was neither a landslide nor outright and overwhelming dominance? President Tinubu lost Lagos, his base, Osun in the Southwest, and Katsina where the then sitting president Muhammadu Buhari of the ruling APC came from, and in no state did he win by a huge margin on the scale Mr Obi did in the Southeast. But analysts have distorted the presidential election outcome, raised dishonest posers and comparisons with past elections, and illogically and unconstitutionally concluded that perhaps a runoff would have lent the results credibility.

    Agitating for reforms is a democratic right. That right cannot be abridged. But it is unhelpful and counterproductive to anchor agitation on false premises and dishonest extrapolations designed more to inflame the mob, bait coups d’etat, promote discord and anarchy, and sully and humiliate national and democratic institutions. Nigeria’s democracy is not perfect; it is work in progress. To continually seek to throw out the baby with the bathwater simply because of electoral setback, especially in an increasingly fissiparous and nationalistic world, is to sail near the wind and risk a shipwreck. Nigeria is a delicate and highly vulnerable pastiche of religion and ethnicities; it is a miracle it is still standing despite the extremism and dangerous rhetoric of political leaders who show no grace and nobility in defeat. Mr Utomi’s group is one of the constitutional reform groups being cobbled together by disaffected politicians to either repudiate the progress recorded in the last elections or impugn the integrity of the poll outcome as well as the institutions that undergird democracy. It is tragic that anyone is giving them a hearing.

  • Israel’s attack on Qatar

    Israel’s attack on Qatar

    For more than two months, Israel had planned a strike against senior Hamas leaders in Qatar, including its chief negotiator, Khalil Al-Hayya. Last Tuesday, the strike was carried out against the remonstrations of Israel’s Army chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir, and Mossad chief, David Barnea, who felt the timing was awkward. The objectors were worried that Qatar was a United States ally, with the Americans operating the Al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar for more than two decades, its largest in the region. Only last year, the Qataris gifted President Donald Trump and the US a $400m Boeing 747 luxury jetliner to be used as Air Force One. The Tuesday attacks killed some six lower level Hamas officials but failed to get any of the group’s leaders.

    The pretext for the air strike was that Qatar sheltered Hamas leaders who continue to direct attacks against Israel, especially last Monday’s Jerusalem killings that caused the death of six Israeli citizens. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had since the Hamas attacks against Israel on October 7, 2023 put pressure on Qatar to expel Hamas from Doha for continuing to orchestrate attacks against the state of Israel. Allegations against Qatar’s sponsorship of terrorism are not new. In 2017, Saudi Arabia-led Arab League countries imposed a blockade on Qatar for sponsoring terrorism and violating the 2014 Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) agreement of which it was a signatory. The League accused Qatar of fraternising with Iran and Turkey and the Muslim Brotherhood, all of which had become instruments of regional destabilisation. Israel understands the deep division in the region, especially in the context of the Sunni-Shiite divide, a division that is nevertheless not as sharp as it seems. Though the blockade, which lasted until January 2021, did not achieve its aims of drastically downgrading the relationship between Qatar and Iran, or shutting down the hostile Al Jazeera cable television, or stopping military coordination with Turkey, it signposted the fault lines in the region that Israel could potentially exploit.

    Read Also: Trump, Blair, others meet over Israel’s war in Gaza

    The irony is that Qatar offered to shelter Hamas at the instance of the US and Israel. But while the US under President Trump has since upgraded relations with Qatar, a part of which privately benefits the Trump family’s businesses, Israel’s relations with Qatar have remained fraught. It is not clear that the failure of the September 9 attack against Hamas leaders was due to a tipoff from the US – though this was denied, and Israel itself has claimed it acted independently – it has probably sent signals to the GCC that, in the context of Israel, their relations with and dependence on the US will remain far more intractable than they seem on the surface. Worse, the hostage and ceasefire deals proposed by the US may now be hard to get back on line, while Israel may also begin gradually to recognise that military prowess, of which it has shown scintillating examples in recent months, has its limitations.

  • US outplaying itself on Russia, China

    US outplaying itself on Russia, China

    Decades of United States efforts to nurture strategic relations with China and India, while isolating Russia, have gone up in smoke under President Donald Trump’s tariff blitzkrieg. That nurturing produced a complicated diplomatic mosaic, which has now been considerably simplified and attenuated by Mr Trump to the detriment of the US. India and China were until the past few weeks ill at ease with each other, having fought a bitter and bloody border war in 1962; Russia and China were not the best of neighbours, with the former annexing a part of Chinese Manchuria (1858-1860), and after the Sino-Russia split in 1961, became bitter leadership rivals for the control of global communism, nearly coming to nuclear blows during the Zhenbao Island incident of 1969; while Russia and India relations had warm relations that peaked in 1971 (Friendship Treaty) but cooled and even stagnated after the collapse of Soviet Union until the 2000 Strategic Partnership, and again cooled as India veered West and fostered a rapprochement with China.

    Such diplomatic complexities, with all their intricate and delicate nuances, proved too cumbersome for President Trump to grasp. His insular view of diplomatic relations makes sense to him only if it is mediated by purely whimsical, boyish and punishing tariff impositions. On August 27, after India failed to heed US directive to desist from buying discounted Russian crude oil that saved the South Asian country $17bn, Mr Trump imposed 25% tariffs on some key Indian goods, and a further 25% punitive tariffs on those same goods, bringing the total tariffs to a whopping 50%, almost at par with the tariffs imposed on Brazilian exports to the US. Before the imposition of extraordinary tariffs on India, the South Asian country had enjoyed a trade surplus against US to the tune of over $4bn. The result of the tariffs is that India, which regards Mr Trump’s ultimatum as hostile and duplicitous, has begun to look elsewhere, defying America’s bullying tactics, and working to restore and rebuild relations with China. Much worse for the US, decades of American efforts to decouple India, the world’s biggest democracy and fifth largest economy, from China, the world’s second largest economy at $19.23 trillion to the US $30.50trn, has not only been reversed, the mistake is now probably beyond remedy. Having nurtured its relations with the West, and particularly the US, for decades, India is shocked by Mr Trump’s insensitivity and utter lack of strategic insight into global power politics as he unites the worlds’ second, third and fourth top military powers against America.

    The damage to US foreign policy and image consequent upon Mr Trump’s shallow and whimsical approach to global power politics is immense and probably irreparable. The world’s other economic and military powers will not only distrust the US, or probably hold it in contempt, they are almost certain to unite against it, a point the US president himself made in oblique reference to China’s President Xi Jinping hosting India, Russia and eighteen other countries at a two-day regional security and economic summit (The Shangai Cooperation Organisation) in Tianjin between August 31 and September 1. The purpose of the summit essentially was to intensify the effort to promote a powerful counterweight to the Western Alliance and produce a new global order. The Russo-Ukrainian war may have brought Russia down a peg or two, almost in the same way World War II paradoxically diminished the influence and power of Great Britain in contrast to the US, the Shangai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) will proceed in the years ahead to entrench itself as a countervailing force to the Western Alliance. To a President Xi hungry for global power and influence, Mr Trump’s bumbling and pedantic diplomacy is godsend.

    Read Also: Nigeria-China relations and the Global Governance Initiative

    No country, not even in the Western Alliance, trusts the US anymore, not to talk of Mr Trump in particular. The US president has not only alienated Asia and completely damaged and repudiated the Indo-Pacific alliance carefully curated by his predecessors to produce the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) and the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF), both of which aimed to whittle down the growing geopolitical assertiveness of China as well as sustain the paramountcy of liberal international order, he has also managed in the same breath to antagonise the rest of the world, including Africa and Latin America. He has promoted American exceptionalism with a nationalistic and deeply offensive fervour, twisted visa policies without regard to America’s global leadership, ridiculed and discarded his country’s value system from which most of the world previously took their compass, turned his back on science, research and intellectuals, enthroned a truly vexatious sense of triumphalism and entitlement, promoted mercenary foreign policy, and returned the country to the unprofitable isolationism and racist tendency of the early 20th century that contradict and undermine America’s global ambition and position. No president anywhere has so profoundly undermined his country’s ennobling objectives.

    Mr Trump, though a darling of American evangelicals enamoured of the prophetic, may inadvertently be fulfilling Bible prophecy. Under him, there is an almost undecipherable and dystopian future about the US. How could such a richly endowed, powerful and dominant country elect someone so unendowed, so self-centred, so averse to logic, so pedestrian? But it happened, not just once, but twice. After his reelection, he has embraced the most retrogressive and pugnacious domestic and foreign policies ever, and projected his personal insecurity upon his country. The ordinary task of analysing and explicating the future and ambition of his country eludes him in a way that made ancient Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar far his superior. Shorn of any capacity for reflection or circumspection, and unlike King Nebuchadnezzar who wondered what fate awaited Babylon after his death, Mr Trump has spared no thought for his country after his presidency, beyond of course his insufferable comparisons, nor wondered why the bible seems silent on the US while giving copious mention to the alliance between Russia and China vis-à-vis the solution to the Palestinian conundrum.

    China may not have been tested in war since Deng Xiaoping inspired its economic renaissance, but it has in the past one decade or a little more deployed its newfound economic power to forge a technological base and military machine that may have exceeded Russia’s capability. One day, inevitably, this machine will be put to use, perhaps at a time America seems truly and irrevocably isolated. If the timeline of the collapse of the Soviet Union is any example, it will be futile to imagine or calculate that fateful date to be far in the future. Under Mr Trump, America has antagonised nearly every country and embarked on scorched-earth foreign policy as well as racist and divisive domestic policies. His successors, even if they are not cut from the same cloth, may find the damage hard to amend.

  • RANDOM SNAPSONG 263

    RANDOM SNAPSONG 263

    Super Power

    Killer Power

    How can a civil world

    Survive this explosive madness?

    My bomb is bigger than yours

    My rocket is a ruthless arrow from hell

    I own the piece of sky above your house

    I can send death on countless errands

    From a thousand million miles

    Our missiles can spot your innermost hideaway

    We can strike you in your bedroom

    And pluck you clean from the bosom of your wife

    Our missiles never miss

    And when they ‘obliterate’ unintended targets

    We possess the Super Power Impunity

    To ‘obliterate’ our crime

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    Nothing is ever wrong

     Unless we say it is

    Never ever right

    If we decree it’s never so

    Super Power corrupts

    Super Power corrupts dangerously 

    Too many deadly toys in the hands

    Of those who act before they think

  • ‘Lie lie’ wage structure

    ‘Lie lie’ wage structure

    This must be dismantled and replaced with a realistic and equitable one

    With regard to wages or salaries, successive Nigerian governments have been behaving like the woman who has only one child, and when the child was fighting outside and the matter was reported to her, she asked: which of my children? Which one? How? How many children does she have to warrant that sort of question?

    That is exactly the same way Nigerian governments and indeed, almost all employers in the country have been deceiving themselves over salary matters for years.

    They pay wages that cannot take people home and call them take-home pay. Unfortunately, the politicians in the National Assembly who become so stingy when handling other people’s salary matters spoil themselves with some of the most stupendous wages and allowances that would qualify for one of the most obscene in the world.

    While some state governments and even private employers are trying to do more for their workers, others are lukewarm.

    Just last week, the Nigeria Labour Congress’s (NLC), president, Joe Ajaero, and the Nigeria Employers Consultative Association (NECA), commended the Imo and Ebonyi state governments for raising minimum wage from the N70,000 approved by the Federal Government in July, 2024, to N104,000 and N90,000, respectively.

    Ideally, this should be the spirit: the Federal Government’s minimum wage is, as its name implies, the minimum anywhere in the country. Employers of labour are at liberty to go beyond that amount. But they cannot pay less. The two state governments said they are able to raise workers’ salaries because federal allocation to them has increased substantially.

    READ ALSO: How long can Wike walk the tightrope?

    This is a truth some state governments do not want to get out there. State governments, as well as other tiers of government have been receiving substantially more revenue from the centre since President Bola Tinubu took over in May, 2023, as a result of withdrawal of fuel subsidy. But, despite this increased monthly allocations, not much is happening in some states.

    This is why I join the NLC and NECA in commending the two state governments. Investment in human resource is a meaningful one and workers that are relatively comfortable should be able to put in more to justify their pay.  

    I have never believed, as labour does, that state governments must pay the same salary across the country. One, states are not equally endowed. Two, they operate in different economic milieus. While food and some other items are relatively cheap in some states, they are also relatively expensive in others.

    But, the question now is; do Nigerian workers need as much as N70,000 or N90,000 or even N104,000 minimum wage to be happy? I don’t think so. Just that things have gone haywire.

    In the 1970s, the N96 or so that school certificate holders in the country earned monthly then was always enough for people in that category. I remember I bought eggs at the then prestigious Kingsway Stores, even as a school certificate holder, not just because I worked there after my secondary education , but because then, meat pie at Kingsway (the equivalent of today’s Shoprite, etc), was sold in kobo (I think 25 kobo apiece) and its size doubled what now goes for the average meat pie in any reputable eatery of the same standard with Kingsway Stores then.

    Even though Kingsway was an elite departmental store, it is unlike the Shoprites of today because many people, including school certificate holders, could go in there and have snacks, cold or hot beverages and coffee, electronics and what have you. Today, many graduates see the Shoprites only from outside, or even when they manage to enter, all they do is window-shop, hoping that someday before their time at this end would expire, they too would one day be able to walk in and out of the place, clutching something of substance, or having some people carry whatever they purchased from the place for them.

    For many, the way things are structured, that may remain eternal pipe-dream unless and until some of the measures being taken by the government begin to yield results.

    This is why I have always argued that labour leaders should insist on good governance. Not incessant wage increases.

    But they would not listen. Today, workers have the wads of naira notes in their pockets but can only buy little with them. I was far better off with the N400 that I first earned as a graduate in 1985 than today’s graduates earning N150,000 per month.

    A colleague who just returned from abroad told me that the price of a car he ordered a few years ago remains virtually the same today, but when it gets here, that is where the problem lies because of the exchange rate.

    If Nigerian workers had been insisting on good governance, it is not unlikely that what is hitting us hard now would not have been this serious because there would have been incremental adjustments that would have made things easier for us to swallow now.

    The truth of the matter is that what we call salary today, starting from the president down to the least paid worker, is ‘lie lie’ salary. How can our president be earning N1.5 million monthly? To do what? We need no one to tell us this is unrealistic. That of the National Assembly is even worse. Ask 100 members how much they earn monthly and you will get 100 different answers. Nigeria is probably the only place in the civilised world where such a matter of public concern is shrouded in secrecy.

    I do not know in how many state capitals people earning N70,000 can live if they must enjoy electricity, pay school fees, spend on transport for a family of at least four, pay for medicals, and do other routine things.

    Let nobody tell me we were able to enjoy most of these things before because they were being subsidised. Was the government also subsidising the bumper meat pies that we were eating then at Kingsway Stores? Was it subsidising the Hing’s singlet (unarguably one of the best brands then) that we were buying on the streets of the popular Balogun Market in Lagos at the time, for almost peanuts? Were they also subsidising the Peak Milk that some of us would always insist on, as against the Carnation and other brands that we considered inferior?

    Come on, something is wrong somewhere. It is that thing we should find and fix. The Revenue Mobilisation Allocation and Fiscal Commission (RMAFC) should get down to serious business and stop this unrealistic pay fixes.

     It is because the National Assembly members are not comfortable with whatever the commission gave them that they found a solution to their wage problem through some other ingenious means. Recently, in spite of the economic challenges the poor are facing; they even mooted pay rise for themselves.

    Meanwhile, lesser Nigerians have to cope with the miserably low pay the same National Assembly approves for them.

    We need to do something about this lopsided, ‘lie lie’ wage structure before it does something to us because it is not just inequitable, it is ungodly. It is a recipe for tempting even people who do not know how to steal. It is only a matter of time before we start expanding our prisons because we would have cause to receive more prisoners; not prisoners by choice, but prisoners by societal injustice.

    Professors earning N500,000 to N600,000 a month in this economy is scandalous? To do what? Many people would have stomached it if this is the general trend but a situation where conscientious workers cannot get commensurate reward whereas a few others cream off the resources at the expense of millions of others is unsustainable.

    Many of us who disagree with Ajaero often do so not because we do not understand his point, but, first, because, we know some of his protests had beyond labour undertones. And, two, because contemporary labour matters should now be more of brain than brawn and ‘gra gra’. Ajaero does not seem to be ready to admit that labour leaders would be judged in the final analysis, not by the number of strikes they mobilised, but by the impact their tenure had on workers’ welfare.

    Ajaero needs tutorials on how his forbears in the labour struggle, like the inimitable Pa Michael Imoudu, and indefatigable Hassan Sunmonu, did it so successfully.

    One of the reasons some people get so much to steal from the public till is because we have too much idle funds all over the place. Otherwise, why would someone be able to steal the humongous amounts of money we used to hear (some would tell you public funds are still being stolen) running into multiples of millions and sometimes billions (as if these billions are Japanese Yen), without the country knowing until years after? Something must be wrong somewhere.

    We may argue that the loopholes are being blocked, but the most important deterrence would be to punish those who pilfer our funds, to the full extent of the law. Often they don’t get their full comeuppance. Rather, they are given slaps on the wrist by allowing them to do plea bargain which allows them to return only a fraction of what they stole and keep the rest to themselves.

    Unfortunately, while these people who stole more than their three generations require get this kind of soft treatment, the poor man that stole a goat or something because he is actually hungry gets years behind bars; sometimes with hard labour. No plea bargain. Well, as one of our former first ladies used to say, ”there’s God o.”

    Nigeria’s ‘lie lie’ salary reminds me of an advert that newspapers used to carry some years ago. The ad had to do with a company that paid peanuts as salaries. At the head of its management was the lion calling the shots, flanked by other dangerous animals. Your guess is as good as mine as to what that company would turn out to be.

    That is the Nigerian situation with regards to its wage structure. While I have no problem with some sectors earning extremely well because of the sensitive nature of their jobs, what is required, in my view, is a holistic review of wages for all such that every Nigerian will, like it used to be when we were growing up, be able to afford the basics, particularly food and shelter.

    If for one reason or the other that is not feasible now, it should be on government’s pending priority list.

    After all, as they say, “what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander”.

  • A gathering Storm

    A gathering Storm

    ASUU, perhaps the most visible industrial trade union in the country is beginning to rumble ominously again. For more than two years now, the volcano has been quiescent, allowing the present government, an extended honeymoon period during which the government has been making all manner of announcements mainly without a robust response from the union. It seems that all that is about to change as the union has started making pointed references to the famous, or if you prefer, the infamous 2009 agreement between the government and the union. The union recently reminded the government of the existence of that agreement but the initial response from the government was most discouraging. The Honourable minister of education, betraying lamentable ignorance of the matter on ground, announced that no such agreement existed. It is noteworthy however that the minister has been brought up to date with correct information. That agreement certainly exists. It was signed, sealed but lamentably undelivered at a time when a one-time bona fide member of the union was the President of the Republic.

    The 2009 agreement was detailed and wide ranging. It was thrashed out between the union and a large government delegation which had the authority to act on behalf of a conscious and fully responsible government. At least that was the impression that was given at that time. It was designed to be an agreement to end all agreements and in the usual tradition of ASUU, it was enthusiastically endorsed by the rank and file of the union before it was signed. The most important clause in the agreement was the one which stipulated that the agreement was to be revised within two years and every two years after that, to keep everything fresh and up to date. Long story short, successive governments have repudiated the agreement. Sixteen years after it was signed, it has remained unclaimed and unfulfilled, as the university system tottered towards a terminal state of collapse.

    At the time that agreement was signed, there were twenty-seven Federal government owned universities, nineteen state owned universities and thirty-two private ones. At the heart of the agreement was the issue of funding. The consensus was that the publicly owned universities were severely under-funded, making it impossible for them to function as decent centres of learning, not to talk of excellence, as they should be. The government agreed with this assessment which is why it put pen to paper, committing itself to providing sufficient funds to rescue the universities from decay. In the meantime, the government, at the behest of the union, restated her commitment to the provision of free education at the service point. The union, exhausted from seventeen bruising years of continual struggle with successive governments, both military and civilian, heaved a heavy sigh of relief and waited for the government to keep her own side of the bargain. Sixteen years and several bitter and unproductive strikes later, the union is still waiting and wailing.

    READ ALSO: North frantic about 2027

    The union was still waiting on government confirmation when out of the blue in 2012, the Federal government which all the while had been pleading insolvency announced the immediate setting up of twelve brand new universities. How did the government, broke as it was, find the required funds to bring twelve twelve universities to life at one stroke? The insincerity of the government in this respect was hinted at by the fact that one of the new universities was to be sited at Otuoke, a tiny settlement on the Otuoke river, a tributary of a tributary of the River Niger. Everything about Otuoke screamed humility, if not backwardness except that it was the birthplace of the sitting President of the Republic. A government which suddenly realised that it did not have the funds to do the honourable thing by the university system was going to provide the money with which to launch what were described as universities in twelve places at the same time and with immediate effect. The problems hanging around the neck of the witch have been compounded by her inability to stop giving birth to daughters. Now, there are sixty-three Federal government universities in Nigeria following what can only be described as an explosion in university founding instead of funding. At that time, it just did not make any sense that the government which had studiously neglected to take responsibility for twenty-seven universities was now prepared to provide the funds which were required for the added responsibility for twelve new universities. The restoration of the glories which departed from our universities all of three decades ago is obviously a high mountain to climb. Under current circumstances, it is pertinent to ask if our leaders quite know what a university is supposed to be.

    With the proliferation of universities, both public and private, it is becoming clear that the principle of tertiary education has been exposed to the harsh winds of the reality of our everyday existence. There is an unruly scramble for the appearance of scholarship even as substance is being visibly eroded from our educational system.It is only a matter of time before we are found out by the truth of university degrees devoid of all practical value. For the most part what we now have are university graduates who can only be described as being barely literate and without any real or applicable knowledge from which our society can derive any tangible benefits. We have been deceived into thinking that the hood is more important than the monk. Indeed, the monk has become invisible or at least butt naked and shivering from the icy blasts of the winds of ignorance. It is now pertinent to question the proliferation of universities in a nation with such scant regard for those who have, for one reason or the other chosen to take up the challenge of an academic career. Lecturers in Nigeria, through their union, have consistently drawn attention to the sorry state of our universities for more than thirty years now. Clearing the accumulated dross of that struggle has become a truly Herculean task but one which needs urgent attention.

    In the last few months, I have come across a plethora of advertisements for all cadres of academic staff, from the humble but hopeful graduate assistant, to the decorated but weary professor in a broad spectrum of media in Nigeria. With the birth of so many new universities, this is only to be expected. The number of academic positions created in the last five years by all those new universities is simply staggering. According to NUC rules and regulations, for a department to be accredited, it must have a minimum of six academic members of staff divided between fledgling junior lecturers and experienced professors. It is worth stressing that six is a minimum number, accepted only in emergency situations. When I arrived at Ife with a PhD in 1976, I came to a department with eighteen active members of staff and with new ones joining those on ground all the time. The department hummed with activity until late in the night. Undergraduates were working on their various projects in well equipped laboratories. The postgraduate programme had just started at the time and the best graduating students in Pharmacy had been retained to get the programme off the ground preparatory to becoming lecturers in their own right. All the eager young members of staff of that time, at least those of them who went all the way in an academic career are hoary haired grandparents, now retired from the rigours of the classroom. Not many of them have been replaced or can even be replaced. Over the years, as new schools of Pharmacy were founded, many of the staff of the department, enticed by promotions which were necessarily slow in an established department were siphoned off and new recruits with desired qualifications became increasingly difficult to attract. Any objective assessment of that department will return lower and lower scores until now when qualified candidates are very few and those that have stepped into vacant positions are under the harsh environment of their work place are plainly unenthusiastic. In the meantime, there has been an explosion in the number of Pharmacy schools and the number of aspiring pharmacy students has climbed through the roof. Teaching them has become an unwelcome and unremunerated chore, not worthy of the attention of the brightest graduates. But for the recent embargo on the establishment of new universities, the situation, at least in terms of staff recruitment would have continued down a steep, perilous slope. And yet, the number of eager student applicants for a place in the Faculty is increasing all the time. The pressure on the dwindling resources at the disposal of all our universities is fast approaching breaking point and needs to be toned down as quickly as possible through a massive and eminently sensible cash injection from a clear eyed government.

    The 2009 agreement between ASUU and the government may have been adequate for that time but it is clearly no longer the case. So much slush has passed under the bridge that the situation needs very careful handling. That there is now a moratorium on the establishment of Federal universities suggests that the government may have been put into a frame of mind to live up to its long deferred responsibility. But, to be honest, I am not holding my breath any more than to prevent my being choked.

  • A Romp through the Beautiful Interior

    A Romp through the Beautiful Interior

    To the wonderful Yoruba interior which can be as captivating as it is bewitching in its pristine essence, this past Saturday and Sunday to reconnect with the soul of a storied people. Some of our Lagos-based urban sophisticate friends and cosmopolitan deracinѐ often dismiss these constant retreats as a satanic shuttle in the occult crypt; a gathering of wizened witches and samurai sorcerers in the heartland of juju and dark metaphysics.  One of them even located the Talmudic tavern as somewhere between the impossibly named villages of Akiriboto and Majeroku which are actually about three miles apart. But it is an anti-native lie from the pit of hell; a continuation of the class war between the city-dwellers and the denizens of the interior.

      Till date, Lagosian urbanites often dismiss people from the interior as country bumpkins. To hear the surviving aristocratic dinosaurs among them pronounce the word with a particular upper class inflection is a source of wicked hilarity. The putdown is redolent of cave-dwelling and its attendant incivilities, to put it with diplomatic reticence. Yet having been taught a hard lesson in political marksmanship, economic gamesmanship and spiritual hay-making by these selfsame yokels, our coastal aristos have refused to take heed. In seventeenth and eighteenth century England, city people fleeing from the ravages and disorientation of rapid industrialization in all their alienating necessities often headed for the countryside for solace and relief. Till date in western societies, living in the leafy suburban far away from the chaos and disorder of the inner city is seen to be “cool” and cultivated. Anybody who wants to find out how the heroism and hardiness of the people survive in hard times; and how a nation embroiled in postcolonial turmoil in all its devastating ramifications manages to trump them all, needs an unguided visit to the interior and its rugged and redoubtable interstices.

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      Modernity, modernization and their concomitant incubus of globalization have not been kind to Africa and its postcolonial nations, particularly a multi-ethnic behemoth like Nigeria. It has led to a further centralization of political and economic power in the old metropolitan centres and an intensification of the marginalization of the margins or the peripheralization of the traditional peripheries. Only countries with the requisite culture, national philosophy and resourceful politics have been able to claw something back. In the old peripheries, a new margin has emerged; a periphery of peripheries such as can be seen in their rural hell-holes, their inner cities with violence, struggle for scarce land and inter-ethnic conflicts fuelling food insecurity, threat of famine and an apocalyptic meltdown.

       The bigger the head, the bigger the headache, as they say. The institutional ravages of modernity and globalization have been quite unkind to a country like Nigeria. None of its precolonial institutions has been spared the disorientation of their invasive and disruptive momentum. Old certitudes and certainties have been smashed up in the collision of altars with nothing passable to replace them.  Worse hit perhaps is its old traditional institution and its rampart and regnant royalty. But even among casualties, there are often more remarkable casualties. In death, there is also class formation. Ask William Shakespeare, because when beggars die, there are no comets seen. The worst hit traditional institution in contemporary Nigeria is the Yoruba Obaship system probably because of its centuries old glory and grandeur and its stellar antecedents.

      But in recent years, particularly in the last two decades, royal rectitude and regal comportment appear to have gone out of the window. To be sure, there remain stellar royal exemplars and shining symbols of the old order. However, in the main, the Yoruba Obaship institution has become a site of outlandish crime and a scene of disgrace and dishonour to the entire race. The condemnation has come in a torrent and they have been as unsparing as they are unstinting. Reading through some of them makes one wilt in tears and regrets. For a race justly celebrated for its feudal deference to traditional authority and worship of royalty, this is quite a landmark development which must be monitored closely.

      For their lust and avarice, our royal fathers have lost their illustrious lustre and sacred nobility. The disrespect and disregard is frank and frantic. There is an open campaign for scrapping the entire institution. It may yet come in a revolutionary upheaval which will upend the entire polity. But for now and for strategic and security reasons, it is not advisable to throw away the baby with the bath water. What the Obaship system needs is rigorous reform and stern reevaluation. But for globalization which has brought the world together in the centre, what will an Apetu be doing moonlighting and stealing in America while pretending to be ruling his people from abroad?

      These are some of the questions one intended to put to the newly ennobled Soun of Ogbomosho, Oba Afolabi Olaoye, as we intended to pay him an unscheduled royal homage in his storied homestead. The Soun was not the principal reason for our visit to Ogbomosho. Rather, it was to honour the memory of our late father in-law, Chief Christopher Adepoju Adeyanju, businessman, hotelier and entrepreneur on the tenth anniversary of his departure. He was a childhood friend of the late Soun and both of them had journeyed to Jos to make their fortune with Adeyanju eventually departing for Mubi in the old Adamawa Province where he established himself as a major retailer and industrial force.

     But why do we think Oba Olaoye is even in a position to answer these weighty posers? He was this columnist’s student at the fabled University of Ife and must have imbibed some of the intellectual rigour for which the old department of Literature in English became world famous. Despite the marked decline in the Obaship institution in recent years, there is still a lot of architecture in the ruins. The Alake of Egbaland, Oba Adedotun Aremu Gbadebo, remains a consummate military intellectual, cultural icon and discerning political analyst. The Orangun of Oke Ila, Oba Adedokun Abolarin, is impeccably well-conducted and a shining symbol of the possibilities of transformative royal leadership in his domain. Our own sovereign monarch, the Olufi, Oba (Dr) Adetoyese Oyeniyi, Odugbemi1, remains a sober and solemn professor hiding under royal plumage and an implacable farmer. He once ushered yours sincerely into a room in the palace filled with huge yam tubers harvested from his farm in Mokore in the old Area Five. We have high hopes of the new Olubadan, Oba Rasheed Adewolu Ladoja, a sometime NADECO freedom fighter who as governor of Oyo State valiantly and vigorously resisted anti-democratic tyranny. There are many more.

      The last time one spoke with the new Soun, it was to apologize for our inability to attend his upcoming coronation which was about two weeks away then. As soon as the monarch presumptive established the identity of the caller, the conversation took on a tone of rapture and respect. I told him I got his number from his friend and classmate at Ife, Oyewole son of the last Soun and former commissioner in Oyo State. “Sir, he is sitting in the car beside me”, the new Soun responded and we all chatted excitedly for a few more minutes. About thirty years earlier in the rugged and scenic town of Oke Mesi in 1993, yours sincerely had attended Oyewole’s colourful engagement ceremony to Bike, the medical doctor daughter of late Professor Toks Durotoye. It was the last snapshot of the great medical genius, Professor Kayode Osuntokun, who was to join the Triumphant Procession about a year after. It had all gone very quickly.

     Not going very quickly was the hard, five-hour slog from the Oshogbo Junction to Ogbomosho later on Saturday afternoon through some of the most atrocious roads that ever perforated a mosaic of historic hamlets and fabled towns for which the Yoruba are justly famous. All the way from Lagos the previous day, it had been a gentle drizzle and now on Saturday, the harmless, half-hearted weeping continued, like the sulking of a miserable elf. It was not a question of cruel neglect as wayfarers on the axis would attest but of a lack of continuous maintenance. What was passable ten years earlier had become an impassable cul de sac.

      Having attended a meeting of titled chiefs on the Otun Line and having presided over the arbitration of a rancorous land dispute between two historic families, we were truly on our way. Land matters a lot in these climes. One of the warlike disputants muttered darkly that if the dispute did not end in victory it would surely end in death and heroic folklore. But all that was soon forgotten as the Yoruba countryside opened up to a glorious spectacle of heroism and hardihood. From Gbaje Hills, to Ejemu village, Odeomu, Oogi, Sekona, Ede to the outskirts of Osogbo where a bustling market has mysteriously sprung up, the local people turned up in droves to sell their farm produce and to haggle about price despite the gentle drizzle. These people are simply incredible in their resilience and unyielding optimism.

      It was from here that we made a detour to connect to Ilobu hugging the outer perimeter of Ofatedo the homestead of the Offa people after the crazed and sadistic Ilorin warlord, Balogun Karara, decapitated their chiefs. From Ilobu, it took some rough tackles from the road to get to the historic town of Oko. It was from here that the famed and tempestuous warlord, Balogun Kurunmi, erupted fighting and feuding his way to the ancient Egba town of Ijaye which he converted to an autocratic fiefdom before meeting his Waterloo in the hands of the Ibadan army in 1865. From Ilobu through the ever surging and commerce-minded town of Ejigbo, the ancient metropolis of Ogbomosho opened up in its sprawling and ungainly majesty.

       All the way it was the same story of industrious and hardworking local people of this part of the country permanently on the go and indifferent to adversity while scraping together a living. If only we could understand and appreciate what a great natural work-force this heaving mass of people can constitute when properly tooled. It has been quite a run on the beautiful interior of old empire. May the reign of Soun Afolabi Oladunni OLaoye, Orumogege 111 be long, prosperous and scandal free.     

  • A Wreath for Solomon Arase

    A Wreath for Solomon Arase

    The columnist mourns the passing of one of the finest human beings ever to don the uniform of the Nigerian Police Force in its uppermost crust. It was a uniform that sat very well on his tall, gangling and deceptively languid frame. Solomon Arase was an intellectual in uniform, a rare distinction in a workforce notorious for the menacing and minatory bearing of its top cadres. Calm, unflappable and superbly cultured, he was an officer and gentleman in the most sublime sense of the phrase. If ever the title, Inspector General was designed for a particular officer, it was for him: combining the native wiles and guile of the guardroom police inspector with the massive intelligence and cerebral armament of a modern military general.

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      Such was Arase’s meticulous brilliance, painstaking attention to details and fair-mindedness that he was in high demand even as he rose through the ranks. His superiors spotted his humility, his sense of loyalty, his professional diligence and capacity to deliver such that they earmarked him for high duty as he slogged his way up. He wore no airs apart from his extant rank and was therefore able to put them at ease. As attested to by one of his former bosses, he was probably the only police officer in recent times who had served as Principal Staff Officer to three consecutive Inspector-Generals before subsequently acceding to the exalted position himself.

      His sense of personal loyalty knew no bounds and did not recognize any professional or political danger lurking in the background. This is how you recognize foul-weather friends, colleagues and subordinates alike. The last time we met was a few years back at the wedding of the daughter of his former boss, Tafa Adeoye, to the son of a friend. He was his smiling, polite and ever courteous self as he rose for a warm embrace. Now, he has gone to meet his maker after meritorious services to country and people. May his soul rest in peace. 

  • Baba Lekki meets his match

    Baba Lekki meets his match

    To the elegantly appointed and classy Cleopatra Hotel on the outskirts of Igando for the first convention of the new political outfit calling itself Women Imperative for State Power in Nigeria (WISPN). It is a radical organization demanding the immediate surrender of state power to women in the country based on what it called staggering and overwhelming evidence of male political menopause and declining moral and ethical capacity to hold a nation in dire distress together.

      Sounds very much like the revolutionary rhetoric of a celebrated Marxist hell raiser recently forcibly retired from a top university on the grounds of senility and age discrepancies. He was seventy nine when he claimed to be sixty nine.  Poker-faced, the aging Stalinist told his interlocutors that all he could remember was that he was born on a market day several moons ago and that was all there is to that. He who seeks to prove must first disprove, or has Obasanjo told your fathers his real age, the old class warrior demanded from his tormentors as he munched on roasted corn and palm kernel.

      The mystery of it all this cool drizzling money was how the ragtag organization was able to put such an impressive show together. The list of attendees was equally impressive. So was the troupe of ushers. The second mystery was the paucity of women in attendance, apart from a sprinkling   of tomboys and toy-girls. The real women of substance and substantiality shunned the gathering. But there was the old rogue and contrarian, Lambert Adesokan, aka Baba Lekki, haranguing and hectoring the crowd even as he extolled the virtues of great Nigerian heroines from antiquity to the current epoch until he was rudely interrupted by a cynical thug from Amukoko.

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        “Baba, all dat na igan mushe as dem Fela go say. You wan tell me say you never sabi woman who dey steal gobment money like dem Oyenusi man before? “the man chortled. Sensing that his platform of logic and fact was about to collapse, the old rogue maintained a stern, impassive face.

      “Not to the best of my knowledge”, the old man replied without much conviction as he scratched his head leering at the exit door.

       “ Liar!!! Baba Olosi!! Onijekuje!”, a mountainous , heavy duty woman screamed from the back of the hall and began heading menacingly towards the platform and the old crook. Amidst the pandemonium, the stage shook and then collapsed but the old man had vanished.

  • Nasir el-Rufai unravels quickly

    Nasir el-Rufai unravels quickly

    As is his custom, former Kaduna State governor Nasir el-Rufai has talked up a storm anytime something politically agitating catches his fancy. No topic is off-limits to him, and no personality or organisation beyond his sanctimonious rage. He has been widely quoted for his last Sunday’s television pontifications on the inanity of presidential aspirants making one-term promise, and on his number crunching that already predicted the winner of the 2027 presidential election.  On both points, he has been very assertive and magisterial. Firstly, he took on his comrades in the African Democratic Congress (ADC), the platform they wish to use to win the presidency, asking them to quit lying about their promise to do only one term in the event of winning the poll. And secondly he accused the federal government and Kaduna State of bribing and inevitably empowering bandits to halt their attacks on beleaguered northern states afflicted by banditry.

    No one is sure whether Mallam el-Rufai is not just stoking fires in order to sustain his visibility in the news or whether he really means what he says. Regarding the one-term controversy, he accused his comrades, former governors Rotimi Amaechi and Peter Obi, of dangerous populism. No president can change Nigeria’s fortune in four years he asserted. According to him: “On the question of people saying they will come out and do one term, I don’t think that anyone believes them and I don’t think that it’s right. You should not constitutionally give up what is yours and frankly, as someone who has been governor for eight years, Amaechi and Peter Obi have both been governors, they know the time it takes to make meaningful changes in governance; four years is not enough. I want to appeal to everyone to stop making this commitment of ‘I will do four years’ because nobody believes you.” But since the National Assembly expunged him from the ministerial list, he has not stopped excoriating the Bola Tinubu administration, insisting that it should perform miracles in rebooting the national economy and midwifing utopia.

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    What is more, his former political mentor vice president Atiku Abubakar, with whom he had wanted to migrate to the Social Democratic Party, and latterly to the ADC, has also promised four years in the presidency should he win. Even Mr Obi, famous for his farfetched ideas and impossible scenarios, has sworn that four years as president would be enough to remake Nigeria. All the politicians of note who surround Mallam el-Rufai, and who have defected into both the ADC and SDP, are convinced that the only way to win in 2027 is to promise a four-year term. It is not clear to what degree the former Kaduna governor can isolate himself or become the sole party philosopher capable of charting the only and infallible path to the presidency for the parties in question. However, gradually, he is beginning to be aware that he is becoming politically emasculated, and has thus started to whine about burying his own ambition in order to lend support to other aspirants to win the presidency. Indeed, he is so confident his adopted party – whether the ADC or SDP, he did not quite say – will win the 2027 election, probably on the second ballot, and President Tinubu would not even qualify for the runoff. It is no fanciful theory to come to that conclusion, he said sarcastically.

    In the same interview last Sunday, he indulged in another hyperbole on the subject of banditry, and especially on the non-kinetic approach to defeating the menace. As he put it: “What I will not do is to pay bandits, give them a monthly allowance, or send food to them in the name of non-kinetic. It’s nonsense; we’re empowering bandits…You don’t empower your enemy; you don’t give him money to go and buy sophisticated weapons. That is why the insecurity problem has not gone away and will not go away as long as this policy continues…My position has always been that the only repentant bandit is a dead one. Let’s kill them all. Let’s bomb them until they are reduced to nothing, and then the five per cent that still want to be rehabilitated can be rehabilitated. They can deceive, they can cover up, they can do propaganda, but those that live in Katsina, those that live in Zamfara, those that live in Kaduna,  they know what is happening…Let the governor or anyone come and deny. When the time comes, we will reveal everything.”

    Mallam el-Rufai appears disconcerted by truth. In the early years of his governorship, he embraced a different approach to banditry in his state, Kaduna. Yes, it is possible for politicians to change their mind, but they need to explain why, and admit they had made mistakes. Not Mallam el-Rufai, especially not when he lies about his change of mind. In the Sunday interview, he said his position had always been that the only repentant bandit was a dead one, and they needed to be killed, all of them. As governor, however – and there is video proof – he admitted seeking out and paying off militias killing indigenes of the state, with Southern Kaduna being the worst hit. It is reassuring he has changed his mind, but it is a little too late not to be seen as an opportunist. Perhaps one day, he will also change his mind about the December 2015 killing and burial in mass graves of nearly 350 Shiite members in Zaria mere months into his first term in office.