The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sunday

  • ‘The problem of Nigeria…’

    Instead of working together to build the country, everyone is busy looking for who to worship or who to worship them

    During the week, I received the following message. It attempts to explain the Nigerian situation from the viewpoint of the average man. As usual, I have tinkered a bit with the grammar but I promise you the sense is intact. Please read:

    … Two million of the likes of Buhari cannot change Nigeria. Everything is wrong with Nigeria. The Director won’t give you a contract except you pay up front. The banks won’t give you a loan except you concede a certain per centage. The man supervising the contract won’t pass the job except you play ball. The clerk won’t pass your file for payment except you rub his palm. The accounts department won’t raise your payment voucher or cheque unless you see them…

    The worst thing is that it has become a norm and no one sees anything wrong with it. If you think otherwise, they begin to think you are sick and not normal. If you stand in their way, you put your life at risk. If you get killed, there is no justice system in place to seek redress and bring the perpetrators to book.

    The police are corrupt; the judge is the same. Nobody cares about anybody. No law and order… everybody is only desperate about one thing: MONEY. They will kill anybody and anything that stands between them and money.

    I am an electrical engineer contractor with MNSE and COREN. But the system doesn’t care about my qualifications. (Power) Distribution and transmission jobs are given to Alhajis, pastors, friends and relatives without any basic skills. I started to ask myself how I would convince my children that education and hard work are rewarding when fools, agberos and touts are running the country from the national assembly to the presidency.

    Don’t put yourself in harm’s way for any reason. The problem of Nigeria is in the hands of Nigerians living in Nigeria… Everybody there thinks about himself and nobody is thinking about Nigeria.

    That lamentation almost has you in tears, no? It fair broke my heart. I am sniffing so much I may not be able to come up with my usual jokes today. I will still try though.

    I agree that the problem of Nigeria is in the hands of Nigerians, but not in the way you think or the writer thinks. For one thing, I do not believe that the generality of people were participants in the orchestration of this gargantuan failure. Most of us have become victims of the charade. Even when we have joined in doing the wrong thing, we are still victims. Not excusing your wrongdoing though but, I quite believe that this debacle was planned and executed at the very start of Nigeria’s birth. It was not an accident.

    This is why I find it really amusing when people play the blame game and point fingers at President Buhari. Like I always say, I am not the man’s PRO or his media man (or woman) but any short-sighted fellow can see that deducing that he is the source of Nigeria’s failures because ‘things are hard in the time of Buhari’ is myopic. I think, and I know many will agree with me, that the failure we are witnessing today was planted the same day the country was born. Nigeria came DOA. The failure is not in our stars, brethren; it’s in our genes.

    Nigeria was very unfortunate to have had the first set of elites she had. It was that crop that planted the disorder, deception, wreckage, chaos, plunder, destruction, insanity and abnormality that have become part of our national life and psyche. In planting a cancerous ethnicity/tribalism seed, encouraging a divisive religious atmosphere, and pursuing an arbitrary political system, the nation’s first set of elites sealed Nigeria’s coffin, set her independence ablaze and made sure she never found her freedom again. That system benefitted the personalities at that time; it was exploited by the army; and is being fine-tuned even today by the nation’s neo-politicians.

    For a system to flourish, it must be inherently utilitarian, i.e., be of benefit to the average man, not just a few personalities or families. Nigeria’s system is at present cult-based, which puts personalities at the centre of action. This is why it is possible for us to turn a few individuals to demigods and worship them as such and place them above the law – executive members, legislative members, institutional heads, service heads, corporate heads, just name them. As gods, they can do no wrong. They are above the law.

         I have a post in my phone showing Russia’s president, Putin, serving himself fuel at a filling station with no attendant in sight. I have another one of the former Iranian prime minister taking a bus to work as an ex-minister. It’s different here though. Recently, I heard that the former IG of Police and the current were having a spat on the number of cars the former hooked home with his finger when he retired: twelve or twenty-four. What?

    The present cult-based system is also why it is possible for an ex-governor to be welcomed from prison like a conquering Hercules just returned from a war. This is why it is possible for fellow senators to worship another senator like he was Caesar leading some Roman campaigners to expand the empire. Instead of working together to build the country, everyone is busy looking for who to worship or who to worship them. And, as of a man, everyone has chosen the emblem of worship: money. It brings power. This is why the system has failed. It never existed.

    These evidences of systemic failure have spread through all the nation’s institutions to result in zero productivity – power, civil service, school systems’ failures, etc. Erroneously, many of us have attributed these failures to the nature of the African man’s heart which I have heard is ‘wicked, black and evil’. I have found this a little strange. I do not believe a Nigerian’s heart is any more depraved than a Briton’s heart for example. The heart of man in general has a depravity depth as long as the north pole. What makes the difference is the presence or absence of well-defined systems.

    So, there are no scientific measurements for ‘wicked,’ ‘evil,’ ‘black’ hearts, but there are scientific measurements for whether one has done one’s work or not. Everyone’s work schedule is clear enough. If there is a failure in a civil service office, then the head should be held responsible. The failure on a police station floor should be put squarely at the door of the supervising inspector. The failure in a classroom should be accounted for by the teacher or the head of the school. If every officer takes responsibility for their jobs, then it should be possible for the policeman to arrest a wrong-doer, be he the president.

    Foundational errors have been committed with respect to Nigeria. I still maintain that it was arrogant of Britain to have yoked three disparate groups together in the first place. However, Britain’s error has been compounded by the error of governance adopted by the early elites for Nigeria. Good statesmen would have built the people rather than focus on tribes or personalities. The most powerful instrument for developing a nation is not so much the material as the human resources. That we built personalities and tribes rather than people has become our millstone now.

         Nigerians should stop behaving like criminals. Many a criminal prefers to recriminate his reporter neighbour, the arresting policeman and the sentencing judge for his stay in prison rather than himself for committing the crime. This is what Nigerians are doing – pointing fingers. We do not need two million Buhari; we need just you. Begin to hold yourself accountable for this country today.

  • So, Jammeh o tie le?

    So, Jammeh o tie le?

    So, Jammeh was only grandstanding?

    Watchers of the political developments in The Gambia, since the last December 1 general elections in that country would have known that the country was headed for a needless crisis the moment the (then) incumbent president, Yahya Jammeh, rejected the result, after initially accepting defeat. Adama Barrow won the election which was adjudged worldwide as credible and fair. “I hereby reject the results in totality,” said Mr. Jammeh, who had been in office for 22 years. I will not accept the results,” he added, rather emphatically and called for fresh elections to be organised by a “God-fearing electoral commission. A man who had vowed to spend one billion years in power if Allah permitted him, and had spent only 22, must still be at the preliminary stages of his presidency. So, quitting was out of the question.

    By this action, Jammeh had merely confirmed the saying that it is needless putting someone destined to sleep on the bare floor on a water bed; because he would still roll to the ground where he belongs, from the bed. Jammeh had every opportunity to etch his name in gold by surrendering power after his defeat by Barrow and his iniquities throughout his 22-year stay in power would have been forgiven, perhaps forgotten. Indeed, he was headed in that direction when he accepted defeat only to change his mind when he was bitten by the bug that had bitten his ilk on the continent in the past.

     Two things might have led to the volte-face. One, it is possible the man suddenly could not imagine his new life as ex-president, with all the allures of power in Africa, and especially in his country. The pictures of his palace that we saw on television and even in the newspapers were enough to show how much the man loved power.

    As a matter of fact, the way he sat while addressing the West African leaders who earlier visited him to see if they could make him see reason readily gave him away as a man who coveted the office. This was what made many Nigerians remember, with nostalgia, former President Olusegun Obasanjo. Seeing our own President Muhammadu Buhari looking so clueless before a small mortal like Jammeh at the parley, they wished Obasanjo had been in Buhari’s shoes. The Owu chief would have summoned Jammeh to Abuja to come and explain what he saw in the pot of soup that made him pack locust beans in his hands.

    Perhaps Jammeh was reluctant to leave office due to guilty conscience; he could have been troubled by the consequence, out of power, of his dark deeds as president.

    But the lust for power could be more like it because if it was a question of his iniquities as president, those could have been taken care of during the many negotiations by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and others that had long intervened, apparently to secure soft-landing for him. But rather than see reason, he saw ECOWAS as anti-Jammeh or at best, a meddlesome interloper. My proof? To Jammeh, the Gambian presidency was his birth-right. That was why he told his people on state television on December 20, 2016, that:”I am not a coward. My right cannot be intimidated and violated. This is my position. Nobody can deprive me of that victory except the Almighty Allah. Already, the ECOWAS meeting was a formality. Before they came, they had already said Jammeh must step down. I will not step down”.

    That was why he continued to ignore the warnings from the group which gave a deadline of January 19 (when his tenure officially ended) to step down or he would be ousted militarily. This deadline was corroborated by the Senegalese government that also gave him till midnight of January 18 to leave office. To show how terribly bad Jammeh’s case was, even the United Nations (UN) supported his removal by force of arms. However, despite all these signs on the wall that it was all over, Jammeh stayed put.

    And, like a drowning man who would not mind clinging to a serpent for help, he began clinging to anything imaginable when he saw that the world was closing in on him. Jammeh used all the subterfuge known in the books to his ilk: his hope to use the country’s Supreme Court to upturn Barrow’s election met a brick wall after the court postponed the hearing of the case for months. The court said it could not rule on Jammeh’s challenge against his electoral defeat due to a lack of judges. “We can only hear this matter when we have a full bench of the Supreme Court,” Emmanuel Fagbenle, the court’s chief justice said on January 10. The Nigerian judge said the extra judges needed to hear the case were not available. Jammeh even declared a state of emergency a few days to the end of his tenure, in his mad desperation for power.

    Rather than step down honourably, he continued to invoke the sovereignty of his country to denounce ECOWAs’ intervention as if that sovereignty meant anything to him too. He had apparently forgotten that in today’s world, such a claim is as tenuous as it is archaic.

    Seeing that he was not ready to see reason, some of his cabinet members began to desert him. Indeed, almost everyone else who had been in the saddle with him saw the handwriting on the wall; almost everyone else, except Jammeh. More than five of his ministers resigned ahead of the ultimatum. Then his vice president, Isatou Njie Saidy, threw in the towel last week, amid rising political tension. Saidy, the highest level official to abandon Jammeh’s camp had been in the role since 1997. Some accounts even said his wife and children had fled Banjul, leaving him to face his comeuppance all alone.

    Perhaps the last straw that broke the camel’s back was the country’s military that said it would not fight a “stupid fight.” Chief of Defence Staff Ousman Badjie said, after eating dinner in a tourist district close to the capital, Banjul:”We are not going to involve ourselves militarily. This is a political dispute…I am not going to involve my soldiers in a stupid fight. I love my men. If they (Senegalese) come in, we are here like this,” Badjie said, making a hands up to surrender gesture.” On Thursday, the Gambian Navy led by Rear Admiral Sarjo Fofana, also abandoned Jammeh and pledged to pass allegiance to Barrow after his swearing-in in Senegal.

    This is the wise thing to do and the military chiefs deserve to be commended for being realistic. Only a foolish military leader would order his men out against the formidable ECOWAS military fire power, especially when there was no justifiable reason for such suicide. Innocent people do not need to shed their blood or tears for a foolish tyrant.

    But no one ever thought Jammeh would hold on till last Friday before stepping down from the throne of his forefathers. Our elders say that someone who does not have the drug for nausea should not eat raw cockroaches. If Jammeh had considered the totality of everything around him –  his coming from a minority ethnic population, his military strength, their will power to defend him, the seriousness of the world to get him out, etc, he would have known that staying put was just not an option. It was clear, even to the greatest fool, that once his military commanders abandoned him, it was all over.

    But, why are African leaders like this? Has Jammeh forgotten how Laurent Gbagbo was smoked out of his room in the presidential palace in Ivory Coast like a common criminal in 2011? Why would any sane human being risk his all just to stay put in power? What new things did Jammeh have to offer after 22 years in government and in power (to paraphrase our own self-styled ex-president, General Ibrahim Babangida)?

    Anyway, it is good that the leaders of the region eventually rose to the occasion, rather unusually. “ECOWAS has stood up, and they don’t always do that. It’s an important message to Jammeh, both from the people of The Gambia, the people of Africa, and from neighbouring states, that it’s not business as usual anymore,” Amnesty International’s chief Salil Shetty said at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

    But we could go to bed with our eyes closed and be rest assured that Jammeh had no choice but to leave given the weapons and men amassed against him because tiny Gambia is involved. Could ECOWAS have taken the same stance, say, against a country like Nigeria if such an electoral impasse had occurred here? Will our military have reacted as a single entity to the election result? If we cannot answer these questions in the affirmative, then Africa is not yet out of the woods. We still need a working framework to remove cavemen thrust into power by some benevolent spirits who would want to bring down the roof on everybody’s head rather than leave honourably when their term ends.

    But it is good that we have seen the exit of a man who was described as ‘capable of anything’ and had instilled so much fear in his people.

  • Of rest & routine medical check up 

    Of rest & routine medical check up 

    With a number of local and regional issues demanding his urgent attention, the announcement of President Muhammadu Buhari‘s plan to embark on a sudden 10-day vacation in United Kingdom came as a surprise.

    The vacation, according to his spokesman, Femi Adesina, will avail the president the opportunity to rest, and also undertake his routine medical checkup.

    One would have thought that the crisis in The Gambia for which our troops have been dispatched to join the possible intervention force and the accidental bombing of the Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camp in Borno were enough serious issues, among others, requiring the president’s personal attention.

    But for reasons best known to him, he has opted for take part of his personal leave at this crucial period.

    Those who think that there is more to the president’s decision to travel out of the country for leave and have been suggesting that it may have to do more with his medical condition have good reasons to speculate.

    Nigerians have every reason to be worried about the president’s health and need every assurance that he is very fit to cope with mounting challenges the country is going through.

    The federal government has its plate full and overflowing with all kinds of issues and all hands, especially that of the president, are expected to be on deck to accomplish the change promised Nigerians.

    I have no doubt that Vice President Yemi Osibajo is up to the task of acting for the president and want to believe the assurance by Adesina that Nigerians have no reason to be worried about the president’s health.

    As a clear departure from the past, I would, however, have preferred if the president and other top government officials don’t go to rest or for routine medical checkups abroad.

    What is it about our country that makes it unsuitable to rest in or have routine, not major, medical checkup? Considering the high costs of trips abroad, we would have been saving scarce foreign exchange if successive governments in the country have provided necessary facilities.

    Why should our government officials fly out of the country at our expense to rest when they have permanently created a situation of unrest for a majority of Nigerians who are constantly battling to cope with the economic situation in the country?

    With what we all have to go through to survive as Nigerians, we all need good rest like the kind our leaders enjoy when they travel abroad. If the leaders of the countries they usually escape to have not taken necessary steps to make their cities preferred tourist destinations, we would not have found them good enough.

    If our country is not good enough to rest in, we should all endure and work hard at making it conducive instead of squandering our resources on unnecessary foreign trips. There is nothing wrong with travelling to other countries once in a while, but when it becomes the usual option, we need to ask ourselves if we are serious about developing our country.

    As for routine medical checkup which many top government officials and personalities also indulge in, it is yet another waste of our money which should have been invested in providing necessary medical facilities.

    While our leaders go for routine, not critical, medical checkup abroad, the average Nigerian has had to do with what President Buhari himself called consulting centres. Not even enough basic primary health care is available for most Nigerians, yet our leaders get the best of medical care home and abroad at our expense.

    At this stage of our development and the money that has been supposedly allocated to the health sector in the country over the years, routine medical checkup should be available in the country and our president should not have to fly to the United Kingdom for it.

    Too many Nigerians have died due to lack of access to medical care in government hospitals and unaffordable fees in private facilities. Government at all levels should give health the priority it deserves and make good medical care available for all and not the president and other government officials alone.

  • Again as the world sees us in Africa – A learning curve

    I can pick up a nincompoop from the New York streets, clean him up, and take him to Lusaka and you all be crowding around him chanting muzungu, muzungu and yet he’s a riffraff.

    A gargantuan pity it is that our politicians, like Africans in general, do not read: the reason it has been said that if you want to hide something from an African, simply put it in a book. Some two months ago, or thereabout, I showcased on these pages, a typical example of how foreigners, mostly whites, make fools of our leaders, and, ipso facto, us. That was in an article I captioned: “Nigeria, No Africa, as the outside world sees us” but which I am sure hardly any of those we call leaders read.  Fortunately, today’s piece is a continuation but it also contains a learning curve for us Africans. The piece, written by a US-based Zambian, says it all.  It is what any patriotic African should describe as a dirge.

     ”They call Africa the lazy man’s purview; the sluggishly slothful and languorous prefecture with its people sleepy, dreamy, torpid, lethargic, and therefore indigent; penniless and poverty-stricken, with no discoveries or inventions to their name. “It’s amazing how you all sit there and watch yourselves die,” the man sitting next to me said. Get up and do something about it”.

    When I first discovered I was going to spend my New Year’s Eve next to him on a non-stop JetBlue flight from Los Angeles to Boston I was angst-ridden. “My name is Walter,” he extended his hand as soon as I settled into my seat. I told him mine with a precautious smile. ”Where are you from?” he asked.

    “Zambia.”

     ”Zambia!” he exclaimed, “Kaunda’s country.”

     ”Yes,” I said, “Now Sata’s.” “But of course,” he responded. “You just elected King Cobra as your president.”

    My face lit up at the mention of Sata’s moniker. Walter smiled, and in those cold eyes I saw an amenable fellow, one of those American highbrows who shuttle between Africa and the U.S.

    “I spent three years in Zambia in the 1980s,” he continued. “I wined and dined with Luke Mwananshiku, Willa Mungomba and many other highly intelligent Zambians.”  ”I was part of the IMF group that came to rip you guys off.” He smirked. “Your government put me in a million dollar mansion overlooking a shanty called Kalingalinga. From my patio I saw it all—the rich and the poor, the ailing, the dead, and the healthy.”

     ”Are you still with the IMF?” I asked.

     ”I have since moved to yet another group with similar intentions. In the next few months my colleagues and I will be in Kenya to hypnotize the Raisi. I work for the broker that has acquired a chunk of your debt.

     We’ll be in Lusaka to offer your president a couple of millions and fly back with a check twenty times greater.”

     ”No, you won’t,” I said. “King Cobra is incorruptible. He is …”

     He was laughing. “Says who? Give me an African president, just one, who has not fallen for the carrot and stick.”

     Quett Masire’s name popped up.

    “Oh, him, well, we never got to him because he turned down the IMF and the World Bank. It was perhaps the smartest thing for him to do.”

      ”This is white man’s country’. “We came here on Mayflower and turned Indian land into a paradise and now the most powerful nation on earth. We discovered the bulb, and built this aircraft to fly us to pleasure resorts like Lake Zambia or Lake Kenya.  ”That’s what we call your countries. You guys are as stagnant as the water in the lake. We come in with our large boats and fish your minerals and your wildlife and leave morsels—crumbs. That’s your staple food, crumbs. That corn-meal you eat, that’s crumbs, the small Tilapia fish you call Kapenta / omena are crumbs. We the Bwanas (whites) take the cat fish. I am the “Bwana” and you are the “mtu”. I get what I want and you get what you deserve, crumbs. That’s what lazy people get—Zambians,  Kenyans  , other Africans, the entire Third World.”

     The smile vanished from my face.

    “I see you are getting pissed off,” Walter said and lowered his voice. “You are thinking this Bwana is a racist.

    Okay. Let’s for a moment put our skin pigmentations, this black and white crap, aside.

     Tell me, my friend, what is the difference between you and me?”

     I said, “There’s no difference.”

     ”Absolutely none,” he exclaimed. “Scientists in the Human Genome Project have proved that. It took them thirteen years to determine the complete sequence of the three billion DNA subunits. After they were all done it was clear that 99.9% nucleotide bases were exactly the same in you and me. We are the same people. All white, Asian, Latino, and black people on this aircraft are the same.”

     I gladly nodded.

     ”And yet I feel superior.”  ”Every white person on this plane feels superior to a black person. The white guy who picks up garbage, the homeless white trash on drugs, feels superior to you no matter his status or education. I can pick up a nincompoop from the New York streets, clean him up, and take him to Lusaka and you all be crowding around him chanting muzungu, muzungu and yet he’s a riffraff.

    Tell me why my angry friend.”

     For a moment I was wordless.

     ”Please don’t blame it on slavery like the African Americans do or colonialism, or some psychological impact or some kind of stigmatisation. And don’t give me the brainwash poppycock. Give me a better answer.”

     I was thinking.

     He continued. “Excuse what I am about to say. Please do not take offense.”

    I felt a slap of blood rush to my head and prepared for the worst.

     ”You my friend flying with me and all your kind are lazy,” he said. “When you rest your head on the pillow you don’t dream big. You and other so-called African intellectuals are damn lazy, each one of you only going for leadership;  just to fill their own stomach and steal from poor. It is you, and not those poor starving people, who is the reason Africa is in such a deplorable state.” Poor and uneducated Africans are the most hardworking people on earth. I saw them in villages toiling away.  I saw women on Kafue Road crushing stones to sell and I wept. I said to myself where are the Zambian intellectuals? And in Kenya l saw women as bricklayers. Where are these intellectuals? Are the Zambian or Kenyans engineers so imperceptive they cannot invent a simple stone crusher, or a simple water filter to purify well water for those poor villagers? Are you telling me that after thirty-seven years  or more of independence your university school of engineering has not produced a scientist or an engineer who can make simple small machines for mass use?

     What is the school there for?”

     I held my breath.

     ”Do you know where I found your intellectuals? They were in bars quaffing. I saw with my own eyes a bunch of alcoholic graduates  calling themselves policy makers. Zambian, Kenyans , other African intellectuals work from eight to five and spend the evening drinking. We don’t. We reserve the evening for brainstorming.”

     He looked me in the eye.

     ”And you flying to Boston and all of you Africans in the Diaspora are just as lazy and apathetic to their country. You don’t care about your country and yet your very own parents, brothers and sisters live there. Many have died or are dying of neglect . They are dying of AIDS because you cannot come up with your own preventive measures. Too much immorality .You are here calling yourselves graduates, researchers and scientists and are fast at articulating your credentials once asked—oh, I have a PhD in this and that so what?

    What next? Handouts from IMF ? Then repay?

     I was deflated.

    “Wake up you all!” he exclaimed, attracting the attention of nearby passengers. “You should be busy lifting ideas, formulae, recipes, and diagrams from American manufacturing factories and sending them to your own factories. All those dissertation papers you compile should be your country’s treasure. Why do you think the Asians are a force to reckon with? They stole our ideas and turned them into their own. Look at Japan, China, India, just look at them.”

     He paused. “The Bwana has spoken,” he said and grinned.

    Dream big; make tractors, cars, and planes, or  forever remain inferior.

  • Selflessness in a strong moral personhood: for Comrade Dipo Fasina, aka “Jingo”, @70

    Selflessness in a strong moral personhood: for Comrade Dipo Fasina, aka “Jingo”, @70

    Tomorrow, Monday, January 23, 2017, Dr. Dipo Fasina, aka “Jingo”, will be seventy years old. He looks so much younger than his real age that some people think that the reported or recorded age is not the real thing. What you see is what you get, isn’t that the case? Fortunately, we have two reasons to disbelieve the evidence of our eyes in the matter of Comrade Dipo’s age. One reason is circumstantial and the other reason is substantive. Here is the circumstantial reason: in Nigeria, people do not revise their ages up; they revise them down in a practice, a habit that is legendary in the scale of its perpetration. For the substantive reason, we have nothing other than the witness borne by many of Dipo’s classmates at Kings College where he had his high school education and the Government College, Ibadan, where he went for his two-year higher school certificate education. In looks and appearance, many of these former classmates of Dipo seem decades older than “Jingo”, but they all remember him as a beloved former classmate either at KC or GCI.

    As both a moral philosopher and a teacher of philosophy, these opening, playful musings about circumstantial and substantive reasons not to believe the illusory evidence of our eyes would, one imagines, delight “Jingo”. At the Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), Ile-Ife, where it was both my privilege and my honour to be his colleague and comrade, one of the greatest accomplishments of “Jingo” was to so popularize and demystify philosophy that nearly every student wanted to take his courses. At one stage, the classes got so huge that the only space large enough to contain students registered for his introductory philosophy class was the university’s outdoor sports complex, complete with rigging for mass amplification to make him audible to everybody. I should say audible and personal to everybody among the hundreds of students present at this modern-day revival of what philosophy had meant to the entire polis in ancient Greece: a practical guide to life and action in pursuit of the collective good. I have the personal evidence of one former student of “Jingo” present at this mass studentship of philosophy, Miss Nkolika Anyadike, that like everyone else in the multitude, she felt that their beloved teacher was talking to her, even though she knew that the register of address was pitched to a mass audience.

    Jingo’s retirement from service five years ago was nothing short of momentous, increasing the substantive documentation that we have that he is indeed now a septuagenarian, youthful looks notwithstanding. In the size and the variety of people present, the festive gathering that graced the occasion was absolutely without precedent in the history of that university. I was personally unable to be present at the event, but news reached me of its magnitude. Although in number and sheer physical presence students and university academic and non-academic staff were the most notable category of festive communards at the occasion, dozens of representatives of labour, professional associations, civil society organizations and rank and file members of associations of market women and men were also present at the mammoth gathering. Of the pictures and news reporting of the occasion that came to my notice, nothing moved me more than the almost reverential nature of the respect, the esteem universally accorded to Jingo during that phenomenal retirement celebration. This calls for a special commentary.

    In a country in which reverence, when real and not fake, is given only to men and women of God before whom all bow in worshipful idolatry, Jingo is about the only man I am aware of that is not a born-again pastor about whom a deep reverence bordering on hero worship, or indeed secular idolatry, has been expressed. I wish to make this observation the pivot around which to arrange the things I wish to say about and to Jingo on this occasion of his making it to 70 and beyond. My central or essential point will be this: in order to so completely put the needs of others before one’s own needs as Jingo has done all his adult life, you have to have a profound belief in the moral personhood, the moral agency of not only yourself but also of others. Before coming to this crucial point, first, a few important and exemplary details of Jingo the teacher, the activist, the comrade, and one of the moving spirits of the struggles for justice and equality in our country at the present time.

    At OAU, Ife, when we both taught and lived in that foremost among the progressive university communities of not only Nigeria but the entire African continent, the popularity and respect that Jingo enjoyed among students was matched by the popularity and respect that he enjoyed among his fellow lecturers and professors. Although this was and still is uncommon, the reason for it was fairly simple: Jingo was such a profoundly selfless, decent and fair-minded person that he won the admiration of even those who did not agree with him in matters both great and small. He was a model teacher and mentor to his undergraduate and graduate students, as well as his younger professional colleagues in the Philosophy Department and the Faculty of Arts. I used to marvel at the depth of loyalty and dedication that he inspired in his students and young acolytes. The truly remarkable part of this observation is that among our own small group of Marxists and socialists in the Socialist Forum Collective (SFC), Jingo was about the only one that enjoyed the trust and the respect of all the members and the undeclared factions within the group! The same thing is true of the myriad other crucial positions that Jingo has held: as National President of ASUU; as Chairperson of the Committee for the Defense of Human Rights (CDHR); as National Coordinator of the Joint Action Front (JAF), the body responsible for linking all the progressive struggles in the country, from the labour movement to students and the unemployed, and from women and youth affairs to the rights of internally displaced peoples in hotbeds of war and rapine in the country.

    Since nothing works better than stories and accounts from actual experience to illustrate the sorts of observations and assertions that I am making here as a tribute to Jingo’s integrity and the universal admiration that he commands within and beyond the Left, permit me to briefly relate a story about a little known but highly pertinent fact concerning Jingo’s role in the origins of ASUU as Nigeria’s and Africa’s most radical and progressive association of university teachers. In mid-April 1980, to my own as much as to everyone else’s surprise, I became the National President of ASUU. Though the Union had just been re-registered and had just changed its name from the old Nigerian Association of University Teachers (NAUT), it was still very much cast in the mold of the NAUT: conservative, unpopular even among academics and so badly run that it had very little active support or following among its own members. I had gone as a member of the OAU-Ife delegation to the 1980 annual delegates’ conference of the union at Port Harcourt not to become its president but to persuade the national body to more actively to advance the cause of radical and progressive lecturers that had been unjustly dismissed from service by the military dictatorship at places like UI, Unilag and Unical. I apparently was so successful in that mission that a good number of delegates from other institutions felt that only under my leadership could the Union be expected to effectively take up the cause of our dismissed comrades. Reluctantly, I accepted to stand for election and won by a majority of – one vote!

    Back at Ife, the news of my election as ASUU president was received almost as an anti-climax or non-event, especially by many members of our group, the Socialist Forum Collective. There were about three factions: one neutral or indifferent; one supportive but only mildly and cautiously so; one very vigorous in its opposition. This last group was numerically and vocally the most dominant. Its leading proponent – who has since become a renowned, beloved and storied “elder statesman” among ASUU’s older generation of past local and national leaders – poured his scorn and disapprobation, not on me, but on the Union and its entire membership. Quite correctly at that time, he said that NAUT/ASUU was a union without backbone or spine, a union that had constantly betrayed its members in the past and would do so again, regardless of its leadership under me/us. Of me, this comrade asked what had happened to our longstanding practice of maintaining a distance to conservative, bourgeois organizations that we knew we could never change from within? Why had I unilaterally departed from this practice and had gone and accepted to be ASUU’s national president?

    The day was saved by – yes! – Jingo, ably supported by Dr. Segun Osoba. Among other reasons, this is why, if you go to the Foreword to my book on all the writings of Wole Soyinka, Politics, Poetics and Postcolonialism, you will find that I pointedly mentioned their two names as the colleagues and comrades with whom I had felt the greatest political, ideological and moral affinity in my years at OAU-Ife. At any rate, it was on the basis of Jingo’s visionary support that our group accepted to do everything possible and necessary to transform the old NAUT to a new vibrant and ideologically radical ASUU. At that crucial moment in time and history when the glory days of ASUU was still in the future, while some chose to believe only the evidence of their eyes, Jingo looked deeper and saw not what was there but what could be there. More accurately in my opinion, this was not so much a case of what was not there; rather, it was a matter of what was there but was hidden from plain or ordinary or jaundiced sight. For want of a more adequate or precise language, I would describe this “thing” that was there but was/is hidden from plain sight as the moral agency or personhood, actual or potential, of every human being, old or young, rich or poor, conservative or progressive, bourgeois or proletarian, religious or irreligious. More than many other comrades that I personally met and was greatly influenced by in the Nigerian Left, Jingo stands out as the one to whom this issue of the moral agency and personhood of all human beings is a fundamental article of faith and action. What exactly does this mean? Permit me to offer a brief answer to this question in my closing comments in this tribute.

    He puts the interests of others before his own interest – this is one of the most constant things you hear said about Jingo by just about everybody who has ever met him, especially the poor, considered as either the working or unemployed poor. The notion of selfhood is central to this constant comment that is made about Jingo, even though paradoxically, this is selfhood as selflessness, the sacrifice of the self and its (own) interests. A man who is not pursuing the things that other men, other comrades are pursuing – promotions, girlfriends and concubines, contracts, houses, cars, titles –  has only his selfhood to offer. The poor and the looted of our society, like the poor and the dispossessed of all societies, are extremely discriminating in the selfhood that they will accept on the altar of the self-sacrifice of upper middle class revolutionaries and progressives. As his friend and comrade, I am in great awe of the sacrifices that Jingo has made for the people’s cause. For in him and only a few others in our society lies the hope that belief in the moral agency of the downtrodden and the oppressed will not ultimately be wiped out in our lifetime.

    Congratulations and welcome to the club of senior citizens, Jingo! A luta continua; victoria a certa!

    • Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • The gods of War

    With Idi Amin, there was no way of knowing if he was appreciating the value of one’s verbal contribution or the succulence of one’s flesh, until you woke up one morning to find you did not wake up and you were the breakfast.

    Dear reader, I’m sure you’re familiar with the book/film The Dogs of War by Frederic Forsyth, I think. Well, I’m not. I have rather heard of that other one, the gods of war. No, you haven’t? Surprising, considering the story is lived out daily in Africa, what with all these despotic rulers who sprout like mushrooms everyday everywhere on the continent. The gods of war are the despots who people the landscape of Africa as rulers or presidents and brutalise their own people and declare war on them just to remain in power.

           Let me remind you of a few. I remember… Gnassingbe Eyadema of Togo who was said to have clung to his presidential seat by the skin of his teeth for close to 40 years. He killed a few good men for that seat. Well, he eventually had to go I think, or was it that the seat left him? I don’t remember now.

          I do remember what’s his name again now? Oh yes, Idi Amin of Uganda he was. He ate a few good men for that seat. As the story went, he was not just a bad ruler, he was a cannibal of his people to boot! Imagine how creepy it must have been working with him. There was no way one could ever tell if he was appreciating the value of one’s verbal contribution or the succulence of one’s flesh, until you woke up one morning to find you did not wake up and you were the breakfast. Get that?  Huhh!

         I found the one I was looking for in Teodore Obiang Mbasogo who has been ruling Equatorial Guinea since 1979. He entered my book because he is said to be, and I quote, “the country’s god with all power over men and things…” Huh, god indeed, please!!! Even my dog sometimes thinks he’s a god, especially when I give him what he does not like. It’s said though that Mbasogo is said to have eaten a few good men and can “decide to kill without anyone calling him to account and without going to hell.” What hell? Have I not many times desired one cone of ice cream and my wretched reasonable mind would tell me ‘no’ because it would go to my hips and I swing them hips worse than a rhinoceros? Now, that’s hell. But wait, there is more.

        We have all heard of Nigeria’s Sani Abacha, Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe and Dos Santos of Angola; the last one there is said to have been warming his seat since 1979. Mugabe is definitely not done warming his seat, just as he’s also not done wrecking the economy. Well, we all know the stories of Abacha and Gaddafi; hardly deserves any mention, neither do they as a matter of fact.

         Now, why have I gone into so much story telling considering I am no historian? It’s because I read recently that another of our dictators is putting up another drama in his country. I read that Yayah Jammeh of The Gambia is even right now rejecting the free and fair elections his people held after he has been ruling them for 22 years. Worse, he himself was said to have earlier conceded defeat and declared the elections fair. Then he changed his mind; now, he wants more years on the throne, like Oliver Twist, except that Oliver twist was really hungry, underfed, poor, sad, afraid, an orphan and… This man, on the other hand, appears to be more into greed.

         That set me asking: just what virus attacks the black man’s brain that when he gets into power, he begins to make himself out as one great god whose sun should not set? Worse yet, he sets about doing anything to entrench himself but govern. He even goes to war to defend the throne against the people and against time. He refuses the results of polls and refuses to die.

         I am beginning to believe the theory that says that the African mind is still grappling with infantile delusions of grandeur. Sadly, this syndrome makes the rulers believe that they are some great ones and ‘possess some superior qualities such as genius… and the conviction of having some great but unrecognised talent or insight…’ Let’s stop the quotation there.

          So, back to our question on just what attacks the brain of the black man. I really don’t know but I can hazard a few guesses. First, I want to believe it’s something in the air of Africa. There is so much heat and dust around it’s no wonder some of both get into our brains. If the brains are not being fried by the sun, they’re being contaminated by the viruses in the air. Seriously. Ever heard of the sun effect theory? It is also called the greenhouse effect but the story is the same: the sun fries our brains and prevents us from thinking clearly. After all, the gasses produced in a greenhouse are more useful for growing plants. Grrr!

          My other theory is that there is something in the food in Africa that prevents us from seeing clearly. Have you checked our diets lately? When the times were good, someone said our plates consisted of carbohydrates garnished with a dot resembling meat which was well below the United Nations’ ration. Now, in these recession-ridden times, the meat has disappeared completely.

          Yes, I agree with you, these things should not be so. Any African should have access to a well-balanced diet where the plate of protein is garnished with a little carbohydrate. This would be so too if we had people to drive developments such as plenty of mechanised farms, animal and plant, energy to consume and work with, industries to produce end-products that can refine lives, imaginations to make people dream, etc. Then, you and I can have lots to eat and even despots will not need to eat their fellow human beings. That’s right, the people we need are called presidents who need to be self-denying to get the job done.

          Somewhere in my phone, I still have a post titled ‘Should we tell Africa?’ I wondered, tell Africa what? It turned out to be a discourse by a group of discussants in the West on the world’s economy. Accompanied by sniggers, laughter and guffaws, the panel concluded that there was no point telling Africa about the new direction the world economy was taking. Its god-presidents were too busy fighting wars of self-entrenchment and the people busy struggling to survive.

         Clearly, Africa’s new elites need to wake up and demand that their presidents do more than preen in new clothes in front of the mirror every morning, noon and night. Thankfully, that is something we cannot accuse Nigeria’s current president, President Buhari of doing. The man clearly is taking his job very seriously. This cannot be said of most of our undemocratic neighbour-presidents.

          These presidents do not only not have the solutions their countries require for development; they actually plunge their countries into chaos. Somalia’s Barre left after decades of playing god and there was a civil war; Gbagbo of Ivory Coast also reneged on elections. Now, Jammeh is playing the same game in The Gambia. What he is saying like the others is, ‘if I cannot be king then there’s no kingdom’.

           African presidents should realise two things. They do not have a monopoly of wisdom in their countries. Even if they did, there is so much any group can take of any brand of wisdom. They need to realise that power always seeps out of the throne, somehow. African presidents should therefore learn to respect tomorrow because it does come.

  • State principles and religious identities

    State principles and religious identities

    In fragile and unstable post-colonial states and nations, the incursion of religion into the state arena ought to be avoided like a plague. This is because religion, being a faith-based and emotive phenomenon, is resistant to logic and the rational intellectual constructs on which modern nationhood is founded. No amount of logic and intellectual rigour on display can sway the religious adherent. Magic cannot be explained away rationally. In its purest form, religious worship is based on the suspension of logical and intellectual disbelief.
    This is why religious disputes are a potentially explosive affair. Yet Nigerian authorities find it very hard to shy away from religious contentions. If religion is truly the opium of the people, it may well be the adrenalin of the ruling class in Nigeria. The Nigerian post-colonial state, like a condemned moth, finds religious conflagrations very conducive and appealing indeed. It is like an addictive urge to play with fire, just to test one’s fire-fighting skills. But there are fires and there are fires.
    Yet it is also obvious that despite its strength, its power and capacity for violence, its ability to instil and inflict terror on the populace, the state continues to be vulnerable to certain traditional institutions and religions particularly in Nigeria. Why this is so goes back to the very foundation of the colonial state on the continent and the emergence of the Nigerian nation from the colonial laboratory of artificial insemination.
    Events of this past week have brought to the front burner the explosive mix of religion and statehood in Nigeria. Jim Obazee, the rogue regulator at the Financial Reporting Council (FRC), in an attempt to bring the leadership of the non-traditional church in Nigeria to heel brought himself to heel instead and brought the federal government to precipitate fury in an unhelpful and maladroit manner. For a government often characterized as slow and tardy in response to national emergencies, the retribution was swift and severe. In one fell swoop, Obazee was dismissed and the council reconstituted.
    The ripple effects of this dramatic denouement are still very much with us. Many have lined up behind the government and the embattled leadership of the non-traditional church. Superstitious intellectuals, an oxymoronic formulation unique to Nigeria and Africa, are having a field day. The alleluia boys and girls of the press have risen as one to condemn what they consider to be an unwarranted interference in freedom of worship and choice of church however its structural and fiscal eccentricities. While the senate kept a dignified silence, the house waded in in an unwieldy and unhelpful manner.
    This development leads to several interesting and intriguing paradoxes which must be teased out in the interest of national clarity and state illumination. Some of these need to be immediately isolated for the sake of analytic leverage. For example, is the Nigerian post-colonial state a secular state or a theocratic state with pretences to secularity based on its choice of democratic governance underscored by secular parties, secular ideologies and secular elections based on secular freedom of association and leveraged by a free, secular press?
    The very idea of a theocratic secular state is a contradiction in terms. Despite the prevalence of theocratic rule in certain segments of the human society, the modern-nation state is premised on the secularization of the state and the subordination of religious practice to the rule of law as fashioned by the state and its agents. This development occured when territorial space came to be defined by earthly authority rather than religious identity. Whereas in the old arrangement, religious identification and spiritual affiliation was all that mattered, in the new arrangement it was national identification and a pan-ethnic identity which superseded tribe and tongue. Thus was born the modern nation and its concomitant nationalism.
    It is to be noted that like all human activities the advent of the modern nation-state is not a result of peaceful contemplations, political decrees and philosophical postulates. It was as a result of relentless human exertion in the field of battle followed by peace treaties, particularly the Treaty of Westphalia and later The Treaty of Utrecht. Indeed, had the Ottoman Turks sweeping all before them not come to grief outside modern Serbia, we might have been talking of global Islamic theocracy.
    The subjugation and pacification of the continent of Africa by the European imperialist powers followed much the same pattern. It was a function of relentless and dogged secularization. The motive was economic and political and only secondarily religious. Several nationalities with different religions were boxed together and slammed with a national identity with the state superintending.
    In Nigeria, the marked preference of the colonial authorities for a cohesive north even with its different religious affiliation shows that theocracy was far from the pressing agenda. By this same token, it shows that any attempt to impose a theocratic solution on the contradictions of a multi-religious nation like Nigeria is bound to come to grief.
    This leads directly to the other paradox. Is Nigeria a multi-religious state? Contrary to some prevalent political illiteracy, there can be nothing like a multi-religious state. The idea of a multi-religious state is a violent contradiction in terms. Nigeria is a secular state superintending over a multi-ethnic and multi-religious nation and adjudicating among different factions of the political elite who often use the blackmail of religion and ethnicity to pursue their economic goals and interest. The idea of a multi-religious state presupposes a turn by turn power arrangement in which different religious leaders take turn to rule the nation which can only presage much division and disruption.
    The question to be asked is this: why is it that despite the fact that Nigeria is not a theocratic state, religion is often allowed to invade the arena of the state in a way and manner that threatens the secularity of the state, its sacred ethos and fundamental covenant? Virtually all of Nigeria’s post-military leaders in the Fourth Republic with the exception of Umaru Yar’Adua are guilty of this relentless de-secularization of the state.
    In the case of General Obasanjo in his second coming, perhaps in an attempt to validate his sense of messianic exceptionalism, Aso Rock was virtually turned into a permanent Christian Revivalist kingdom with tropes and totems of His Second Coming dotting the landscape. But if this can be excused as arising from the psychological trauma of a man who nursed cosmic vengeance against his tormentors, what can one say of a man like Goodluck Jonathan who became a footloose prayer warrior routinely kneeling before religious authority in a vote-garnering political gimmick bristling with spiritual chicanery?
    Yet the fact that Jonathan became a virtual praying mantis abasing himself and the sacred ethos of secular authority did not stave off looming defeat and the crippling economic depression he and his cohorts inflicted on the nation. There is another historic reference point. In the Second Republic, the pious and prayerful Alhaji Shehu Shagari was known to retire upstairs to commune with his maker as his acolytes took the nation to the financial slaughter slab. It seems as if the more underdeveloped a nation is the more over-religious its leaders are.
    In the particular case of General Mohammadu Buhari, it may well be that his ascetic and abstemious nature, the solid and stolid credentials of his Islamic piety, do not admit of the spiritual razzmatazz of his Christian predecessors. Nobody can fairly accuse him of religious one-upmanship in his public conduct or utterances or of turning the precincts of Aso Rock into an Islamic redoubt with minarets blaring.
    Yet the paradox on ground suggests that in a bid to avoid the tar of religious fundamentalism, he has raised the decibel of the politicization of religion in the country particularly in his last two campaigns as political exigencies led him to court and cultivate certain religious pressure groups at the expense of the secularity of the state simply to demonstrate that he is not a fanatic but a much misunderstood statesman.
    This is precisely what has returned to haunt the government in the Obazee affair as the Buhari administration appears to bend over backward to please and mollify a particular religious tendency with presidential vote-husbandry and the next election in view. To be sure, Obazee, driven by petty animosity for a sect that had reportedly sanctioned him for an earlier pastoral infraction, demonstrated grave political irresponsibility by not clearing matters with his superiors.
    Yet the bald fact remains that in a secular state, all religious groups are subordinate to the directing vision of the secularized Leviathan. This is what guarantees societal cohesion, intra and inter-religious harmony and economic prosperity certainly not religious piety. Even the bible enjoins us to give unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar.
    Ordinarily, respect for freedom of association ought to preclude the state from unwarranted interference in the internal political structure and tenure of leadership of private associations such as non-traditional churches. But it is also the case that government cannot refrain from intervention where the conduct of certain non-traditional religious associations constitutes an economic security threat to the nation or when the internal jostling for power or succession struggle is deemed as prejudicial to public order.
    Having been forcibly constituted as a modern nation-state by colonial conquerors, it would amount to a great historical tragedy if the nation were to regress into Stone Age religious anarchy where religious leaders hold the nascent state to ransom. In contemporary Nigeria, there is a marked disjunction between inner spirituality and overt religiosity, otherwise why is there so much wickedness and wanton cruelty such as we are currently witnessing, despite the nocturnal vigils and endemic fasting?
    As some sections of the political elite fan the embers of religious cum ethnic schisms in several flashpoints leading to widespread mayhem and industrial killing, it is the bounden duty of the Nigerian state to rise to the occasion or lose its fundamental raison d’etre. If that were to be the case, both the state and the nation it is supposed to superintend will unravel in the shortest possible time.
    Finally a word for our spiritual leaders and people of God. To whom much is donated, much is also expected in terms of probity, accountability and fiscal godliness. They cannot continue to resist or cleverly evade state audit of their finances as long as they remain an integral part of the nation and not some theocratic enclaves operating at some interstices beyond state surveillance. But even more important at this perilous conjuncture for the nation, our religious leaders must avoid inflammatory political rhetoric and divisive statements which tend to put the entire nation at grave political risk.
    They must avoid the temptation to turn their exalted political platforms into a bullying pulpit for the sole purpose of wresting political and economic concessions from the state. From the events of the past few years, it is obvious that many of them need political minders. May God grant them the wisdom to appreciate the fact that we are not equally endowed and that a religious avatar is not the same thing as a political genius.

  • The town and the cassock

    The town and the cassock

    FRC Act is a clarion call to church leaders for introspection

    Pastor Enoch Adeboye’s resignation as General Overseer (G.O.) of the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG) on January 7 has raised dust that has refused to settle. Pastor Adeboye, who announced his stepping down as G.O. of the Nigerian arm of the church at the Annual Ministers Thanksgiving held at the Redemption Camp, Ogun State, also named Pastor Joseph Obayemi as the G.O. of the Nigerian branch while he assumes duty as the Spiritual Head and Global Missioner of the church. Adeboye said his stepping down was in response to the new legal requirements by the Financial Regulations Council (FRC) guiding all registered churches, mosques and civil society organisations (CSOs).

    Although it is only Pastor Adeboye that has so far complied with the FRC law (now suspended), which stipulates that heads of nonprofit organisations like churches now have a maximum period of 20 years to lead their organisations, and in retirement are not permitted to hand over to their relations; the fact is, more churches would have followed suit but for the suspension of the law by the Federal Government and the promise by the House of Representatives to take another look at the provisions of the law.

    Expectedly, the law has generated controversies, with Nigerians seeing it from different perspectives, depending on which side of the divide they are. I knew we have not heard the last of the matter the day Pastor Adeboye made the announcement, but what would happen specifically was what I could not tell. How would Vice President Yemi Osinbajo feel that such a thing happened to his church’s G.O. at a time he is the country’s number two man? (Remember he is also a pastor in the church). I tried to put myself in his shoes. Somehow, Jim Obazee, the FRC boss has had to be sacrificed for implementing the law. It is impossible to catch such a big fish in our kind of country without the net tearing.

    Whilst one is pained by the fact that government – the National Assembly and all-  which are also sick and in need of deliverance, are now the ones trying to regulate the activities of churches (that should set the moral tone and be an exemplar of everything Christ-like), the fact is, the churches brought this situation of the man with a log in his eyes trying to remove the speck in the eye of the other, upon itself. Today, it is impossible to know the difference between the church and the town, or the town and the cassock. Many of our churches have exalted those things they ought not to have done at all and have left undone those things they are supposed to exalt. Poverty stares one in the face on seeing members of some of these churches, including those where they worship prosperity. But the opulence surrounding the leadership is a sharp contrast to this.

    For example, what do churches need private jets for? Even as a country, we complain about the astronomical costs of running presidential jets. If the idea is to propagate the gospel, this can be more economically done by those concerned using commercial flights. But what obtains in some of our influential churches is the rat race of my jet is bigger than yours! This being the case, they should be able to pay some money into government’s coffers. Do they also tell those collecting parking and other fees for the jets that they should not pay because they are churches?

    The point is; the mouths of some of the church leaders have now become so wide that offerings, tithes and other incomes realised in the church can no longer sustain them. So, they have delved into business ventures, including schools, universities, hospitals, etc., in some cases with turnovers in billions. With such stupendous wealth made through business activities, you cannot be on your own. Somebody must look into your books. As they say, if you don’t want to get wet, don’t go near the brook. The spiritual head should not double as the head of administration, accounts and even audit; in which case they report to no one but themselves. Even Jesus Christ was not everything; he appointed a treasurer!

    At any rate, the churches cannot take not wanting government to look into some of their activities too far because most of them would not be operating in the country if they were not registered. Registering with government is admission that they accept the supremacy of government and is indication of their readiness to submit to the law (government).

    Moreover, we have had incidents of church buildings collapsing because some pastors would want to sidetrack the law. Investigations into the last one in Uyo, the Akwa Ibom State capital, last month, revealed that the founder was in a hurry to get his ordination conducted in the new edifice that he could not wait for the necessary government approvals. In the end, more than 50 people perished when the building collapsed. There is so much impunity on the part of some church leaders that government cannot but be interested in.

    It is necessary to see what amendments the lawmakers want to make to the FRC law. Were the churches not consulted before the law was made? Were there no stakeholders’ meetings where the issues were thrashed out? Why did the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) wait till now before crying wolf? Whatever it is, the country would do better with the spiritual aspects only left for the churches. That is what the Bible asks them to do. Not business. Christians know that God can call anyone at any time. While He could call some early in life; He also could decide to call some in old age. So, what happens to such latter day men of God? This, for me, is where we should leave the spiritual matter completely in the hands of the churches. But not with church money; particularly proceeds from business ventures that the churches engage in. Such money cannot be left to the whims and caprices of one individual in the hope that he would act rationally simply because he is a man of God. These days, we know there are men of God and there are men of God. We also know what money, as the root of all evils, can cause.

    The truth of the matter is that no matter the amendments the lawmakers and the government make to the law, it would be useless if they do not make the churches, mosques, etc. accountable for the people’s money that they collect. It is not a sin that some of these organisations are extremely rich, some richer than some nations; but it is sinful that the people who contributed the money do not have a say in how it is spent. It is the leadership that takes that decision solely, and when we talk of the leadership, we are not talking about any committee or board but one or two persons, perhaps from the same family. This is wrong.

    Unless where there is incontrovertible evidence that the business ventures established by the churches are being subsidised by the church, they should be treated as the business concerns that they are. As of now, many of their members’ children cannot attend the schools established with the church’s money because of the astronomical fees. The implication of what I am saying is this; the organisations, churches, mosques, etc. must be compelled to send their annual returns to the appropriate quarters. Some churches have been doing this for years; even long before the FRC came up with the law. Indeed, for me, this basically, is the reason behind the brouhaha that has attended the issue since Pastor Adeboye’s resignation.

    We must give it to some of the pastors who seem concerned about the tenure proviso though because they really toiled to grow their churches. It was Pastor Adeboye that took RCCG to its present enviable height just as credit also should go to Bishop David Oyedepo for his untiring efforts that have made the Winners Chapel witness its meteoric growth. But, if the spiritual life of these churches has not outgrown the founders; the financial life has. To the extent that they threw their coffers open for public money, there is need to ensure that such monies are not abused.

    The import of what has just happened is that our churches have to brace up for the inevitable; this is the simple truth. Let no one jubilate over Obazee’s removal. It would only amount to a well deserved sack if he had ulterior motives for doing what he did. Otherwise, the entire incident should be seen as a clarion call to our church leaders for introspection. They should use the incident to search their conscience to see where they missed it. We as church members may lack the capacity to touch them or do them any harm; but they will do well to retrace their steps before what will do more than harm to them comes.

    And, on their own part, if our leaders truly fear God as they do some of our church leaders, they would know that good governance is what is needed to make the country a better place. Lawmakers who want pension for their leaders that spent a few years in government do not have the moral right to sit in judgement over tenure of people who spent decades building their institutions.

  • ASUU, Fed Govt and endless renegotiations

    ASUU, Fed Govt and endless renegotiations

    FORGIVE the pessimism, but there will be no end to dithering over education in Nigeria. The merry-go-round simply won’t stop. Those saddled with the responsibility of managing Nigeria’s education system have for decades shown neither the depth of understanding needed to make it work even at the rudimentary level nor the vision required to make it great, effective, productive or transcendental. This, like every other thing about Nigeria, is a peculiarly Nigerian mystery. Last week, after much pestering, including a one-week warning strike by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) in November last year, the federal government has finally conceded to another effete round of renegotiating the 2009 Fed Govt/ASUU agreement.
    For a federal government enamoured of reaching agreements it never hoped to keep, it is not so amazing that they have become both used to embarking on negotiations and inured to honouring agreements. The usual style is that after bellyaching over certain key provisions of the agreements, the government, half-winded and half-awake, eventually agrees to sign. The ASUU, which has become in one breath a glutton for punishment, and in another breath an incurable optimist, also eventually pens the agreements half-convinced that the serial truce breaker it had just negotiated with had no cat in hell’s chance of honouring anything, let alone a rigorous agreement requiring commitment and a huge budgetary outlay.
    Consider the following. The 2001 agreement between ASUU and the federal government was more honoured in the breach than in the observance. It was, therefore, largely adapted in 2009 after two years of onerous and enervating negotiations and nearly an academic session of strike. Four years later, it was obvious that the government was either inattentive to the agreement it freely reached or it was entirely disinterested in what it gave the impression was a bothersome educational headache. Six months of strike thus followed in 2013, culminating in another round of renegotiation and agreement in December of that year. Alas, even that agreement was also dishonoured. To be sure, there were always gestures in the direction of the agreements, with some sops given to the lecturers, but the government has always been evilly careful not to do anything fundamental about education, as if the disagreements provide it a raison d’être.
    If you thought that the pirouette of negotiations and agreements and renegotiations and breaches was all there was to the exasperating malady, you knew little about Nigerian officialdom. In 2009, the teams to the negotiation (ignore the word renegotiation) between ASUU and federal government were led by Bolanle Babalakin as Chairman, Committee of Pro-Chancellors, Gamaliel Onosode as the government’s own chairman of the renegotiation committee, and Ukachukwu Awuzie as president of ASUU. Some eight years down the line, with two Fed Govt/ASUU agreements bruised and battered, the federal government has turned round to make Dr Babalakin the leader of the government team. The muddle and insincerity can’t get much worse than that.
    What was wrong with the 2009 agreement? And what ailed the 2013 redone agreement? It is understood why the government is not tired of negotiations. But why is ASUU enthusiastic about another round of what will likely turn out a wasteful exercise? The answers are simple. The only thing wrong with both the 2009 and 2013 agreements, despite the government squeezing water out of the ASUU stone, is not the agreements per se but the government’s claim that the kind of money needed to implement them was simply not available. The huge emoluments and allowances of public officials and their aides do not corroborate the government’s argument. As for ASUU, the only explanation for its enthusiasm is that it has since reconciled itself to eking out small gains from unlimited and often protracted negotiations. If snail walk is all it takes to make progress, it thinks, by all means, so be it.
    The substance of the disagreement is plain enough for all to see. Education in Nigeria is in a shambles, completely broken down. To remedy the dire situation, ASUU has among other demands asked for government to progressively raise budgetary allocations to education from the piddling figures of today to some 26 percent of the budget; allocate half of that to the universities, including compelling states to make reasonable increases in their own allocations to state universities; and incentivise lecturers by paying them earned academic allowance now estimated to be about N128bn, among other very crucial demands. The government has on its own responded by leaving untouched virtually all the maladies afflicting the universities, polytechnics and colleges of education and instead preferred to set up new ones. It is true that less than a quarter of those qualified for admission to universities or polytechnics find placement in the few tertiary institutions available, but why add to the morass?
    The new 16-man committee constituted to examine the 2009 agreement afresh gives the government and ASUU some hope that something agreeable to all stakeholders would be fashioned out. Nigerians will hope that everyone can be spared another needless break in the academic calendar, with students in particular desperate to graduate no matter how deplorable the quality of their degrees and diplomas. Cynics who distrust government motive will tune off naturally and expect the worst. The government will hope that the 2009 agreement can be reconfigured by a chastened negotiation team to conform with the new recessionary realism of the day.
    This column takes a totally different view. It would be pleasantly surprised should the negotiation team break the mould and produce a workable, implementable agreement. In the opinion of this column, that implementable agreement is far-fetched. If the right thing could not be done when the money was available, even when the country had a former member of ASUU, Dr Jonathan, at the helm of affairs, it is unrealistic to expect anything better when the Education minister, given his action over the 13 new varsities whose vice chancellors were summarily sacked, and President Muhammadu Buhari, have shown a worrisome lack of depth in tertiary education affairs. Where the Education minister has been fairly narrow-minded, the president has shown a disturbing proclivity for designing and executing programmes in consonance with available funds. He does not envision ambitious educational reforms which should drive a frantic desire to source for funds.
    In short, this column sees the renegotiation of the 2009 agreement as a pointer to the rudimentariness of the government’s education programme. It is a pointer to the president’s lack of education vision, and a far more annoying pointer to the ordinariness of the work going on in the Education ministry. Rather than focusing on renegotiating the 2009 agreement, should the Buhari presidency not have presented a lofty and breathtaking education vision for the country? Should that great vision not show the country what the goals of a revived education sector are, and how the funds necessary to drive the vision would be sourced, and perhaps what roles citizens are expected to play? After almost two years in office, should the government not be telling Nigerians the milestones it hopes to achieve, and how and, more importantly, why Nigerian schools would in the near future outclass those of West Africa and Africa, and thereafter compete favourably with the rest of the world?
    It is of course not expected that ASUU would give up, for to give up is to finally bury education in Nigeria. Indeed, given the number of Nigerian academicians in foreign universities and research institutions, it is an indication that many have lost faith in Nigeria’s education sector. That faith will not be restored with the little amount voted for the sector each year. That faith will not be restored as long as the president has said precious little about where he hopes to take education in the next few years and what he hopes Nigeria can achieve technologically and scientifically with a revived education sector. The Dr Babalakin-led committee will of course hammer out palliatives to secure industrial peace in the universities. But the fundamental change Nigeria needs and the funds to drive it can only come from the president’s vision. Sadly, there is absolutely no indication that such real change is afoot. That kind of change can only come from the inside of the leader, a leader intent on daring great and mighty things, a leader who can see far into the future, not a leader cajoled by restive unions whose perspectives on the subject can sometimes prove too abstract for him.

  • Obaze: No, Buhari, No

    Obaze: No, Buhari, No

    The best of man under anointing is still a man – Bishop Oyedepo

    Considering the instant controversy which greeted the announcement of the unexpected stepping down of the much revered Pastor Enoch Adeboye as the General Overseer of the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG) and the sensitive nature of religion, it is understandable that the federal government should be alarmed that one of its agencies has stirred the hornet’s nest at a time it needs all the goodwill it can get.

    For a government already being accused of not being sensitive to the plight of Christians, especially against the background of the killings in southern Kaduna, it cannot afford to confirm such allegation by not taking necessary action to address the uproar over the code which is allegedly threatening to sweep away Church leaders who are almost regarded as ‘God’ by their followers.

    It is against the above background that a quick response by the federal government on the matter can be deemed necessary. However, the removal of the Executive Secretary of the Financial Reporting Council of Nigeria (FRCN) is an unnecessary overkill which could be counterproductive.

    By removing Obaze who is already about to complete his tenure, the federal government has succeeded in complicating the issue. If Pastor Adeboye had agreed to abide by the controversial law after a failed attempt by some groups to challenge it at the federal high court, the federal government need not panic by penalising a diligent civil servant who must have assumed that the Buhari government is committed to enforcing regulations.

    Instead of being seen as a law-abiding Church which believes in due corporate governance structure, the federal government’s action has exposed the RCCG and the person of Pastor Adeboye to unnecessary criticisms. If 89 out of 23, 216 registered churches in the country have complied with the regulation, why should RCCG be treated differently?

    By its action, the federal government has given the wrong impression that some individuals and organisations are above the law. RCCG had the option of not complying with the code like many others who have not. But having done so, the sanctity of the code needs to be protected instead of being suspended.

    Instead of being excited by Obaze’s removal and engaging in chest-beating like some Christian leaders have been doing, Pentecostal churches particularly should be worried about the negative image the controversy has earned them as organisations that do not believe in corporate governance.

    I am trying hard to understand the conflicting explanation the RCCG has been forced to offer over the status of Pastor Adeboye after the announcement of a new General Overseer. If Pastor Adeboye remains the General Overseer as the Church insists, how has the code, which requires that administrative heads of non-profit organisations step down after 20 years of service or attained the age of 70, affected him?

    I have read many arguments about how some Pentecostal churches are ‘God ordained’ and cannot be subjected to human laws. I do not accept this claim as the God we serve is a God of order. The best of man, as Bishop David Oyedepo of Winners Chapel once stated in the quote at the beginning of this piece, remains a man and should not be equated with the almighty, unquestionable God.

    Asking Church leaders to be accountable, which is the main reason for this code, should not in any way be equated to questioning any divine mandate. If churches have remained faithful to their divine mandate of soul-winning and evangelism and not been involved in commercial ventures, there would have been no need for the intense scrutiny they have been subjected to.