The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sunday

The passing of a titan

Column and columnist mourn the passing of the elder statesman, revered Afenifere grandee, distinguished author, lawyer and legendary political operative behind the curtain, Sir Olaniwun Ajayi. A man of muscular Christianity and deep spiritual faith, Sir Olaniwun was also one of the most sophisticated and accomplished political chess players thrown up by the Awo tradition in Nigeria’s modern political history.

As an avatar of the creed of apostolic followership, he was ready to do anything for an adored leader he regarded as next to God and for a political cause he regarded as sacrosanct and sanctified by the presiding deities of his people. If it led to a certain rigidity and inflexibility of strategy and tactics, so be it.

If it warrants a prompt foreclosure of other competing options then to the devil with such options. It was adamant discipleship at its most visionary and ennobling. They do not come like this anymore. Yet in a multi-ethnic nation with other competing deities, it was bound to lead to a permanent collision of altars and a seething confrontation with other faiths powered by equal zeal and self-belief.

But like his surviving fellow disciples, the late political juggernaut was not about to be fazed by such little national difficulties. In fact, they seem to relish the slow-motion adversarial leisureliness of the permanent Yoruba political warfare. “Ijafaajini’ja Yoruba”, as one of them famously put it. Whether in frenzied opposition or wary collaboration with the centre, it is this questing and questioning spirit dating back to the Oduduwa Revolution a millennium earlier that has defined the essence of the Yoruba Question in modern Nigeria.

As it is said, looking at a king’s mouth, no one would ever believe that he suckled at his mother’s breasts. It is hard to imagine that Sir Olaniwun was a self-made man who had lifted himself up by the bootstraps slogging his way through primary school and teacher training college before finally making his way to England to study law when he was already the headmaster of a local primary school. It is an inspirational story worthy of emulation by generations to come.

Compact, well-built, erect till the very end and carrying himself with an understated aristocratic flair which remindedone of ancient Yoruba nobility, the late patriarch was a man of immense personal charms and abiding generosity of spirit. But only the most foolhardy would take this as a license for political rascality. Behind the smooth and alluring exterior, there was a hint of steel infrastructure.

Till the very end, the old man was concerned and disturbed by the fate of his people in the colonial conundrum that is Nigeria. A few weeks back, he had come for a meeting somewhere in Bourdillon, Ikoyi together with Chief Ayo Adebanjo and Pa Rueben Fasoranti to deliberate on the fractious nature of Yoruba politics and the way forward. He had spoken extempore and without notes for almost an hour. Nobody guessed then that he had come to say goodbye. May his soul rest in perfect peace. Adieu papa and his “piping hot” pounded yam.

November 13, 2016
Ondo governorship poll of controversies

IN their response to allegations of orchestrated fiddling with delegates’ votes during the All Progressives Congress (APC) primary election, leaders of the party simply brushed off protests by three aspirants whom they said did not do enough to substantiate their complaints. The three — Olusegun Abraham, Ajayi Boroffice and Olusola Oke — felt so aggrieved that they distanced themselves from subsequent party activities. The party’s preferred candidate, Rotimi Akeredolu, who is also believed to be a sort of lightning rod for a budding faction of the party based in Abuja, has felt so confident about victory in the November 26 poll that he has carried on regardless of the feelings of the aggrieved troika. Yet, the troika commands such a large following in the state that it is near impossible for candidate Akeredolu, a lawyer and senior advocate, to win without their support.
But whether Mr Akeredolu would win or not, it is chastening that the APC has not felt the need to discharge the burden of justice evoked by the primary election, let alone convince the three aggrieved aspirants that they had legitimate concerns about the motives of the party in skewing the primary in one person’s favour. Mr Akeredolu’s backers felt so emboldened that they even organised a photo opportunity for their candidate with the president sometime last week. Could that translate into victory? It is doubtful, for the only man really scouring one rural community and town after another is Mr Oke, who is also a lawyer and grassroots politician. He is candidate of the Alliance for Democracy (AD) to which he defected.
The two Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) factional candidates, Jimoh Ibrahim from the Ali Modu Sheriff faction and Eyitayo Jegede of the Ahmed Makarfi faction, are embroiled in a bitter struggle to get the Independent National Electoral Commission’s final approval. The governor, Olusegun Mimiko, is with Mr Jegede. Consequently, the two disputants’ campaigns have been constrained by the court cases hanging on their necks. With Mr Akeredolu not really a dyed-in-the-wool politician, and Messrs Jegede and Ibrahim playing cat and mouse, it has left the field and the whole excitement to Mr Oke. Should he secure the tacit support of both Messrs Boroffice and Abraham, it could make him the man to beat on the 26th. That is of course assuming that the pusillanimous INEC can manage to conclude the election and ensure fidelity to electoral principles and procedures.
What is, however, most important in the Ondo poll is the confusion plaguing the APC. Not only has the party’s leadership in Abuja been hijacked by forces which also betrayed Kogi State in the last governorship election, it is now also clear that the party is engaged in an internal struggle to demystify one of their own in a campaign that makes party leaders subordinate party principles to private and selfish goals. If this is not terrible enough, then consider that the party, by disavowing internal justice, is also showing that its mantra has nothing to do with the great and lofty philosophies it has propagated since 2013, but the practical and grasping philosophy of intrigues and subversion to secure personal advantage.
This column usually endorses a candidate for important elections irrespective of their outcomes. It has decided to endorse Mr Oke, whether he wins or loses. The reason is that right from the inception of this column, it has never sided with injustice, especially one so flagrant and insulting as the one that produced Mr Akeredolu. Should Messrs Boroffice and Abraham decide to bury the hatchet to ensure APC victory, this column will still gladly side with Mr Oke to underscore the point that yielding an inch to unfairness, not to talk of one triggered by a determination to punish or outwit a faction of the party’s leadership, is embarking on a dangerous misadventure whose consequences cannot be gauged. But why not Mr Ibrahim or Mr Jegede? Mr Ibrahim is a spoiler in the mould of Donald Trump of the U.S. He stands grandly and obtrusively for nothing. And Mr Jegede, despite his geniality and sophistication, is a stooge of Dr Mimiko, the obtuse thinker and non-performing governor whose tainted support is a negation of the little political morality his protégé claims to possess and represent.

November 13, 2016
An appeal to Donald Trump

He should erect his promised wall to shut out Nigerian elite from America

Just like our credulous parents – Adam and Eve – whose ‘understanding’ opened only after eating the forbidden fruit, and just like the British who realised the depth of their mistake after voting to exit the European Union (Brexit), the Americans too have suddenly woken up to the reality of the import of the election of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States of America on November 8. Less than 24 hours after the result was announced, Americans trooped out in their thousands to denounce it, with not a few wondering about the wisdom in a situation where a candidate with the majority vote could still be subjected to the decision of an Electoral College before knowing whether he/she could be declared winner of the election. Indeed, how do you explain it that Hillary Clinton who had 60,467,245 votes (47.72%) lost the presidency to Trump’s 60,071,650 votes (47.41%)? The puzzle is in the country’s Electoral College in which Clinton had 228 as against Trump’s 290. Interestingly, Trump himself has had cause to criticise the Electoral College which he described as phoney: “The phoney electoral college made a laughing stock out of our nation. The loser one!” He also tweeted, “He lost the popular vote by a lot and won the election. We should have a revolution in this country!” he had said. But he has since deleted the comments from his 2012 posts.

Many Americans reportedly smashed their television sets when Trump was making one broadcast or the other, in a manner reminiscent of the way people destroyed their Rediffusion sets in the Western Region here in Nigeria in the 1960s, because they saw them as purveyors of the fraud that the then election represented.

Perhaps the worst violence was in the northwestern city of Portland, where protesters hurled projectiles at officers, vandalised businesses, smashed car windows and attacked drivers. It is so serious one would have to start wondering if this is happening in America, God’s own country. But this should be expected in an election that was preceded by campaign of calumny, racism, sexism and xenophobia, especially on the part of Trump, who simply threw all caution associated with America’s elections to the winds, threatening fire and brimstone if he lost at the polls.

Almost everything that he did not get right appears to have some Nigerian flavour. That is why I am suspecting that Trump had received some tutorials from some Nigerian politicians on how to do electoral campaigns because we have a surfeit of politicians who see politics as a do-or-die battle. Unexpectedly, just as it is often the case in Nigeria, Trump too is accusing the media of being behind the protests. No one should be surprised at this because most of the major newspapers in the U.S. have seen as highly repugnant, a Trump presidency. They cannot imagine how a ‘bush man’ like Trump can successfully lead today’s America. But Trump has no one to blame for this than himself. His mannerism does not show he has the temperament required of the exalted office of the world’s Number One Citizen.

The way things are, it seems perhaps only a matter of time for the Electoral College to be dismantled. It was the same Electoral College that led to the failure of Al Gore to make it to the White House in 2000. Although there had been several failed attempts to do this in the past which failed because of the cumbersome nature of the amendment of the American constitution, this will pale into insignificance when America continues to suffer the kind of fate it is now going through when the majority voted in favour of the country’s first female president only for the votes to count for nothing because of the Electoral College.

Well, how the Americans begot the Trump presidency is now a belated issue. The fact is, for good or for ill, they and the entire world that is still recuperating from Trump’s shocking electoral victory will have to live with Trump as president in the next four years; and, if care is not taken, eight years, ceteris paribus. Only Mother Nature can supervene to avert either of these.

However, like most Nigerians, nay Africans, I also would have wished Clinton got the mandate. But while man proposes, God disposes. But a question many Nigerians have been asking is what specifically did we as a country benefit from the Barack Obama presidency that has made us to want to die for Clinton? It is an understatement to say that we routed for Obama. In fact, Nigerians carried the Obama campaign on their heads like most other Africans during the 2008 presidential election campaign. It is even doubtful if we were as ecstatic and passionate as we were during the Obama swearing in as when our own presidents are sworn in. The reason is simple: America is, loosely speaking, the world. But, despite this support, what specific gains did Nigeria benefit from the eight years of the Obama presidency? The Obama presidency it was that terminated oil imports from Nigeria in July 2014. For a country that used to be Nigeria’s major crude importer, this meant substantial revenue loss for the country. Well, the U.S. said then that it had to stop fuel importation from Nigeria because America was able to produce more oil than it imported.

We can therefore concede this to Obama on the basis of national interest.

But President Obama has been to Africa at least five times but did not deem it fit to touch down on Nigerian soil. Well, some claim it is due to security concerns; but others say it was because of the corruption that signposted the immediate past Jonathan presidency.

None of the two can stand as the gospel reason why the outgoing American president has not visited Nigeria. Take security, Obama was in Nairobi, where al Shabaab has carried out high profile attacks in the city centre. Second, if he did not visit Nigeria during the Jonathan era because he did not want to be tainted with the corruption tar, that regime was swept away about 18 months ago! Moreover, it goes without saying that Nigeria is Africa’s economic, political, communications and petroleum giant. It is the continent’s largest economy – almost twice the size of South Africa’s and a third larger than that of Egypt.

All said, much as the world waits expectantly for what kind of baby the Trump presidency would deliver, Nigeria’s elite must be the jitteriest of his victory, given the red alert he gave during his campaign, to tinker with some of the country’s policies concerning immigrants and allied matters. They have every cause to. It is doubtful if there are other countries whose elite are as crazy for America as the Nigerian elite. They are the ones who jet out to that country to treat common mosquito bites or a minor cut by a razor blade instead of developing our hospitals to the standards that obtain outside. They prefer sending their own children to schools in the U.S. while urging the rest of us to make do with the ramshackle institutions at home in the name of sacrifice and patriotism, thereby helping to grow the economies of the United States and other countries and killing ours. So, Trump will be doing Nigeria a lot of favour for which we would be eternally grateful if he can ‘erect the wall’ he has promisedto shut out the Nigerian elite and even encourage other countries to do same so that our elite can stay back at home to develop their own country instead of jetting out at the slightest opportunity.

IN THE LIGHTER MOOD

THERE is no point crying over spilt milk; the worst has happened (I can hear you say the worst for who?) and the best way we can mitigate the impact is to put the event behind us. One way to do that is to turn what has happened into a wall-clock joke and laugh over it.

There was this conversation about the outcome of the American presidential election between a mother and her six-year-old daughter who is reputed for being highly inquisitive. The daughter asked the mother: “so, now that the election is over, which party won; APC or PDP?” The mother answered: “PDP”.

Since the little girl knows that her mother is APC, she got the message that her candidate in the U.S. election lost.

November 13, 2016
Trump and bitter memories of Abacha: rubbishing liberal democracy at home and abroad

Last week, I made a prediction that Hillary Clinton would win the 2016 American presidential elections. Technically, the results confirmed my prediction: Clinton did win the popular vote by getting about a quarter of a million votes more than Trump received from the American electorate. But as I am not a charlatan or a sophist, I must admit that though technically or literally accurate, in essence my prediction was wrong. Clinton, as the whole world knows, lost to Trump. In America, you do not win by and through the popular vote; you win only if you are the victor in the battle inthe so-called electoral college. In the overwhelming number of cases in American political history, the candidate who wins the popular vote also wins in the electoral college. But in a few instances, there has been a divergence between the two. Significantly, in those few instances when this has happened, American democracy has been thrown into a profound crisis. The last time that this happened was in the year 2000 in the contest between Al Gore, the Democratic candidate who won the popular vote by a huge landslide victory, and George W. Bush, the Republican candidate who won the contest in the electoral college by a very slim majority. This crisis has reappeared again in this year’s contest between Clinton and Trump. In this last installment in my series exploring similarities between elections in Nigeria and America, this unusual crisis that is engendered by a divergence between the popular vote and the electoral college will serve as a springboard for reflections that will focus on chilling reminders of Sani Abacha that I perceive in the profoundly troubling advent of Donald Trump.

Abacha and Trump? Yes, even though Abacha did not come to power through the electoral process but through a military putsch that violently aborted an election that everyone regarded as the freest and fairest presidential elections ever conducted in Nigeria. I should perhaps even add that through the influence of his father, Fred Trump, Donald Trump succeeded in avoiding being drafted for military service when most young men in his generation had to compulsorily serve their country in uniform and in battle. So, on the surface, no two men could be more dissimilar than Trump and Abacha. However, within the framework of the interconnection between personality and politics and between individuality and the exercise of rule over hundreds of millions of people, no two persons could be more similar than Sani Abacha and Donald Trump. This is why, as I hope to show in this short piece, Americans in particular and, with a few notable exceptions, the whole world in general, is in great shock and fear in the victory of Trump, just as we in Nigeria, the rest of Africa and many parts of the world, were greatly dismayed when Abacha seized power in 1993. Indeed, the similarities are nothing short of being uncanny.

At the most obvious level of comparison, think of the following fact, dear reader: Trump won, but to the very last day of the electoral campaigns, he was shouting to the rooftops of his country and the whole world that the system of American democracy was so rigged that he would accept the results of the elections only if he was the winner. Moreover, he openly threatened his opponent, Hillary Clinton, that if he won the elections, he would have her sent to jail. [And indeed, on Thursday this week, Rudy Giuliani, the man everyone expects to become Attorney General in Trump’s cabinet, warned President Obama not to grant preemptive pardon to Clinton in the remaining two months of his presidency]And throughout the campaigns, Trump repeatedly declared that he would be a “law and order” president; that he had the support of most of the organizations of policemen and women; that the majority of serving and retired generals, border guards, and veterans preferred him over Clinton. Moreover, throughout the campaigns, Trump constantly and consistently expressed a surfeited hatred, fear and suspicion of the press the like of which had never been seen or heard in American political history. Does not all this remind you, dear reader, of our own Sani Abacha? No dictator in the tragic experience of military autocracyin Nigeria was more fearful, more contemptuous of democracy and its institutions than Abacha, just as no civilian president (or president-elect) in America has ever expressed the level of disdain for liberal democracy and its institutions and values than Donald Trump.

The similarities between Trump and Abacha assume even more alarming portents if we compare the particular elections that brought the two men into power in their respective countries. In each of these two cases, the plurality of votes won respectively by M.K.O. Abiola and Hillary Clinton was demographically the widest in each country’s political history and democratic experience. Of course, we must not ignore the fact that as with Abiola, Clinton was a deeply flawed candidate. Those who supported Abiola and to this day still cherish his memory must not lose sight of the fact that many patriotic and progressive Nigerians in the public sphere were opposed to him, no one more so than the late Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. On the Left, many were at best lukewarm in their support of Abiola, the basis of which was the suspicion that in office, M.K.O. might place the interests of global capitalism and its powerful agencies and forces above Nigerian national interests and the interests of the poor and the downtrodden.These reservations, these suspicions also substantiallyapply to Clinton and her campaign. But that is not the end of the story.

This is because with both Abiola and Clinton and in spite of the deep reservations they engendered, they went on to cobble together the greatest and widest coalition of demographic and ideological forces in the respective political histories of their two countries. Permit me to express this observation in concrete terms: America and Nigeria being both extremely diverse and plural countries, the ultimate challenge is to forge unity across the length and breadth of the country, not a contentless unity but a robust unity that would both work to the benefit of all and protect the interests of the poor, the exploited and the marginalized. We will never know if, in office, Abiola and Clinton would have gone on to achieve the great expectations that their pluralities intimated. In Abiola’s case, we know that history has been extremely harsh in its judgment of Abacha, the man who sent him to jail and consummated the theft of his mandate that was initiated by Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida. In America, Rudy Giuliani has indicated that Trump intends to act on his threat of sending Clinton to jail. But that is not the essential moral of this story; that moral lies elsewhere, it lies precisely in the probability that Trump’s presidency will, like Abacha’s rule in Nigeria,sow seeds of disunity, fear, and hatredamong people at home and abroad that may take generations to undo.

You wake up one day and you find that an Abacha or a Trump controls the reins of power in your homeland precisely at the time when it seemed that things were/are on the brink of a breakout of cooperation, peace, justice, and solidarity between diverse groups and communities in the land and between all men and women, at home and in the world at large. Abacha and Trump: if there is an ideal personality type for the values and practices associated with liberal democracy, these two men were/are the ultimate antithesis, the final negation of those values and practices. Abacha shrouded his endless capacity for cruelty, his arbitrariness and wanton disregard for due process and decency with his trademark dark glasses. Perhaps because he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and had a father who was openly a racist and a bigot, Trump has never felt that he had to hide who and what he is. Like Abacha among and within the Nigerian military establishment, Trump subjected all contenders for power within his own party to suspicion, insults, derision, and if possible, humiliation. Thus, what he said and did to Hillary Clinton in the general election he had said and done to virtually all his opponents in the Republican Party’s primaries. Like Abacha, Trump is completely unforgiving and is vengeful to the extreme. These character traits indicate deep psychological insecurities that seem to need compensation or assuagement by hurting and damaging others. Abacha was probably more psychopathic than Trump, but the American president-elect is not that far behind the late Nigerian military despot as a narcissistic sociopath. Claiming or pretending to act on behalf of their constituencies – Abacha: the North and the military; Trump: whites forgotten by economic prosperity and increasingly sidelined by non-white racial groups – each man fundamentally acted/acts for his ego and its insatiable needs for self-inflation.

Incidentally, in response to the other articles in this series on comparisons between American and Nigerian elections, I received many emails from African evangelicals whose support for Trump is close to fanaticism, so much so that they actually perceive the will of God in Trump’s electoral victory. One of this group of respondents to the series actually tried to persuade me to embrace Trump since, in his view, the will of God and its ways of manifestation in human affairs are inscrutable to human understanding. I make reference to this experience not to mock such people but to, in fact, engage them in a dialogue. So, I ask them and others reading this concluding piece in the series to ponder the following facts and observations.

Already, Trump has caused considerable damage to respect for the strength and value of American democracy in the world, especially among its allies in the West. Only his most fanatical supporters and those blinded by formulaic biblical quotations and conservative theologies of divine collusion with bigotry can fail to see that if Trump carries out many of the things he promised his supporters during the campaigns, in the months and years ahead, America and the world will be dominated by the worst instincts, fears and prejudices known to our species. Already, even before his formal inauguration, and emboldened by Trump’s victory, racial supremacists, bigots of all kinds, xenophobic vigilantes, homophobic extremists, and petty-minded bullies among the young have all come out swinging and attacking special targets in their exultant certitude that under Trump the time has come for them to reclaim America for themselves and their kind. But the picture is not all bleak: all good, decent, progressive and humane people will fight back; indeed, they are already giving every indication that they will fight back.

Biodun Jeyifo bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

November 13, 2016
For the new sheriff to come up Trumps …

Mr. Trump has trumped all obstacles including his own personality to reach this point to the surprise of everyone, most probably including himself. I believe he started the race in jest but got hijacked by some people with more serious intentions than himself

By now, reader, I need not tell you that Mr. Donald Trump has been elected the next and 45th president of the United States of America, even though there was no reason on earth why he should have won. I also do not need to tell you that many Americans are not happy about that development even though he won by a good majority of the Electoral College votes. I do believe you also know that the streets of America have not rested since then because they have been sprouting protests against the president-elect, mainly by people against Trump’s victory. So, if you know so much, why should I bother to tell you anything more? Well, maybe we can have a few laughs together on the subject.

Let’s start from when Mr. Trump declared his intention to run as president. Pause. Yes, we all did pause, just to laugh. Now I look back and wonder why we did. Perhaps, it is because as we knew him, we imagined he was too unsuitable for the position he sought. In our heads, the model of someone who would be president had to be sedate, deep thinking, charismatic and well-behaved. Mr. Trump did not appear to fit into any of these.

In my phone right now, there is a posting of a Mr. Trump (don’t know if it’s the same one and not photo-shopped) grabbing or groping the private part of some bikini-clad models he posed with in daytime and in full public view. This kind of behaviour just does not fit the frame of a country’s president, let alone America’s. Furthermore, it is reported that the president-elect is twice divorced. Worse still, his pronouncements reported in the media showed that if ever there was an extreme or outlandish position to take on an issue, Mr. Trump was sure to take it. How on earth can you imagine that building a physical brick and mortar wall between two countries can deter people from crossing over? So, yes, his participation in this political race could not have been a bigger joke.

Yet, the unbelievable reality is that Trump has won. The question is how did this come to pass? I can only conjecture because I am a good conjecturer. First, it is to be supposed that the Republican Party got tired of being out in the cold. They needed to get power back after sitting in the sidelines for a good eight years. Who better to use than someone not afraid to call a spade a snapping jackdaw? It had to be someone who could command the public’s attention, no matter how awry that attention was.

More importantly, as far as the Republican Party was concerned, the public needed a good whipping for going too far with all their liberal ideas. Liberal ideas can get you this far if you’re looking for where to raise your camping gas for the weekend but not, definitely not when you’re talking of mates of the same sex hooking up in matters of love. Liberal does not justify same-sex marriage, etc. Someone just must reign public sexual morality back in. So who can better whip the public than a man who is not afraid to look for a female’s sex organ in full public view? Indeed, no one reckoned with the desperation of the old American establishment, the old order, the far right, and their hidden agenda.

Obviously then, these very moral Far Righters closed their eyes to such minor misdemeanours in their candidate. They needed him for more important things like closing up the borders against more immigrants and curbing the excesses of the liberals’ permissiveness in public sexuality. This important political system forgot the equally important fact that only the American Indians are not offspring of immigrants in America today.

The sophisticated American political system however thrives on the freedom of the press. On account of the somewhat ‘unusualness’ of his utterances, the press had a great job reporting Mr. Trump as they did the other candidate, Mrs. Clinton. With the benefit of hindsight, Mr. Trump calls these reports ‘negative’ or ‘unfavourable’ forgetting that part of the job of the press is to report the uncommon. His acts and utterances were uncommon so he probably got more attention than his opponent did. For this, he is even now still screaming blue murder.

I bet he is not the only one screaming blue murder at the American press. I believe that America came to this bind because of the extreme fear of immorality in her candidates. Nearly all the ‘few good men’ who would have made good president-materials have been driven underground for one misdemeanour or the other through negative press reports. This is how the country came to this pass of having to present and elect someone whose candidature is now inciting protests and riots.

The next thing to ponder is where to go from here. Mr. Trump has trumped all obstacles including his own personality to reach this point to the surprise of everyone, most probably including himself. I believe he started the race in jest but got hijacked by some people with more serious intentions than himself. He is thus the new sheriff in town who must come up trumps against much more odds than he has had to encounter thus far. How well he handles these odds will determine whether he sinks or swims.

For one thing, Mr. Trump must react more maturely to issues than he is presently doing. It is blithe and immature for him to simply blame the press for everything that goes wrong. This is not Africa or even Nigeria where the opposition party is to blame for every wrong cough and the people are generally complacent. This is America where people are more enlightened about their pains and know how to cough well so everyone can take notice. The protesters obviously have genuine fears that have arisen from many of Mr. Trump’s assertions, utterances and proposals and are bringing these pains to the world’s notice. Blaming the protests on the press is childish in the extreme. He must do more to explain to the people what he means by his intending to be the ‘President of all Americans’.

Secondly, Mr. Trump needs to tread very carefully on the issue of immigration, the sorest foot in America today. The truth is bitter but it must be told. The globalisation policy pursued by the developed countries, aka First World Countries led by America, has been more beneficial to those countries to the detriment of many Second and Third World Countries. This simply means that much of the monies of these countries, e.g. Nigeria, are locked up in the vaults of western countries, fuelling their economies.

In order to escape the ensuing poverty, the youths of second and third world countries have preferred to flee to the west to grapple for better chances of survival than stay home and endure hunger. Who can blame them? For Mr. Trump and his allies to insist on ‘building walls’ between America and Mexico for instance is not the best option; indeed, it shows they are not thinking things through. They would need to build many walls between America and the rest of the world.

Most importantly, Mr. Trump will really need to put a firm grip on his utterances. The less said, they say, the better. Very few people can stand the truth but truth still needs to be said. However, there is a difference between truth-saying and destructive speech. Without due decorum in speech, I believe that those who made Mr. Trump president might very well be the first to regret it.

November 13, 2016
Nigeria, no Africa, as the outside world sees US

One only hopes that the American system will prove resilient enough to stop a highly bigoted incoming President Trump from transmuting to one of these two

Nothing would have been more appropriate today than a discourse on the rise of nationalism in the United States of America, as exemplified by the victory of Mr Donald Trump in the U. S Presidential election; something some, otherwise, very knowledgeable Nigerians, but certainly with a gap in their knowledge of world history, have been celebrating. They need be told, or is it reminded, that the last time the world saw this in Europe in the mid-20th century, it quickly resulted not only in the rise of the likes of Mussolini and Hitler but in a war the world has not seen its kind since with the resultant death of 6 million Jews and millions more of other nationalities. One only hopes that the American system will prove resilient enough to stop a highly bigoted incoming President Trump from transmuting to one of these two. Not much hope here, anyway, as we saw the conservative party proved completely unable to rein him in during his highly inflammatory campaign.

However, the new emphasis by the EFCC on the $180m Halliburton bribe in which about four former Nigerian Heads of State and 89 prominent Nigerians are allegedly involved has turned the story you are about to read into a fait accompli for the week. Besides the Halliburton case, though, the fact of this column being essentially a moralising one is an added incentive for the story and even though it relates, primarily, to a compatriot from Ghana, the story is so symptomatic of happenings in Africa as a whole but, especially in resource-rich countries like Nigeria.

We would let the eye witness tell his story.

“Recently, I witnessed a tirade by a white man in the first class cabin of a mid-size airplane, admonishing another first class passenger, a Ghanaian, for begging for his seat.

‘What is wrong with you Africans, he bellowed? All you do is beg, beg, beg, for everything!! You can beg all you want; I am not going to give you my seat. Tempers finally down, I turned and asked him “what was all that about”? Apparently, the Ghanaian was travelling with his ‘wife’ who was seated on a separate row. He asked the other man to exchange his seat, so the couple could be close but the white man refused whereupon the Ghanaian persisted with choruses of “I beg you”; which eventually drew the white man to his boiling point.

“So what would it have cost you to exchange your seat?” I asked, and his response is the essence of this story. ‘You see,’ he replied, ‘I have just finished a month-long negotiation with your ministers and government officials over your god given minerals, and what my gold mining company should pay. I come to your country, saw all this poverty everywhere, but with wealth right under your feet. Your own government gives only foreign companies the rights and privileges to rape and steal your country blind. For a few thousand dollars, your government officials allow foreign companies to walk away with: (a) Perpetual tax holidays (Africa was cheated out of US$11 billion in 2010 through just one of the tricks used by multinational companies to reduce tax bills, according to new Oxfam report, ‘Africa: Rising for the few,’ . This is equivalent to six times the amount needed to plug the healthcare funding gap in Ebola affected countries of Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea and Guinea Bissau)

(b) Duty free imports, (c) Bloated capital and operational investment costs,

(d) Under-declared mineral output, (e) Minimum wages for local employees doing all the work, but fat salaries and expense accounts for foreigners who do almost nothing; (f) Exaggerated cost of shoddy school blocks and boreholes instead of meaningful royalty to local land owners and communities;

(g) Destruction of local farm lands with pitiful resettlement payments; (h) Pollution of local drinking water; (i) Destruction of local infrastructure, etc.”

“My bosses have briefed me before my departure. I was asked to read your Osageyefo’s “Neo-Colonialism”, and told to be the first to offer the negotiating team, (a) a few thousand dollars each (b) a centre or a 6-room school block, or a few bore holes for the community and that there will be no mention of the normal royalties or any government oversight of our operations.

I did not believe them since I, a mere high school graduate, was coming to negotiate with officials having higher degrees. Imagine my shock when these officials, instead of demanding what is the internationally acceptable compensations and royalties only accepted 3% royalties but with all kinds of giveaways and, coming to me later , begging me to deposit ‘something’ in their foreign accounts, details of which they gave me on pieces of paper. The irony here is that these government officials, after short changing their countries with ‘something’ deposited in their accounts, would turn round to go and borrow their own money from the IMF, World Bank, or donor countries, and so-called development partners. It amazes me that your presidents, ministers etc, who have studied or have travelled severally overseas, still don’t know that there is no free lunch, no donor countries nor development partners. The foreign mining companies take your minerals for next to nothing, deposit their haul in their banks, and turn round to loan the same to your governments with some absolutely ridiculous conditions like asking you to discontinue welfare programmes or subsidies which help the poor.”

Surely, companies like Anglogold and Newmont are contributing to our economy, I managed to interrupt him.

“At what price, he asked? Have you been to Obuasi recently to see the devastation and destruction of a once a beautiful city? (The Nigerian reader should substitute with Ogoni and the Niger Delta in general). Newmont has over 740 sq. km concession in Ahafo: what did the Ahafo’s get in return for Newmont’s annual revenues of over $750,000,000? Almost nothing!!”

This is exactly what your first President, Nkrumah, was talking about in ‘Neo-Colonialism’. “Have you read that book?” He asked me. I was ashamed to answer no. “I don’t blame you; none of your officials at the negotiating table has read it. That book ought to be a must-read in your schools and colleges so that you can understand how foreign companies and governments strive to rob you blind like before. This time around, their methods are cloaked in one-sided agreements with the connivance of your presidents, ministers and managing directors.

“The big companies are not even ashamed to connive with your officials to sidestep paying the increased 5% royalty; they are paying based on ancient gold price of $300.00/oz instead of the current worldwide price of $1500.00/oz., short changing your people $75,000,000 in the process. Unfortunately, your negotiating officials are happy to look the other way.

“Even the Chinese are getting in on the act, albeit illegally. They are threatening communities with guns and firepower (it happened here in Nigeria before with Shell arming what they called security personnel) and your military looks on unconcerned. Your media is just as bad. With buffet lunches or dinners and a few cedis, your media becomes the propaganda arm of these mining companies. They tout the few miserable boreholes and the 6-room schools the companies gave as corporate social responsibility but forget the callous treatment meted to local employees and residents, and the destruction of the environment. Normally, a 50% annual return on investment (ROI) for the first 7 years is generally considered excellent but today , foreign mining/ oil companies in Ghana and the rest of Africa, are hauling home nothing less than 400% return on their investments, with scant regard to the plight of the indigenes.”

I feigned sleep, so he stopped talking but I was actually reflecting on that entire he had said. I realised that YES, we Africans are to blame: we watch our officials give away our gold, oil, bauxite, diamond, etc for their meagre kickbacks, while we collectively wallow in poverty. It is time we woke up from our deep slumber and take what is rightfully ours at the negotiating table. Then we will be able to tell Obama and May to take back their gays and aid.

November 13, 2016
Wanted: Better medical care

About a year ago, after being on admission in a federal hospital that’s supposed to be one of the best public health institutions in the country, I wrote a four-part column on my experience.

While I was grateful to God and the hospital for being discharged alive, unlike some other patients, I couldn’t resist sharing my experience for the benefit of whoever may have cause to be admitted there and draw the attention of the management and government to the need to improve on the services rendered.

Considering the life and death nature of being on admission, I was very concerned about some of the lapses I noticed and lack of basic facilities needed to enhance the level of healthcare provided in the hospital. I could have written a lot more, but I didn’t want to create the wrong impression that there was nothing good about the hospital.

Of course the hospital staffers were doing a lot to attend to the influx of patients, but with limited resources, they couldn’t do as much as they should do. How, for example, like I noted, would two nurses be able to cater for over twenty patients overnight? The inability of doctors to give enough attention to patients was obviously not their fault, but the large number of those they needed to attend to.

To see such shortcomings that may have been responsible for some of the deaths recorded in the hospital and not write about them would have been insensitive on my part to the plight of many voiceless Nigerians not getting the right medical care they deserve.

That was why I was shocked, though not surprised, to hear of the displeasure of the head of the institution about my carefully-worded true account of my experience. Obviously, his anger would have been that I exposed some of the inadequacies in the hospitals, but, for me, the life of the hundreds of patients seeking treatment in the institution is more precious than the cover up he would have preferred.

There is no point creating the false impression about the medical services that do not exist. If the institution requires more funding and resources, the government needs to know from the patients if the staffers are unable to say so.

I was told that the medical director claimed he has checked my medical records and I would soon be back at the mercy of the hospital. My response was that he should be told that he is not God. Like he should know, Doctors only care, it is God who heals.

One year after, I am alive by God’s grace. I have been going for check-ups in the hospital and there is still need for improvement in the services rendered.

The medial record-keeping system in the hospital is so disorganised that cases of missing files are not unusual.

Instead of getting angry like I should have been last Thursday when my file could not be found and I had to get another appointment when, hopefully, it would have been found, I took pity on the staffers that have to check through piles of files where they are kept. It would be a miracle if some files don’t get missing once in a while given the filing system still in use in the hospital.

I was told I should have photocopied my case notes to prevent losing my records as it may happen in this instance. Too bad I assumed that the records should be safe and well-kept considering the importance of the lifesaving information contained, but this is the sad situation I have found myself.

The health of the citizens is too important for the government not to allocate adequate funds for it. The high cost of medicare in local private and foreign hospitals is not affordable for most Nigerians.

November 13, 2016
America’s presidential election: lessons for Africa

The primaries of both major political parties, though not without moments of tension, ended on the note that it is citizens’ choice that is supreme.

“Hillary has worked very long and very hard over a long period of time, and we owe her a major debt of gratitude for her service to our country.—President-elect Donald Trump.
“I have been very encouraged by the interest by the President-elect Trump’s wanting to work with my team around many of the issues that this great country faces. I believe that it is important for all regardless of party and regardless of political preferences to now come together, work together to deal with the many challenges we face.”—President Barrack Obama
“Last night, I congratulated Donald Trump and offered to work with him on behalf of our country….Our constitutional democracy enshrines the peaceful transfer of power and we don’t just respect that, we cherish it. It also enshrines other things: the rule of law, the principle that we are equal in rights and dignity, freedom of worship and expression. Secretary Hillary Clinton
“We discussed a lot of different situations, some wonderful and some difficult. I very much look forward to dealing with the president in the future, including counsel…. Mr. President, it was a great honor being with you, and I look forward to being with you many more times in the future.”— Donald Trump.

The snippets in italics from three major stakeholders (to use Nigerians’ favourite word) in the recent election capture the theme of today’s piece: the joy of democracy as a culture and the belief that democracy cannot thrive in any space in which electoral culture and management are determined solely by leaders who prefer to remain in power perpetually or to construct and sustain an electoral system and constitution that enable selected politicians to award privileges to members of their ethnic or religious group, or to stay in power in perpetuity, as it often happens in many African countries. Leaders in Africa need to pay special attention to the blustering campaign before the recent presidential election in the United States as well as the soothing words that follow the election results, to know what they are missing and how their intolerance of democratic choice as the hallmark of people’s sovereign powers can turn their citizens into clones of themselves: intolerant of opposition parties and ideologies.There are lessons for African politicians, especially those already in power to learn from the just concluded elections in the United States.

The claim that Africa has lessons to learn from the election by no means suggests that American electoral politics is perfect. What is enviable about it is the maturity and readiness of those seeking power to govern the countryto respect memorandum of association that makes the enviable political space different candidates love to govern possible: readiness to abide by the rules of the game, instead of changing the rules before, during, or at the end of the game. For example, pundits in Nigeria who called Ayo Fayose a third-world politician for his lack of civility during the presidential election of 2015 must be wondering why civility disappeared during the campaign of Donald Trump in the country that has presented itself as the poster-child of democracy and sophisticated governance. Another aspect of American constitution that may be unsettling about presidential election is the two levels of election results: popular vote and electoral college vote, which young people protesting outcome of the elections in major U.S. cities seem to be worried about. But this piece is not about the logic or illogic of the electoral college system; it is about pre- and post-election behaviour of candidates, political parties, and election administrators.

African leaders are likely to miss the benefits of watching other countries’ democratic practice if they give credence to Fayose’s superstitious theory that the outcome of the election is a punishment of Obama for what he did to Jonathan. The first lesson pertains to pre-election phase, particularly the laws that guide primaries in each state in the country’s federal system. The primaries of both major political parties, though not without moments of tension, ended on the note that it is citizens’ choice that is supreme. Each of the two major parties accepted the choice of Trump and Clinton as presidential candidates for Republican and Democratic parties. In contrast, primaries in Nigeria have been largely controversial and divisive. In the era of Obasanjo, PDP gubernatorial primary in Rivers State chose a gubernatorial candidate whose victory at the primary was given to another candidate preferred by the party’s overlords, only for that person to later become at the instance of the Supreme Court the governor of the state without going through election. The presidential primary of the PDP in 2014 bypassed its own due process for picking candidates; the ticket was awarded to President Jonathan. More recently, the gubernatorial primary in Ondo State has been a bone of contention between candidates and within the parties. Charges and countercharges of manipulation have been in the air since the end of the primary. Even less than two weeks before the election, there is uncertainty about who the candidates of the state’s two major parties: PDP and APC are, thus pushing citizens to characterize PDP and APC as two sides of the same coin.

Administration of elections from primaries to election in the last one year has been noticeably credible. During the primaries, the security and law enforcement agencies that are designed to sustain electoral democracy responded effectively to their responsibilities. It was not conceivable for any strong politician to hire thugs to prevent party members from voting or to support imposition of fake party delegates to replace duly approved ones by the party. No politician was given any reason to cry foul about partiality of police of any of the states, regardless of which party was dominant in such states. This cannot be said about most African countries. During the election, nobody complained about vote selling and buying. No police had to worry about thugs or of people in police or military uniforms stealing ballot boxes. No candidate canvassed for new constitutions to extend the tenure of incumbents or contemplated detention of opposition candidates, the way such actions affected recent elections in Uganda, Zambia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, to name a few.

Even though some states attempted to frustrate some voters by creating state laws that made it difficult for African Americans to obtain photo identification cards to facilitate voting, on the average, registering to vote and being able to obtain voter’s card were relatively easy. This was not even so in Nigeria in 2015 when thousands of voters in Southwestern Nigeria were disenfranchised by the ruling party which frustrated voters in the region from obtaining their voter’s cards before the election. Even despite the accolades INEC received after the election, the election commission appeared clueless about how to get permanent voter’s cards to those who duly registered to vote in the Southwest. I was the only person in my household lucky enough to get permanent voter’s card even though four of us had registered in the same place and at the same time.

African politicians would benefit significantly if they accept that the joy of democracy is that citizens can shift power from one political party to another as and when they deem it fit to do so. Many ‘do-or-die politicians’ must be surprised why all the persons involved in the election have within 24 hours of release of election results come around to pledge support for the new government,despite the many insults traded during the campaign. The Mugabes and Musevenis of Africa must be amazed that there are human beings who would allow power to pass to other people without killing and maiming some of those who attempted to wrest power from them.

Nigerians in diaspora who participated in mobilising for votes for the party that they believe shares their vision of the world in the 21st century must be disappointed at the result of the election. And many of them have been expressing fears about their future. It is, however, reassuring that Nigerians (being what they are) are already coming around to renew their confidence that the rule of law must take its course. Those without proper documentation do not need to exaggerate their problems, as every rational president in the United States since its inception knows the benefit of keeping the country as a nation of immigrants that it has been since the arrival of the Pilgrims on the Mayflower. What African leaders need to worry about in this respect is how to stop the politics or governance that pushes their own citizens into risking their lives by choosing to be trafficked to Europe or the United States without proper documents. Once Africa’s political leaders accept the responsibility that it is their duty to make their countries user-friendly to their own citizens, they do not need to worry about whether President Trump would end globalisation; they need to get their acts together and move the continent into a respectable one.

November 13, 2016
From a peculiar mess to a peculiar mission

Excerpts from an address to the 1966 set of Government College, Ibadan on the occasion of its golden jubilee.

Mr Chairman, the president of the old boys association of Government College Ibadan, distinguished members of the Class of ’66, their spouses and all the notable alumni in the hall, please permit me to stand on existing protocols while I thank the organisers for the honourof asking me to deliver this address.

I did not attend Government College, Ibadan, so I am not one of Mr J.D Bullock’s boys. I am not even a full product of IONIAN secondary schools or “äyo” as you guys referred to products of provincial secondary schools in the old Western Region. They suffered in your hands. Even after we had all got to the university, some spoilt rascals from elitist schools derived immense pleasure and rib-cracking humour from forcing us to recite what was to them the strange-sounding names of many of these institutions: Iganmode, Atakumosa, Manuwa Memorial, Titcombe, Iju-Ota Ogbolu, Gbongan-Odeomu etc. To their metropolitan eardrumsthey must have sounded straight out of DOFagunwa.

Permit me to establish some bragging rights. Having finished primary school in 1962, had I gone straight to secondary school, I should be in the set of 1963, three clear years ahead of the set of 1966. But we thank God for small mercies. Bernard Shaw, the great Anglo-Irish playwright, contrarian and cutting wit once famously noted that his education was continually interrupted by schooling. Some of us finished secondary school in the primary institution of early responsibility.

However that may be, let me note that fifty years of having entered secondary school is no joke particularly in an unstable polity bristling with chaos and disorder. Your journey through life has been marked by an astral distinction; a stellar congregation which can only produce a galaxy of stars. Your class boasts of illustrious products who have distinguished themselves in all walks of life. Except in rare cases of a cosy lack of awareness, those who are marked by destiny are often aware of the heavy hand of fate.

This is even more so in the particular case of your class. Why is this so? You are children of destiny. You entered Government College the very year Nigeria lost its innocence and a dark cloud settled on the nation like a permanent companion. It was the year of booming guns; the year when tanks and armoured cars became regular fixtures of the Road. It is fifty years of solitude.

We had walked our talk and we found ourselves hurled across the path of thunder as memorably visualized by Christopher Okigbo, one of our greatest poets ever and himself a proud product of Government College, Umuahia. You are the children of that midnight when hope deserted us and despair settled in. This was the year of the great misadventure when the dancer became estranged from the drummer. And in distress and disorientation, we began to applaud.

In the event, this class is crucial and critical to the recuperation of our essence as a people and the recovery of elite momentum without which the nation is doomed. The failure of a country is the failure of its elite. To whom much is given, much is expected. Let us use this as a golden opportunity for critical reflection, first on the state of Government College, the state of education in the country and the state of the country. Nigeria is too important to fail.

Hence the title of this address: How to transform a peculiar mess into a peculiar mission. The phrase “peculiar mess” or “penkelemesi”— its folk translation—is attributed to one of the most iconic products of Government College, Ibadan and the stormy petrel of the old Western Region: AdelabuAdegoke. He was as charismatic as he was intellectually gifted, a rebel against colonial education of which he was an exemplary product and colonial cultural politics which he denounced to no end.

Almost sixty years after his tragic death, Adelabu’s brilliance continues to dazzle. As a result of multiple promotions, he was reputed to have spent only three years in school. Had his intellectual genius found accommodation and rapport with Awolowo’s more methodical and painstaking socio-political genius, had the two titans realised that they were antagonistic but paradoxically complimentary kindred spirits, perhaps the trajectory of Yoruba politics in post-independence Nigeria would have been different.

Like Awo, Adelabu was also from a remarkably poor background. But the two men succeeded by sheer grit and determination lifting themselves up to pole positions in their society by their bootstraps. There is a folk saying in Ibadan which illustrated Adelabu’s straitened early circumstances: Adelabu ta panlari, aroyeoteni. Recalling that Adelabu hawked stock fish as a youth is just a diversionary tale of intrigue and sheer malevolence.

Yet there is a remarkable sense in which Adelabu exemplifies the triumph and tragedy of Government College, Ibadan. The late avatar of Ibadan politics bears heroic witness to the notion of an intellectual aristocracy which has nothing to do with inherited money or feudal transfer of political fiefdom. You make your way or fall in society as a result of your brains. You are somebody not because of who your parents are but because of who you are.

This is perhaps the most paradoxically revolutionary legacy of colonial missionary education in Nigeria. It was a radical and radicalizing vision of an egalitarian society. Vigorously pursued by the Awolowo administration in the old west, it led to the rapid emergence of a new educated middle class which in its own contradictory way has become the scourge of political retrogression in post-colonial Nigeria.

But it was the colonial educators who showed the way. JD Bullock, the iconic principal of Government College, was the visionary pathfinder. No promising student was turned away simply because the parents could not afford the fees. It was not beyond and beneath Bullock to ask a poor boy he had encountered hawking bread on the streets of a Western Region town to come for the entrance examination at Government College, Ibadan. Having passed the examination in flying colours, the young man would later become a distinguished professor of Mathematics in an American university.

Another future distinguished professor would have remained stuck in his father’s farm but for the fact that Bullock was having none of that. He had personally gone to the farm to bring the boy back to school. It was inevitable that the glittering products of Bullock’s would later distinguish themselves in all walks of life and the various fields of human endeavour.

But there was a fly in the ointment, a major structural defect in this glorious amphitheatre of the best and the brightest. It would appear that you were all trained to be apolitical professionals without political ambition; hockey-playing gentlemen without any burning urge to dominate their environment.

It was just enough to provide ancillary services supporting the political establishment. Political rugby is a game of thugs writhing in the mud and muck of politics, and it was fun to watch them even as they contribute to the plight and pillage of the country. The new aristos must wear their colonial bowler hats and opinions lightly.

In the event, you all became famous lawyers, celebrated professors, doctors, engineers, writers, psychiatrists, architects, surveyors, economists, accountants, judgesetc without first securing the political kingdom. One cannot say whether this is a conscious colonial policy; a subtle re-engineering of the colonized consciousness away from intellectual and ideological confrontation towards cooperation and collaboration with external and internal colonization. This is the Raymond Spartacus Kassoumicomplex famously exemplified by the protagonist of YamboOuologuem’sBound to Violence.

On the other hand, this apolitical neutering may well reflect the origins of the colonial pioneers and missionaries in the lower middle class of their respective societies. You cannot give what you don’t have. In any case, the Colonial Office and its sophisticated surveillance radar would have picked off potential contaminators of “young” African minds and acted accordingly either through subtle disincentives or direct apprehension.

Whatever it is, it is ultimately a disservice to the nation. A nation deserves what it gets when its best and brightest are discouraged from politics. They will be ruled by their moral, spiritual and intellectual inferiors. This is not the case with the colonizing countries. It was said that the battle of Waterloo was won and lost on the playing grounds of Eton College. In England, the Oxbridge concourse and connection provides the political leadership. In America, it is the Ivy League conclave in close collaboration with the military industrial complex. Same with France and Germany.

In these countries, would be kings are first taught how to be philosophers and the intellectual aristocracyis easily transformed into the political aristocracy. A young William Hague was first spotted addressing the Conservative Party annual conference as a teenage secondary school pupil while a youthful Bill Clinton charmed his way up to the White House to whoosh and whoop over President Kennedy’s Camelot. Only the best and finest are allowed to make it to positions of leadership.

By contrast, a developing country like Nigeria is saddled with its fourth eleven when only the first eleven would do. The result is multiple jeopardy of mutually reinforcing failures in every sector all pointing at avoidable national collapse. Consider for example, the aplomb and sterling heroism with which Lee Kuan Yew and his Singaporean avatars assembled and dismantled concepts and ideas from the west only retaining whatever is of use and value to their people. The education of the post-colonial citizen begins with the de-education of the colonial subject.

Although there was the fundamental problem of colonial mis-education, the roots of the modern decline of Government College even as a provider of ancillary services can be traced to 1979 when the government in a misguided zeal to democratize education simply parcelled out the old college and divided its premises to accommodate new tertiary institutions. This was the radical ideology of social levelling in reverse gear, a political absurdity which recalls the Taliban desecration of Holy sites and destruction of national heritage worthy of the attention of UNESCO.

There is a lot to be said for constructive elitism and the adherence of a society to the higher templates of civilization. The finer aspects of culture and civilized existence are often spread by osmosis or direct transmission of superior consciousness to the less privileged. A society is redeemed not by the number of the privileged sent under in the dark paranoid furies of misdirected vengeance but by the number of the underprivileged rescued from cultural, political and economic serfdom.

Had Government College been able to boast of a powerful political lobby which could serve as a nuclear deterrent to the antics of transient governments perhaps it would have been spared its appalling fate.No one who lived in the old Western region beginning from the early fifties till the late seventies would fail to appreciate the civilizing and refining impact of this iconic secondary school.

On the musical scene we remember with gratitude the college band, the iconic Sound Incorporation with its ever magical signature tune. Its literary and debating society threw up the likes of Wole Soyinka, TM Aluko and later stars such as Femi Osofisan, Bode Sowande, Chucks Momah, Femi Olugbile etc. Across different generations, it produced a posse of legendary academic stars such as OmololuOlunloyo, Lekan Aare, Femi Okuronmu, Akin Aboderin, TokunboOsinowo, AjibolaOgunshola, Akin Omigbodun and later day whizz kids such as Femi Olugbile, TayoAkinwande and co. Their spectacular teenage feats and later distinction in various fields of human endeavour served as a source of hope and cultic emulation for many in the old region.

So my friends, brothers and compatriots, there is a lot of work to be done. You must rediscover the old spirit of Apataganga. You already have the critical mass of distinguished old students. You must now galvanize this critical mass into a force for good governance and the academic redemption of the nation. As a link to the past and a bridge to the glorious future, your class of 1966 is strategically placed to achieve this objective. Let it now be your avowed peculiar mission to transform this peculiar mess of a nation. Once again, I thank you all.

November 6, 2016
Abdication far from Buhari’s mind

FOR two days last week, the media overplayed President Muhammadu Buhari’s mournful admission of the frustrations he faced when he assumed office in 2015. He had wanted to ‘abscond’ when he discovered that the treasury was almost empty, he told members of Course 38 of the National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies (NIPSS), one of the few occasions he spoke keenly and eloquently outside a prepared text. He, however, probably meant abdication. For no president absconds; they abdicate if sufficiently pressured. But beyond the meaning of his words, the media were also puzzled whether he meant what he said literally, or he was simply underscoring his disappointment by reaching over the top to shock his audience, or perhaps more intriguingly he was indulging in one of his often arcane jokes. It is hard to tell which one agitated him.
If the passion with which he schemed for a return to the Nigerian presidency is factored in, including his experiences during three failed presidential campaigns between 2003 and 2011 that made him weep on one occasion, it is unlikely the president had abdication on his mind. Perhaps he was joking, then. It is true some of his jokes are difficult to disentangle from his fiery and mocking putdowns of the despised modern ways he regularly frets about and the loathsome counterculture that makes him so uneasy and sometimes susceptible to gaffes during foreign press conferences; even then his talk of possible abdication in his early days in office seems incongruous. He was doubtless numbed by what he met in office in May 2015, and disturbed that his long-standing view of what it meant to rule a country was being dealt a massive blow. But what in fact ailed him was finding the right words to convey to his esteemed audience the confusion that enveloped him when he saw the shredded treasury.
That distinguished audience of the National Institute, the Nigerian equivalence of the French Enarque, of course knew enough not to take his statement at face value. They knew he spoke facetiously, even if he were to insist, like he did when his wife, Aisha, took him to task on his administrative style, that he was dead serious when everyone else thought his view on women was anachronistic. So if abdication was never on his mind, and he was not telling a joke, what else could be the matter? for the use of the word ‘abscond’ was quite a serious thing to contemplate. He was right to note that crude oil prices fell from the dizzying heights it reached under his predecessors, and he was even more forthright to moan over the lack of sustainable investments in all facets of the economy.
But much more fundamentally, the ‘abscond’ statement was a disturbing window into his unconvincing worldview on politics and governance, and perhaps too his person. He apparently sees governance as a simple process of allocating huge and readily available resources to easily ranked needs instead of the rather difficult and complicated process most economists know it to be. He fails to see governance as an opportunity for a leader to respond to both scarcity and surplus with equal zeal, and the character to be stoical in the face of the dangers that accompany such challenges. When he thought of abdication, he apparently showed quite openly why his presidential campaign last year was based on fallacies and make-belief; that he did not commission a study of the country’s finances and prospects; and that he did nothing in his decades out of office to re-examine the paradigms that doomed the military regime he led between 1983 and 1985.
Worse, he seemed to give indication that even after winning the election, he did little to prepare himself to assume office with the promptitude and diligence the desperate occasion demanded. He could not have pretended he did not know he won because his predecessor was judged a failure, nor that signs everywhere did not give ample warning that the economy had been ruined by sloth and corruption. To then assume office and be flustered by an empty treasury, to the extent of even contemplating abdication, is a self-incrimination like no other.
There are not many aspiring leaders petrified by challenges. And there are fewer still so naive as to foreclose big and epoch-defining challenges coming along. To approach leadership with the enervating mind-set of being elected to preside over a boom is to prepare to underachieve or simply muddle along. Great leaders are forged on the anvils of crises and in the storms of conflicts and clashes of expectations. They may not have all the statistics and full descriptions of the problems they meet or expect, but they come equipped to make such a definitive impact upon their countries that when they leave office, their societies are changed forever. To contemplate abdication is a sign of weakness, a dangerous indication that somewhere in the leader’s mind lurk defeat, rage and extremism in a lethal, seething brew. It also indicates that the chances of embracing desperate but unworkable solutions are high, and that reverses and failures will heighten the whining and blame game.
In that same speech before the National Institute Course 38, President Buhari demonstrates his aversion to a multidisciplinary approach to solving Nigeria’s problems. Whenever he speaks about the country’s problems, it is to whine about former leaders’ incompetence and dereliction of duty. He does not see the problems as a bigger and better opportunity to develop a creative, workable paradigm and comprehensive framework for remoulding the country’s politics, economics and society. Yet, he needs an integrated solution, one that recasts the foundations upon which to rebuild and restructure the entire system like no president has ever done. Simply returning oil to its primacy in national revenue or regaining economic equilibrium and stability will not erase the country’s problems or propel it automatically to greatness.
President Buhari has not often spoken profoundly on tough issues within and outside the country. He may not even have all the wisdom or energy required to redo the country. But he must possess the intuition to assemble the right people to do the work, and must nurture the right instincts to accurately gauge work done. So far, he has ignored the party that brought him into office, and neglected party programmes and manifesto. Through a few aides, he micromanages a country of about 180m people, a people of different religions, cultures, parties and ideologies. Governing a 21st century society is not the simple job of militarily dictating untried policies that were regnant in the last century. Today, societies are unravelling along many dangerous fault lines. A leader without the knowledge and charisma to engage ethnic and religious groups, not to talk of fringe groups as well, and find an acceptable national mean and fulcrum upon which to rebuild and balance a just, egalitarian and inclusive society, is simply wasting time.
The unvarnished fact is that President Buhari’s extempore speech of last Thursday to NIPSS Course 38 is a grave and disturbing indication that he has not started the arduous task of moulding the society he dreams about. Yet, that task is urgent. More, he needs the best brains from all parts of the country, political parties, religions (including sects), and ideologies. If he can’t find the discipline, detachment and good sense to understand what he needs to do and how to assemble the men and women able to accomplish the task, he will himself become a lost cause. After all, the inelegant, oversimplified and sometimes disdainful manner he has approached the constitution, rule of law, reform and cleansing of the judiciary, and handling of difficult and even deviant elements within the society, show how inadequately he has prepared both for Nigeria and the 21st century.

November 6, 2016