The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sunday

  • Broda, me joo yi; Sunny mo fe joi

    Broda, me joo yi; Sunny mo fe joi

    Tribute to King Sunny Ade at 70

    In our kind of country where only bad news hit the headlines, it is sometimes difficult for columnists, particularly those who maintain weekly columns, to find something to write on because you would just seem to be repeating yourself. Ordinarily, one would have been forced to write on the allegation of the stunning foreign currency that Patience Jonathan, wife of the immediate past President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, Goodluck Jonathan, PhD! claimed is hers. And, pronto, her husband’s Ijaw youths have come to her defence, saying the money represented gifts to the former first lady.

    If I did not find this interesting enough, the other option is to say something on the proposed sale of some national assets by the President Muhammadu Buhari administration. As a Yoruba man, I find this difficult to comment on, even if it is the government’s last resort, given the dire economic situation the country is in, no thanks to corruption, particularly in the Jonathan years. We have a name for such a thing in the south western part of the country which I would not want to mention so that people would not say it is the government I am referring to. Those who know me well know that if I wanted to call the present government that name, I would have said so without fear or favour. But I can understand its predicament.

    I was just flipping through this paper on Friday in search of what to write on that would be somewhat different from what I have been writing in the last few months when I saw the advert by Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu and his wife, Senator Oluremi Tinubu, congratulating King Sunny Ade on the occasion of his 70th birthday. There are musicians and there are musicians: Sunny Ade is unarguably one of the greatest music legends of our time.

    Sunny Adé was born Sunday Adeniyi to a Nigerian royal family in Ondo, Ondo State, on September 22, 1946, to a father who was a church organist; his mother was a trader. He left grammar school in Ondo under the pretext of going to the University of Lagos but instead began a musical career with Moses Olaiya’s Federal Rhythm Dandies, a highlife band. He formed The Green Spots in 1967; changed its name several times, first to African Beats and then to Golden Mercury.

    When the matter was music, particularly the Juju genre in the 1970s and 1980s and even the 1990s in Nigeria, you either mentioned Sunny Ade or Chief Commander Ebenezer Obey. There were a few fringe Juju musicians then, no doubt; but none of them was able to maintain the long grip that the duo had on Juju music fans at home and beyond. Obey had albums like Ketekete, Ki iseru akata, ‘Operation feed the nation’; to name a few to his credit. Then Sunny Ade: Oro to nlo; Sunny ti de; Synchro System; Ja fun mi; Nibi Lekeleke Gbe Nfosho;  Mo beru agba; Ma jaiye oni; 365 is my number; Kira kita kira kita; Mo ti mo; Sunny lo ni ariya; Ma a jo; Won lomode o mela; Orisun Iye, Merciful God; Eri Okan. Others are ‘My Mother’; Alase la’iye; Suku Suku Bam Bam; ‘Appreciation’, among Sunny Ade’s numerous albums.

    Even Sunny Ade’s rivals would readily agree that these were albums to reckon with. They could not have been nothing but the product of hard work. It was this hard work and the innovations that he brought into Juju music that extended his fame beyond our shores, to America and Europe, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s. His Synchro System was so fascinating and irresistible that it earned him his first Grammy Award nomination in the folk/ethnic music category. Sunny Ade is the first African to be nominated twice for the prestigious Grammy Award, the second in 1988, when he released Odu, a collection of traditional Yoruba songs.

    It is not for nothing that Wikipedia describes the Juju maestro as “…a pioneer of modern world music adding that “he has been classed as one of the most influential musicians of all time” The New York Times describes him as “one of the world’s great band leaders”. To Record, Sunny Ade is “a breath of fresh air, a positive vibration we will feel for some time to come” while Trouser Press sees him as “one of the most captivating and important musical artists anywhere in the world”.

    Sunny Ade is all these and more.

    I was at the Federal School of Arts and Science, Ondo, for my Higher School Certificate programme for two years, and that afforded me the opportunity of interacting at close range with Ondo people, Sunny Ade’s kith and kin. There is no doubt that he is well loved by his people. To him therefore, Jesus Christ’ allusion of “a prophet is not without honor except in his own town, among his relatives and in his own home,” does not apply. During my two-year stay in the town, I had cause to attend a few social parties. The youths, particularly the ladies then could not hide their admiration for their own as they politely told you at the parties when you asked them to dance with you:  “broda, me joo yi, Sunny mo fe joi” (brother, I am not interested in this music; I prefer Sunny Ade). I am sorry if I adulterated the Ondo dialect; it’s been quite some time, but I guess the message is clear, which is the most important thing.

    The dance floor would be half empty when people were dancing to the ‘gbam-gbam dim-dim’ (disco) music. But the wise disc jockeys (DJ) knew what the problem was and immediately they switched over to King Sunny Ade’s music, the dance floor would be full again, with the ladies this time being the ones to tell you: ‘Excuse me dance’.  And they could be on the dance floor for hours, retiring to their seats only when Sunny Ade’s music was replaced with something else that they could not comprehend. But, as I said earlier, even the uninitiated DJ knew that should only be an interlude; it should not last long if he wanted the party to be the talk of the town for some time.

    You cannot blame them. The man, Sunny Ade, is simply great; fantastic. I have been following him since the mid-seventies and he remains my best musician of all times. As a matter of fact, for me, Sunny Ade and Chief Commander Ebenezer Obey remain the Juju musicians to beat. While Sunny Ade was noted more for his mastery of the guitar (little wonder some call him the master guitarist; he calls himself anjonu oni jita (the guitar wizard) and rightly so. Sunny Ade’s dexterity on the guitar is unmatchable. The white man may have invented the guitar; it was as if he invented it for Sunny Ade who did and is still doing wonders that even the white man cannot do with it. Obey’s strength is more in the philosophical message of his music. My friends, John Adeolu Akanbi and Gabriel Dare Ekundina and I were so fanatical about these great men of all times back then that we followed their albums as they were released. We did not joke with them as we bought their collections and could tell you serially which album followed which.

    But life was fun then. Even as secondary school students, I know the pleasant moments we had. As a matter of fact, when I see the kind of hardship many students, including those in the universities and other higher institutions are going through today, I feel sorry for them. Yes, things were hard then; but compared with what today’s youths are going through, we were in paradise. That paradise is now lost, apologies to John Milton, and no thanks to purposeless rulers who have continually pauperised Nigerians that God has blessed with a country flowing with milk and honey.

    But it is important to stress that whatever pleasure we had then did not distract us from our studies. We were guided by the maxim that ‘all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’. I mean as hardworking students, we were also entitled to a little social life, a guided one that is. Perhaps that was also a function of some of the messages we picked from the reigning Juju musicians then, I mean Sunny Ade and Obey. You can’t compare these with the ‘junk’ that many of today’s youths gobble as music. Apart from the fact that most of today’s musicians carry no discernible message; whenever they attempt to, they pollute the air That is why they come and disappear like some passing dreams.

    Sunny had collaborated with major artistes such as Manu Dibango (Wakafrika), Stevie Wonder  (played harmonica in Aura), as well as younger Nigerian artists like Wasiu Alabi Pasuma and Bola Abimbola and even the songstress, Onyeka Onwenu. Needless to say that Sunny Adé is also a household name in the country, running multiple companies in several industries. He established a non-profit organisation called the King Sunny Adé Foundation, and is also working with the Musical Copyright  Society of Nigeria.

    Sunny Adé, now known as ‘The Chairman’ in his home country, was appointed a visiting professor of music at Obafemi Awolowo University Ile-Ife ; he was also inducted into the Afropop Hall of Fame, at the Brooklyn African Festival in the United States. He dedicated the award to the late Michael Jackson.

    Please join me in wishing this great man who has been an inspiration to many other upcoming musicians in the country a happy birthday on behalf of millions of his other fans. His coming to the world on September 22, 1946 was not a mistake.

    Egin, igba odun kan, odun kan  i.

  • President Buhari erred in his endorsement of Local Government autonomy

    President Buhari erred in his endorsement of Local Government autonomy

    This, in spite of the mess we daily see local government chieftains make of local council funds resulting in their being, individually, richer than their respective councils and with no meaningful impact on the lives of the communities that make up the councils.

    First, Re:  SENATORS CALL FOR SACK OF MINISTERS:

    1. Then what should happen to the Senators, if not simply guillotine them?

    They deserve to suffer the worst fate possible, given their dismal level of competence, performance and integrity- Ayo Omowumi.

    1. Saraki should address cost of governance which is not sustainable with, or without recession by removing the beam in his, and his colleagues’ eyes. The senate should lead in adjusting to these austere times. – Okan Adetunmbi.
    2. Fascinating, seeing alleged treasury looters knocking the anti-corruption war, claiming its sweeping approach was scaring investors away. Will these people, ever learn, purge themselves, disgorge all they have allegedly stolen and help Nigeria out of recession?

    Given the huge misuse to which all Nigerian military Heads of State  had put local governments during their time,  especially during the administration of the ‘allocation snatcher’, it would have tantamount to  a Pauline conversion to see President Muhammadu  Buhari do anything other than endorse local government autonomy. I had read, and casually dismissed his endorsement until something else brought me back to the need to urge him to re consider his position. That was the short birthday lecture Dr Olusegun Mimiko, the Ondo State governor, gave this past Monday, at the 70th birthday celebration of Chief Ishola Filani. Brilliant, tactical and, ever calculating, reasons the APC should waste no further time in putting its house in order ahead of the Ondo State governorship election, Mimiko gave an extremely poignant lecture, devoted mostly to restructuring but with emphasis on the place of local governments in a federal system. Given their historic misuse as earlier referred to, it should not be a surprise that all manner of potentates have grown around local governments, feeding fat and, cornering to themselves and their cronies, huge portions of the funds coming in from the federation account.  So massive is the level of corruption in local governments that during the administration of Dr Kayode Fayemi as Governor of Ekiti State, a traumatised elder statesman told me about how  certain categories of local government officials in the state were not only making a monthly contribution of not less than N1million, but  owned – as at the time- most of the hotels and gas stations in Ado-Ekiti, the state capital, which information I promptly passed on to the governor and who, in turn  quickly fast tracked his government’s introduction of the e-payment system to check mate this mother of all corruption.

    Governor Mimiko was categorical in denouncing federal involvement in a matter that should, absolutely, be a state affair, drawing attention to how military Heads of State deliberately gifted the north an abysmally disproportionate number of local governments, using such nebulous parameters as some sterile land mass. To buttress his point, he  cited the specific case of  Kano State which, even after Jigawa State had been carved out of it , still dwarfed Lagos State, three or four times, in the number of local governments. You only have to mentally calculate how much money goes to each state monthly from the federation account, to fully appreciate the wicked, but deliberate intent of that treacherous act. However, in order not to get subsumed in the muddle  of  present day Nigerian politics, let me very quickly excuse Governor Mimiko and invite, far from the great beyond, for further elucidation on this matter, unarguably Nigeria’s foremost  political commentator ever:  the evergreen Uncle Bola Ige, legal luminary and former governor of Oyo State who wrote , mutatis mutandis, on what he captioned: “Man -Made Avoidable Local Government Troubles”, in his column in The Sunday Tribune of 27 April, 1996 from which I  shall quote at some length.  Wrote Chief Ige,  “anyone who has a good knowledge of the local government system, its history, theory and practice, not only in Nigeria but also in civilised countries, cannot be surprised at what is happening in various parts of the country since the Federal Military Government announced the “creation”of new local government areas. I personally have been shocked and pained by the violence that has been unleashed in some places and I am apprehensive that the tinder box is waiting to be ignited in some places where uneasy calm exists. There are modalities that govern local government systems all over the civilised world. The first is that a local government must be truly government at local level. In other words, the people of a given area must be allowed to come together, of their own accord, and in a spirit of agreeing to some sort of social contract, to run their local affairs. The community must of course be easily identifiable – usually they must be people of the same stock, or citizens who inhabit a town, or a village or a quarter as existed both during the colonial times and when we had regions.  That was also what happened when I was governor of the old Oyo State. Local government system was based on emirates where they existed or administrative units where there were no emirates in the north; in the west, it was based on the combination of the Obaship system and innate democratic inclinations of the peoples of Western Nigeria; in the East where the people were largely republican, the local government system was based on the clan. Unfortunately, the Murtala-Obasanjo Federal Military Government began the nonsense that has remained with us. Pretending that they wanted a better local government administration, they set up a Commission, headed by Alhaji Ibrahim Dasuki. In my opinion, the recommendations of that commission were the worst disaster to have happened to local government system in Nigeria. For instance, it was from there that the idea of uniformity in size, scope and administration was introduced. I confess that I suspected a hidden agenda in the recommendations: in order to strengthen the administrative stranglehold of the emirates, all of Nigeria was advised to base its local government system on defined populations and elaborate administrative system. Also, the military wanted to be able to manipulate the local governments, and ipso facto, the entire country.  Fortunately, it did not work, nor will it ever work.

    Concluding, the legal luminary wrote: “In a federal set-up, the federal government must have nothing to do with the creation or running of local governments. Nigeria is the only federation in the whole world where the federal government decides how, where, and when a local government council must run. In all civilised countries, and in all democratic countries, it is the state or provincial or regional government that legislates on local government.”  As solution to the unending problems of local governments in Nigeria, “the federal government must hands off local government affairs.  State governments should formulate guidelines for the setting up of local government councils. They must be of universal application and not tinkered with. Once any community satisfies the criteria in those guidelines, they should have their own council. What a people or community always want is a community of interests-not handouts by the authorities. Only then shall we be saved from man-made avoidable local government troubles.”

    It will be describing President Buhari’s endorsement very mildly, indeed, to suggest that it is a huge surprise that a whole 20 years after Chief Ige made those Socratic suggestions, the president comes round, with his endorsement of local government council autonomy, obviously expressing his preference to have local councils set up as competitors with state governments which, the world over, has full and undiminished authority over them. This, in spite of the mess we daily  see local government chieftains make of local council funds resulting in their being, individually, richer than their respective councils and with no meaningful impact on the lives of the communities that make up the councils. In voicing this endorsement, President Buhari has the good fortune that, as my co-columnist, Olakunle Abimbola, recently put it: his ‘sheer moral authority, powered by his unchallenged integrity’  to thank, as  that forbids us from  accusing him of political opportunism as he made the remarks while receiving the leadership of  the Association of Local Governments in Nigeria (ALGON), one of those bodies that have perennially, unduly, profited from our wayward local government system even as the communities atrophy.

  • Kogi’s judicial and election debacles

    Kogi’s judicial and election debacles

    ON the surface, Governor Yahaya Bello of Kogi State has won a major judicial battle to entrench his reign after James Abiodun Faleke and other petitioners exhausted their appeals before the courts of the land. The victory was not without some questionable pronouncements. For instance, the election petition tribunal, in determining the disputes, either ignored the salient issues of the petition or in the end gave a perverse decision. Among other issues, Hon Faleke had in particular petitioned the tribunal to settle whether the November 21, 2015 governorship election was conclusive or not, and whether Mr Bello was right to have contested the supplementary election without a running mate. The tribunal ignored the issue of the conclusiveness of the poll, and made no definite pronouncement on Mr Bello’s presence on the ballot without a running mate.

    The Appeal Court appeared to understand some of the issues in dispute, but it either spoke on facts not in evidence before it or even deliberately built inexistent facts into the dispute in order to come to a strange conclusion. For instance, though Mr Bello’s defence did not claim he voted in the poll, and the petitioner proved he did not, the Appeal Court, without any evidence, found that he did. Worse, though INEC documents and the petitioner proved Hon Faleke was not Mr Bello’s running mate, the court bewilderingly claimed that Mr Bello adopted him. In addition, responding to other issues in the petition, the court also claimed that the manual of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) supersedes the relevant provisions of the constitution.

    The country therefore waited to see whether the Supreme Court would talk law or gymnastics, politics or jurisprudence, or whether the eminent justices would find the magical dexterity to build something on nothing. The apex court has not given reasons for affirming the position of Mr Bello and dismissing Hon Faleke’s petition, but in their unanimous judgement last week, they built a castle whose location, whether in the air, as many Kogites moan, or firmly anchored on the ground, as the governor’s supporters enthuse, no one can tell. By the end of the month, when the justices thunder as they promise, a legal analysis on the three judgements will be done and published on this column. This column has the abundant patience to wait.

    So, on the surface, Mr Bello has won the legal battle for the Kogi governorship seat after the highest court in the land gave its decision in an abominable practice of deferring the reasons for the verdict till a later date. The implication is that when the judgement is being written later, when calmness takes over the mind, and when better, intuitive perspectives well up in the intellect, the apex court can no longer change its mind. They will have to justify their decision by hook or crook. Yet, there are only some 10 days between September 20 when they announced their verdict and September 30 when they promised the reasons would be adduced.

    Mr Bello knows, however, that despite winning the court battles, he neither won the election nor the hearts of the traumatised people of Kogi, a people he is chastising with his tongue and with scorpions. Newspapers perversely reported jubilation after the apex court sustained the governor in office, as if the word had lost its meaning and exuberance. A few of the governor’s supporters in court in Abuja when the decision was announced, and some at the Government House in Lokoja, the state capital, grinned like Cheshire cats and raised their hands in victory, but there was nothing any sensible person could describe as jubilation. Instead, from the blighted plains of Okunland, to the disgruntled Savannah of Igalaland, and the harsh hills of Ebiraland, a pall of frustration and funereal silence descended upon the state the moment the apex court, upon which the good people of the state had invested their trust and confidence, voted with the inscrutable minds of the local courts.

    In barely eight months, enough time for the youthful bohemian Mr Bello to prove his bona fides and convince the state he was very much worth the mistake and quixotism of his party, the All progressives Congress (APC), the governor has instead underscored his magnificent incompetence and spitefulness. (Sometimes, incompetence and evil can indeed acquire a malevolent, beguiling and artistic form of magnificence). When Chris Ngige, former Anambra State governor and current Employment and Labour minister assumed office by a crooked manipulation of the ballot, he nonetheless proved by sheer industry, imaginativeness and charisma that something good could come from Nazareth. Mr Bello, on the other hand, has been befuddled, vicious, haughty, insensitive, imprudent and childishly sentimental. He managed to elevate these vices into an art so quickly and so comprehensively that the state groaned for a messiah. They knew the circumstances of his emergence, and loathed them, and wished, indeed pined, for salvation. The tribunal and Appeal Court proved too distracted and disinterested to be of any help. So, with bated breath, and given the antecedents of many justices of the Supreme Court since independence, Kogites summoned the instinct to expect succour at the ninth hour, hoping to be delivered from the grasping hands of Mr Bello who had their feet to the fire. When the apex court’s hammer fell anticlimactically, Kogites gnashed their teeth and have been wailing since. Any newspaper that talks of jubilation is therefore misguided and mischievous.

    But Kogi is merely a pawn in a desperate and bitter ethnic and religious power play within the heavily polarised APC. Mr Bello himself is even a more insignificant and pathetic pawn. The late Abubakar Audu, who died at the point of his electoral victory, was a supporter of Kano’s ex-governor Rabiu Kwankwaso for the presidency. Though he eventually supported the APC presidential ticket and rallied enthusiastically for APC victory in the poll, he was still treated as an outsider, and a corrupt one to boot, though no court had found him guilty. His death was thus a convenient excuse for powerful forces to jettison the APC ticket in last year’s governorship poll. Worse, since the sensible thing for the party to do was to ensure his running mate inherited the mantle, the party, clutching primordial considerations, and immersing itself in religious and intra-party power play, spurned Hon Faleke and gave the undeserving Mr Bello the inheritance.

    The consequence was that what should have been settled at the political level became a costly legal adventure destined to widen the cracks in the ruling party. The cracks have now widened to the point that no one can paper over it anymore. Mr Bello was neither registered in Kogi to vote, nor did he vote. More, he even supported the opposition against the APC when Prince Audu held the ticket. But he is smartly connected in Abuja and professes identities the power mongers in the party find enticingly congenial. Hon Faleke, they claimed, was simply the face of competition that must not be given an inch, let alone a yard. There would be no court in the land to give him the justice he was petitioning for, the power mongers swore. Demonstrating more clearly that the breaches in the APC appear irredeemable, the power mongers, who are not limited to one geopolitical zone, have expanded their forays beyond Kogi to afflict the electoral process in Ondo State.

    It will, therefore, be inaccurate to imagine that the Kogi debacles are a product of purely legal shenanigans or state manipulations. There are many camps in the APC today; and though boundaries are shifting rapidly, it is still obvious that one camp has the upper hand at the moment. That supremacy is of course very tenuous, but it is nonetheless evident. It is that camp that worked its sorcery in Kogi, that did and is still doing wonders in Ondo, and is plotting yet other chicaneries elsewhere. That camp has found willing Southwest recruits, with religion subtly deployed as a common denominator to the dismay of true democrats and liberals within the party. It is not clear what is preventing an open war, whether timing or indecision. But the fractures in the party will undoubtedly manifest sooner or later, with the war front limited in the short run to the Southwest where many of the zone’s leading politicians have spurned unity and common interest for personal and egotistic considerations.

    As the many post-judgement analyses on this page have shown, it is simplistic to imagine that the judicial pronouncements on Kogi have been limited to purely legal considerations. They are not. More importantly, the judgements have indicated both the vulnerability of the judiciary and the terrible fractures in the polity in terms of ideological, cultural and religious fissures. The APC, it is clear, is disunited and without a binding tradition and belief. More and more, thanks to President Buhari’s inability to stamp authority and a unifying ideal upon the party, the APC is looking like a multipurpose vehicle which a cabal has hijacked to luxuriate in power as an end in itself. The party appears now to cater to a narrow interest sustained by a narrow coterie of northerners and ambitious Southwest politicians who, ignoring the lessons of history, believe that they need a shifty alliance to project power. The alliance will prove unworkable, for it is impossible for it to exist in the context its architects plan, without the principles and values that ennoble and advance a great society.

    The Kogi tragedy cannot be remedied until some three years or so to come. The people may gnash their teeth all they can and watch in dismay as Mr Bello and his fellow incompetents push the state to the edge of despair, but with the disarray in the country, the entrenched divisiveness fostered by the ruling party everywhere, and the contempt security agencies have for the constitution, not to say the weakness and impotence of the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), their feeling of hopelessness will be further accentuated. When the party assumed office last year and almost immediately began to get off track, this column and many others believed some gentle or fierce admonition would restore it to the path of sanity. That hope appears now lost.

    It takes a party without a sense of unity and justice to promote the nonsense in Kogi that has culminated in Mr Bello’s judicial victory. It takes even much worse for the same party to sweep the injustice in Ondo under the carpet. The implication is that the APC’s change mantra is suspect. Shorn of an ideology, shorn of principles, and bereft of a fierce dedication to great and noble values such as justice, equity and fair play, it is impossible for a party, let alone a country, to stand and prosper. Surely the APC has a commonsensical understanding of these fine points. But alas, the party appears overrated.

    After the Appeal Court undermined the principles of its own sacred and legal existence in the Kogi election dispute, and the lower tribunal shirked its responsibility with such daring and indifference, many felt the Supreme Court would save the day. That day was not saved; indeed, it is now lost. For a state that has groaned for more than 12 years under inept leaders, the next three years under a bungling Mr Bello could prove tremendously injurious and calamitous. The only thing left to hope is that the APC’s irresponsible approach to both politics and the cause of national unity will, regardless of the party’s incompetence, confine the gloom to a few states and individuals.

    But given the nature and texture of what is happening everywhere, especially the wheeler-dealing and back-stabbing in Abuja, the Southwest may not emerge into that hypothetical future unscathed. The zone has had a history of fractious and treacherous politicking. That history is being entrenched. The zone has led the country in peaceful religious co-existence, where politics is religion-blind and governors and their deputies sometimes emanated from the same religion; now its people are being foolishly divided along religious lines by short-sighted politicians who link up with alien forces and outsiders to promote religious division in Southwest states, schools and local communities, a division antagonistic to their proud and iconic culture. The Southwest may arguably be the most liberal in the country, and may also have produced a slew of great democrats and mentors, but it is highly vulnerable, and its politicians widely believed to be appallingly easy to manipulate. Last week, Kogi, and to a lesser extent, Ondo, simply showed those fault lines in all their ugly pompousness.

  • René Dirven (1932-2016): René has moved on, but his work lives on

    If our borders are closed now, I think most of us would expire from lack of oxygen. I know; the thing is everywhere, but I tell you, what provides oxygen for most of us is made in China. We make nothing, and we eat everything.

    This week, dear reader, I would like you to join me in mourning, if you don’t mind. I am mourning the loss of an academic father, an excellent host and a most erudite Professor Emeritus of Cognitive Linguistics, Prof. René Dirven. He was of the University of Duisburg, now University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. For decades, however, Prof. Dirven had been at the forefront of studies in Cognitive Linguistics in Europe.

    On the 25th of August this year, I received by post an invitation letter/programme announcing the obituary and burial arrangements of Lutgard Dirven, the wife of Prof. René Dirven. She had died the first week of the month. Quite saddened by this, I hastened a letter of condolence to my Prof. His daughter replied that her father, Prof. René Dirven, had died exactly two weeks after his wife died.

    I met Prof. Dirven in the summer of 2001. He was my designated host during my twenty-month programme in that country on the Alexander von Humboldt fellowship. I therefore have had the privilege to know him for about sixteen years now. Even though he had retired, he had arranged a surrogate host for me in Dr. Wolfgang Hunig, a most open and warm personality, at the Duisburg University. This meant that I did not have a day-to-day working relationship with Prof. Dirven. However, thanks to modern technology, we were able to relate frequently throughout my stay and beyond, even to the month of his passing via the internet’s many resources.

    As soon as I arrived at my research station in Germany, Prof. Dirven held a dinner party in my honour where he introduced me to the rest of the linguistic cast and crew. I soon understood why. It was not just that he wanted to make a foreigner feel at home; the fact was that there was a strong familial relationship existing among members of the linguistic investigation group. I was being welcomed into that group (no, not initiated, look at you!). By all accounts, this large community of investigators had been drawn together by Prof. Dirven.

    There were three things I learnt from my host, Prof. Dirven. First, there was his people spirit. He was a people builder. I would honestly like to report that everyone I met while I was in Europe was kind and race-blind. Unfortunately not. However, Prof. Dirven was one of those not afraid to play host to those of us from Africa: Nigeria, South Africa, etc. He extended his arms of friendship and welcome to scholarship wherever it came from in the universe.

    For Prof., scholarship was his credo. He took researchers into cognitive linguistics and knit them into one closely-linked community. He was always welcome to new ideas, needs for tutoring, needs for guiding, and that way brought linguistics into one huge loop. To work with Prof was to be prepared to go the whole nine yards. Any work given to him for assessment usually attracted comments that were most times longer than the work. Indeed, with him, you had to account for every word choice, even your thought. He was that thorough.

    One of the things I will always remember Prof. for was his generosity of spirit. Even after my programme ended and I returned to Africa, he did not allow me to get off the scholarship train. He would write to ask what I was working on and offer some support. His support often came in form of reference materials but, more importantly, books. Taking advantage of his association with academic books publishing houses in Europe, he ensured that I had an endless supply of current books on English studies. I even received one the month before he died.

    Most of all, I will remember Prof. René Dirven for his work spirit. On my first day with him, he told me he was going blind due to some degeneration in his eyes. Apparently, the degeneration started quite a while back, but he never let that stop him. He always got through a prodigious amount of work daily, managing to write or edit very many books on cognitive linguistics. By the time he died, he was quite blind but again, he did not let that disturb him, working mainly through speech recognition devises. Prof. Dirven’s work credo have continued with me to this day: speed, accuracy and thoroughness.

    Many of us in this country can learn something from this. It is clear that the one virus that is killing us is our approach to work, which borders on the criminal. Most people regard their legitimate jobs as the avenue that brings in the ‘chicken change’ in their lives. It’s the stuff they are able to cream off the top of their job that brings in the real thing. The result is that most of us make only futile stabs at our work.

    The sad thing is that Nigerians have come to believe that the only thing that counts is the amount of money they are worth, no matter how that money has been gathered together. Unfortunately, these monies are for no other purpose than to boast with and consume material things. Alas, illicit money a life doth not make.

    During the week, I got a text message that told clearly how Africans have concentrated their strength and energy on pilfering huge sums of money from their countries to use to indulge in their mindless consumerism. Africans are not even attempting to bring out innovations that can transform their countries from total dependence on foreign culture to some dignifying independence. There is no reason on earth why everything consumed in Nigeria should be made abroad. It is not just lazy, it is suicidal. If our borders are closed now, I think most of us would expire from lack of oxygen. I know the thing is everywhere, but I tell you, what provides oxygen for many of us is made in China. We make nothing, and we eat everything.

    The reasons are not too far. The political and military leadership of this country since independence has persistently seen itself as a replacement for the colonial masters. It has therefore rather made our leaders to behave like a ravaging swarm of cavalier locusts, leaving us the masses in helpless wonder. As the ravaged grasses, our half-eaten leaves are lucky to survive.

    Nigeria cannot be transformed like this. We cannot continue like this. We cannot hope to get any change like this. When you think of it, how much can a man consume? But i don’t want to think of that right now.

    Listen, I bet you that the car you thought you could not live without buying will not matter to you in two years’ time. I tell you, all material things will fly out of your thoughts, were, God forbid, some terrible illness to strike. I can tell you categorically that those houses you are accumulating by illegally creaming off the top in your job will be auctioned off at two a penny by your beloved children or brothers or other loving relatives.

    I tell you, you and I do not need anything more than what comes in legitimately from our hard work if we make a habit of living within our means. Those who do that value their work and their work speaks for them, even when they are long gone. Prof. René Dirven’s work continues to speak to the quality of his life. He built people, he wrote books and he served his continent. I can therefore say confidently that though he is gone, his work goes on. He has only changed his address.

  • Now, Okon solves the exchange rate riddle

    Talking about African oddities and oddballs, Okon is surely a distinguished specimen. As various scams overwhelm the nation, Okon has devised his own scam to become a trillionaire. One morning, the old crackpot marched into the sitting room wearing the uniform of a Niger Delta insurgent. Before snooper could say a word, the crazy boy opened up in a verbal torrent.

    “Oga, I wan quickly reach dem Ambode boy , make I too surenda dem weapons like dem Ibo boys. I get two dane guns, one cutlass, two hoes and three katapots. Make dem pay me dollar make I go open pepper soup joint like dem Mama de piss.”

    “I see “, snooper replied with a deadpan expression.

    “Oga, you know say dem soldiers don drive man comot for Arepo. Money no dey yanfunyanfun again. Price don hit roof. Everything don skyrocket and dem rocket come tear heaven apart”, the mad boy rued.

    “By the way Okon, what is the current exchange rate?” snooper asked.

    “It depends oga. For dem Yoruba oba or otunba, na four million to one, for Ibo Reverend Father na one point five million to one, for Lagos landlords na sixteen million to four minus one and for dem Otedola boy na one billion to one”, the crazy boy sniggered. On that note snooper quickly drove him out.

  • Pope offers comfort to friends and relatives of Nice attack victims

    Pope Francis on Saturday sought to comfort relatives and close friends of the more than 80 victims of the attack in Nice in July, who were run down by a man driving a truck as they celebrated France’s national day.

    The pope began his solemn address by apologizing for not speaking French because he said his was not “bon”.

    Then, shifting to Italian, he urged those who were “attacked by the demon” to respond with “forgiveness, love and respect for your neighbor” rather than giving in to the temptation to react with hate and violence.

    Among the some 1,000 people who attended the ceremony were members of Nice’s Jewish community and a local Muslim imam.

    “It makes me happy to see that inter-religious relations are very vibrant among you, and this cannot but soothe the wounds left by this dramatic event,” Francis said.

    Islamic State (IS) militants claimed responsibility for the July 14 Nice attack. Less than two weeks later, IS militants killed an elderly French priest, Father Jacques Hamel, in his church, prompting the pope to declare the “the world is at war”.

    But the pope also insisted the war was not a religious one, and that it was wrong to “identify Islam with violence”, suggesting instead that the lack of economic opportunities for young people in Europe was one of the causes of terrorism.

    After speaking briefly, the pope descended from the pulpit and spent more than 45 minutes meeting those who attended the ceremony, many of whom were in tears.

  • Four al Qaeda members killed in suspected U.S. drone strike

    Four members of al Qaeda’s Yemen branch, including a local commander, were killed in a suspected U.S. drone strike on a vehicle traveling east of the capital Sanaa, two local officials said on Saturday.

    They said the attack in Marib province, controlled by forces loyal to exiled President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, occurred late on Friday. A local commander of the militant Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), known as Abu Khaled al-Sanaani, was killed along with three associates, they said.

    It was the second drone strike in two days to target a local commander of the Islamist militant group regarded by U.S. officials as one of the most dangerous branches of al Qaeda.

    A drone strike on a vehicle in al-Bayda province in central Yemen killed a senior AQAP leader known as Abdallah al-Sanaani, identified as a regional commander of the group, on Thursday.

    The United States has been using drones to target the Islamist militant group which has exploited Yemen’s civil war to carve out a foothold in the impoverished country. Several leaders of the group have been killed by drone strikes in recent years.

    U.S. officials have said AQAP is one of the most potent security threats in the Middle East. The group, whose attacks have mainly targeted the Yemeni government and the Iran-allied Houthi group, claimed responsibility for an attack last year on the Paris office of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

     

  • Dateline 2030: The Blackman’s burden

    In the summer of 2000, I attended a send-off party for a younger friend, a famous Nigerian dissident, who was returning to the home front after a ten year spell of involuntary exile. The host was a successful business magnate of Indian extraction, and the party was held in a posh and plush London Heathrow hotel recently acquired by the business mogul. It was a glittering affair, and the place was packed full with upwardly mobile and enterprising Indians who had found fortune in the west in a remarkably short period.

    Many of their parents had arrived penniless in England after being expelled from Uganda by the notorious and unlamented Idi Amin Dada. For practically all of them, there was no question of returning to India, except on brief spiritual pilgrimages. The west was home. I suppose this makes for greater focus and intense concentration. I put this question to an Anglo-American friend of mine, a distinguished professor of post-colonial history, and he was as withering as he was devastating.

    “You see”, he began as he cut me to size with a look of blistering contempt. “The Indians have their instincts in the right place. Even their ancestors made it to the other side of the Mediterranean before they got stuck. In the case of your people, you cannot cope with fresh challenges of life and history, you are always longing to go back to the womb, to the cradle of mankind, so that you can continue a life of tropical indolence and lassitude. That is why you never made it out of Africa in the first instance.”

    When I protested that my people, the Yoruba, were fabled to have left ancient Egypt after a bitter succession struggle, he shrugged with weary disdain. “They were headed in the wrong direction. Soft people looking for softer targets to dominate. If they had moved in the direction of the Red Sea even if they had been conquered, by now they would have been completely assimilated as a European race”.  As I reeled from this relentlessly Afrophobic onslaught, I informed my friend that despite everything, I longed to return home.

    “That is empty nostalgia, which is a form of psychiatric disorder”, he blasted.

    Before I return to my distinguished friend, let me make a curious confession. Yours sincerely suffers from an affliction which can be best described as intellectual masochism, a gluttony for mental punishment. I take delight in testing my hunches against other insights no matter how savage and antagonistic these may be and no matter how devastating or destabilizing the consequences are. I also take a secret delight in inflicting maximum intellectual punishment on those who believe that Africans are incapable of tremendous intellectual exertions. I have been in some desperate intellectual scrapes and might have been blacklisted by a few conference organizers in the hallowed sanctuaries of western intellectual power.

    I met Professor Lambert Trevor-Roper at one of those conferences, and he was obviously the star of the show. He was as brilliant and dazzling as ever, and had a reputation for not taking intellectual hostages. My first question to him was whether he was related to his more infamous namesake who had famously proclaimed that Africans had no history and were an embarrassment to humanity. But this he proudly and pointedly ignored. But as I turned the table on him, forcing him into precipitate retreat and testy non-sequiturs, he knew I could not be ignored.  He eyed me with a mixture of scorn and panic. He collared me during a break in hostilities.

    “If you are filled with this contempt for the west and its institutions, what are you doing here?” he thundered.

    “I am here for the decolonization project”, I had replied casually.

    “What? I thought we did that for you sometimes ago”, he replied.

    “No, I mean mental decolonization, that is decolonizing the colonizers. I want to show that all these theoretical gimmicks and nonsensical abstractions are a game anybody can play”, I shot back.

    “I see then”, he stuttered and slunk away.

    But Lambert was not one to take defeat lying low. Still smarting from my vicious put-down, he cornered me in a dark alley at the end of the conference.

    “I see you are one of those uppity Africans who think they know everything. Take this and get in touch so that I can drill some sense into your thick, Early Man’s skull”, he said thrusting his card into my hand and vanishing before I could give him a good measure of my tongue.

    I took up his challenge and we became great buddies. Despite his caustic, malignant tongue, he was as warm as he was generous and was eccentricity personified. On my first visit, he peeped through the shutter of his magnificent study and exclaimed: “Ah, Cannibal!” When I protested vigorously at this racist denigration, he told me he meant Hannibal, the great Roman general of Carthage fame, and that ever since his last visit to a sadistic dentist, he had found himself unable to pronounce the “H” silent consonant and had been substituting it with a “K”. “It is the tyranny of the dentist’s tong, my friend”. Then he called out to his elegant and aristocratic wife. “Betty, Betty, Othello’s Countryman is here!” he screamed, slyly recalling Professor Eldred Durosimi Jones’ celebrated doctoral thesis.

    As the evening wore on, it was apparent that Lambert took a child-like delight in outraging and scandalizing. At a point, he took a tipsy lunge at me.

    “I like the way you down your wine, with refinement and considerable finesse. Where did you learn that from?” he asked with snide condescension.

    “When my ancestors were making wine, yours were Roman galley slaves”, I fired back.

    “I see, I see”, he crooned with juvenile delight. “But instead of looking for ways of inventing the storage barn you were turning your surplus food into cheap wine and thereafter engaging in orgies of drinking and fornicating and that has continued till date. But you see, we are not going to allow you to drink and fornicate yourself to death. It is not in the interest of humanity at large. By the time we are going to Mars, we would have sanitized your evil forests for you, rid them of Ebola, Aids and human pestilences such as your pot-bellied tyrants and devious dictators. Then we will parcel out the land again to those who have better use for real estate. For example, if we hand over your country to Bill Gates, in five years you will achieve the food sufficiency which has eluded you for a thousand years…”

    He completely ignored my feeble gesticulations of protest, eyeing me with triumphant malice. I had had enough punishment to last ten meetings. On our last meeting, I told him I was sick and tired of the of the institutionalized cruelties of the west, its merciless rationalism, its attempts to turn humanity into unfeeling cyborgs, robotized machines and this business of going to Mars when three quarters of humanity cannot feed itself. He cut me short with professorial severity.

    “It does not matter what intellectual sophisticates like you think. What is important is to take the bull of history by the horns, and that is what we are doing. We gave you modernity, we gave you Christianity, we even gave you your names. Now we are going to take man to Mars. Do you want another beer, my friend?”

    To my shame, I didn’t decline.

    • (First published in 2004.)

     

  • Coal for light

    Coal for light

    Diversification of the sources of fuel for power is a welcome development

    For decades we kept talking about diversifying the country’s revenue base but, beyond the rhetoric, little was done in this direction. For a country that has been taught something and has learnt something, we should not have been caught off guard in the quagmire of another oil price slump. We had it in the 1980s in the Shehu Shagari years; we had it even shortly before the Obasanjo presidency in 1999 when oil sold at a rock-bottom $9. All successive governments did was to keep hoping for the best; which somewhat came and we soon relapsed into our business as usual. Diversification became once again a slogan rather than a programme of action.

    But when we talk of diversification, it goes beyond the source/s of revenue generation. Part of the problem with this country is that in terms of ideas; we have a surfeit of them; our problem is in converting them. What I am saying is that many of us, including our leaders, past and present, have always been conversant with the aphorism that it is dangerous or unwise for one to put all his eggs in one basket. Why? Simply because once that basket has problem, the eggs will break. Again, as with crude oil, we have for long relied on thermal plants essentially for electricity generation.

    It is however gratifying that the economic recession is now compelling us to look more in the direction of diversification properly so-called. But the diversification I am talking about is not the one we are familiar with; rather, it is as it pertains to electricity generation. Minister of Solid Minerals and Mining, Dr Kayode Fayemi, told the executive director of a non-governmental organisation, CSR-in-Action, Bekeme Masade, who led somer members of the group on a courtesy visit to his office in Abuja, that Nigeria will soon be using coal as an alternative source of energy. Indeed, coal will supply about 30 per cent of the country’s power needs, according to the policy on energy needs set by the Ministry of Power, Works and Housing under Babatunde Raji Fashola, its minister.

    “We have dedicated that coal licences will only be awarded to those who want to generate electricity and we are collaborating with the FMPWH (Federal Ministry of Power, Works and Housing) on this.

    “There are certain processes you need to fulfill. You need to have a licence for power generation before you acquire a licence for mining. Since the inception of this administration, no licence for coal has been awarded which is not for the purposes of power generation.

    “So if you acquire a licence for mining coal, you have to also have that for power. Once the application is filed and it is not encumbered by any legal or existing holder of a licence, the licence is awarded, but it must be for power generation only. Quite a number of companies have applied directly either to us or to the FMPWH,” the minister told his guests.

    This is a welcome development. Nigeria has large coal reserves, estimated at about two billion metric tons. What many of us have been saying is that the government should think out of the box to take the country out of its present economic doldrums. If the proposed idea  represents part of that process, we should support it. The fact is that our present concentration on thermal stations cannot take us to the Promised Land, with persistent gas shortages occasioned by avoidable and unavoidable factors. Ours is a country richly blessed with good weather. We have sunshine in abundance; which offers a good opportunity to tap greatly into solar energy. We have coal, which also plays a great role in the power sector in other places. We have areas that can support wind farms, etc.      

    It is important to note that coal-fired power plants currently fuel 41 per cent of global electricity. Indeed, an estimate says electricity generation accounts for 43 per cent of all coal consumed in South Africa. As a matter of fact, many of that country’s coal-fired power stations are located close to a coal mine from where they are directly supplied with fuel. Thus, we have the Grootegeluko open cast mine on the Waterberg Coalfield in Limpopo (one of the largest in the country) which feeds the Matimba Power Station with about 14.6 million tons of coal a year through a conveyor system. The same mine is also contracted to supply the new Medupi Power Station. What South Africa has done is to apply the simple economic principle of locating the power plants near the source of fuel. The country generates about 34,000 megawatts.

    Even China which accounts for 46 per cent of global coal production and 49 per cent of global consumption due to its large electric power requirements, fuels its economic growth with coal.

    There is no doubt that coal is one of the most polluting ways to generate electricity, which explains why some regions like Europe have been trying hard in recent years to phase it out. But this is a case of different folks; different strokes. Those who have a case against coal to power our electricity plants here as a result of the challenge of pollution should ponder the amount of pollution from all kinds of generators that our people use to generate electricity privately whenever there is power outage.

    For me, what is important is that we diversify our sources of fuel for power supply. It has become clear that we cannot continue to rely on gas due to the challenges we have been having, especially with militants in the Niger Delta. Even if as a short term measure before the government gets a firm grip of the situation, we need to look beyond gas for this purpose. This is much more so that we do not have full control over the weather to fully engage the hydro stations all year round. We are only able to maximise them during the rainy season.

    The good news here is that even in spite of government, some people on their own; as well as government and private organisations are now popularising the solar option for electricity generation. Schools as well as hospitals in Lagos, for instance, are now experimenting with solar energy. Indeed, one cable television station that is also into estate business in partnership with a private concern has come up with the idea of powering its estates with solar energy. We also have many homes using inverters to power their electrical devices. The result will surely be amazing if more Nigerians key into some of these alternative sources of power generation and more people are able to bypass the problematic national grid.

    Perhaps what the government can do is to support people that are providing these alternatives to the public power supply system however it deems fit. The truth is; we have lived with darkness for too long such that we should be hungry for light now, except we are saying that our nation is haven for darkness.

    We should be firing from all cylinders if truly we are desirous of banishing darkness from the country. We should encourage wind farms where there is wind in abundance; solar power in places where/when there is a surfeit of sunshine; hydro power where it makes sense and thermal power stations where such best fit. This idea of one-cap-fits-all has not helped us with regard to electricity supply. Indeed, the idea of a national grid which can throw the entire nation into darkness simultaneously due to system collapse is no more in our national interest; that is if ever it was at any time in the past. Where we need to amend laws to achieve this, let that be done without further delay.

    Our developmental efforts have been hampered for too long by lack of steady power supply. Even the projected 10,000MW by end of 2019 is a far cry from where we should be if we want to industrialise fast. We must encourage the government to lighten our darkness from wherever it can – be it from the moon, Mars or Jupiter. All we want is power; steady power supply.

     

  • The nation in question: some conceptual clarifications

    The nation in question: some conceptual clarifications

    In its modern incarnation, the National question arose from a feeling of marginalization and oppression by distinct nationalities who felt cheated or shortchanged by the forcible imperialist restructuring of their territorial space.  Some of them were rendered stateless or technically nation-less. But in some embryonic forms, the national question has been with us since the beginning of civilization and modern warfare.

    It is captured for posterity in the Israelite dirge of loss and traumatic captivity. How can we sing King Alpha’s song in a strange land?  Today, there are many children of Alpha crying for freedom even in their own land. With floods of refugees sacking the most secure bastions of the nation-state paradigm, with America virtually fractured along racial lines, it is the return of the repressed. The National Question has returned to haunt the global order. It has become the International Question.

    If gold can rust, what will iron do? The public climate in contemporary Nigeria is of such burning hostility and ferocity that it has proved impossible to achieve consensus on any matter, be it the wobbling economy, fiscal federalism, restructuring, appropriate federalism, the nature of the nation itself or the transformation of the paradigm of change. It is an enervating Bedlam which reminds one of the film, One Flew out of the Cuckoo’s Nest. The Tower of Babel itself would have been a model of moderate and modest exchanges.

    A lot of this reflex hostility is based on myths presenting themselves as grand actualities and on ethnic and regional fears masquerading as facts. Yet it should also be obvious to the various gladiators that without some minimal consensus on the destiny of the nation, moving it forward is an impossibility. We can continue to rave and rant till the end of eternity and we would still be where our colonial masters left us.

    The problem with the politics of change leading to a change of politics is that it does not advert our mind to certain changes taking place in the polity without any prodding or prompting from the government. Certain emergent forces, both national and international, are beginning to take away the resolution of both the national and the continental question from the political elites of Nigeria in particular and Africa in general.

    Hunger and burning resentment do not conduce to rational and respectful citizens. If President Mohammadu Buhari expected the Nigerian populace to show gratitude and admiration of for the new “Change begins with me” campaign, he must have been appalled and dismayed by the fury and ferocity of the return to sender response.

    With many citizens charging the government with a betrayal of fundamental obligation and poverty of emotional intelligence, this new effort at national mobilization is dead on arrival. The renewal and rejuvenation of national consciousness cannot begin at the deck of the pyramid of fraud. It is a top/bottom affair. That is why you have the political elite in the first instance. The dominated cannot be made to bear the burden and dereliction of the dominant.

    Perhaps the problem has to do with the conceptual hiatus at the heart of contemporary governance in Nigeria. With the “change begins with me” mantra, the weaknesses and intellectual limitations of the Buhari government are in bold and open display. You cannot whip the people into line when you have not convincingly whipped the political elite into line. When the first Buhari administration inaugurated the war against indiscipline campaign, many citizens openly and willingly bought into it because the body language and the opening salvoes suggested that the unsmiling duo meant business.

    But not so this time around. First unlike WAI, this one is coming rather late in the day and as an afterthought; a mere response to grave political pressures from civil and political society. It does not portray the government as a proactive and active organ but as a tentative and temporizing entity probing and feeling its way forward without any conceptual organogram or ideological master-plan.

    Although so far nobody has had the courage and audacity to query General Buhari’s personal probity, controversies continue to dog the integrity of the current campaign against corruption and the lop-sided nature of sensitive national appointments. The problem really is that the government appears to feed on a daily calorie of paranoia and paralysis. Paralysis as a result of its intellectual deficiencies and paranoia about the kind of help and friends it must seek to help it move the nation forward.

    But to dwell on all this is a tad unfair without also mentioning some positive developments such as the overall improvement of power supply, the humongous and staggering nature of loot recovered and the valiant efforts to secure the nation against sundry miscreants. The presence of conflicts is not synonymous with the absence of development. All human societies evolve in conflict and dynamic contradictions. Since the National Question resonates through these developments, they bear close monitoring and conceptual clarifications.

    With “Operation Crocodile Smile” extending its theatre of operations and with General Buhari warning Biafran separatists for the umpteenth time that the unity of the country is not negotiable, what is crystallizing is a law and order administration which will go to war to defend the territorial integrity of the nation and to provide security for the citizens. In other words, a super-security state is attempting to impose territorial order and security on Nigeria at a time when the economic, political and spiritual insecurity of Nigerians has never been more severe and crippling.

    A super-security state which does not address the political architecture of the nation or the devolution of economic power to more vibrant sectors of the polity is bound to come into potentially prohibitive contradictions with forces spawned by these foundational anomalies. This is why it is important at this point to offer some conceptual clarifications about the vexed National Question. There are three important issues to isolate.

    Although the International Question is present in the National Question, the two are often in conflict and they sometimes exist in a state of paradoxical and contradictory reciprocity. The International Question came into being with the hegemonic dominance of the nation-state paradigm imposed on the rest of the world by European civilization. Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and the Americas were forcibly restructured in compliance with the dominant paradigm of envisioning the global order.

    After the Second World War, the League of Nations transformed into the United Nations. This was in direct and dynamic response to German, and to a less extent, Japanese nationalist militarism. In the case of the Germans, they felt that The Treaty of Versailles which imposed punitive retributions on a proud and warlike people was unfair and unjust. In the case of the Japanese, it arose from indignation at the global dominance of western powers and the abiding resentment arising from Commodore Perry’s humiliating trip to Japanese shores at the close of the nineteenth century.

    The United Nations is an example of how the global order can restructure itself in response to international pressures. But this has not stopped international conflicts as new forces of history come into collision with old forces. The colonial cartography of Africa and the Middle East which resulted in a posse of unstable and often unviable nations, the rise of a unipolar world with America as supreme power and the pressures from a resurgent and resentful Russia powered by Slavic nationalism, have concentrated the mind of the international community.

    Thus the Colonial Question which was solved but not resolved by the forcible restructuring of Africa and the Middle East in the national image of their European conquerors has turned out to be the greatest threat to global peace as seen in the violent flashpoints of Syria, Yemen, Kuwait, Iraq, Congo, Nigeria etc, They all speak to unfinished business and the need for constant repair works.

    To be fair to the colonialists, they maintained fidelity to the home culture of permanent maintenance in their attitude to their overseas possessions. Whether this maintenance was for the right purpose or in the right direction is another matter. The reason for the amalgamation of the northern and southern protectorates of Nigeria is suspect. Thereafter, Nigeria was ruled very much like a dual-state nation only for a flurry of restructuring exercises to take place in the final run to independence.

    It was during this period which lasted until military intervention in 1966 and the collapse of the First Republic that what approximated to many observers’ ideal of a beneficial and benevolent federalism was practiced in Nigeria. According to the romantic lore of federalism, this was Nigeria’s golden epoch when regional autonomy and fiscal federalism reigned supreme. The three regions were in dynamic competition which spurred growth and meaningful development.

    At this point in time, the demon of forcible cohabitation for the purpose of surplus extraction which spurred the original amalgamation of the various protectorates appeared to have been exorcised. However, a more vicious mutation of the demon emerged thereafter. Using the nation’s vulnerability to centrifugal and polarizing forces as an excuse, the military realigned the nation with the statist and centralizing worldview of its original colonial conquerors. The structure of federating units was forcibly restructured and de-federalized into dependent, feeding bottle vassals of a neo-feudal state.

    Those who claim not to understand what restructuring means must now be told in bold and bald terms that restructuring is a reconfiguration of a polity in such a fundamental manner that it affects its subsequent destiny for good or bad. In Nigeria’s history, the three agencies of restructuring have been the colonial overlords, the military and the political formation.

    But unlike the first two agencies which rely on forcible acquiescence, you cannot have restructuring in a civilian dispensation without substantial elite consensus. This is why since the First Republic, no civilian administration has had the courage or audacity to embark on a restructuring exercise. Agitators hoping to steamroll the rest of the country into compliance should note this fundamental conundrum, particularly in the light of General Buhari’s statist revanchism.

    Drawing conclusions from the above, it can be seen that the International Question is permanently embedded in the National Question. But more importantly, we can see that both cannot be wished away nor are they amenable to a once and for all time cure or “final solution”. As Britain continues to lick its wounds from the “Brexit” debacle and as America, the world greatest democracy, lurches and thrashes about in uncharted waters, National Questions will remain with us as long as nations remain. This is a lesson for contemporary Nigerian leaders. {c, 2016}