The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sunday

  • A Congolese allegory for Nigeria

    A Congolese allegory for Nigeria

    It is a year ago that the Buhari administration came on the scene. It is obviously a mixed bag. But as a gesture of charity and strategic goodwill, this column will suspend judgement to reflect on the harsh economic realities facing Nigerians at the moment and the consequences for the social fabric of the nation. At this point, recession is inevitable. When you combine wholesale looting of the treasury with global collapse of oil revenues and the lack of a clear economic blueprint, it is a perfect economic storm.

    Human beings, irrespective of race or civilization, behave very much the same way in the face of unimaginable social stress and looming economic genocide. The difference between us and our animal cousins lies in the power and efficacy of the institutions we have put in place to humanize us as we evolve away from the state of nature.  When these institutions collapse, we are no better than foraging and rampaging animals.

    There are times when human societies reach the same social and cultural cul de sac via different routes. So, has se dPbrouiller  as practiced in Mobutu’s Zaire finally berthed in this land? Arguably, se dPbrouiller is the summit of human corruption. In the face of social annihilation, human beings resort to strange and creative strategies of survival and the primal law of the jungle. There is no paddy in the jungle. Everybody is for himself. So severe is the degree of human alienation from self and society that social cannibalism reigns supreme.  You consume others before you get consumed by the other. It is as simple as that.

    It is important at his point to know what Mobutu and the old Congo are all about.  Joseph Mobutu, lately Mobutu Sese Seko, aka the cock that leaps from hen to hen in the barn yard, ruled his country with an iron fist for forty two years and presided over the most sustained and primitive case of state looting ever known to humankind before the advent of its Nigerian cousin . By the time Mobutu was chased out of his Gbadolite paradise, the old Congo had become a charred hulk of a former nation. So terrible had things become that even his trusted body guards peppered the plane carrying the absconding master thief with bullets.

    For a nation so richly endowed, Mobutu left behind only a few diamond stones and his soiled diapers. He was incontinent and had already reached the terminal stage of prostate cancer.  The enduring image one had of Mobutu was of a truculent and implacable despot, his body completely ravaged by cancer, being helped to his feet by a frail Nelson Mandela on a frigate off the Atlantic coast where his exit from power was being negotiated with a disdainful Kabila. After finishing off his country, Mobutu was not ready to let go.

    Nigeria and Congo are often compared. In terms of land mass, both are giant colonial contraptions whimsically and willfully carved out from the heart of Africa by the colonial masters. The two African mammoths are among the most richly endowed nations on earth, with Nigeria’s mineral wealth the stuff of legend while Congo has been described as “a huge country ridiculously endowed with natural resources”. But both are prone to man-made misfortunes and human disasters in the guise of rulers.

    Although Nigeria has by and large been able to avoid or negotiate the steep descent into chaos and ungovernability that have characterized much of post-independence Congo, the end-result appears to have been pretty much the same thing: shattered nations, collapsed state institutions, the dehumanization of the social order, weak and divided political classes and up-ended treasuries in both instances. It is useful to point out that rather than being a lone star brigand, Mobutu also had accomplices who superintended the industrial scale pillage with him.

    Nigeria’s luck— if it may be so called— is that it is powered along by strong, competing and countervailing centres of power, a micro-pluralism of terror-deterrents if you like, which makes it impossible for one person or a power group to rule the country in perpetuity or to hold on to power against the wish of other power centres. All Nigeria’s former rulers, military and civilian alike, who have tried to dominate the nation in perpetuity or to illegally extend their tenure have met their political Waterloo in the process. If this makes a unified elite and national consensus impossible, it also makes the prospects of permanent despotism improbable.

    Contrary to the opinion of those who say that structure does not matter, Joseph Mobutu benefited and profited immensely from the structural logjam of the Congolese nation. Conceived originally as a vast fiefdom of slave labour, it has been forcibly transformed into a nation-state without any mediating political institution worth the name. In the event, ever since the Portuguese invaded the old Kongo kingdom and dispersed its hapless inhabitants to the new colony of Brazil through the slave port of Luanda, the place has suffered from one form of harsh centralized and authoritarian rule or another.

    Towards the end of the seventh decade of the nineteenth century, King Leopold of Belgium seized the Congolese rump and turned it to a colonial plantation for the expropriation of rubber resources for the emergent auto industry of the western world. His word was iron law and such was the Stone Age severity with which he ruled that at the end of it all, a quarter of the entire population had lost their life or limb. Those who refused to work or were thought to be malingering had their hands summarily hacked off. Such was the fear of the White One and the terror struck into the heart of the populace that the state in its suffused ubiquity and malignancy became known as Bula Matari or the crusher of rocks.

    Joseph Mobutu, a cruel natural enforcer and master of political intrigues, who had been de-enlisted after conscription from the army where he rose to the position of a master sergeant, had his work made easy for him by the institutional chaos left by the departing colonial masters. The son of a former maid who was escaping conscription into the harem of a local chief and a cook, he was physically imposing and gifted with the superior intelligence to dominate his environment. In the brutal world of Congolese politics, he soon learnt to put his mental endowments and mesmerizing charisma to use.

    He was originally an ally and collaborator of Patrice Lumumba who promoted him and returned him to the army as a full colonel. Lumumba himself had had barely four years of formal education. But in the brutal world of political duplicity, Mobutu soon learnt to make hay for himself. In the violent power play that erupted shortly after independence, Mobutu sided with President Joseph Kasavubu and quietly connived at the summary execution of Lumumba by Belgian troops.

    In 1965, Mobutu sacked Kasavubu and thus began a reign of terror and thievery which was to last a whopping forty two years until 1997 when Kabila’s troops arrived at the gates of Kinshasa. Mobutu became so stupendously wealthy that he often loaned his country money to pay workers’ salary. He was so calm and cool about it that everybody thought that it was normal and natural. Money flowed in from the west and priceless minerals flowed out of the Congo. When the western patrons complained, Mobutu quietly and politely told them to shut up because he had learnt his trade from them. The chicanery and duplicity eventually cost the French the life of their ambassador in Kinshasa.

    But by then, the social, political and economic fabric of the nation had been completely destroyed by Mobutu’s rule. The culture of se debrouiller had firmly taken root in Zaire. Translated rather roughly from French, se debrouiller means to manage or to evade suffering. This was the common refrain among Zairians at the height of Mobutu’s misrule. Nobody was being paid and nobody was complaining. Everybody was managing. The wages of fake labour is false currency.

    But all government property gradually managed to vanish. Even the fittings in public places disappeared. Meanwhile, Mobutu himself” managed” with periodic Concorde flights, a barber imported daily from Paris, twenty eight palaces, specially farmed giant maggots washed down with pink champagne popped at nine every morning and a luxury yacht moored off the Congo from which Mobutu contemplated the plight of his stricken compatriots in sybaritic opulence.

    In what was arguably the most explosive expression of se debrouiller, Mobutu was known to have been furious with a soldier who complained of not having been paid. Pointing at the gun in the hand of the enlisted man, Mobutu asked him what other salary he was expecting. There is nothing as terrible as state corruption because it infects everything in the society. The glue that binds humanity and society together has come unstuck; mutual trust has evaporated. Long after the actual disease might have disappeared, the pathologies remain.

    Human societies often arrive at the same point of social perdition through different routes. After decades of misrule, there are firm indications that something worse than the Congolese plague has arrived in Nigeria. Trust between and among classes has completely broken down. Everybody is openly cheating everybody. Intimate enemies abound as spouses kill their spouses. The police routinely murder the unpoliced. Your employee or employer is looking for an opportunity to put you away. Ethnic groups that have existed in mutual goodwill and affection for centuries slay each other at the slightest provocation. Public utilities are sabotaged at short notice by disaffected nationals. Hell is here with us, and it is not a respecter of anybody.

    You cannot plant cassava and expect to harvest yam. In the end, not even Mobutu was spared the horror of it all. At the end of it all, he was a wretched and pathetic figure, swindled by everybody including the importers of his choice champagne, his accountants whom he employed to hide his loot, his flying crew, his domestic details, his concubines, members of his elite Presidential guard and members of his own family, particularly his own son, the bestial and nefarious Kongulu Mobutu who had personally ordered the execution of the best general in the army, Kyolo Mahele.

    But human societies have incredible regenerative capacity. What we are currently witnessing in Nigeria may well be dying throes of an old order, or the pathologies of an active ailment. Seeds must completely decay before new plants can sprout. Whatever it is, this tale of Black man’s inhumanity to fellow Black people is an engrossing allegory for contemporary Nigeria.

  • PDP moves from pragmatism to tenuous stalemate

    PDP moves from pragmatism to tenuous stalemate

    SHORTLY before the May 21 elective convention of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in Port Harcourt, it was obvious the opposition party was in a deep stupor. Court orders and judgements were flying everywhere; Lagos and Abuja courts were neck-deep in the crisis; the National Working Committee (NWC) of the party was groaning under pressure; the party’s Board of Trustees (BoT) was fulminating; and the terribly flustered and embattled acting chairman, former governor Ali Modu Sheriff, was pondering whether to flee in panic or display hopeless defiance. In the end, the convention was aborted, barely managing to dissolve the NWC and empowering former Kaduna State governor Ahmed Makarfi to head a national caretaker committee to plan another convention in three months.

    First, Senator Sheriff stood pat, but not before vacillating between threatening the party with a lawsuit and offering them sop. But soon thereafter, a good number of the NWC began to queue behind the new caretaker committee. Then the parallel ‘pretender’ Abuja convention inspired by former minister Jerry Gana and Senator Ibrahim Mantu began speaking peaceably with the caretakers, at first dilatorily, and then more sure-footedly and briskly. And finally, the party’s BoT, which had plotted to take over the party’s affair in response to the stalemate, aligned itself with the caretaker committee. By yesterday, with the exception of some NWC members, there was hardly anyone left behind the pugnacious Senator Sheriff, whose betrayal in Port Harcourt a newspaper had described as a palace coup. Even the cantankerous duo of Governors Nyesom Wike of Rivers State and Ayo Fayose of Ekiti, both of whom had fiercely backed the interim chairman, had begun to sing a different and implacable tune.

    Senator Sheriff shot himself in the foot in a maddening but fateful dash for glory. He had received popular support to become the party’s acting chairman. But almost immediately, he brazenly began to scheme to retain the influential office in substantive capacity. More galling to many party members, they thought he sent faint signals he would not even mind also bagging the party’s presidential nomination, a prize he could deploy his enormous resources and the party’s chairmanship to take peremptorily. At that point, the highly consternated party rushed at him with daggers drawn. In Port Harcourt, he was the sole aspirant for the chairman’s post. But the conspirators pulled the carpet from under him. Now, they have virtually inoculated him against any future ambition. He is no longer regarded as acting chairman; it is inconceivable he can become substantive chairman. And as for the party’s standard-bearer position, pigs can fly before he smells the post.

    The PDP was pragmatic to have made Senator Sheriff the acting chairman. He is bold, rich, fearless and eager for a fight. In fact, in some ways, he seems the perfect counterpoise to the All Progressives Congress (APC) President Muhammadu Buhari, the laconic former army general whose suspect democratic credentials grate on the nerves of the opposition. Had the senator limited himself to the three-month tenure gifted him by the dispirited leadership of his party, his stock would either have continued to rise or at least stayed the same. But he spurned wisdom. Now he is out in the cold, alone, chafing and increasingly demoralised.

    On the other hand, former governor Makarfi, who like Senator Sheriff is also a senator, appears an even sturdier politician than the former Borno State governor, of course without the flight of fancy and shenanigans of the latter. He is technically not the acting PDP chairman, but he will deploy the powers and goodwill of that office to conduct a new convention. He is more level-headed, more urbane, and more calculating. Above all, he is not bitten by the ambition bug that unhorsed Senator Sheriff. At the rate the party is coalescing around the former Kaduna governor, the PDP may be prepared to conduct a rancour-free convention, and possibly produce party officers without the restraining and enervating orders and judgements of the courts. More importantly, Senator Makarfi is unlikely to want to transmute into anything in the immediate future.

    The stalemate being witnessed by the PDP may in fact be a temporary one. Once the party manages to transcend that paralysis, it will have to confront the task of rebuilding itself, first into a vibrant opposition, and then into a winning party. Those tasks will not be easy. Since it lost the presidency and many governorship offices last year, the party has been reluctant to embrace the fearful and radical measures required to reposition it to check the ruling party and offer the wary public a veritable alternative. One of those radical measures is the need to purge the party of its discredited leaders, most of whom are either being investigated by anti-graft agencies or prosecuted for corruption. By shunning that option, the party gives the impression it underestimates the deep public revulsion against the manner it rifled through the nation’s treasury and emptied it. Indeed, had the 16 years of PDP been probed, the stench would have been unbearable, if not truly asphyxiating.

    In 2014, this column presciently suggested that the nation was waiting for the APC to fight and win the presidency debauched by the PDP over 16 years. Now, the country is waiting for the PDP to offer the right and beneficial opposition to the APC, if it can purge its leadership, recruit new leaders, and embark on the structural and intellectual re-engineering so direly needed at this time. It has put paid to Senator Sheriff’s ambition, and brought in new faces to plan another convention. But it has left undone all the greater and deeper changes that would stand the party in good stead not only now but in the near future. Yet the hope of a brighter tomorrow for the party, one which it desperately but awkwardly desires, is contingent upon how quickly and effectively the party actualises the changes.

  • The looming cattle war in Nigeria

    The looming cattle war in Nigeria

    Let those in authority quickly find the right solutions so we do not have another civil war on our hands

    Consistent with my  belief that a Pan-Nigerian resolution of the Fulani herdsmen’s menace, under the lead of President Muhammadu Buhari, rather than piecemeal  and abrasive reactions to their sundry attacks  should be the way out of this dangerous matter, I wrote as follows in: ‘Chief Olu Falae: Matters Arising, 15 October, 2015 : ‘the most rabid of humanity should never have had the audacity to put Chief Falae through such ordeal and the nation on such tenterhooks that the President had to intervene. Unfortunately, sad and nauseating as that is, it is the saner part of this very unfortunate incident as what emerged later as the Afenifere reaction was totally embarrassing. So uncharacteristic was it  that  you begin to wonder if it was coming from  the same elders who wined and dined with the avatar, Chief Obafemi  Awolowo. For Awo had a template as was  captured by Idowu Samuel,  Wednesday, 15 September 2010,  in the article: Obafemi Awolowo: One prediction, one democracy in which he wrote: “When Awo stepped out to speak, the shout of ‘’Awooo…! would be thunderous and almost endless. Papa would pause for more than 30 minutes to gain control. He had to do it, sensing that the message he was to pass was germane, eternal and compelling. Awo’s style was simple, direct and aimed at the amelioration of the problem. He would draw attention, complete with verifiable facts and figures, indicate the likely consequences if situation is left unattended to, and then prescribe ways out of the problem”.

    For him, decisions were never taken on the spur of the moment.

    Again relying on  the lessons of history, this time around, the ill consequences arising from King Yunfa, the Hausa Sarkin in Gobir  hosting  a Fulani immigrant  named Usman Dan Fodiyo and his group in February 1804, his murder and how his kingdom  was  subsequently  taken over by Fulanis and renamed Sokoto Caliphate,  and the Afonja story in nearby Ilorin, I suggested in: “Neither Grazing Reserves Nor Ranches –Let History Be Our Guide”, May 15, 2-016, that neither should be cited in any part of Southern Nigeria.  I took this position in view of the well-known Fulani expansionist tendencies which will make  the presence of  Fulani communities  everywhere  all over the country extremely dangerous, in my view.

    Given my opposition to Afenifere’s banning of  Fulani herdsmen from the Southwest in the wake of Chief Falae’s kidnap as enumerated above, my initial  take on  Governor Fayose’s reaction  to the  totally  unprovoked  herdsmen’s attack on  a peaceful Oke-Ako  community  in the state was to see it  as  precipitate, unhelpful and, indeed, dangerous to both the state and Nigeria.  But  I have withdrawn these comments until I have reactions correcting the contents  of   a  report by the Chinua Achebe Center for Leadership and Development (CACLD), key areas of which Nigerians must see to know the danger on our hands.  Titled: ‘Fulani Herdsmen Killings; Modus Operandi, Those Involved & Possible Solutions, it is a very damning report, and  the onus is on those  implicated to let  Nigerians, nay  the world,  know  the truth.

    The report begins: “For a long time, the Nigerian state has been under siege by Fulani herdsmen terrorists operating under a predictable pattern of reconnaissance, attack and withdrawal, leading to many deaths and social dislocations. Since January 2016, there have been documented deaths of approximately 1000 Nigerians from these  coordinated Fulani herdsmen attacks.  They claimed to have dispatched a fact finding team to the Southeastern part of the country to unravel the intricacies and complexities of the Fulani terrorist group; a group, they say,  is rated as the fourth most dangerous by respected international conflict organizations (According to the Global Terrorism Index 2015 report; “Fulani militants” killed 1,229 people in 2014 — up from 63 in 2013, Making them the “fourth most deadly terrorist group”).

    These, the report said, are their findings:

    1. The Fulani herdsmen terrorists are Fulanis but mostly non-Nigerians with only about ten percent of them being Nigerians and live within the Hausa Fulani communities in Ama-Hausa and Garki’s in the South East and South-south regions. They are employees of Fulani cattle owners, who imported them from places like Chad, Niger etc.
    2. The Fulani Herdsmen terrorists do not own cattle: Fulani herdsmen killers’ major job description is just to kill. They do not own any cattle. Most of them are employed as “security men” whose job is strictly to protect the cattle.
    3. The Ama-Hausas and Garkis harbor 80% of the Fulani herdsmen killers. The Garkis are mostly Hausas but within them, the Fulani herdsmen killers reside. They are young, less religious with most using drugs and consuming alcohol. They are mostly from Chad, Niger, and other Fulani enclaves outside the Nigerian state. A small percentage of these Fulani youths are Nigerians born in the states where they reside. They lead these Fulanis on their regular rampage.
    4. The Fulani herdsmen that accompany cattle from the North to the South per season do not own cattle. They are owned by prominent Fulani leaders in the country. Most Nigerian Fulanis are no longer migratory herdsmen, but big men in Nigerian politics and business but still maintain their ownership of cattle. Instead of investing in ranches and buying of grasses from the South, they chose the cheaper alternative of having their kinsmen, imported from outside the country.

    5.There are about 5 million Fulani  in Nigeria out of which 3 million are Nigerians. The rich Fulani’s own almost all the cattle being reared in Nigeria. The remaining 40 percent, mostly peasants, are from outside the country.

    In Garki and Ama-Hausa settlements all over the country, there exist a few Nigerian Fulanis (some are born in these states) who coordinate the cattle business. Lastly, there is a group of Fulani herdsmen who rear the cattle from the north to the south. They only carry arrows and machetes to help them navigate the bushes on their way down to the South.

    1. Fulani Herdsmen Attack.

    We learned from the surrounding communities and from some of the Hausa elders about what constitutes a Fulani herdsmen attack. According to information we received, when there is a disagreement between host communities, or between herdsmen and farmers, the Fulani herdsmen who accompany the cattle will locate the nearest Fulani settlement and if there is none, they will locate the nearest Garki or Ama Hausa. When they arrive, they will narrate their story. The Fulani Nigerian middlemen cattle managers will notify the owners which in this case, include top politicians and others.  If an attack is sanctioned, then modalities will be mapped out and a date will be chosen for the attack. Most times, Fulani herdsmen in the military and police are notified and everyone sends a representative. Neighboring settlements send out representatives and arms cache are opened and arms are distributed to the participants. The major participants are the 20 to 40 Fulani herdsmen who reside in the Garkis and Ama Hausas. These are the Fulani warriors whose job is to kill.

    During an attack, every Fulani person in the area knows there will be an attack and all will contribute to make sure it goes on successfully. Fulanis in the higher levels of the military will ensure all commands under them stand down, and the top Fulani police officers will do the same – (no wonder you never hear of arrests, however heinous the attack and no matter, how many killed). The road is then clear for the Fulani herdsmen to carry out their attacks.

    1. Solution

     Many natives the team spoke to suggested the following as solution: ban grazing, establish ranches for the cattle in the north, let the cattle owners pay the southerners to harvest grass and send to the north. With this, everyone would be pleased with the outcome. This solution is expected to generate 1 million jobs in the South and about 500,000 jobs in the North. Also Fulani herdsmen terror will be totally eliminated.

    I am sure neither Afenifere nor those non-Fulanis who reacted to my articles claiming they own cattle know jack about these things. I went to this length to let those in authority quickly find the right solutions so we do not have another civil war on our hands in Nigeria.

  • Buhari at one

    Buhari at one

    The president must get it right this time or never

    It is  exactly one year ago that  President Muhammadu Buhari was sworn in as President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Since the president has a four-year mandate, he has spent exactly 25 per cent of his tenure, as he is expected to leave the stage on May 29, 2019, unless he secures a second term. Without wasting time, just how has the president faired in the last one year?

    Before discussing that however, it would be unfair not to acknowledge that President Buhari came on board at a time the country had been sufficiently destroyed by the erstwhile ruling party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). Nothing was working as at the time he took over from Dr Goodluck Jonathan. Education was in a shambles, the health sector was comatose, and infrastructure was virtually dead with most of the roads almost impassable. State governments in many instances had to take the responsibility of reworking federal roads in their domain. To crown it all, corruption loomed large, as several public officials and politicians, especially those with connections to the seat of power looted the treasury as if looting was going out of fashion. We have been hearing all manner of depressing stories with the probe of the $15billion arms funds. One can only wonder what will happen when the searchlight is beamed on the oil sector, where monumental frauds were also known to have occurred.

    So, the road has been somewhat bumpy. The Jonathan administration did not design Buhari’s road to be smooth. Although President Jonathan conceded defeat in the 2015 presidential election , what he handed over was the carcass of virtually every sector of the country. The president therefore took over a nation that had lost its bearing and moral soul. He took charge at a time when substantial parts of Nigeria had been taken over by Boko Haram which became a source of cheap funds for looters in the Jonathan era.

    This was the milieu when President Buhari was sworn in, still amidst pomp and splendour; because Nigerians saw in him hope against the hopelessness of the Jonathan administration. It was just the same way when President Olusegun Obasanjo was sworn in on May 29, 1999. Expectations were high as the average Nigerian recognised that the country’s biggest challenge was corruption, which Buhari was supposed to take out, given his past record as an anti-corruption crusader. In fairness to the president, this is one issue he has had his hands on and he could be scored a pass mark in this area.

    Also, Boko Haram has been substantially tamed; but not so kidnapping and increasing militancy, particularly in the volatile Niger Delta, and the menace of Fulani herdsmen.

    The economy is another area the president has to buckle up. Not much has happened in this sector, first because the cabinet was late in coming (it did not come until about six months after the president’s inauguration); and second because the budget too suffered inexcusable delays. We are still in darkness as the energy sector continued to witness hiccups either from militants’ disruptions to gas supply or due to the inability of the generating and distribution companies to get their act together. Youth unemployment continued to rise with its attendant social consequences.

    But, in spite of everything, I always chuckle when some people say things were better in the Jonathan era. Obviously it is the ignorant or the mischievous that will say such a thing. One should not even contemplate what the situation would have been like had Dr Jonathan not left the scene. Let’s even take it from the angle of the humongous sums that were stolen and are being retrieved. Could Dr Jonathan have had the courage to ask those who stole to return the money, especially when some of the stolen funds allegedly went into his own presidential campaign?

    But, if Buhari has not been able to hit the ground running until now, he has to with immediate effect. Time is no longer on his side. I have said it before; and I would repeat it, that the president seems oblivious of the fact that he has four years in the first instance. He appears to be ruling in a cavalier manner. This cannot help his cause even as it cannot help the cause of those still sticking out their necks for him. Yes, Nigeria had a serious integrity deficit at the time we had the elections last year and he (Buhari) symbolised the change the country yearned for then. That was why Nigerians dumped the former president for him. That integrity remains intact. When Nigerians shunned Nigeria Labour Congress’ (NLC) call for strike over fuel price hike, it was the president’s integrity at work. And that should count for something. Nigerians have had to endure the taunting by those who either have had their umbilical cords severed from the easy money that corruption offered, especially in the immediate past and are therefore angry; or the innocently ignorant who keep asking whether the current hardship Nigerians are facing was the change they voted for. Some are even saying so nostalgically that things would have been better if Dr Jonathan had continued in office.

    No one should be surprised this is happening. Nigerians are human just like any other people; they become weary when expectation is taking too long to materialise. In other words, the president should realise that good as integrity is, it cannot put bread on the table. That is why the scripture enjoins us not to live by bread alone; it acknowledges the importance of bread in our lives, hence the inclusion of the word ‘alone’. So, Nigerians still need bread before integrity can make sense to them.

    Overall, the score card has not been particularly impressive. But Nigerians understand, and they have demonstrated that again and again. It is only those who did not understand the complexities of what Buhari inherited that would be calling for quick fix. Of course the discerning knows. Even the former president, if he would be truthful to himself, knows that things would have been worse if he had been reelected.

    But it is time for President Buhari to get cracking. He has to address the problem of the Niger Delta militants because that is crucial to the country’s survival. The Niger Delta issue is akin to a fly that perches on the scrotum; it requires a lot of tact and intelligence. He should dialogue with them to know what the issues are and grant the ones that are possible while he can then deal with the others who still opt for violence the way they deserve.

    Then the herdsmen. Nigeria and indeed, his presidency do not need the distraction that grazing reserves constitute at this point in time. So, he should not sweat too long on these; rather, he should have his mind more on ranches that have become the norm in the civilised parts of the world. It is not likely that many parts of the country would want to give space for the establishment of grazing reserves. Land is a priced asset in many parts of the country. The herdsmen (whether they are Fulanis or not is immaterial) have not shown that they are ready to show concern for their environment or respect the feelings, culture and tradition of their hosts. Already, they are claiming that they have freedom of movement under the constitution. This is the problem with half education. Whoever taught them that ought to have added that where on a continuum their own freedom stops, other people’s begins. They cannot destroy farmlands, rape and kill simply because they have been guaranteed freedom of movement in the constitution. Many people will want to see the president deal with the herdsmen’s menace the same way he did the Niger Delta militants and Boko Haram.

    Nigerians look forward to a more robust second term of the Buhari presidency. If he misses it this time, chances are he may not be able to catch up again. We want to see the economy diversified; we want to see more refineries so as to get out of this cycle of fuel scarcity despite being a major oil producer. We want to see hope restored to our country; we want to see Nigeria respected again in the comity of nations. Nigerians want a situation where they can sleep with their two eyes closed; we want to see more and more of our youths get good jobs; we want to see more industries hum again. We want  these and more.

    Sure, those who profited from the rot of the past would not want him to succeed; but he must find ways to clip their wings.

    So help Buhari, God.

  • Being wary about improvement in oil price

    Being wary about improvement in oil price

    Residences can make do with solar energy if the government is willing to provide the right support

    The world is going to have to continue using fossil fuels, whether they like it or not. Oil and gas will still provide about 60% of the world’s energy demands by 2040, even if countries adopt climate change proposals agreed in Paris.—Rex Tillerson, CEO of ExxonMobil.
    This Agreement, in enhancing the implementation of the Convention, including its objective, aims to strengthen the global response to the threat of climate change, in the context of sustainable development and efforts to eradicate poverty, including holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2C or 3.6F above pre-industrial levels.—Article 2 of Paris Climate Agreement.
    We have therefore decided to turn the disaster that we inherited into a blessing by diversifying our economy away from the mono-product of oil, leveraging on agriculture, solid minerals as well as culture and tourism among others.—Lai Mohammed, Minister of Information

    Regular readers of this column would remember that three or four years ago, this column carried a four-piece article titled, Petroleum and the Future of Nigeria. Lovers of the easy life created by huge flows of revenue from petroleum wrote to call the author a Cassandra, someone whose ideas about anything or trend analysis should be automatically discountenanced. Now that the price of oil is going up again, it is necessary to warn our political leaders and civil servants who may be victims of short-termism not to do or say anything to suggest dilution of the rhetoric and praxis of diversification that has formed the core of President Buhari’sChange Agenda.

     It is for this reason that I provide the three quotations in italics overleaf. The first one by Tillerson is to encourage those who see petroleum or fossil fuel as synonymous with easy money to remain steadfast in their belief in the concept of oil as money spinner at least until 2040. The second is about the worry of about 134 countries that fossil energy may take life away from our planet if humans do not industrialize in an environmentally responsible manner that can sustain life on our planet. The third by the minister of information is a re-statementof commitment by the Buhari administration to govern Nigeria as if there is no oil in its picture.

    Despite the optimism of Tillerson, the picture of the future of petroleum and other forms of fossil fuel may not be as buoyant as the Tillersons of this world believe. Environmentally responsible leaders of nations are struggling to promote the ascendance of renewable energy and the chances that advances in science and technology can shift attention away from fossil energy are high enough to make serious national leaders more cautious about how they grow their economy. It is instructive that when shale oil emerged a few years ago, the government driven by petroleum under President Jonathan and the PDP belittled development of shale oil by saying that United States of America’s becoming a petroleum exporting country could not adversely affect their sale of petroleum to new customers. Before our very eyes, more petrol than the market could absorbcame to the market,  and the rest is now history. Nigeria’s leaders in the government of change cannot afford to play the Ostrich this time, particularly with the demand for controlling the rise of greenhouse gases and the promotion by advanced countries of renewable energy. We cannot afford to be caught napping again.

    It is reassuring that President Buhari has not wavered in emphasizing the character of Nigeria’s new economy that is to be driven by agriculture and solid minerals. It is also important to accept that what happened to petroleum can also happen to solid minerals later. Hence, the reliance on solid minerals should not be viewed for the long-term as the magic wand to neutralize all of Nigeria’s ills. As for the long-term, emphasis should be on nudging the country in the direction of food security through agriculture and self-reliance in terms of other items consumed by our people should be seen principally through manufacturing. Agriculture in all forms and manufacturing are energy-intensive activities that require constant supply of electricity. The issue of electricity should not be on the second page of the priority lists of the Buhari presidency. No major achievement is likely to be possible in the area of agriculture and solid minerals mining without reliable electricity.

    If our country is to make any impact in the areas being pushed as the core of the federal government’s agenda: agriculture, solid minerals, and tourism, the government has to review its policy on provision of power. It is not surprising that President Buhari had said that the policy on privatization of the power sector will not be reversed. On the basis of the experience of Nigerians with privatization of telecommunication of services in the era of Obasanjo, they are likely to find Buhari’s decision to allow privatization of this crucial sector acceptable. But the way the sector has been handled by its new owners calls for immediate attention from the new administration.

    Apart from the controversy over increase in electricity tariff, the sector has been characterized by underachievement since it has been privatized, to the extent that citizens still refer to electricity suppliers: GENCOS and DISCOS as NEPA, the agency that transformed electricity supply in the country into a trope for inefficiency. As ever, under the new owners of this sector, distributable megawatts have been going up and down from 5,000 to 2,500 and the excuses or reasons have remained the same: no gas to power the turbines, low water in the dams, or too much water in the dams. In addition, even what appears to the average citizen as a simple matter— installation of pre-paid meters in the residential units across the country—has appeared unachievable. Excuses have been about inefficiency of imported pre-paid versus locally produced meters. Now that there is no foreign exchange to import meters, DISCOS should be urged to push for improvement of local pre-paid meters, so as to assure consumers that there is no ulterior motive behind Discos’ inability to supply pre-paid meters.

    It is also encouraging that the minister of power has assured citizens that the government plans to commence soon a special initiative on use of solar energy. This is an area that should receive intense attention from the federal government for several reasons. The solar power technology is advancing phenomenally, to the extent that energy-rich countries such as the United States of America and South Africa have added provision of solar power to the list of their own equivalent ofGencos and Discos. Secondly, we need to be able to leave the inadequate megawatts produced at present to agriculture, mining, manufacturing, and tourism, the sectors that can create jobs for our youth. Residences can make do with solar energy if the government is willing to provide the right support.

    In all the top ten countries in production and use of solar power: Germany, China, Japan, U.S., Spain, Australia, France, Belgium, Italy, UK, and India, the governments provide support for development of solar energy industry and for use of solar power. Such support to users include subsidy and rebates. There is a need to give ourGencos and Discos competition by licensing private solar power company(ies). We started a Center for Solar Energy at Nsukka about 40 years ago, the same time we started a Nuclear energy center at the University of Ife. The governments need to think further now about the need for the country to take advantage of its states with high sun irradiation levels. This effort should not be just to source for cheap solar panels for individuals or approach countries to donate megawatts of solar energy to agencies, but to license solar energy companies for provision of off-grid electricity, to compete with existing fossil fuel energy producersacross the country. Since there are essentially rudimentary energy producers in the country at present, there is no need to worry about big lobby to frustrate a new solar power initiative. Grid electricity companies will be relieved to distribute whatever is available on their system to farmers and manufacturers.

  • Okon named hero of democracy

    As Democracy Day approached, a rogue civil society group known as Calamity for State Robbers with offices in Orile Iganmu has named Okon as one of its heroes of democracy. Snooper was put in a terrible dilemma. If one put a stop to the endless stream of well wishers and idle political lunchers knocking at the door to congratulate the boy, it may be misconstrued. How the mad boy gained such traction remains a source of mystery even to snooper. Many of these civil society groups are crazy scammers and Okon might have paid through his nose to have his name mentioned. When he showed his certificate to Baba Lekki, the old contrarian snorted.

    “You see, sebi you say dem people dey Iganmu, abi? Na dat one dem Yoruba people dey call igan mu se”   But Okon was undeterred, leveraging his new found star status for a controversial radio interview. Okon wasted no time and hostilities commenced straightaway.

    “High Chief Okon, congratulations on your recent award”, the interview began.

    “Point of incorrection!” Okon screamed. “I be higher chief now. I no wan any Yoruba tortoise come mess around with Calabar title. I dey higher pass dem Otunba. Even Yoruba mechanic for Matori dey answer dat one, you hear me?”

    “Okay, Higher Chief Okon, it is the seventeenth anniversary of democracy. It is obviously better than military rule, isn’t it?” the second interviewer opened with a cunning glare.

    “Bia, Yoruba soup mouse, you wan trick me? We thank God dem soja don leave patapata. Make dem type never come back again. But dis civilian one he get as he be. When dem soja dey thief, na only dem oga patapata but this one everybody dey thief yanfunyanfun. I been dey wonder why dem money never finish, but I hear say he don finish so we dey one chance  motor for obodo”, Okon sneered.

    “Sir, how do you see the last strike by the Nigerian Labour Congress?”

    “You see dat dem labour leader, Wabba abi wetin him dey call himself? He come remind me of dem book I read for primary school for Itigidi, na Wanba the Jester dem dey call am”. Okon snorted.

    “How do you mean sir?”the interviewer pressed.

    “Wetin you mean by wetin I mean? Dem foolish labour people say make we strike, I strike well well. I come put my oga under dem house arrest. I no give am food and I no even give am water. Dem come say dem no dey strike again. Na so dem dey do all dem time. Next time when dem say strike, na dem head I go strike well well”, Okon snarled.

    “Mr Okon, what is your view on the menace of herdsmen?”, one interviewer asked with deadpan daring.

    “Ha ha yeye man. You wan put me for trouble with dem Daura man, abi? He get time like dat when dem Kanu Ibo boy dey blab him mouth and him dey yabi everybody. Kai dem don forget dat one for Guje and him come grow Nebu beard. So, I no sabi menace and I no sabi dem cattle people,but I sabi say Efik people no dey drive dem cattle”, the mad boy crowed.

    “Sir, one last question. Chief Obasanjo said that President Buhari does not know much about politics and economy. What is your view?”.

    “You see, baba don old well well past bed time and him head no correct again. Wetin himself sabi for politiks and money matter? But him sabi two-fighting and teeth-fighting pass Buhari and na for dat area dem go finish dem Buhari man”, Okon grunted as he dismissed the interviewers with an imperious swagger.

  • ND: Where a shiftless region meets a shiftless nation

    There is nowhere you pay any group of people unearned money that you can expect them to live quietly or happily ever after. It goes against human nature. It is teaching privilege without responsibility

    Honestly, reader, this week, I was spoilt for choice of topic. There I went thinking, should I talk about the one-year anniversary of President Buhari’s government? I think I would have found myself commiserating with him again as he seems to be the only one pushing this country up the mountain top to its rest. I can’t help pity the poor man as I watch him groaning and spluttering and heaving, hardly able to answer to a simple greeting, biceps breathing hard and all. Honestly, I would have volunteered to help him but for the fact that I am so busy playing the harmonica on my corn cob right now. Come on, it is the season; I am entitled to my creature comforts.

         Should I remind the IBEDC chairman that it is now Week Five of my #bringbackmytransformer sit-in in the darkness detention he has consigned me since my transformer got damaged while he has continued to sleep in his air-conditioned house? Or, should I talk about our lost, lost youths and what they have decided to occupy themselves with now such as killing their friends to make money? Naaa, I will leave that for another day. Should I talk about this crazy grazing bill that is in the air? Naaa, I will again leave that for another day. Let me have the peace to still enjoy my beef for now. Instead, I think I will talk about our Niger Delta region and how they have blown their way into our hearts again by blowing up the oil pipelines. I think they didn’t quite like all the attention boko haram was getting.

         Listen now. I understand that the Asian country of Indonesia is made up of about 17,500 islands. Phew! I am full of wonder I tell you. First, who counted them? Certainly not a Nigerian I can tell you that. For sure he or she would have got his or her math wrong, mainly because his or her people at home would have convinced him or her to not be so stupid as to tell the truth. Would the others not cheat them if they knew there are only five thousand islands in their region? Come on, they would convince him or her, add another ten thousand islands to give them the leverage. Never mind what the helicopters count from above. Are they not powered by human beings?

          My second marvel is that with so many islands surrounded by water, the country must have endless kilometres of coastlines and beaches and relaxation points and holiday spots and island music and elephants… So sorry, I just kind of lost it there for a minute. I was imagining myself stretched out on one of those jungle beaches soaking in the life of all play and no work, you know, like dancing with the elephants. Ah, what a life that would be! Don’t worry, I intend to do just that someday, as soon as I can get rid of this painful boil of a country called Nigeria… I will also let you know how that dance goes.

           Oh yes, back to the matter. Reading about Indonesia just reminded me that we have just such an idyllic environment in Nigeria. Around here, we call it the Niger Delta region. Only, it is now to us the dreaded Niger Delta region. Well, for one thing, instead of beaches to lie on all day and daydream about that perfect world of all play and no work, we have oil polluted sands. Also, instead of playful elephants dancing to the jigs of folk ballads sung by local musicians, we have guns and explosives. So yes, there are kilometres of jungle beaches but they are manned by them stupid gunboats and gun powders and kidnappers. Man, beach sand mixed with gun powder and kidnapping can bring nothing good to my backside!

           This column, along with many other voices, did warn then that this amnesty payout was not the best way to solve the ND problem. There is nowhere you pay any group of people unearned money that you can expect them to live quietly or happily ever after. It goes against human nature. It is teaching privilege without responsibility. I guess the government was only interested in an instant solution, like instant noodles. Well guess what, it goes with indigestion, which is exactly what the country is experiencing right now.

            There is no doubt that a great deal of injustice has been meted out in the ND region, perhaps a little more than that dished out to other parts of the country. On the other hand, a great deal of money has also been dished to that region, again, much more than to other parts of the country. Unfortunately, much of it has gone the way of all others since independence – into the deep, bottomless pockets of the elites of that region.

            There is a saying that when you dig for a while and you strike no oil, it is time to stop boring. It is not quite clear if that saying refers to an oil rig down the ground or one’s finger up the nose, I honestly do not know. Whichever one it is, it teaches us a lesson here. When the government found that all its efforts were going down the pocket drain of people, why did it not change tactics? Why did it not try what other governments in other nations have done successfully for centuries – bring development within the reach of everyone in the country, like diseases?

           Within an entity, everyone is entitled to be given the key to access social privileges – education – so that s/he can reach for the house, health care or job type that he desires. The people of the ND region were and are entitled to this key. The failure of the government to provide this key to these citizens while benefitting immensely from the natural resources of that area led to the payout which is nothing more than ‘conscience’ or ‘guilt’ money. Naturally, the money is used to enable wasteful living. I hear little work gets done in that region anyway, while money is the currency of street talk.

            The problem with singling someone out from a group for extra payout is that it psychologically reverses positions. The payer thinks he/she has the upper hand because he/she can afford to pay but the payee is the one with the upper hand because he/she can decide to pull the chair out from under the payer should he/she have the temerity to stop paying. This is what is happening now between the ND youths and the nation.

              Now the government is begging the ND youths to stop blowing up the pipelines as a way to remind the government that the payouts need to continue. That was not my father’s problem. When we went against the rules, we paid him with our backsides, with him holding the cane. I will not mention the other ways such as bringing out our cheeks for a good…

             Anyway, I think it is time the government brought out a workable blueprint for the development of the ND region. If the youths in the region had schools and factory jobs to go to, and their parents had good cottages to go to at the end of the day, I think they will be reluctant to blow up any pipeline that would disrupt the flow of success into their lives. To continue to give payouts to young people is to continue to encourage a shiftlessness ideology in the payer and the payee. And while we are at this development thing, it will be good to let no other region get left behind…

  • Time APC played politics

    Time APC played politics

    PRESIDENT Muhammadu Buhari may be forthright, full of integrity and stubborn to causes he believes in, but he is hardly the exemplar of politics the office he occupies suggests or the electoral campaigns he had waged and the presidential election he had won. This is why he has seemed to run his presidency as a technocrat averse to the shenanigans of politics, and with the single-minded resolve of an army general scared of his image of resoluteness being sullied by the dribbles and feints politicians are accustomed to. Perhaps unknown to him, this has created a needless gap between his presidency and the people he is presiding over, whether it pertains to his anti-corruption war or fuel price hike. If the apparent disconnection is not to become a problem now or in the future, he must study the situation and find ways to narrow the widening divide.
    The ruling party, the All Progressives Congress (APC), is even worse. Scalded by its misadventure over the legislative leadership elections in the National Assembly, it has appeared to lose interest completely in the convoluted politics of its fractious and seething members, many of whom have stuck wilfully and pugnaciously to the identities that preceded their party’s merger. Not only have they been unable to substantially influence the presidency, they have also been incompetent to consolidate the vibrancy and depth of politics that saw them catapulted into the presidency almost overnight. Since assuming office in May 2015, the APC has lost major elections, and displayed appalling slothfulness in projecting ennobling party principles, the kind it had theorised with gusto before the polls last year.
    On top of these lacunae is the disturbing impression the party’s leaders have given of their party and the relationship among themselves. If not to even themselves, then at least to the public, the APC seems little more than an abstraction and an enigma perching gingerly on a totem pole. If at all they are talking to themselves, perhaps they have managed to make it unduly and unproductively secretive. The presidency is perching somewhere, party executives are perching elsewhere, and party leaders are eyeing themselves warily, unsure what to say and how to say it. The party is not ennobling the presidency, and the presidency is not ennobling the party; and yet there are grave national issues that require the concentration of the party’s intellectual and emotional energies, and the urgent application of party panache and principles.
    If the party does not learn to play politics again the way it showed it was capable of doing before the 2015 polls, they will hang separately at the next polls, to paraphrase Mark Twain. They must consider themselves lucky indeed that the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has proved unable to manage defeat, just as the APC has proved incompetent to manage victory. Had the former been less pigheaded about the calls by well-wishers for restructuring and reform, the APC would today be in more trouble than its delicate shoulders can carry. This column had stridently advised PDP to get its act together and offer Nigeria the quality opposition the country needs to weigh the policies and programmes of the ruling party. It has spurned advice. Today, this column is advising the APC to re-learn politics and play it with the suavity it demonstrated last year and the year before. Hopefully, they will take it in good faith.
    The first step the APC must take is to see the president as nothing more than the primus inter pares the constitution envisages him to be. It seems so far that both the party and the president’s kitchen cabinet venerate the president instead. This is absolutely unhelpful. This column had joined issues early enough with President Buhari on his kitchen cabinet, arguing that it did not seem to have been composed with the carefulness, spread and chutzpah required to surround the president with deep, dialectical, brave and questioning minds. Nor does it seem to this column that debate of any kind, or at least vigorous and stormy debate, is being encouraged at the Federal Executive Council (FEC). Members of the cabinet, this column fears, may be more preoccupied with deciphering the president’s body language or second-guessing him. This may be why the herdsmen problem has been allowed to fester, and why rather than find deep and subtle solutions to the crises in the Southeast and Niger Delta, the president has spoken truculently and impatiently of employing military might.
    This column, and perhaps many Nigerians, get the impression of a one-man presidency, with everything revolving around the president. But the people need to get the impression of a firm leader, a deep and reflective kitchen cabinet, a great, intellectual and questioning ministerial cabinet, and a forward-looking, innovative and adept ruling party. It is within the reach of President Buhari to summon these possibilities. It is only after these things have been done that the party can begin to play politics with the expectation of a great tomorrow and hope for delightful electoral outcomes in the years ahead.
    While it is true that President Buhari placed the corruption war and counterinsurgency operations in the Northeast at the top of his agenda during the presidential campaigns, it is also true that he won mainly because ex-president Goodluck Jonathan first lost the election. If the presidency and the APC are realistic about this order of things concerning their victory, they will recognise that it accounted for the reluctance of the electorate to really and significantly interrogate the APC/Buhari campaign pledges. The implication is that far beyond the two leading pledges of Boko Haram war and anti-corruption battles are a plethora of other issues that have equal existential germaneness to Nigeria’s quest for greatness and the abundant life.
    Curiously, the APC became lost after the elections, unable to galvanise itself or anyone for that matter. However, Nigerians need to begin to see APC in its resplendent flourish. It has fed the people the bread of affliction for the past few months; they need to see the party visualising a land flowing with milk and honey, and affecting policy pomp and circumstance that are uplifting, energising and revitalising. There must be news about the party — good news — and they must begin to create or produce their own stars, whether young, middle age or old. Critically too, it is time the president, his team and the party gave the people and their newspapers resonant headline news, not of corruption and Boko Haram, but of innovations, new programmes and policies, fresh economic vision, political restructuring or even tinkering, and social engineering, among many other things. These new ideas and programmes must trump the stale diet that has constipated the people and given fillip to foreign derogatory remarks.
    It is a scandal that the herdsmen crisis has been emasculated in the president’s ethnic background, as if he is not a product of a progressive political party, as if he has no thinking cabinet, as if the whole country is flummoxed by the mesmerising concept of change. Yet, the people had expected to hear their president and his party (which had swept nearly all of the North) to declaim upon the urgent issue of climate change in the positive sense of finding a solution to deforestation and grazing problems. Unfortunately, the president and his party unwisely allowed the discourse to be shaped and led in the wrong direction of grazing reserves and seized lands — a clearly wrong-headed and provocative panacea — when desertification can be arrested by inspiring and far-sighted environmental restoration schemes.
    If President Buhari and his APC cannot play politics the way it should be played, and they are too timid to ask for help; if they see governance in the narrow, imperial and retrogressive sense that the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and the Department of State Service (DSS) are interpreting it — for they are beginning to equate dissent with treason –; and if they will continue to render politics in the dismal, joyless and depressing image of their recent uninteresting past, they should serve notice of their willingness to relinquish office in the next elections. Since the APC can’t pass muster and the PDP has proved pusillanimous in offering a credible and fighting opposition to the ruling party, perhaps it is time Nigerians began to contemplate their future outside the joyless dualism represented by the stifled and melancholic APC and the self-destructive and profligate PDP.

  • The perils of rogue westernization

    The perils of rogue westernization

    Great events often steal upon a people virtually unnoticed.It is when they gather speed and momentum that we begin to wonder what has hit us. This past fortnight has been quite dramatic in its possibilities for the nation. Once againwe are on the cusp of unusual developments.

    Last week began innocuously enough. But by midweek, all illusions of peace and calm have been shattered. Upon all the crippling economic burdens the average Nigerian is forced to bear, a totally unforeseen and unprecedented hike in petroleum pricing was slammed on the nation with the deadly ferocity of a military ambush.

    It all seems so unreal and bizarre in the extreme. All of a sudden, a governmentwhich has bonded so intimately with the poor and injured of the land, a government which has advertised its compassion for the injury inflicted on Nigerians by their ruling class, bared its knuckles in a manner reminiscent of harsh, authoritarian military rule.

    Yet in a strange reversal of role, it was the government that began playing the injured, pretending to be hurt that explanations not offered have not been heard. Glum and uncommunicative at best, jumping from one absurdexcuse to the other, with IbeKachikwu levitating on highfalutin techno-speak and the latest petrolese, this is not the finest hour of the administration.

    Is it any wonder, then, that up till this moment and in the face of looming mass alienation, the president has not found the courage to address the nation? At least, the retired general from Daura cannot be accused of great immoral courage. Like all formidable military commanders, the president has retreated behind a wall of silence, secrecy and stealth. But one suspects that the general is personally hurting from this breach of trust and his inability to guarantee the integrity of his own earlier promise.

    But General Buhari needs not obsess about this failure of policy or be fixated on the dent on his honour as an officer and gentleman. There is plenty of opportunity to make up. Government is not about a single capitulation. There is still much hope invested in the Buhari administration as the very last opportunity for this country to get it right after forty years in the wilderness of aborted promise.

    Yet amidst of all this, the divided and polarized Labour Union has ordered a national strike which has turned out a damp squib, shunned and ignored by majority of the workers on whose behalf they claim to be stirring. This is the first time in the history of the country that Labour has been so comprehensively cuckolded by labourers. In effect, the Nigerian Labour Union stands disgraced and demystified.

    It is a disgrace and demystification that has been long in coming. For over thirty years, many of us have been warning our labour aristocrats that the day is coming when the falcon will no longer hearken to the falconer. That day, it seems, is now upon us. For the post-colonial society battered by the rampaging forces of global capitalism, old labour, with its rustic and rusticated conceptual armature, no longer works.

    When labour is not in collusion and conspiracy with the state to break the back of rampart civil society as it was evident in the watershed January 2012 protests, it has turned itself into an enemy of the very workers whose interests it is supposed to protect. For a long time, some of us have argued that what labour needs is not retroactive and reactive protests whose outcome do not make a dent on the plight of workers but an alternative political platform and ideological paradigm which will challenge the ravages of global capitalism in its current stage and particularly in Nigeria.

    But this has fallen on deaf ear. You cannot give what you don’t have. Rotten mango cannot fall very far from the parent tree. The conceptual and intellectual rigour demanded is beyond the ken of the dinosaurs of “up and at ém” struggle.

    The irony t is that with its reformist consciousness and salary increment per protest mind-set, labour exists in a state of antagonistic but paradoxical collusion and complicity with global capitalism and its transnational oligarchs. The masters of the forces of production are even toying with dispensing with human labour altogether.

    With labour added to the casualty list, Nigeria is a post-colonial morgue of dead and dying institutions. All the vital institutions of the state and civil society are either dead or on life-support machine. This is why there is this eerie disorientation in the nation, as if one is walking in a land of living ghosts.

    Unless Nigeria is remade and rebuilt from scratch, we can forget it. The greatest affliction which can befall a people is not the affliction itself but the inability to correctly identify the affliction.  The current crisis about petroleum pricing is not caused by the precipitate removal of the so called subsidy but something more fundamental. It is a classic case of confusing the symptom with the disease.

    In the hallucinatory haze of the terminally diseased, we often reach for whatever we confuse with the nearest pain killer. When Nigeria was fairly well-governed, particularly before the advent of military despotism, we did not hear of subsidy. When there was no run on the naira by a kleptomaniac ruling class and massive corruption compounded by impunity, we did not hear of subsidy.

    Simply put, what is erroneously referred to as subsidy is State levy or government tax on rogue westernization. It is a case of double jeopardy and a lose-lose situation for the teeming Nigerian underclass. But pray what is rogue westernization?

    Nigeria was never conceived as an organic country but as a trading and retailing outlet of the western imperium. Till date, the nation has retained a proud fidelity to the founding charter. Deliberately peopled by a political elite organically divorced from the aspirations and yearnings of a true nation, a political elite unable to come together to found a new authentic nation, aping the worst aspects of western capitalism without being able to draw on the inner strengths and resources of the new nation, Nigeria is a disaster always waiting to happen.

    In the event, Nigeria has come up with national institutions which are genetic hybrids combining the worst aspects of western societies with the most pernicious carry-over from traditional institutions. They can hardly pass muster.

    Worse, and a result of the programmed inferiority complex of our elite, we hanker after western goods that we do not produce: from the latest cars, household gadgets and even petroleum products that we ought to be able to produce were this not to be a truly dysfunctional society.

    Yet apart from crude oil, we can hardly sell anything to the west. How can we preserve our foreign reserve and strengthen the value of the naira when we are wedded to frivolities and meretricious fripperies from the west?

    On any typical journey by train from London on a weekend, you are likely to run into one of Her Majesty’s ministers on his way to his constituency clutching his red briefcase and his sandwich. Nigeria does not have a viable rail system or even decent road transportation.

    Meanwhile, our own national and state assemblies as well as other functionaries of the state award themselves humongous salaries and emoluments which have no bearing with the dismal economic realities of the nation. All the mass transportation schemes which they claim to be derivative ameliorations from subsidy removals of the past have ended up as gigantic frauds fuelling inflation and the run on the naira. When will Nigeria produce Nigerians?

    To survive, the government must tax this rogue westernization and petroleum products are the softest targets because of the sheer volume of the racket. Everybody, particularly the poor, must bear the brunt of elite malfeasance.We have now been told with commendable if brutal candour that petroleum prices went up simply because the nation was flat broke.

    At a similar point in his nation’s history, Pandit Nehru decreed that if India cannot produce its own fabric or develop its own indigenous car, then the people can trek and walk naked. After mongering platitudes about self-reliance and the need to stimulate indigenous production, Nigerian leaders usually relapse into the despotic opulence of village tyrants. The people take their cue from the rulers.

    The argument for the removal of petroleum subsidy is solely conducted at the level of synchronic manifestation of reality without any conceptual linkage to its diachronic and futuristic dimensions. It is all about where we are at the moment rather than where we are coming from and where we are headed. The faulty answer is embedded in the faulty question.

    This inability to totalize facts is a conceptual subterfuge which allows the mind to avoid uncomfortable political truths and it is the bane of western empiricist epistemology and all the disciplines derived from it, particularly modern Economics which often accounts for their lack of dialectical rigour and delinquent simplification of complex reality. This is perhaps the worst intellectual legacy our colonial masters bequeathed to us.

    It is this endemic crisis of nationhood and rogue westernization which often manifest in the periodic removal of so called subsidy to much national anguish. As long as there is unregulated consumption of western goods and as long as corruption is backed by impunity, there will always be a run on the naira and the subsidy trap will open once again. Once the naira hits 500 to one single dollar, the subsidy experts will be back again to collect their scalp until we reach Weimar Republic and its worthless currency.

    This crisis which has been long in coming has now developed its local pathologies and may no longer be amenable to a national cure-all prescription but a creative and visionary restructuring of the entire political architecture of the nation. We have now reached a point where what is tonic for a particular nationality and its local economy may be toxic to another.

    In retrospect, it is doubtful whetherPandit Nehru, with all his heroism and considerable political clout, could have achieved the grand Hindu consensus about the destiny of the new nation if Mohammad Ali Jinnah and the Pakistani militants were still to be part of an amorphous India nation. Colonial India had to be created anew, but in a situation of regrettable mayhem and bloodshed.

    National consensus and cohesion will always elude colonial creations where constituting nationalities retain strong individual identities and a vibrant sense of private destiny within or outside of the superimposed behemoth. Nigeria remains a classic example of this explosive colonial cocktail.

    But it can be made to work, particularly if Nigerian nationalities are willing to surrender this unstated but turbulent sovereignty in exchange for a more creative and cooperative union of fiercely independent nationalities. At no other point in its history has Nigerian been in a greater need of a visionary political genius. The next twelve months will show whether General Buhari is truly the man we have been waiting for, or whether we have to tarry awhile.

     

  • The exit of a star prince

    The exit of a star prince

    As evening approaches, as the final bend in the river of life comes in full view, and as one can see the lone terminus of a long journey, the crowd begins to thin dramatically. On behalf of the surviving members of the Cobra clan of the old University of Ife, snooper mourns the loss of hisboy ,indefatigable lieutenant and comrade in campus combustion, Prince Jimoh Ademola Adeniji-Adele. He was a stellar cub reporter for the Cobra News Agency.

    Some are born princes and some achieve principality. Ademola, aka “Akoke”, was a prince by birth and bearing. There was always something about his geniality, conviviality and genuine humility which reminds one of those remarkable nobility of ancient Yoruba lore. He was a true man of the people.

    Like his late much beloved brother, Sultan Adeniji Adele, who was a star mathematician, Demola was a star pupil scientist entering the old university at the precocious age of sixteen in 1972 and graduating near the top of his Chemical Engineering class five years later in 1977. He could easily have found his niche among Nigeria’s eminent Chemical Engineers, but like his ancestors and illustrious forebears, he chose the vocation of politics and social engineering instead.

    He was particularly outstanding as the Chairman of the Lagos Island Council, a post to which he brought his boundless energy and characteristic gifts of fairness and empathy for the people. Thereafter, as a formidable grassroots organiser and relentless hell-raiser, he played a prominent and heroic role in the struggle to actualize Abiola’s June 12 mandate, suffering harassment and subsequent incarceration in the process. Whenever this turbulent phase of Yoruba history in Nigeria is properly recorded, Ademola would be accorded his due place as one of the avatars of his people.

    In his last years despite failing health and dwindling political opportunities, the scion of Oba MusendikuAdeniji-Adele remained his cheerful, occasionally self-depreciating self often wondering what a top flight Chemical Engineer was doing in the murky political world of hand to hand combat and savage infighting.

    But he was neither daunted nor fazed by the prospects of looming political incapacitation. He remained till the end, a ferocious freedom fighter. Wherever he got whiff of political imbalance or inequity of opportunities, he would be there in the thick of battle often against wiser political calculations and judgement.

    Long after his earthly remains have been interred, this charming prince of Lagos will be remembered as an exemplar of the saying that nobility must have its obligations. Snooper remembers the prince with warmth and affection and for the unfailing civility and courtesy he accorded his former comrade and old editor in chief and mischief till the end. May Allah grant him eternal repose.