The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sunday

How to regrow a shattered nation (2)

It is crunch time in Nigeria. It has been coming for quite some time, but it has now arrived with fearsome fury. It exempts no one. A malignant downpour does not spare anybody, the lords and the lorded over. In any case, you cannot purchasedizziness and start complaining of tizziness.

In order to rise from its current prostrate position, Nigeria requires maximum efforts from all stakeholders: the state, the political society and the teeming Nigerian masses either in antagonistic cooperation or paradoxical complicity or something more daring and devastating in the long run. It is not a situation for hoary exhortations. They will fall on deaf ears.

But there is no way we can come to terms with the dismal plight of the nation without confronting the origins of the current phase of the crisis and without coming to grips with the unfailing and prompt recurrence of some of its malignant manifestations. Chief among this is the downward spiral of the national currency, particularly after the infamous “liberalization” policies of 1986, and what we now propose as the devaluation jinx that has haunted the country ever since.

On the face of it, the argument for the devaluation of the naira is unanswerable. It is based on the irrefutable logic of sound econometrics and formal economics. Whenever a huge gap opens between the official value of a currency and its real market value, it is imperative for this gap to close in order not to give room to distortion and sundry sharp practices. In Nigeria, this gap has reached over a hundred per cent. Only the unstable oil-rich Muslim countries of the former Soviet Empire can beat this.

On the other hand, a government which spends a disproportionate amount of its foreign exchange earning propping up and sustaining the artificial rather than the real value of its official currency is adjudged guilty of fuelling massive distortion and disequilibrium in the economy. In both cases, devaluation appears logical and inevitable.

In its recent critique of the handling of the Nigerian economy, the IMF puts the case with succinct restraint. In a competitive economy, exchange rate should be allowed to reflect “market forces”. Therefore, restrictions on access to foreign exchange should be removed. In other words, the fate of the naira should be determined by the vagaries of the demand and supply of foreign exchange even where such demands are obviously frivolous and nation-disabling.

On deeper investigation, it will be discovered that the IMF and all the zealots of market forces merely convert a problem to its own solution by starting out on a wrong premise. The aggregate strength of a nation’s economy cannot be reduced to mere foreign exchange racketeering. There have been countries that blockaded themselves against the importation of foreign goods without doing any harm to the prestige of their national currency on the long run.

The fundamental issue here is political, and this is what the IMF shies away from as if it is a plague. Why is it that there is such a run on the naira, and what is the guarantee that after the current round of devaluation occasioned by a glut of naira chasing scarce foreign exchange another round will not open up in the foreseeable future compelling another round of devaluation, that is if the country itself has not been completely grounded by then?

The answer, apart from the crash in international oil price, is the unprecedented scale of state stealing which has put tremendous pressure on the local currency. The fact that these monies have to be taken out at all costs and by all means simply translates to a naira besieged on all fronts. Last week the siege on the naira finally broke through its defensive cordon and the result is an economic tailspin of unprecedented dimension.

Yet this is a country of prodigious natural resources, a country of phenomenal human capital, a country that fought a ruinous four year civil war without borrowing a kobo and without its currency being devalued. Why has the same country found it difficult if not impossible to maintain a healthy balance sheet in peace time? What is the difference between 1966, the year Chief Awolowo emerged as Finance Minister and Vice-Chairman of the Federal Executive Council, and 2016?

The answer lies in the deteriorating structural configuration of the country and the kind of predatory political elite the gargantuan political dystopia must throw up. From a twelve-state structure in 1967, Nigeria now has a thirty- six state structure consisting of mainly unproductive and unviable states which puts a crushing burden on the federal purse. Unable and unwilling to resolve the political logjam the elite resort to stealing as an insurance against the volatility and uncertainty of the times.

The question political psychiatrists and scientists of behavioural pattern must now answer is why the Nigerian political elite often go on historic binges at particular periods. Like the passage of some monstrous birds homing on its prey, these predatory sprees can be timed to precision.

They always follow phases of economic boom when the treasury is filled to the brim. This is when they sniff blood. After the pillage, the country always ends up screaming for a messiah to come to its rescue. By a curious irony, it always ends up with the same man. And the rumbling and grumbling begin all over again.

This was the case in 1979 after the first military government left a buoyant economy and a healthy balance sheet for the profligate and corrupt civilian administration to squander. It required a military intervention to send them packing. The same thing has happened between 2010 and 2015 after soaring international price of oil left the country awash in petro-dollar. It has takena virtual people’s uprising to terminate the binge.

In 1986, the IMF took side against the Nigerian populace by conspiring with the military dictatorship to foist devaluation on Nigeria without a society-specific inquiry into what was driving the phenomenon. The result was instant de-industrialization, the destruction of a glorious education system, massive flight of cultural and intellectual capital and the traumatic immiseration of the Nigerian people.

Thirty years later, the IMF is back with the same prescription and automatic pills of devaluation, even as it avoids the painful political question of asking what actually went wrong beyond the devious econometric figure crunching. The marauding political class have been let off the hook so that they can return to feast on the nation once again as soon as the economy improves and foreign reserve is aplenty . Could it be because the west is the choice destination of these pilfered funds? A dullard and his dollar are soonest parted.

Fortuitously and by some relentless historical gaming, the IMF is faced once again with the same man who rebuffed them thirty two years ago and has done so all over again. And this time around again, the retired general is not about to let the thieving political class go scot free, even though the exercise is about to be bogged down by sheer institutional failure.

General Buhari should continue to resist the poison pills of devaluation while applying all fiscal measures possible to rein in the market forces and all political measures feasible to staunch the run on the naira. In the final analysis, the so called market forces are not mysterious or metaphysical wraiths but creations of economic relations which are vulnerable to human praxis. No serious nation ever leaves its currency completely at the mercy of market forces.

Of course it can be canvassed that as it is, the naira is effectively devalued. This is neither here nor there as long as the “devaluation” remains unofficial. Currencies are not static storage of values. All currencies experience a permanent swing between devaluation and revaluation with most governments doing little or nothing about it. In stable currencies, the swing is minimal. But in a country like Angola things can get cyclothymic with a swing of 180%. But the Angolan economy has not collapsed. It is actually booming.

President Buhari should shore up the value of the naira by placing an immediate ban on all frivolous importation of second hand and virtually worthless goods from Asia and Europe. The humungous saving can be rerouted to the development of infrastructure such as haulage, mass transportation, basic electricity, cottage industry, potable water and decent housing.

The national motto should be: Produce or perish!! From now on, it is expected that we must only consume what we can produce. AlikoDangote, the billionaire industrialist, has noted that the annual import bill for rice is about eighteen billion dollars. This should be gradually phased out and the money diverted to local production of rice, mechanized farming,experimentation with local yield-boosting strains and irrigation schemes which demystify the annual superstitious wretchedness of waiting for and appeasing the god of rains.

A cardinal plank of any salvage mission worth its salt in Nigeria is a thorough going drive for a new national orientation and salvation ethos. This is virtually impossible without the errant being brought to speedy restitution. The people will refuse to be galvanised for any national mission once they perceive that they are being taken for a ride. He who comes to social justice must come with bruised palms.

At a similar point in their history, the Chinese, defeated and demoralised by the Japanese Army, humiliated by the Russian Imperial Command, resorted to the economic model of autarchy, a system of severe self-isolation which brooked limited or no contact at all with the outside world. When they finally emerged on their own terms, it was as an economic superpower.

Given the rampaging impact of globalization in which non-state actors routinely bypass the surveillance of the state, this model may no longer be available but the Chinese spirit of proud self-reliance commends itself; so does the Vietnamese model of prudence and doughty self-sufficiency which has seen the South East Asian country overcome the trauma of civil war and occupation by France and America. In the early years of independence, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru defiantly declared that if Indians could not feed or clothe themselves let them go hungry and naked. India never looked back.

Nigeria must borrow tropes from these great human societies: the wily invincibility of the inscrutable Chinese, the proud forbearance of the aristocratic Indians, the doughty indestructibility of the hardy Vietnamese, the Teutonic thoroughness of the disciplined Germans and the genius of American ceaseless self-surpassing.

Nigeria can overcome its present travails and trauma. But it will take a visionary galvanization of the national spirit and a political restructuring of the misbegotten colonial slave-house to release the energy and genius of the people. Given the inherent can-do spirit of the people, their flair for the unusual and the flamboyant zeal with which Nigerians have excelled in virtually all spheres of human endeavours, these are redemptive resources waiting to be harnessed by an exceptional leadership.

Exactly forty years ago, General Murtala Mohammed stood on the continental podium to proclaim that Africa has come of age. It is a question of time, despite the defeats and setbacks, before another Nigerian leader or international diplomat will mount the global podium to proclaim that Nigeria has finally come of age.

March 6, 2016
Ese Oruru Beyond the shame of a nation

Anyone having a daughter must have felt for Ese Oruru and her parents, seeing the kind of cross the little girl is being forced to carry at a tender age of 14. For seven good months (whatever is good in the months!) this innocent girl was abducted and taken to far away Kano, from her native Bayelsa State. Now, the girl is carrying a pregnancy she must have least bargained for. And to think that some prominent Nigerians were aware of her plight ab initio but did nothing, or did too little to get her out of captivity, only to be speaking in incoherent tunes after the harm had been done! There is God o! The question to ask these people, the most talked-about of them being the Emir of Kano, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, is: would they have handled the matter the way they did if Ese was their daughter?

One must single out the Emir because of his education and his exposure, considering what he has been able to do for himself in life before becoming Emir. How could anyone in this age and time abduct a 14-year-old girl only to forcibly convert her to Islam and then ‘marry’ her? And all an all-powerful Emir would do is ask that the child be released to her parents without following up on the matter? This is a serious omission on the part of Emir Sanusi that he would need all the angels swearing on his behalf to make any difference.

What is going round is that such young girls are the lubricants that keep some big men in parts of the country going. Indeed, it is the blood of such innocent girls that these elders use to rejuvenate theirs. Others call it pedophilia but those who are into it see it as a practice welcomed by their culture or religion. But I guess it is more cultural than religious because there are Muslims in other parts of the country and they do not celebrate such ‘weddings’. Whilst it may sound so absurd to many of us who do not understand the basis for such a thing, those whose culture permits it must be surprised at how the rest of us are outraged, with a national newspaper launching a campaign for the girl’s freedom. This should be expected when culture or religion is transported to places where people do not accept such religious or cultural practices.

Those familiar with the social media said the matter had been trending for quite some time. As a journalist it is good news that it eventually became an issue after it was published by a national daily. That was when panic hit the camps of all those involved and they became jittery, leading to the release of the poor girl last week. Some of the big dramatis personae, including the Inspector-General of Police (IGP), Solomon Arase, even had cause to say ’em… em…’ after being boxed to inescapable corners over the matter. What this tells us is that the social media cannot be a substitute for the newspaper. Each has its distinct characteristics that cannot be replaced by the other.

But that was only a digression. Although Yunusa Dahiru (a.k.a. Yellow) is the sole beneficiary of the absurd and regrettable episode; to me, he is but an unknown quantity who nonetheless must have his full comeuppance by the time the full weight of the law is applied on him, to deter others who might be harbouring the devilish intention of forcibly having their own virgins here and now. If those that mattered had acted expeditiously by telling him in unmistakable terms that he could not do what he did, the man might have thought twice, seeing that he was on his own. What the feeble response of the Emir and others in the matter did was to embolden him. Now, the result! Unless the dramatic happens, Ese’s pregnancy may change her life trajectory for life. This is why these people who have turned little girls barely old enough to be their children or even grandchildren into groundnuts that they can ‘taste’ anyhow deserve to be condemned in the strongest terms. Ese’s case is that of a baby that would, in the next few months, be tending to another baby, her own baby! Not just a baby-mother; but a forced one at that!

There are several reasons why Yunusa should be in soup over this matter. First, he took his search for a minor to marry beyond the borders of where such is permissible. May be if he had restricted himself to places where such a practice is allowed, he would have got away with it, or, at best, got a slap on the wrist for his imprudence. Second, his victim is not even a Muslim; so, she could not have understood all the talk of her conversion to Islam, not to talk of marriage without parental consent. Ese might not have witnessed her parents’ wedding, but she must have heard one or two things about how they did it. So, she must have seen the wide world of difference between her parents’ marriage and the one she was initiated into.

There are useful lessons we all must learn from this sad incident. One is that we should teach our children never to trust strangers. As a matter of fact, with the benefit of hindsight, Ese’s mother (Rose Oruru) too must have realised that we have to be measured even in being nice to people. According to her, she once allowed Yunusa to be sleeping in her shop when she found out that he was homeless. Ordinarily, this would not have been a bad deed; indeed, it is what the scripture enjoins Christians to do: give succour to the distressed and home to the homeless. It only happened that she was nice to the wrong person. Her good nature was what must have given her daughter the confidence that, with Yunusa, she was in safe hands. Even if Ese was hypnotised as the mother claimed, the familiarity between Yunusa and the family must have facilitated that. It is unlikely that the poor girl would have felt so secure in the company of Yunusa if he had not been close to their (Oruru) family.

I have seen some people describe Ese’s plight as the shame of a nation. It is worse than that. It signposts how far we have gone adrift and lost. How could someone pounce on a 14-year-old girl and think that he has had manna from heaven? What kind of culture or religion approves of such criminality? So, if there had not been an outrage over the matter, Yunusa would still have been keeping the girl under the illusion that she is his wife, while the parents keep agonising over their daughter’s whereabouts. Although Ese has finally reunited with her family, the next stage is to ensure that those who are responsible for her plight are brought to justice. The matter is too grave to be swept under the carpet. If the investigations are thorough, it is unlikely that Yunusa would face his cross alone; all the big men named in the saga must also be made to face the music.

The IGP was saying the other day that all the policemen found culpable in the saga would be identified and punished. From what is in the public domain, most of the middle-level police officers involved in the matter tried their best. They only gave up when they discovered there were powerful interests involved -interests so powerful that the IGP himself could not untie their shoelaces. But, in all true conscience, does the inspector-general think he too has done well in this matter? Anyway, we are waiting to see how far he can go, first in picking up people involved; and then in ensuring they are prosecuted. We want to see if he too would step down from his high horse, at least pending the completion of investigation on the matter because he is involved and so does not qualify to preside over any such investigation.

But what seems the most important thing now is to get Ese the proper counselling that would prepare her for the new life she has been forced into. One can only imagine how the girl would be feeling in the midst of her peers, with her protruding tummy. She needs all the attention – medical, psychological – and all so that life does not become miserable for her.

March 6, 2016
Towards our emergency economic conference

While there will be need for short-term interventions in the nation’s economic problems at the forthcoming conference, emphasis should be on long-term solutions

The President should call an emergency economic conference with experts to be invited – consumers, producers, labour unions, university experts, professors, etc. I think we really need an emergency economic conference, a rescue operation, bringing as many heads as possible together to plan the way forward…The economic condition of the nation of the people does not deteriorate overnight, something came before that deterioration. A certain prolonged and unchecked process of attrition which was neglected in the past is now knocking on the door.—Wole Soyinka

It is remarkable how some minds think alike even when they are so far apart in physical terms. Professor Soyinka’s call during his visit to the Minister of Information and Culture on February 18 for an emergency economic conference is reported to have been preceded by the decision of the 65th National Economic Council meeting of January 28th, according to a senior federal government official. While the FEC version was originally designed to be constituted by government officials from the central and state governments, Soyinka’s version of a national brainstorming session calls for inclusive approach that goes beyond just representatives of federal and state governments. As there is no space for a conference that can include all citizens, today’s piece is a distillation of comments from regular readers of this column, especially those who are not likely to get invited to this important national meeting on policies that can advance citizens’ welfare.

Our country is not new to national conferences on issues of concern to citizens from time to time. The federal military government of General Ibrahim Babangida declared a national debate on whether the country should take an IMF loan. Judging by the number of newspaper cuttings on the subject, pundits declared that the nation was opposed to any IMF loan with conditionalities, particularly adoption of Structural Adjustment Programme. In the end, the military president agreed to IMF’s conditions for any financial assistance and soon after SAP became a lasting part of the country’s economic culture. It is now too late to assess the rightness of each side of the 1975 national debate.

President Olusegun Obasanjo also responded during his second term to calls for a national conference on the polity, popularly known then as the call for Sovereign National Conference (SNC). Obasanjo’s National Conference on Political Reforms ‘came and went’ as we say in the vernacular. About nine years after Obasanjo’s conference, President Goodluck Jonathan also convened a national dialogue one year before the election of 2015. The conference also held for months without leaving any trace on the country’s political culture. Some of the delegates to the conference, particularly those from the Yoruba region, have argued forcefully that the conference would have changed the political and economic trajectory of the country were President Jonathan allowed to implement the conference recommendations during his second term, a tenure which majority of citizens deprived him of by voting for General Buhari. Others have countered this argument with the claim that the recommendations of the conference are too perfunctory to make any difference in the fortunes of the country. Now the Jonathan conference, like the Obasanjo one before it, is an item in the nation’s archive or museum.

Whether the conference is an all-comers conference or an assembly of top government officials and their favoured economic eggheads and whether it is an emergency conference or the first of periodic conferences on how to salvage the nation’s economy after a precipitous fall in oil revenue, the 2016 economic conference under the presidency of General Buhari must address not only the effects of the fall in the price of oil and of decades of stealing of public funds by politicians and civil servants; it must also address the cause of noticeable decline in the economy.

For decades, Nigeria has been governed by short-termist leaders. The dominance of short-termism as guiding principle of government policies has left many traces on the polity and economy. For example, while the flow of petrodollars was assured and abundant, no effort was made to use such funds to create the type of infrastructure that can sustain a post-oil reality. No ruler worried about the danger of petroleum losing its historical charm to international buyers, the possibility that petroleum could lose its cutting-edge status as the driver of modern civilisation, or the possibility that some of the usual customers of Nigeria, such as the United States, could become oil exporters.

Short-termism was not limited to political leaders and civil servants in a country that spent close to half a century talking about the imperative of diversifying its economy to reduce reliance on petroleum export, without plucking the political courage to do anything to diversify the economy until the sudden drop in petroleum revenue crept on the nation at night. Many of our rulers who had property in the United Arab Emirate, for example, watched that small federation use its oil revenue to build world-class infrastructure and to diversify its economy to the point of becoming the first place of choice for Nigerian elite in search of pleasure, luxury goods, and property. Citizens, especially those in the middle-class, also demonstrate the proclivity for short-term gratification over long-term solutions to problems, by making choices that indicate preference to avoid problems than to search for solutions. When the government failed to provide good secondary and tertiary education or good hospitals, millions struggled to look for solutions by moving to Ghana, Britain, the United States, or United Arab Emirate. When the government failed to provide modern mass transit system, citizens rushed to buy Okada and Keke Maruwa. When the government failed to provide proper policing of the community, groups created militant organisations and vigilante groups to pretend to secure their communities or even regions. When electricity supply could not sustain manufacturing, many manufacturers moved to Ghana. When most state governments refused to provide essential public service in the various regions, their residents saved up money to migrate to Lagos State.

While there will be need for short-term interventions in the nation’s economic problems at the forthcoming conference, emphasis should be on long-term solutions. Justifiably, conferees are likely to worry about the foreign exchange rate and the value of the naira. Citizens are likely to hear hair-splitting arguments about boosting the value of the naira in the black market through immediate formal devaluation, conferees must give attention to the fundamental issue of the meaninglessness of focusing on the value of the naira in relation to the dollar if the economy is not diversified to include manufacturing of many items that are imported and which have caused problems of balance of payment for the country since the fall in revenue from petroleum and the vacuuming of the nation’s treasury by rulers and public servants. Conferees from states must also not fail to examine the sustainability of decades-long system of governing states solely with allocations or transfers from the so-called federation account.

In particular, governors from states and their economic advisers must not focus on lamenting the effects of fall in oil revenue. They need to address the cause(s) of the new reality and join others to think as if the end of the age of petroleum is at hand. There is a need for the economic conference to look at the political dimension of the country’s economic failure, in view of the decline in oil revenue that had sustained 36 states as sites of consumption (rather than centres of production) for decades. Macro and micro economic theorists at the conference should examine the need for a new political philosophy that calls for fiscal federalism that can empower states or clusters of states to justify existence of such levels of government in a country cited in international taxonomy of governments as a federation. No sustainable solution is likely to emerge from panel-beating the effects of the nation’s underdevelopment without coming to terms with causes and without borrowing Achebe’s imagery about not only focusing on ‘drying our bodies but also finding out where the rains started to beat us.’

March 6, 2016
Is Buhari’s anti-corruption war anexercise in futility?

But it would appear that President Buhari is shielding the former president from being invited to testify, even if only as a witness.

– The ‘Goodluck Jonathan Alibi’ diplomatic pussyfooting?

“What component of our education is missing in the upbringing of our political leaders, who fight in the respected chambers of the national assembly, who loot the national treasury, so much so that 500 or so of them take 25% of the resources meant for 150 million of us? What component of our education is missing in the development of our Governors, who when caught in the net of EFCC, plea bargain or run away or use the court to cut the rest of us to pieces? I ask what component of our education is missing in the upbringing of our parents that make them jam JAMB, squeeze the neck of NECO and fabricate certificates so their children can gain admission into our centers of decomposed educational excellence. What component of our education is missing in the training of our civil servants and contractors that make them inflate contracts, execute budget in the real sense of EXECUTION, and fiddle with documents to filch our finances. Finally, what component of education is missing in the upbringing of our pastors and preachers that make them defecate on the altar of celestial adulation” – Professor Oyewale Tomori, FAS, former Vice-Chancellor, Redeemer University, and President, Nigerian Academy of Science in *BUILDING A NEW GENERATION UNIVERSITY: PROSPECTS AND PROBLEMS”.

One needs not be an economist to know that Nigeria’s current economic circumstances demand a meeting of economically literate minds – not the all-comers jamboree some Nigerian Labour Union leaders are canvassing – to clinically interrogate our problems and plot a way out, at least in the short term, since only a fundamental restructuring of Nigeria can cure its many ills. Persons with whom I have interacted on the issue can attest to my vibrant enthusiasm about it all. But things must be put in their proper perspective and so it must be said that corruption sits atop every factor that brought Nigeria to its present circumstances. A good reading of our history, spanning, especially the regimes of General Ibrahim Babangida through Abacha, Abubakar, Obasanjo ( second coming) and President Goodluck Jonathan will affirm the view that dealers, rather than leaders, ruled Nigeria throughout that long period. This is, no doubt, a grave charge but I will proceed to prove it and before heading to the courts, they should first do Nigerians a small favour: go on prime time television and invite President Muhammadu Buhari to subject their records as Head of State to a forensic audit, the report of which should be published in at least ten national newspapers in English, Yoruba, Hausa, and Igbo languages. If they come out smelling like a thousand roses, they can, in addition to their legal victories, banish me to the Gulag Archipelago.
In the first place, these are a group of people who, after opportunistically getting into office, rather than diversify the economy and moderate their greed, luxuriated in, and mercilessly frittered away the billions of petro dollars that poured endlessly into the country’s coffers. Rather than encourage massive investment in agriculture and solid minerals, their greater concern was for amassing huge personal fortunes that today see them holed up, almost solitarily, on hilltop castles. Yet, in spite of their bulging wealth, they remain so conscienceless they still collectively earn billions in unearned pensions and sundry benefits at the expense of the poor – monies they really do not need, nor are morally entitled to. But that was not even half the story of those Dr Jide Oluwajuyitan calls “Dealers as Leaders”, in his column in The Nation of Thursday, 3 March 2016, where he wrote as follows: “The real tragedy is that Buhari is yet to start the war on corruption. All he has done so far is attacking the symptoms of a deep rooted malaise unleashed on our nation through Babangida’s Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) and Obasanjo mismanaged privatisation programme. The former allowed Babangida’s ‘army of anything is possible’ to pillage our land like a conquered territory resulting in the betrayal of the vision of our founding fathers. Part of the fallout is the depreciation of our naira from Babangida’s pre-structural adjustment programme value of N1 to US$1 to today’s over N300 to the US$1. With the latter, Obasanjo presided over the sales of N100b assets acquired over 50 years (1958 and 2008) for a paltry $1.6b to dealers and wheelers who embarked on asset stripping to buy private jets and build skyscrapers instead of running the industries they bought at next to nothing, efficiently”. President Buhari cannot close his eyes to these, talk less of Halliburton and co, if he wants to win the anti corruption war. Too much is known of the dark goggled Kano general to delay us here and it will take his immediate successor, General Abubakar, to take up my challenge to prove his complete innocence. Their subalterns, as military governors all over the country did no less harm to the country’s financial an economic well-being – the scandals surrounding the sales of Cocoa Industries Limited under the Babangida liberalisation policy and the Ajaokuta Steel Complex during Obasanjo privatisation drive readily call to question the loyalty of the two to our nation, whatever the protestations to the contrary.
Other individuals, even inanimate organisations like banks have been used in stealing the country blind. For instance, each and every penny of our stolen trillions went through Nigerian banks, one of which is known to have illegally helped a government agency to transfer huge sums of money to the accounts of some of the agency’s executives who thereby succeeded in stealing large sums. To imagine that these are the stolen monies for which Nigerian banks turned our mothers of tomorrow to well dressed prostitutes chasing after these lousy irritants. Nigerians can wait no more to see some of these banks heavily penalised and their executives hauled into jails if President Buhari really wants to make a success of this war that has clearly defined him.
The same day that Oluwajuyitan wrote, a usually very restrained Emeritus Professor Jide Osuntokun could not help writing as follows in his column in the same newspaper: “The kind of looting we are being told happened is enough to depress any sane and patriotic Nigerian. The level of looting poses existential threat to this republic. In China, some of what happened in the recent past would have attracted the ultimate punishment (death). Some of the stories sound like they are from Ali baba and the 40 thieves. People walk into the office of the National Security Adviser, sign a piece of paper, and walk out with a mandate to go to the CBN or banks where government has money to go and collect billions for some spurious work for government or the ruling party or for no work at all! Nigerian oil was sold without the treasury being credited with the proceeds. People have come out to say their accounts were credited with huge amount of money without their knowledge or without having performed any assignments for government. Billions if not trillions were shared among party bigwigs as if people were playing the game of monopoly with the nation’s money. Government’s decision to bring the guilty parties to book had better been hastened and speeded up before people lose their patience. Money taken from these economic saboteurs had better be deployed to pay the millions of Nigerian miserably awaiting the payment of their salaries and pensions.”
Another reason for the lingering fear that informed the title of this article is what Stephanie Findlay of AFP calls: “the Goodluck Jonathan Alibi”. This alibi, already pleaded by Metuh in his money laundering no case submission, and according to informed sources, former National Security Adviser, Col. Dasuki would also plead, is that both men were obeying President Jonathan’s orders. But it would appear that President Buhari is shielding the former president from being invited to testify, even if only as a witness. This is said to be on account of a so-called pledge to Jonathan by him on account of the former’s concession telephone call as if, with the President Gbagbo example, he had a choice after Obasanjo had earlier drawn his attention to Gbagbo’s travails. I am sure the president needs not be told that if any of these cases miscarries, there goes his anti-corruption war. And he should please put Nigerian survival first, before any diplomatic pussyfooting.
However, whichever way President Muhammadu Buhari chooses to be remembered by history, is strictly in his hands.

March 6, 2016
Change, change, change! – top-down and/or bottom-up? (3)

I start this final piece in the series that began two weeks ago in this column with a great emphasis on what I call the limits of journalistic punditry with regard to this column itself and all newspaper and newsmagazine columnists in Nigeria at the present time. We are all pundits, all of us of the clan of columnists that populate the dozens of newspapers and newsmagazines in circulation in our country. I think that on the whole and everything considered, the emergence and rise to high public visibility of journalistic punditry has been one of the most significant cultural and intellectual developments in Nigeria in at least the last two decades. For it is a very salutary cultural phenomenon that hundreds of thousands of literate Nigerians are avid readers of the opinions, analyses and reflections of columnists. This is because the historic moment of the vitality of the town or village square is gone, perhaps forever, at least with regard to the significance of the constituted public sphere of the national community. To express this observation in concrete terms, I for one as a columnist am immensely encouraged by the fact that people read what I have to say in virtually all parts of the country. Moreover, via the internet, this extends to the global community of Nigerians in the diasporas of Europe and the Americas. But notwithstanding this undoubted impact of columnists in the political and intellectual domains of our collective experience as a nation, I return to what I stated at the beginning of this opening paragraph: the limits of journalistic punditry. What does this mean and how does it relate to the issue that I have been discussing in this series?

I shall be very succinct in my response to this question. Almost without exception, most newspaper and newsmagazine columnists – the commentariat – nurse the illusion that what they/we write collectively has a decisive role to play in the fate of the nation, especially with regard to the terrible condition of the masses of the poor and the underprivileged in our country. But this is simply not true; more to the point, it is delusory. Nothing illustrates this claim more than the war on corruption in high places in our country. For at least two decades now, we, the columnists, have been railing ceaselessly and tirelessly against corruption. This started long before the current phase of the war in Buhari’s administration, a phase in which the commentariat has exponentially stepped up its verbal attacks on looters and looting. For nearly two decades, corruption was completely undaunted by our salvoes. And now in the current phase of the war, corruption is striking back; it is fighting hard and seemingly effectively too, in the law courts and in the federal civil administration. If it is the case that we shall not and must not stop waging a verbal war against the looters and their allies, we must at least pause to reflect on this unquestionable limit to what we can hope to achieve. To put this in stark and admittedly rather oversimplified terms, it is time for us to come to the realization that the war against corruption will ultimately not be won in the pages of newspapers and newsmagazines.

Let me rephrase that last sentence: We can hope to have an effective impact on the war on corruption only if what we write as pundits move the masses to act, to intervene – in the war against corruption and in the many other spheres of political and economic affairs that are badly in need of change and reform in our country at the present time. I place emphasis on this issue because it is a very notable and perhaps even defining view of journalistic punditry in our country that all that needs to be done is to write well, to write eloquently and all else shall fall into place. This may be true in those very limited and narrow circumstances in which calls are made to reverse a specific act or policy of the president, a governor, a federal minister, a local government chairman. But on far weightier and consequential issues like the war on corruption or redistributive justice in our country, if what we write as columnists do not move the masses of Nigerians to act, to intervene, then regardless of the vigour or eloquence of our writings, nothing significant will happen.

At this point in the discussion, it is perhaps necessary for me to specify what I mean by the term, “the masses”, together with precisely what sorts of action and intervention I have in mind.In its most widely understood connotation, the term, implies, rather undifferentiatedly, the bottom layers of the socio-economic order, the truly disadvantaged, “the wretched of the earth”, in Frantz Fanon’s celebrated coinage. I admit that in general, this is what the term, “Talakawa”, in the title of this column implies. However, when the term is politicized with expectations of radical possibilities, mass action or intervention applies to any phenomenon that powerfully advances the interests, the collective cause of the truly disadvantaged of any society. Let me put this in simple, concrete language: an action, an intervention by even as few as two or three people that sparks the imagination and interest of the Talakawa in their millions is a mass action, a mass intervention. This is not to deny the fact that throughout history, the most powerful and consequential acts of the masses take place when sizeable proportions of the poor and the underprivileged march, protest, demonstrate or act in their own interests: Soweto; Mao’s Long March; Martin Luther King and the March on Washington; the innumerable occasions when our own departed and sorely missed Labour Leader Number One, Pa Michael AthokhamienImoudu, led thousands of workers and the unemployed against the injustices of both colonial and post-independent governments of our country.

So while not ruling out the possibility, the necessity even of the masses of Nigerians to act decisively across the boundaries of region, ethnicity and religion that are often used to divide them, we end this series with a profile of the sorts of actions and interventions that might serve to advance the cause of the masses, even if they are undertaken by a few people, by a segment of the society, by a band of committed patriots, by a network of professional associations, and by a phalanx of civil society organizations and NGO’s with genuine credentials as honest and dedicated activists.This is in fact what the well-known phrase, “two or three people can change the world” means.

Think, compatriots: the war against corruption and the looters in the law courts will get a tremendous boost if, for instance, the few SANs who have spoken out eloquently against the collusion of influential members of the Bar and the Bench with the looters launch a series of well publicized public forums or “town hall” discussions with diverse segments of the Nigerian society: workers on the shop or factory floor; university students in their dining halls or soccer stadiums; congregations of faith communities of Moslems and Christians in their places of worship; market women and male and female petty traders in the capacious spaces of our volatile open-air markets; even primary school pupils in their playing grounds. In such widely publicized conversations, the obstacles that the looters and their allies are placing in the path of the battle against corruption will be clearly identified and discussed. Needless to say, there will be no need in such forums to mention or publicize the names of the prominent legal backers of the looters, for this will be credibly subjected to the charge of “trial by the mob”. Rather, the judicial blockages to the war against corruption will be identified and x-rayed as first and foremost a process which is manipulated by individuals. Destroy or cripple the process and you incapacitate the individuals who manipulate the process. Apart from taking the battle in the law courts directly to the people, these forums will serve as immensely useful teachable exercises that will give the masses of our peoples a sophisticated understanding of how the process now works against their interests but can and should be made to work in the interest of all.

Think again, compatriots: beyond the specific and currently very pressing battle against corruption in the law courts, almost all areas of our completely run down, dysfunctional and hugely unjust economic and political affairs can in the same manner bedirectly taken by a few people and organizations, acting alone or in collaboration with others, to the people across the length and breadth of the country. I give just a few examples of some of the most crucial crises of accountability, waste, injustice and insecurity in our country: the jumbo salaries, allowances and perquisites of our lawmakers and high public officeholders; the yawning gap between what is spent on maintaining the bloated bureaucracies of our federal, state and local governments and what remains for expenditure on capital projects to expand opportunities for gainful employment, especially for our youths; the terrible state of our physical infrastructures, especially the roads, highways, power generation and supply, public hospitals, clinics and dispensaries; the banking system and the terribly skewed nature of credits and loans to the rich and the powerful as compared with the poor and the powerfulness in their millions.

As is well known, in one way or another, in “peoples’ parliaments” on radio and in “molues”, “danfos”, “maruwas” and “tuke-tukes”, Nigerians of all classes talk endlessly about these crises. The point being made here is that it is one thing to talk forever and despairingly about these crises, it is another thing entirely to launch public forums about them that lay bare to the people how they are manipulated by our political elites, and how it is in everybody’s interest to find ways to end the crises. Indeed, it is of supreme importance to emphasize thatcritical understanding of how our crises can be resolved should become common knowledge to the masses. Armed with such understanding, we write endlessly on these issues in our columns; it is time to take such understanding directly to the people.

I end with only a partial list of cultural and pedagogical instruments that can be mobilized to make these radical public forums very lively and even entertaining to the masses of our peoples: musical performances by iconic figures as a backdrop for, say, a forum for stopping the “ilabe” of the lawmakers; drama sketches to augment forums on the judicial hideouts of the looters; specially commissioned short cinematic docu-dramas on why Nigeria has never exceeded 5000 megawatts of electrical power production in a country of about 180 million; traditional musicians, dancers and acrobats performing in open air markets as both prelude and closing frame for a public forum on how a country as rich in wealth and resources as Nigeria is filled with such unbelievable levels of poverty, suffering and hardship. This all amounts to a peaceful “revolutionary” process; whoever prevents peaceful means of attaining social justice makes the violent, traumatic alternatives that much more probable, alas.

Biodun Jeyifo bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

March 6, 2016
On the economy (From the All Progressives Congress manifesto)
- Maintain sound macro-economic policy environment, run an efficient government and preserve the independence of the Central Bank;
- Restore and strengthen financial confidence by putting in place a more robust monitoring, supervising and regulating of all financial institutions;
- Make our economy one of the fastest growing emerging economies in the world with a real GDP growth averaging 10% annually;
- Embark on vocational training, entrepreneurial and skills acquisition scheme for graduates along with the creation of Small Business Loan Guarantee Scheme to create at least 1 million new jobs every year, for the foreseeable future;
- Integrate the informal economy into the mainstream and prioritize the full implementation of the National Identification Scheme to generate the relevant data;
- Expand domestic demand and consider undertaking associated public works programmes;
- Embark on export and production diversification including investment in infrastructure; promote manufacturing through agro based industries and expand sub-regional trade through ECOWAS and AU;
- Make Information Technology, Manufacturing, Agriculture and Entertainment key drivers of our economy;
- Balance the economy across regions by the creation of 6 new Regional Economic Development Agencies (REDAs) to act as champions of sub-regional competitiveness;
- Put in place a N300bn regional growth fund (average of N50bn in each geo-political region) to be managed by the REDAs, encourage private sector enterprise and support to help places currently reliant on the public sector;
- Amend the Constitution and the Land Use Act to create freehold/leasehold interests in land along with matching grants for states to create a nationwide electronic land title register on a state by state basis;
- Create additional middle-class of at least 2 million new home owners in our first year in government and 1 million annually thereafter; by enacting a national mortgage system that will lend at single digit interest rates for purchase of owner occupier houses.
March 6, 2016
Okon founds APON (Aboriginal People of Nigeria)

As the trial of NnamdiKanu, the rogue Biafran neo-nationalist, gets underway, Okon has been making hay playing both sides of the divide often running with the hare while hunting with the hound. He has been seen protesting with the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), while he was also linked with supplying hired demonstrators to a mysterious pro-government group based in Ikate.

A few days ago, the crazy boy actually raised the stakes by co-founding a pro-nation group known as APON (Aboriginal People of Nigeria) to infiltrate and cause trouble at every IPOB rally. The plot was to raise anti-Nigerian hysteria to a shrill pitch at these gatherings and then slip away when the bullets start flying leaving the hapless Biafran autochthons to deal with the dead and the dying.

The logo of the new group carries the image of a truly aboriginal Australian aborigine with a massive primitive bangle set above flared nostrils. When Okon was confronted, the crazy one retorted that he was operating under a new doctrine of necessity. “Ogana doctoring of necessity. Even doctor sefsabi say ebana necessity. Na necessity make dem stupid Kanu boy come look for trouble for Naija and na necessity make dem mala come dey shoot dem people. . You know say when man who no get brains come jam man who no get mouth, dat one naOjuelegba proper”.

“Okon, you are not sleeping in this house tonight”, snooper shouted in alarm.

“No be di thin wey we dey talk about me dat?” the mad boy charged at me. “Na demWazobia people dey cause trouble for obodo. Make dem come dey go make we come find rest. Na dem come run here and nademdey cause wahala. We sabi when demOduduwa man come from Egypt. We sabi when dem Ibo people come from Israel. Na dem mala come last from Futa. But nademdey kill, nademdey kidnap, nademdey abduct, nademdey do 419, nademdey eat people and nademdey wire small girls. Make demdey go”.

It was this last stunt that landed Okon in jail on Friday. A day earlier, he had gone to the head office of the shadowy pro-government organisation to demand for full payment for his services. He had been met at the entrance by a pompous American wannabe with a fake Yankee accent. Okon eyed him with savage contempt.

“Oh me man, you have come for your honorarium, then?” the African American opened.

“Even honourable sefdemdey steal, so please pay me my money and forget dis stupid grammar”, Okon snapped.

“So, you have come for your tranche then. How many lorry-load of assholes?”, the Yankee Lagosian continued with his prancing and preening, not in the least fazed by Okon’s irate disgust.

“I bring a container of Ibo rioters and another container of dem Yoruba spare parts. If to say you get common sense you for go bring my money, now, now”, Okon raved as he primed himself for fistic exertion.

“All right, all right. Where is your LPO?” the crank from Connecticut demanded with hair-raising levity. By this time, Okon had lost his cool completely.

“Wetin be LPO? Wetin concern long playing record with money you owe?” By this time, Okon had dragooned the poor New Yorker to himself and given him a resounding head butt followed by a of series devastating jabs. New Yorker crumpled on the floor as Okon made good his escape. He was captured hiding inside a giant disused bin. After being viciously assaulted, Okon was taken to the police station where he was stripped and remanded in custody.

March 6, 2016
Giving the country the run around

One thing is sure: this mystery could not have been more fascinating if it came from the pages of a bestseller

Lately, I have watched young Ese Oruru seize the country’s imagination by the simple act of disappearing and re-appearing like a magician between last year, 2015, and this year. First, the story read that she had been kidnapped; then that she had eloped; and then that she had been forced into something like a marriage in the very modern city of Kano from the bosom of her mother’s shop in Bayelsa. Imagine the distance of that journey! It is almost as long as the saga!

One thing is sure though: this mystery could not have been more fascinating if it came from the pages of a bestseller. The Ese story only goes to prove to my unbelieving friends what I have been trying to tell them for ages: that life is many times stranger than fiction. As Hamlet has proclaimed, ‘there are more things in life than are found in your philosophy (literature) books!’ I think the man must really have been exasperated by his friend’s naive innocence. I am equally getting exasperated as this saga seems to really be giving the country the good ol’ run around. It is drawing out more questions than answers.

I am often fascinated by the ‘whodunit’ structure of many mystery books. In my professional opinion (err, as a detective, that is), many aspects of this story fit into the structure of a mystery book like a glove. It is complete with your leading lady, a probable protagonist with her innocence, and the sinned-against rather than the sinning face (at least for now). It also has the antagonist, a certain Mr. Yunusa, who is said to be the violator and snatcher of the many properties of the protagonist – her innocence, naivety, purity, youth, freedom, rights, religion, identity, culture, parents, home, familiar birthplace, friends, etc., and all the things that went into making her who she fancied herself to be.

From the accounts, it would appear that young Mr. Yunusa had many motives. Indeed, at the height of the elopement theory, the motive seemed to have been romance. For a tiny winy while, it actually seemed like a romantic story; and since most of us like romantic stories, we were kinda tempted to let our guard down on the age thing. That was just for a tiny winy bit, mind. I have since changed my mind, even in the face of that data.

That is what brings in the third, fourth, fifth and any number of parties whose interests in the story are not yet clear, nearly all of whom can be said to have some elements of motive, complicity and/or failure. There is the theory, according one of the stories, that the girl had been fetched up north by the said Mr. Yunusa and kept in the palace of the Emir of Kano, but this has since been denied.

There have been many speculations as to why the police did not enforce the girl’s freedom earlier. I think there is an aspect of the law that says that security operatives are not supposed to enter one’s house except on invitation or there is a warrant from a competent, unbiased judge that says your house can be searched in an emergency security situation. However, it is well known that the Nigerian security systems have more respect for persons of a certain class; so there is often a very elastic or varied interpretation of what constitutes ’emergency situation’. So, I cannot blame the police too much for waiting for clearance on the situation before releasing the girl. There are just too many things that are not clear about the case, even for the police.

You can see that this is a tightly woven and complex plot that could only have been conceived by a wild imagination such as natural occurrences. Indeed, if some wild writer had come up with it for a bestseller, I tell you that s/he would have been hung, strung and quartered for trying to start a war in the country comparable to that which greeted the stealing away of Helen of Troy.

You remember Helen of Troy, don’t you? It is said that she was the most beautiful woman of her time, and when Paris (a handsome young ‘un) forcibly took her from her husband and brought her home to Troy, that city did not mind going to war in order to keep her. Consequently, hundreds of thousands of people died trying to keep that beauty within Troy’s borders in a war that lasted about ten years. I have seen something of Ese’s beauty and I am afraid it does not quite come near Helen’s.

However, were a writer to conceive the Ese plot in a work of fiction, s/he would have been accused of trying to pit the north against the south religiously, economically and culturally. It could very easily have been a religious war, seeing that the girl is said to have been taken from her Christian roots and put in a hijab within the few months of her departure. Culturally, Ese is still considered underage and in tutelage in her birthplace,, having much schooling ahead of her whereas in the new setting, she would be considered to have arrived at the port of her life even at that age.

It would have been an economic war that would have pitted the rich resources that the girl might have dreamed of; you know, the Abdul-like kind of treasure trove that opens to ‘Sesame!’ against the poor resources of her shop-keeper mother. Who really knows how she ended up in Kano?! For all we know, she might have been lured by the beauty in the simplicity of saying ‘Sesame!’ to open the treasure troves to meet all her needs, who knows? Who really knows what is going on in the mind of a thirteen year-old girl?! For now, we can only hope that all the questions that will keep the country quiet will be answered soon by time. I can’t trust any of the parties in this matter to do that.

In the meantime, I think it behoves us as parents of teenagers and other young ‘uns to learn to become mind readers fast, fast. This is because too many things are going on in their heads, and you need to be able to predict which thought will dominate and become ideological. As parents, believe me, you want to be able to hold and call the spades. You need to be one step ahead of your young one. You want to hold the element of surprise in your hands so you can control its use. This is as good as saying you should not let your ward control the element of surprise so that you don’t get this kind of run around that the country is agonising through. Good luck to us all.

March 6, 2016
Keep Lagos safe and peaceful

Just last week, I wrote about how Lagos under the administration of Governor Akinwunmi Ambode can be said to be working very well.

In less than a year of taking over from his predecessor, Mr Raji Fashola, whose accomplishments remain a reference point among his colleagues, Ambode has not only sustained the tempo of performance, but seems determined to surpass Fashola’s.

The response I got to my last week’s write-up confirmed that many initially had doubts about Ambode’s ability to live up to expectations, but his performance so far gives a lot of hope that the state is set for yet another glorious era.

Two incidents last week, the kidnapping of three students of the Babington Macaulay Junior Seminary School in Ikorodu and the ethnic clash that led to the closure of the Mile 12 Market in Ketu are very unfortunate and must be dealt with decisively.

The kidnapping of the girls in a manner similar to that of the Chibok girls who are yet to be found, is very frightening and is capable of putting a doubt on the safety of school children in the state.

Governor Ambode is known to accord safety a high priority judging by the huge amount recently committed to equipping the police command and other security agencies in the state.

Everything possible must be done to ensure that the girls are rescued alive urgently as promised by the governor. There are reports of the kidnappers demanding for ransom and whatever negotiation is going on must be handled carefully.

There is need to crack this case and get to the root of the matter before kidnappers of school children start having a field day in the state. While waiting for the girls to be rescued, school authorities must step up their security. Movement of school buses, pupils and students must be monitored.

The Mile 12 incident should also be properly resolved to prevent a recurrence as the warring groups seem determined to continue to confront themselves in retaliation for their losses.

The swift intervention of the Rapid Response Squad of the police command and the military saved the day in what could have been one of the bloodiest ethnic clashes in the state.

The closure of the market and restriction of movements in the affected streets are in order and must be enforced until peace can be guaranteed in the community.

Ordinarily, the clash said to have been triggered off by an attack on a motorcyclist should not have been enough to lead to the kind of bloody incident recorded last Monday but for the tension which must have been building up between the Yoruba and the Hausa community for whatever reasons.

As Governor Ambode rightly noted, ethnic clashes, usually hijacked by miscreants, are not unusual in a multi-ethnic city like Lagos, but more than ever before, law and order should be enforced in every community.

My worry when I heard of the Mile 12 incident was that it could spread to other parts of the state where Yorubas and Hausas are known to be managing to live in peace despite occasional disagreements. Thankfully it has not and I pray it doesn’t.

Despite the state government efforts to regulate the operation of motorcyclists, the rate at which the crowd of obviously unlicensed Hausa riders, who can barely communicate with their passengers, is growing in New Oko Oba area, is worrisome.

I won’t be surprised if what led to the clash in Ketu triggers off a similar confrontation in New Oko Oba based on the reckless driving one witnesses daily in the Abbatoir area. A stitch in time saves nine.

To keep Lagos safe and peaceful is a task that must be done. Governor Ambode over to you.

March 6, 2016
Change, change, change! – top-down and/or bottom-up? (3)

I start this final piece in the series that began two weeks ago in this column with a great emphasis on what I call the limits of journalistic punditry with regard to this column itself and all newspaper and newsmagazine columnists in Nigeria at the present time. We are all pundits, all of us of the clan of columnists that populate the dozens of newspapers and newsmagazines in circulation in our country. I think that on the whole and everything considered, the emergence and rise to high public visibility of journalistic punditry has been one of the most significant cultural and intellectual developments in Nigeria in at least the last two decades. For it is a very salutary cultural phenomenon that hundreds of thousands of literate Nigerians are avid readers of the opinions, analyses and reflections of columnists. This is because the historic moment of the vitality of the town or village square is gone, perhaps forever, at least with regard to the significance of the constituted public sphere of the national community. To express this observation in concrete terms, I for one as a columnist am immensely encouraged by the fact that people read what I have to say in virtually all parts of the country. Moreover, via the internet, this extends to the global community of Nigerians in the diasporas of Europe and the Americas. But notwithstanding this undoubted impact of columnists in the political and intellectual domains of our collective experience as a nation, I return to what I stated at the beginning of this opening paragraph: the limits of journalistic punditry. What does this mean and how does it relate to the issue that I have been discussing in this series?

I shall be very succinct in my response to this question. Almost without exception, most newspaper and newsmagazine columnists – the commentariat – nurse the illusion that what they/we write collectively has a decisive role to play in the fate of the nation, especially with regard to the terrible condition of the masses of the poor and the underprivileged in our country. But this is simply not true; more to the point, it is delusory. Nothing illustrates this claim more than the war on corruption in high places in our country. For at least two decades now, we, the columnists, have been railing ceaselessly and tirelessly against corruption. This started long before the current phase of the war in Buhari’s administration, a phase in which the commentariat has exponentially stepped up its verbal attacks on looters and looting. For nearly two decades, corruption was completely undaunted by our salvoes. And now in the current phase of the war, corruption is striking back; it is fighting hard and seemingly effectively too, in the law courts and in the federal civil administration. If it is the case that we shall not and must not stop waging a verbal war against the looters and their allies, we must at least pause to reflect on this unquestionable limit to what we can hope to achieve. To put this in stark and admittedly rather oversimplified terms, it is time for us to come to the realization that the war against corruption will ultimately not be won in the pages of newspapers and newsmagazines.

Let me rephrase that last sentence: We can hope to have an effective impact on the war on corruption only if what we write as pundits move the masses to act, to intervene – in the war against corruption and in the many other spheres of political and economic affairs that are badly in need of change and reform in our country at the present time. I place emphasis on this issue because it is a very notable and perhaps even defining view of journalistic punditry in our country that all that needs to be done is to write well, to write eloquently and all else shall fall into place. This may be true in those very limited and narrow circumstances in which calls are made to reverse a specific act or policy of the president, a governor, a federal minister, a local government chairman. But on far weightier and consequential issues like the war on corruption or redistributive justice in our country, if what we write as columnists do not move the masses of Nigerians to act, to intervene, then regardless of the vigour or eloquence of our writings, nothing significant will happen.

At this point in the discussion, it is perhaps necessary for me to specify what I mean by the term, “the masses”, together with precisely what sorts of action and intervention I have in mind.In its most widely understood connotation, the term, implies, rather undifferentiatedly, the bottom layers of the socio-economic order, the truly disadvantaged, “the wretched of the earth”, in Frantz Fanon’s celebrated coinage. I admit that in general, this is what the term, “Talakawa”, in the title of this column implies. However, when the term is politicized with expectations of radical possibilities, mass action or intervention applies to any phenomenon that powerfully advances the interests, the collective cause of the truly disadvantaged of any society. Let me put this in simple, concrete language: an action, an intervention by even as few as two or three people that sparks the imagination and interest of the Talakawa in their millions is a mass action, a mass intervention. This is not to deny the fact that throughout history, the most powerful and consequential acts of the masses take place when sizeable proportions of the poor and the underprivileged march, protest, demonstrate or act in their own interests: Soweto; Mao’s Long March; Martin Luther King and the March on Washington; the innumerable occasions when our own departed and sorely missed Labour Leader Number One, Pa Michael AthokhamienImoudu, led thousands of workers and the unemployed against the injustices of both colonial and post-independent governments of our country.

So while not ruling out the possibility, the necessity even of the masses of Nigerians to act decisively across the boundaries of region, ethnicity and religion that are often used to divide them, we end this series with a profile of the sorts of actions and interventions that might serve to advance the cause of the masses, even if they are undertaken by a few people, by a segment of the society, by a band of committed patriots, by a network of professional associations, and by a phalanx of civil society organizations and NGO’s with genuine credentials as honest and dedicated activists.This is in fact what the well-known phrase, “two or three people can change the world” means.

Think, compatriots: the war against corruption and the looters in the law courts will get a tremendous boost if, for instance, the few SANs who have spoken out eloquently against the collusion of influential members of the Bar and the Bench with the looters launch a series of well publicized public forums or “town hall” discussions with diverse segments of the Nigerian society: workers on the shop or factory floor; university students in their dining halls or soccer stadiums; congregations of faith communities of Moslems and Christians in their places of worship; market women and male and female petty traders in the capacious spaces of our volatile open-air markets; even primary school pupils in their playing grounds. In such widely publicized conversations, the obstacles that the looters and their allies are placing in the path of the battle against corruption will be clearly identified and discussed. Needless to say, there will be no need in such forums to mention or publicize the names of the prominent legal backers of the looters, for this will be credibly subjected to the charge of “trial by the mob”. Rather, the judicial blockages to the war against corruption will be identified and x-rayed as first and foremost a process which is manipulated by individuals. Destroy or cripple the process and you incapacitate the individuals who manipulate the process. Apart from taking the battle in the law courts directly to the people, these forums will serve as immensely useful teachable exercises that will give the masses of our peoples a sophisticated understanding of how the process now works against their interests but can and should be made to work in the interest of all.

Think again, compatriots: beyond the specific and currently very pressing battle against corruption in the law courts, almost all areas of our completely run down, dysfunctional and hugely unjust economic and political affairs can in the same manner bedirectly taken by a few people and organizations, acting alone or in collaboration with others, to the people across the length and breadth of the country. I give just a few examples of some of the most crucial crises of accountability, waste, injustice and insecurity in our country: the jumbo salaries, allowances and perquisites of our lawmakers and high public officeholders; the yawning gap between what is spent on maintaining the bloated bureaucracies of our federal, state and local governments and what remains for expenditure on capital projects to expand opportunities for gainful employment, especially for our youths; the terrible state of our physical infrastructures, especially the roads, highways, power generation and supply, public hospitals, clinics and dispensaries; the banking system and the terribly skewed nature of credits and loans to the rich and the powerful as compared with the poor and the powerfulness in their millions.

As is well known, in one way or another, in “peoples’ parliaments” on radio and in “molues”, “danfos”, “maruwas” and “tuke-tukes”, Nigerians of all classes talk endlessly about these crises. The point being made here is that it is one thing to talk forever and despairingly about these crises, it is another thing entirely to launch public forums about them that lay bare to the people how they are manipulated by our political elites, and how it is in everybody’s interest to find ways to end the crises. Indeed, it is of supreme importance to emphasize thatcritical understanding of how our crises can be resolved should become common knowledge to the masses. Armed with such understanding, we write endlessly on these issues in our columns; it is time to take such understanding directly to the people.

I end with only a partial list of cultural and pedagogical instruments that can be mobilized to make these radical public forums very lively and even entertaining to the masses of our peoples: musical performances by iconic figures as a backdrop for, say, a forum for stopping the “ilabe” of the lawmakers; drama sketches to augment forums on the judicial hideouts of the looters; specially commissioned short cinematic docu-dramas on why Nigeria has never exceeded 5000 megawatts of electrical power production in a country of about 180 million; traditional musicians, dancers and acrobats performing in open air markets as both prelude and closing frame for a public forum on how a country as rich in wealth and resources as Nigeria is filled with such unbelievable levels of poverty, suffering and hardship. This all amounts to a peaceful “revolutionary” process; whoever prevents peaceful means of attaining social justice makes the violent, traumatic alternatives that much more probable, alas.

Biodun Jeyifo bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

March 6, 2016