The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sunday

  • The global economy – The weakening tide

    The global economy – The weakening tide

    Woe to the player who takes to the field after the final score has been written

    The economy is a game that is not a game. It is a matter of numbers and competition wherenumerical figures are more than mathematic abstractions; they speak of the real lives of flesh and bone human beings. Competition is all about, ceaseless and unrelenting. Much of it is unfair, its results mostly precooked if not preordained. The largest teams select and arrange the field of play, keep score, and amend the rules during the game as they see fit. Initial advantage is made compound and then turned perpetual. An initial disadvantage multiplies itself to become permanent setback. As things are, affluence begets affluence; poverty begets poverty.

    The current structure of the global economy tends to exacerbate not alleviate disparity. The game is less than a game because weaker nations have not a fair chance to win. Even when they gain, their gain is never sufficient to close the gap between them and the affluent. When they lose, they lose in chunks much bigger than the piecemeal benefits earlier attained.

    That the wealthy control the game does not mean they always win as they would like. This is because the game is more intricate than human mental processes. The economy is too complex to outthink and completely master. It can only be guessed at and approximated. Moreover, this is a game where avarice often supplants skill and greed exceeds acumen. The affluent may overshoot their mark by overestimating their ability to control the uncontrollable complexity. Sometimes, events take place none could foresee and the consequences thereof none could prevent.

    Yet, even when they guess or guide wrongly, the big dogs remain atop. They may lose or not profit optimally. The affluent derive their solace knowing that if they are at a loss, poorer nations and people have lost even more.  This is the turn that the global economy is currently taking.  It has entered a period where all may be losing; however, the losses of the poor damage them much more than wealthy’s losses hurt them.

    The global economy partially recovered from the 2009 financial crisis but was never rehabilitated or restructured to prevent a similar event. Today, the world economy now tailspins because it refused to break old habits. This current downturn will not erupt into the major calamity that was the 2009 breakdown. However, the current slowdown will be painful to many nations, including Nigeria.

    Moreover, it is a warning that something more bleakly profound could be in the offing if the game continues to be played as it is.  This warning will be ignored by all save a small few. Sadly, today’s stumble will likely be an insufficient alert for the world to protect itself from itself and a greater fall. That the world will recover from this brief clip will boost the confidence of those at the helm who have but scant knowledge of what they are doing.  They will act even bolder; their ignorant boldness will push the economy into the realm of deeper risk and a plunge that may rival the 2009 meltdown. Fortunately, that major global major meltdown lies sometime in the future. Sadly, that future may be less than a decade away.

    While today the international economy may not be suffering a major slump, it undergoes a painful slowdown. Aggregate demand is weak throughout the world.  America, the world’s largest economy, has experienced modest growth but of an uneven, unsustainable variety. Due to loose monetary policy, money has flowed to the rich who used the influx to purchase financial assets not invest or spend in the real economy. This dynamic elevated financial asset prices and fueled the excessive speculation in commodities that has helped lead to the current downspin.

    America’s economic growth has been one of the affluent class enjoying an appreciation of their assets. However, wages for the majority of Americans have stagnated since the 2009 recession. Thus, they do not have enough new spending power to fuel a robust recovery of the productive economy. Although the American government fortunately did not indulge in fiscal austerity during the last few years, it also did not undertake a fiscal stimuli of the dimensions needed to jumpstart the economy.

    The European economy has fared worst. With governments chaining themselves to the burning pyre of austerity, the Eurozone has languished in or near recession the past five years. The two main drivers of global consumer demand – America and Europe – have tapered.  Tapering of these economies has undermined the export-driven model of the Chinese economy. The dominoes have started to fall.

    China’s unprecedented growth was built on a neo-mercantile strategy of exporting manufactured goods and suppressing local demand for those goods as well as for imports. This export model worked well until the economies of the North Atlantic went tepid under cataracts of private sector and household debt. The Chinese were slow to recognize the changed environment.  They continued to pump too much investment into manufacturing, real estate and construction. The government also encouraged investment in the stock market. As a result, the market mushroomed by over 250 percent from mid-2014 to mid-2015. This steep growth ran contrary to underlying economic reality. Both the world and Chinese economies were slowing. This climb of stock valuations was nothing more than an exercise in mass irrationality, a classic bubble. It busted.

    While all this was happening, the Chinese government took modest steps to boost internal consumer demand to compensate for slack external demand. These steps were too small and came too late. China had erred into overreliance on an economic model that needed readjustment and had engaged in overinvestment in manufacturing and related sectors.

    The slowdown of the Chinese economy and crash of its stock market would cascade globally.

    The damage to the Chinese economic model would spread damage to those nations and other economic actors that relied on the Chinese model if not directly relied on the Chinese economy itself.  These nations had gotten used to high commodity prices, mainly driven by China’s appetite for commodities, including oil, to fuel its manufacturing sector. Nigeria and other African commodity producers have been scarred by their unwitting reliance on the durability of this neo-mercantilist model. Until the last half of 2014, Nigeria enjoined the flush of currency caused by high oil prices exceeding $100 per barrel.  It was thought that the price level would be sustained as the world economy put more distance between it and the 2009 recession.

    But the economy does not always travel in straight lines. Like the world itself, sometimes the economy rotates. Moving in an erratic circular fashion, the economy often returns to where it has been without most people understanding that they have been there before and would not have returned but for the arrogance of those who deem themselves the masters of world and all that is of economic worth.

    Thus, Nigeria and other African nations allowed themselves to become too reliant on the economic prowess of the Chinese to sustain their economic model. This in turn made Nigeria and other nations dependent on the spending patterns and debt levels of the American consumer. As always, Nigeria’s economic fate would be decided in locations thousands of miles from its shores and by people with only a passing idea of where Nigeria is located.

    Other important factors compounded this process. Technology even conspired against the nation. America was able to commercialized the ability to extract oil from shale rock formations. With this development, America quickly ended its tryst with Nigerian crude. With both China and America looking for less oil, global demand grew slack. However, Saudi Arabia refused to reduce production. Despite the short-term injury to its economy, the Saudis appear to be chasing a political objective of which Nigeria seems painfully unaware. Saudi Arabia wants to retain market share by keeping prices down so that American fracking becomes unprofitable and Russian production is also brought to heel.  Saudis understand that market share gives it global political clout otherwise unavailing.

    The Saudis also want to revamp or scuttle OPEC so that it can claim greater leadership. The Saudis believe OPEC has become unwieldly and leadership too diffuse within the organization to suit Saudi national interests. Thus, while Nigeria prays for higher prices, the Saudis work the opposite side of the street.

    This latest downturn is another warning that Nigeria and other African commodity producers need to revamp their economic strategies. African nations have been too easily lulled into a false euphoria when commodity prices rise, only to go into a recessionary swoon when the prices collapse. The worst part is that African nations have little influence over price trends. They remain at the mercy of economy forces they cannot command.

    The truth is that the rise in commodity prices witness the past few years was the yield of speculative impulses fueled by lax American monetary policy. Lax monetary policy put money in the hands of affluent investors. After the real-estate driven 2009 recession, they were reluctant to sink too much money too fast back into the real estate market. They turned to commodities. Speculation in commodity markets approached historic levels.  This helped pump prices higher. But this speculation became divorced from economic fundamentals over time. A contraction was inevitable. The inevitable is now here.

    Oil prices are half of last year’s. Given the sluggishness of the global economy and America’s embrace of fracking, this modesty of oil prices promises to last for some time. The Nigerian economy has already felt the severe sting. Their federal allocations reduced, state governments were unable to pay salaries or service their debts. The naira has devalued. Import prices have climbed. Economic activity has slowed. Hot money invested in the stock market has fled back to America or Europe, causing the stock market to jettison significant value. The banking system is not as strong as it portrays itself.

    Nigeria faces an economic challenge that, because of secular changes in the international oil market, may be more momentous than the 2009 downturn. Nigeria weathered the prior downturn with emergency measures such as establishing AMCON to salvage the financial sector. However, the nation did not restructure the economy.

    The warning and challenge are here again. This downturn shows that reliance on oil revenues is becoming an increasingly uncertain risk with returns diminishing after each successive economic crisis.

    Nigeria has a fateful choice. Does it crawl into a recessionary ball and seek to outwait the storm of economic reduction or does it take fiscal measures to avert the worst of recession’s consequences?  The braver and more logical course is to engage in fiscal activity to bolster the real economy by funding projects that will put the able jobless to work in rebuilding critical infrastructure so that business activity is made more efficient and less costly.  If this mode is chosen, it should not be just as a temporary emergency measure to bridge the gap between boom periods in commodity prices.

    These measures should be part of a larger-term plan to transform Nigeria into a nation with a manufacturing and industrial sector that services domestic as well as export demand. There is a psychological component to this. Historic incident lulled Nigeria into falsely believing it held a secured place in the global economy. For a long period of time, it had oil for which the world was willing to pay a high price. This convinced the nation that the world would buy whatever Nigeria had to sell. Nigeria was needed.

    However, technology and the geo-political considerations of others have dashed this false comfort. Nigeria now has to learn that it must make itself needed. This comes not by what Nigeria can pull from underground but by what it can fashion with its hands and ingenuity. Nigeria must alter its economic mind to see that prosperity does not lie in simply selling what it might have by reason of geographic incident. Prosperity is found in making and selling what the world is willing to pay the seller’s price for.

    This is the challenge of Nigeria today. In the midst of economic challenge will the nation undertake the steps required to begin the structural reform needed to transform the economy into what the present and future requires?Or will it stay mired in the past and succumb to the reduced future that awaits all nations that fall to realize the diminishing value of their once precious chief commodity? The decision is nigh and so much is at stake.

     

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  • The Sagay committee

    The Sagay committee

    A pragmatic approach to crack corruption

    President Muhammadu Buhari moved another step further in his government’s anti-corruption war with the constitution of the Presidential Advisory Committee against Corruption, headed by a prominent professor of law and civil rights activist, Prof Itse Sagay. Femi Adesina, the president’s special adviser on media and publicity, said the committee’s brief is to advise the government on the prosecution of the war against corruption as well as the implementation of required reforms in the country’s criminal justice system.

    Other members of the committee are Prof Femi Odekunle, a professor of criminology at the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria; Dr (Mrs.) Benedicta Daudu, an associate professor of international law, University of Jos (UNIJOS); Prof E. Alemika, professor of sociology also of UNIJOS. Others are Prof Sadiq Radda, professor of criminology, Bayero University, Kano; Hadiza Bala Usman, a civil society activist while Prof Bolaji Owasanoye of the Nigerian Institute of Advanced Legal Studies would serve both as member and executive secretary of the committee.

    One area of the committee’s brief that interests me is that having to do with the reform of the country’s criminal justice system. Without doubt, unless something drastic is done about this, we would only be moving in circles on the anti-corruption war. As things stand, our criminal justice system appears inadequate to tame the corruption monster. Where it is not, some judges have made a mess of it in a way that gives criminals and the criminally-minded undue protection.

    The celebrated Halliburton scam is a case study. This is a scandal that allegedly involves several prominent Nigerians, including former heads of state. As a matter of fact, this seems the very reason why we are making progress in reverse on the matter. Today, the case is ordered reopened; tomorrow it is ordered closed. So, we have been going back and forth on a matter for which some of our big people should have been left to rot in jail as a result of their involvement in the $182m bribery scandal. The latest information is that the United States is insisting that the case be reopened for it to return the $130m in its coffers to the Federal Government.

    Without doubt, the judiciary has been complicit in some of the corruption cases such that it is even possible to smell a rat in some of the decisions taken on some of them. Of course judges are also part of the society; and may not necessarily be immune to what obtains in the society. But then, it is because we hardly punish corruption, especially at the top. If we do, judges who hawk injunctions would think twice before doing so. Imagine the last time, shortly before the general elections when the chief justice warned judges against unethical practices, the warning sank and that was part of what ensured the sanity witnessed in our courts in many of the cases brought by politicians, with many of them ready to bribe God if he would make himself available to be bribed.

    It is only in this country that people who are to be investigated for corruption would rush to court and ask for injunction not to be investigated and the court would grant the injunction. This is one of the few countries where the courts would waste a lot of time trying to decide whether James Ibori and James Onanefe Ibori are one and the same person, even as the substantive matter is yet to be heard.

    The point is, for the country to make progress in its anti-corruption battle, the government has to be systematic in its approach. Otherwise, those who looted our treasury would continue to flaunt the ill-gotten wealth to our chagrin and nothing can be more disheartening than that for victims of treasury looting. I could feel the tears welled up in the eyes of one of my readers a few weeks ago when he sent an sms concerning a particular oil baron in the eastern part of the country who still goes about with a retinue of official security men, with siren to boot, even when we all know the damage he has done to the nation through fuel subsidy racket and other scams. Hopefully, President Muhammadu Buhari’s directive that security men attached to important personalities be pruned will reflect on the number of security details protecting this oil baron. I can only imagine the millions of other Nigerians who are weeping silently over similar unfair and unjust protection of treasury looters.

    Apart from systematically approaching the issue for maximum benefit, there is also the need to reinvigorate the anti-corruption agencies. The way they sometimes lose important cases in the courts seems to show that they lack the requisite professional expertise to successfully prosecute especially high profile cases. And it is some of these big fishes that we need as scapegoats to show the government’s seriousness in this matter and drive home the point that, truly, no one is above the law. That is not the case for now as these big people often buy justice and only get a slap on the wrist for serious crimes committed against the state.

    The courts too must be strengthened with the needed modern facilities provided to assist them in the administration of justice. Moreover, judges found wanting, especially with regard to corruption should not only be retired, they should also be made to face the law. There is a lot to do if the country is to make any serious dent on corruption.

    All said, however, given the credentials of most members of the committee, there is no doubt that they have the essentials to make a success of their assignment. The chairman is himself a man of proven integrity, and one who should know where the judiciary is being abused to miscarry or delay justice.

    President Buhari must realise that his integrity is at stake in this matter. Indeed, it is this question of integrity that has made three influential international development partners, the Ford foundation, MacArthur Foundation and Open Society Foundation to establish an Anti-Corruption and Criminal Justice Reform Fund with $5m to assist in the implementation of key components of the Action Plan and the work of the Presidential Advisory Committee. The government must realise that this is an unusual partnership and must therefore strive to ensure there are results. It is doubtful if any international organisation could have extended such assistance to the immediate past Federal Government to tackle corruption. On their part, the committee members must realise that all eyes are on them to see what they would make of the assignment.

    My daddy is gone!

    Finally, my dad died on August 11, after battling with death for about one week. It was exactly eight days to his 80th birthday. He took ill on August 5, was rushed to a hospital, appeared to have recovered and was returned home, only to be taken back to the hospital the next day when the sickness relapsed. In our efforts to get him better medical care, we changed his hospital. But death, that necessary end that will certainly come when it will, according to Shakespeare, came and snatched him away at about evening on August 11.

    For the benefit of readers who had been wondering why this column had been off in the last two weeks; this explains it all. I spent the first week trying to assist so that the old man could make it, and the next, when he didn’t, trying to recover from the shock. What could have come as an 80th birthday present by way of celebrating him on this same page would be published shortly before his burial. My only regret is that he is no more alive to read or feel it.

    I say thank you to all those who have been calling to commiserate with me. It was an experience indeed.

  • Derailing of Nigeria: the smaller picture (1)

    Derailing of Nigeria: the smaller picture (1)

    Four years may be too short for Buhari to take a holistic view of the phenomenon of corruption in a country whose structure and ideology for decades had grown out of the vision of rulers who believed in the philosophy that political power is for personal enrichment

    There has to be a general recognition that this crisis (corruption) is moral as well as economic. It is, indeed, a perfect illustration of the economics of morality—the absence of a sense of propriety, of restraint and of right and wrong, was not just obnoxious, it was economically disastrous. —Fintan O’Toole

    The quotation from Fintan O’Toole’s Ship of Fools, a discussion of the role of corruption in Ireland’s economic meltdown of 2008, is deliberately chosen to get readers thinking about Nigeria’s economic collapse, now slated for rehabilitation under the Buhari administration, after decades of massive kleptocracy in the land. Just judging by the headlines so far, there is no doubt that President Buhari, who campaigned on the promise to end insecurity and corruption, two conditions that Sarah Chayes in her 2015 book, Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security has described as relations, has identified some of the visible forces of venality in the country. President Buhari’s focus so far has been on the bigger picture. Today’s column is meant to remind him of the smaller picture of corruption which is by no means less venal than corrupt practices at the hands of oil thieves or treasury looters.

    Four years may be too short for Buhari to take a holistic view of the phenomenon of corruption in a country whose structure and ideology for decades had grown out of the vision of rulers who believed in the philosophy that political power is for personal enrichment. President Buhari cannot be unfamiliar with the surge of centralism in the country. He had been a military ruler during the decades to de-federalising the country, which started with the 1979 Constitution and seems to have gotten to a head in the 1999 Constitution, which the president has sworn to uphold and defend.

    There will be plenty of time to talk about the role of over-centralisation of the polity and economy in the monstrous growth of corruption in the country. The emphasis today is on sections of the nation’s security and law enforcement systems that citizens have seen as synonymous with corruption. Most of the corrupt characters in this sector do not steal money from the nation’s treasury or central bank; they do not engage in illegal bunkering, over-invoicing, and contract abandonment. They simply prey on citizens, especially those that are most vulnerable. However, they occasionally prey on the big men and women in society who need their assistance to do the wrong thing.

    Knowledge of the folks about corruption in the law enforcement sector is within reach of any Nigerian who cares about morality in government. The central or national police has been a beehive of corruption for a long time, including the era of military dictatorship. Police assigned to secure the roads—urban streets or interstate highways—are notorious for turning their beats into sites for extorting citizens. The regular dialogue between Nigeria police officers and citizens are “whey your papers? Whey your licence? Wetin you carry? Wetin you bring or have for us today?” At the end of the short dialogue, the average citizen stopped by police loses a little of his/her hard-earned income to law enforcement officers on government payroll. If the citizen who is stopped on the highway has the look of a big-man, he gets a little more respect as law enforcement officers ask him obsequiously: “What do you have for your boys today sir?”The big man responds to them as boys by throwing some naira notes on the ground for them to pick.

    Police men are also known for locking citizens up in order to extort money from them. Just last week, a woman with some disagreement with her neighbour in a section of Egbeda found herself in police cell after her neighbour reported her to one of his own police friends for packing one of his bags along with hers at the close of market. The woman was in police cell for hours until she was able to get her own big man to read the riot act to the police or to bribe the police more generously than the first complainant.

    The culture of extorting citizens in the course of law enforcement and crime prevention is not limited to the national police. It is also evident in the circles of Federal Road Safety Commission and Vehicle Inspection Officers. An agency set up to protect lives on federal highways is now in the habit of sending its staff to nooks and corners of streets without names in urban areas, where they collect unofficial tolls from motorists. Those who act with generosity are allowed to go regardless of what violation they have committed while those who are stingy or too poor to give anything end up being asked to pay official fines. Even at places where driver’s licence is issued, the same agency insists that applicants for licence produce evidence of driver education from specific driver education centres. Most of the time, citizens are sold such certificates of attendance or completion of driving rules and regulations for 3,000 naira each. Driver’s licence issuing stations create other obstacle courses that pressure citizens to pay for accelerated service and save them from going back and forth.

    Similarly, Vehicle Inspection Officers are in the habit of stopping motorists arbitrarily and asking some of them to get in to VIO’s cars, ostensibly to drive them to VIO’s stations but in reality to make it easy for such citizens to give  uniformed officers “something for the road.’ Just as in the case of the police, no law is enforced most of the time. Such stops on roadways and highways and last-minute negotiations in front of court houses are designed as obstacle courses to extort money from vulnerable motorists. Even military checkpoints on interstate highways also become a market for exchange of money between motorists and military personnel deployed to highways to prevent transportation of materials that can be used to compromise the country’s security.

    The recent news published in The Punch about the ping-pong of denials about the whereabouts of the final report of police investigation into allegation that rules of the Senate on election of officers were forged is, if true, an example of law enforcement personnel taking advantage of a bad situation. How else does anyone explain that even after the vision of Buhari about fighting corruption is already common knowledge, staff in the police and the ministry of justice are still brave enough to argue about a simple matter in a manner reminiscent of impunity under past administrations. What more embarrassment can two agencies charged with the rule of law give a country over such a simple matter to resolve?

    How far is the police headquarters in Abuja from the Ministry of Justice for a report sent from the former to the latter to have miscarried? What mode of transportation did the police use to send the report in an age where offices in different countries are linked by the Internet? If the report was carried from the police headquarters to the justice ministry by hand, what is the identity of the police man or woman charged with this important function? Is there just one copy of such report with the police? If not, there is no reason for the media to lose its expensive space to such story. All that a credible law enforcement system should do to save the country from this shame is to take another copy of the report to the ministry and ensure it is signed for by the staff at the receiving end.

    Most of the things in today’s column should be repetition to most people who live in the country. It is clear that they are to President Buhari who recently warned the police not to collect bribe in the process of recruiting 10,000 officers. The Immigration Service had done taken illegal collections from applicants for jobs and endangered their lives in the past without any reprimand. But the purpose of repeating these clichéd anecdotes about our country is to remind President Buhari that the fight against the culture of corruption, which could become the factory of perdition for the country if not arrested, must not be stopped at the doors of ministries and agencies in charge of oil and gas. Corrupt practices that can shake the confidence of citizens in government and even lead them to the hopelessness that precedes resort to violence against the state or its agencies, such as we are now witnessing in Boko Haram’s rebellion against the state, are rife in the most unlikely places: the nation’s security systems.

    To be continued

  • Buhari faces dilemma in anti-corruption war

    Buhari faces dilemma in anti-corruption war

    President Muhammadu Buhari must be gradually facing up to the reality and complexity of ruling a country in a democracy, where things are not always what they seem. If he thought he had the liberty and exclusive right to circumscribe the boundaries of his war on corruption, he must by now be coming to terms with how grossly mistaken he is. It is no secret that Nigerians appear to be enjoying daily breaking news on the astounding sleaze that went on under the Goodluck Jonathan government. Indeed, already, some of the looted funds are being recovered or surrendered. In consequence too, reputations are being shredded, especially that of the opposition party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), and its backers and leaders.

    Those opposed to President Buhari’s anti-corruption war, or who oppose his methods, are beginning to fight back. They are presenting the president with a number of moral dilemmas. First, they suggest that the president has no moral, political or constitutional defence to limit the war to only his predecessor’s time in office, as he stated before assuming office and has reiterated since he assumed office. He should extend the probes farther down the line. Second, they also argue that those who financed his election did not use their personal funds but public funds, and must therefore be investigated as well.

    The president’s opponents are clearly not making these arguments from altruistic or patriotic points of view. They are simply determined to stymie the anti-corruption war, or failing that, to make the sky fall on everybody’s head. If the president should heed the call to expand the investigations, he risks making it unwieldy and impracticable. But whether he likes it or not, he will not be able to convince his opponents that no APC state government deserves to be investigated. And if he continues to shun the calls to expand the investigations, the campaign will only grow more deafening, if not even threatening.

    The president made a mistake from the beginning by inadvertently allowing his anti-corruption campaign to be conducted with fanfare and extravagant flourish. He of course had no choice but to call the last government to account, but he is president, and should have anticipated the reactions of his opponents, many of whom for sentimental reasons are still smarting badly from the humiliation they received at the last polls.

    But is the president really able to control or limit the manner and circumstances of the investigations? Could he order the EFCC to limit its investigations? Or could he persuade the media to de-emphasise selected reports? The president clearly faces a dilemma. One way out, probably the best way out, is for him to give better and bigger meat to the public and the media to chew. (See main article). While he continues his anti-corruption battles, perhaps on as many fronts as he wishes, let him more importantly refocus the attention of the country to his main blueprints for the radical make-over of Nigeria, away from corruption and EFCC/ICPC, and to governance and ideas for rebuilding Nigeria in the 21st century and beyond, along the change paradigm his party promised before the 2015 polls.

  • In the war against corruption effective prosecutions not probes are the ultimate weapons (2)

    In the war against corruption effective prosecutions not probes are the ultimate weapons (2)

    As promised at the end of this column last week, this concluding essay in our series on effective prosecutions versus probes as weapons in the war against corruption in our country will focus on the Administration of Justice Act of 2015. Most Nigerians, including lawyers, seem either to be totally unaware of the existence of this Act or if they are aware of its existence, do not seem to have a grasp of what it would take to make it work. It was for these reasons that in my concluding remarks last week, I promised to bring a prominent member of the Bar to the conversation with a view to publicizing through this column, the difference that this Act could make in the fight against corruption in our society. The lawyer that I will bring into this conversation is none other than Femi Falana, SAN. I am sure most readers of this piece would agree that he needs no introduction other than the following: Femi Falana is Femi Falana! Before bringing him into the conversation directly through his responses to three questions that I posed to him, permit me in a few paragraphs to provide a historical and political context for the short interview with Falana.

    In a way, in our seemingly unending war against corruption, the coming to power of Buhari in 2015 is very much like the coming to power of Murtala Ramat Mohammed exactly forty years ago in 1975. Within weeks of coming to power, Mohammed instituted probes into corruption and malpractices in virtually all areas of public life in the country, with specific application to the government from which he took over, that of General Yakubu Gowon and the continuing influence and authority of Gowon’s appointees both at the federal and state levels. Buhari has also announced that his “probe” will be limited to the administration of his predecessor, Goodluck Jonathan. Though he is yet to actually and concretely “deliver”, Buhari, again like Mohammed before him, inspires great confidence in the generality of the Nigerian people that in this “war” he is serious, that he “means business”. Finally, almost in the same manner in which Mohammed did not spare members of his own “party” – the military – in his anti-corruption war, Buhari has also stated that no one would spared in the probe of the period of the Jonathan administration; he has promised that governors and public officeholders of all parties would be probed.

    However, having noted these similarities between the two men in the war against corruption, we must not be uncritical and too quick in coming to the apparent conclusions that these analogies between Mohammed and Buhari might seem to indicate. Mohammed went far beyond probes to both summary dismissals and criminal prosecutions of identified wrongdoers. It astonished Nigerians and the whole world that soldiers could deal with themselves in the war against corruption. Especially, it delighted Nigerians to be shown concretely that no one was so powerful, so “connected” that he or she could not be touched, could not be held accountable for looting government monies and public assets. Thus, the “essence” of Mohammed’s legacy is that probes are not enough; they must be backed with effective action; they must end with restitution for the wronged and deterring punishment for the wrongdoer. Mohammed made many mistakes and created many enemies for himself in that “war” (as he did in the civil war proper); but he was absolutely insistent that restitution and punishment must follow exposure of corrupt practices through probes.

    As a moral and practical benchmark for Buhari, Mohammed’s legacy in the war against corruption is a tough and complex act to follow. As a military ruler, Mohammed could make summary dismissals; Buhari, as an elected civilian president, cannot. Compared to its colossal scale now, corruption in the time of Mohammed was not unmanageable. That was why, in the criminal prosecution of named and identified wrongdoers, Mohammed did not have senior and distinguished lawyers and judges who use perpetual stay of proceedings to block successful prosecution of looters to contend with; Buhari does. Moreover, they constitute the cream of the Nigerian legal profession. What Buhari has that Mohammed did not have is the Administration of Justice Act of 2015 – if he and his administration, with massive support from the Nigerian public, can make it work. And on this note, we move to the short interview with Femi Falana.

    Question: What is “revolutionary” about this Act? What are its key provisions that everyone should know about?

    Falana: With regard to the specific issue of the war against corruption, the Act has far-reaching provisions that will make it impossible to unduly delay or permanently prolong the prosecution of criminal suspects. To ensure speedy trial, objections shall not be taken in criminal proceedings on the ground of an imperfect charge. All objections shall be considered along with the substantive issues at the time of delivery of judgment. An application for stay of proceedings pending appeal will not be entertained as the trial of the defendant shall proceed from day-to-day until conclusion. Where day-to-day trial is impracticable, no party shall be entitled to more than five adjournments provided that the interval between each adjournment shall not exceed 14 working days. The elevation of a high court judge to the Court of Appeal will not delay trial as the Judge shall have dispensation to continue to hear and conclude any part-heard criminal matter within a reasonable time.

    To really appreciate how far-reaching these provisions are, we have to go back to where and how frustration of successful prosecution of criminal cases against the rich and the powerful started. In Nigeria under colonial rule, trial by jury was part of the criminal justice system. By 1960 when Nigeria became independent that tradition was continued. Trial by jury was however stopped in 1975 on allegations of abuse of the procedure by many jurors. The impact of the abolition was not immediately felt as Nigeria was then under a military dictatorship which decreed that criminal offences be tried summarily by courts and tribunals.

    However, ultimately, the abolition of the jury system historically led to undue delay in criminal cases in the regular courts which also have to deal with many civil cases. The delay of criminal cases reached ridiculously high proportions in the year 2000 when suspects charged with corruption in the high courts had their trials stayed to await the decision of the Supreme Court in the case challenging the validity of the Independent and Corrupt Practices Offences Commission Act. Although the law was upheld by the Supreme Court, the trial of cases which had been suspended could not commence as fresh objections were filed by the defendants. That was how the procedural practice of suspending trials via stay of proceedings was smuggled into the Nigerian criminal judicial order, ultimately becoming perfected as a system.

     The system, the practice has since continued to the huge detriment of criminal justice in Nigeria. It is pertinent to note that the defence lawyers engaged by politically exposed persons and other members of the ruling class to manipulate the criminal justice system are senior lawyers. To show how pernicious the system has become, it is important to note that “fat cats” who could not be tried locally in Nigeria have been successfully prosecuted abroad. This has exposed the Nigerian criminal justice system to ridicule internationally.

    Beyond the specific issue of the war against corruption, the Administration of Criminal Justice Act, 2015 also has other far-reaching provisions that deal with justice and fairness in general to all accused persons, especially those who are too poor, too powerless to “buy” justice. It is important to note here that Nigerian prisons are full of thousands upon thousands of inmates who are “awaiting trial”. Under the new law a suspect is entitled to consult a lawyer of his/her choice or free legal representation by the Legal Aid Council of Nigeria before making a statement. Arrest of innocent persons in lieu of suspects or on a civil wrong or breach of contract is prohibited. To ensure that violence is not unleashed on suspects during interrogation and to avoid trial within trial, confessional statements of suspects shall be recorded electronically.

     An officer in charge of any detention facility shall report to the nearest Magistrate the cases of all suspects arrested without warrant within a month. The reports shall be forwarded to the Criminal Justice Monitoring Committee. All places of detention other than a prison shall be inspected at least once a month by a chief magistrate within a territorial jurisdiction. The Comptroller-General of Prisons shall make returns every 90 days to the head of the court in which the prison is situated and to the Attorney-General of the Federation of all persons awaiting trial beyond 180 days from the date of arraignment. The Nigeria Police Force shall have a Central Criminal Records Registry while the Attorney-General of the Federation shall establish an electronic and manual database of all records of arrests.

    Question: How was it possible to have this Act passed? Who were the major players in having it passed? How did they manage to succeed in having it passed?

    Falana: Well, the bill for this Act was submitted after Lagos State passed the Administration of Criminal Justice Law of 2007 upon which, as a matter if fact, this 2015 Act is based. The paths to the enactment of both Acts are rather circuitous. Following the conviction of Ex-Governor of Delta State, Chief James Ibori in London on the same charges for which he had been unsuccessfully prosecuted in Nigeria, together with the reckless grant of stay of proceedings in many corruption cases, the Human Rights community mounted great pressure on the National Assembly to pass the bill. It was passed and signed into law by President Jonathan on May 13, 2015. So in a way, the credit must go to the Human Rights community. Incidentally, the current Vice President, Professor Yemi Osinbajo, was the Attorney General of Lagos State who shepherded the passage from bill to law of the Administration of Criminal Justice Law of Lagos State 2007. We should hope that he will have a special interest in the success of the Administration of Justice Act of 2015 as a major weapon in Buhari’s war on corruption.

    Question: In what ways can the provisions of this Act be made widely known and enforced? Who will be the key players in this task?

    Falana: No doubt, the Administration of Justice Act, 2015 which came into force on May 13, 2015 is a revolutionary intervention in the criminal justice sector in Nigeria. To ensure the success of the law the federal government has to provide adequate funding for the justice sector. However, the Human Rights community should mobilize the Nigerian people’s support the enforcement of the provisions of the Act, with special regard to both the successful prosecution criminal suspects that have stolen government monies and assets and the defense of the rights of all suspects, poor and rich, guaranteed by the law.

    Biodun Jeyifo                                                                                             bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Obasanjo’s conceit

    Obasanjo’s conceit

    The retired general, two time Head of State – a third unconstitutional attempt failed spectacularly at the senate of the federal republic – should be humble enough to pray to God to remove conceit far away from him rather than continue to pull others down, even posthumously.

    Like him or hate him, the man, Olusegun Aremu Obasanjo, two-time Nigerian Head of State, is the ‘numero uno’ Nigerian statesman alive.

    Although he is as loved as he is hated, those who like him do so with a passion. Witness, for instance, this panegyric of a contribution by a forum member on  9 December, 2013  : “As far as Nigeria’s presidents, past and present are concerned,  none  could be called into OBJ’s peerage. Reading OBJ from a distance, as I do not know him personally, I believe he is head  and shoulders above all of them, civilian as well as military. He is intellectually sound and has a high capacity for understanding complex socio-political and economic issues. It doesn’t take him long to understand what the experts are explaining to him and can break it down into ordinary people’s language, and, in fact,  go ahead to  weave local proverbs around them. Being an engineer, he is easily at home with technical issues.

    He is a prudent, and wise man by all measures. He has grown into the class of sages. We should celebrate him and his accomplishments while still alive and  not wait to write funeral dirges about our own courageous, fearless and accomplished Chief Matthew Olusegun Aremu Obasanjo GCFR, former military head of state, two-term democratically elected president, retired army General, civil war hero, international diplomat, accomplished writer and author, committed Pan –Africanist; a leading light of the Yoruba race and  traditional chief of the Owu kingdom. I will leave writing about his excesses, foibles and faults to his close friends and detractors alike. I admire his tough guy persona.”

    There is little, if any at all, to dispute in the above, but it is somewhat disingenuous that the author preferred to inflict on Obasanjo’s friends, and foes alike, any mention of the man’s many stunts and excesses, not to talk of his outright dubiety. Although General Obasanjo’s name has become very popular, given his reported exploits during the Nigerian civil war,  6 July 1967 – 15 January 1970 – the reader is advised to read General Alabi-Isama’s:  ‘The Tragedy of Victory: On-the-spot Account of the Nigeria-Biafra War in the Atlantic Theatre’, for a more nuanced account of that – I came to know the general, close up,  a little later  through a senior colleague,  and  Estate Manager,  of the University of Ibadan  in the mid-70s whose views of  Obasanjo  unambiguously mirrored Mama Iyabo’s about her husband. From that point on, I came to pay more attention to news concerning General Obasanjo, either as military or civilian Head of state, as a distinguished diplomat with his views on African juju, whether in Abacha’s gulag, or visiting Ekiti dancing ‘omo o le jo baba’ during Ayo Fayose’s first coming,  and, seriously, up until  his PDP membership card was torn to pieces for him by proxy.

    As I write this, I have not stopped watching him, coyly scheming to play the baby feeder to President Buhari, albeit, from  behind the shadows.  Through all these, Chief Aremu Olusegun Obasanjo comes up, indisputably, as an enigma.

    He showed his hands again this past week on a matter so weighty my life teacher – my teacher in the secondary school, at the university and ever since –  a solid,  gracefully aging  intellectual,  a Nigerian senior citizen whose sole concern now is aggressively canvassing ways out of  Nigeria’s unfortunate circumstances – had to devote his entire column in The Nation of  Thursday, 20 August, 2015, to the latest of  Obasanjo’s  gaffes ; his ever ready predilection to shoot down anything that does not revolve around him or present him as the hero.

    Writing in an article he titled “Message to Obasanjo”, Gbogun Gboro began as follows: “I make it a point of duty to be respectful of President Olusegun Obasanjo, whether I happen to mention his name in public or in private. I am sure that is part of my respect for my country. For me, it is not a small thing that a person has once been

    head of the country of my birth.” Obviously, this intro would have  been non sequitor, if his subject was ever willing to extend the same measure of courtesies to others. Unfortunately, it would appear that Obasanjo considers extending respect to others as taking something away from his assumed self-importance.  The columnist then went on:

    “In the past few days, President Obasanjo has been widely reported to have made some thought-provoking statements about the issue of leadership in the Yoruba nation. I see no need to probe into his motives for making these statements – and I will not so probe, out of respect. Whether he is out to shoot barbs at some person or persons among the Yoruba people is not unimportant, but I choose not to step into such considerations. It is quite possible to look into the statements themselves on purely objective basis, and that is what I would rather do.”

    Unfortunately, the Yoruba say, if you do not tell an evil doer that he is wicked, he would most probably consider himself the best person ever. I therefore make bold to say that Obasanjo, by that statement, was aiming  at none other than the Avatar;  the man believed by most, Nigerians as well as foreigners, and with utmost justification, to be Nigeria’s greatest political visionary ever, the man Awo. Nor would that be Obasanjo’s first time of taking a dig at Awo. In one of his books, written about the time he became quite close to the likes of Professor Billy Dudley of the University of Ibadan, he had written that what Awo longed for, futilely all his life – the Nigerian presidency, that is – was handed to him on a platter. Obasanjo did not stop there. When, as President, he went after Afenifere, the highly regarded Pan-Yoruba organisation, and shredded it beyond recognition, putting in its place a formless Yoruba Council of Elders, it was intended to rubbish a man whose place in history is far beyond diminution.  When through all manner of subterfuge and dubiety, he literally killed off the Alliance for Democracy, with only the LagosState governor, Ashiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, being the sole surviving governor out of six, in a thoroughly rigged election, it was for no other reason than to submerge an imperishable name with the  hope of emerging primus inter pares, amongst Yoruba political leaders,  even though he should come far below in the pecking order.

    What then drives a man so truly blessed of God but who is forever looking for something? What exactly, like forever, puts him in a seeming competition with non-existent rivals?  It is that elusive thing that pushed him to inflict on Nigerians, a decent, but obviously sick Yar Adua and, subsequently, Goodluck Jonathan, a man, the consequences of whose incompetence, as we are getting to see daily, President Buhari is almost guaranteed to spend his entire first four years in office cleaning up. For things to be otherwise, it would mean that Saraki and his friends in the National Assembly, support the president by effecting appropriate amendments to our extant weak anti-corruption laws; which  weaknesses lawyers take undue advantage of to  make cases seemingly unending.

    Obasanjo makes so much of his belief in God that you would think he should have abandoned all these bush fires which can only end up diminishing him in the estimation of a citizenry which should, ordinarily, have nothing but the greatest respect and admiration for his services to Nigeria, warts and all.  I have heard many attribute not less than 70 percent of  Nigeria’s current woes  to him which is why it is befuddling reading him present, as he did in his recent interview with Mojeed, to be  the best thing  to have happened to Nigeria, ever.

    The retired general, two time Head of State – a third unconstitutional attempt failed spectacularly at the senate of the federal republic – should be humble enough to pray to God to remove conceit far away from him rather than continue to pull others down, even posthumously.

  • The trial of Bishop Kukah

    The trial of Bishop Kukah

    Poor Mathew Hassan Kukah! He has had it up to the nape of his cassocks. The torrents of abuse have now transformed into a tsunami of vilification. It was just as well that the week ended with the congregation of Catholic Bishops removing the ground from under Bishop Kukah by wholeheartedly supporting President Buhari’s anti-corruption hurricane.

    Never in Nigeria’s public history has a hitherto respected man of god tumbled so fast in public esteem. Never has a man so widely admired for his cutting intellect become a master of pompous equivocation and fatuous obfuscation. Never has the implacable Nigerian intellectual lynch mob been so fast and furious in dismembering and devouring its victim.

    It is a sad spectacle, and a consuming Nigerian tragedy to boot. Many of us who consider ourselves friends and admirers of the gutsy and cerebral Bishop of the Sokoto Catholic Diocese can only watch in pained silence as the man of god appears to unravel in a drama of self-demystification. But in revolutionary situations, everybody must answer their fathers’ name and one must be ready to drop a friend because of principles rather than drop principles because of a friend.

    These must be revolutionary times in Nigeria indeed. It is only in revolutionary times that people lose total respect for priestly cassocks and other symbols of traditional authority. It is only in revolutionary times that the sacred become desacralized in bitter profanity and people move from hero to zero. The man of the people becomes the enemy of the populace. The dark night does not recognize sacerdotal distinction.  As the mob brays in implacable distemper, the expiring ruling class that has held Nigeria hostage must note this development.

    Bishop Kukah’s superiors in the Nigerian Catholic nomenklatura  must be clicking their tongue in sagely relish. A child can have as many new clothes as an elder, but he can never have as many rags. Many of the superiors of the Sokoto Bishop must be rubbing their palms in smirking satisfaction. Only the barely discerning would not have noticed a certain froideur, a chilly discomfort among the Catholic hierarchs as Kukah rose to secular apotheosis as a liberating theologist and friend of the rich and powerful at the same time. As the Yoruba will put it, nobody must stop a youngster from climbing the hill of Langbodo.

    In retrospect, perhaps it will be said that the Sokoto bishop chose the wrong time to cross the Homeric frontline between the Nigerian powerful and the teeming powerless; and between whistle blowing against the powerful or becoming a loud and brash megaphone of its rearguard rally. Not even the most gifted and proficient trickster knows when the trick will fail, and in revolutionary situations one cannot be too careless in his choice of enemies.

    The last straw, it seems, is Kukah’s stirring at the behest of the controversial Peace Committee. Let it be bluntly and baldly stated that this committee is not about peace at all. It materialized as a last ditch ruling class initiative to force General Buhari to accept dishonorable defeat and hence to stave off the revolutionary turmoil and anarchy that would have accompanied electoral miscarriage. It is a wearisomely familiar Nigerian ploy to impose “peace” in the absence of social and political justice. But they misjudged the mood of the nation and the fact that Nigerians have had it with their ilk.

    Bar a few misguided ones who are glad to be dredged up from peat bog of political oblivion and the odd naïve do-gooders, most of our newly minted peaceniks are compromised scoundrels working for the old regime and traditional mischief-makers on a typical pay day. Available reports indicate that some of them were already privately gloating about the inevitability of a Jonathan victory. They came to bury Buhari and not to praise him. But it bombed spectacularly. Perhaps this is one of the “spectacular” things that Jonathan did which Kukah  referred to with deliberately oblique disingenuity.

    Having failed in their core mission, they have now transformed into a “peace” council to disturb the peace of the nation, and to stalemate the inevitable sanitization of the polity. They have gone about endlessly chattering about due process and the fact that this is a democracy and not a military order. One wonders how democracy and due process would have fared had they succeeded in suborning the sovereign electoral will of Nigerians.  Let this be the last time President Buhari will give them a decent hearing.

    Kukah’s attempt to defend the motive of the peace council has brought a gale of angry denunciations on the internet and social media with many of them charging the Catholic supremo with perfidy and betrayal. This columnist read about three hundred of these angry rebuttals and only a few were willing to stake their integrity on the integrity and honesty of the bishop. It was redolent of pent up fury and misgivings, as if they have been waiting for Kukah to cross the line.

    Kukah’s  attempt to correct a purportedly mischievous slant that gave the impression that the council went up to President Buhari to bargain for a soft landing for the disgraced and discredited Jonathan drew even more tempestuous  tirades. And then in the unkindest cut of all, a shadowy and hitherto unknown organization going by the name of CUPS came out to directly impugn Kukah’s integrity and claims to probity in a well-detailed allegation of sleaze and corruption.

    This column will refrain from publicizing the salacious and insalubrious details, but they go to show how far Bishop Kukah’s stock has fallen. It is a remarkable development and no matter his public grandstanding and defiance of the gravitational pull of seamy scandals, the plucky priest must be having some anxious private moments. Even if they remain at the level of mere allegations, that they are ever broached at all shows how public perception can be influenced by the power and putrescence of offensive associations. The bishop’s cup is full and it overflows indeed.

    It may well be too late to ask the august catholic prelate to return to base. For a man of such calm and deliberate mien, such choices are not lightly made in the first instance. As we have said, everybody must answer to his patronymic in these perilous times. Like a savage hawk remarkable for its hunting prowess and ferocious precision, the Nigerian ruling class knows the particular moment to home in on its intended prey and which foibles and personal peccadilloes to zero in upon.

    In a postcolonial society infamous for its political dysfunctionality , the transition from  civil society activist to state actor is a very precarious affair indeed. In Nigeria, only few people, if any at all, have been able to manage the transition without major scars. This is because inchoate and disadvantaged civil society feels abandoned and neglected by one of its own. Like vultures waiting for the ethically deceased, they bid their time waiting to take their pound of flesh or carrion and the quiet hysteria of private abandonment soon gives way to the public hullabaloo of angry and messy divorce.

    The Catholic Bishop of Sokoto Diocese seems to have had it coming for quite some time. There might have come a time when a practical patriot like Kukah might have come to the conclusion that it might be better and more nation-rewarding to remonstrate with the Nigerian powers that be at close proximity than to demonstrate against them from a far distance.

    As a minority scion of the most minority of ethnic formations, Kukah might have concluded that he stood no chance raising hell among the hell-bound  majority monsters—as he himself once memorably dismissed Nigeria’s major ethnic formations. It may well turn out to be a bridge too far, but in the brutal power calculus of Nigeria’s political coliseum, innocence is not a virtue but a symptom of suicidal naivety.

    Who will then speak and speak up for the Nigerian minority ethnic subaltern? As a devoted watcher of Nigeria’s volatile and explosive political gymnasium, this columnist entered into a private correspondence with the father who art in Kaduna then over his seemingly seamless transition from civil society activist to state actor.  Yours sincerely wanted to know whether the transition was conscious or seemingly unconscious. It was a particularly illuminating exchange whose details must remain private and confidential.

    What did it for this columnist was Kukah’s out of proportion reaction to a Soyinka piece detailing the ills and ailments of the Nigerian postcolonial state. As usual with the implacably agonistic Nobel avatar, it was a merciless and astringent critique dripping with venom and vitriol. The old literary lion does not take hostages in these matters. But anybody who has watched Nigeria’s descent into political infamy over the decades would side with Soyinka’s angst about the fate of his beloved country.

    What seemed to have drawn Bishop Kukah’s particular ire was Soyinka’s damning conclusion that nothing good could come out of the Nigerian state as it was constituted. It is interesting and intriguing that Soyinka’s response to Kukah was a mixture of puckish humour and elderly irritation. Subsequent events seem to have proved the Nobel laureate right.

    Thereafter, certain changes in Kukah’s public personae became noticeable as he moved closer and closer to the sanctuary of state power. An imperious swagger seems to have been added to the bouncy gait even as a pompous and pomaded puffery became the order of the day. A moody irascible brio and prickly condescension became the sine qua non of Kukah’s public engagements. The bishop’s secular beatitude was in full progress.

    But such beatitudes do not beautify, and neither do they ennoble in the tumultuous and turbulent context of a postcolonial nation roiling in crisis and contradictions. In such circumstances and situations, it is the bounden duty of all men of god to speak truth to secular power and not to become carpetbaggers and reactionary rearguard rallying points for the retrogressive and anti-progress rump of a failed ruling class.

    The current pope is an outstanding exemplar of this sacred moral responsibility to the powerless of the earth; and so was the old much admired and revered Polish pope, the illustrious Cardinal Karol Wojtyla. We dare say that in the last decade and a half beginning with the Oputa Panel, Bishop Kukah has been rather remiss in that historic and sacred duty. If it is not too late, this gifted priest should find his route back to public restitution and redemption.

  • Impatient with patents

    The Economist is at it again. The influential and agenda-setting London weekly magazine is famous for testing the fast moving waters of global modernity particularly as they concern the intellectual, political and economic exceptionalism of the west. You may not always agree with its Anglo-American side-nettings but there is no point denying the intellectual verve, the brilliant prose and the logical bravura of its merciless exposition.

    In its penultimate edition, the great London magazine set the cat of innovative and paradigmatic thinking among the pigeons of modernist mediocrity by arguing convincingly, it seems, for the abolition of the regimen of patents as we know it because it stifles and stymies scientific discoveries and their immediate application. Set innovation free, the iconic intellectual powerhouse of western domination screamed.

    Oh dear, oh dear. This is the intellectual equivalent of The Economist’s  economic mantra of deregulation and the free market, this time at the level of ideas and practical innovations in a  universe of monological ideas pretending to the status of global verity. How can patents which are the fathers and guardians of invention become the enemy of progress and the inflow of vital scientific developments to the expanding frontiers of the knowledge economy?

    The argument is set forth with compelling brilliance and a surfeit of damning empirical evidence. It would appear that in a world in which innovation and invention are driven solely by profit motive rather than a genuinely human desire to solve human problems, prospective patent holders and their Shylock legal protectors have become enmeshed in a tangle of obstruction and obfuscation which prevent knowledge sharing and the swift application of urgent innovations for the benefit of humanity.

    But where does that leave Africa and particularly Nigeria where both patents and innovative scientific thinking are at their rudimentary and almost primitive level? Only scientific innovations original to Africa and innovative thinking that focuses on the political, economic and spiritual peculiarities of its people will set the continent free. As a conquered and psychologically subdued race, we are yet to embark on this arduous journey of self-discovery.  To discover the world, you must first discover yourself.

    Yet in the great sanctuaries of innovative thinking of the world, whenever great scientists and people of profound cutting edge intellect are gathered, you can be sure that at least one of these avatars is of African extraction.  From the days of Hannibal, the great Roman general of Carthaginian extraction, Africa exports what it doesn’t have in abundance only to import what it has in abundance. This is the surest route to continental extinction.

    But the journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step. It is very heartwarming to note that President Buhari is thinking of gathering together a team of entrepreneurs and practical scientific innovators that will seriously address the problems of technological underdevelopment in Nigeria and the dearth of original ideas applicable to our dire and desperate situation.

    Penultimate Thursday, snooper spent the entire afternoon at Ikoyi Club mulling over the prospects with Femi Olugbile, one of Nigeria’s leading psychiatrists and innovative thinkers. A star student in medical college, tears welled up in Olugbile’s eyes as he lamented the professorial penury that has overtaken many of his colleagues and former teachers. The truly gifted must chafe at the current Nigerian university system and the abysmal self-abasement of its most outstanding and illustrious denizens.

    The problem, in his view, is that most of the research in Nigerian universities is geared towards climbing the professorial ladder without any thought to applicability or naturalization. This is the syndrome of aping western epistemology which Lee Kuan Yew dissects so brilliantly. After the tomes of erudite irrelevancies and professorial ennoblement, the journey back to the village and bucolic bitterness begins.

    By midnight, Olugbile had sent forth his thoughts on the matter as encapsulated in a recent lecture on patents and intellectual property. It is an engrossing read. In Britain, the Industrial Revolution was powered by small scale industries and relentlessly inventive thinking. When scientific innovations meet ready sponsors, the frontiers of knowledge and enlightenment expand dramatically, spiritual hocus-pocus retreats and a nation is on the road to self-created prosperity and stable governance. These are the resources for a redemptive journey for Nigeria.

  • Of private universities and private individuals

    Too many private individuals who would be richer making shoes or condiments are given private university licences … but they should note that it is not a profit making venture

    University education is just beautiful, and if I had my way, I would want everyone to go through it. Apart from the fact that one learns a lot there (in and out of the classroom), there’s just this way it has of influencing your perception of life and everything. I am of course talking about the ones who truly go there to learn, not the ones who regard the place as their hideout from their parents while they go about their normal businesses. Please don’t ask me what that is; ask your ward.

    Anyhow, I believe that most of us are fed a lot of stuff in our primary and secondary schools which we dared not question, or WAEC would miraculously move away from our planet. You were just told to accept that the world is round and forever (till you get out of there anyhow) hold your peace. I guess not many teachers would like a student who goes ‘how do you know the world is round? Prove it to me.’ I think a stick would do a lot of proving on that ‘silly student’.

    University education, however, allows you to seek knowledge to your satisfaction. Not only is the stick forbidden, you also have this vast space called lecturers who are supposed to open your mind and allow you to ask intelligent questions such as ‘why does man bleed when cut by glass?’ or ‘why can we not test how hot an iron is with our finger or tongue?’ Such deep questions and others that fly around in the intellectual sphere can be asked, you guessed it, in the university. After all, no one can bring out any stick of correction.

     There is also the vaster space called the university library which, if a student ensconces himself sufficiently in, can teach him just about anything he is interested in. I assure you that every tool we use in the world today is a product of that intellectual sphere of teachers who entertained deep questions and libraries that entertained the researcher who mostly slept, and sometimes read, in her hallowed rooms.

    I have read of someone who set out to know just at what point an egg boils. After reading through and sleeping over many books, he headed to his laboratory where many eggs suffered an indescribable fate in his hands (or pot). I authoritatively report here that he had many eggs to eat of course. I also authoritatively report here that not many people could move near him for days afterwards. Why? Well, reader, he seemed to give off this odour of superior intelligence from somewhere around his behind. Today though, thanks to that young man’s brave and superior education, we now know that egg boils at 33/5 minutes or thereabouts. More researches are  needed on that anyhow.

    There are still so many questions regarding the condition of man that need to be answered and for which we need no end of researchers, believe me. For instance, we need to know if it is possible to bend over backwards and touch one’s toes. I have bent over backwards for my dog but I have not been able to touch my toes. We need to know how to make people sense that the water on the stove is boiling no matter where they are, in or out of the house. Most importantly (and my favourite one), we really need to know how to spend money and not make it run out, ever – no matter how little one has. For all of these and more, we need researchers and inventors, which universities produce.

    True, I believe that Nigerian universities are working round the clock to ensure they mint them intelligentsia. As of now, records show that there are close to one hundred federal and state owned universities in Nigeria. Finding that these alone could not cater for the close to one hundred and fifty million Nigerians desiring university education for themselves, children, wards, neighbours or foes (there’s always the vain hope they might stop being foes when they get some university education), the National Universities Commission opened the floodgates to private university enterprise. Now, I understand there are more than sixty of them in Nigeria. Yet, there are cries that even these are not enough. I agree.

    However, I don’t know about you but I am just a wee bit concerned about the rather long jump in the number of the private universities for many reasons. To start with, the very word ‘private’ conjures up many senses, the most noticeable being the fact that these universities are ‘personally owned’, ‘not publicly owned’. So, there is just this much you can ask of them. For example, it is difficult to begin to ask them why they are charging this much and that much amount for school fees. From sources, fees in private schools range from roughly N.2m to N1.7m annually.

    In times past in the old west, private schools were owned by former teachers. Now, every prospector who has made a kobo somewhere comes to plough it into university owning mostly as an investment that will yield some day, hence the fees. The payers of these huge fees are denied many of the things they have paid for; and sometimes the staff are not paid regularly, according to information, to make the kobo stretch. There are many universities without requisite staff; some offer courses taken by only one student; and many whose students do not graduate in good time because of accreditation problems. Yet, they all seem to have a penchant for producing first class graduates.

    I observe that many of these private universities have not quite keyed into the philosophy of university education. Many of the schools have their administering eye trained on the Naira and kobo coming and going, mostly from the students. One school is said to have announced a change of fees mid-semester! I do not know what the registration requirements are but I think that this focus on what should come into the pocket of the school appears to be averse to the focus of university education which is more on what should go out into the society. This is why it has been oft said that tertiary education is essentially social service. To truly be one, it requires that every kobo gained be ploughed right back in because it is never enough. So the project is not only capital intensive, it is constantly yawning for more. A situation where profit on investment is the focus translates to business savyness, not social service.

    Focus is not the only thing that needs seeing to in this matter. I understand that there are private universities around here whose students are not free to move around the campus. They are rather herded around in lines from one classroom to another and have lights out time. I know; perhaps it is to curtail wayward behaviour, but it also curtails the student’s freedom of choice. University education should breed thinkers. It should teach individuals to reason and choose to do what is right at any time; that is when the results will not vary at any time in the individual’s life when his conditions change. Education should help the student to see the bigger picture and gain a greater perspective.

    Too many private individuals who would be richer making shoes or condiments are running private universities. I do not begrudge anyone for wanting to own one; the country needs more thinkers and researchers to answer its myriad of questions. I only ask that owners and potential owners should note that it should not be a profit making venture but should produce innovative thinkers. Those are the ones who will propel the country into the sunrise of self-actualisation.

  • November deadline mystifies Boko Haram

    November deadline mystifies Boko Haram

    While decorating the new service chiefs on Thursday, President Muhammadu Buhari charged the nation’s armed forces to bring the Boko Haram menace to an end in three months. Militarily speaking, and given the rearmament begun under the Goodluck Jonathan presidency but now intensified, coupled with the coalition the president has deftly built with Nigeria’s neighbours to take the fight to the insurgents, both the task of defeating the sect and meeting the November deadline should be achievable. Under Dr Jonathan, many such optimistic deadlines were routinely given by the government and scornfully defied and broken by the insurgents. Notwithstanding this poor record, which shattered the credibility of the armed forces, particularly the army and the air force, it does appear that resolving the corruption conundrum in the anti-terror war and reorganising and motivating the military should knock Boko Haram into a cocked hat.

    But there is nothing the president has said thus far that gives the impression his understanding of the Boko Haram menace is much better than his predecessor’s. He of course recognises the socio-economic dimension of the problem, and has spoken blithely in support of recognising and tackling poverty, a causative agent of the revolt. He has also indicated the value of forming and inspiring a coalition to give muscle to the war effort. In addition, he appears sensibly to understand the place of education in the equation, and how wiping out ignorance among the populace could deny terror merchants the support base they have so casually and complacently relied on. Undoubtedly too, as the president has indicated, and in response to external pressures, he will intensify efforts to fight a clean and just war, as well as deliver justice to victims of the war, including members and leaders of the sect extra-judicially murdered by the police.

    President Buhari will do many things different from his lethargic predecessor, Dr Jonathan. He will approach the war honestly, diligently and with all the integrity he can muster. Reassuringly too, he will handle the counterinsurgency exercise with all the methodicalness at his disposal. Indeed, the country will not be irrationally optimistic to expect that soon, all will be quiet on the war front, not excluding the bombing cauldrons. But irrespective of all the salutary changes he will bring to the war effort, and going by his statement when he decorated the new service chiefs, his understanding of Boko Haram has only gone a tad above that of his predecessor’s. He appears to perceive the problem as an existential issue, one of crime and punishment to ensure the survival of the country, and one in which he speaks effusively of misguided individuals as the bane of the country’s many headaches. The president seems painfully at odds with the historical significance of the Boko Haram insurgency.

    If effective and comprehensive strategies are to be developed to fight Boko Haram terror, the Buhari government must go beyond the usual explanations. The government is admittedly not wrong to identify economic, social and even political injustice as some of the factors that predisposed the Northeast to revolt. They are in fact right to single out religious fanaticism, poverty, ignorance, corruption in government and in the military, and general misrule. These factors, and many more, are important in understanding Boko Haram. And these factors may in fact explain why Dr Jonathan put too much premium on crushing and defeating the insurgency militarily. These factors may also be why President Buhari, having taken care to approach the problem methodically, also believes that he now possesses the military antitoxin to neutralise the sect in three months.

    Both President Buhari and Dr Jonathan, however, exaggerate their understanding of Boko Haram’s causative factors, and put misplaced confidence in what should be done to defeat the menace. Boko Haram’s foot soldiers may be poor, harassed, uneducated and exploited; yet, its leaders have a fair understanding of what they think of Nigeria and what must be done to tackle the problems that hobble it. It does not matter how contemptuously the rest of Nigeria and the outside world view the Boko Haram leaders’ worldview, all they care about is their vision of the revolutionary changes they seek to impose on a country they visualise as diseased and untenable. Without a deep understanding of the dynamics shaping, influencing and inspiring Boko Haram, whatever solutions are conceived may, therefore, be temporary and probably ineffective.

    A sizable number of the social and religious revolts that have convulsed the country took place in the Northeast. The Northeast is regarded as the poorest part of Nigeria. But apart from poverty, and perhaps misrule, which is not exclusive to that blighted region, religion and empire building (caliphate) greatly fascinate the people. Borno State, the epicenter of the current revolt, not only hosted the great Kanem-Bornu Empire, it was the first part of what later became Nigeria to introduce Islam. To Boko Haram leaders, the ongoing revolt is little more than a political clash between a secular order and a theocratic order, a clash, in their view, between the unwanted old and the desired new. Terror is merely a tool to bring about the utopia of their dreams. Events in other parts of the world, such as the fearsome exploits of al-Qaeda, and now ISIS, simply give fillip to the Boko Haram project and help refine and sharpen their ideology.

    President Buhari must bring into the Northeast equation an understanding of the historical dynamics that have shaped the world for centuries. Nigeria is not an island, and is thus not immune to these caliphal forces, whether they are cruel and brutal or gentle and modernising. Nothing however indicates that the Buhari government has a substantial understanding of these historical forces. If the Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS) is not guilty of exaggeration, its announcement that it barred nearly 5,000 Nigerians from travelling abroad between January and March this year probably to enlist in the bloody reign of terror masterminded by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is not just an indication of a passing fad, but a countervailing manifestation of powerful historical dynamics. Boko Haram, with its theocratic overtone, has become an ideology. It is unlikely to end until it is replaced in the esteem and fascination of the people of the Northeast by something bigger, better and more endearing.

    Empire builders are an integral part of human society and history. There will always be movements, religions and ideologies attempting, sometimes successfully and at other times unsuccessfully, to reshape the world and redraw borders. In contemporary times, Russian borders have been redrawn twice, and are still being redrawn. There is no proof the exercise will end soon, as Ukraine and Georgia are showing. The Mongoloid Empire of Genghis Khan is regarded as the most brutal ever, leaving approximately 40 million people dead in its wake, and wiping out or transplanting whole nations from Asia to Europe. Historians describe him as “a great ruler who was equal parts military genius, political statesman and bloodthirsty terror.” Under Stalin’s Soviet Union, it is estimated that more than 15 million people were killed to nurture the Soviet communist system and ideology. Suleyman the Magnificent’s Ottoman Empire also authored fierce displacement and destruction of peoples and cultures, without undermining the laudatory view of his rule. Like ISIS, Boko Haram is bitten by the same ambition bug as these other historical greats.

    The allure of ISIS will continue for some time to come, attracting fervent and adventurous youths from all parts of the world. ISIS can of course not be divorced from the terrible mistake committed by the United States when it overthrew Saddam Hussein’s Sunni/Baath rule, a mistake and regime change policy that has not only produced ISIS but also empowered and elevated Iran into a major regional power destined to shake and influence the Middle East and parts of Europe in the near future. Al-Qaeda in Iraq feasted on the disintegration of Iraq, then transformed into ISIS when the former’s ideology became constricting, and is now exploiting the Sunni-Shiite dichotomy to unleash a reign of terror on the region and carve out a contiguous, more or less Sunni, theocratic territory. Even if the US were to compound its mistake by putting boots on the ground sometime in the near future, it is difficult to see them extinguishing the ISIS flame.

    If the Nigerian Immigration Service actually barred about 5,000 Nigerians from travelling to Iraq and Syria to join ISIS, as it claims, then the question to ask is: how many others have successfully smuggled themselves into linking up with ISIS and al-Qaeda? Last week, two Kano youths were caught in India attempting to enter Pakistan from where they hoped to journey to Iraq. The fascination for ghoulish and grandiose adventures will not end even after Boko Haram has been militarily defeated. It is of course necessary to engage Boko Haram in the battlefield, but President Buhari must get his perspectives right. Military victory and economic empowerment will not be sufficient to end the fascination for Boko Haram ideology or similar extremist ideologies. The government must urgently seek to replace the passion for Boko Haram and other such ideologies with a unifying national essence or raison d’etre. This is the biggest challenge facing Nigeria today: how to instill a unifying and inspiring concept of Nigeria into the minds of Nigerians, how to infuse into them the powerful and overriding doctrine of Nigerian exceptionalism. But given the dynamics on the ground, it is hard to see President Buhari and the northern elite who are on the front lines of the terrible war embracing such radical measures.

    To replace Boko Haram’s fervency and ideology in the hearts of Nigeria’s boisterous youths, and to supplant its irresistibly isolationist, exclusionist and parochial attractions, will involve subsuming the North’s main religions under a national ideology in a multi-ethnic and multi-religious pastiche. At the moment, the mind of the country is vacant, except for irritating cobwebs. If Boko Haram can’t fill that vacancy because of defeat, ethnic irredentists will try to; and if ethnic bigots fail, religious bigots will give it a shot. The Nigerian condition is so bad that except those who live in denial, everyone is apprehensive of the implications of Nigeria’s long-standing inability to shake off its label as a mere geographical expression.

    Boko Haram has not been intelligently led. Were it to have brilliant leaders, Nigeria would be in far worse trouble than its puny intellect can manage. Just as the world’s tectonic plates are shifting, the world’s political and behavioural plates are also moving, sometimes very radically. Indeed they have never stopped shifting. North Africa and the Middle East have witnessed great shifts. Rashidun, Abbasid, Umayyad and Ottoman Caliphates, and other ‘successor’ entities within Nigeria’s borders such as the Sokoto Caliphate and Kanem-Bornu made vast regions restive and fertile for revolt and adventure. Rather than set a November deadline to defeat Boko Haram, President Buhari and his government should be drawing lessons from the factors that made great societies and empires endure for a long time. Those lessons will help Nigeria fashion a way out of its present cul-de-sac and make victory in the Boko Haram war certain and enduring.

    If the right measures are not adopted, if the ‘nations’ in Nigeria’s South and the ‘nations’ in Nigeria’s North continue to hold on tightly to their prejudices and exclusionist ideologies, there is no amount of military power, local and international, that can defend the country when a powerful, intelligently-led movement comes along. Nigerian leaders have not been bright enough to learn from their country’s chequered history since independence. If the present political structure and behaviour are not reformed, the country would be sailing near the wind, courting disaster and disintegration. Boko Haram is the perfect example of why it is time to think outside the box.