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Category: Sunday

Desertion, Boko Haram: Nigeria’s fragility underscored

In 2005, the National Intelligence Council (NIC), which is described as “The center for midterm and long-term strategic thinking within the United States Intelligence Community (IC)”, published a report of a one-day conference it convened to look at the future of sub-Saharan Africa. The conference examined a 15-year trend in the region and concluded that for Nigeria, any major event could upset its “precarious equilibrium.” The report did not rule out disintegration. Consequent upon the NIC report, the US military conducted a war game exercise in 2008 and also examined what should be the response of the US military should anarchy overtake Nigeria. There was no definitive prediction of a Nigerian break-up, nor any attribution of the predictions to the US government, but none of the studies undertaken by the US bodies ruled out that possibility. Indeed, in view of the security challenges facing Nigeria since 2009, and the country’s increasing fragility, it would require extreme optimism to rule out that frightful worst-case scenario.

But that is precisely what Nigeria’s rulers have done. Rather than dispassionately examine the damning reports on Nigeria, especially the parameters used to arrive at the frightening conclusions on the country’s stability and cohesion, the rulers have dismissed the study, especially since it emerged it was not a US government study — as if it mattered by whom the studies were produced. Surely it has not been forgotten that in 1991, there was hardly anyone, intellectual or soothsayer, within or outside the US government, who predicted that the Soviet Union would disintegrate that year. Underscoring that universal ignorance, a US international relations expert, George Kennan, confessed that he found it “hard to think of any event more strange and startling, and at first glance inexplicable, than the sudden and total disintegration and disappearance … of the great power known successively as the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union.” Everyone, including leading members of former U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s government described the Soviet collapse as “unexpected.”

But Nigerians are enamoured of superstition and are fanatical about religion. Yet, irrespective of their private longings, revolutions are an integral part of history, happen periodically, and are often unpredictable. The spectacular and constantly irredeemable act of leadership malfeasance in Nigeria in fact makes the country more susceptible to fragmentation than any study anywhere has predicted. The absence of social, economic and criminal justice is enduring. The federal and state governments have repeatedly and callously undermined the constitution, abridged rights, promoted tyranny, exploited religious, ethnic and political cleavages, and hoped that by a strange alchemy they could deploy religious faith and conviction to dissipate the spectre of disintegration. They seem to think they are immune to the centrifugal tendencies, (especially the fashionable sectarian adventurism promoted by the Islamic State), overwhelming and inspiring fanatical elements in parts of the world such as Iraq, Syria, Libya and now Nigeria.

Nothing makes the danger of destabilisation and fragmentation more pressing for Nigeria than the continuing threat posed by the Boko Haram Islamist sect, which has just declared a caliphate in Gwoza, Borno State, and seems set to heighten its territorial affront in the face of shambolic and feeble military response. And nothing exemplifies that feebleness than the strange and dramatic manner 480 Nigerian soldiers found their way into Cameroon last week after a particularly gruelling encounter with Boko Haram militants. Some analysts have described the movement of the 480 troops, almost a battalion strength, as desertion, the worst disgrace Nigeria has ever faced in its 54-year chequered history. On their own, however, military officers, presuming Nigerians to be incoherent, have described the embarrassment incredulously as either tactical manoeuvre or tactical retreat.

Before the Soviet Empire and its accompanying Warsaw Pact alliance disintegrated, they did not face the kind of countdown Nigeria is confronting, a countdown where soldiers are reluctant to fight, their wives are protesting against the deployment of their husbands, and the national spirit is either inexistent or is substantially distorted. There have been one or two attempts at mutiny in barracks in Maiduguri, the Borno State capital, with military authorities blackmailing the discerning public into desisting from commenting on the collapse at war fronts. It will be recalled that Governor Kashim Shettima of Borno State was the first to raise the alarm that Nigerian troops were unwilling to fight because of poor motivation and inferior weapons. He was pilloried for his outspokenness, until soldiers themselves began to complain openly of being poorly armed, and their wives joined in the unprecedented revolt, never before seen in these parts.

That the country is badly and incompetently administered is no longer in doubt. What is in dispute is the continuing promotion of the nonsensical viewpoint that Boko Haram is the creation of anti-Jonathan elements, a viewpoint championed by ruffians in the South-South and strangely and stupidly endorsed by elements in the Southwest. This viewpoint has in turn triggered the divisive demonisation of the North as a wholesale champion of Boko Haram, even though the sect was birthed during the presidency of Olusegun Obasanjo, a southerner, and acquired its terrifying streak under the presidency of the late Umaru Yar’Adua, a northerner. It apparently suits the Goodluck Jonathan presidency that that abhorrent viewpoint is promoted and reinforced by dangerous and malevolent reiteration. This was perhaps why the abduction of more than 200 schoolgirls from a secondary school in Chibok, Borno State, was politicised not by the opposition, but by the Jonathan government, which first doubted the abductions, and has approached the matter since then with undisguised, shameless and enervating impotence.

Sadly, the government’s appalling strategy is anchored essentially on one leg: to defeat the insurgency militarily, a feat now looking increasingly complicated and far-fetched, and provoke the country with its disjointed and disfiguring triumphalism. As far as the complex factors that have engendered Boko Haram are concerned, such as injustice, economic deprivation, subversion of the constitution, political suppression and oppression, divisive use of religion and ethnicity, nothing has been done, and nothing is planned. Indeed, the abhorrent sub-plot of the Boko Haram insurgency, which is to use it for electoral ends, is nearly so complete that the Jonathan re-election team brutally hangs their campaign on blaming and demonising others — the opposition and the North especially — for its incompetence and impotence in forging a way out of the national morass. The consequence is that instead of the unity needed to direct the fight against the common foe, the country is more divided than ever, fighting one another, promoting fissiparous tendency even in the military, fostering ethnic and political resentment, while Dr Jonathan’s government continues to harvest the sympathy of some of the geopolitical zones which have concluded that Dr Jonathan is in fact being persecuted by northern oligarchs and a complicit faction of the Southwest elite.

It is not clear why the Jonathan presidency is unable to rise up imaginatively to both the insurgency in particular and the disequilibrium in the polity in general, or whether he in fact truly desires to challenge and defeat the insurgency and other problems plaguing the country. But I think Dr Jonathan’s government is widely despised for its lack of discipline and its poor intellectual endowment. It is unable to situate the Boko Haram problem in the global Jihadist context, let alone in the less complex domestic context, and is reluctant to appreciate that the sect needs to be examined closely to discover why and how it continues to grow in strength, why it is attractive to all manner of adventurers, why the army seems out of tune with reality, and why his political methods have discouraged and alienated a large swathe of the country. Worse, I fear that Dr Jonathan is not even interested in mustering the huge responsibility needed to understand and solve these problems. He believes that his method of shifting the blame for the insurgency on the opposition and the North will yield him votes, and his tactics of plundering the constitution for provisions and sundry authorisation to sustain and promote the acts of repression will strengthen his hands. He is not tempted to change, and perhaps, as galling as this may sound, may never change even as the country plummets to its most terrifying nadir ever.

August 31, 2014
A materialist reading of ideological suicide

As the virus of stomach infrastructure infects everything in the land, the word materialist itself may appear incapable of meaning no more than an addiction to gross material consumption; an obsession with mundane materiality as opposed to the finer and more refined aspects of existence. Materialism has damaged our social life beyond recognition. Tragically enough, even some of our most revered spiritual leaders are not exempt from this addiction to irrational material acquisition and gross consumption.

But as students of advance philosophy will attest, to conduct a materialist investigation is to deploy the principles and methodology of Historical and Dialectical Materialism in order to deepen our understanding of a specific occurrence, particularly the historical and material circumstances in which it takes place. On the other hand, ideological suicide occurs when people kill off their self-advertised convictions in a way and manner that suggest a new identity and the complete erasure of their former self.

Moral outrage and fiery denunciation of those who betray their self-stated political ideals may satisfy our anger but they can hardly yield insight into the way forward, or provide a practical roadmap for immediate action. The classic statement of materialist interrogation of history is Karl Marx observation that men make history, but not under the circumstances of their choice.

There is commotion and crisis everywhere you turn to in the political landscape of Nigeria. The permanent carpet crossing, the eternal to and fro has reached an epidemic proportion. This perpetual shuttle of refugees and politically displaced persons suggest an ideological neutering of the polity. All politicians appear the same, like cats in the night. The collateral damage has been prohibitive. There is a collapse of public trust in politics and politicians.

People no longer perceive politics and politicians as the route to social redemption. So far the biggest casualty in this refractive mirror of public perception is Malam Nuhu Ribadu. While not doubting his political courage, his quaint and quixotic notions of patriotism , this column has already expressed profound reservations about Ribadu’s intellectual and ideological solidity even while he was the presidential flag bearer of the ACN. We need not be further delayed.

Yet in a curious way, this apparent collapse of ideology as a weapon of social engineering and as an instrument for fashioning out political action may well be indicative of a tectonic shift in our polity which could have been rumbling below the surface for quite some time. But the world has never existed in a vacuum of ideas. The end of ideology as a means of social engineering may well signal the arrival of a new vista of ideological struggle.

The politics of the Fourth Republic and the Nigerian post-military society cannot be divorced from the politics of its military progenitors and their end of ideology bravura and triumphalism. Although very much their military superior, General Obasanjo is very much an ideological heir of his professional subordinates in every material respect. Perhaps smarting from the trauma of the civil war, the principal aim of the post-civil war military hierarchy has been to create huge pan-Nigerian parties capable of holding the nation together at all costs even at the expense of national development and rapid transformation.

They seem to have succeeded beyond their wildest dream, except that it is becoming impossible to hold the country together without accelerated economic development and genuine political transformation. The mass ideological suicide of so called progressives in the current republic attests to the success of this military formula. Both the PDP and the NPN were conceived as huge Pan-Nigerian bazaars and millennial political monopolies. The problem is that like the NPN before it was stopped in its track, the PDP is set to consume both itself and the nation.

If we cast our mind back to pre-Independence politics and the struggle for decolonization, we would find that there was no room for mass defections and the Russian roulette such as we are currently witnessing. Although there were regional differences as to the actual departure date of the colonial masters, it would have been political taboo for anybody to establish a political platform based on the project of continued colonial rule.

This ideological solidity and political coherence remained very much the name of the game in the First Republic even within the context of widening inter-party animosities. Those who defected from their parties did not have the courage or the political heart to join the hegemonic party. In the case of deserters from the Action Group after its crisis erupted in 1962, they could only manage a tense and edgy alliance with the NPC till the bitter end. After a futile rebellion, K.O Mbadiwe, a popular and charismatic politician, returned to the NCNC with his tail between his legs.

Although anchored on a regional platform and later on clear ideological differentiation along Socialist Democratic line, the most outstanding avatar of this politics of principles in the First and Second Republic was Obafemi Awolowo. Even when and while he sought alliances at the centre, Awolowo stubbornly refused to surrender the principles of his party, the Action Group. Throughout his distinguished political life, Awolowo sought and fought to prevent the homogenisation of the Nigerian political class. His thinking was that unless the Nigerian populace was presented with a clear and well-articulated alternative blueprint, the polity was doomed.

After the death of the Ikenne titan, the road was clear for succeeding military autocrats to engineer the destruction of the old regional platform that was the basis of pre-military politics. Responding to what they might have honestly and genuinely thought was a national emergency particularly after a costly civil war, the military sought to demobilise the old regional project. In this respect, the dissolution of the old regions and their balkanization into unviable states came in very handy.

Thus was born in its post-independence incarnation the unitarist and harshly centralising state, a final product of the military imaginary which began life in the colonial incubator and which haunts the Nigerian post-military polity till date. But even before Awolowo’s death, the private wall had already fissured. The 1983 UPN gubernatorial primaries witnessed startling defections to the ruling party. Before then, one of UPN’s serving senators also deserted to the ruling party.

This was something hitherto unheard of in an Awolowo party. The old man would have been pained to no end seeing some of his beloved and trusted lieutenants absconding. One of these had even written a book on the principles “Awoism”. To show the extent to which the new military class had penetrated Awolowo’s fortress even while alive, Chief Bola Ige was almost summarily expelled from the party for inviting a pariah like General Obasanjo to mediate in the dispute between him and his estranged deputy, the late Sunday Afolabi.

Famously moved by Alhaji Lateef Jakande in what has been dubbed the infamous Night of the Long Knives in Yola, 1983, the motion of expulsion was a foretaste and forerunner of the tragedy that was to befall Awolowo’s surviving discipleship. Exactly 10 years after, Jakande himself was excommunicated for joining the Abacha government.

This was the beginning of the end of politics of principles based on clear ideological preference in Nigeria. The homogenization of the Nigerian political class which Awolowo feared and fought against seems to have come upon us with the force of a gale. In the dialectical maelstrom, what may warm the heart of certain Nigerian nationalists is the seeming collapse and death throes of the old regional politics. But it has come at a stiff nation-disabling price.

In a moment of sublime contempt, Anthony Enahoro, the departed great nationalist and foremost freedom fighter, once dismissed both the SDP and NRC as little better than government parastatals. As if to confirm the old man’s prescient hunch, the leadership of the SDP, acting out a military script, summarily traded away its party’s hard won presidential victory with enthusiasm and relish as if clear party lines existed only in the imagination of jaded Nigerians.

Five years and another military regime after, the late Chief Bola Ige caustically described Abacha’s five parties as the five fingers of the same leprous hand. Shortly before Abacha died in mysterious circumstances, the five parties were bandying together to proclaim the goggled one as their sole presidential candidate. It doesn’t get more politically homogenous and leprous to the bargain.

The current mass defections and borderless gallivanting among the political class may well signal the final death knell of ideological politics in contemporary Nigeria. To discerning Nigerians, there may not be much difference between the APC and the PDP. Sir Olaniwun Ajayi, the revered Afenifere patriarch, has dismissed both the PDP and APC as platforms of predation and primitive accumulation.

But given the flirtations of the Afenifere rump with the Labour Party which is nothing but the evil doppelganger of the PDP, and their covert complicity and collaboration with Jonathan’s statist agenda, we may well be witnessing the final working out of some ancient curse. When Chief Sunday Michael Afolabi famously told Chief Bola Ige to shut up and get on with the federal meal he had been invited to partake in, he might have thought he was making a brilliant point. For lending their talents to the statist chicanery so loathsome to their people’s federalist ambition, both men were later to give up the ghost in mysterious circumstances.

It is not surprising, then, that in all of this, it is the APC that is left clutching the wrong end of the stick. Already stuck at the zero ground level of low public esteem, the PDP has nothing to lose. The end of ideology is also an ideology of sorts and a viciously and virulently reactionary ideology at that. But it allows the ruling party to retain the initiative. In such circumstances, It will surely take the vigour and vibrancy of a mass movement allied with civil society groups and other professional organizations to unseat the PDP.

Like an overweight sprinter, the APC has been slow to get off the starting block. But in linking up at the centre, the party’s dominant old ACN faction might have left its western flank exposed. Huge internal fissures are showing up. With the tragic loss of Ekiti, its regionalist impetus is already in grave danger. If the party allows the PDP or any of its sleeping partners to poach another state in the old region, both the ideological and political planks of its regionalist agenda would have collapsed.

For a party that is hoping to distinguish itself with a genuinely transformational blueprint based on clearly differentiated principles, the current climate of mass defection and ideological suicide could not have been more ominous in terms of public and popular perception. Yet an even more cruel and tragic irony is playing out which portrays many of the party’s leading lights as unreconstructed products of military democracy. Rather than relying on mass recruitment of the electorate, the APC seems to be relying on the big men theory of African politics, a game that happens to be the founding template of the ruling party.

The likes of Nuhu Ribadu are nothing but small fry in this turbulent ocean of political betrayal. The hurricane of mass political suicide has finally berthed on our shores. The ideological neutering of a polity often results in the neutering of political strategy and methodology with all parties resorting to the same methods and measure. For a developing society, this is the real tragedy of the collapse of ideological politics. It is a one-party state by any other name with the parties no more than bickering factions of the same political monopoly.

But you cannot play poker with history for long, just as you cannot plant cassava and expect to harvest yam. Should the opposition groups falter in their bid to present Nigerians with a clear and well-articulated alternative blueprint, and should the ruling party continue to hold the nation to ransom in its current strangulating stasis and paralyzed inertia, we might just wake up one day to find that we are truly at the mercy of a social earthquake. In the history of human society and its political evolution, no party or politician has been known to defect from that one.

August 31, 2014
Initial encounter with transformational grammar proved fateful: For Prof Ayo Banjo @ 80

Tt is many months now since my old teacher at the University of Ibadan, Professor Ayo Banjo, turned 80 and so this tribute should have been written long before now. Nonetheless, and as the saying goes, it is better late than never. And in a way, perhaps it is in fact appropriate that I should have taken my time to write this tribute to Professor Banjo since the nature, the meaning of my studentship under him took a very long time to achieve clarity in my mind. Since this observation goes to the heart of this tribute to my old teacher, I should perhaps clarify what the observation is about. This is all the more necessary since it is this very issue that supplied the title to this tribute which centers round the term, “transformational grammar” which is probably as intriguing to many who are reading this piece as it was to me when I first encountered it in Professor Banjo’s class. But before coming to this matter of my first, initial encounter with “transformational grammar” in Professor Banjo’s class that would later prove fateful to my intellectual development, I wish to say a few preliminary things about the man that set him apart from most people I have ever met.

Everyone reading this piece has, I suspect or hope, come across the saying, “speak no ill of the dead”. If there is a corollary to this saying which asks us to “speak no ill of the living”, I am yet to come across it. The reason for this is simple and it is this: none or few of us has ever met a living person of whom we cannot think of many wrong or evil things that they have, at one time or another and on a small or great scale, done to their fellow human beings. Indeed, so basic is this fact of life that to say “speak no ill of the living” would more or less make us all incurable hypocrites. But with only one other person who incidentally was also my teacher, Professor Banjo is one of the two persons I have ever met of whom it could be said “speak no ill of the living” without being hypocritical. That other person is Mr. Modupe Oduyoye, scholar, publisher and humanist, who was my English teacher in the upper forms of secondary school. Quite literally, I have never met anyone who has had an unkind or disparaging or dismissive word to say about the character and behaviour of Professor Banjo and Mr. Oduyoye and they are the only two people, especially in the world of learning, about whom I can make this assertion.

I have often pondered this fact anytime that my mind goes to these two former teachers of mine. In a terribly corrupt and cruel world, how is it possible to stay above the rot? In a country that is endlessly muddied by a seeming universality of cheating, lying and dissembling on a grandiose scale, how can anyone stay above it all? What inner qualities of spirit and psyche make this possible, this state of moral rectitude or equanimity that seems superhuman and otherworldly? And to be completely honest about this without taking anything away from the reputation of these two former teachers of mine, I have also sometimes wondered if indeed it is a desirable quality or achievement for any man or woman to stay above it all. This is because, as I know only too well from direct experience, it is nearly impossible to remain blameless and unsullied if and when you try to intervene to put an end to the rot, to the bog of decadence and suffering into which our country and our world are sinking almost inexorably and unstoppably. But in spite of these thoughts, Professor Banjo remains in my estimation one of the two avatars of whom one can indeed say “speak no ill of the living” and not be hypocritical. This leads me to the heart of the content of this tribute, the matter of “transformational grammar” as I fatefully encountered it as a student of Professor Banjo.

If my memory serves me right, I took only one class with Professor (then Dr.) Ayo Banjo in my undergraduate studies in the English Department at Ibadan and this was in my first year. He taught in the Language, not the Literature section of the Department. Overwhelmingly, the Literature program was the much larger and more established concentration; only a handful of students of the Department ever went on specialize in Language. [Niyi Osundare, who was two years behind me, is one of the few famous scholarly alumni of the Department who went on to specialize in Language] I entered the Department as a student fairly certain that, like most of my classmates, I would choose the Literature program. This was the major or primary reason why I took only one course – and in my first year – with Professor Banjo. The other reason, though secondary, is however more central to what I have to say in this tribute and it is this: after that one class with Professor Banjo, I became even more convinced of the choice of Literature as my concentration. And “transformational grammar”, as brilliantly but elaborately taught by Professor Banjo, was at the heart of this confirmation that the Language concentration was not for me. Let me explain.

In all my other courses in my first year, I felt fairly on top of the difficulties and challenges, probably because all these other courses had some narrative and imaginative dimensions to them. Incidentally, this included Sociology which was and still is officially classified as a science, albeit a social science. Only in Professor Banjo’s course were these dimensions missing, to be replaced by what seemed like a science that even seemed to me closer to the natural sciences than the social sciences. I had gone into Professor Banjo’s class expecting to have the kind of fun, the kind of excitement that I expected and received from my other courses, but lo and behold, it was as if I was back in my Physics class in high school which, of all the subjects we were taught, had given me the greatest – and for me – ultimately insurmountable challenge. And so from having received an “A” in English Language in School Certificate and GCE “O” level exams, I plummeted to a state of utter bafflement in Professor Banjo’s class on that same Language! And at the heart of it all were the expositions that he gave on, yes, “transformational grammar”.

At this point, it is perhaps time for me to get to what “transformational grammar” is and how my encounter with it in Professor Banjo’s class eventually proved very fateful in my intellectual development. Before that encounter, “grammar” was for me – as it probably still is for most people – the descriptive outline of the ground rules that govern correctness and mastery in language use. It essentially entails learning what the different aspects of language are and how to use them correctly. In “transformational grammar” the emphasis is displaced from descriptive to structural and from correctness to possibility. With “transformational grammar” a completely incorrect sentence can still be “grammatical” and Professor Banjo gave many examples in that class that I took with him. This in itself was exciting but prior to that, our teacher espoused on many concepts and ideas that were completely at variance with all we had learnt about or known as “grammar”. Perhaps the most startling of these was the proposition that transformational grammar was “generative”. What this means is that the great immensity of what could be done and is done with and in language rested on just a few basic principles or properties. In other words, the abundance, the endless possibilities of and in language actually rested on just a few basic structures in grammar.

The reader probably knows from this explanation of “transformational grammar” that my understanding came much, much later after my encounter with the subject in Professor Banjo’s class. And that is exactly what happened, but I have to explain that it was because of the way in which he taught it that made me decide that this was something I had to get to know, get to understand eventually. In other words, after the excitement of being told that a bad, ungrammatical sentence could be structurally grammatical, the rest of what he taught us about transformational grammar seemed to me so technical, so arcane that I was left with a powerful wish to get to the bottom of the matter. And so in graduate school in America, one of the first things I did was start reading everything I could on the subject. And when I did finally achieve an understanding of it, this was central, even decisive in helping me to understand many other extremely complex and challenging intellectual and theoretical currents of non-traditional, modern thought like Marxism, Poststructuralism and Deconstruction. Thus, in a very indirect way that could be likened to negative dialectics, many things that helped to shape my intellectual adulthood began in that class with Professor Banjo in my first year as an undergraduate at Ibadan.

In conclusion, I must confess that I was prompted to lay emphasis in this tribute on a specifically intellectual subject because most of the tributes to Professor Banjo on getting to 80 years that I have read have concentrated on his solid qualification for that rare phenomenon in which, without hypocrisy, one can “speak no ill of the living”. As I salute him on reaching this milestone and wish him a long(er) life with good health, I also want to acknowledge what I took away from my brief studentship under him. The young shall grow – especially if they have teachers like Professor Ayo Banjo.

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

August 31, 2014
From Boko Haram to Ebola

Even if millions die, should that stop the President’s campaign train? Go on, TAN

Just as we were celebrating our containment of Ebola, and as if to make nonsense of that celebration, a fresh Ebola case was detected in Port Harcourt, the Rivers State capital, on Thursday. I had wanted to caution that we should not dance ourselves lame on Ebola yet when our health minister, Prof Onyebuchi Chukwu, said last week that we had contained the disease. But then, one could have been branded as unpatriotic. With the Port Harcourt discovery, it simply means we still have a lot to do to keep Ebola at bay.

Indeed, Nigeria has not been at ease since Mr. Patrick Sawyer, the American-Liberian imported the disease into the country on July 20. In fairness to the Federal Government, its response and collaboration with the Lagos State government since July 20 have been impressive. This has, as it were, almost obliterated the fact that its agencies at the airport had been lax in their duties, hence Mr. Sawyer’s ability to beat the security checks there.

Well, as some would argue, such collaboration is the most sensible thing to do where Ebola is concerned. This is a different ballgame from the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). Yes, Ebola, like AIDS does not respect party affiliation. It is no respecter of whether you are progressive or conservative. It does not recognise boundary, be it religious, social, economic or geographical. Like AIDS, Ebola has no known cure. With AIDS, one can take all the precautionary measures: buy your barbing kits to avoid using general clippers, avoid using the same injection or syringe with someone carrying the AIDS virus; don’t take blood transfusion indiscriminately, above all, avoid the ‘danger down below’, zip up.

Even where all these fail, AIDS could still be somewhat managed. But not so with Ebola. So far, there is no known cure for it. Anyone struck by it could jolly well start singing the Nunc Dimittis, or its other version, ‘Oh Lord, I am coming home’. That is how bad things are. So, even when one is crying, he should still be clear-headed as to keep his eyes wide open. Even where political party or ideology differs, that should not preclude collaboration to ward off the Ebola.

It seems to me that with Ebola, God does not need to take any trouble of using either fire or flood to bring the world to an end again if He so desires today. Some 5,000 Ebola patients would do the job. Imagine what would have been our fate in Nigeria had Sawyer been allowed to escape into thin air as he had wanted to, even after having been taken to First Consultants Hospital in the Obalende area of Lagos? Not even Donatus could have been as generous as he would have generously distributed the virus in the country, such that even the Boko Haram terrorists would have seen how little their bombs and other armaments that they had hitherto relied on as weapons of mass destruction could be.

Nigeria had been dealing with a seemingly intractable blood-letting unleashed by the Boko Haram insurgents before Ebola came. Indeed, since 2009 when Boko Haram began its onslaught on the country, there has been no respite. The insurgents have attacked virtually everywhere one could imagine and even never have imagined, including police and military formations. It has sacked entire townships and presently has its flag hoisted in Gwoza, Borno State, where it has also proclaimed a caliphate. More than 12, 000 lives had been lost to the senseless attacks by the terrorists and they do not appear to be done yet. The way they slaughter their victims that they did not bomb suggests they are being propelled by some blood-sucking demons.

As things stand, the terrorists are still holding captive more than 100 secondary school girls that they abducted in their hostel in Chibok in April. At least twice they have rubbished the ultimatums given by top military chiefs even as they seem on a systematic mission of demystifying the Nigerian military, given the ease with which they stroll into parts of the country, abducting people at will.

In all of these, one person I do not envy is President Goodluck Jonathan. Indeed, if any man is sitting on a hot seat, President Jonathan is it. So hot is the seat that one would think he should be in a hurry to get out of it. But the most surprising thing is that he is not in a hurry to complete his term and leave. He has been to churches to pray for peace and apparently to seek God’s nod for more years in the rock. And, just in case that fails, he also invited some Senegalese clerics to Aso Rock, in what many have interpreted as a spiritual angle to the current war against Boko Haram. The 10 clerics were led to the State House, Abuja, by Khalifah Sheikh Ahmad Tijani Inyass, the grandson of Late Shehu Tijani Ibrahim Inyass, the founder of the Tijjaniya sect. They met for about an hour with the President at the First Lady’s Conference Room and offered prayers for an end to the security challenges facing Nigeria, as well as for peace and stability in the country.

Jonathan is not alone in this. As the spokesman of the group, Ahmed Tijani Sanni Alwalu said, “It is a historic visit because it has been done by his father with the then President, Gen. Yakubu Gowon and Gen. Aguiyi-Ironsi. So, history is repeating itself and we come for the Moulude of Ibrahim Inyass Gombe and on his way going home, the President requested for a courtesy visit and Shehu granted that.”

But President Jonathan is yet to complete the ‘tripod’ as he has not called in the African Traditional Religion people for similar prayer. In this wise, one would have thought he would cultivate Governor Rauf Aregbesola of Osun State whose government has embraced the ‘three-in-one’. But he appears to have made Aregbesola a sworn enemy because it was only in Aregbesola’s Osun State that the president did not do well at all in the south west in the 2011 presidential election. With Aregbe’s election for a second term, that history is set to repeat itself in the state in next year’s general elections, a thing President Jonathan had wished he could nip in the bud, by militarising the state to scare voters in the August 9 governorship election.

Interestingly, to date, President Jonathan has not indicated his intention to stand for reelection, but his campaign train is already on the track. The most visible one is the Transformation Ambassadors of Nigeria (TAN) that has been holding rallies on his behalf, I suspect very much against his will, reminding one of the late General Sani Abacha who never said he wanted to transmute from military to civilian president but everything, including his body language and all, pointed in that direction. With TAN having flagged off the president’s reelection campaign, Nigeria has moved on. What this implies is that that is the end of the search for the Chibok girls; that is if Nigeria ever searched for them. Apparently those who came to help us had to abandon us to our fate when they saw how unserious and unprepared we are in looking for the poor girls. Not many serious countries would want to have anything to do with a country whose soldiers, in the course of ‘tactical manoeuvre’, would stray 80 kilometres into another country in battle! But, wouldn’t it have been better for our military authorities to tell us that in this season of defections, our soldiers merely took a cue from our politicians and defected to Cameroon, instead of saying they were on ‘tactical manoeuvre’?

But whatever the degree of blood-letting or blood-shedding, the president’s campaign train must start. If he wins reelection, President Jonathan would still have a large part of the country under his control. And if he loses, his successor may have to negotiate with the rebels for a return of the Gwoza caliphate to Nigeria.

August 31, 2014
Confab: opening its political balance sheet 1

Just reviewing the basic laws of union would have been enough for a conference of that size without overloading the delegates with an encyclopaedia of items about governance

If Professor Bolaji Akinyemi’s self-congratulation is a good measure of how to assess the just concluded national conference in Abuja, there would have been no reason for any federalist in the country to have a second thought about the hyperbolic claims of success at the end of the conference. Having served as the vice chairman of the conference, nobody would blame the former foreign minister for grading a project he co-directed generously, although most people in that capacity would rather wait for others not engrossed in the project to do the evaluation. The balance sheet of the conference does not look as good as it has been painted by the conference’s vice chairman. That the balance sheet appears more negative than the vice chairman has acknowledged is not necessarily because of what the conference staff did directly or did not do at all.

The conference was aborted ab initio or at its planning stage. Preferring to select delegates to mandating communities to elect their representatives in many ways hobbled the good people that were selected to determine how the peoples of Nigeria want to inter-relate with each other in one united political territory. In addition, the assignment given to the conference was too much: amending or re-writing the 1999 Constitution and also writing a proposal on how to re-invent governments across the board. Just reviewing the basic laws of union would have been enough for a conference of that size without overloading the delegates with an encyclopaedia of items about governance– from designing form of government to showing how to build a silo to keep harvested grains in the country.

Moreover, the possibility of thinking out of the box in terms of constructing basic laws of union was limited by the house rules that required a minimum of 70% of votes for any decision to hold in the absence of a consensus. Furthermore, what was needed to make delegates think creatively about how to design a multiethnic state-nation was ruled out at the beginning of the conference by its convener: President Goodluck Jonathan. Delegates were told that nobody had the right to think about self-determination, as doing so would question the basis of the union of Nigeria’s nationalities, as if a constitutional conference is not about questioning or problematising the status quo.

There is no doubt that honest delegates must have gone to the conference, not necessarily for the emoluments as many commentators have observed, but perhaps because delegates were optimistic that they could achieve very much with very little. To be fair to the delegates, they must have exerted themselves. Just seeing the catalogue of what they advise governments to do in order to make Nigeria work or thrive regardless of the type of constitution it has, is enough to convince those who live by criticising others that the delegates thought and talked about many things in the few months of deliberation. Taking over 600 resolutions about every aspect of governing a country, ranging from establishing a sports village and how to choose athletes to represent the country to ensuring adequate supply of potable water for toilets in the markets across the country must have required paying attention to details. The success of the conference is not in the changes delegates recommended in the direction of restoring federalism but more in terms of giving the president a Governance Blueprint of what to do and how to do them in order to govern meaningfully.

Opening the balance sheet after the conference has submitted its report to the convener suggests that the Yoruba region in particular has gained the least from the conference. This may not be because of any inadequacy on the part of Yoruba delegates. Yoruba delegates included some of the country’s best and finest men and women, many of whom would have been elected by their people were such opportunity available before the conference. But the Yoruba went to the conference as disparate groups or members of opposition parties or pro- and anti-Jonathan groups, rather than as Yoruba people with the belief that true federalism marked by shared governance and shared sovereignty including a reasonable measure of resource control among federating units would improve the life chances of Yoruba people. Each Yoruba delegate believed that his or her patriotism was enough to guarantee seminal contribution at the conference.

Even before the conference, the Yoruba region was divided on the issue of the conference. Some of the delegates, especially those referred to as leaders of Afenifere or old Afenifere were believed by many to have colluded with the presidency to design a conference that was to be driven by North-South dichotomy and to strengthen Jonathan’s bid for another tenure, on the assumption that de-federalisation of Nigeria since 1966 was the brain child of the North. Such individuals who later became delegates joined forces with other southern regions to prepare a Southern Position, which, from all accounts, now appears to have been jettisoned before the meeting or during the meeting.

In fact, it took the circulation of the paper from the North titled the “Strength and Backbone of Nigeria” for some Yoruba delegates to commission a paper on regionalism, to replace the anecdotal case each brilliant Yoruba delegate was capable of and expected to make at the conference. It also took one of the young delegates from the Yoruba region to beg and cajole a lot of the delegates for them to see the need to keep their eyes on the ball: functional federalism. The reason for this should have been obvious at the beginning. Yoruba leaders who believe they constitute the region’s permanent shadow cabinet were bent on proving Yoruba politicians who thought the conference was a diversion wrong. In this process, they were enthusiastic more about making sure the conference did not end prematurely than in ensuring that any meaningful re-federalization took place.

Such leaders had trust in the alliance they conjured with some Southeast and South-south leaders. The burden of proving Yoruba APC leaders wrong about the conference hobbled many of the delegates from the Yoruba region, to the extent that none of the issues raised over the years by the Yoruba about how to bring federalism back to the polity got into the catalogue of resolutions. The highlights of the conference’s success according to Professor Akinyemi should be seen in the context of the overall desire to avoid clear failure that could prove those opposed to the conference right. I am not sure most of the delegates had time to worry about those of us who argued that a national conference called by anybody and at any time was always worth attending. Otherwise, going back to the old National Anthem would not have counted as a success worth celebrating. Pro-democracy groups during the anti-Abacha dictatorship switched from the “Arise o compatriots” to “Nigeria we hail thee” without necessarily moving the country a notch higher on the ladder of federalism.

This was not because individual delegates did not think and talk right at the conference. It must have been because the civil war the Yoruba fought at home before and during the conference became a burden for most of the delegates, to the extent that regions that came there with proper strategic thinking got what they wanted while the Yoruba region got the option of a state police that is to be subsumed under the central police, which, in addition to other central para-police units: FRSC, National Civil Defence Corps, each state must have as the country’s superintending law enforcement agency. The conference report shows that the Yoruba may be better than other regions in fighting civil wars among themselves, other regions, particularly the North and the Southeast are more astute in strategic thinking, directed at getting their political desires fulfilled.

To be continued

August 31, 2014
Islamic State (is): The world’s next scourge and why Nigeria must be alert

It would be quite a shame if the country would sit on its hind legs and wait until Nigerians head to Syria and Iraq to be trained in all the technicalities of decapitating fellow human beings

If al-Qaeda and its associates have killed in hundreds of thousands, the way The Islamic State, (IS), is going, it may account for millions killed by the time the world finally gets clean with it, if ever. Without a doubt, the world is permanently in a flux but if anybody had suggested that the world was going to contend with anything worse than al-Qaeda so soon after the US dispatched Bin Laden, we all would have told that person to perish the thought. This is not to suggest that there hadn’t been chilling predictions, post Nostradamus, but they were mostly that: predictions that may, indeed, never come till the end of time. No more. They now mushroom like violence is the last name in Christendom.

Talking about post Nostradamus predictions, there had been many and they keep pouring in. Indeed, 2014 vows to bring the hardest times for mankind. The predictions are terrifying as the world would, according to them, be shocked by natural disasters, assassinations and incurable diseases, and doesn’t Ebola come to mind. The year is believed to be a turning point in the history of humanity. Plagues, wars and disasters threaten the world according to Baba Vanga, a famed Bulgarian prophetess. A blind mystic and clairvoyant, she foresees an epidemic of skin cancer that will decimate the planet’s population and according to the Ukrainian engineer who deciphered Nostradamus quatrains, 2014 will be engulfed in violence. Famed seers have even seen the beginning of World War111 and Mr. Putin appears to be working unerringly towards that end now that Russia has deployed troops in the Ukraine.

However, if all these are in the future, not so the mind boggling violence the IS (Islamic State) continues to visit on mankind. Its militants recently besieged a village in northern Iraq, gave the residents a deadline to convert to Islam and when they refused, more than 80 men were killed and the women and children of the village became their slaves; this in addition to several weeks of crucifying Christians, beheading their children and burying others alive. Although it started out like al-Qaeda on an extremist hard line, adhering to global jihadist principles, al-Qaeda has, since February 2004, closed all links to the Islamic State because of its extreme brutality. Indeed, only two weeks ago, a British-born member of the group was reported to have beheaded the American journalist, Mike Foley, in a horrendous act of brutality that would hardly be equalled. Its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, claims to be a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad and has proclaimed him the Islamic “caliph”. Caliph, meaning successor, is a title used by Sunni Muslims for those who led Islam from the death of the Prophet to the 20th century. When Turkey was made a secular state after World War I, the caliphate was abolished. Now al-Baghdadi claims to have reconstituted it in himself. He is calling on the Muslim world to move to his Islamic State to support his movement. Militants are already carrying the IS flag in Indonesia and across North Africa. Jihadist groups around the world are deciding whether to switch their allegiance from al-Qaeda to him. Al-Baghdadi has announced his group’s intention to march on Rome and Spain, seeking to establish his caliphate across Europe. When he was transferred from American to Iraqi custody in 2009, (from which he was later released), he told his American captors, “I’ll see you in New York.”

For us as Nigerians, the most important part of this story, and its relevance is this: ‘Now al-Baghdadi claims to have reconstituted it in himself he is calling on the Muslim world to move to IS and to support his movement’. The potency of this statement and its probable dire consequences arise from what we have come to know about our intelligence community. Naturally, one would expect that a country of Nigeria’s economic standing and place in Africa would, by now, be on top of everything concerning the Islamic State. Indeed, going by the experience of how some Nigerians so easily hung on themselves everything concerning the Islamic world, be it in Iran, Afghanistan or Tajikistan, it should not be out of place to expect that there should be in place, as you read this, a desk specifically dedicated to Islamic state affairs in not only our Ministry of External Affairs, Defence Intelligence or at the ubiquitous DSS. But that will be the day!

Given that it is not unknown for Nigerians to actually make their services available to organisations like Al-Qaeda, and with the entire Northeastern part of the country now being ferociously buffeted by Boko Haram, it should stand to reason that our intelligence community, if not the presidency, should now be fully engaged with all the ramifications of Islamic state activities. But as I indicated earlier, it would be the mother of all surprises if Nigeria is giving this ogre the importance and seriousness it deserves.

It would be quite a shame if the country would sit on its hind legs and wait until Nigerians head to Syria and Iraq to be trained in all the technicalities of decapitating fellow human beings, causing and fuelling urban terrorism and putting the entire Nigerian government to fright, not to talk of completely destabilising the economy before our government starts running to foreign countries for assistance.

The Islamic State (IS), formerly the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI or the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in its self-proclaimed status as a caliphate claims religious authority over all Muslims across the world and aspires to bring much of the Muslim-inhabited regions of the world under its political control beginning with Iraq, Syria and countries which include Jordan, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Cyprus and an area in southern Turkey. The Economist reported in June 2014, that “it may have up to 6,000 fighters in Iraq and 3,000–5,000 in Syria, including perhaps 3,000 foreigners manly from Chechnya, France and Britain’.

With a territory bigger than Britain, and assets worth more than 2Billion dollars, oil resources, gold bullions and massive kidnappings from which to easily increase its current holdings and the well known attraction of the young and employed who are relentlessly being recruited via a massive propaganda on the social media, it is obviously a short distance from recruiting hundreds of young impressionable Nigerians who, like the recruits from Europe, will not think twice before returning to Nigeria with their newly acquired capabilities in inflicting complete mayhem on society.

If Boko Haram is this keen on completely annexing the Northeast, it will not be unreasonable to believe that , if care is not taken, if the Nigerian government does not take appropriate, creative and proactive measures like keeping on perpetual watch list, the movements and activities of Nigerians who may stray into this weird and dangerous organisation, Nigeria may be heading into the mother of all troubles.

God forbid.

August 31, 2014
Redefining full-scale war against Boko Haram

This newspaper published a report last week of retired military officers campaigning for the declaration of a full-scale war on the Boko Haram insurgents in the Northeast. A battle line must be drawn, they suggested angrily. The report also added, perhaps hilariously, that some unnamed sources within the military disclosed that the 480 soldiers who ‘strayed’ into Cameroon last week and returned rather ignominiously were eager to return to Gamboru-Ngala, from whence they earlier fled, to give battle to the insurgents. It will be recalled that the Senate President, David Mark, some weeks back, also suggested it was time full-scale war was declared on the insurgents. The sentiment on full-scale war has been growing in the past weeks, especially with every reverse suffered by the Nigerian military. Even the former military ruler, Gen Ibrahim Babangida, has suggested that negotiating with Boko Haram was pointless on account of the sect’s facelessness. Some logic.

We know the origins of the campaign for full-scale war, and the personalities behind it. What is unclear is where they got the impression that the Goodluck Jonathan government was yet to declare a full-scale war on the insurgents. If Nigeria is unclear about the war they are fighting in the Northeast, certainly Boko Haram and its commanders are neither burdened nor hamstrung by that semantic fog. As far as the insurgents are concerned, they are already engaged in a full-scale war with the Nigerian military, and are having a ball. Whether they are giving it their all is not clear. But by achieving some spectacular victories in recent months, even putting Nigerian troops on the run in a few areas as demonstrated by the Gamboru-Ngala debacle, the insurgents show their tenacity and contempt for terminological inexactitudes.

If the Nigerian military will soon scale up their engagements against the insurgents, it will not be because they were unclear what tempo and quantum of war they have been fighting. I think their war effort has been hamstrung by a number of factors, among which are the poor quality of arms available to them, which they at first disputed and downplayed, the manner in which the leadership of the military has mishandled the issue of esprit de corps, the military’s own strategic and tactical shortcomings, and as some officers have confessed, their discomfort and puzzlement with guerilla/terrorism warfare. I believe the military has been fighting a full-scale war, and have given it their all. As professionals, they must not be seduced by the ignorant pitches of those who suggest that a full-scale war of a different hue could still be declared, perhaps one which will discountenance clinical and surgical strikes in favour of massive and indiscriminate bombardment.

The disgrace of the past few months has been unprecedented. But both the military and the federal government must recognise that the brutal Sri Lankan model of total warfare, which Nigeria briefly flirted with, will complicate the problem. They must also situate the Boko Haram war within the global context of the war being waged by borderless or asymmetric warriors, such as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (Isis), now simply called Islamic State (IS). What is at play here is the contest of ideas and philosophies of government, the push and pull between liberalism and theocracy, and arguments as to how the almost total alienation in the polity can be addressed. Those who suggest full-scale war, apart from being grammatically inexact, seem to imply that once military victory is achieved — a doubtful proposition in the short term — peace and stability would be reestablished. Nothing could be more wrong.

As I have suggested in this place many times, it is now more urgent than ever for the president, if he can manage it, to appreciate the harm the absence of a national spirit or national identity is causing Nigeria. I doubt his talent in this regard. In addition, it is also very urgent that the country must be anchored on profound values and principles, among which are constitutional rule shorn of any abridgement or perversion, justice in all ramifications, and the fostering of unity around those great values. Nigerian rulers have for a long time been complicit in the destruction of these values and principles, and consequently there is no lodestar around which to build a country every Nigerian would be proud of. A military victory against Boko Haram, even though desperately desirable, will only offer us a temporary relief; it will not bring lasting peace or stability, nor the forging of a great nation.

August 31, 2014
Stranded in Jamaica

For sometime now, I have been in touch with a Nigerian who along with some others are stranded in Jamaica due to their inability to renew their Nigerian passport.

In his last mail Eromonsele Akhidenor wrote: I am writing to let you know that I am seriously relying on you to speak out on our behalf as I have observed that we might wait endlessly here and no one will ever rescue us.

I have decided to reproduce one of his mails for the urgent attention of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Immigration Service. I will be glad if necessary action is taken to rescue Akhidenor and other Nigerians waiting to be rescued.

“ I left Nigeria in 2010 in a bid to obtain a graduate(Masters and PHD )degrees to further enhance my capability to be useful to my community and my country I chose the Caribbean because of a personal choice I made.

“ I have completed my Master’s Program in Integrated Urban and Rural Environmental Management under Natural Resource Management Streams with good grades (My school can be contacted to verify my academic grades as I emerged as one of the best students).

At this point, I am stranded in Jamaica and have turned a destitute due to the non-renewal of the present e-passport at the Nigeria High Commission Kingston Jamaica.

“My problem started by the Month of May 2013 when my Nigerian passport was about to expire,4 months before its expiration date I proceeded to the Nigeria High commission here in Kingston Jamaica to get it renewed

only to be told that I cannot renew my passport at the High Commission in Jamaica.

I was told that I will have to go back to Nigeria to renew the said passport, because they do not have the new machine and personnel to do so here in Jamaica. That was the first surprise of my life.

“At another occasion I went back to explain my position to the Embassy officials about my inability to travel back to Nigeria, because this was at the heart of my final Master’s research project which was sponsored by the Environmental Foundation of Jamaica and this was a topic where I looked at Hazard Mapping and Risk Assessment in five communities within the buffer zone of one of Jamaica’s renowned protected area, the Blue and John Crow Mountains National Park.

This was a rare opportunity granted a foreigner and I did not intend to let it pass by me. It was then that the Administrative Attache one Mr Rufus Adeniyi gave me two options.

“ He told me, I could go to the Nigerian High Commission in New York or alternatively, I should write down my name and wait for the Nigerian Immigration Officials from the United States. He stated that, they usually come to the embassy to renew passports once in a year. In order to be on the safe side I took both options. I then immediately contacted the United States of America Embassy here in Kingston.

The Embassy of the United States of America told me that there is a six month validity period rules which must be adhered to by citizens of some selected countries which included Nigeria and that automatically disqualified me to travel to the United States hence I chose the second option.

“I went back to the embassy I was given a notebook to write down my name and my phone number. I did not only put down my phone number I also included my wife’s phone number just to be sure they are able to contact me. I waited and kept in constant contact with the embassy only to be told on the 31st of October when I contacted the High Commission, that the Nigerian Immigration officials came and they stayed for two days and that since it was a short notice the embassy could not contact every one of us.

“The Nigerian community in the Caribbean are professionals and law abiding citizens whose life and destiny should not be toiled with by the inefficient way our officials especially those from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Nigerian Immigration Service handle their assigned duty.”

August 31, 2014
When silence is not the best answer

The country’s authorities did not grasp the weight of the Boko Haram problem in spite of warnings from the press and others, until it came to this. And that is the surprise, when you consider that people have been tried for treason in this country just for writing newspaper articles

One of the things women do best is worry; it’s almost first nature with them. Women worry that they are losing their beauty, never mind that they normally first spend ages worrying that they didn’t even have any. They worry that they are losing the battle of the bulge, never mind that they first spend ages worrying they are never the right weight. Then they worry that their husbands are losing interest in them, even though they have sometimes (perhaps rightly) concluded that the said husbands never had as much interest in them as they had in men’s cars, and the women’s culinary abilities. Then they worry that their children will not turn out right. If those ones turn out to be medical doctors, lawyers, accountants, etc., what is the good of all that? What is the use if children don’t have money in today’s world? Gosh, how on earth are they going to convince those arrantly knavish children to marry money? Worry is Our Way; the women’s way.

Men worry too, but they have a different kind of concern. They worry if the car will start in the morning, and whether the mechanic will cheat them again should that happen. They worry that they will not be able to provide enough to meet the needs of the house. They worry that they may never get to the position that will put them in direct access to government coffers. Sadly, I have no such words of comfort for the men as I have for the women.

Sometimes, though, I tend to feel that the song that goes ‘Don’t worry, be happy’ is a good song, as far as songs go, but it falls very short of the mark, as far as effectiveness goes. It gives the impression that happiness is in a room and you can go pick at it as you like, rather than something you have to work at. You can’t just fold your hands behind the back of your head, cross your legs and rest your pretty back on a bench, then expect happiness to come strolling in to meet you. Let’s look at this logic. 1) Happiness, I believe, is about beating the odds. 2) Worry happens when the odds are difficult to beat. 3) The odds are difficult to beat when we fold our hands too much. Pure, isn’t it?

Sometime last week, the news came that the seemingly intractable boko haram group might have set up, first a caliphate, then a Sharia state, in the north eastern part of the country. From where most of us are standing, that is news to cause the women to put on their worrying caps as the country appears to be stretched out, relaxed on a bench, hands behind its head, while a fire is raging in its backyard.

Three things strike one here. We will not go into all the rhetoric of this act being a direct confrontation against the state and all its instruments of office. We will also not go into the debate of the uselessness of the action, given that the region is already practicing, unhindered, the system of religion supported by the act. We will also not get involved in the attempt to argue that the act is an open and direct declaration of greater antagonism. We will not go into all these because the earth is too round for that.

The first thing that strikes one here is that politicians and other elites in the north appear to have failed to foresee where the problem created by covert or overt omission would lead the region and the rest of the country. Worse, the central powers, i.e., the federal government and the armed services under its thumb, also failed to foresee this damage potential. So, our worry stems from the fact that the country’s authorities do not appear to have grasped the weight of the boko haram problem in spite of warnings from the press and others, until it came to this. And that is the surprise, when you consider that people have been tried for treason in this country just for writing newspaper articles.

Secondly, all the combined forces appear to have fiddled, watched and sat thinking while men and women were being massacred, burned, terrorized, dispossessed, and made homeless by these troublers in our midst. Rather than apply sufficient energy to burn the problem to cinders at its onset, the country diddled and did practically little enough; but that little was enough to allow the problem to grow. Right on our watch, little girls were abducted by the boko haram and have not been seen till now. I don’t believe we have understood completely the ramifications of this failure.

Let me explain. This country maintains a security unit made up of all kinds of sub-units: police, navy, air force, soldiery, and other less understood ones. Since these units are maintained on public funds, it means that the public has a right, nay, expectation to demand protection against robbers, raiders, and other big bad wolves. That public includes all our young girls, young boys and defenseless adults. Naturally, when young girls are abducted, they expect the country’s defense units to come to their rescue, no matter how far away they have been taken. They expect that their parents will come to their rescue, no matter how poor they are. Children have faith. The failure of both parents and government to do this has meant that the country has failed in its duty and has let the girls down in their belief in the protection offered by adults and their systems. In short, we all, collectively, have failed to honour the faith of those girls in parents and country.

Thirdly, four months after the abduction, there does not appear to be any move to reclaim the country’s good name. Worse, the boko haram people have even upped their game. Now, they are moving to set up a government for themselves while the country watches. Yet, in all of these, the country is maintaining some studied silence which is not very comprehensible. Right now, some move, any move, would be better than this silence, this stillness, in the face of this severe provocation. I don’t know about you, but I feel very mortified by all these because I was one person, and I have stated this more than once, who really believed in the ability and ableness of the Nigerian armed forces. I have relatives who served on them and I know their worth. That is the basis of my faith.

Whatever may be the handicap of the army and the government in putting out this already growing wild fire, I think they need to step over it now and step up. Corruption in the army, as we have been hearing, is no excuse. Insufficiency of manpower, as we have also been sniffing, is no excuse. If it were so, the government would not have been able to afford to send thousands and thousands of soldiers to go and monitor election sites in one state only. So, no, we don’t buy insufficiency of soldiers as an excuse.

It’s been predicted that Nigeria may disintegrate by 2015, even though the president and others have expressed their convictions to the contrary. Keeping silent while a group sets up its own flag in a part of the country is helping that forecast become a self-fulfilled prophesy. We do not have to tow this highway of self-destruction; we just need to borrow a leaf from the ‘Our Way’ of women: worry produces the peaceable fruits of self-preservation.

August 31, 2014
…..And a short goodbye from Snooper

Dear readers, it is time once again to say a short goodbye to our numerous fans and the critical admirers of this column. Since its debut in January 2007, this column has gone on leave only once. It has been almost eight years of continuous and killing exertions. It is now time to take a proper rest. After eight years of hammering away before the lucent screen , even the keyboard is beginning to play poker. There are times when you type in the last letter and then fall asleep on the keyboard only to find that the last letter had multiplied into eight screen pages of strange hieroglyphics which only the ancient Egyptians can decode. It is the Nubian’s nunc dimittis.

The columnist thanks the numerous readers who have kept him on his toes, particularly our old friends and colleagues in the global academy and the internet samurai who also occasionally come to blows among themselves. We may not always agree on the state of the nation or the way forward, but it has been one hell of an experience discovering how many people still care about the fate of this gifted country. May their tribe multiply. Bye for now.

August 31, 2014