The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sunday

  • What are you reading, please?

    Reading maketh a man. Books are the fertilising manure for the inner landscape of humanity. Just as a modern society cannot make much progress without requisite knowledge production, a person who has forsworn reading cannot make much progress in the development of the thinking faculty and the rational facilities that come with this. This is what separates humankind from the lower animals.

    Increasingly, this is turning out to be the epoch of “bukuru” people. Our apian and simian cousins are also very smart and sometimes profoundly cunning, but the very idea of signifying monkeys and reading apes is a violent oxymoron. This is the bane of many of those who aspire to lead us in the millennium of increasingly sophisticated knowledge production. The rise of counter-hegemonic knowledge often makes our rulers very ordinary and sometimes downright stupid.

    Thanks to the internet revolution, the reading and learning process has undergone some radical and even revolutionary restructuring. Nowadays, you can read whole books and articles on the net. But there is still no substitute for the solid tome in front of you with the raw smell of its powerful currency. There is an orgiastic dimension to the opening of a new book with its hint of conquest and power acquisition. In the copious mating of minds, certain authors and writers become lifelong lovers.

    Snooper reads books as if there is no tomorrow, and with a punitive passion. It must be confessed that sometimes, a lot of these books are mnemonically stolen from libraries and bookshops, so to say, by standing for hours and absorbing their essential content. This was a habit acquired from desperate youth which has refused to go away. There used to be a legendary professor of Physics at Ife who was so poor as a youth that he acquired his tertiary degree by going to the library and directly downloading the abstruse and impossible equations into his brains.

    Yours sincerely is currently reading two books. Frank Kokori’s memoir on the express orders of Aremo Olusegun Osoba, and a beautiful twin-tome from Chuka Momah, one of Nigeria’s greatest sports writers ever. There will be more on these books in this column. In the last 12 months, Snooper has read the memoir of Justice Somolu, Ambassador Oladapo Fafowora, Smolette Alamu, Chief Akindele and the war memoir of General Alabi-Isama among others.

    In Pa Akindele’s memoirs, the most hilarious but chilling moment came when the tempestuous and irascible Brigadier Murtala Mohammed blitzed into his office service pistol blazing. Without any formality, Mohammed warned the old man that he would shoot him anytime he had the temerity to query his memo again. Akindele wondered whether if his military commission had come through, Mohammed would have had the audacity to threaten his superior officer. As head of state, the general later duly apologised to the old man.

    Such are the joys of reading. If we are ever to achieve our potential as a country, we must bring back the old Public Library system in its modern incarnation. As usual, the proactive Lagos State government is already taking some steps in this direction.

  • Osun poll: What next for APC?

    Osun poll: What next for APC?

    For a politician whose credibility is in doubt, and whose principles and values are in contention, the performance of Iyiola Omisore, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) candidate in the recent Osun governorship poll, must worry both the All Progressives Congress (APC) and other political analysts. Though Senator Omisore got a huge part of that surprising vote from his Ile-Ife stronghold, thereby raising doubts about the fidelity of the balloting in those places, it is certainly not out of place to take cognisance of the electorate’s unpredictability and sometimes weirdness when they perform their civic responsibility. If in the 1993 presidential poll, Bashir Tofa lost his home state of Kano to M.K.O Abiola, it should not be regarded as normal that Southwest voters, who sometimes erroneously pride themselves as more sophisticated than any other electorate in Nigeria, should vote so bizarrely in favour of someone so controversial, so unqualified for high office, and so unprincipled.

    President Goodluck Jonathan defends his embarrassing militarisation of elections in the name of providing security, but he will be unable to do that in 2015, for the forces available to him are so limited that even if he wishes, there is no way he can pour troops into the states on the contemptuous scale witnessed in the Ekiti and Osun elections. The APC has promised to campaign against the militarisation of elections, it should go ahead, for there is hardly any Nigerian who is not embarrassed, even humiliated, by Dr Jonathan’s immature methods. However, while the APC must continue to doubt the president’s oath to conduct free and fair elections, seeing how boisterously he often fails to match words with actions, the party should not lose sleep over any attempt to militarise the polls. Dr Jonathan simply won’t be able to do it, not even if he succeeds in pacifying the restive Northeast.

    What should preoccupy the APC, and by extension right-thinking patriots, is how to respond to the increasing pedestrianism of Nigerian politics and elections. It is not only the Nigerian leadership that is incompetent and infantile, the voters themselves are probably far worse, with the Southwest electorate in greater ferment than any other geopolitical zone. For instance, consequent upon the loss of Ekiti, governors in the zone have started to roll back their principled and fairly well-considered stand on education, infrastructure and other policies. They have begun to enact mass surrender to the short-sighted and even whimsical needs of the electorate. Indeed, if they refuse to cut school fees, the truth is that the PDP opposition would simply promise to do it and sweep the polls. If they enforce their sensible stand on restricting the use of commercial motorcycles, the opposition would simply take advantage of what is now ludicrously described as a disconnect. Yet, the current, newly modified policy on education, particularly as it relates to cutting of school fees, is simply not tenable. The end is disaster, considering how the quality of education, like infrastructure, health and security, has been declining for decades.

    If things look dreary on the social and economic policy fronts for the APC, the party however remains unchallenged on one front: that of providing, in alliance with like-minded and principled politicians, ideological, visionary and sound leadership for the Southwest in particular, and the nation in general. It will be recalled that when Olusegun Mimiko won the Ondo governorship poll in 2012, there was a thunderous clamour by a faction of the Yoruba leadership – the same Afenifere faction that now unreflectively and selfishly allies with Dr Jonathan – for the projection of a new leadership for the Yoruba. They failed to understand that no one can give what he doesn’t have. Dr Mimiko has of course been unable to satisfy the longings of that faction. And when in spite of his mediocre talent and accomplishment, not to say temper and superficiality, Ayo Fayose won the Ekiti poll, the same faction began noisily to celebrate what they described as the impending change of leadership in the Southwest, a change they swore in June would sweep Osun into the PDP column and sound the death knell to the APC.

    Osun has been saved. But that is not to say that Ogun, Oyo and Lagos are safe. The APC must recognise that the pedestrianism undermining the polity in general is also wasting the Southwest even more. The electorate cannot be trusted to be sensible or futuristic, and in many ways their private envies, which, like the Afenifere faction’s, manifest in their hatred for APC leaders, will tempt them into the same fatalism and self-destruction that are convulsing the Middle East. Osun has been saved, but Osun is also in many ways different. The state appears impervious to the private demons gnawing at the livers of the electorate, and immune to the hobgoblins erected as scarecrows by a faction of the Yoruba leadership who implausibly see the PDP as their salvation. The APC must find ways to counter the religious card foolishly played by the PDP in the region, and the campaign of calumny directed at one or two members of the party’s leadership in Lagos. If Southwest voters had recalled the stagnation they endured under the PDP after 2003, they would have spurned the PDP’s advances in Ekiti and elsewhere. But memories are short, and the APC, in spite of its stellar performance in its Southwest states, is actually threatened by protest votes, with the non-performing PDP poised to benefit.

    Ogun and Oyo States must also find ways of uniting their party; and Osun, in spite of APC’s spectacular victory must recognise the need to find common ground with those who voted against the party. Indeed, given the needless controversies engendered by the APC government in Osun, one shudders to think what might have been had the PDP found someone less controversial and more brilliant and earthy than the obnoxious Senator Omisore. There is, however, no way the campaigns for the 2015 polls will not exert some influence on the voting pattern in the other APC states in the Southwest, for many issues will come up between now and the general elections. To that extent, the APC may not be in mortal danger. But following the Osun victory, the party must cleverly repackage itself, refine and make its message more succinct, rejigger its internal democratic processes and, knowing the limitations of the electorate, how they are often swayed by frivolities rather than substance, find a means of reaching out to them and meeting them on safe and common ground.

    The Osun victory is a relief to the APC. Now must begin the hard work of appealing to the sometimes superficial desires of an undiscriminating electorate without compromising the futuristic plans and noble principles of the progressive party. For, notwithstanding the propaganda of the PDP, and in spite of many conservatives and reactionaries joining their ranks, the APC remains Nigeria’s best chance at the moment to escape the chaos, madness and retrogression instituted and reinforced by the PDP in the last 16 years.

  • Beyond Aregbe’s victory

    Beyond Aregbe’s victory

    For the progressives, it’s time for introspection

    Two weeks before, I had made a case for the reelection of Governor Rauf Aregbesola of Osun State in the (then) forthcoming governorship election in the state billed for August 9. I mentioned some of Aregbesola’s many achievements in less than four years, and in spite of financial limitations. As I said then,  such campaign would have been unnecessary as Aregbesola’s achievements should have spoken for him. But we have entered a dangerous era in our political development where achievements alone no longer speak. That much was learnt from the June 21 governorship election in Ekiti State in which the incumbent Governor Kayode Fayemi of the All Progressives Congress (APC) lost to his Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) challenger, Ayo Fayose.

    Mercifully, the Osun election result was different. Although Osun people took ‘political notice’ of the nuisance value in Aregbesola’s challenger, they rewarded performance by retaining Aregbe (APC) as governor with 394, 684 votes against Iyiola Omisore’s (PDP) 292,747. It would have been tragic to have allowed unserious people and impostors to take over another state in a pace-setter region like the south-west. It was not that they did not try; they did, but the people’s eternal vigilance and God made it impossible for them to carry out their satanic desire. This is why I find it so ridiculous to laud President Goodluck Jonathan for deploying troops to Osun as he did in Ekiti. Only that in the former, we saw not only genuine soldiers but also suspected fakes; both hooded and hoodless.

    Moreover, the motive for sending the soldiers was not altruistic. An account had it that at a point, the soldiers were reminded of the ‘patriotic duty’ not to disappoint their C-in-C in Osun. But everyone who should know ought to have realised that Nigeria is one of the very few places where President Goodluck Jonathan could be a political asset. A situation where the president would have thrown his hat into the ring should have been avoided instead of allowing him to do that only to start looking for security agents to ensure his party was rigged in. More importantly, soldiers would have had no business in elections if the ruling party had done what was required in the police force all these years. Why should soldiers take up police duties while duty calls at Sambisa Forest?

    It baffles me that despite what happened in the Western Region in the ‘60s and ‘80s, some people still had the effrontery to want to rig election in the region so barefacedly like the PDP tried even in Osun on August 9. But, as we all know, if history is always to repeat itself, there must be people to make that happen. Renegades there always will be. They were there even in Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s time. With every 12 disciples, there must be a Judas. I mean sons of perdition will always be sons of perdition, no matter what.

    But, it is good we continue to remind such people that they rig election, especially in the south-west, at their own risk. This is not a clarion call to arms. And even if it is, it is nothing to be apologetic about. After all, John Kennedy in 1962, it was who said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” This is forever true, whether in Kennedy’s America or anywhere for that matter. America will not experience violent revolution today simply because politicians there would not attempt to subvert the will of the people blatantly as our politicians do at the polls. Elections are supposed to be sacred and those who desecrate that sacredness are like people who cause rain to fall. Unfortunately, they did not reckon that when the rain starts, the possibility of its being accompanied by thunderstorm is high. Yet, they do not want thunderstorm.

    One of the reasons why Africa is in a shambles today is because people who do not deserve to lead have forced their way into positions of authority in many African countries. And they always want to stay put even when it is clear that they have outlived their usefulness. When undeserving people sit tight in power, it has implications not only for today but also for tomorrow. It is people’s future; people lives and people’s progress that such usurpers arrest for every minute that they stay in power.

    Anyway, having driven away those who wanted to reap where they did not sow in Osun, it is time to tell the progressives some home truths. Posterity would not be kind to them if they give people who have nothing to offer the opportunity to fish for ridiculous excuses why politicians who perform cannot be reelected, thus throwing the people into perpetual lamentation. All over the democratic world, performance is key. We should resist the attempt by non-performers and vagabonds who are lurking around, waiting to exploit minor weaknesses of some of the region’s performing politicians. We have passed that stage in our political evolution where achievements would take the back seat; we should not allow the PDP to reduce the region to its base standards.

    I say this because if truly Omisore scored the 292,747 votes that INEC said he scored in the August 9 election, then, the value system that we used to hold dear in the south west is being gradually eroded. And this is dangerous. In the past, no one in Yorubaland would touch Omisore, not even with a long pole, given his antecedents. His acquittal over the murder of Chief Bola Ige might have had the force of law, but it would have lacked the force of votes in the south west because the people’s court too used to count. Chief Commander Ebenezer Obey, in one of his evergreens it was who sang that ‘ka to fi’yan j’oye larin Egba, o ni lati je’ni rere’ (before anyone is given chieftaincy title by the Egba people, such a person must be worthy of it). Ekiti people say their land is ile iyi; (land of honour); but this is not true of the Ekitis alone, it used to be like that all over Yorubaland.

    Yes, the PDP might have fielded Omisore, not necessarily because of what he has to offer, but, as a source put it, because it wanted people who have an infinite capacity to cause trouble; still, the Yoruba people would have rejected him resoundingly at the polls. I hear the ruling party also sponsored another candidate in the region because, again, as the source said, ‘he get craze for head’! These are, trying times for the south west; indeed trying times for Nigeria!

    But, the point is, if the Yoruba people were ready to insist that their votes count in the 1960s, breaking their rediffusion sets which they saw then as the roguish government’s tool of propaganda in the process; and if they were ready to do same even in 1983, then there must be a reason why they think such struggle is no longer worth it today when robbed of their votes, even in broad daylight. Agreed, as Hans J. Morgenthau argued ‘… all politics is a struggle for power’ but not all struggles for power are struggles for people’s development. If politicians in Nigeria devote only 30 percent of the energy they give seeking power into governance, things would never have been this bad. Indeed, as we saw in the First and Second Republics, and as we must have seen so far after more than 15 years of PDP rule, the struggle for power has largely been a struggle for personal aggrandisement. “If someone spent eight years in power, I should be able to beat that record”. “If someone who entered the Government House in bathroom slippers is able to come out in golden shoes barely a week after, I should be able to do same in two days”. This may seem more of exaggeration, but that is the spirit among many of our public office holders now.

    Without doubt, the PDP would not mind allowing people who want to ride Okada from Lagos to Ibadan on the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway kill themselves if that would fetch it votes. It is ready to return Nigeria to the Stone Age, provided that would bring in votes. Such is its desperation. And it is understandable; that is the only way it can get gullible people to still reckon with it in spite of its monumental failure since 1999, especially at the centre. I am not arguing that the south west should fall to such base standards, because the region has always been a pace-setter, but the political leaders in the region have to learn to sell their programmes to the electorate instead of putting up a ‘know-all’ posture or being arrogant or messianic in doing things. And, when like all mortals, they find they are wrong, they should not hesitate to reverse themselves. That is one sure way to keep the predators at bay.

    All said, the progressives family has to call a meeting where they have to tell themselves the bitter truth. As I argued earlier, if the Yoruba people were ready to go the whole hog like they did in 1966 and 1983 when roguish politicians subverted their electoral choice, then something is missing if they cannot take a similar risk today in the face of a rampaging ruling party that has nothing to offer and yet wants to ‘capture’ more states in the country, particularly in the south-west. Like the biblical missing axe, it is that missing link that the progressives must find to make the difference in 2015.

  • Ogbeni’s victory; Omisore’s defeat: the 1965 Western Regional Elections Revisited

    Ogbeni’s victory; Omisore’s defeat: the 1965 Western Regional Elections Revisited

    Be se tiwa, bee si se tiwa, Demo a wole [Whether you are with us or not, Demo will win] 

    Declaration on radio and television by Chief Remi Fani-Kayode on the eve of the 1965 Western Regional Elections

    Ogbeni’s victory

    Free, fair and credible elections are to a genuine democratic order what oxygenated blood that flows without blockages, clots and hemorrhages is to a healthy human body. In this case, the human body is like a nation’s body politic: a nation on the brink of becoming a failed state, a nation that hobbles from one nation-wrecking crisis to another is like a diseased human body whose arteries and veins are so blocked that the vascular and circulatory systems are prone to, and sometimes give way to cardiac arrest or stroke. Fortunately, and thanks largely to the wonders of modern medical science, cardiac arrest and stroke are not always fatal. A quick and effective intervention can bring a person stricken by stroke or heart attack back to life and the chance to gradually recover either completely or with a fairly good chance of a long and productive life. These thoughts were at the back of my mind on Sunday, July 10 when around 8 a.m. Berlin time (7 a.m. in Nigeria) I went online and discovered to my great relief and satisfaction that Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola had soundly defeated Iyiola Omisore in the recent Osun governorship elections. To me, the Ogbeni’s victory was like a successful triple bypass heart surgery to an electoral system that has hovered for a very long time on the edge of political cardiac arrest. Please note that I say that these thoughts comparing the diseased human body to a national body politick in a perpetual terminal crisis were at the back of my mind and not in the foreground of my consciousness. Let me explain.

    Now, the regular reader of this column ought to know by now that I am not a supporter of any of the ruling class parties in Nigeria. I am resolutely against the ruling party, the PDP, which, in my opinion, is one of the worst, one of the most corrupt and one of the most mediocre ruling class parties in the world. But I do not consider any of the opposition ruling class parties a sufficiently consistently progressive and clean counterforce to the PDP. As political parties aspiring to power, the only claim that all the opposition parties have is the fact that any other group or party can and will do better in office than the PDP. The most telling fact of the absence of a real or true choice for voters between our ruling class parties is the quite phenomenonal scope of the perpetual crossing and re-crossing from one party to another by members of our political class. In other words, in the present political order in power at the centre and in the states in our country, you can never be so corrupt, so mediocre, so cynical and so devoid of any ideas as a politician that you cannot move from being a chieftain in one party to becoming a kingpin in another party. Nothing, absolutely nothing, disqualifies you from being a power broker in one party today and a strongman in another party tomorrow. This situation is similar to the phenomenon in the linguistic philosophy of the identity of the letters of the alphabet in which, say, the identity of the letter A is established, not by anything in itself, but by the fact that it is not B, or C, or D or any of the other letters in the alphabet. Thus, by the logic of this philosophy, in the Nigerian political context APC is APC not because of some things inherent in the party but because it is not PDP

    But real choice for the voter in Nigeria is fortunately not completely absent. For if it is the case that, at least for now there is no real choice between the political parties as parties with programs, policies and worldviews that distinguish one from another, there is sometimes a choice between candidates. In the Osun State governorship elections last week, there was a real choice for the voter between the Ogbeni and Omisore, quite apart from the election being a pre-2015 showdown between the APC and the PDP. Indeed, so palpable, so stark was the choice between the two candidates that it was like a choice between day and night or between light and darkness. The most evident indicator of this is the fact that Aregbesola is quite possibly the most articulate governor on the ideals and practices of good governance in our country at the present time while Omisore, on the evidence of his unscripted speeches and impromptu pronouncements, cannot put two or three coherent thoughts together on responsible and accountable governance.

    To expatiate a little more on this distinction, Aregbesola belongs to the rather rare order of politicians in our country at the present time who actually think; who actually have progressive and compassionate ideas about obligations that governments have for their constituents; and who actually have sophisticated knowledge regarding where our country and our continent stand in relation to the rest of the world and the contradictory forces of modernity, especially in the new millennium. By contrast, Omisore is a political operator whose vocation begins and ends with making the best for himself politically by following party diktats and carrying out the will of his superiors in the party apparatus.

    Last week as I waited anxiously for the results of the Osun state elections, I began to think, rather subliminally about the analogies between a diseased human body and our national body politic. And as I did so, I worried greatly that the PDP might have completely buried the real choice between the Ogbeni and Omisore under the weight of pre-2015 showdown between the APC and the PDP. In the entirety of my experience as a Nigerian very much aware of the precarious nature of electoral politics in our country, no incident stands out more in my consciousness as the ultimate negation of the voter’s choice than the chilling declaration of the late Chief Remi Fani-Kayode on the eve of the legislative elections in the Western Region in October 1965. This is the declaration that I have appropriated as the epigraph to this piece: “Be se tiwa, bee si se tiwa, Demo a wole”. I have given an approximate translation of this declaration: “Whether you are with us or not, Demo will win”. By “Demo”, Fani-Kayode who was the Deputy Premier to Chief S.L. Akintola, meant the Nigerian National Democratic Party (NNDP), perhaps the most fascist, right-wing party this country’s politics has ever produced. But what does this observation have to do with last week’s Osun state elections? Again, let me explain.

    Among other things, all fascist parties have this in common: the votes – and the will of the electorate – are always already subjugated to the control of the Party. Last week, the ghost of the fascist political legacy of the late Deputy Premier of the old Western Region in the mid-60s appeared and stalked the length and breadth of Osun State. The choice between Aregbesola and Omisore seemed about to be completely abrogated and denied the good people of the state. But Ogbeni’s victory sent it back to the shades of the netherworld of bad conscience and troubled and troubling memory where it belongs.

    We must not be complacent. PDP is determined to make every election before the 2015 showdown a prologue, a foreshadowing of the total elimination of choice and popular will in our country’s electoral politics. The militarization of the electoral process is particularly apposite here. Most commentators have said of this phenomenon that it is meant to intimidate voters, especially those voters that wish to exercise their choice, not only between parties, but also between candidates. While this is true, I think there is something more sinister, more ominous in this militarization of the electoral process that Jonathan has taken to a far much bigger scale than we had hitherto ever seen in this country. The sheer size of the military presence can mean only one thing: anticipation of mass uprising, of widespread popular rejection of election(s) that people in their hundreds of thousands or even millions perceive as rigged, stolen. Ekiti and Osun: two gone, more still to come before 2015. I repeat: we must not be complacent; we must not tire of protesting to the high heavens and to the whole world that we reject the militarization of the electoral and political processes in our country. Ogbeni’s victory is enormously gratifying in itself; it had the additional advantage of reminding us that the popular will counts and must be defended.

     

    Omisore’s defeat

     

    “Congrat osun people, congrat APC, and congrat Nigerian, people have spoking and God have spoking too”

    From a tweet by someone self-identified as “Musco”

     

    I encountered the epigraph above when I was reading the reactions to the defeat of Omisore on the internet. The bizarre and colorful murder of language in the tweet made me laugh hard, very hard. It reminded me of the language of Chief Zebrudaya Okoroigwe Nwogbo, alias 4:30. The language of tweets on the internet is often so awful that it seems to come from undiagnosed cases of mental leprosy. But in the particular case of this tweet commenting on Omisore’s defeat, it seemed to come straight from the heart. And at any rate, it read like vintage Zebrudaya English. But consider the following strangulation of logic, syntax, tense and grammar from a letter that Omisore wrote to the press on the night of Saturday, July 9, to protest what he saw as premature release of elections results by the APC in order, according to him, to delegitimize the true results of the elections which he was confident would end up in his favour. The statement was personally signed by Omisore who, by the way, added the title “Dr.” to his name. Here goes:

    “I hereby condemn the APC candidate, Raufu Aregbesola declaring his own version of the results without recourse to INEC. With the facts of results, its apparent the PDP candidate, Dr. Iyiola Omisore, is leading. This act of APC is in conflict with the provisions of Electoral Law 2010 whereby a candidate can concoct figures and released to confuse the public thus make this election inconclusive until facts behind the figures are released by the INEC. The peace and stability of this state is such under an unprecedented threat. The result so far by APC remained cancelled.”

    A use of language protesting defeat that paradoxically ends up in a thorough defeat of language. It is unintended but is revealing, very revealing.

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • U.S.-Africa summit: beyond the fanfare

    U.S.-Africa summit: beyond the fanfare

    On the African side, no amount of money from the United States will bring development to most African countries if the right thing is not done at the right time

    Just about a week ago, a momentous event took place in Washington. President Barack Obama invited African leaders (short of a few sit-tight dictators out of many on the continent) to discuss with him and his staff the opportunities waiting to be tapped in relation to increasing trade and investment between the United States and Africa. The event was filled with pomp and ceremony. Now that African leaders have returned to their base, it is advisable that both sides of the summit—the U.S. and Africa—come to terms with why trade and investment has been abysmally low, compared to what the situation is between China and Africa.

    Though the United States did not participate in colonisation of Africa (despite the special relationship between Washington and Monrovia since President Monroe settled some enslaved Africans in Monrovia), America has largely followed the model established by the two major countries that colonised Africa: Britain and France, with respect to stimulating trade and investment between the U.S. and Africa in the years following the decade of decolonisation in the 1960s.

    Instead of taking the business risk of trading with and investing in African countries, it imitated Britain and France in taking the model of giving aid to Africa. It, like Britain and France and later Portugal, got into the tradition of giving aid to cover all manners of issues in the continent:  population control, food and nutrition, partial democratisation, etc. Most of these efforts first went to African governments during the era of big governments and government doing business and later to non-governmental organisations. Giving aid to Africa instead of trading with the continent has not worked, according to someone who should know, World Bank loan expert in Africa, Robert Calderisi in his book, The Trouble with Africa: Why Foreign Aid Isn’t Working (2006). It is noteworthy that the United States has finally come to terms with the fears of Calderisi.

    It is also good news that the United States has chosen to take notice of China’s aggressive trade and investment in Africa. Pledging to respond positively to what President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden consider encouraging stories from Africa: good growth rate, a very young population, and promise of consolidation of democracy in many countries on the continent, the Obama administration has reasons to shift from the tradition of aid to trade in Africa. While a summit with the theme: “Investing in the Next Generation” shows optimism on the part of the United States, there is need for realistic thinking that separates the promise of commitment to democracy and the rule of law by many African leaders for the reality on the ground in many parts of the continent.

    Without doubt, both sides have more home work to do after the elaborate celebration of good intentions in Washington. On the African side, no amount of money from the United States will bring development to most African countries if the right thing is not done at the right time. Proper infrastructure (good roads, regular supply of electricity, functioning rail transportation, and reliable aviation sector for moving goods and services) is a sine qua non if the over $14 billion dollars in investment for the continent is to lead to any progress. Africa had received much more than this in aid over the years, without having anything to show for it. $14 billion dollars looks like a lot of money, but in reality, it is not much for a continent of Africa’s size and population, more so, if it ends up being thrown into an environment of chaotic transportation, lack of security for citizens and foreigners, mounting corruption fuelled by a culture of impunity.

    In addition, no amount of investment dollar by itself can bring progress if African governments are not committed and prepared to make themselves to be seen to be genuinely committed to sustaining democracy, particularly free, fair, and transparent elections in non-threatening atmosphere. The problem of poor record of rule of law and independent judiciary in many African countries cannot be divorced from lack of free and fair elections and readiness of elected officials to respect the sovereignty of the people. It is such commitment to the culture of transparency, accountability, and respect of the citizenry that makes political leaders in functioning democracies to aspire to provide good governance.

    When government leaders rig themselves directly or indirectly into office, they are not likely to support or encourage independent judiciary and the rule of law. Committing to reforming the way business is done in many African countries without reforming the way elections are conducted may not be enough for creating an enabling environment for good use of new or additional investment from the United States. Generally, businesses are about making profit. American business in Africa will not be an exception, and there may be no profit for such business in an atmosphere of corruption, insecurity, and political instability.

    On the American side, there is a need for investors to influence their government to separate the grain from the chaff, with respect to African leaders promising in the most mendacious of tongues good governance and free and fair election. Just as Calderisi has said in his book referred to earlier, the United States must insist on proper internationally-supervised elections in many of the countries that are basically in transition to democracy. Countries that are not ready to play by the rules should be de-listed from the group of countries to receive foreign investment. African leaders that have no respect for their citizens are more likely to waste such investments as they will be unable to empower their citizens to become consumers of goods and services.

    The United States needs to pay attention to the kind of subtle racism that has prevented it from recognizing the need to trade with Africa over the years well ahead of China, despite the fact that many of the African countries speak the same language as the United States. But the U.S. must avoid copying the China model of trading with any country regardless of human rights record and level of commitment of its leaders to genuine democracy.

    The just concluded summit and the commitment on both sides to increase trade and investment for mutual benefit must give the United States and Africa an opportunity to pay new attention to Africans in Diaspora in the United States. There are thousands of Africans with good American education and training and with rich experience of the culture of rule of law and understanding of American business practices that can be used to add value to the new business between the two blocks. Africans in Diaspora have the added advantage of bi-cultural fluency that is needed to understand the nuances of business practice in both continents.

    In short, America and Africa need to pay attention to President Obama’s statement: “Our message to those who would derail the democratic process is clear and unequivocal: the United States will not stand by when actors threaten legitimately elected government or manipulate the fairness and integrity of democratic processes….” (U.S. Strategy toward Sub-Saharan Africa) and to President Jonathan’s assurance that the era of election manipulation is over and his assurance to African Diaspora: “We will continue to engage your services and expertise when we can.”

  • The progress of former progressives

    The progress of former progressives

    It is one of the great paradoxes of Nigerian history that the most vicious and venal reactionaries are often former progressives. Given the enormous damage they subsequently cause to the progressive cause, the question must now be asked as to whether they were ever progressive at all in the first instance or mere ideological choir boys chanting what they hardly understood or barely believed in.

    Some of them may even be innocent victims of political disorientation or mere wannabes looking for a political platform to actualise their legitimate ambition. Or in some extreme cases, this crisis of ideological orientation can be traced to the political equivalent of gender confusion or some more profound case of genital conflation which produces political hermaphrodites.

    As it is now being revealed in the twilight of their political career, it is even possible that a few of our progressive avatars were nominal conservatives who cheated demystification by sheer good luck. Rather than hurling insults and invectives at each other, it may be better to understudy the very notion of progressive politics in order to lay bare the structure of contradictions that power politics at any given time and place and the radical restructuring of the status quo which happens to be the hallmark of progressive politics.

    It may well be that we have all along been confusing an abiding preference for modernity and modernisation which is the default temperament of the majority of the Yoruba people as well as the template for their pre-colonial and post-colonial politics with progressive ideology which is marked by a clear and intellectually sustained preference for the radical reorganisation of the existing order.

    To say that the Yoruba are naturally progressive because of their instinctive preference for modernity and the modernisation project may well be true. But it does not exhaust the possibilities of the term. In the same individual, the same people and the same society, the conservative may well coexist and cohere with the progressive until a defining crisis forces one tendency to supplant the other. .

    As we have seen in the case of Dubai, Singapore and the Asian Tigers, it is quite possible for great modernising drives to be sustained by or anchored on conservative politics which is suspicious of the radically disruptive. Yet by creating a potent and prosperous middle class, these conservative societies have already provided the future nursery beds of radical discontent with the existing status quo.

    With the resounding victory of Governor Rauf Aregbesola in the Osun gubernatorial election, a new vista has opened up in the perpetual struggle between progressives and former progressives in the old western region of Nigeria. It was a major political rout and electoral shellacking of the Yoruba conservatives and sundry mainstream apostles of federal power.

    Yet some rabid ideologues of the right and their ethnic carrion feeder collaborators are already insinuating that having captured forty two per cent of the total votes cast, the PDP is clearly ascendant in this heartland of Yoruba progressive politics. They have conveniently forgotten that this was the same state they claimed to have legitimately ruled between 2003 and 2010 when they were dislodged by judicial justice. What happened to that majority of their imaginary hallucinations?

    In the 2011 elections, Aregbesola completely cleaned out the entire state in a brilliant display of total politics. Was it possible to proceed from nothing to this electoral substantiality?  It is obvious that this is all part of the anticipatory approval of the looming electoral heist their principal is preparing to foist on the entire nation come 2015. The PDP has been hoisted by the petard of its own lies and electoral chicaneries.

    For Aregbesola, it has been a close shave indeed, but they have not managed to touch his shrubby beard. That magical goatee should be preserved for posterity and in the interest of electoral sanity in Nigeria. Having captured the old Ondo province, had the PDP succeeded in overrunning Osun State through its blatant intimidation and electoral cajolery, it would have been a straight dash to the sea through Oyo and Ogun..

    Like his illustrious warrior forebears did in 1840 at the Jalumi battle, Aregbesola has managed to turn the tide against federal invaders. Like all those who have tried to turn Yorubaland into a theatre of war using Yoruba renegades, Jonathan will learn his lesson the hard way. By trying once again to humiliate the Yoruba people and rob them of their electoral preference, the federal authorities have roused a slumbering bear. The magnitude of Aregbesola’s victory will appear in bold relief as we slouch towards 2015. We may yet have to thank the federal authorities.

    Before taking a look at the immediate future and its portents, we have chosen to take a retrospective glance at the immediate past by republishing an article which first appeared on this page about four years ago.

  • Osun: Oju ti owo (money is shamed) and the fascists are put to shame

    Osun: Oju ti owo (money is shamed) and the fascists are put to shame

    Ministers of Yoruba extraction became couriers and guardians of money meant to swindle elections in two southwest states, yet it failed in Osun’s case.

    A few reactions to my last week’s article questioned my fidelity to the cause of progressivism when they saw me give hints as to how President Goodluck Jonathan could brighten his chances in the 2015 presidential election without him having to ride roughshod on the rights of the electorate by unduly militarising elections and putting opposition party members through untold torture. Let me confess that I did that because I know that the man is not intrinsically bad; nor is he a Pharaoh but being too sold on his re-election, he has permitted himself  to be dominated by two groups of Yoruba politicians, namely, the elders, whose politics is now being  solely driven by their enmity towards the former Lagos State governor, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who they never cease to claim they made, but now looms a million times larger than them politically and so had to be stopped in his tracks by their being on the coattails of whoever is Lord of Abuja while the  other group is the rambunctious power mongers I have dubbed the fascists in the title of this article and who would not mind Nigeria going to perdition. These are the two groups that recommended the total clamp down on APC members in both Ekiti and Osun, a scenario that was completely absent in the militarisation of both Edo and Anambra elections simply because, for them, Jonathan must, willy nilly, be re-elected.  A clear attestation to this was Dr Okunrounmu’s fervent prayer to God, in a newspaper interview, that Aregbesola should lose the Osun election but which prayer the all-knowing God returned to his laps in ringing hollowness because they do not mean well for the Yoruba.

    Lest I forget, I must quickly point out that the first part of this title, OJU TI OWO, is in deference to a very distinguished retired General who called me first thing on the Monday after Ogbeni shamed them all, to suggest that title for the week. As for the elders, distinguished men in all respects, what also drives them is excessive bile. When was this one born and didn’t we make him governor in the first place? That is their regular refrain about Tinubu and it accounts for all the troubles President Jonathan is putting us through in Yoruba land. I will actually not be surprised if some of these elders elect to go meet their maker than see Tinubu’s party holding the reins of federal power. It should be remembered that they were publicly led to the Villa by the duo of Olusegun Mimiko and Gbenga Daniel, two men that can never serve the president enough.

    It has been suggested in serious circles that it is to enhance President Jonathan’s re-election that these elders mooted the idea of the just concluded National Conference and got their in-house academic to write the enabling memo complete with a word as to how to ‘work’ the membership so that the president could be gifted a fresh term of six years. All they needed to do, going forward, was to be vigilant and ensure that from start to finish, a member of the group was on the ringside, missing nothing. Only problem, it turned out, was how to finally turn the resolutions of a conference that was only a presidential proclamation without any legal backing to a draft constitution. That ended up causing the ruckus at the end of the conference because they did try to force it through, pretending not to know that constitution making requires a different set of modalities.

    Then come the fascists and I challenge any Nigerian to tell me where, in this country today, there is a greater assemblage of the type of characters that mill around the president claiming to be the PDP poster-boys than the Southwest; those former governor OIagunsoye Oyinlola so uncannily described. These are men who have quite easily made an angel of the once swashbuckling Chief Bode George of the Obasanjo era and who will not mind seeing Nigeria to Armageddon. No wonder there is the whispering news that PDP leaders from both the Niger-Delta and the South-East hate their arrogance with a passion. I have no doubt they sold election militarisation in the Southwest to the president. They had earlier conned him to cede to them, the macho ministries of Police Affairs and Defence in the belief that Yoruba are weaklings, a suggestion to which the president easily agreed. And money was never their problem as this was being ferried, a day to each election, in millions from Abuja by choppers accompanied by Yoruba ministers of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. It does not get more sickening.

    If we were caught unawares in Ekiti with militarisation, torture and pre-programmed ballot papers which they, of course, could no longer deploy in Osun having been busted, not so in Osun where our compatriots showed them that the Yoruba are no weaklings, after all. Indeed, they were so determined to shame the ‘Ode Apanias’ –as one called himself after he slapped a former governor of the state – that they trouped out in mammoth numbers and ended up recording the highest percentage at any election in Nigeria since June 12.

    To demonstrate what exactly these power mongers are turning the president to all because they claim they would deliver the votes of a region where they are loathed like a leach come 2015, I reproduce below the notes of Wole Olujobi, a journalist and Media Adviser to the Rt. Honourable Speaker of the Ekiti State House of Assembly, on how these desperadoes led soldiers, policemen and hooded others to deal with APC leaders, members, and Ekitis in general:

    “At a press conference attended by about 40 journalists a few days before the election, the State Chairman of APC, Chief Jide Awe, gave the names of members marked for arrest. Governor Fayemi was himself tear-gassed and the MOPOL Commander Gabriel Selenkere, from the Niger-Delta, was quoted as saying that he was “acting on orders from above”. But the siege was yet to come as members  slated  for  arrest included the  Chairman  himself, the Chief of Staff to the governor, Yemi Adaramodu; Richard Apolola , Hon Sunday Ibitoye, Niyi Adedipe, Tope Olanipekun, Rotimi Olambiwonu, Otunba Femi Olanrewaju, Peter Oladosu and Speaker, the Rt. Hon. Dr. Adewale Omirin, Speaker of the Ekiti State House of Assembly, Hon  Olurotimi Odu, Member of the state House of Assembly; Oladipo Ige, Hon Taiwo Olatunbosun Former Deputy Speaker, the Jamiu brothers, the Security Adviser to the governor,  Col Babatunde  Oluwayose (rtd),  Special Adviser to the governor, Kayode Akinyemi, Hon. Peter Adekunle, Ojo Olanipekun, Kayode Ojo, Femi Aluko,  Tayo Egunlusi. Caroline Egunlusi and Thomas Ajewole.

    “APC members were to be shocked into knowing that that was only the beginning when Chief Dapo Awojolu, a 70-year-old APC leader was seized. The Director General of Kayode Fayemi Campaign Organisation, Hon. Bimbo Daramola,MHR,  was arrested and his father thrown into an army jeep and driven away. Finance Commissioner, Dapo Kolawole, Chief Bisi Egbeyemi, Oodua Board member;  State Protocol Officer, Tade Aluko, Special Adviser, Tope Osatoyinbo and others too numerous to mention were all arrested and kept incommunicado until voting was over. Hon. Femi Awe, an LG Chairman had to scale the fence of his house to escape the early morning. Sunday Adeyanju was pointed out by a PDP member, himself in mask inside a soldiers’ truck. Earlier, Vice President Namadi Sambo had declared Ekiti election a war.

    “Eight PDP members were arrested thumb-printing ballot papers in Dipo Ani’s, (Ayo Fayose’s campaign manager) hotel at Are-Ekiti. Yet nothing came of it even after the then AIG confirmed their arrest. A week before election, a vehicle with voting materials was intercepted by soldiers who were alarmed to see 2014 stamps for Ekiti election among the materials. Till today, nothing more has been heard. In Ekiti soldiers were under instruction to respond with maximum force to any reaction by the people and the soldiers did not leave Ekiti until the House of Assembly passed a resolution to that effect.”

    This was the torture chamber these reprobates cooked Ekiti APC leaders, members and Ekiti people in general in and they are here gloating all over the place that they won an election and Marilyn Oga continues with her joke of the century.

  • History 101 for political renegades

    As the progressive forces look set to reclaim their traditional political redoubt of the old west, one can feel a mood of upbeat defiance and rugged optimism sweeping through the region. There is a sense in which it feels like the end of another inglorious era in Yoruba politics or what is known by the fastidious French as a fin de siece.

    But since history is full of paradoxes, it also feels like just the end of a particular beginning rather than the beginning of a particular end.  In this modern equivalent of the War of the Roses, a battle is only the culmination of an engagement between opposing forces and not necessarily the end of hostilities. It is a small arc within a wider arc of history in a long revolution full of stunning victories and equally daring retreats.

    Although ideologically and intellectually vanquished, the Yoruba reactionaries may yet regroup under the federal might with a new retrogressive war-cry, but that is if the federal might itself were to remain federal or mighty. There is a time for everything and nothing remains forever, not even oppression which often has to change its hue in order to accommodate new realities.

    All of which is to say that it doesn’t really matter which way the Osun Tribunal proceeds. All over the political ramparts of the old west, the forces of retrogression and their mongrel offspring have their back to the wall. The entire region is in ferment. The fat lady is walking towards the stage with roly-poly assurance.

    If it pleases their lordships, they may choose to prolong the misery of a government and party in total disarray by a few months. It simply means the end will be even more cataclysmic. And who can query their wisdom? It was the great Mike Tyson who wryly noted that he knew of certain blows that can make a heavyweight boxer crash to the canvas many cynical minutes after delivery. Let it be with the mainstream adventurers in the old west.

    But for this politically turbulent region, an epoch also seems to be coming to an end. Just as oppression changes colour, the forces of resistance also undergo critical transformation in terms of engagement and in terms of the men and material they have been saddled with. Adjustments have to be made to accommodate new developments. Since you cannot step into the same battlefield twice, you cannot also fight new battles with old weapons and strategies.

    In the event, this is the first time you have in power in several parts of the old west people who are not direct disciples of Obafemi Awolowo but who seem to buy into the progressive ideals and ideology dominant in the region. Twenty three years after the demise of the late sage and with a new generation of voters who grew up without his overpowering aura, it may no longer be enough to swear by the old man’s name, or to appeal to him directly.

    But as the old political wizard from Ikenne recedes into the background, we must still pity the mainstreamers. They seem to have read their history books upside down, that is if they ever completed a history book in the first instance. When Zik urged the late Sardauna of Sokoto that they should forget their differences, the great grandson of Othman Dan Fodio famously retorted that it was more important that they should understand their differences.  This is the ideological and intellectual tragedy of our modern day mainstreamers.

    A gifted and outstanding political strategist, the scion of the Sokoto caliphate never surrendered his semi-theocratic vision of the modern nation-state to any mainstream. It is a troubling and unviable proposition all right, but the great man never wavered in his granite determination to remould modern Nigeria as a semi-feudal fiefdom. All he did was to identify acolytes and collaborators all over the country willing to subscribe to this quaint and anomalous notion of the modern state.

    This was no political crime. He had the force of history and political culture to back him. He was even willing to surrender the levers of the state and their immense leverages to non-native believers. After all, Saladin, the great Islamic conqueror and ruler, was of Kurdish extraction. Abubakar Tafawa-Balewa himself belonged to an endangered minority ethnic group from the old Bauchi province.

    The problem, then, is not the mainstream but what you bring to the mainstream. If you surrender your own political and cultural dominant for a mess of federal pottage, it is your business. Obafemi Awolowo, the Sardauna’s greatest political adversary, despite being co-opted to the mainstream at a time of grave national crisis, never surrendered his unflinching belief in the destiny of Nigeria as a progressive modern nation-state based on  rationality and order.

    In book after book and tract after tract, the Ikenne titan railed and rallied against feudalism as a homophobic nuisance and the greatest threat to national aspiration. The feudal mindset was a veritable obstacle to the development of mental magnitude and the emancipation of human-kind as a free autonomous rational being capable of taking his destiny into his own hand.

    Just like his arch-rival, the Sardauna, Awolowo was stubbornly unyielding and unwilling to surrender his vision of Nigeria as a progressive, genuinely federated modern nation-state. If his antagonists were willing to cooperate with him and allow him to move the nation forward by moulding it along his visionary ethos for the benefit of everybody so be it. If not, tough luck to Nigeria.

    It was a collision of altars and of mutually contradictory and savagely antagonistic worldviews. But Awolowo did not just emerge from nowhere. He was at once a product and great beneficiary of what is known as the political unconscious of his Yoruba people, their progressive libertarian outlook and their fiercely robust sense of self-worth.

    It is to be noted that those progressives who jumped into the mainstream without their battlements and order of battle always come back in political body bags. On the other hand an early mainstreamer like MKO Abiola who finally saw through the charade and chicanery was also brought back home in a body bag. It may have to do with an ancestral curse, but it also has to do with the political consequences of surrendering the initiative to the adversary.

    If anybody calls the Yoruba republican monarchists, he would not be wide of the mark. This apparent contradiction would probably have been resolved in favour of full modernity or some compromised variant had they been allowed to follow the trajectory of their own history without colonial irruption.

    For two centuries before colonial conquest, the Yoruba had been locked in a battle of wits and will with their kingship institution, relentlessly subverting the system from within through periodic eruptions of rebellions and civil disobedience. By this they had hoped to tame and domesticate the institution by curing it of its grosser and more tyrannical absurdities. Some of their subversive lyrics and wittily profane proverbs attest to this battle royale.

    In the old Oyo Empire, a tyrannical Basorun Gaa was eventually subdued and summarily incinerated by an angry mob. After the old empire fell to Fulani incursion, the former prince Atiba who had converted the old Ago hamlet to a new Oyo was openly mocked, disdained and treated as a powerless feudal dinosaur by a succession of Ibadan warlords. The same fate was reserved for his successors. An “empire” without an army was a huge joke indeed.

    Meanwhile as the  Ibadan army went about establishing its suzerainty and hegemony over the rest of Yorubaland, it was also resisted and undermined militarily and politically from within. After Owu was defeated and sacked, old antagonisms culminated in the Ijaiye war with Kurunmi who was originally from a village near Ogbomosho squaring it up with the Ibadan generalissimos in a bitter military duel which reverberated throughout the region .

    Yet this was the same Ibadan army that stood between the Yoruba and Fulani subjugation. In the meantime, the Ijebu and the Egba armies made sure that they were frustrated in their territorial ambition by standing between them and the sea from where they could have obtained more deadly ordnance. The Ibadan army eventually met its Waterloo when the Ekiti people chose confrontation and rebellion rather than acquiesce to tyranny and feudal servitude.

    In Awolowo this healthy rebelliousness, stubborn self-will and fiercely independent outlook seemed to have crystallised in the way it normally happens when there is a total convergence between public destiny and the private destiny of the exceptional individual. Journeys end in lovers’ meeting, as Shakespeare famously noted.  Awolowo could not have imposed the feudalism and prebendalism of mainstreaming on his own people without falling on his political sword. That would have amounted to a historic retrogression and a negation of the gains of two hundred years of struggle. In times of stress, an organic nationality must throw up its own organic standard bearer.

    Those who have attempted to drag the Yoruba people into the mainstream of greed, opportunism, power pragmatism and its buccaneers’ ethos must now realise their historic folly. Judging from the irascible mien, the gloomy grimace of their current principal and the frozen, death-like grin of their minions, they seem to realise that the game has reached injury time. It is time indeed for restitution.

     

    First published in 2010.

  • The Giant who wielded the big stick on an ant

    Unfortunately, whenever the wake-up calls on our hospitals have come from the doctors, the typical response from government has been to display its fangs and threaten to tear all concerned to pieces. How indescribably inane!

    One day last week, I went into a shop to purchase a perishable food item. I watched as the salesperson blew with his mouth into paper bags in order to properly open the bags and wrap the sold items. This continued until I pointed out that in an Ebola state, he would have succeeded in distributing the virus to several homes. That got me thinking.

    In Nigeria, there are just too many casual acts and contacts that are so insanitary even the bacterial world are beginning to despair whether they will ever get to leave this country and try other lands. There are the casual handshakes. I could not have given or taken anything less than five during the week on reflex before remembering Ebola. There are the banisters we touch to assist weak bones to climb staircases. Then, the biggest of all, the exchange of goods that takes place thousands of times per second in this country. Hands touch while handbags are moving from one person to the other. Use antiseptic, you say? What about the thousands of God’s own tiny but deadly creatures which exchange homes in droplets of spittle when people speak to each other? Is there an antiseptic for that?

    There is no doubt that a little warning preparation would have saved us many agonies over this Ebola outbreak. True, there are some among us who would not bat an eyelid if the devil were to drive down hereabouts and told them personally to beware of a catastrophic epidemic coming from his kingdom. They would guffaw and go on sharing cups and needles.

    By and large though, the rest of us would have been grateful for that head-up from the ministry of health on the Ebola crisis. I know that the doctor and nurses at the clinic that tried to treat Sawyer would have. They could have been saved this agony and death. Now, I understand that some are dead and some are dying for doing the right thing. Sadly, reports from newspapers are saying that for doing their duties, the quarantined survivors of that Sawyer contact are being neglected and abandoned in filthy, unsanitary circumstances with no amenities. They are cut off from what used to be their world. Just imagine right now the psychological state they are in: the terror, confusion and mental turmoil they are roiling in. Imagine right now how much gratitude they have towards the country they served which is now giving them disservice. Imagine right now what prayers they are saying for the country. We could have saved them from going down this torturous path if our ministry of health had been working like it should. Their families have the right to demand an answer from this country in the law courts.

    The most dangerous reasoning so far on the matter of the nurse who escaped to her family from quarantine has come from our national officials. They say that because the nurse had not shown any signs of succumbing to the disease, her fellow travelers are not in any danger. Now, that is just so bizarre, because many of them could have touched what she touched; taken droplets from the air she breathed or from a cough or a sneeze from her innocently. And we say they are in no danger, or in danger of infecting others? How unutterably careless can we be?

    I think what everyone agrees on so far is the fact that we were not only not ready, we even now still lack the facilities that can sufficiently take care of victims; you know, something that indicates some attempt to keep in step with modern civilization. There we were, with our hospitals being no more than ‘mere consulting rooms’ as described thirty years ago, and we all are still in denial about it today. Over those thirty years, I cannot count the number of times doctors have gone on strike to impress on all, government and masses alike, that hospitals need to be equipped so that they would no longer stand by and watch people die because of one lack or the other. Unfortunately, whenever these calls have come, the typical response from government has been to display its fangs and threaten to tear all concerned to pieces. How indescribably inane!

    Rather than face issues of inadequacy in public hospitals, every group has been encouraged to fight for control of HOSPITALS THAT DON’T WORK! After all, it is well known that government officials do not use our hospitals around here – their families live abroad; their girlfriends and boyfriends shuttle in between. At government expense, all of them together use hospitals abroad that have been well funded, well equipped, well staffed with people who know their place in the system. Why, even when they want to die, they go to well-furnished hospitals in India or the West. Need I say more?

    So, why should they care what confusion may ensue in the nation’s hospitals? As it is now, I believe even Hospital Sanitation Engineers (Cleaners) can rise to take charge of the government hospitals. Now, our hospitals are still no more than consulting rooms, and the government hopes that doctors would call off their strike to rush to hospitals and treat the Ebola scare. It is even miffed that they have not! Pray, what protective equipment are doctors to use when they go back to these hospitals? What drugs are they to use? What insurance is there for them should they have incidental contacts with infectious diseases? And I am not talking about the emergency insurance offered by Lagos state in the heat of the moment. And what would happen if some of the over twenty thousand doctors and other hospital workers were to take Ebola home? Now, that is what I call calamitous.

    Sadly, we the public (including government) cannot see the scarcity of personnel or resources in our hospitals. All we can see is that doctors’ strikes have been too frequent. True, but I think it may be because we have failed to appreciate the dynamics of those call-outs: the reasons for their existence in the first place, the background, the processes, the personae, etc. No, it appears all we want to do is possibly teach those doctors who are not politicians a lesson. A story is told of how, a long time ago, a member of the public who was waiting to see a doctor during a lean period in the hospital, rejoiced when he heard that the government had dismissed all the doctors on strike.

    No, I am not biased, just irritated that we are not ordering our priorities right. Every sector is important in a serious economy, but in a growing one like ours, the most important ones demand that we put our money where our mouths are: education, health, industry, and the police system to keep us all in line. Sadly, the government appears to be allowing corruption to toy with them all. This is why we consider that the country is in serious trouble.

    I consider that the move to terminate the appointments of over sixteen thousand doctors at once in a country as seriously in trouble as this does not speak well of our politicians. If we think it is wrong for the doctors to refuse to resume work and help with the Ebola virus, the government’s action is a more massively wrong stroke. It is nothing but a giant wielding a big stick to fight an ant. If the government is not beating itself up for not acting on time on the Ebola virus, why is it now cudgeling doctors for asking for the right thing?

  • What you should know about social media

    What should youths and other users know about social media which has become a major source of sharing and getting information?

    This was the question I was asked to speak on at a lecture last Tuesday to mark the International Youth Day.

    This question is very relevant considering how addicted many youths have become to social media. While there is nothing wrong in using the platforms, there are concerns that they are being misused and many are not maximising their full potential.

    Here are ten things to know about the social media.

    Social media are not only meant for idle social interaction like picture sharing and endless chats but  should, more than ever, be used as learning tools to enhance knowledge and source information.

    There is nothing wrong in being a young person – who you are, by catching some bit of fun when necessary and hanging out with your friends online, but don’t be obsessed with it.

    The social media offers you an opportunity to be a global citizen and make contacts locally, nationally and internationally. It is up to you to determine how you want to utilise this opportunity. You have a choice to determine who you want to interact with.

    •Social media skill is a work skill that you can fully acquire and become an expert in rendering paid-for services. Increasing deep knowledge of social media use is becoming a requirement for fresh graduates in many industries and it is an added advantage for employment by some companies.

    You have to be careful about what you share on social media. Share, if you must, but avoid over sharing which has become the pastime of young people. You have to realise that you are permanently documenting your life story and how you want to be perceived each time you do anything on the social media.

    It is necessary to spend quality time online instead of moving from one social account to the other and clicking all manner of links. The internet platform is like a shopping mall where you can spend the whole day window shopping if you don’t know what you want to buy and decide how long you want to spend there.

    Your online preferences should be things that matter to you and can enhance your life and whatever you are doing at any particular time. Search for useful websites on your areas of studies and interests and bookmark them on your computer.

    You don’t need to be on all social media. While it is necessary to be online compliant in the present age and have social media accounts, you don’t have to have too many social media accounts.

    You can easily get overwhelmed with checking and responding to messages on the platforms. Don’t hesitate to delete or be dormant on accounts that are giving you nightmares.

    There are many fraudsters online and you have to be careful how you respond to your mails and those you interact with. Some of the accounts online are fake and with false identities and claims.

    Don’t accept every friend request you get on Facebook without checking who they truly are.

    Don’t be gullible and fall for offers, invitations and messages you cannot double check.

    Your user name matters. The user name you use on social media is also important. As much as possible, use your real names instead of some funny ones that are not too suitable for official purposes.

    Don’t abuse the use of social media through postings that offend public sensibilities. Yes, the online platforms are still largely not regulated, but you need to mind what you share and write on the various platforms. What you share speaks a lot about who you are.