The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sunday

Fayemi: Four more years (3)

We will repay Fayemi with our votes come June 21, 2014, and no Jupiter will succeed in manipulating our victory

Today, we conclude the trilogy on the above topic and from the outset, let us emphasise that the manner of former governor Ayo Fayose’s emergence as PDP’s governorship candidate in the forthcoming governorship election in Ekiti has clearly demonstrated the Jonathan mindset. It is one that will rig elections, even a national one and say, so what? Here is a president who has severally been described as a snake and therefore capable of committing the most heinous democratic coup without batting an eyelid, still believing he could not be linked to it; a skilful falconer. He is doing this not knowing the reverberations can completely evaporate his 2015 ambitions. Even if the PDP could so contemptuously brush aside the interests of its remaining 12 contestants who each paid N11 Million, I think it behoves President Jonathan to have thought of the larger picture, the consequences for self and country especially for a man claiming to lead a transformational government. Had he done that, he would have realised that Ekiti has gone far past his candidate in the full knowledge that former governor Ayo Fayose has a past, writ large, in the state. It is a past so bad some people reading this will believe my days are numbered. In the instant case though, there are no fears, as Ayo is my own brother. Unfortunately, Jonathan and his party’s attraction to him is exactly that past of unmitigated mayhem. It is what they see as the only answer to Fayemi’s intimidating record as governor. For them, therefore, the other 12 contestants are what you will describe as disposables.

But the truth is, and I can see it a mile away, Fayose is being used in this macabre dance to test run 2015. I will explain. The way he was egregiously announced over and above the others, in a take-it-or- leave-it audacity now reportedly ratified by the party’s National Working Committee, is a perfect picture of how the president intends to use the INEC not only in the two 2014 governorship elections in Yoruba land, but also at the presidential election come 2015. They think nothing of failure and if there happens to be a crisis , especially arising from manipulating the 2015 election, the fallback position will be to encourage the South- South to secede with Jonathan, the snake, claiming he has no hands in it as he would not have, otherwise, convoked his diversionary national conference. They see it as a win-win situation. Well, I do not know what could happen at the national level, but his minders got it massively wrong in the Southwest.

In 1966, the Northern Peoples’ Congress (NPC)-controlled federal government, after ravaging the Western Region, giving it a sole administrator of its own description, was about unleashing the entire Nigerian Army on it when the bubble burst. That story would repeat itself in ’83 and ‘93 with dire consequences for the country. I have no idea how old the president’s current anchormen were in 1965 -66 but the history of that carnage in the entire Western Nigeria, but especially in Lagos, is written in indelible ink for those who have ears. One other thing driving their plot is the fact that, at the instance of a Senator Omisore and his likes in the Senate, that distinguished chamber, at a time Omisore was going to contest the Osun governorship election, enacted that governorship appeals would now terminate at the Supreme Court . With that in mind, they believe that INEC only has to declare their wish and the rest will be history as the case could go on, literally, for a life time. They need be told that if any of the elections in Ekiti or Osun is rigged – please note there is a conditional precedent – then the Americans may have missed their 2015 apocalyptic date for Nigeria by several months.

The history of the Yoruba goes back thousands of years. We were never, as a corporate whole, slaves to any group, small or big and no Kashamu, for whatever personal profits, can haul us into any modern day servitude to Jonathan even when an Obasanjo now counts for nothing with him. If six decades down the line, Awo fed us on education, nobody, especially from the Avatar’s neck of wood, will now come and haul Yoruba into any kind of modern day slavery. We will remain our own masters, deciding our own preferences, making our choices, like it or not. Fortunately for us in Yoruba land, especially in Ekiti and Osun, the ‘soldiers’ Jonathan is pressing into service have such odious history our people can never forget in a hurry, be it Omisore as deputy governor in Osun or Fayose, as governor of Ekiti – a history of blood and mayhem whose gory details I will leave to Yoruba stakeholder groups which must now rise and denounce this millennial plot against the Yoruba nation. In contra-distinction to their ‘soldiers’, those they are trying to oust through foul means in both Ekiti and Osun are exemplars in the true tradition of cultured Yoruba people, men who have worked their hands to the bare bones in the service of our people. They have both rekindled the Awo developmental paradigm and we can no longer be taken back to the 14th century. Dating back to Awo, the Yoruba has a history of development which they appreciate. Short-changed during both the military interregnum and the PDP’s seven years of the locust when every facet of life in the region degraded, the last four years of the APC has been an era of reconstruction and modernisation.

In education, where Fayemi’s first surprise as governor was the state’s unbelievable 29 percentage pass in the preceding WASCE, pass rate last year was above 70 percent. The Youth Commercial Agriculture Programme has seen thousands of our hitherto unemployed young people become gainfully engaged, even as employers of labour themselves. Care of the elderly has been taken to a new level totally unprecedented anywhere in Nigeria. In tourism, Ikogosi, popular only as a rodents’ reservation colony in PDP days, has been completely transformed into a world class tourist centre now being patronised by a minimum 20,000 local and international visitors per month. Ado-Ekiti, the state capital, glows, day and night, just as urban renewal is on-going in other towns. Among other state agencies, the Water Corporation is doing everything possible to increase the water stock in the state so that many more areas can have treated water and given the governor’s leadership style and pedigree, the World Bank is giving substantial assistance to this just as it is doing in education and like so many other development partners currently actively engaged in the state. It is no longer the Ekiti State Ayo Fayose was governor over.

Despite the lies being peddled about by the opposition, teachers remain happy and supportive of a

governor that has done the most for them of any Ekiti governor.

Most local government workers are appreciative of the fact that to continue in employment, the government had, of necessity, to plug the corroding leakages which a tiny few was using to short change the system. Okada riders, recently empowered by the government, can see the difference

between the roads, then and now, as they ply their trade on the new Ekiti road network which must rank among the best in the entire country even if the federal government is deliberating with holding refund of roads done on its behalf with its formal authorisation.

Ekitis are no ingrates. We will repay Fayemi with our votes come June 21, 2014, and no Jupiter will succeed in manipulating our victory. Rather, it is their serpentine ploys, unholy alliances and evil schemes that will collapse like a pack of cards.

March 30, 2014
Oh, to be king just for one day!

In the spirit of continuity, I want to share with you two text messages I received during the week over last week’s entry. As usual, I have taken the liberty to remove abbreviations.

After all the rigmarole, you hit the nail on the head. This is because when in our situation the government becomes the entity that corners all the resources to itself at the expense of the society, the unfortunate incident and nightmare of 15.03.2014 is definitely waiting to happen again. To avoid a repeat of this disgrace and embarrassment on itself, the government should without further delay let go its stranglehold on our resources! Until they do this, it is their duty to create jobs for the unemployed citizens. 2348036732277.

Madam, please there’re issues that we shouldn’t trivialise. Government has enormous resources to create wealth especially in a primitive society like ours. Where’s your private sector in Nigeria? Public organizations are mismanaged and taken over by the same gang and you call it private sector. Enough of this weekly jesting please. 2348037058775.

Now, all those in favour of our continuing the weekly jesting on this column say ‘aye’; and those not in favour say ‘nay’. There you are, sir, the ‘ayes’ have it. The weekly jesting continues. Remember that around here, we do not count votes, we weigh them. That is why your vote and my vote don’t count. They never have.

Funny that these gentlemen (I assume) should come up with these very words around this period when we are approaching April Fool’s day. You know that day, don’t you? That is when someone wakes you up to tell you that you’ve won a lottery of ten million Naira and you jump up and down on your bed for ten minutes before you sit down and recollect that you did not buy any lottery ticket. Long ago, I read of how some poor folks watching a video were told that they could pluck spaghetti strings off trees and they all requested to know where they could get that tree. It is also the day that we remember jesters, clowns, comedians and all those involved in the art of lifting up our spirits and helping us to see that we have not quite succeeded in wrecking this world beyond repairs. There are still some funny people in it to make it bearable with laughter, humour or jesting.

The problem with humour is that it does not really care where it lands. Sir, if you are familiar with the antics of jesters, you will notice that they lift base things and people to sublime heights and bring kings and other sublime things to the base level with the gentle art of humour. Indeed, so adept are jesters at their trade that the kings who keep them know that the true worth of their Highnesses as sovereign lieges lies in the tongues of their jesters. Back then, that was a very important responsibility. The power of the jester’s glib was expected to be employed in criticising their masters, other nobles and everyone else by bringing out the truth. It is reported that Queen Elizabeth I had to rebuke her own jester for being ‘insufficiently severe with her’. She knew the truth: that many a truth laid in jest.

Truth hurts, and absolute truth hurts absolutely. Jesting manages however to mitigate many offensive and malodorous contents of many truths while not reducing their worth. With humour, you can ridicule and heal. To concentrate on ridiculing alone reduces the art of humour to base laughter, which will not do. That is purposeless and tasteless. When humour is used to heal, however, the object of laughter is reborn as s/he sees himself or herself as a spirit renewed. Someone once said that the man who does not appreciate humour has never looked in a mirror because the greatest piece of evidence of nature’s mirth is there.

You have two choices in your response to nature. First, you can berate it for sculpting you with that big, flat nose (which makes you oh, so African!), flat forehead that resembles Africa’s flat tableland, or thick lips (again so African!), not to talk of your black, black skin. I wonder, have you ever asked where nature got that from? Or, you can react by laughing with nature. I chose a long time ago to laugh with nature at my persistently woolly hair seeming to defy all the known American relaxers; my big, fat lips; and Jonathan’s political somersaults. That way, I keep my sanity and my head of hair. Did I mention that many times, jesters lost their heads because they said the wrong truths to the wrong persons? Too true.

Very importantly now, when the gift of the gab is bestowed on you, man, you do not stop to ask questions. It just seizes you something terrible and you hardly know when you are wanting to make people who have been going around with perpetual frowns from dawn to dusk have something to smile about. I hasten to add, however, that I am no jester; I do not believe I am sufficiently qualified to be one. My art, a mere rigmarole as it is, is not honed enough to be compared to a jester’s or an April Fooler. My clothes are not even that colourful.

However, I am not unmindful of the pain expressed by our two respondents. I feel the anger caused by having governments that think their only duty is to squander the nation’s resources in Europe while not providing jobs for its citizens. It even exacts taxes off its citizens by making them provide their own amenities – water, energy, oil, rain. For this year’s April fool’s day, I could tell you that the government said if you want fuel in your tank, feel free to dig your garden for oil but I won’t. I could tell you that if you want rain on your crops, sink a well or borehole, and hold up the sprinkler over your head, but I won’t. You know why? It is largely because we are doing those things already. When we were sinking a well in my house, I kept the soil sample for a geologist to check just to be sure the silt did not resemble the kind found in oil-rich areas. So now, I have taken to inspecting new wells just to be sure.

Anyway, my main worry is this: why is every Nigerian you meet now just waiting to get into government so that s/he can corner some resources for their personal use in Europe and the other barracuda islands? This bizarre mindset that is so essentially Nigerian is where you and I should direct our anger. One of the stories concerning how April fool’s day began was that a king in Europe allowed his court jester to rule the kingdom for one day. The poor thing, the only thing he was said to have done was to institute the April Fool’s day to celebrate jesting, clowning or generally just fooling around.

So, I ask you, if you were king of this unstable kingdom for one day, what would you do? Would you take all the country’s resources to Europe like our leaders because they believe the ship is sinking; or would you command food for everyone; or would you simply lie by Jonathan’s pool all day and forget you have problems? Just what would you do? Me, I would look for the wisest one in the kingdom, and contract out the job to him. Then I would sit down to plan how to continue to rigmarole and jest in honour of the smile, and April fool’s day. Thank you for asking.

March 30, 2014
The national conference: things it will talk about and things it will not talk about (3)

May Allah provide for you so that you can provide for us!
The ultimate supplication of the almajaris and talakawa of the North to the rich and the powerful. Its origins date back to the precolonial, precapitalist, feudal epoch.

In this concluding piece in the series that began in this column two weeks ago, perhaps it is best to start the discussion by quoting directly from the concluding sentence of last week’s essay: “At the end of JNC, whether we will have a looser or stronger federation is only one part of the epic drama of the times we are living through now. The more important thing is the fact that our peoples will always have to live together. If we are to live together in peace, justice and equality, what unites our peoples beyond their imagined and real differences must take precedence over what the political elites broker as appeasements to their greed, their megalomania and their bankruptcy.”

Please make no mistake about it, compatriots, what will emerge from the JNC will, in one form another, be appeasements to the demands of each formation of the power blocs of the ruling elites of the country. Whether what emerges is a stronger or a looser federation, the fundamental thing is that some factions of our elites will feel more satisfied and others will feel considerably dissatisfied and aggrieved. If a reasonably high proportion of our elites feel satisfied, then the status quo of looting and squandermania would have bought some more time for itself. I personally think that this is highly unlikely, but I may be wrong. What is more likely is that a much larger proportion of our political and economic elites will walk away from JNC highly dissatisfied and disgruntled. Why is this the more likely scenario that we will get at the conclusion of the deliberations at JNC? The reason for this is simple in outline but considerably complicated in its substance: we have reached the limit of how much social peace and cohesion can be “bought” by the sharing of power and wealth exclusively amongst the elites, with the concomitant massive exclusion of the vast majority of Nigerians from all parts of the country. That’s it: we have reached the limit; we in fact reached the limit a long time ago of the quotient of tolerable cohesion and social peace that can be bought and prolonged on the basis of the economic and political marginalization of the overwhelming majority of Nigerians through the exclusive sharing of power and wealth among our elites. If that is the profile in its simple outlines, what is the nature of the more complicated substantive dimensions of this conjunctural crisis in which looting, squandermania and patronage peddling can no longer either secure cohesion among our elites or “Pax Nigeriana” in the country as a whole? Allow me to carefully elaborate what this entails.

As I remarked in last week’s column, long before the peoples and cultures of our country were “amalgamated” by colonial administrative diktat into one country, our peoples had made deep and wide cultural, linguistic and economic exchanges amongst themselves. Incidentally, they had also made wars of conquest and domination against one another. But even through those wars, the exchanges sustaining life and civilized existence continued. From this, I repeat one of the central observations that I made last week: whether at the end of the JNC confab we have a stronger or looser federation, whether or not the crisis of power and wealth sharing among our elites is resolved, our peoples, our societies will always live together in this national and regional patch of the planet as they have done for more than millennium. However, local, regional and global capitalism has massively impacted upon the age-old patterns of economic and cultural exchanges between our peoples. In particular patronage peddling by the elites to the poor and the marginalized as a means of maintaining social cohesion and inter-group peace can no longer work in the epoch of modern regional and global capitalism.

I do not wish to mince my words on this particular point. Those who among our progressive and radical comrades who denounce the present looting frenzy and wanton squandermania of our political elites as a form of capitalism are not exactly accurate in their denunciation. The kind of looting with utter shamelessness and impunity that characterizes the political economy of our country at the present time is “capitalist” in name only. Capitalism is justly famous and even celebrated by its defenders for creating wealth in vast proportions. Its fundamental flaw is the vastly unequal and exploitative nature of the distribution of wealth generated. Capitalism that squanders wealth and that is fundamentally based not on the generation of more wealth from oil revenues but the sharing and dissipation of the oil revenues as loot is no capitalism. To give a particularly apt illustration of the crucial point I am making here, permit me to briefly explore the profoundly non-capitalistic nature of the use of patronage peddling as the primary means of “sharing” their non-productive, looted wealth with the masses of ordinary Nigerians by our elites. In doing this, I wish to invoke the system and practice of the so-called “trickle down economics” that is the hallmark of the bastions of capitalism at its most conservative and recalcitrant in the sharing of wealth with the majority of workers and the poor in even the richest capitalist countries in the world.

Trickle down economics is fairly easy to understand, even if admittedly it is extremely difficult to combat. Basically it means through extremely low rates of taxation, through loopholes that favour the rich in the regulation of how wealth is produced and shared, an extremely small minority of the very rich keep the lion’s share of the total wealth produced in a nation’s economy, but making sure that they do not consume the whole of the social surplus, that some fraction does “trickle down” to the majority of the populace. In some cases, 5 to 10% of the population keeps 80 to 85% of the social surplus, of the total wealth produced. At the height of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, the activists and spokespersons of the movement symbolically chose 99% of the population of the United States as the fraction to which 1% of the social surplus “trickles down to”.

On the surface, the manner in which our economic and political elites keep the lion’s share of our oil wealth while doling out mere pittance to the majority of Nigerians everywhere in the country seems to be another example, another form of “trickle down economics”. The President, the Executive Governors, the Ministers and Commissioners, the Senators and Honourables, the Chairmen and Chairwomen of the local government authorities, they all take their respective jumbo shares of our oil wealth, but pass some of it, a little portion of it, to their constituents, their “people”. The wealth has trickled down, hasn’t it? We are practicing our own brand of trickle down economics, aren’t we?

No, we are not! For the simple but crushing truth is that in our context, all the wealth, all the oil revenues, are consumed, the small, infinitesimal proportion that goes to the masses of ordinary Nigerians as well as the lion’s share that our elites keep for themselves. Looted, squandered wealth is not real, productive wealth, whether in its bloated incarnation among our elites or in its ridiculously and insultingly small handouts to the masses. In truly capitalist economies and nations where real trickle down economics is practiced, factories don’t close down in their hundreds of thousands because the wealth has been consumed; millions of young school leavers and graduates don’t face mass unemployment and a bleak future because oil wealth is mostly looted and squandered and not put to the production of more wealth, more productive economic activities. No, we are not practicing trickle down economics; what we are practicing is “evaporation economics”: the crude oil turns to oil wealth; and the oil wealth evaporates and vanishes.

“May Allah provide for you so that you can provide for us”. So goes the epigraph to this piece. We must not judge this supplication that degrades both the giver and the receiver in the light the values and processes of modern capitalism. In pre-capitalist and feudal societies, obligations of the rich to the poor did not generate new wealth but neither did they evaporate the wealth that was produced. But in the age of global capitalism, to continue to distribute the wealth of the country along the lines of this feudal supplication of the poor to the rich is to condemn our country to a long, endless form of “capitalism” that will never generate wealth but only “evaporate” it.

For those who might think that I am ending this series on a note of an apologia for capitalism, let me reply strongly by saying that that is not the case. Capitalism is not the end of the story in the unfolding of history in our country and our world. And there are various forms of capitalism. The ones that I find the most admirable and the most humane are the social democratic societies and economies of the truly capitalist world. There does not seem to be the ghost of a chance that deliberations at JNC will free us from “evaporation economics” and deliver us to a capitalism that we can begin to work on. So this seems like crying in the wilderness. Sometimes, in a single human life or in the lives of entire communities out of wilderness come new possibilities. More importantly, the true wilderness in our country at the present tine is in JNC and what it represents. If much of what I have written in this series is correct, JNC will fade quickly into the oblivion of history. And we shall continue the search for a country in which all our peoples, all those that constitute the vast majority of the excluded and marginalized will find restitution under a different order of organization of life and its possibilities that does not rest on “evaporation economics.”

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

March 30, 2014
Tottering on the brink

President Goodluck Jonathan generates both excitement and puzzlement whenever he makes speeches. While inaugurating the national conference in Abuja last week, he was at his most robust best with this fallacious supposition: “In our history as a political entity, we have experienced highs and lows but have always forged ahead. To my mind, the fact that we have weathered all storms and continued with the mission of evolving a truly national identity signifies that we are going in the right direction.” But there is absolutely nothing in what we are doing or how we doing it that shows we are headed in what the president describes as the right direction. If we were headed in the right direction, why would we need a national conference to remake the country’s template? The speech was indeed full of many other false and homiletic suppositions and propositions, disjointed efforts to stir the people with tired and worn-out phrases, not to talk of many sweeping statements the president himself, by his antecedents, never embraced nor endorsed.

Predictably, too, he all but ended his speech, which massaged the ego of the national conference delegates and listeners around the country, with the equally untrue and vexatious proposition: “We need a new mind and a new spirit of oneness and national unity. The time has come to stop seeing Nigeria as a country of many groups and regions. We have been divinely brought together under one roof. We must begin to see ourselves as one community. We are joined together by similar hopes and dreams as well as similar problems and challenges. What affects one part of the community affects the other.” Both in his past political campaigns and present disposition, including his unguarded and insistent deployment of religion as a tool of political mobilisation, Dr Jonathan evidently repudiates the ‘one community’ spirit he so facilely recommends. As proof that he and his speechwriters hardly read contemporary materials and analyses on grave national issues, he restates the false theology of attributing divine permanence to national borders, a deeply mendacious and ahistorical theology rebutted in this place several times and in many other write-ups elsewhere.

What is clear is that Dr Jonathan and his national conference delegates repose an unrealistic confidence in the conference both as a sacrifice for our national slothfulness and indiscipline and as the ultimate panacea for the woes afflicting the body politic, woes almost entirely man-made. Apart from the fact that a significant number of the conferees had before now dedicated their lives and careers wholly to the subversion of the national interest and to nurturing and benefiting from the status quo, Dr Jonathan has himself deftly appointed many delegates – though he pretends to altruism – whom he is confident will either ingratiatingly rally behind his battle cry when the need arises or are too enfeebled by ideological stasis to challenge his frequent brainstorms. Given the flattering stipend voted for each delegate, and the fact that some of them even celebrated their appointments as delegates with newspaper advertisements, the doubts of sceptics are more likely to grow and be reinforced. For in the final analysis, we are more likely to get a highly compromised constitution, in the spirit dictated by Dr Jonathan, than tackle the real problems undermining the country.

There is also the expectation that Dr Jonathan, conference delegates and many other Nigerians hope the conference will arrest the country’s dangerous march towards the precipice, in addition to providing a road map to peace, unity and prosperity. I am an advocate of sovereign national conference as a tool for formulating a framework for national coexistence and cohesion. But I have never imagined that even if that template was designed, peace and prosperity would inevitably be guaranteed. The 1999 constitution might have presumptuously claimed to be a people’s constitution, like all other constitutions before it, but that presumptuousness did not indicate that the constitution could not be redeemed by intelligent and altruistic leadership and citizenry through patriotic and substantial constitutional amendments. In his speech to the conference, Dr Jonathan makes the trite argument that a constitution is a living document needing periodic review and possible amendment. It is good that that elementary fact has dawned on him. That epiphany, it must be added, did not escape his predecessor, the highly animated but obtrusive Olusegun Obasanjo. Yet neither Dr Jonathan nor Chief Obasanjo made conscientious effort at the beginning of their presidencies to remedy the situation.

For both Chief Obasanjo and Dr Jonathan, the fact is that they think constitutional review, mechanically done through legislative work or national conference, can replace the need to devise a philosophical framework upon which the country’s government must be anchored if it is not to experience persistent disruptions or atrophy. Had that philosophical framework been devised and applied, the passion to build a great nation, one that eschews the kind of injustice rife in the land and eliminate the massive alienation and politics of exclusion undermining the polity, would have seized the hearts and minds of Nigeria’s rulers. Historians recognise this philosophical framework in Rome under the first two Caesars, Britain in Pax Britannica, the United States in Pax American (and its discredited variant, the New American Century), and Stalin’s and to some extent Vladimir Putin’s Russia. It also existed under Tito’s Yugoslavia, France’s Gaullism, Hitler’s Germany (in a perverse way), and contradistinctively in Bismarck’s Germany and Charlemagne’s Holy Roman Empire, among others.

The point is that there is a crushing and suffocating absence of knowledge-based leadership. Most Nigerian leaders have either been ordinary men or, if active and passionate, nothing more than practical men. They are not philosophical because they are unable to be. That philosophic state of being comes from the inside and is based on the depth of knowledge and understanding one has acquired. Constitution reviews do not teach, and cannot imbue, that essential quality of a knowledge-based or philosophical leadership. Recall, for instance, the drafting of post-war Japanese constitution, how Gen Douglas MacArthur all but framed it, though it was fleshed out by the technocratic expertise of men like Shigeru Yoshida. That constitution has philosophical underpinnings that have made it to endure. Recall also that the framing of France’s Fifth Republic constitution and its military doctrine, especially the now discarded Force de Frappe nuclear policy, were essentially the work of Gen Charles de Gaulle. Italy’s constitution did not have the benefit of that Gaullist touch, making its constitution often inadequate in addressing the country’s contemporary needs.

Dr Jonathan has transferred the responsibility for the making of a new constitution, as it were, to his national conference. Understandably, he has no original ideas to contribute, because his knowledge of history and politics, like Chief Obasanjo’s, is severely limited, if not obfuscated and jaundiced. Indeed, whatever the conference comes up with is unlikely to arrest the drift towards chaos, for the problems are so fundamental that this conference, not to talk of the Jonathan government itself, is hopelessly incapable of inspiring the structured and disciplined approach to national political renewal. Consider, for instance, the fact that Dr Jonathan has not ensured a legal basis for the conference. Worse, he has left the outcome of the conference open-ended, unsure whether it should be validated with a referendum or be a part of the National Assembly’s constitutional amendment process. Would this not create extreme dissonance in the system, and given the intellectual conceit and volubility of some of the conferees, would the stage not be set for a major political clash possibly ending in the deliberate or accidental extension of the electoral timetable?

A national conference may be underway and a new constitution in the works, but the country is proceeding blithely towards catastrophe with its troubles over kerosene subsidy rip-off, fuel subsidy financial abracadabra, rape epidemic, political violence, religious conflicts, pension heists, and Boko Haram insurgency, among others. There is no plan or deep thinking to fashion a way out of these symptoms of grave and precipitous societal decline. Indeed, we are in far worse trouble than we think. It is, therefore, urgent that we come to the realisation of the limits of Jonathan’s conference, and appreciate why we need to compel this government to do what is intelligently necessary in the few months it has left. Above all, there is a far more urgent need to vote a thinking government into office, or we perish.

March 23, 2014
On the wind of change in education from the north

That northern leaders from various political parties are now convinced that progress in the north depends on the level of literacy in the region is good news for the whole country

Whose who criticise the propensity of Nigerians to have faith in miracles do not seem to understand the metaphysics of change. Change sometimes comes in the manner of miracles, without any visible connection to logic. At a time that a section of the north is killing innocent citizens in the belief that education is sin, major leaders from the north are creating revolutionary ideas about education in response to the logic of lack, lack prolongation, and lack liquidation. Perhaps, the age of Nigeria’s miracles has arrived, even before delegates start sitting to create constitutional change in Abuja.

Although the quality of education has declined considerably in all parts of the country, the number of children in schools and colleges in most of the north has remained small in relation to the south, despite several attempts to redress the imbalance over the years. The low enrollment across levels of education has not resulted from Boko Haram’s Education is Sin philosophy. Long before the grandparents of Boko Haram adherents were born, the gap between school enrollment in the north and in the south was very wide. It was so wide in the 1970s that the federal military government designated most states in the northern part of the country as educationally backward or disadvantaged. Only two states: Rivers and Lagos were in this category from the south at that time. These two states outgrew their disadvantage, simply because their leaders took deliberate decisions to redress educational imbalance as the only way to participate in the culture of modernity.

But most states in the north have remained disadvantaged even four decades after the federal government created several affirmative action programmes to change the culture of education in the region. Schools of basic studies were started in the region, to prepare students for tertiary education. Nomadic education was established by the federal government to give education to itinerant animal farmers. Joint Admission and Matriculation Board was created to control admission to federal universities, with a view to ensure a level playing field for candidates from the north and the south. Up till today, JAMB has different levels of scores for college admission for citizens from the north and the south, all in an effort at educational equalisation between the two regions. More recently, the federal government also initiated a new version of nomadic education, called Almajiri education. But none of these affirmative action programmes seems to have worked well to induce the culture of modernity in the north, in relation to the rest of the country.

All the time that the federal government devoted huge resources to affirmative action, northern leaders did not show as much enthusiasm about changing the mindset of citizens and improving facilities for learning as the federal government did. The result is the widening gap between the two sections of the country even fifty years after independence. That northern leaders from various political parties are now convinced that progress in the north depends on the level of literacy in the region is good news for the whole country. Once all the states are on the same page on the relationship between literacy and development, the entire country will be on its way to solving most of the other problems that militate against peace and progress in the fledgling federation.

New ideas about how to position the north favorably for development are now coming from within the region, without any stimulation from the omnipotent federal government that often confuses creating bureaucracies with providing education. The good thing about the new ideas from northern leaders is that they can also help the south to come to grips with changing demands for modernisation and globalisation. For example, nothing captures the theme of education in a federation better than Nuhu Ribadu’s advice: “As part of a federal system, the north can legitimately articulate its own philosophy and tools for development to achieve whatever agenda is for the north….In this journey we are making, we have to continue to evaluate and from time to time, shake up or shake off practices, norms, and dogmas that hinder our progress.”

Another seismic change in worldview or ideology is captured by Atiku Abubakar’s recent suggestion: “We cannot significantly improve education in this country if we continue with the current overly centralised system with suffocating federal control….Federal schools should be handed over to the states in which they are locatedand the budgetary resources hitherto expended on them transferred to those state governments. In addition to decentralisation and geographical diversification we must also diversify our curriculum and educational programmes. The one-size-fits-all approach will not help us.” Just like Ribadu, Atiku is responding creatively to the realities of the north in particular while also pointing to the way out of the educational decline that has affected the whole country in the last four decades, particularly since federal government’s take-over of commanding heights of education during the era of military rule.

Still on the theme of miracles happening when the time is ripe, the Northern Governors Forum put the icing on the cake when it announced the group’s intention, shortly before going on an investment drive in the United States last week, to take the matter of education into the hands of the rulers of the north. To show that the governors are ready to use home-spun methods to increase school enrollment and retention, they have, without apology, decided to re-establish two-year teacher training colleges that the federal government had abolished nationwide, to abolish school fees for secondary school students; and to re-establish schools of basic studies to prepare school leavers in the region for university admission.

These ideas from the north should be of interest to politicians from the south as well. They are likely to be as useful to the south as they are to the north. Northern political leaders have, in the statements quoted earlier, set the tone for re-federalisation of education in the country. They have come to grips with major issues in the design of education provision. First, major northern leaders have recognised the umbilical cord between literacy and development. Second, they have acknowledged the relationship between culture and education. Third, the leaders have come to realise that federal bureaucracies cannot develop education effectively in a federal system. Fourth, they are ready to do whatever is necessary internally to solve a problem that is largely internal to the region.

The unintended consequence of this paradigm shift in the north is the groundwork it has done indirectly for delegates at the national conference. By recognising the failure in centralisation of education, especially the stifling of innovation caused by an “overly centralised curriculum,” to borrow Atiku’s vocabulary, northern political leaders are signalling to their southern counterparts that they are ready for far-reaching decentralisation in the provision of education in the country.

National conference delegates need to congratulate themselves for having the advantage of starting the conference on a note of consensus on a major area of revenue and responsibility allocation. Just as Femi Folorunso said in a recent lecture in Lagos: “Make or Break: the Imperative of Cultural Democracy in Nigeria,” delegates should accept the need to put the matter of education at all levels to the states and leave only quality assurance and specialised research to the federal government. The old approach started by military rulers to give funds and functions that should have been better left to subnational governments to the central government are now being deconstructed by political and cultural leaders from a region that has contributed more to unitary rule than any other part of the country. The call for decentralisation of education by the north is the way to go for the entire country, especially now that it embarks on re-designing itself for a future of peace and progress.

March 23, 2014
Immigration of death

Nigeria’s govt gives death for jobs

Ours must indeed be a country of taught nothing, learnt nothing people. Otherwise, we would not have lost the 19 youths, including pregnant women and their unborn babies that died in their desperate search for jobs on March 15. It is bewildering that a recruitment exercise would turn to such a blood-sucking demon that would consume three pregnant women in Benin, eight applicants made up of six women and two men in Abuja, three in Minna and five in Port Harcourt. We would see that we were taught nothing and so learnt nothing when we realise that no fewer than 20 people died in various states of the federation during a similar exercise conducted by the same Ministry of Interior, for Nigeria Prisons Service, Nigeria Immigration Service and Customs Service, in 2008.

In the 2014 episode, some of the applicants were flogged by security men brought in to control the crowd that turned up for the exercise. So, what is the difference between people looking for what to eat in the country and those who, out of desperation, get killed in their bid to get to some foreign countries where they believe their lives could be bettered? The NIS tragedy merely tells us how much we value lives in Nigeria. Indeed, if what happened here had happened in some other countries where the level of social consciousness is high, the story would have been different. By now, interior minister Abba Moro would have become a former minister because even the government would be struggling to extricate itself from the mess. So, there won’t be any question of the minister having the audacity to say he won’t resign. If he failed to do the needful, the government would have done something about him so that something would not do the government itself.

But Nigeria’s leaders are so contemptuous of the people because they know Nigerians, as the happiest people on earth that they are said to be, will tolerate anything. That is why state governments would have the temerity to suggest that fuel subsidy should be removed without fearing any backlash. And that is why the Federal Government itself would accept the suggestion hook, line and sinker, because it agrees with its own plan for the people.

Now, less than a week after the incident, President Goodluck Jonathan jetted out of the country to Namibia. Many of us would be wondering why this should be so. Well, may be the president has seen the frequency of these sad occurrences and has made up his mind not to be distracted by them because, at the rate at which people are dying needlessly in the country, the president would do nothing if he decides that flags must fly at half mast with every occurrence. Anyway, he did not travel out without leaving comforting words for the victims’ families as well as the injured. While three family members of the former were offered three job slots, the latter would get automatic employment. But it is only a matter of time , there would soon be infighting among some of the relations; whether the beneficiary should be the wife, husband or the younger or older ones of the deceased, etc. Unemployment is such a serious issue in the country that there would be a series of family meetings to resolve who should take the benefit of the deceased in some cases, with people who were sworn enemies of the dead now coming forward as the closest to them in their lifetime. The government’s gesture is tokenism, at best. But, because our leaders have always known us to be minimalists, they throw such things at us and we also accept so appreciatively. I won’t be surprised if people from the towns and states where the beneficiaries come from start praising the government for its kind gesture, perhaps taking advert space in the media to express their profound gratitude.

Yet, everything about the tragedy encapsulates the Nigerian situation. It captures the way we are; from corruption in government to its ineptitude, and then to the people’s legendary docility. Why would 520,000 job seekers be running after 4,556 openings? The answer is simple: because government has not done the necessary things to expand the economy. Even Minister Moro’s statement on Wednesday that more people than expected came for the NIS interview because they learnt they could be posted out to other countries and be pensionable, leading inexorably to the uncontrollability of the crowd was still an indictment of the government. Why are Nigerians always anxious to leave the country at the slightest opportunity, after all, it has not always been like that? It is because the government has refused to make not just the business environment, but also the general environment, conducive. It is so harsh in here; you don’t have light; you don’t have water; the roads are bad; there are no jobs. In fact, nothing works here; and astonishingly so in a country where people still scramble for power despite the fact that we regard many people in government as thieves. Even the Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister for the Economy, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, who was employed to redirect the economy appears so clueless as to the way out of our quagmire that she submitted that we must be under some resource curse.

May be the minister is right, otherwise, why would government become Agbalowomeri (someone who takes from the have-nots)? How on earth can government ask people looking for jobs to pay to get jobs? It is the same syndrome that is driving the so-called removal of fuel subsidy. Government has become a gaming machine and no amount of money is enough to satisfy it.

Now, instead of the minister accepting responsibility and throwing in the towel, he has been blaming everyone else but himself for the calamity. He blamed the police, the doctors, teachers, bankers, etc. for the stampede that led to the applicants’ deaths, in spite of the fact that the Board of Immigration Service, Nigeria Security and Civil Defence, Prisons and Fire Service claimed that he sidelined it in the tragic exercise. So, it was his sole show. Therefore, he should carry the can now that things have gone awry. And that, it seems, is what he dislikes.

Perhaps the sad aspect of it all is that it is not unlikely that NIS had already known those it would employ; yet, it wanted to give the impression that the recruitment was transparent. If that is the case, it is almost certain that those to be taken would not have been in any of the centres as their letters of employment would be taken to them at home, courtesy of their parents who know somebody who is somebody that also knows somebody either in the bedroom of power or at its corridors. So, we might just have wasted those youths who died in the false hope that they were going for a transparent recruitment exercise.

As usual, there would be probes into the disaster; but we need not live by probes that bear no fruit alone. Let those with the locus standi take the matter to court. They should sue the hell out of the government. If anything, government itself would know that important appointments should go to people who are capable only and not just as job for the boys. We cannot just bemoan our plight each time we suffer this kind of fate. The best way to make people learn is by making them pay for their negligence or incompetence, especially when it involves loss of lives. We must grow; and we cannot grow when people lose their loved ones in these avoidable circumstances and they are only left to mourn and grief alone or get rewarded with tokenism. Yes, the dead cannot be brought back to life; but the lesson would have been taught and learnt that people must be up and doing in their respective official capacities.

We also need to know into which account the about N520million that was collected from the applicants was paid. I hope you are not beginning to have my kind of fears as to why the government is yet undecided on sacking the minister? As I have always said, ‘to a carpenter, every tool looks like a nail’; in the same vein, to most of our politicians these days, every money looks like campaign fund.

March 23, 2014
Mugabe’s vitriolic attack and Jonathan’s Namibian response

Robert Mugabe, the bellicose and tenacious nonagenarian President of Zimbabwe, gave Nigeria such a hefty piece of his mind during his birthday luncheon last week that many people were left nonplussed. A few Southern African leaders, including the late Nelson Mandela, often felt disgusted by Nigeria’s mediocre achievements, but until now they vented their frustrations behind closed doors. Last week, however, Mr Mugabe could no longer hide his exasperation. Said he while reproving Zimbabweans at the luncheon hosted by his country’s Service Chiefs and Public Commission: “Are we now like Nigeria where you have to reach your pocket to get anything done? You see, we used to go to Nigeria and every time we went there, we had to carry extra cash in our pockets to corruptly pay for everything. You get into a plane in Nigeria and you sit there and the crew keeps dilly dallying without taking off as they want you to pay them to fly the plane.”

Not quite one week after Mr Mugabe made the scathing remark about Nigeria’s well-known romance with corruption, President Goodluck Jonathan visited next door Namibia. Meeting with the Nigerian community in Windhoek, the country’s capital city, the president described talk of corruption in Nigeria as unduly celebrated. Corruption is everywhere in the world, he said tersely, but because Nigerians talk about it effusively (perhaps he meant to say report it), the country is stigmatised everywhere. Contemplate the president’s weird logic for a moment, if you can. His problem, it seems, is that talk of corruption is celebrated in Nigeria, not that it exists on the scale the world is familiar with. If only we could bury it or de-emphasise it, all would be well, so thought the president in Namibia.

But did Dr Jonathan rebut Mr Mugabe’s conclusions? Was the Zimbabwean president’s perception coloured by our boisterous celebration of talk of corruption, rather than the plain, hideous fact of our corruption? Indeed, is there anyone, Nigerian or foreigner, who needs anyone’s report to appreciate the maddening delight Nigerians take in corruption? Can anyone truly get anything done in Nigeria without, as Mr Mugabe put it dishearteningly, paying for it? There is absolutely no doubt what the answers are, even if Dr Jonathan buries his head in the sand, pretending not to know how he has by his lack of diligence magnified the inventiveness of corrupt Nigerians and coloured the sham heroism of the anti-corruption agencies.

In Windhoek, Dr Jonathan also talked about the futility of fighting corruption with a sledgehammer. Alas, he gives the false impression he is fighting corruption with anything at all, sledgehammer or plastic hammer. If anyone requires proof of how Dr Jonathan is fighting corruption, assuming any fighting is going on at all, let him ask the president’s ministers, especially the former Minister of Aviation, Stella Oduah, and the Minister of Petroleum Resources, Diezani Alison-Madueke, who is alleged to have frittered away billions on egotistic plane junkets.

Mr Mugabe did not exaggerate. On the contrary, it is Dr Jonathan who is living in denial. Africans know us well for who we are. So, too, do many other world leaders, even if they humour us with sympathetic words and gestures. The reputation of a corrupt Nigeria is not one Dr Jonathan can get rid of with his feather touches and kitchen midden policies, not even if his past years of slack policies and bureaucratic lassitude were rewarded with another four undeserving years.

March 23, 2014
Fayemi-four more years (2)

It is important that our people be made very aware of PDP/LABOUR/ACCORD satanic plans for the coming elections so that we will all be on our guard

We are not confused. We are very clear about where we have come from, where we are

and where we are headed. When we started this journey, we said it is a collective rescue mission. That is the journey that has brought us this far. We are on the march again and

we are unstoppable. We know that the journey has not reached an end because we have not finished the job. That is why we are in this race. It is to serve our people.” Gov. Kayode Fayemi.

Fifty years ago, back at the prestigious Christ’s School, Ado-Ekiti, the young journalist who covered the unveiling of ‘Domestic And Foreign Dimensions Of Nigeria’s Politics’, another from Prof. Jide Osuntokun’s stupendous brain and wordsmithery, would promptly have got me Into ‘imposition’ or even the far stiffer ‘Detention’ for having the audacity to write that I was the Professor’s ‘friend and classmate’ at The School’. O yes, for a less ‘humongous’ sacrilege as that, or even for no offence at all, you could very well be wacked into any of those two purgatories and should any reason be needed at all, it could be ascribed to something as nebulous as ‘urinating all over the compound’. Boy, that journalist should be careful next time as his ascription should have gone to Seniors Bode Fadase and Sanmi Ajaja who had come to celebrate one of their own: the distinguished Prof of History and Diplomat, who belonged with them in the witheringly brilliant class of ‘60’. Sir, I hereby apologise on behalf of the journalist.

It is just as well that we are continuing our celebration of another distinguished alumnus of The School, and the Executive Governor of Ekiti, Dr Kayode Fayemi, who, this past week, picked his nomination form as an APC aspirant in Abuja and later arrived Ado- Ekiti to the waiting hands of a tumultuous APC members and, a knowing and appreciative Ekiti citizenry, who would love nothing better than to see Fayemi continue his wizardry of impressive multi-sectoral development of the state. What a huge democrat Hon Opeyemi Bamidele would have been called today if he had waited to be denied the same opportunity of picking that same form before porting to the Labour Party, a mere PDP under party, claiming he was snuffed off when he never at any time as much as officially informed his ward of his intention to contest on the APC platform.

Without a scintilla of doubt, no single edition of any newspaper in the country today can exhaustively do justice to the multi-sectoral development the Collective Rescue Mission, spearheaded by Dr Kayode Fayemi, through the grace of the Almighty God, has accomplished in the state underpinned, as it were, by his ramifying 8-Point Agenda. I therefore do not have to start repeating his achievements on this half page. Rather, as was the practice of the column in the pre-rerun election days of 2009, this piece will be dedicated to enlightening the electorate in both Osun and Ekiti states but more specifically Ekiti, where the first of the two governorship elections will come up. Happily, these are two states which emerged from the old Western Region where the Avatar, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, made the difference more than five decades ago by his strategic investment in education which he provided free of charge to the entire children of the region. The result is that today, no governor in any South-western state can ask newspaper editors to publish just about anything, however odious about him and his administration, because five percent of his people can neither read nor write. Awo’s trail-blazing revolution further ensured that, today, there is no family where you would not find at least one or even more graduates, just as it ensured that my small town, Are-Ekiti, with a population of about 30, 000, has produced 10 University professors, three of them from one single family.

I state all these because of the totally pedestrian logic of the PDP and its client parties which informs them that to get votes in the coming elections in either Ekiti or Osun state, all their Abuja suzerain has to do is make kerosene available to our people. The cheek of it is that this is a product through which they steal daily in billions of naira in the name of kerosene subsidy whereas the Nigerian poor and their children daily line up at filling stations where kerosene is bought at over a N100.00 per litre when available, at all. PDP will have to go locate its Somalia elsewhere, far, far from Ekiti or Osun.

The electorate in these two states, thanks to education and an innate intelligence, can very easily make a distinction between Ekiti and Osun states of a mere four years ago and today. They remember the days of the locust just as they can see the developments all around them. I think at this point, we should allow Mr Femi Awoniyi, a Germany- based Ekiti Diasporan, give his testimony. Answered Femi to the question: What changes have you noticed in Ekiti? In an interview published in The Nation of Sunday, March 16, 2014: ‘Many. First, the peace that reigns in the state today is a marked departure from the insecurity that ruled before Fayemi’s coming to power when political violence and urban banditry were pervasive. For me, a revolutionary feat of the Fayemi administration is the introduction of social security scheme for the elderly. It has greatly helped to alleviate abject poverty in the rural communities. Look at Ikogosi. The place has been completely transformed and it is drawing tourists from all over the country. That is a boost to the state economy. Programmes such as the Youth Commercial Agricultural Development and Youth Volunteer Corps Employment Scheme have taken thousands of our youths away from the streets into productive economic activities.’ He went on and on.

It is therefore the height of the illogic for the PDP to think that as long as they can inundate our streets with soldiers and men of the PDP police, they can scare off educated and intelligent individuals who know, like the palm of their hands, the difference between the PDP seven years of the locust and today when all the Southwest states under the banner of the APC are aggressively pursuing an integrated economic development paradigm for the entire region.

It is important that our people be made very aware of PDP/LABOUR/ACCORD satanic plans for the coming elections so that we will all be on our guard because we will never go back to those harrowing days in ‘Egypt’. One of them is for the president to financially starve the Southwest states even up to a point governors in Ekiti and Osun may not be able to pay salaries. To this end, federal allocations to states had plummeted by about 40 percent in the first quarter of the year whilst states friendly to the president are more than fed from grants from such funds as the ecological fund. Naturally, those of their clients who get away with murder through oil subsidy, pension scam, kerosene subsidy scam etc will all be requested to make huge donations to their war chest. But this is where they will remember we have a saying here, dating back to the First Republic: BO ROWO MI, O RINU MI meaning, ‘yes, you see my hands taking your bribe, but you can’t know my mind.’ Our people must take these monies when offered, indeed, ask for more because they were stolen from all of us in the first place.

March 23, 2014
The national conference: things it will talk about and things it will not talk about (2)

I concluded last week’s originating piece in this series with the claim that the topic of power and wealth sharing amongst our political elites and between our elites and the masses of Nigerians throughout the country will be the biggest thing that the Jonathan National Conference (JNC) will not talk about. I said, I asserted that JNC will be entirely, perhaps even exclusively dominated by deliberations on power and income sharing among our elites. Of course, I should have added that at the JNC confab, they will not call it power and money sharing amongst the wealthy and the powerful of all ethnic groups and geopolitical zones in the country. No, they will give it other names, other designations. They will call it “fiscal, political and administrative federalism”. They will call it power sharing between the North and the South, between major ethnic groups and minorities. They will call it “rotational presidency”. They will even call it replacement of the 1999 Constitution with a new, more truly “federal” Constitution. But compatriots, don’t be fooled by these fine-sounding appellations: the bottom line, the overriding subject of deliberations at JNC will be how to share power and wealth amongst our elites, to the unanimous and almost complete exclusion of the sharing of power and wealth between our elites and the vast majority of Nigerians from every part of the country.

My suggestion, my claim in this series is that since they will not talk about this all-important subject at JNC, all truly democratic, patriotic, progressive and fair-minded Nigerians must talk about nothing else during the duration of JNC and even after it has ended. This is not only because it is too important a subject to exclude from conferences and deliberations on the future of our country, but also because in virtually all forms of representative democracy throughout the world, equitable and “civilized” power sharing and wealth and income distribution between elites and the rest of society is the cornerstone, the foundation of good governance, social and economic justice, peace and sustainable development. This means that we cannot talk of one and exclude the other; we must talk simultaneously and substantially about both, power and wealth sharing amongst the elites and between the elites and the rest of society that actually constitutes the demographic and human majority of the country’s citizenry.

In making this observation or claim so assertively, I have in mind the fact that many progressives, democrats and radical activists are of the view that all fair-minded and patriotic individuals and organizations in our country should completely ignore JNC and have nothing to do with it. I am not unsympathetic to the reasoning behind this stance, this being the largely indisputable fact that Nigerian elites and Nigerian ruling class parties and politicians are, with few exceptions, completely indifferent to the economic and social conditions of deprivation, immiseration and suffering of the majority of Nigerians in every part of the country. But while I readily acknowledge this fact, nonetheless I think it would be a mistake to completely ignore or be indifferent to the deliberations at/of JNC. We must take issue with any and all deliberations on power and wealth sharing among the elites, the purpose being, unambiguously, to show its lack of connection with power and wealth sharing with the vast majority of Nigerians. Let me explain what I mean by this carefully.

Power sharing and wealth and income distribution among our elites is a subject that massively dominates political discourses in our country, even and especially among the masses of Nigerians who are themselves substantially excluded from the sharing of wealth and power. Which person reading this piece is unaware of the fact that Nigerians of all walks of life, elite and non-elite alike, are obsessed with the sharing of power and high political offices between the North and the South, between “Christians” and “Moslems” and between major ethnic groups and minorities? Who is not aware of the largely unwritten but nonetheless ironclad, nation-wrecking post-civil war “agreement” between politicians of almost all the other ethnic groups that the time is not yet ripe to have an Igbo as the President of Nigeria? Which person reading this piece is not aware of and perhaps not disturbed by the fact that across the length and breadth of the country, hundreds of thousands of ordinary Nigerians, perhaps even millions, are ready to respond to the calls, the mobilization of professional politicians of their ethnic group and religious affiliation to come out and protect the interests of their ethnic group or religious community in the sharing of the country’s wealth and political power? Aren’t we all fearful, perhaps even terrified of what looms ahead of us in the forthcoming elections of 2015 precisely because many politicians have been threatening Armageddon if power does not come to their part of the country? And who is not aware of the fact that outside Nigeria in the wider world, most commentators and analysts see the sharing of political power in our country precisely along these same lines of deep cleavages based on ethnicity, regionalism and religious fanaticism? Indeed, don’t we all know that when the American government, through its State Department or the CIA, makes its periodic prediction on the looming breakup of Nigeria, it bases itself on “tribe”, “region” and “religion” as the ineffable political fault lines?

But as the late Chinua Achebe, basing himself on an Igbo proverb, used to say, “where one thing stands, another thing will stand beside it”. For side by side with the tendency of the masses of Nigerians to let themselves be mobilized and manipulated along the lines of “tribe”, region and religion, Nigerians also know, they know in their millions that apart from ethnicity, region and religion, they are divided by power and wealth. They know, in every part of the country, that while a few hundreds or thousands have power and wealth, the populace in its millions lack power and wealth, lack the basic necessities of a dignified existence. Nigerians know also in their tens of millions that they are united by the operations of market forces; they know that if the paths of trade and commerce between the different parts of the country are impeded or blocked, people will suffer all over the country. For this numberless masses of Nigerians, it is not the 1914 amalgamation of the North and the South that united Nigeria since most of them have never heard of Lord Lugard; rather, what effectively unites Nigerians is the concrete fact that we trade and do business across the different parts of the country and moreover, have a dominance in economic and commercial relations over the whole of the West Africa region. Finally, the Nigerian masses in all parts of the country have a deep distrust, a deep hatred of the looting frenzy and incurable squandermania of our political rulers and public officeholders.

Like the CIA and the State Department of the American government, the Jonathan National Conference is only driven by considerations of the things that cause quarrels and disunity among our political elites. In this, they are bolstered by the fact that, as I have remarked earlier in this discussion, they are often able to mobilize and manipulate the passions of the Nigerian masses around ethnicity, region and religion. But if the CIA and the State Department cannot see that Nigerians in their millions are also acutely aware of the things that unite them, things like the forces of the market and their deep anger and resentment of the looting frenzy and squandermania of the political elites, why cannot the JNC see these things? Why are the handpicked delegates to JNC so sure that this time around, as in previous cases, they can exclude from their deliberations these things that unite the masses of ordinary Nigerians in their powerlessness and their faith in the forces of the marketplace? These issues will be the composite starting point in next week’s concluding piece in the series. In concluding this particular essay, let me give a short preview of what I shall be discussing more substantively in next week’s piece.

Nigerians in all their ethnic, linguistic and cultural diversity lived together, traded together and made cultural exchanges together long before British imperial and colonial amalgamation of the North and South administratively “united” the country. [We must not forget that they also made war against one another]. Moreover, Nigerians have been active along trade routes across the whole of West Africa for at least a millennium before modern relations of regional and global capitalism became the dominant framework of national, regional and continental affairs. At the end of JNC, whether we will have a looser or stronger federation is only one part of the epic drama of the times we are living through now. The more important thing is the fact that our peoples will always have to live together. If we are to live together in peace, justice and equality, what unites our peoples beyond their imagined and real differences must take precedence over what the political elites broker as appeasements to their greed, their megalomania and their bankruptcy.

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

March 23, 2014
On form and social discontents

We have received quite a robust and large volume of responses to the piece last week which was titled The coup against capital. As usual, the responses range from the peevish, the perverse to the profound. In their different ways, they all speak to the social and intellectual ferment in the country today. A thousand conferences about the state of the nation are currently on-going and only a political fool would ignore the dire and ominous signals.

One of the joys of the columnist is reading these intellectual slugfests, not just when they cross swords with the writer but when they cross swords among each other, that is when the commentaries become meta-commentaries producing their own contextual and inter-textual tensions. They speak to far from finished business, one hundred years after amalgamation.

An amalgamation is not designed to produce a unified society or a homogenous national consciousness. To get by, Nigeria has always relied on exceptionally strong individuals who impose consensus from above until the national fabric gives way. From Lord Lugard himself, to Ahmadu Bello in the First Republic, Babangida’s democratic chicanery until the master scam overwhelmed the scam-master, Abacha’s frantic terrorism until prostitution became a noble profession again, Obasanjo’s messianic despotism until the Third Term fiasco exploded in his face and now Goodluck Jonathan’s beguiling political levitations.

It is trite to observe that an unhappy society also provokes formal uneasiness among its serious and genuine writers. How do we capture the turbulent and toxic realities of these unhappy times without doing fundamental damage to the integrity of writing and the writer? This is what has been described as the unhappy consciousness at the stylistic level.

An abiding concern of many readers of this column is about its mode of production; its obdurate and incorrigible stylistic bravura. There is often more than a hint of desperation and frustration with the columnist. Just tell us what you want to say in plain English or get lost. Many think that the mandarin and elitist style is massively alienating and therefore an exercise in intellectual futility.

A very good friend and ardent fan of the columnist, Dr Ezenwa F’ Chizea, roused Snooper up last Monday and rued laconically: “My friend, who are you writing for?” Before Snooper could volunteer an answer, the redoubtable son of the Omu of Asaba, roared: “These things are too intellectual and deep for most readers!” In this, there was a hint and subtle plea to the absconding academic to return from whence he came to disturb the peace of the polity.

Actually, this is an old ghost and Snooper is more than happy to rouse the old apparition once again this morning. We publish an old response about Snooper’s stylistic engagement, titled, Advertisement for My Style. We do not add or remove a word. Written 28 years ago in Newswatch, it is as if nothing has changed in this much abused country, as if the nation has remained frozen in time and space. But this is nothing but a reflection of the travails of a society in the throes of a traumatic transition. Think back. Things do change, but sometimes it appears for the worse. What sustains some of us is what Antonio Gramsci has called pessimism of the intellect but optimism of the will.

March 23, 2014