The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sunday

  • Southwest governors’ unfinished agenda

    Southwest governors’ unfinished agenda

    In spite of the massive and commendable efforts by the progressive governors of the Southwest political zone to reclaim and redo their region in line with the civilising vision of their iconic past, they have proved strangely deficient in focusing on a few key issues necessary to safeguard their legacies and forge a great society out of the perverted crucible bequeathed to them by their wanton predecessors. The governors, working on the platform of the All Progressives Congress (APC), must now gradually begin to complement their fixation with infrastructural development with an equal or greater than normal fixation with creating a new social ethos. If the work of the governors is to endure, if their legacies should not be claimed by others or bastardised, they must be undergirded by a fundamental set of values by which the region is to be known and differentiated.

    I absolutely do not get the impression, by their works, utterances and dispositions, that the progressive governors of the region are quite able to draw the line between the development or recreation of the region’s broken infrastructure and the values necessary for the regeneration and refinement of the region’s essence. Somehow – I do not know how – Obafemi Awolowo had an instinctive feel for the ingredients necessary for the embodiment of the Western Region essence. Perhaps because he had a metaphysical grasp of the interrelationship between man and matter, he knew as a social alchemist how to balance economic development with human development. He knew, indeed, how to build the man and imbue him with definable and noble essence while anchoring those efforts on the foundations of physical and economic development.

    The Southwest governors have done substantial work, far more than necessary to win the next elections, in rebuilding the region’s infrastructure destroyed by decades of military rule and incompetent elected governments. Now, they will need to dig deep and show a greater appreciation of the interconnectedness between man and material things, and just how the two, in measured proportions, produce a great society. For in the end, it is not just schools, roads and hospitals that conduce to a great society, as indispensable as they may seem.

    I single out the progressive governors of the Southwest for mention in this piece because they seem to have at least a vague understanding of why it is important to build a great society. And they also seem eager to tackle one of the constituent blocks of building a great society – the troublous matter of infrastructure. But they seem baffled that in spite of their best efforts, not only are they still being heavily criticised, their states have neither changed fundamentally when put side by side other states nor have attitudes been reengineered in such a way as to create the desirable outcomes they are familiar with in foreign sojourns. They may make definite and perceptible efforts to rebuild their states’ infrastructure, but they unhappily discover for instance that in spite of their better efforts they still play politics the same enervating way other unaccomplished or even failing states in the country do. This failure is a reflection of the things they have either de-emphasised or are not doing at all.

    The progressive governors may not have noticed, but it is becoming increasingly clear, in the face of almost universal breakdown of law and order in the country, that the Southwest seems to be the last oasis of order and stability. While other regions have virtually broken down under the weight of religious cum ethnic and social revolts, with some even manifesting extreme and dehumanising forms of trade in human beings (or kidnapping), the Southwest has managed to maintain a semblance – only a semblance – of peace and civilisation. It is time the region’s governors began to take steps that are consistent with the desired fundamental changes in values in order to consciously build a society immune to the madness around them. Already, their insulator is being gradually eroded, as religious acrimony is creeping into social and political discourses in some of the states. Rather than seek to appease sectarian activists, the states must find ways to firmly and publicly distance government from religion. Appeasement of any kind will be counterproductive.

    While the Southwest has produced an integration agenda, an action that has inspired at least one other region, it has been unable to pursue its implementation with the same enthusiasm that informed the agenda’s formulation. This shortcoming is unlikely to be due to rivalry between the governors, for state boundaries are clearly delineated, and boundary disputes in the region are few and far between. I suspect, as I said earlier, that the governors themselves are not clear about what should be done to create a great society, or how and why a great society transcends roads, schools and hospitals. They do not seem to understand why they must enunciate different paradigms for democracy, for electoral contest, for the justice system, for taxation, for law enforcement, etc. In fact they need to appreciate why there should be some form of uniformity in these areas, in order to build or restore the civilisation that has stood them out for more than a century.

    It must be acknowledged that the Southwest will find it difficult to stand aloof from the morass around them, especially given the massive decline in competence and standards at the federal level and the erosion of values in high places. It is doubly difficult for the region, or any state for that matter, to be differentiated when the federal government itself, particularly through its electoral, security and law enforcement agencies, stands as a dangerous, if not insane, counterpoise to orderly and peaceful governance. But except the region makes conscious effort in creating a new social ethos, notwithstanding the countervailing forces around it, it will find itself drawn deeper and ineluctably into the vortex of mediocrity, confusion, examination malpractices, chaos and decay that have undermined the country in general.

  • Education and democracy: training the future generation (4)

    Education and democracy: training the future generation (4)

    Apart from periodic panelbeating of the education sector, far-reaching reforms of this sector cannot be achieved without a national dialogue 

    In a six-part essay, today’s piece is still on primary and secondary education, for obvious reasons. Without a solid background in these two levels of schooling, all efforts to advance and achieve competitiveness in a knowledge-driven universe will come to naught, regardless of how prestigious tertiary education institutions appear to be. I, therefore, crave indulgence from readers who may be tired about reading my opinion on how to prepare Nigeria for the new world that is staring it in the face.

    We said, among other things, last week, that reforming education in our country will involve new strategies to ensure highly motivated learners/teachers, conducive learning conditions; qualified teachers; dedicated school administrators; etc. There is the tendency to think (the way most federal politicians and their administrators do) that promising to throw money at these challenges may be enough to keep citizens inspired to learn. Some may even argue that spending up to 24% of the country’s annual budget on education as recommended by UNESCO, instead of the paltry 4% that is usually allocated to the education sector will transform the nation’s education landscape. Given the parlous state of governance over the years, giving 24% of the nation’s budget to education is not likely to create a sufficient condition for improving the quality of education. Doing just that is likely to fuel the culture of corruption within the circles of politicians and bureaucrats put in charge of the sector.

    What must happen before the right percentage of annual budget is allocated to education is to have the right ideological framework for governing the country at all levels: federal, state, and local. Put simply, there is a need for political parties and their leaders to provide leadership in creating development vision and mission that can inspire and mobilise citizens. Such vision must include measurable and visible milestones that citizens can identify with. Using the mantra of unity and transformation to inspire citizens is too vague and devoid of measurable milestones for citizens to identify with. Leaders of other nations have in recent times created visions that have helped to transform their countries. South Korea, Singapore, Brazil, India, Mexico, and even United Arab Emirates have all created national goals that have kept both their governors and citizens moving towards progress, not only in education but in other sectors.

    Nigeria had even done something like that in the past. According to LadipoAdamolekun, BisiAdesola, and Chief BisiAkande in Legacy of Educational Excellence, the Universal Free Education Programme of Western Nigeria in the years before Nigeria’s independence and civil war would not have succeeded if there was no synergy between the government and the civil service that served it and without the mobilisation of the citizens done by the Action Group in the 1950s. With an ideological mission that set out to improve freedom and quality of life of citizens in the Western Region, the Action Group used the motto of “Freedom for all, Life moreAbundant” to mobilise citizens to support all its developmental projects including education. This explained why it was possible for Western Nigeria to create the Partnership Model for education provision almost half a century before it became popular in many countries today. The Partnership Model in Western Nigeria then recognised the government as the agency with superintending responsibility for education and of citizens, communities, and religious institutions as partners in a vineyard that was directed by politicians and administrators at both state and local government levels. Local governments, under the nose of parents with children in the schools, managed the schools while the state government provided financial support through revenue from taxation. The success in provision of primary and secondary education in Western Nigeria later turned into failure under the auspices of military dictatorships, as Adamolekun pointedly observed : “The unitary and centralised command structures of the military contrasted with the ‘true’ federalist arrangements within which the Western Nigerian ‘success story’ was incubated and implemented.”

    The institutional decay and educational decline that started with increased unitary governance under the military and that appears to have become an abiding aspect of federal governance in the post-military era have created a situation where states and local governments no longer have the powers to raise taxes to fund their own development. By depending on handouts from the federal government, many states and local governments have also sought and obtained support from the federal government in their direct and indirect efforts to alienate citizens. The result of decades of institutional decay and a national journey without destination under post-military rule is the failure that abounds in all levels of education, particularly in the most seminal level: primary/secondary education.

    Apart from periodic panelbeating of the education sector, far-reaching reforms of this sector cannot be achieved without a national dialogue that allows each part of the country to spell out what it hopes to achieve for its citizens in a highly competitive global market. Throwing money periodically and grudgingly at tertiary education and after long periods of strikes may not lead to meaningful education reform. We may not know what type of education to give citizens and how to do so effectively until we know where we want our nation to be in the future and what capacities we want our citizens to have.

    As Adamolekun has aptly observed, our citizens have been demobilised for over three decades. The demobilisation has arisen from an ethos of increased unitary rule and the disjuncture between government and citizens created by a system of funding through allocation of funds from a central purse constituted by rents collected from extractive industries and the spoils system that this has engendered during and after military rule. Local governments and states need to be autonomous enough to raise funds for their own development. This is not in the sense intended by lawmakers (now engaged in some form of constitutional amendment) to allow local governments to spend money donated to them by the federal government without any oversight by the states that compose them; it is in the sense of giving states and local governments autonomy to raise the taxes they need from citizens, the real owners of the country and its parts, and to collaboratively engage citizens in creating a functional education system from primary to postgraduate training.

    In other words, the ethos of nation building that was evident in Western Nigeria in the 1950s and that is evident in most federal states in the world today needs to be retrieved by those who make it their calling to rule Nigeria and its parts. Just as Chief Akande once observed, “At present, Nigeria has no educational system with adequate philosophical objectives as a backbone. It can be seen therefore that the major purpose of most Nigerian educational institutions is administration of an examination orientation.” Primary and secondary education has to be reformed urgently and given a goal that is larger than running elaborate examination boards. Creating good philosophers and plumbers (used here as metaphors for effective academic and vocational training) depends on agreeing on what kind of Nigeria and Nigerians the country and its parts desire to produce to ensure sustainable unity and development. Doing this requires paying more attention to primary/secondary education.

    To be continued

  • A wariness of being be-clouded: cloud, twitter, facebook, texting and other inducements of the digital age

    A wariness of being be-clouded: cloud, twitter, facebook, texting and other inducements of the digital age

    Becloud: verb (used with objects) – 1.to darken or obscure with clouds.
    2. to confuse or muddle: to becloud the issues.
    Dictionary.com (Online)

    I think it was about two years ago that my mind began to focus on the appearance of the words “the cloud” and “cloud computing” on the screen of my laptop computer. I use the term focus deliberately for as soon as I began to pay attention to these words, I realised that for quite some time, my mind had been slowly registering their appearance on my laptop screen and pondering what they meant. At any rate, eventually my slight, semi-conscious curiosity became a very active need to know and that was when I began to focus on those words, “the cloud” and “cloud computing”.

    I should perhaps add at this point that the first thing that came to my mind with this focus was a vague intimation that I felt between these words and one of my favourite plays from Greek antiquity, The Clouds of Aristophanes. The play is a powerful and rambunctiously funny satire on the school of classical Athenian philosophy known as the Sophists. As we all know, it is from this school of philosophers that the word “sophistry” has come down to us. Famously or notoriously, sophistry beclouds issues by a show of brilliance that initially promises to be illuminating but actually turns out to be muddled and confounding.

    Astonishingly, when I searched for the meaning of “the cloud” and “cloud computing” on the internet and even asked people who knew what the words meant, my vague intimations of Aristophanes’ play were confirmed. “The cloud”, it turns out, refers to a range of services on the worldwide web that seem to be provided by real internet servers or providers when in fact they are served up by virtual or simulated software applications (apps) running on one or more real machines. Since these virtual servers of “the cloud” do not physically exist, they can be moved around and scaled up and down endlessly in the manner in which a cloud – an insubstantial cloud that appears to the naked eye like a weighty mass – can be blown about in the wind. Another thing that I found out about “cloud computing” is that it involves a large number of computers and users that are connected in a seemingly real time communication when in actual fact they may be located at opposite ends of the planet.

    To date, I have not tried “the cloud”, even though it intrigues me a lot. And it is this very fact that links it with all those other services and inducements of the internet and the digital age that I also have not tried or tried rather half-heartedly. These include but are not limited to twitter, facebook and text messaging. Obviously, my hesitation, my reservation about text messaging needs an explanation and, dear reader, I am happy to give one. I come from an age in which the only form of “texting” that we knew was the telegram. To send a message by the telegram you of course had to go to a post office. You filled out a form with your message on it and took great care to be economical with the number of words in your message because each word cost quite a bit. I forget now how long it took for your message to be delivered to whom you wanted it sent, but it certainly was not the same day, talk less of the same instant. From this brief account it can be seen that the telegram is to text messaging on a cell phone as travelling in the horse drawn carriages of the past is to traveling in the futuristic “bullet trains” of China.

    Does my reservation about text messaging on the cell phone have anything to do with my having once been a user of the telegram? Yes and no. Let me take the no first: I have no nostalgia, none whatsoever, for the telegram. This is because even back then, long before the arrival of computers, smart phones and text messaging, using the telegram was a cumbersome and rather joyless affair! You not only stood in line for a long time at the post office but when you got to the service counter you often found out that you had to go and prune down the number of words in your message because you did not have enough money on you to pay for the number of words in your message. And that sent you right back to the end of the long line in which you had stood for perhaps more than thirty minutes!

    Now for the yes part. Coming from the age of the slow and laborious rituals connected with sending telegrams predisposes one to being economical, being prudent with one’s time and one’s dispositions. Here I must make a confession: the longest, the absolute longest, that I can go on a text messaging spree is, at the very most, ten messages each way. Imagine this admittedly spartan regimen to the unlimited temporal freedom of the enthusiasts, the champions of marathon text messaging sessions that can spend a whole day sending messages back and forth, most of them quite inane! I do not make this comment self-righteously, sitting in judgment over the aficionados of cell phone text messaging. But if it seems that I am being judgmental, being haughtily dismissive of what other people find joyful and fulfilling, do accept my apologies. To each person his or her own inclinations and disinclinations. Only, please, please do not force your own inclinations on me as a denizen of the new brave and buoyant 21st century age of a digitality that promises so many inducements!

    In all seriousness, though I affect a light, playful tone in these ruminations, these are very serious matters. In this new age of a virtual digital paradise in a real world that has not successfully tackled some of the oldest and most enduring problems of survival for us as individuals, nations and the species, we are all, in our diverse and often conflicting ways, consumers of an endless range of services that confound the distinction between our wants and our needs and between products and services that can sustain us and those that are meant only to entertain us or even distract us from the hard, difficult choices we have to make. Let me elaborate a little on this observation.

    I spend an inordinately large part of my daily life on the internet. For the most part, these are hours well spent, hours in which I am working on things I must do in order either to enhance my professional competencies or get a better and fuller sense of the world we live in. There is also the odd hour or two in which I am hunting down or chasing after humorous or entertaining posts and blogs on the internet. In all, it means that I have to be extremely mindful, first, that I am not distracted from important things by the surfeit of mirages on the internet and second, that the recreational inducements of the internet do not overwhelm my real or potential capacity to intervene, to make a difference for the better in the conditions of my life and the lives of others close to me. This, I confess, is the source of my hesitation, my reservation concerning things like twitter, facebook, LinkedIn and, yes, the newfound intriguing inducement of “the cloud”. The deluge is upon us and growing. Unless of course you among the hundreds of millions of the poor and the marginalised of the world who have no access to the internet.

    If you are not among these multitudes and if you are not an incurious person, you cannot go surfing on the internet without discovering new things that catch your fancy, that send powerful impulses of wonder, delight and discovery. It can be both exhilarating and very tiring and confounding.

    How do you react wisely and productively to this cornucopia of elixir and poison, uplift and confusion? What are the signposts for separating the wheat from the chaff, the wine froth from the dregs? Drawing a lesson from the time in my childhood when I taught myself how to swim at Alalubosa Lake in Ibadan and discovered that when you were tiring and the shore was still a long distance away, you could regain your strength and your composure by treading water on the same spot, I take a pause, a long pause, before taking the bait of each new product, each new inducement thrown up by the profligate supermarkets of digitality on the internet and elsewhere. Let me state a few of these “treading water” pauses of mine with regard to one particularly ubiquitous product or service of digitality, phone calls.

    Phone calls. I am very wary, perhaps even very resentful of just how massively and crazily phone calls have become intrusive into our daily lives. Without a doubt, this comes from the instant connectedness that the cell phone has established between friends, families, acquaintances and even total strangers in our world. Moreover, some of us remember the time not too long ago when you had to be rich and well connected to own landline phones. At any rate, who among us can now leave home without his or her cell phone? Well, consciously and deliberately, most times I do! And I cannot believe that there are not a few others like me who also feel completely unperturbed to leave their phones at home when they step out into the outside world. If you sometimes feel inclined to do so but feel unsure that it is a wise thing to do, try it a few times and you will discover that your daily life has not become impoverished on account of that simple act. Yes, I miss many calls but I return the missed calls when I can. Yes, I am haunted by the thought that one day a call might come that might have to do with a life and death emergency, but that is a contingency that is there all the time anyway, cell phone or no cell phone.

    I readily admit the fact that many of my friends were initially quite upset by the constancy of the missed calls they got from me. However, in time they have become used to the discrete distance I have established between my cell phone and my daily life. What are friends but those who are willing to take you for who you are as long as they know that your idiosyncrasies do not negate your love, your respect for them? There are long stretches of daily life that I try to keep free of any and all intrusion; and there is a corresponding pool of inner concentration that I try to preserve from the incessant, endless barrage of phone calls. And on a far more mundane level, I never take phone calls when I am walking in the streets, never!

    To conclude, perhaps rather inconclusively. Facebook, twitter, LinkedIn, they all interest me but so far, I have stayed away from them. This has not stemmed the flow of invitations to wade in, to join them, to tune in on the waves of their allegedly very ebullient social networking. Concerning “the cloud”, something tells me that sooner or later, I will try it, I will get in on the act. But if and when I do so, I hope that I shall not be be-clouded.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • PDP: Reaping the whirlwind

    PDP: Reaping the whirlwind

    Why would a party chairman attract so many enemies?

    Up until Friday last week, everything pointed to my having to write, again, on Livingston, an enchanting Scottish town which I arrived some two weeks ago and about which I had written as follows on 26 June, 2011: ‘located approximately 25 km west of Edinburgh and 50 km east of Glasgow, Livingston is the fourth post-war new town in Scotland. Adorned every inch of the way by enthralling greenery, it is built around a collection of small villages – Livingston Village, Bells quarry and Livingston Station. The population, as at 2008 was estimated to be around 63,160 and the name dates back to the 12th Century when a Flemish entrepreneur, De Leving, built a fortified tower and the settlement around it became known as Levingstoun, Layingston and, eventually Livingston. Livingston is, without a doubt, a visitor’s delight’.

    I, however, woke up that morning, convinced this was no time to afghanistise, as truly momentous events are happening back home, the most important being the literally irreversible – Nigerians must endeavour to make it permanently irreversible – dismemberment of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP); a party which, through trickery and unimaginable dare-devilry, has succeeded in holding Nigeria down since 1999 when a military mafia divined it into being to keep its members’ loots safe. What that means, in essence, is that PDP has been true to its proprietors, and what little extra it has done ever since, is to increase the rate of rent seeking in the country. Nigeria has therefore not progressed an inch in spite of its massive resources and the cheap propaganda about transformation. It must be conceded, however, that there has been some transformation in corruption. We now have pension scams, almost unknown before, just as all manner of stratagems are now in place to steal the huge oil resources, among them, fraudulent oil subsidy payments, some to children of PDP’s past chairmen, and totally incredible levels of oil theft, even when billions are being paid to some contractors to stave off same.

    What then underpins PDP’s unraveling which, if successful, will ultimately redound to the benefit of Nigeria? Because it is made up largely of politicians without conscience, and cohered solely by patronage, PDP has severally found itself at the brink, but yet clawed back from disaster. Based largely on its performance, this article will examine the urgency of a necessary PDP break up if Nigeria must survive to take its rightful place in the sun. Storming out of its impunity- driven mini convention at which members rights were serially abridged on Saturday, 31 August, 2013, former Vice President, Atiku Abubakar, alongside seven governors and some very senior party men, described the move as an attempt to ‘save the PDP from the antics of a few desperadoes who have no democratic temperament and are bent on hijacking the party for selfish ends’. Kawu Abubakar Baraje, chairman of the group, added that they are out to check the dictatorship which had resulted in political repression, restrictions on freedom of association and arbitrary suspension of members’. Deep down, however, it is well known that what is in contention is the question of a level playing field for the diverse groups and interests towards the 2015 presidential election which is , of course, seen majorly as an opportunity to continue to bleed the country. Whereas Jonathan and his gerontocrats want automatic selection for the president, his opponents want him completely out of contention having, they allege, severally promised to spend only one term in office

    If its members could dress their differences in such fancy language, not so Nigerians who had, for these many years, been at the receiving end of a totally clueless party whose policies have ensured that Nigeria is stuck within the lowest rungs of the Human Development Index like forever, with its latest ranking captured as follows: ‘Nigeria’s HDI value for 2012 is 0.471 –in the low human development category – positioning it at 153 out of 187 countries and territories’ with a life expectancy of 52. 3 years –Ekiti’s is 55 years plus – while Ghana ranks 135th with a life expectancy of 64.2. This parlous state of affairs includes a decrepit national infrastructure stock as well as an education system gone berserk. University teachers have been on strike since July, 2013.

    While the party, from inception, has had no redeeming features, driven as it is only by selfish motivations, its case worsened when President Obasanjo assumed all powers and brutally co-opted all its organs. He would hence forth appoint and dispense with party chairmen, chose and inflicted presidential candidates and did whatever it was he craved. When, therefore, Jonathan says Obasanjo caused the party’s problems, I interpret it to mean that the imperious Chairman Tukur sees himself in the Obasanjo mold. Unfortunately, the new chairman has no style; but rather reminds you of Peter Drucker’s authoritarian manager. Somebody needs to tell him that he is neither Obasanjo nor an elected president. It should be Nigerians’ wish, however, that he does not come down from his high horse. Why, for instance, would a party chairman, if he were busy, attract so many enemies and fights at the same time? Alhaji Bamanga Tukur is either fighting his home state governor, so he could install his son as governor come 2015, or fighting the governor Amaechi –led governors’ forum; he is either refusing to hold meetings of the party’s national executive or dissolving state Executive committees; Tukur is either calling founding leaders like Atiku Abubakar rascals or threatening to single-handedly declare legislative seats vacant. He needs a rude awakening but I am sincerely praying that, for the sake of Nigeria, President Jonathan would choose to retain him. In many articles before former president Obasanjo succeeded in persuading an otherwise reticent Jonathan to discount PDP’s zoning formula I, alongside many other Nigerians, pleaded with him to moderate his ambition to contest the 2011 election in the belief that four, or at most eight years down the line, he would have a very legitimate claim to the candidacy of his party and that Nigerians were most unlikely to forget his self abnegation. His insistence, and subsequent victory, at the presidential polls, has been partly responsible for the indescribable tension, even the escalating terrorism, in the country ever since. Only this past week, there were conflicting claims as to whether or not we lost some of our hard fighting men of the military to the irritants called Boko Haram. If only a Vice President Jonathan had remembered that there is always the day after! Finally , unrestrained impunity at all its levels, will account for a significant portion of the reasons the PDP went kaput, as it must, if Nigeria must escape the doom starring it in the face under a PDP stranglehold.

    I must, as usual, end this article with a word for the APC which stands to gain from PDP’s many troubles but which must, of necessity watch out for the crowd of politicians who may be opting to join it. The PDP, APC must remember, is a past master in planting moles and agents at very high levels in opposition parties. AD learnt too late and could only watch in utter bewilderment when its erstwhile chairman, Abdulkadir, and where is he today, became a presidential adviser to Obasanjo just as the ANPP did not know what hit it when its own chairman crawled, on all fours, to the PDP. The old PDP is desperate and the presidency will not shy away from deliberately suborning some desperate individuals to move into the APC, armed with a fat purse, to buy positions in which incalculable damage can be done to the party. Long before the schism, PDP was aggressively recruiting some self-opinionated members of the progressive political wing, bribing them with gubernatorial slots on either PDP or on any of its midget allies, like the Labour Party; promising them limitless funding and the tacit support of the country’s security agencies. Last word: Let APC put nothing beyond the Peoples Democratic Party and its serpentine allies.

  • Education and democracy: training the future generation (3)

    Education and democracy: training the future generation (3)

    The federal government and its agencies are too far from  local communities where education is provided.

    We sent our two children to Ghana, not because we are rich but because we believe that Ghana has a more reliable education system that Nigeria. Our education system in Nigeria has become largely a factory for manufacturing credentials, rather than laboratories or classrooms for disseminating and acquiring knowledge and skills. My wife and I went to school in this country in the early 1970s, after the civil war. I still remember that emphasis then was on mastering what we were taught in school, not primarily on the credentials that schools gave at the end of our courses. We were sure good credentials would come after mastering the subjects. Even as students, we created our own informal clubs in the boarding house or in the neighbourhood to demonstrate how much each student knew about whatever subject we chose to discuss. That hardly happens today; parents and their children show more concern for the academic grades to take to the university, and thus corrupt even the process of determining outcomes of learning. Comment from a couple who retired into business after thirty years in the civil service.

    Last week’s piece concluded as follows: “Like everything else, organising provision of education to respond to the fear that allowing states and regions more freedom to determine how to refine their culture and advance their development is not likely to achieve anything more than the organisation of the Nigeria Police Force has done: inefficiency and ineffectiveness. It is indeed safer to believe that encouraging all parts of Nigeria to develop ways of providing quality education to citizens without excluding any group or class directly or indirectly has a higher chance of enhancing the country’s unity than holding parts of the country down from embarking on creative steps to solve the problem of education provision for citizens.”

    The major challenge regarding the country’s education is how to ensure quality and equity in education provision. Many people would argue that the federal government’s policies of free-tuition in federal universities and of free education for citizens for the first nine years of schooling under the system of Universal Basic Education appear to have solved that the problem of equity. The UBE’s offering of free education for nine years is not enough to make the country competitive. Most countries of the world including those that are hundreds of years ahead of Nigeria in terms of industrialisation and technology have free and compulsory education for citizens until they complete senior secondary or high school. Even some countries, such as Sweden, Finland, and Scotland, have policies of free-tuition for citizens in tertiary institutions.

    To make Nigeria more competitive, it is necessary to make education free and compulsory for citizens until they complete secondary education and to create tuition-free adult education centres for citizens to attend after work or on weekends. For example, tuition-free adult education programmes were available in Western Nigeria in the years before the civil war, even at a time that the region had a free primary education. The policy was created to support sectarian or local community schools in creating a second chance for citizens who could not benefit from free primary education on account of age restriction.

    The major problem crying for solution is how to transform education to the point that public school education can have quality. At present, public school education, the only education provided for citizens with severely limited resources but not necessarily without high intelligence quotient, is without any quality and thus without any effectiveness. This is why more than half of those who went through secondary school failed to pass the number of subjects required to move to the next level. While government leaders are not found wanting in terms of waxing eloquent about the power of knowledge and the need for the country to have a better education than it has had in the last twenty-five years, there appears a clear lack of focus on how to transform the education sector, particularly the primary/secondary schooling system that generally prepares citizens for academic and vocational skills capable of increasing competitiveness of citizens and the country.

    It is on record that Nigeria spends less than 4% of its annual budget on education, despite the call by UNESCO for up to 24%, if the country is to be in a position to produce men and women of academic and vocational skills needed to compete in a world that is driven by new frontiers in science, technology, and management of complex organisations. Several decades of doing the same thing (throwing money sporadically and grudgingly at the education sector) ought to have proven that what is needed is moving away from the madness of doing the same thing and expecting different results. The country’s desperate problem in the education sector is, in the parlance of popular culture, calling for a desperate solution, one that requires thinking out of the box.

    The relationship between the federal and state/local governments needs to change, if the country is to transform its education system. A situation in which the federal government holds and allocates funds to various aspects of education across the country through various agencies is calling for creative and bold thinking. Making education an essentially a local government matter is more likely to create the ingredients needed to create excellence in education provision: motivation, enthusiasm for new knowledge, depth of learning, conducive conditions of learning, effective teaching, and community involvement in provision of education and management of schools, etc.

    The federal government and its agencies are too far from the local communities where education is provided. Local governments should impose taxes to run primary and secondary schools. Doing so will reinforce a social contract between the local government and citizens with respect to provision of an effective public school system. The federal government should have a system of giving matching grants to local governments for specific projects, such as creating of digital learning architecture, modern laboratories, etc. State governments should be free to raise funds through lottery to provide additional matching grants to local government authorities for measurable and verifiable education projects. The Western Region used proceeds from its lottery to provide additional funds for education in the 1950s, in addition to collecting taxes from citizens.

    Using taxes collected from citizens to fund education that is managed by the local government authority creates a space for direct and indirect involvement of citizens. Because citizens are principal stakeholders after providing the funds used to run schools by paying their taxes, they will be emboldened to call school administrators to order, much more than our present system that runs education from funds that citizens cannot directly claim ownership over. Apart from creating a core curriculum to reflect a national ethos, local governments and states should have a central role to play in curriculum design. For example, apart from making the teaching of English (the country’s national language and window to the global market) compulsory for students in the first nine years of school, each state should decide on which language to use to teach students in the first six or nine years of education. The current situation, whereby about 30% of the population is illiterate; only half of those who completed twelve years of education qualify for further education; and lack of lifelong learning provision for citizens, only signposts a country that is unwilling to face its future with determination and courage to position majority of its citizens to make direly needed contributions to levers of development through knowledge.

  • Mark denounces national conference at NBA meeting in Calabar

    The amendment process to the constitution is a continuing one and the current exercise is contemplating an amendment to the constitution that will provide modalities for the making of a new constitution.

    “The 1999 Constitution (as amended) made provisions for its alteration. It did not make provisions for any new constitution. It is in answer to the clamour for a new constitution by vocal sections of the polity that an amendment to make provisions for how a new constitution can come about is being contemplated. In making these calls, suggestions for the process of making a new constitution have been made. These range from a constitutional conference to a ‘sovereign’ national conference.

    “The National Assembly recognises the right of Nigerians to aggregate, assemble or meet in any legitimate form or manner to discuss the affairs of their country and indeed encourages such fora as it is a constitutional right. A mark of such encouragement is the elaborate public hearings that have become part of our constitutional amendment process. We however have difficulties with the calls by certain sections of the polity for a “sovereign’’ national conference.

    “The 1999 Constitution (as amended) with all its imperfections, including its debatable origin, remains our grundnorm, our supreme law from which all other laws derive and expresses our sovereignty. It creates all the powers, institutions and authorities of the State to which we have all submitted. We have challenged its provisions in Courts of law established by it and obeyed the decisions of these courts. We have therefore ratified the constitution by our conduct. The 1999 constitution (as amended) is a reality. Consequently, where will the ‘sovereign national conference’ be deriving its sovereignty from, and under what framework? How will the conference be convoked and by whom and under what terms? I have been confronted by the argument that sovereignty derives from and belongs to the people. This is certainly beyond argument. How then do we get the people to confer sovereignty on such a conference? There are intractable issues to be addressed by the agitations for the ‘sovereign national conference’ and that is why I subscribe to the proposal for an amendment to the 1999 Constitution to provide for the making of a new Constitution.”

  • Fifth anniversary of the global economic meltdown of 2008: counterintuitive anti-capitalist reflections (2)

    Fifth anniversary of the global economic meltdown of 2008: counterintuitive anti-capitalist reflections (2)

    If, as I argued in last week’s column, the unregulated and perhaps even unregulatable exercise of greed within capitalism was the evil, the rot that led to the global economic meltdown of 2008, perhaps the greatest lesson that came from the crash is the fact that the greed that capitalism had perpetrated ‘abroad’ in the developing nations of the world came to wreak terrible, unmitigated havoc at ‘home’ in the rich nations of the global north. Fortunately, the outlines of this tragic reversal can be stated succinctly, without any equivocations, any ambiguities.

    The central global division within capitalism for much of the second half of the 20th century was the division between capitalism at the center and capitalism at the periphery. The colonial stage of imperialism had ended and there were no colonies left, but the old division continued in a new and extremely invidious distinction between ‘capitalism at home’ and ‘capitalism abroad’. For the five decades of the post-Second World War period before we get to 21st century capitalism, the working and non-working poor of the neo-capitalist nations and societies in the periphery bore the full brunt of the exploitative ravages of the capitalism of the rich countries. With very few exceptions, as the affluence and consumerism of these rich countries of the global north were extended to ever-widening circles of their workers and the general populace, the workers and non-working poor of the developing countries saw ever declining levels of quality of life, even though a greater proportion of the planet’s deposits of natural resources are located in the global south. This chokehold on the lives of the masses of the developing countries came to a climax in the so-called Structural Adjustment Programs (SAP) of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that were imposed on the third world countries starting from the mid-1980s. As nearly everyone in the world knows, SAP left a trail of devastating impoverishment in the developing countries that is still unfolding, that will indeed take generations to reverse.

    Well, with the crash of 2008, the chickens came home to roost: when the economies of the rich countries crashed, when the national or sovereign debts of these countries spiraled out of control, SAP took a detour from the global south and came visiting the shores of the global north, like the grim reaper with his unforgiving harvesting scythe. In the words of the Yoruba cautionary adage that serves as the epigraph for this essay, beware when you throw ashes to the winds for quite often the ensuing trajectory is not windward, it is leeward and you end up being the hapless receiver of the ashes you threw into the winds.

    I hasten to say that I do not make these observations in a spirit of gloating. Exploitation, impoverishment and suffering, whether in the developing countries or in the rich countries, are to be carefully studied and resolutely resisted. One of the great lessons to be learnt from the worldwide crash of 2008 is how closely linked are the fates of the poor and the marginalized of the world. This is not a pious, moralizing observation; it is a claim I make on the basis of an acute awareness of the fact that under capitalism, the rich of all the countries and regions of the world extract surplus value from their working and non-working poor by basically the same means, the same mechanisms. As a matter of fact, this claim should draw our attention to perhaps the single most unexpected development from the crash of 2008, this being the fact that the rich countries have now joined the rest of the world in the widening of the gap between the few extremely rich and the rest of the population. Since this is an absolutely crucial, it needs to be restated carefully.

    For most of the second half of the 20th century, the ultimate claim of triumph over socialism that apologists and ideologues of capitalism made vigorously was based on the assertion that, without bloody revolutions, the rich countries of the world were narrowing the gap between the rich and the poor and doing so in leaps and bounds. Well, the crash of 2008 has exposed this claim as a premature declaration of victory over socialism and as a completely bogus and misleading claim. Indeed, in the long historic view of the impact of the meltdown of 2008, it may well be that this exposure of the claim of a continuous narrowing of the gap between the rich and the poor as nothing but a myth will turn out to be its greatest intellectual legacy. The ramifications of this demystification are worthy of note.

    The rise in the number and the ranks of the working and non-working poor in the rich countries of the world since 2008 has been nothing short of dramatic, at the same time that wealth continues to be concentrated in the hands of a very tiny minority. As everyone knows, the figures are more bracing in countries like Greece, Spain, Ireland and Italy, but even in the United States, the centre of gravity of global capitalism, the figures are so striking that they led to the so-called “Occupy” movements that started, inevitably, with “Occupy Wall Street”. What is worthy of especial note in all these countries is the fact that it is the market, it is market forces that threw hundreds of millions of people into poverty. Conversely, it has been the state in its diverse incarnations that has been called upon to effect redress, to put a human face to capitalism. But all things considered, the market is fiercely holding its own against the constraints of the state and public institutions and considerations. What does this portend?

    We know from history that there is nothing new in this role of the market in mass exploitation, this tendency of market forces to enslave and degrade human beings on a colossal scale. At different periods but with fairly regular consistency, the market has aligned itself with capitalism to perpetrate historic horrors like slavery, colonialism, workers’ exploitation in factories, patriarchal exploitation of women in what is known as the feminization of poverty and the kind of jingoistic-nationalistic militarism that the world experienced in the First and Second World Wars. I will be the first to admit that market forces have also historically led to progress and to the discovery of new knowledges and the construction of new and better ways of organizing production. But it has never been the case that the market all by itself achieved these laudable goals without the intervention of human solidarity with those caught in the traps of the darker and more destructive aspects of market forces. In the very early days of capitalism when its classical theorists were still casting about to provide justificatory explanations for the significant role of the market, they theorized that a so-called “invisible hand” was at work in the world of trade and commerce coordinating the infinite number of competing operators and interests at work in the market. That theory has been discredited many times over but that has not stopped the ideologues of free market capitalism from resuscitating the theory again and again in one version or another in the last two hundred years or so. The end of this perpetual revisionism is nowhere in sight.

    Since 2008 in the rich countries of the world, unregulated or minimally regulated capitalism has been on the defensive and currently, it has its back to the wall of credibility and viability. Memories are still keen, still sharp on what a casino-style unregulated capitalism can do to the life savings, the jobs, and the futures of hundreds of millions of ordinary men and women. But the apostles and warriors of free market capitalism are not conceding defeat. Far from this, they have in fact of recent gone on the offensive and are doing all they can to reverse all the legislations put in place after 2008 to regulate the market more diligently and efficiently. Let us not be mistaken in appraising why the struggle is so fierce between the forces of regulation and deregulation: the bottom line is whether the wealth that is created by and in society will be equitably distributed or cornered by a powerful and oligarchic few.

    In Nigeria and many other African countries, it is as if these battles between the forces of regulation and deregulation are not taking place in the heartlands of global capitalism. In our country in particular, the ideologues of the deregulated market are extremely sanguine in their promotion of the total surrender of the state to the market. True, they sometimes talk of the trinity of the P-P-P, this being the so-called public-private partnership. But don’t be deceived by this subterfuge, compatriots! The “public” in this triad really means a state, a government that is completely beholden to a tiny kleptocratic elite because it has been massively privatized. Let me spell out this claim very clearly, compatriots.

    Every time that you hear the likes of Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Nasir El-Rufai and Charles Soludo talk of the public-private-partnership, run for cover because behind their notion of the “public” is a massively privatized state, a looted state, a comatose state. I mention these three names deliberately because they have been the most articulate and the most authoritative and militant defenders of free market capitalism in Nigeria since the inception of the current Fourth Republic in 1999. Of recent, Soludo has been making a tentative or hesitant review of his positions on free market capitalism but perhaps because he is currently in the grip of APIP – Any Party In Power – and is desperately looking for a party in which his unrelenting ambition to become Governor of Anambra State can be realized, he is distracted from a full-scale revision of what the promotion of free market capitalism, in theory and in practice, really means in Nigeria at the present time.

    In my view, the so-called informal or parallel market is the only truly unregulated market in Nigeria today. On this view, the official, regular market is no more or less than an extension of the state, the massively privatized state. This is obviously because most of the capital with which privatized public enterprises were bought was looted from our national coffers. But in addition to this, the privatized state is too compromised, too weakened to carry out any regulatory functions on the market – even if the political will was there to do so. Effectively shut out of both the formal, official market and the privatized state, the overwhelming majority of Nigerians subsist in the informal, parallel market where you can buy and sell any commodity in the world, where no taxes are paid, and where cheap, meretricious goods rub shoulders with genuine articles of trade. Some economists put the size of this informal or underground market at twice the size of the formal market; that is how big it is.

    To some analysts, the size of the Nigerian informal market indicates that Nigerians are, deep down, natural or inveterate capitalists in the sense in which over the ages, capitalism has always resisted all attempts to regulate it, to subject it to other values beyond those in the service of cutthroat competition and unlimited accumulation. I beg to disagree with this view. The informal, underground market thrives everywhere in the world where the state has been taken over by mediocre, thieving political elites unwilling or incapable of running a well organized modern capitalist or social democratic state. Nigeria is thus only an exacerbated example of this universal pattern. We must take back the privatized state from the looters, the kleptocrats. The starting point for this is the demystification and rejection of privatization and deregulation as the only panaceas for the discontents of capitalism. The global crash of 2008 provides ample evidence that this is on the agenda of the political and economic affairs of every nation, every region of the world.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • …Gives disingenuous support

    Let me counsel that we make haste slowly, and operate strictly within the parameters of our Constitution as we discuss the national question. We live in very precarious times, and in a world increasingly made fluid and toxic by strange ideologies and violent tendencies, all of which presently conspire to question the very idea of the nation state. But that is not to say that the nation should, like the proverbial ostrich, continue to bury its head in the sand and refuse to confront the perceived or alleged structural distortions which have bred discontentment and alienation in some quarters. This sense of discontentment and alienation has fueled extremism, apathy and even predictions of catastrophy for our dear nation.

    “A conference of Nigeria’s ethnic nationalities, called to foster frank and open discussions of the national question, can certainly find accommodation in the extant provisions of the 1999 Constitution which guarantee freedom of expression, and of association. To that extent, it is welcome. Nonetheless, the idea of a National Conference is not without inherent and fundamental difficulties. Problems of its structure and composition will stretch the letters and spirit of the Constitution and severely task the ingenuity of our constitutionalists. Be that as it may, such a conference, if and whenever convened should have only few red lines, chief among which would be the dismemberment of the country. Beyond that, every other question should be open to deliberations.

    “However, I hasten to add that it would be unconstitutional to clothe such a conference with constituent or sovereign powers! But the resolutions of a national conference, consisting of Nigeria’s ethnic nationalities, and called under the auspices of the Government of the Federation, will indeed carry tremendous weight. And the National Assembly, consisting of the elected representatives of the Nigerian people, though not constitutionally bound by such resolutions, will be hard put to ignore them in the continuing task of constitution review. But to circumvent the Constitution, and its provisions on how to amend it, and repose sovereignty in an unpredictable mass will be too risky a gamble and may ultimately do great disservice to the idea of one Nigeria.”

     

  • Fire on the Mountain, pray, pray, pray!

    Today, the shine has gone from what is left of the fire engines in our
    nation’s fire stations. Most of them just sit out their days on display only.

    Some weeks back, I watched absolutely horrified as a sudden power surge provoked a fluorescent bulb in my sitting room and set it alight right before my very eyes. My mate, an untrained fireman, quickly sprang to action to attack the flames. Me, I did the most natural thing in the world: I jumped on a chair and began to scream, flapping my arms in absolute horror like a demented fish seller while intermittently pointing at the offending flames as if it was invisible to everyone else but me. I like to think that the fire respected my screams but I suspect it responded more to the pragmatic measures taken by the emergency ‘fireman’ who went at the flames with much more respectable vigour and implements. I shudder when I think that that could easily have happened when no one was home, or if I was home alone.

    The statistics of fire disasters that happen in this incredibly easy way is simply unimaginable. The other day, a friend’s house burned completely to the ground from a fire that was said to have sparked off from ‘the top of a wardrobe’ – i.e. an electrical spark. Many homes in Nigeria have gone up in flames because of one freak accident or the other. True, a few of those fires may have broken out while the cook was consulting her cookery book and trying to decide whether one teaspoon of oil might not be better than one tablespoon owing to the spots on her face! That usually happened to new wives.

    Most neighbourhoods have learnt to rely on other measures such as gathering their own buckets of water. I learnt from experience that the fire brigade is every wise Nigerian’s last resort. When an unoccupied house across my street caught fire sometime ago, I dialled 199 before finding out that no one respects that number, least of all the police. And to invite the state to respond to any emergency in your vicinity, you have to know someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows their secret, unlisted number! I have no social connections to speak of.

    Anyway, I finally knew someone who knew someone who knew the fire station’s number and when I called, the voice that responded assured me the fire brigade would come in a short while from then. In the meantime, could I and others around me attack the flames with whatever came in hand? I said we would try since water was scarce and all we had were a few buckets, so could they hurry? He said they would. When the smouldering flames grew in intensity to a near conflagration consuming the ceiling and the roof, I panicked and called the fire station again. The cool voice contrasted sharply with my shrill one as he assured me they were still coming. At the third ‘We’re still coming’, I remembered that the linguistic behaviour of Nigerians compels them to say they are coming when they are going in the opposite direction to your voice. So, I gave up expecting them and those of us around the burning house just concentrated our energy on making sure the fire did not spread to our turfs. Luckily, providence relieved us of our anxiety; it soon began to rain, and the fire died from natural causes.

    I remember very well how the fire engines in the Oyingbo-Lagos station used to attract more than a passing glance from passersby, back in those days. And it wasn’t just sitting pretty either. Its clanging tones rang frequently in response to distress calls from new wives in new kitchens, with the firemen springing and swinging artistically into action in ways that brought stinging tears into our eyes in appreciation. They even had a training school which, I am sure, attracted many who joined out of admiration for the engines. Today, the shine has gone from what is left of those fire engines in our nation’s fire stations. Most of them just sit out their days on display only.

    Traversing the high street in my city takes one past its only fire station. Though visible to all as it sits on a knoll, there is, indeed, less to the building than meets the eye for all the impact it has on our lives. I have never heard it ring its emergency bells, nor have I ever seen it race to the rescue of anyone. That means I have never been asked to give way to its vehicle while in traffic; rather my car has been frequently shoved aside on the road for some bullion van or governor or some other fellow not necessarily in a hurry but who is hurrying through traffic just for the fun of shoving me aside.

    I asked around if anyone had ever known the firemen respond to any emergency call in this city. Someone said yeah, well, once in his school days but they turned up only after the fire had died – at the children’s hands. It happened in a students’ hostel. The students went at the fire in indignation because it ate up all their provision boxes, and no one, but no one, is allowed to eat up students’ provisions but students: not thieves, not any fire. Clearly, motivation is the guiding principle for many an emergency ‘fire fighter’ now. Just as you provide other amenities for yourself in this country, you not only also make your own fire, you get to put it out yourself.

    I read a news report many months back about a fire that broke out somewhere in one of the states in the western part of the country and the fire brigade was summoned. Quite unlike my own story, the firemen did turn up, but in a taxi. A disbelieving crowd asked them what they had come to do. They replied that they had been sent to come and assess the fire, then they would know if it warranted their bringing their engine or not. Someone in the crowd said, ‘don’t mind them; their problem is that they have no engine to bring.’ The reason was that the same station had been summoned to an emergency previously somewhere else in the town and the firemen had had to hitch a ride from the complainant. At that, the report said, the crowd forgot the fire and concentrated their energy on lynching the firemen.

    What has brought our fire stations to such a sorry pass can only be conjectured. In the first place is the excruciating neglect of the fire services. In many states, the governor’s car polish has a higher budget than the fire stations. Now, that’s corruption. Combine this problem with the water shortage that besets many parts of the country all the year round, it translates to the fact that we cannot get round to borrowing a few litres of water from the Atlantic Ocean, or any other river, sitting at our backyard to recycle for our daily fire-quenching needs. Then of course, there is the problem of indifference to duty, a disease of epidemic proportions, attacking most Nigerians…

    The last resort of course is still prayers. Most emergency fire situations seem to have been fought with that weapon anyway since independence in Nigeria. And, owing to the efficacy of this strong implement, I have come to believe that there is a fire station up above looking out for Nigerians’ distressed voices. So whenever you next hear children at the game of ‘Fire on the mountain!’ just teach them to end it with ‘Pray, Pray, Pray, Pray!’ It is good for them to learn early.

    This article was first published in 2006 by New Age.

  • It turns out CP Mbu is actually governor of Rivers

    Since the officious Rivers State police commissioner, Mbu Joseph Mbu, began to lend himself for political uses, neither he nor victims of his insubordination have slept peacefully. His career seems fated to crumble like that of Assistant Inspector General of Police (AIG) Raphael Ige, who in 2003 led the abduction of Chris Ngige, then governor of Anambra State, but what does he care? He is inured to history and its harsh lessons. He boasts a high level of education from reputable schools, but in all his doings in Rivers State, he has shown nothing of the learning and character required of an educated officer and gentleman.

    But Mr Mbu, we all appreciate, could never on his own summon the courage or the recklessness to undermine the person or office of the governor of the state as he did last Thursday when he blocked the access of the governor and his august visitors to the State House. And like many of his colleagues, there is no incentive in the police conditions of service, nor flexibility in their training, to equip them with the character required to resist unlawful orders or to call their souls their own. Except I err gravely, I do not also think the urbane Inspector General of Police (IGP), Mohammed Abubakar, would give Mr Mbu orders to disrespect the Rivers State governor. If anything, I suspect that if it came to the crunch, the two, or any other police officer in their shoes, would simply and safely second-guess the presidency.

    But whether they were ordered to disrespect and subvert the elected governor of Rivers or not, or they second-guessed the presidency with intent to curry favour or secure promotion or not, the important thing is that Mr Mbu has acted and presented himself as the real, not even alternate, governor of Rivers State. He proves increasingly that he has more real power than the governor, and could even ruffle the feathers of the governor, if not singe them altogether, if provoked. That we elected the defiant Governor Amaechi, not the snivelling and grovelling Mr Mbu, is, to the police officer, a small theoretical inconvenience. Given the way he speaks whenever he crosses path and arms with the governor, it is obvious that Mr Mbu has assured himself that what obtains in the state, and in which he is not disadvantaged at all, is what historians describe as contrapuntal paramountcy. Cheeky analysts may even describe the balance of terror in Rivers State as a sort of dual mandate, where Mr Mbu draws his insidious and destabilising power from Abuja, and Mr Amaechi draws his legitimate power from the long-suffering and sometimes confused electorate. To our collective dismay, we know that the real power resides in Abuja, not in some vague and indefinable electorate.

    Someday, however, we will have a bright patriot as president. He will know what to do, and he will do them well. That day, alas, is not here yet.