The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sunday

When 4% confronts 1.8%: further questions for the finance minister

In this column last week, I stated how startled I was when in March 2012, I read an article in the British newsmagazine, The Economist, in which Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala made an assertion that she would be quite satisfied if by the end of her current term as the nation’s Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister for the Economy she would have managed to reduce the scale of corruption, waste and mismanagement of government finances in our country by 4%. Well, this week, I wish to draw attention to another statistic that was even more abysmal and more depressing than our Finance Minister’s extremely low aspiration of 4% success rate. This is none other than the 1.8% of those who passed the Senior Secondary School Certificate Examination (SSSCE) conducted by the Nigerian Examination Council (NECO) in November-December 2009. 1.8% passed which means that a whopping 98.2% failed. Failure in this case means passing with credit in less than five subjects including English and Mathematics. As stated concretely in NECO’s official breakdown of this calamitous failure rate, while 234,682 sat for the exam, only 4,223 passed.

After my initial shock and panic upon coming across this terrible failure rate, I deliberately calmed down and began to ask myself some questions: Was there something in the breast milk or infant formulas that a new generation of mothers in our country was feeding their infants that was producing “oridota” children that were alright in every other respect but were congenitally moronic and uneducable? Was this failure rate an aberration or was it a regular occurrence? Are there any other countries in Africa and the world in which such a failure rate has been recorded? Why was there not the slightest expression of outrage and concern by the Federal Minister of Education in particular and every public officeholder in the land? And what of the generality of Nigerians, especially the parents, guardians and custodians of our children – why were they not up in arms demanding that the government and the whole nation pay attention to, and do something about this scandal?

For the records, let me report that since 2009, I have searched widely on the internet and have not found any other place in the world and in modern history and experience where and when 98.2% failed a public, national school leaving examination. I am still searching and if I find a “better” record than that, I promise to share it with the readers of this column. And I should state here that it did not take long reflection on my part to come to the conclusion that the very unspeakably low figure of 98.2% failure did not indicate that our children are the products of a mutation in breast milk production that was making them moronically uneducable; rather, it was the system that was failing our children and robbing them of their birthright to education. Let me also report that since that lowest of the low in 2009, the passing rate in NECO exams has improved beyond that 1.8%. However, I regret to report that the improvement is really nothing to write home about, as the saying goes. Here are some figures from NECO’s recent published statements on this “improvement”: in English, 4.7% passed in 2010; 10% in 2011; 33% in 2012. In Mathematics, 19% passed in 2010; 44% in 2011; 54.8% in 2012. And overall, the total passing rate has not gone above 35%.

Need I state that in most countries of the world, including some countries on the African continent, the concern in national educational planning in a very competitive world is not to bring up abysmal failure rates but to improve even more on passing rates that are normatively higher than the range of the 80 percentiles? This means in effect that because we are located at such a very mediocre passing rate, we face the double jeopardy of, first, being ahead of nearly all others in the race to the bottom and, secondly, being so far behind, so distant in the race to the top.

I should of course add that I have been to countries like China and Japan in which I have been moved to great pity for the high levels of psychological damage done to their secondary school pupils in the cutthroat struggle to pass well in their national school leaving exams. For this reason, I am not unmindful of the dangers involved in fetishizing high passing rates in the contemporary world. But to say this is not to ignore for one moment that every child, every girl and boy, deserves quality education in our country, our continent and our world. For education remains not only a means of socio-economic self-improvement, but it has also become perhaps the most highly prized human social capital in 21st century global capitalism. Moreover, those of us who have been privileged to receive quality education – often at public expense – have an obligation to do everything we can to make others less privileged than ourselves to receive relevant quality education. We can and must do far better than 35% passing rate for the young people graduating from our secondary schools. And we must do this quickly and thoroughly.

This will require many things of which the primary thing is the recognition – the declaration, in fact – of a profound state of crisis in our secondary education system. We must invest more and wisely in the education of our children: better trained teachers, with the incentives for them to be dedicated to their profession; better physical infrastructures and learning environments; and a thoroughgoing rethinking of how best to use education to prepare our young people in informed local, national and global citizenship in a multi-ethnic and multicultural society and in the world of the 21st century. Moreover, this great crisis in our secondary education system extends deep into our tertiary educational system, so much so that one is inextricable from the other. Unfortunately, this is hardly recognized by the powers that be in our country. This observation leads me to the present stalled negotiations between ASUU and the Federal Government, especially with regard to the very unhelpful intervention of the Finance Minister in the negotiations that was the topic of this column last week.

Here, I must state something that I suspect will come as a surprise to many people reading this, including possibly many members of ASUU itself, and it is this: Because there is little appreciation for the fact that our universities are burdened, indeed overburdened, with the many effects and ramifications of the profound crisis in our secondary education system, most thinking, literate adults in this country have little or no intimation of the extremely daunting tasks that our universities face in educating the general order or quality of pupils that come to them from our secondary schools. For the simple fact is that most universities in the world – and throughout the history of the modern, research-intensive university – are not founded and structured on the presupposition that they would have to do the kind of considerable remediation that must be done with the order of students that come to our universities. Consequently little or no remediation is done in our universities: the intakes are for the most part simply moved along, but with the great majority of our university dons doing the best that they can under the prevailing circumstances. Meanwhile, our universities have fallen considerably in prestige and respect, at home and abroad. Most of our elites send their children abroad to foreign countries for their university education. “Foreign countries” here often includes countries in Africa like Ghana and South Africa! Let us not mince our words here: in about the last two decades, the attitudes of most of the federal and state administrations of this country toward our universities and our university teachers show very clearly that they have little regard, little respect for our universities and our university dons. Who can miss the great disrespect in the following words from the Finance Minister that I chose to be one of the two epigraphs to my column last week: “At present, ASUU wants the Federal Government to pay N92bn in extra allowances, when the resources are not there, and when we are working to integrate past increases in pensions. We need to make choices in this country as we are getting to the stage where recurrent expenditures take the bulk of our resources and people get paid, but can do no work.”? By what reasoning, by what logic but that of a haughty, supercilious disdain can one talk of our university teachers as similar or comparable to redundant, idle government workers who “get paid but can do no work”?

This disregard, this disdain of the Finance Minister for our universities and university teachers extends, I would argue, to the country’s politicians in particular and the populace in general. To say that in five years only about 4% of the corruption, waste and mismanagement in Nigeria and its government could realistically be expected to be reduced is to have an extremely low opinion of the country, its government and its people. If any technocrat from the World Bank or the IMF from another country in the world had made that statement, especially if he or she was a white person from the Western countries, the whole country would have been in an uproar and justifiably so. But all the same, such a show of national outrage would have entirely missed the point that among the elite technocrats of the world, it fundamentally does not matter from which country or which part of the world you come from. The technocratic mandarins of the IMF and the World Bank do exactly the same things anywhere in the world they serve and this norm includes what they do in their own countries. Thus, in the case of our own Finance Minister what we have is a symbolic confrontation between her 4% success projections and the 1.8% passing rate of the NECO exam results of 2009. As a matter of fact, 1.8% is a much greater figure than the percentage we can extrapolate from what Okonjo-Iweala herself has claimed to have “saved” the country since 2011 (N53 billion naira)! And please, don’t forget that since 2009, NECO passing rates have moved from 1.8% to around 35%.

To break out of the present impasse between ASUU and the Federal Government, every effort must be made to do away completely with the abysmally low expectations (and low performance) of the honourable Finance Minister. Very few national, publicly financed university systems in the world face the kind of burden that our universities face in the task of educating the order, the quality of students who come into them from our secondary schools. In the given circumstances, our universities are doing a creditable job and would do even far better if given the wherewithal to do so.

The time has come to at last face this huge crisis squarely and responsibly. I give personal testimony here that when I was ASUU National President more than thirty years ago, we faced a very different set of circumstances than now. But some things about the Union remain constant: now as at then in the early 1980s, ASUU was/is always ready to work with the government in the interest of our universities and the nation. The first step in that direction is that the government must demonstrate that it recognizes the enormity of the burdens that our universities face and is prepared to work with the Union and all other interested parties to resuscitate our universities. This won’t be easy, this task of resuscitating our universities. What is easy, what any thinking Nigerian can see is the fact that this present government and any government in the future will always confront the stark reality of this profound crisis; it will not simply go away if it is not confronted or is confronted with the technocratically manufactured low expectations of an Okonjo-Iweala in which, even as NECO’s 1.8% rises to 35% – which is not good enough – her 4% dips below, far below 1.8%

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

August 25, 2013
APC and 2015: PDP is truly exhausted

As the months grind on towards the 2015 general elections, the true nature and character of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) will begin to unfold. I expect the party to endure, of course, and if democracy is to be preserved, we must hope the party will find ingenious ways to sustain itself and even flourish as a great political party. In other words, I do not wish the party bad, nor do I yearn for its collapse. But there is simply no way it can retain its present character, for its present character is neither progressive, as we understand the term, nor conservative, as its members, leaders and well-wishers dare hope. In reality, and unknown to the many so-called progressives within its ranks, such as the highly adaptable Ebenezer Babatope, the party is unequivocally reactionary.

There is a way reactionary politics tends to mask ideological differentiation. Radicals, it is well known, can also be reactionary, just as conservatives sometimes do not quite appreciate when they slip from ordinary conservatism to extreme conservatism. What is clear about the PDP today – and we do not need to hate them for their choices or unusual taste – is that its leaders are rigidly opposed to any serious or major shift in the political and economic structures of Nigeria. They want the police to remain as they are, education to limp along ponderously, health and aviation to involve nothing more than cosmetic renovation of buildings, and economy to be simply a case of prudent management of resources in line with World Bank standards.

Though the presidency of Chief Olusegun Obasanjo was not inspiring at all, and its policies showed little imagination and coherence, the presidency of Goodluck Jonathan has proved to be even much worse. Chief Obasanjo’s policies have not only been sustained, its negative tendencies have been exacerbated by the dithering of Dr Jonathan. Chief Obasanjo ripped the party’s innards apart when he imposed imperial rule on the country and party; Dr Jonathan has allowed the injuries to become gangrenous, with horrifying consequences for the ruling party and the country’s laws and constitution. We remember how besotted Chief Obasanjo was to his brain trust and how inexpertly he sometimes redacted their poorly digested and contradictory policies; but Dr Jonathan’s languidness has laid the country prostrate beneath the hurtful policies of his predecessor and opened her up the more to the fiddling of his own even more insular brain trust.

As we hurtle towards 2015, the country will, therefore, be torn between taking a chance on the newly formed All Progressives Congress (APC) and its eight-point agenda for the country, and resigning itself to the jaded policies and politics of the PDP. To be sure, the APC is not exactly the immaculate progressives of our theoretical fascination. The party comprises clearly discernible elements of both progressivism and conservatism. But if party leaders can find the right chemistry to bond them together, they may not be as immiscible as sceptics fear. The country must remind itself that the last time progressives won an election (in 1993) under the aegis of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), they were certainly not as ideologically coherent as their label misleadingly gave the impression. But they were doubtless the more committed to change, however change is defined, and closer to progressivism on the ideological spectrum than its opponent, the National Republican Convention (NRC).

Today, the fault lines in Nigerian politics are becoming even more pronounced. The country faces its most trying times ever, and in many ways exhibits a frightening tentativeness in governance as well as in policymaking. By the admission of government, the country loses nearly as much revenue through oil theft as it makes through lawful sales. As a result of the natural lethargy of the Jonathan presidency and its many misguided and contradictory policies in combating crimes, the country is being laid waste by kidnappers and other criminals who would love the roof to collapse on everybody. And in spite of the strong-arm and sometimes vacillating tactics against the ongoing sectarian and socio-economic revolt in the Northeast, we are no nearer peace than when the fight broke out in 2009. In short, there are clearly no major initiatives from the PDP government to tackle these alarming problems other than tinkering at best and helpless indifference at worst. The party is exhausted, its ideas jaded, and its leading lights obviously war-weary and punch-drunk. If it gets another endorsement in 2015, there will still be no initiatives, major or minor, and the party’s leaders will suffer predictable paralysis.

To win, the PDP will rely on the frustratingly bizarre dynamics of Nigerian politics, which involves a crazy mix of exploitation of ethnicity, religion, age-long prejudices, and fraud. Given the proclivities of the old warhorses being assembled by Dr Jonathan for the battle ahead, the PDP may find itself inexorably drawn to underhand tactics. As it is, the party is itself not idiosyncratically averse to unorthodox tactics in winning elections. The party will also attempt to tar some of the leaders of the APC with the brush of religious fanaticism and political dogmatism. More crucially, the PDP will eagerly exploit the political ambivalence of the Southeast, a region that has perched on the horns of ideological dilemma for so long. Under the Dr Jonathan government, the Southeast has enjoyed a golden age like never before. It is hard to see the region turning its back on Dr Jonathan in 2015. This is more so because when the country faced a choice between a broadly conservative party and a sketchily progressive party in the 1993 presidential election, the Southeast narrowly opted for conservatism, excepting Anambra which the SDP won with over 57 percent of the votes cast.

The PDP will steer discussions and politics away from issues in the 2015 polls for the simple reason that it fares very badly in that department. It has no concrete ideas to project, and when ideas are nevertheless thrust under its nose, it has neither the patience to grasp them nor the industry to steal and adapt them, nor yet the assiduity to logically take them apart through careful and diligent denigration. Apart from avoiding issues, the PDP will also talk less about its records. Instead, it will dwell more on extenuating reasons for either nonperformance or tardy performance. Dr Jonathan’s aides have denied his government ever attempted to exploit ethnic or religious differences. Not only has it remorselessly done so, its desperation in the coming months will see it embrace the politics of prejudice, perhaps even more shamelessly.

And here precisely is where the APC stands a good chance. In place of the stultifying policies and administrative paralysis of the PDP, the new party, which is more accurately an amalgam of old parties, has already boldly offered a major and radical shift in the kind of thinking needed to heal, restore and renew the country. I am fascinated by its embrace of the decentralisation of the police – an idea that should have come more than two decades ago – devolution of power to states, independence of anti-corruption and electoral agencies, among a number of other serious policies and issues. I think its determination to create one million jobs annually is far-fetched, and its preparedness to remove qualified executive immunity nugatory. On the whole, the party is at least offering sensible steps and policies to remake the country. Even if Nigerians love punishment and are inured to the policy sterility of the PDP, and mistrust the policy initiatives of the APC, it is still necessary to make a change at the highest level of government in order to strengthen democracy and underscore the power of the electorate to change government at will, whether thoughtfully or whimsically.

By 2015, the PDP will have been in power for 16 years. Sadly, those 16 years have worsened the plight of the common man, virtually destroyed education, impoverished and alienated the youths, predisposed the country to unremitting instability and criminality, exacerbated corruption, opened the country to insidious foreign military influences and creeping intervention, and shown the world how mediocre Nigeria has become in nearly all areas of life. The truth is that if the country does not change direction in 2015, the chances of its survival, not to talk of its growth and development, will be made much harder, if not clearly impossible. The rot is too much and the stakes too high to ignore how urgently we need to embrace change in the coming elections.

August 25, 2013
Why do we need law makers when we do not even have law keepers?

Nigerians are genetically growing greedy at an alarming rate by the year such that no amount is too large for their illegal appetites

I don’t know about you, but I have lately formed this habit of talking to myself. So, one day, I stopped to actually listen to the contents of my monologues. That was how I knew I said things like ‘what do ghosts look like; where do snakes come from in the evolutionary tree; why does earth and heaven seem to be merged in my bowl of ice cream; why do we have law makers in Nigeria…’ No, I have not got answers to them all, cause till now, I still do not know what ghosts look like (consider your offer politely turned down; thanks all the same for offering to show me). Also, I can never understand snakes and their place on the tree. But law makers are a different kettle of fish altogether. The more I monologize on the subject matter, the more I conclude that they must have come down from the moon; this is why they do not seem to understand their own place here either. Aliens, get?

Isn’t this country one lovely land of paradoxes? Here we are, with prisons filled with the piously innocent while those who should really be in them are not only free but are ruling us, embezzling going on in the face of the law, people driving along our roads without any regard for any written codes of the road. There is a code? I don’t believe you. Just this morning, I saw that a woman had parked her car with the windows all rolled up while she went into a building not too far from the road, and a child was standing up in the front seat waving to all passers-by. Report to what police? Don’t traffic policemen regularly pass on unaccompanied learners in traffic, drivers with unstrapped children in their passenger seat, government vehicles’ drivers who drive against traffic, policemen who stand by and watch people being lynched, etc? Well, don’t they? So law keepers, we do not have. Why then do we need law makers?

Abuja, we have a problem. What exactly are our law makers doing to earn the pay they are reputed to earn? God forbid that this should be true, but I heard that the Senate leader, David Mark, earns more than a hundred million Naira a month. When I heard it, I did the most natural thing. I rejected it immediately (IJN) and snapped my fingers over my head, like, as in, you know, God forbid! How can I be here, in dire need of just one miserable million Naira and someone is earning a hundred million of it at the end of every month? Whatever for, I ask you?

I tell you, this land is full of paradoxes, and if we are not careful, those blasted things will swallow us all up, paradoxes, I mean. Just think about this. Have you noticed that the religiousness level of the citizens of this country is in direct proportion to our wickedness? Indeed, it has got so when someone tells you he/she is a faithful, you are best advised to run. Nasty, blasted things they sure are, aren’t they? Listen, let me give you the greatest of them paradoxes. Have you noticed that it is the so called poor beggars supporting the wealthy able-bodied? Let me explain.

Lately, I have seen beggars from the northern part of this country working in serious, perhaps unregistered corporations of two in my city: a disabled person who is pushed around on a wheelchair by a strong, able-bodied person. Talk of ‘Beggars: Incorporated’, eh? Anyway, the arrangement seems to be that the disabled does the begging while the able one pushes the wheelchair and occasionally also lends a hand in the begging. At the close of the working day, the proceeds are shared on a previously agreed basis. Normally, these corporations also experience the same problems that all corporations are prone to: misunderstandings, fights, greed, sacking, dissolving, bankruptcy, etc. However, this strange arrangement hones home two points.

The first is that this nation has an army of youths that it does not seem inclined to consider worthy of any consolidated developmental programme, but we have said that before. The second is that the weak can support the strong. In our ‘Beggars: Incorporated’ arrangement, the disabled, no matter how young, is the source of livelihood for the able one, no matter how old. So, on a wheelchair, a disabled feeds an able one who is strong of limbs and presumably, head. The argument thus holds that if a disabled person can be the source of livelihood for an able-bodied person, a poverty-laden person can the pillar of the livelihood of a wealthy one. Yep, I am thinking of our law makers and their jumbo pay.

According to reports, each of Nigeria’s law makers earns $189, 500 (roughly N30 m) in a month for a job they hardly stay at. Furthermore, we are told that the earnings of these law makers amount to a quarter of the nation’s annual budget. Honestly, if I was not so envious, I would be downright appalled. No wonder people climb over the earth, fall into the black hole, get roughened up in space, kill and maim irreverently just to get to that position. Now, who on earth fixed that kind of pay – tooth fairies? And these are quite apart from other sundry expenses such as travel, contracts, contracts, travel, con… which they seem to pursue endlessly. Now, my question is this: how many laws have cost us these whopping sums since 1999 when this experiment started, and how much per law? What law is worth that colossal sum? Quick, somebody, bring out the calculator and the weighing machine. We need both.

That the law makers alone have cost this country trillions of Naira is a gross understatement, and for what? To think that their costly highnesses have not got around to legislate a credible system of transportation, potable water, twenty-four-hour electricity supply, etc., for my house is shameful. It makes me want to cover my eyes. Worse, to think that sixty per cent of the so-called ‘people’ they are representing have no knowledge of what exactly the law makers are doing is also bewildering.

Clearly, this pay is not in tune with the reality of Nigeria’s present and future. It bespeaks either or both of two things. It could be that people have really given up on the future of this country and any access to government coffers is used as an opportunity to forage out whatever amount one can to keep in a safe country for when this house should fall. It could also be, and this is more likely, that Nigerians are genetically growing greedy at an alarming rate as the years go by such that no amount is too large now for their illegal appetites. Now, that will be serious.

So, the question is this: going by the level of illiteracy at these chambers among those who should know better, can Nigeria afford this kind of democracy? No, I do not believe Nigeria can afford it; people are just pretending it can. If it could, it should not go cap in hands for external loans, neither should it even need foreign aids. Both of these show that something is really fishy in that kettle after all.

In reality, the job of a law maker is no more arduous than that of a policeman or a kindergarten teacher or medical doctor or any other Nigerian worker. What then entitles your law maker to such out-of-this-world pay is quite beyond me. But then I am no politician. I think we should seek out the one nearest to us and ask. I am prepared to be surprised.

August 25, 2013
Nigerians as praying mantis

Gen Gowon wants us to pray over our leadership deficit.
But can prayer alone do the magic?

We see all kinds of machetes when an elephant dies. In same vein, we hear all kinds of suggestions when a blessed nation is troubled the way ours is. Just last week on this page, I commented on former President Olusegun Obasanjo who mounted the pulpit in Ibadan, Oyo State, to sermonise on leadership. Expectedly, he did not do a good job of the sermon as many people could not connect the message with the messenger.

About a week later, another former head of state, General Yakubu Gowon, spoke on the same subject in the same city, Ibadan. It couldn’t have been fortuitous that Ibadan is the place where all these is happening because that was the city from where the Late Chief Obafemi Awolowo set a good leadership template, with his many firsts that remain reference points till today. Gowon spoke during an official visit to Gethsemane Prayer Ministries Cathedral, Eleyele, Ibadan, the Oyo State capital, presided over by the National Coordinator, Nigeria Prays, Rev. Moses Aransiola. Nigeria Prays is a non-denominational religious group formed by Gowon in the 1990s.

Of course other eminent Nigerians have spoken on the country’s leadership deficit and recommended prayer as panacea. Even President Jonathan did! But the fact that two of the country’s former heads of state found it topical to speak on, within a week interval, is enough evidence that things are not the way they should be. This may not be sweet music in the ears of many members of the ruling party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). The way some of them talk, they give the impression that the Goodluck Jonathan presidency is about one of the best things ever in this country in recent times. That much could be seen also in the way they romanticise the administration. They are entitled to their opinion, just as the rest of us who still keep wondering whether this is the best we can get from our government are perfectly in order to so do.

Although Chief Obasanjo and General Gowon are both former heads of state, it should be noted that they are not in the same category. The dirtiest leader in Gowon’s days was by far cleaner than the saints in the Obasanjo years. Perhaps we might have been able to put them in the same category if Chief Obasanjo had not returned as civilian president in 1999; that, return was perhaps his undoing as it gave us a better insight into who the man, Olusegun Matthew Okikiolakan Aremu Obasanjo, is.

But I am more concerned about what Gowon said in Ibadan. He recommended prayers as the way out of the country’s challenges. Hear him: “We had a series of crises in the past and if Nigerians can pray well, sooner or later this country will be free from its challenges. God has heard our cries and will surely answer…” As a Christian, I believe in the efficacy of prayers. I am also familiar with the song: ‘Jesus started with prayer and ended with prayer’ and what have you. But it is not in all circumstances that prayer alone is the answer. Sometimes, we need to take steps to support the prayer. The average Christian knows that faith without work is useless. By extension, prayer without action could sometimes amount to naught.

An adage in Yoruba land says if only one knows his or her day of breakthrough, the person will simply go to bed and wake up on the appointed date. I beg to say, and with due respect to our elders, that the person would have passed out before that day if all he or she does is sleep, eat and wake in anticipation of the El Dorado. It is better for the person to be doing something to keep body and soul together, pending that appointed day. I know General Gowon loves prayers; his pet project reveals that much. I do too. As a matter of fact, the day a Christian relegates prayer to the background, that Christian should start a search for another god. If only for this reason, I will refuse to be tempted to say that Nigeria’s problems transcend prayer. Nothing does.

But what I support is prayer with action. Hence my support for a colleague who suggested in one of his write-ups on Boko Haram that Christians should carry the Bible on one hand and the bazooka on the other. That wouldn’t be a bad idea to counterbalance the terror of the religious fundamentalists. If they know that they are likely to be repelled force for force by worshippers, they will think twice before going into worship houses to slaughter people who are there to offer supplications (prayers) to God.

Gen. Gowon’s recommendation could work in places where the leaders are humane and considerate; where their Christian conscience will never fail them and where even if they must steal, they do so with human face. Not in a country like ours where leadership positions have become avenues to get rich quick and many leaders have simply lost their soul and would do anything to get their positions and retain them; anything, not giving any thought about the consequence of their actions to their fellow Nigerians. As a friend has always said, prayers will do, maybe in more civilised countries where they have only powers to contend with. But here, what we are contending with are not just powers but powers raised to power and principalities.

Ours is a country where prayers have been prostituted and bastardised, hence you find people who rig elections in broad daylight go for thanksgiving in the church with supposed men of God extolling the ‘virtues’ of such bandits, and, to crown it all, praying for them. Our churches are filled with such pollutions that will make it easier for the camel to pass through the eye of the needle than for the prayer to climb beyond a few metres before returning to sender. Mind you, this is not the Prince of Persia at work; it is the handiwork of some of our pastors. In these circumstances, even if we all become praying mantis, we still have to help our prayer with some definitive actions.

For instance, could prayer alone have stopped the Jonathan government from removing the so-called fuel subsidy last year? This was despite the fact that those who wanted to force the ‘subsidy’ withdrawal down our throats knew too well that what they were about doing was ask Nigerians to subsidise some people’s pockets.

Obviously, from Gowon’s statements, he too is aware that there are some of our so-called leaders who must give way for things to take shape. “God will uproot all the leaders who have evil intentions against this country”, he said. I join in saying ‘Amen’ to that. But we have to do more than pray. We have to fast, do vigil and all that. In addition, we have to protest where we must; sit in when we must. The only thing I won’t suggest is that we go on hunger strike because that would be prayer answered for those who in the first place see us as irritants and pollutants whose existence is disturbing their peace.

Above all, I want to see General Gowon talk like a general. As an elder, he should eat kola nut ‘gbwa gbwa’. He should not shield bad leaders the way he did in Ibadan. If he is bold enough to admit that they exist, and if he is bold enough to ask God to “uproot” them, then, he should be bold enough to mention their names. What I wouldn’t want him do is do that frivolously. The intervention of people like him at critical junctures in our nation could make a whole world of difference. For sure, it was not prayer alone that built all the fantastic infrastructure that the Gowon regime bequeathed to us. Rather, prayer and hard work did.

August 25, 2013
APC Vs PDP

The common saying that wars are won in the map room cuts no ice with the PDP

One major difference Nigerians would soon come to see between the All Progressives Congress and the ossifying Peoples Democratic Party is the amount of intellectual rigour the APC will put into the formulation of its policies, programmes and governance, as against the sheer vacuity we have come to know with the PDP in the past 14 years; a situation so reminiscent of the NPN when Awo observed then that while he was busy working at solutions to the country’s problems those in that party were carousing around women of easy virtue. So languid has PDP become that, under Chairman Tukur, its National Executive Committee hardly meets , as and when due, but yet, as if in a payback for a Second Republic favour done him, he went all the way to exhume the octogenarian Umaru Dikko to head the party’s disciplinary committee. It doesn’t get more surreal. Nor can you ever hear of a think tank in connection with the PDP. Rather, what it has in quantum is a rash of reconciliation committees: first, the Tukur Reconciliation Committee; then the Anenih and, now the Seriake Dickson Committee which was launched a while ago with the usual PDP bravura, mirroring uncannily, the presidential flag off of the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway project on which nothing else, other than a crippling traffic snafu that takes you four hours to reach Lagos from the Redeemed church camp, has happened since. Nor will the Dickson Committee be the last as jockeying for the presidential and gubernatorial tickets in the party is about to commence in full. We should therefore expect to still see the mother of all Reconciliation Committees. The common saying that wars are won in the map room cuts no ice with the PDP. Otherwise, why would they mess up a whole former President, yank off members of his group even from elective positions only to come back, running helter skelter, seeking rapprochement and asking him to reconcile their warring governors?

On the contrary, APC leaders, in these few weeks, but much longer in states where they are in charge of governments, have showcased their awareness that governance is no tea party nor is it about ‘family dinners’. The grim faces of the party’s leading lights -Akande, Buhari, Masari and others, as appeared on the front pages of many newspapers on Thursday, 22 August, 2013, at the launch of its manifesto, says it all. The entire week before that, party leaders and the party’s intellectual wing have been holed up in Abuja, working at the details of how to take Nigeria out of what the party calls Nigeria’s ‘ paralysis of 14 years’. Through some hard-headed interrogation, the party was able to flesh up its 8-point Agenda of: (1) War against corruption (2) Food security (3) Accelerated power supply (4) Integrated transport network (5) Free education (6) Devolution of power (7) Accelerated economic growth and, (8) Affordable health care,into what has been publicly announced to Nigerians as its Manifesto.

Nigerians are well aware of the score card of the PDP on each of the issues contained in that Agenda. Therefore, none needs be reminded about how the EFCC has all along been shackled in the performance of its duties under the supervision of an Attorney-General who must give prior approval to any case it intends to bring against those it has investigated and who, in most cases, have links to the ruling party. We have also seen how anti-corruption agencies, especially the EFCC, have again regressed into tools against the political opposition as is currently the case with the EFCC in Rivers State where like attack dogs, it is going ferociously after state officials in the wake of Wike’s promise to make life unbearable for the state governor. Corruption, under the PDP, has manifested in every aspect of our national life: in pension scams which ensure that some of our senior citizens die on queues waiting for their pension payments, in oil and gas, the mainstay of the nation’s economy where massive scams and oil thefts are the order of the day in spite of huge oil security contracts to sons of the soil; in the federation account being deliberately, massively shortchanged, in a single minister allegedly running up multi billion naira air travel bill, with no higher official of state able to rein her in; in diminishing power generation and distribution in spite of lies of hoping to become one of the world’s topmost 20 economies in year 2020; in increasing poverty and an unemployment rate that has certainty become a time bomb since majority of the victims, being university graduates, actually need no further lessons in how to make Molotov cocktails to make life more horrible for all of us.

Indeed, the PDP is too consumed with its own internal headache to think of solutions to these multifarious problems facing the country. Granted that it belatedly declared emergency in some states where Boko Haram had already established over lordship in certain areas and flew its flag, it was no doubt the equivalent of bolting the door too late. Such is the state of our insecurity today that poor Oyo State traders have twice been slaughtered in the north. You will not but wonder what constitutes the PDP’s manifesto which, of course, must have been written on the most expensive paper and published in glossy fashion since ‘it is the largest party in Africa’. You would almost think size is the issue, the way they bandy that about.

Operating from the background that Nigeria is already “trapped in a vicious cycle of political crises, social upheavals and economic under-development, and has, in fact, become, not only one of the most unstable countries in the world, but regrettably, one of the poorest despite its huge human and material resource endowments, the APC, after some serious brainstorming, has come up with a party manifesto. In the words of the Interim National Chairman of the party, Chief Bisi Akande, the following are the issues the APC would eagerly devote its all to as a way of getting Nigeria out of its ‘near permanent trauma’:

It shall vigorously pursue the expansion of electricity generation and distribution of up to 40,000 megawatts in 4-8 years as power is the centre-point of the development process which, if inefficient, impacts negatively on any economy. Concerning corruption, the party says it will fight it by granting independence to the anti corruption agencies and repeal all laws inhibiting their performance. It promises to embark on public sensitisation campaigns against corruption and to encourage whistle blowers in the anti-graft vanguard. Special anti-corruption courts will be established and remove immunity from prosecution for elected officers in criminal cases just as it will prevent abuse of executive, legislative and public offices through greater accountability, transparency and strict enforcement of anti-corruption laws.

On the much needed restructuring of the country, an APC Federal Government will initiate action to amend the constitution with a view to devolving powers, duties and responsibilities to states and local governments in order to entrench true Federalism and the Federal Spirit. Regarding national security and defence, the party says it will decentralise the police and expand its local content to include community policing.

It promises to urgently address capacity building of law enforcement agents in terms of quantity and quality and to establish a well-trained, adequately funded and fully equipped, serious crime squad, to combat terrorism, kidnapping, armed robbery, militancy, ethno-religious and communal clashes nationwide. It will also push for more support in the security and economic stability of the sub-region (ECOWAS) and AU as a whole and maintain a strong, close and frank relationship with the international community. It will also secure our borders, which are currently too porous for effective control. For this purpose, it will establish a National Coast Guard to protect Nigeria’s coastal waters.”

On the economy, it promises to ensure that the Nigerian economy is one of the fastest growing emerging economies in the world. It will embark on vocational training, entrepreneurial, and skills acquisition schemes for graduates along with the creation of small Business Loan Guarantee Scheme to create at least 1million new jobs every year, for the foreseeable future.

It will create additional middle-class of at least 1 million new home owners in its first year in government and one million annually thereafter, by enacting a national mortgage system that will lend at single digit interest rates for purchase of owner occupier houses.”

The above, and much more, is what the APC has in store for Nigerians and I urge all Nigerians, including those currently trapped in the clueless party, to come over into the APC and take possession. It is ours and we must rise up and make it a mass movement because it means well for all.

August 25, 2013
The deductive death of Boko Haram’s Shekau

Just before it yielded command to a new army division expected to take over its functions in the Northeast, the Joint Task Force (JTF), which has been combating terrorism in the region, announced to a bemused country that Boko Haram leader, Abubakar Shekau, might have died from gunshot injuries sustained in a firefight with security forces sometime in June. They offered no proof except circumstantial evidence from unstated and probably untested sources. They themselves were careful not to sound definitive. So, why did they feel the urgency to make the announcement, given the importance of the topic? They didn’t say, and they offered no clue. However, it is possible that the JTF simply wishes to depart in a blaze of glory. I was one of the worst critics of JTF operations in the Northeast, but even I must acknowledge that they had cleaned up their acts and fought a much cleaner war after the controversial Baga revenge killings. Even without evidence of Mallam Shekau’s death, the JTF still deserves plenty of accolades.

Both the presidency and the Defence Headquarters (DHQ) are chary of being drawn into the controversy. They needn’t feel queasy. In Nigeria, when government’s lies are exposed, no one is punished, and apparently even the voters do not exact revenge on their deceivers in subsequent polls. So, the government and its agencies can safely lie without fear of retribution. And, as the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) has discovered, no one flinches when the government unabashedly and routinely dishonours its word.

In the matter of Mallam Shekau, deceased, living or injured, I think the JTF merely allowed itself the luxury of deductive reasoning. Apart from other sources which told of Mallam Shekau’s death, the most potent, to me, appears to be the last YouTube video released by the sect. In it, Shekau stated he could never be captured. Now, not even Osama bin Laden, the late Al-Qaeda leader, ever made such a boast, not even as a confidence building tactics. I therefore deduced from Mallam Shekau’s supremely confident assertion that since he is/was not a ghost, he could not say so confidently he was above capture, if he was not already dead.

If another YouTube video does not surface in the next few weeks showing clear proof that the Boko Haram leader is alive, we may have no choice but to respect the JTF’s deductive reasoning and come to the same unproven conclusions as they hastily did last week. Nonetheless, the departing JTF, the incoming army division, the presidency and anyone who has analysed the Boko Haram phenomenon surely understand that killing the leader of a terrorist group does not amount to extirpating the menace. It is often no more than a morale booster, especially when not accompanied by a mass arrest or interdiction of its other leaders.

August 25, 2013
Just see how this country is stealing the youth of its Youths

Sometime ago, I had the privilege to take a young man, no older than eighteen, to task on some of his country’s political policies which bordered on the treatment of a minority group in that country. As best, if not as testily, as he could, the young man defended the country with the excuse that the group refuses to budge from its old, tradition-soaked seats. I know many people who won’t budge from their tradition-soaked seats either, and no one dares ignore them. Yes, yes, I am talking about our great grandpas and grandmas in the parties.

As I was saying before I was rudely interrupted by myself, my interviewee had emigrated, temporarily, from his country just to meet and know someone in another, that’s all. He was on a mission to satisfy his curiosity regarding the individual and had then set out. He met the person, stayed a while doing odd jobs for survival before going back home. He was on a kind of pilgrimage to satisfy a longing in his soul.

Now, no one can completely take care of all the longings on his/her soul, I grant, but sadly, it would appear that many Nigerians, particularly at the top, either do not have or have lost their souls. You know what they are, don’t you, souls I mean? They are those little things men and women carry around with them in the pockets of their shadows. Say what, shadows don’t have pockets?! You could have fooled me.

Anyway, let me tell you what happens when we lose our souls. No; contrary to popular belief, we do not gain the whole world; it would just appear so for a while. Believe me, the feeling soon palls, particularly when you get the bill. I can give you so many examples of people who got the bill of losing their souls in exchange for the whole world and soon realised they did not want the whole world, just their souls. There was Dr. Falstaff, the figure that looms in English literature as a classical example of the soulless man and his deep, deep regrets; then there was Fraser’s Bedazzled and his deeper and deeper regrets; then there are Nigerians…

Nigerians sure constitute one classical group of the soulless. It’s only in Nigeria you can find someone prefer to pack the nation’s billions into his account like one crazy winner at a poker game, not to do anything in particular with it, but for the sheer pleasure of seeing it there. It’s only in Nigeria you can get old, tottering politicians insisting on staying in power to continue to wreak havoc on a hapless nation. It’s only in Nigeria you can get an ineffective government but tall on excuses insisting on remaining in power so it can continue to make the people miserable. And it’s only in Nigeria you can get youths so beleaguered they have no youth to speak of.

Nigeria is guilty of a lot of things, but the most heinous to me is still the fact that it has stolen the innocence of its youths. First, it forgets to draw up a programme of development for this group so that each one can find his/her solid identity as a Nigerian whichever part of the country he/she may come from. Guilty. Next, the country builds a large nest, for its own youths to copy, of the worst kinds of examples anyone can possibly lay down for his/her children: lack of patriotism, murderous politics, selfish soldiery, gingham-like patterns of reckless unaccountability and irresponsibility, unabashed national selfishness, and other things for which names have not been invented. Guilty. Then, it steals the future of its own children. Imagine that. Because of the irresponsibility of the adult group, Nigerian youths now have anxiety syndromes over what may become of them in the country. How does it manifest? It manifests in the rabid dream of every Nigerian child to run to the United States of Heaven… sorry, America. How do I know this?

Nigerian youths have no dreams regarding the country. They do not lie awake thinking of that age-old question: ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country. They cannot dream for the country because they have not been handed any tools to work with: no housing system, no credible transportation system, and no food that can satisfy the average greedy person. So, the youths do not dream for this country, they dream about leaving this country. This should make each of us stand trembling before the mirror, look ourselves in the eyes and ask the mirror: how did I contribute to killing the ability of the Nigerian youth to dream?

There is worse yet. Many youths there are whose only goal in life is to make money, at any and at all costs and too many adults there are ready to teach them. Oooooooh, this troubles me so. The baffling thing is that many of them have no idea why they want to make money except that they have noticed that their papas and mamas worship at the foothill of money every day. They have seen too many adults in their environment listen to what the rich man says (that’s why they say money talks); consult the rich people in their lives (money is powerful); or obey what the rich man commands in the family (money can do anything). They have seen that to bury any family member, people wait for the rich; chieftaincy titles go only to the rich; obaship succession chains change only for the rich; to take someone to the hospital, grown men wait for the rich in the family; and sometimes to eat, people go cap in hand to … Yes sir, the youths have seen the fear in the eyes of their hapless parents and have found a solution: get rich quick.

Nigerian youths have been shown by the adults that it is no use having any youth if you do not have cash backing. So, they have taken to either running out of the country if they want to keep their souls or staying in the country and pursuing money into the hole by hook or crook (quick, cross yourself for those who pursued it to the last hole) or by turning their family members into money. Somewhere in the east, a young man was said to have killed his mother as part of making money rituals, and somewhere in the west, a young man killed his mother for reportedly being ‘behind’ the fact that he was not ‘progressing’ in life. Those who are not killing are either militants (north, south) or in one religious vanguard or the other. Oh yeah, they are also killing.

Nigeria has turned the youths in its charge into ravenous wolves, hungry to consume all the money they can find in their paths. In effect, the poor youths have lost the sanctity of their youths: the zest for knowledge, the beautiful experiences that define life in its purest form, or searching for the kind of associations that show the true meaning of existence. They have not been taught that real enjoyment does not lie in holding a gun to a helpless person’s head, or in spraying walls or people with bullets, or in some mindless pursuit of bawdiness.

Nigeria must teach its youths to pursue happiness, love, beauty, and self fulfilment in ways that are in complete harmony with nature. The country must teach its youths how to reach deep within them and bring out their tucked-away talents to help the society. It is not too late. If it is never done, that is when it will be too late.

August 18, 2013
Okonjo-Iweala on the ASUU strike: please speak truth, not technocratic sophistry to the nation!

Sophistry: 1. A subtle, tricky, superficially plausible but generally fallacious method of reasoning. 2. A false argument; sophism.
Dictionary.com (Online)

At present, ASUU wants the Federal Government to pay N92bn in extra allowances, when the resources are not there, and when we are working to integrate past increases in pensions. We need to make choices in this country as we are getting to the stage where recurrent expenditures take the bulk of our resources and people get paid, but can do no work.

Dr. (Mrs.) Okonjo-Iweala, Address to the National Council on Finance and Economic Development, Minna.

In March 2012 shortly after the nationwide strike against the oil subsidy removal by the Jonathan administration in which she is a key cabinet member, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala made a revelation in an article that was published in the March 3, 2012 issue of that iconic newsmagazine of British and global finance capitalism, The Economist. The revelation considerably startled the writer of the article. It certainly startled me, so much so that I have never forgotten it. What was this revelation? It was a bluntly stated assertion that corruption and waste were so endemic to Nigerian politics and governance that she, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, would be satisfied if by the end of her current tenure in 2015 as the nation’s Finance Minister she would have cleaned up as much – or as little – as 4% of the waste, mismanagement and corruption in the affairs of the Nigerian government. 4%? Yes, 4%.

When I came across this figure of the pace in which our Minister of Finance and the Coordinating Minster for the economy thought corruption and mismanagement could realistically be cleaned from Nigerian governance, I read and re-read the article, thinking that, surely, there was an irony, a hidden meaning or perhaps a playful signification on the usually inflated claims of the statistical sciences intended in that 4% target. But there was no irony, no sarcasm and no ludic intent of any kind in the bar Dr. Okonjo-Iweala had set herself. This is because, as totally absurd as it may seem to ordinary folks like you and me, in the reified calculus of the technocratic gurus that run the nations and business conglomerates of the world, 4% of trillions upon trillions of naira – especially in the context of the monumental swampland of Nigerian corruption – is very consequential. You and I might think that the 96% that remains after 4% might have been reduced means that so much has been taken out of our national coffers that could have considerably made life easier for millions of Nigerians now and in the years head. But the technocratic mind – or more precisely the kind of technocratic mind embodied by our Minister of Finance – does not see things the way we see it. You may call it a form of cynicism that expresses itself as a professional ethos, but to the kind of technocratic rationality we encounter here, 4% recovered in five years is good enough.

This, I suggest, goes to the heart of Okonjo-Iweala’s presuppositions in her strident attack on the ASUU strike earlier this week. In the justifiable rush to condemn the Finance Minister for her intervention the ASUU-Government negotiations, I suggest that it is in our best interest to pay attention to where Dr. Okonjo-Iweala is coming from, specifically to the kind of technocratic sophistry that underpins her reasoning and conclusions. But before getting to this point, a full disclosure of the sources and nature my interest in the matter is necessary, for I am far from being an intellectually detached observer or a dispassionate commentator on the case.

As perhaps some of the readers of this column know, I was the National President of ASUU some 30 years ago, precisely between 1980 and 1982. And when I was succeeded by the late Mahmud Modibbo Tukur, I served as ASUU’s Immediate Past President (IPP) between 1982 and 1986. Moreover, between 1984 and 1987, I served as ASUU’s representative on the Central Working Committee (CWC) of the Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC). I mention all of this background not only to show and declare my strong connections and solidarity with ASUU but also to indicate that in the course of my work in ASUU, I came across many bureaucrats and technocrats, in government, among employers of labour, in the universities and other tertiary institutions themselves – and even within the rank and file of ASUU membership!

I mention this last point deliberately because I think it would be a mistake not to recognise that the likes of Dr. Okonjo-Iweala do not constitute an aberration but are, rather, a part of the corps of elite bureaucrats in charge of the management and administration of the affairs of this world. The word “technocrat” is indeed an appropriate indication of the elite status of this corps of bureaucrats. Dear reader, look at the suffix “crat” in the following terms: democrat; plutocrat; aristocrat. In all of these cases, that suffix lends a seal of respectable identity and pedigree to each term. In the particular case of technocrats, they are – and are regarded as – the cream of the bureaucrats that run the nations, business empires and international organisations of the planet. And we must recognise this: within this demographically tiny elite group in our world, Okonjo-Iweala is among the most celebrated, the most sought after, a fact that she never lets anyone, her fellow cabinet members included, forget. What Okonjo-Iweala does not recognise, what in fact we must not let her and technocrats like her ever forget, is the fact that technocrats and technocracy often get things horribly wrong in our world at the cost of a lot of needless hardship and suffering of hundreds of millions of ordinary folks.

To speak to this last claim, think of the following fact that has almost entirely been missed in the justifiable outrage that the Finance Minister’s intervention in the ASUU strike has caused: the very day before Okonjo-Iweala made her statement about the federal government’s impossibility of meeting ASUU’s demands, she held a press briefing at Abuja in which she informed the world and the nation of the efforts – the technocratic efforts, I might add – that her Ministry had been making to reduce corruption, waste and mismanagement in those arms of government and parastatals known as the MDAs (Ministries, Departments and Agencies). In that press briefing, she was very sanguine about the successes that her Ministry was beginning to make, against all the odds. She mentioned that she had set up two bodies that henceforth would ensure the full rationalisation of the operations of all the MDAs, all the personnel of these government units, together with their activities. Here are the names of these two bodies, both reeking with a maximum of technocratic smarminess: IPPIS – which stands for Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information Systems; and GIFMIS – which in turn stands for Government Integrated Financial Management Information Systems. [Watch out all you government employees! IPPIS and GIFMIS are watching you!]

In the press briefing, Okonjo-Iweala also said that the Revenue Mobilisation Allocation and Fiscal Commission (RMAFC) had hired 53 consultants that would verify the accuracy and probity of revenue generating MDAs like the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) and the Nigerian Customs Service (NCS) in their collection of revenues and remittances of parts thereof due to the government. To cap it all, Okonjo-Iweala at this press briefing last Monday announced that so far, 46000 ghost workers had been discovered and the sum of N53 billion naira had been saved through the work of all these technocratic instruments she had put in place. Hallelujah!

Quite apart from the fact that at this press briefing Okonjo-Iweala did not mention the name of a single public official or MDA that had been responsible for misdeeds and/or incompetence, the figure of N53 billion naira “saved” is worse than a joke; it is the expression of a kind of intellectual fraud and professional complacency that technocrats routinely perpetrate around the world, especially in the poor countries of the global South. Last year alone, an Ad Hoc Committee of the Senate on the oil subsidy scandal of 2011 found that the colossal sum of N2.58 trillion had been siphoned from the national treasury. As I observed in this column a few weeks ago, that sum represented more than half of the national budget for the entire country that year. The oil marketers that were illegally paid this humungous sum are not “ghost workers”; they are known, their names were published, together with how much each real or fake marketer was paid. And yet to date, not a single kobo has been paid back by these looters and not one of them has been arrested, let alone sent to jail. As far as I am aware, Okonjo-Iweala has said and done nothing to recover any of that N2.58 trillion naira. Neither has she nor her Ministry gone after the huge pension funds scams that rocked the country last year and earlier this year. N53 billion saved; meanwhile the N2.58 trillions looted in the oil subsidy scam stand unrecovered and are perhaps are unrecoverable in the scheme of things.

In her defence, it could of course be argued that Okonjo-Iweala had told us exactly what to expect from her. She had told us that by 2015 to expect no more than 4% reduction of the monumental waste and corruption plaguing the land. To argue the case for this “defence” it could be said that technocrats are not police detectives; they are not enforcers of the law; and they are not moral crusaders. Their work is to make the machinery of governance work smoothly and efficiently, every cog in the wheel of management and administration moving along its apportioned groove. Pressing the case for this “defence” further, we could accept the fact that in the modern world, we cannot do without technocrats; and Nigeria in particular needs able and conscientious technocrats to counter the deadweight of entrenched mediocrity and incompetence in the corridors of power and the halls of governance in our country. But the great flaw in the worldview of the Okonjo-Iwealas of this country and this earth is the idea, the belief that to be a good technocrat you must be “realistic”, you must content yourself with the 4% that you can reduce, leaving the moralisers, the idealists, the romantics and the would-be messiahs to worry about the 96% that remains. This in effect means keeping quiet about and acting as if unconcerned with that lion’s share of 96% that the looters get away with.

In conclusion, we need to anchor these generalised reflections in the specific case of Okonjo-Iweala’s extremely unconscionable intervention in ASUU’s negotiations with the federal government over the ongoing strike. Here, once we see clearly that the Finance Minister is basing herself on the assumption that only 4% of what is looted, wasted and mismanaged is recoverable, then we can perceive the fact that her assertion that “the resources are not there” is completely bogus and untenable. For only by a very sophistical reasoning in which ASUU’s demands are reduced to the purely technocratic formulation of “recurrent expenditure” can Okonjo-Iweala assert that the resources are not there. In this case, the gap between sophistry and truth is bridged by the fact that her brand of technocracy is perfectly compatible with all the scams, all the looting going on in the administration of which is a major player in an alliance of technocrats with kleptocrats.

This alliance of Harvard and MIT – or Cambridge and LSE – educated technocrats with thieving, mediocre and unpatriotic politicians is, by the way, not unusual in the developing countries of the world. Since 1999 when our current failing experiment in democratic governance began, it has indeed been part of the justificatory myth of the ruling party at the center that notwithstanding all the unending crises we have gone through and are still going through, the “experts” have been recruited and will guide us to our destiny as one of the biggest economies in the world by the year 2020. This is of course a fantasy. To make it a probability, we need to adequately fund our universities and their teaching and research staff. How ironic then that the one member of the present administration that embodies this justificatory myth more than any of her colleagues should be the one to whom the task is delegated to say, quite untruthfully, that the “resources are not there” to resuscitate our universities!

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

August 18, 2013
Egypt: From flame to fire

•Revolts are rarely won by those who start them

THE land of the Nile has become a pool of blood. As things stand, only a miracle will prevent Egypt from descending to the very portal of civil insurrection and war.

The tragedy now gripping Egypt is of immense portion. Two years ago, Egyptians of all stripes protested to rid themselves of a haughty, arrogant dictator who sought to turn his evil fortune into a perpetual family dynasty.

Yet, a terrible omission was committed. Now, the county pays the dear costs of this error. In ridding themselves of the dictator, the people thought they were also ridding themselves of the dictatorship and the political culture upon which it was founded. They mistakenly thought the man was the institution. He might have personified the system but he was not the system. They tossed him and began to celebrate. The work was but half done. The dictator had been removed but the system upon which his arbitrary tenure was built remained intact.

For all of their novel, internet-savvy political activism and old-fashioned street protests, the agents of civil society were either naïve about the intricacy of their political system or were exhausted from the exertion already made. They relaxed after merely achieving the removal of one man from office. To their current lament, they left unharmed his political structure and the aura of power that structure had acquired.

In beginning this revolt, the secular political activists gave Egypt hope. In not being disciplined, visionary and sufficiently organized to bring the revolt to conclusion, they unwittingly placed the people in a harsh vise that now taxes and tolls them. Payment is being demand and is being demanded in lives and blood.

It is a terrible disgrace not to combat injustice. Yet, it is almost as hapless to fight it incompletely. As such, Egypt serves as a fine lesson how to start a modern protest as well as a terse manual on how not to finish one. What began as a political awakening has quickly transformed into a national wake, a mournful dirge heard in all corners of the ancient nation.

The architects of the Egyptian dawn are mostly invisible now. The manner in which they constructed a diffuse, loosely organized protest movement made it difficult for the authorities to contain the protests. But it also made it impossible for the organizers to transform this amorphous group into a political movement with positive, soundly-defined objectives. Because of this fault, the political ground was ceded to people and groups who had something other than democracy at heart.

Put another way, there were three main groups in Egypt on the day of Mubarak’s exit from power. There was this inventive but disorganized assemblage of civil society and secular organizations. Then there was the military, the most organized and powerful governmental institution. The people erred, thinking Mubarak had made the military when it was the military that had made the strongman. Without the military, Mubarak was an infirmed old man. The military without Mubarak remained its powerful self. Third, there was the Muslim Brotherhood and its large universe of supporters.

By virtue of its lack of political organization and funding, secular civil society disqualified itself from seriously competing for national leadership. Civil society proved adept at causing disruption such that Mubarak was troubled out of office. United about whom it did not want, civil society was incapable of forming a solid coalition around what and whom it wanted to fill the political vacuum civil society had authored.

Battle for control of the nation boiled down to a contest between the military and the Muslim Brotherhood. The present crisis is a turf war between these two politically unimaginative, power-oriented rival groups that care little for the condition of the general population. Both groups seek for national power. Neither cares for democracy.

From the beginning of the crisis, the military saw itself as the only truly national institution. Its generals also had too many significant political and economic interests to cede national leadership to any group uninitiated in their ways and inimical to their interests. Given its very nature, the military, in its most charitable disposition, was inherently hostile to democracy. However, after Mubarak’s ouster, the group decided to play coy, like a venomous snake pretending to slumber. Yet, at the right moment, it would strike.

The dominant wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, symbolized by ousted President Morse, also cared too little for democracy. A conservative, pragmatic lot, they played the game of ballot and vote, understanding their established organizational spread and power gave them a distinct advantage in the early elections that had been scheduled. They exploited the advantage and won. Although rising to power through democracy, they were too willing to clip the very democracy that had just taken them to the place of power.

Last November, President Morsi decreed a usurpation of legislative and judicial power. If taken literally, the decree made him a 21st century pharaoh. What further undid him was his conservative economics. If a leader is to quickly curtail the people’s newly-acquired freedom, at least give them cheap bread. To remove both is to call forth disaster. Morsi did this by imposing a dire economic austerity on the pained nation. Morsi ran into trouble not because of Islam or of brotherhood. His trouble was that his mindset led him to classical economic policies when progressive, at least Keynesian, policies were the only logical escape from calamity. As such, he became more the brother of conservative western economists than of the average Egyptian. Again, there was no innate problem with the Brotherhood as a political force. Islam, as a religion, does not detest democracy or progressive economics. The tragedy is that the particular leaders of the Egyptian franchise of the Brotherhood proved too undemocratic and economically conservative for the exigencies they faced. Had the Muslim Brotherhood selected more progressive economic and political policies, their man might still be in power and the streets moving more toward tranquility than anomie.

Ironically, the conservatism of the Muslim Brotherhood is a by-product of the very state it has been fighting the past eight decades. Although it has been the main organized opponent of the military government, the Brotherhood also has been allowed to exist, even if sometimes on the fringes of legality, because its leadership is not so unlike the military’s. This has made it part of the nation’s institutional establishment, meaning it has been inculcated into the governing system more than it would admit. As such, the Brotherhood leadership, in many ways, is the un-uniformed mirror image of the military’s general class. Save for one thing.

The military’s leadership is politically more adroit. In comparison to the Brotherhood’s leaders, one group looks like a gang of experienced, cynical men while the other appears to be a cackle of adolescents. After Mubarak’s departure, the military’s objective was to regain power. Their strategy would be that of driving a wedge between the Brotherhood and secular society. The Brotherhood won the election. Begrudgingly, civil society accepted the results and decided to give Morsi a chance. However, this was not the making of an alliance or even a gentlemen’s agreement. In effect, civil society had placed Morsi on probation.

Not wanting to push civil society and Morsi together, the military kept its powder dry at the time. As Morsi gained power, the military entered agreements with him protecting their base but also tacitly encouraging him to nip the frail democracy by arrogating power to himself. Exploiting Morsi’s clumsiness, the wedge was driven between him and secular society.

Encouraged by the military, civil society took to the streets. What was done to Mubarak, the groups now did to Morsi. The military deceived the civilians that their coup would be a temporary corrective, saving democracy from the paddle-handed Morsi. The civilians swallowed the bait because they never liked Morsi and because they entertained the fantasy of gaining the upper hand in new elections if the Brotherhood were duly disgraced if not completely shackled.

The civilians gave the military their blessing. Nobel Prize winner Mohammed el-Baradei allowed ambition to get the better of him by agreeing to join the caretaker government the military established. This lent civilian color and legitimacy to what was a military coup against an immensely unpopular Morsi.

Had the civilians been wiser, they would not have accepted the military’s gift. They should have realized the military is not in the business of giving more than it takes. Had they not accepted this easy route, enough people might have been amassed to force Morsi’s exit or his change of ways.

In a series of adroit if immoral maneuvers, the military exploited the differences between civic society and the Brotherhood to grab power.

Recognizing the importance of strong institutions, the military is not satisfied with clipping Morsi. They seek to decimate the Brotherhood. In this way, the military believes it will not face another organized rival for decades. Within the space of two years, the military has serially duped the civil society and the Brotherhood, getting what it wanted as a result: It controls the levers of national government. However, this comes at high price that continues to increase. Hundreds die by the day and night.

The military’s strategy has proven successful. They have civil society in their hip pocket and now dragoon the Muslim Brotherhood. Their goal is to drive the Brotherhood toward violence. The more violent the Brotherhood’s reply to the government’s muscle, the more the military shall crackdown, claiming the Brotherhood is terror inspired. This dynamic will lessen the already slim chance of a rapprochement between the Brotherhood and civil society. The Brotherhood would deem civil society responsible for the suppression in the first instance. Moreover, secular groups now fear the Brotherhood might become more radicalized due to the violence. Secular groups will fear a more vengeful Brotherhood’s inclusion and participation in politics and governance.

The military has succeeded in reshaping the political landscape to fit its narrow interests. Politically, the nation is fragmented and the military is the only coherent institution to be found. Secular society is reeling, not yet fully understanding how massively it has been hoodwinked by the men in uniform whom they thought were bumbling fools. The Brotherhood is fragmented between those who want to fight and those who futilely believe an armistice with the military is possible. The pacifists hope against reality. The fighting is not because something has gone awry. This is all part of the grand design of the military’s return to power.

By violently polarizing the situation, the military seeks to limit the options of the international community, especially the Western powers, to two. Either stand with the known entity, the military, or walk the unfamiliar path with the unknown entity, the Brotherhood. America had already tacitly endorsed Morsi’s ouster when its top diplomat proclaimed the military was trying to “restore democracy.” President Obama issued a recent statement deploring the military crackdown. But all the American did was cancel a nonessential joint military exercise. He did not and likely will not suspend military assistance in any significant degree.

Clearly, America frets more about the Brotherhood and its ilk than about the military. American love for democracy in the Middle East ends when a purported “Islamicist” wins a national election. At that point, the hidden caveats and conditions for American support for democracy surface. Do not be taken by public statements by Obama Administration officials and Republican Party leaders such as Senators McCain and Graham. In public, they condemn the military’s street war. In private, they likely signal their acquiescence to the dirty campaign.

America has not fought dreaded Islamicists in far away, isolated Afghanistan to watch them gain a foothold in the most strategic nation in the Arab world. The Suez Canal, that vital international military and commercial shipping route and dual gateway into the Mediterranean and toward the Persian Gulf, is an Egyptian artery. This is one of the most important channels of water in the world. America would rather it held by those to whom it gives billions of dollars of military aid than by a more radical version of Morsi. Without a cooperative Egypt, Israel’s geopolitical exposure increases exponentially. This cautious American president will do nothing that will be construed by conservative critics as impairing Israel.

Moreover, America has seen what a mess they made of Libya by executing an established strongman. Thus, although the Egyptian military is killing people at a much faster clip than Gaddafi did, the cries that the military is “killing their own people’ are predictably absent. If the choice is between a possible more radicalized, vengeful Brotherhood and the military, the West will dance and wed the military. General el-Sisi knows this. He shepherds the situation toward this result that suits his personal and organizational interests. In other words, Egypt might have gone through these last two years of protests, crashed hopes, rising frustrations and now crimson tragedy just so an old dictator can be replaced by a more acrobatic and strategically clever one.

In this, sober lessons abound.

Incomplete reform quickly leads to complete regression. There will always be a backlash against reform. Ironically, the less vigorous the reform in altering the power equation between rival national institutions, the more potent shall be the conservative backlash.

While anger may stir the people to protest, they must be careful. Quick resort to violence never serves the people. It serves those who wield the instruments of destruction. Last, a political or social movement must have a positive final goal. In Egypt, the movement only had a negative initial goal: the removal of Mubarak. After that, the people’s movement dissipated. Establishment operatives were allowed to seize the reins; they guided things back to the way they were. In the next weeks and months, violence will likely be the way of Egypt. The nation moves from the possible dawn of a new day into the darkness of nights already long passed. The violence and death are sad. Sadder still is the likelihood that these losses come only to install a dictator perhaps more agile and dangerous than the one first deposed. Getting rid of the strongman is but a half remedy. A viable democratic alternative must be the final, purposeful objective. In the absence of such a destination, the people run into the danger that the strongman they bind may be replaced by one they cannot bind.

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August 18, 2013
The sermon, by Saint Obasanjo

The former president mounts the pulpit on leadership crisis!

There must be a mix-up somewhere. In 1984, Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka dismissed his generation as a ‘wasted generation’. Soyinka, in a scathing essay in The Punch entitled ‘The Wasted Generation’ examined Nigeria’s historical travails and concluded, in a damning sentence: “After a quarter of a century of witnessing and occasionally participating in varied aspects of social struggle in all their shifting tempi, dimensions, pragmatic and sometimes even ideologically oriented goals, I feel at this moment that I can only describe my generation as the wasted generation, frustrated by forces which are readily recognisable, which can be understood and analysed but which nevertheless have succeeded in defying whatever weapons such ‘understanding’ has been able to muster towards their defeat.”

Another eminent Nigerian, Prof Chinua Achebe, had said Nigeria’s problem was basically leadership. Achebe declared, in The Trouble with Nigeria, published in 1983, that “the trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a problem of leadership” and of the inability or unwillingness of leaders to rise to “the challenge of personal example.”

Both Achebe and Soyinka had refused national honours in protest against the decadence in the country and the caricature of a nation that Nigeria had become under various despotic regimes. These are the hallmarks of great men. In Nigeria, all kinds of characters usually end up on the national honours lists. So, many men of honour and proven integrity must be weary of wearing the same emblems as the unworthy characters who sometimes populate the lists.

However, more than 30 years after Achebe and Soyinka had narrowed down the country’s problem to a dearth of leadership, former President Olusegun Obasanjo came up with his idea of the younger generation as the cause of the country’s leadership crisis. The former president spoke at the 4th Annual Ibadan Sustainable Development Summit organised by the Centre for Sustainable Development (CESDEV), University of Ibadan (UI), in collaboration with African Sustainable Development Network (ASUDNET).

Obasanjo listed former Bayelsa State governor, Dieprieye Alamieyeseigha; former Edo State Governor Lucky Igbinedion, former Delta State Governor James Ibori; his counterpart in Abia State during the last dispensation, Orji Uzor Kalu, former Lagos State governor, Bola Ahmed Tinubu as some of the young leaders who have failed the nation.

“It is sad that after 53 years of independence, we have no leader that we can commend. The problem in Africa is that when one person takes over, he would not see any good thing that his predecessor did. Let us condemn but with caution,” the former president was quoted as saying by the online news medium, Premium Times.

Trust the former president; he also seized the opportunity to sing his usual song of self-glorification: “In 1979, we had 20 new ships specially built for Nigeria. When I came back 20 years after, the national shipping line had liquidated”. He was talking about his first time as military head of state and 1999 when he returned as civilian president. Has he forgotten too that the government he handed over to in 1979 was as inept and corrupt as it could be and in less than four years, that government had done sufficient damage to the economy and other sectors of the economy. That begot the dictatorship of General Muhammadu Buhari, then Ibrahim Babangida, Sani Abacha before General Abdulsalami Abubakar came and organised elections that threw up the Obasanjo government in May, 1999. So, what did Obasanjo expect the scenario to look like in the circumstance?

Characteristically, the former president was economical with the truth when he said he did not want to hand over to his former vice president, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar because he (Atiku) was a betrayer. “I wanted someone who would succeed me, so I took Atiku. Within a year, I started seeing the type of man Atiku is. And you want me to get him there?” Does Chief Obasanjo think we have forgotten that Abubakar was content with being governor in his Adamawa State when Obasanjo approached him to be his deputy? Has Obasanjo forgotten too how he reportedly cringed before this same Abubakar to get his party nomination for second term? Worse still, if Obasanjo, despite his experience in government (at least he had been head of state in the ’70s) could have a faulty sense of judgement in choosing his deputy, what right has he to lampoon the so-called younger generation for incompetence in leadership positions?

But can we really blame Chief Obasanjo for giving us these homilies? I do not think so; rather, it is his colleagues and others who have been running Africa aground that are still honouring him with invitations to deliver lectures, oversee elections and stuff like that who are still giving him a false sense of importance. Even at the summit on leadership failure in Africa in question where the former President gave the keynote address, he was the least competent to speak on the issue. We remember the many illegalities that were committed during his regime. We saw how governors were impeached without quorum; a thing his political godson experimented in Rivers State with the speaker of the state house of assembly; we saw how he (Obasanjo) used the anti-corruption agency, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) to haunt his enemies. There are too many buts about his administration that we can’t go on counting. Yet, his colleagues keep calling him to deliver lectures and monitor elections, a question of birds of the same feather flocking together?

If there is any leadership lacuna in Nigeria, it is to Obasanjo’s wasted generation that we should turn for explanation. If Nigeria is jinxed with leadership crisis, then that must have been due to the activities of the Obasanjos in leadership positions. It is not even sweet in the former president’s mouth to say the country is jinxed. The country is jinxed, yet Obasanjo was head of state from 1976 to 1979; the country is jinxed, yet Obasanjo made himself available for the presidency in 1999 and was president for eight years. The country is jinxed, yet Obasanjo wanted a third term, a thing alien to our constitution and Jagunlabi would have gladly become a sit-tight president but for Nigerians’ resistance to the satanic plot.

But it is one slave that makes one abuse many other slaves. The truth is that there is no correlation between age and leadership. Obasanjo, at least officially, was born on March 5, 1937. He is therefore 76 years old. Achebe was born November 16, 1930. He died March 21, aged 82. Soyinka on his part was born July 13, 1934, which means he is 79 this year. Officially, therefore, Obasanjo is the youngest of the trio. Much as we can say that Obasanjo cannot be said to have given Nigerians good leadership, both Soyinka and Achebe are renowned worldwide. How it is only the wrong people that get into leadership positions in Nigeria is what one cannot fathom.

Chief Obasanjo should not be deceived that because he owns a leadership forum, then he is eminently qualified to mount the pulpit to pontificate on leadership, whether in Nigeria, worse still, in Africa. It is just one of the many contradictions of the man, Olusegun Obasanjo. In better run societies, no one would touch his forum, not even with a long spoon. His sermons can only make sense if he tells us to do as he says and not necessarily as he does- born again only above, but steep in the world down below! Another contradiction?

August 18, 2013