The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sunday

  • Revisiting the economic battle (ahead)

    Revisiting the economic battle (ahead)

    Economic Policy is made by the rich and done to the poor

    I write this from the United States. My brief visit here has been instructive. Despite those who say American power now swoons, Washington remains the world’s most influential capital. The mindset controlling Washington eventually colours other nations. The world has become a discordant rush partly because an increasingly plutocratic America remains the closest thing the dismal orchestra has to a conductor. Yet, a conductor who insists all things must be done to place him in maximum fettle, is one incapable of directing us toward music of greater harmony and equity.

    American society moves with a foul mood. Claims that the economy is improving seem to be merely that: Claims. People stew in uncertainty. This alleged land of plenty is the abode of plenty of new poverty. Income inequality has reached a peak last witnessed before the Great Depression nine decades ago. High numbers of people remain unemployed. Most new jobs are described by low wages and abbreviated hours.

    Black people are doubly compressed by the hard times. A young Black man has as much of a chance to be on the streets jobless or incarcerated for petty crime as he has to be employed or enrolled in higher education. Detroit, the once proud capital of the American car industry and of soul music, no longer hums with the sound of machinery of car manufacturing. This once fine city had been a symbol of Black progress; it now does nothing but sing the blues. The city is bankrupt and at the prey of creditors seeking public assets on the cheap. The Black population in Detroit is shell-shocked like an ill-equipped platoon finding itself suddenly on a battlefield. Once robust neighbourhoods are blighted by vacant and ramshackle houses. The scene evokes the feeling that a plague has swept the place, consuming people as well as savaging brick, mortar, building and even the spirit of those who remain behind in the desolate town.

    Against this backdrop, President Obama toured several cities touting his plans to revive the American economy by protecting the endangered middle class. Although not a great admirer of the President, I hoped this signaled he would hew a different course.

    His tour produced high-sounding speeches before enthusiastic, often cheering crowds. The purportedly liberal corporate media lauded his every word. For my part, I dropped my head, wept dry tears and cried a silent cry.

    First, the President pulled from the mothballs his threadbare plan for 50 billion dollars on infrastructural improvements. To the average person, the amount seems so vast as to impress. To those more knowledgeable, the amount is so paltry as to insult. America’s ruling crowd has become so selfish that it channels the bulk of the national wealth down its collective gullet. Because of lack of investment, the world’s greatest national infrastructural grid 40 years ago is now the worst among developed nations.

    Obama’s 50 billion dollar scheme is a complete feign. It is akin to adorning a Chihuahua with a horse’s saddle then insisting the ill-fitted combination is primed to compete in a thoroughbred race. It is all farce but one the public’s ignorance and media’s connivance have given a hero’s welcome. The leading organisation of America’s civil engineers estimated the nation must spend over one trillion dollars to place its vital infrastructure in respectable order.

    The White House knows this. Its policy statement was empty theatre, the slick tossing of saccharine but hollow words at a populace too ignorant to realise the speaker ridicules rather than respects them. The fund President Obama seeks will minimally improve the overall state of the nation’s infrastructure. It will be like giving a pedicure to a tuberculin patient. However, it presents a golden opportunity for a few large construction firms to make a real fortune based on expenditures giving the public false hope. Welcome to the feast where only the fat can eat their fill. It gets worse.

    President Obama also unveiled a mortgage reform policy. Again, he declared the reform had the middle class in mind. If that were the case, he then has the mind of a prowler. His plan abolishes the two government-sponsored agencies responsible for broadening the mortgage market so middle and working-class people could own homes over the past several decades. With a broad smile, shut the door to future home ownership for many average people. He claimed this was required to allow the private sector and free market to work their magic. Someone forgot to tell the man the agencies were established because the unfettered, unregulated mortgage market had ill-served the nation’s needs even when working class wages were rising and the overall economy was robust. If such agencies were needed when the economy brimmed with vitality, they are of vital utility during the current period of economic flaccidity.

    The two corporations are to be replaced by a curious scheme. Private firms engaged in melding individual mortgages together to form bundles of financial instruments secured by the real estate underlying the mortgages can now buy a government guarantee of repayment of these financial instruments. What he has taken from the common man, the president gives to the financial speculator in multiple portion. Valuation of these financial instruments is so subjective as to be more conjecture than precision. Enacting this policy will grant investors the open door to pay a nominal fee guaranteeing these instruments then claim outrageous values for the assets. If the market works, the investor gets paid via the market. If the market falters, he collects on the guarantee. Either way, he gets paid, meaning his reward comes not for taking a risk but simply because he had money in the first instance. The common man must fight life’s vicissitudes to earn his quotidian bread and keep. Meanwhile, the rich are protected on all sides; their bounty is promised and secured by the sweat of the poor.

    In all of this, President Obama either is devoid of an economic bone in his body or he is as cynical as a man can be. I cannot believe he is so naïve as not to apprehend the ramifications of what he advocates. Thus, I am left to conclude he remains the loyal steward of deeply-pocketed interests who have little interest in the average person.

    We approach the crux of this tale. We must be careful about the leaven we eat. The yeast of understanding is in a sparse plate on a small table. On the other side is the feast of fools. It is served in large, open halls upon wide, ample tables. The latest Obama escapades are instructive in that they reveal what is to come to much of the rest of the world. Just as there seems to be a dictator’s manual that authoritarians religiously apply to thwart democracy, there is a financialist handbook the economic elite applies to keep people poor.

    Given the imperfection of our social arrangements, some poverty is unavoidable. However, due again to the flaws of the human character, the larger portion of human misery is the unnecessary byproduct of man’s greed. We live in an age of rank elite conservatism as virulent as any time in the past four centuries. Today’s elite believe they are entitled to life in the fullest; this entails owning and possessing as much as possible, including people. For this to occur, they need people to grow poorer so they can purchase more of them, more cheaply.

    Knowing we know little economics, they hire honey-throated mouthpieces like Obama to tell us all is being done for our welfare. In fact, what they have in mind will harm us. However, we believe them and thus keeping playing the roles set for us, little realising the hard work we do will gain us little more than a victim’s status. We become dumb accomplices in setting our lifetime trap of penury, struggle and debt.

    They tell us to look at economics as a collaborative venture where all parties cooperate to maximise output and production. They demand we believe what they know to be a lie. He who believes that this is the nature of economics is a charter citizen in a fool’s paradise balances on the edge of calamity. They need us to think this way so that we blind ourselves from seeing who they truly are and how they actually think.

    They see economics as competition. If too many average people have all they need, the rich are afraid that the people will no longer work extra hard and will drive up wages. If masses don’t place their nose to the grindstone, there will be insufficient surplus and too much wealth among the common people to give the elite the lavish wealth upon which they have come to rely. They must keep you poor, grasping and so afraid that you willingly work your fingers to the bare bone in order for them to luxuriate at their desired level. In the current system, the average person works to indebt himself to an elite whom his work has already profanely enriched.

    This is how capitalism was born. In 18th century England, architects of economic thought and policy lamented how the rural farmer and peasant were too happy for their own good. Because these people had small plots of land and recourse to common land to graze small herds, they were mostly self-sufficient in their bucolic simplicity. The aggressive captains of industry bristled at this waste of human fodder. They needed people to work their factories. To fuel their new way of life, they instituted legislation that would bar the theretofore self sufficient, life of the peasant. They willfully killed an entire social structure and imposed misery on the unwitting farmer and bumpkin just so their capitalist elite could reap the benefits of the forced labor.

    Laws were enacted dispossessing small farmers of their meager holdings. Common pasture land was abolished. Effectively chased from the land and their means of livelihood, the peasant drifted to the city. They formed a pool of surplus labor competing against each other for the meager wages of nonstop work amidst a dreary, wretched urban poverty as has ever existed.

    This is how capitalism was born. Clearly, the global economy has expanded and evolved. It is more sophisticated and nuanced but its basic nature remains unchanged. The cardinal principle upon which this edifice is built remains that the vast majority of the people must run the ceaseless treadmill so they have little time to question things or fight to change them.

    In initial years of capitalism, people were dispossessed of their lands. Today, the people can now own land their ancestors once freely walked. However, they must now pay a high price. Given their low wages, paying such a price consigns them to a lifetime of debt. By nature of the obligation hovering over him, a debtor is willing to work for a wage below what he is due. In this perverted system, to strive to own a home is to acquire a debt that forces you to accept unjust wages which makes it more difficult to redeem the debt.

    In the formative stage of capitalism, only landed wealthy men held the political franchise. Now, everyone can vote but voting matters little. Today, big money decides the candidates of the major parties. The average person votes but his franchise is of no avail. Money Power presents its choice of candidates from which he must select. Usually, all this does is present to the people a choice between bad and worse.

    Africa, you have suffered greatly because of this. Led by America, Western nations suppress the bulk of their populations in order to meet elite demands. If Western nations willingly turn their own people into modern indentured servants, they have no compulsion about keeping African states and their peoples in a place of economic weakness. A vital instrument abetting this unfairness is the nature of many of the continent’s governmental structures. Too many nations have kept the warped values and ways that characterised the colonial political economy. In a profound way, Africa suffers under the weight of excessive capitalist practice shorn even of the false regard the Western elite must feign for its citizens. As such, colonialism bequeathed to Africa a political economy described as rawest form of exploitative capitalism accentuated by racism.

    More than the populations of Western nations, the people of Africa have their work cut out for them. Most of today’s African leaders belong to the same elitist club as President Obama. They talk sweetly but act sourly toward the people’s interests. Instead of being genuine leaders of the people, many leaders are emissaries of the global elite to the people. Thus, instead of demanding from the global elite what Africa needs, these leaders are more apt to instruct the people about what the world says they should sacrifice or forfeit to maintain a good credit rating.

    Breaking this age-old bondage falls on the people themselves. First, we must earnestly begin to learn more about economics and finance. The more you know is the less you can be fooled. The most important point to remember is that economic policy is rarely a completely collaborative venture. Few policies are class neutral. Policy is a subjective determination of who benefits and who losses in relative and absolute measure. Policy is the balancing of competing interests. You must know enough about your interests and those of other economic classes within your nation and of other nations so that you protect and promote what is vital to you.

    Most importantly, we must envision a world free from the exploitation inherent to classical and now modern capitalism. There is a better road available. Adhering to this new path first starts with asking ourselves do we strive for a more just, equitable society for all or do we labor to win the individual lottery – that slim, desperate chance to escape the terse, bare confines of average existence so that we may join the lush elite. If we strive for the former, there is a chance. If all we do is individually labour for the latter, then our children and their children shall be the hand servants of a global system that seeks their harm.

     

    08060340825 (sms only)

     

  • The omoluabi professor as a revolutionary democrat: Ropo Sekoni (aka RS) @ 70

    The omoluabi professor as a revolutionary democrat: Ropo Sekoni (aka RS) @ 70

    If we are not careful, another struggle is going to come. This is because the contradictions will blow up the country again, maybe before 2015 or by 2015. We have not addressed the fundamentals of our politics. As I said earlier, breaking of Nigeria is not going to pay anybody. As a Yoruba man who loves his people, I am clear in my mind that a good Nigeria will be good for the Yoruba.

    Ropo Sekoni, Premium Times (Online), August 7, 2013

    There is no place on earth that I would have loved to be earlier this week on Wednesday, August 7, than in Lagos when the family, relatives, friends and colleagues of RS gathered to mark his 70th birthday with a festivity that I am told, was as intellectually stimulating as it was also a rousing social function. RS, as he is universally known, is of course none other than Ropo Sekoni. Unfortunately, I could not be present as I am far away in China. To make things worse, because right now I am traveling in that vast country, I could not even carry out a promise I had made to some co-conspirators that I would record and send an audiovisual message that was to have been played at the gathering. Given this background, in writing this tribute in my column this week, I am turning an opportunity missed to a rare chance to say in this forum some things that need to be said about one of our country’s most prominent and progressive public intellectuals.

    In Yoruba culture and language, there is probably no higher form of social approbation that could be paid to an adult person than to say that he or she is an omoluabi. I personally cannot think of a single word in the English language that could serve as a satisfactory translation of this Yoruba term. In essence, it encapsulates the social identity of a person that is both self-respecting and highly respected in the community, a person in whom one can repose the complete confidence that she or he can be expected to always do that which is considerate, just and honourable.

    Now the really wonderful thing about this omoluabi appellation is that, as far as class and social status are concerned, it is completely neutral. Though it does not preclude women and men of wealth and power, one does not have to be rich, highly educated or famous to be deemed an omoluabi. This is because it is manifested in your character, in how people not only perceive but also experience you. Thus, an omoluabis are neither more nor less in number among our university teachers than you will find in any other occupational group in our society, including farmers, tradesmen, market women and artisans like mechanics and welders. In other words, it is a great boon to find an omoluabi in any social or occupational group; for me, it is even more gratifying to find one among professors and progressive activists. Among friends and colleagues with whom I have ever worked professionally as an academic and politically as an intellectual activist, RS is among the few who is not only generally regarded as a first rate omoluabi but is also eminently deserving of the honorific connotations of the term.

    At this point, I would like to ask the reader to please note that I have not said that an omoluabi cannot also be a person with an irreverent sense of humor or a very keen sense of the absurdities and inanities of social existence. Indeed, among progressive academics, RS is almost in a class by himself in the ways in which he never takes either himself or others so seriously that he moves beyond the pale of reasonableness to the excesses of haughty self-righteousness. When we were together at OAU, Ife, the only person who had a more wicked but good-natured sense of humor and a more infectious, ringing laughter than RS was the late Professor Oyin Ogunba. And about the only person who could recount anecdotes and tell ribald jokes more exquisitely than RS was Professor Akin Isola, aka “Honestman”. Thus, the last thing I would want the reader to take away from my application of this term, omoluabi, to RS is the suggestion that he is a sentimentalist, a person whose natural inclination to do that which is just and decent prevents from him perceiving and responding with energy to the horrific social wrongs and evils that make life so miserable for the great majority of our peoples at the present point in time. In other words, RS is no sentimentalist, no stargazer hedging his bets on the probability of positive and progressive transformation in Nigeria on a naïve hope that an innate predilection for fairness and decency is all that is needed to bring more equitable and humane conditions to a multi-ethnic, multicultural society that is as deeply divided and misgoverned as our country is at the present time.

    It is remarkable that I not only remember but cannot recall exactly how RS and I became close personal friends and intellectual and political comrades. With all my other close, intimate friends I can recall precisely when and how we became friends: Yemi Ogunbiyi, Femi Osofisan, Eddie Madunagu, John Ohiorhenuan, Niyi Osundare, Chima Anyadike, Yomi Durotoye, Olu Ademulegun, and Kole Omotoso. With RS, there is in my mind and recollection no signal moment of a beginning, almost as if we have always been friends. Of course, certain milestones of extraordinary intellectual and political collaboration do stand out in my mind, especially after he left the University of Ilorin in 1982 to join us at OAU, Ife. I will never forget the work we put in together, with some input by G.G. Darah, to draft the first advanced courses in postgraduate literary and cultural studies in any Nigerian and African university. Before this momentous step, no postgraduate courses were offered in Nigerian and African universities for M.A. and Ph D. candidates; following the Oxbridge British tradition, graduate students took any courses beyond the ones they had taken during their undergraduate years; all they did was read as much and as widely as they could under the guidance of one supervisor who completely controlled the fate of the student.

    The collaboration and comradeship in political activism is too numerous, too eventful to enumerate: ASUU; the Socialist Forum at OAU; the work done with workers and their trade unions; the epic struggles against the Abacha dictatorship as part of the external opposition to that regime. In a deliberately very restrictive use of the term, much of this work of collaborative political activism is “classified” and cannot be told now, although inevitably, all will be told some day. But I can reveal here that as much as anyone in the movement, RS always tried to make his personal, professional and political lives and activities connected with one another and also consistent with his deepest political and ideological beliefs. I do not know if he will agree with this characterisation, but I would note here that he tended to stay a step away from the extreme left, without however blurring his philosophical beliefs and practical engagements with centrist positions as a sort of left-of-centre rather than centre-left. But I am sure that he will not mind my saying here that I can think of only one or two of all the comrades and collaborators I have ever worked closely with who are the equal of RS in the practice of gender equality in his relations with his wife, Banke. All of this composite profile is what I have tried to communicate in that part of the title of this piece containing the phrase “the omoluabi professor as a revolutionary democrat”. Let me attempt to clarify what this entails by a brief discussion of RS’s area of scholarly research and publication, semiotics.

    It so happens that RS was the first major scholar of semiotics that Nigeria produced. [A case could be made for the late Sunday Anozie as the first, but his emphasis was more on a highly idiosyncratic form of structuralist aesthetics and poetics than on semiotics proper] Add to this the fact that in his active professional life before his retirement in 2009, RS made the intricacies and ambiguities of Yoruba and African oral traditions his main areas of sustained scholarly attention. In this, he focused on two particular arrears of semiotic study that tell us much about his brand of political and intellectual activism. These are, respectively, the gnostic-animist tradition of Ifa poetic chants and traditions of West African trickster tales with their emphasis on moral ambiguity and epistemological indeterminacy.

    What semiotics entails can be both relatively easily described and incredibly tough to understand. On the “easy” side, semiotics is the study of the signs by or through which a culture can be “read” and understood, first by the owners or bearers of the culture themselves and secondly, by outsiders. On this account, anyone and everyone that speaks a language and achieves functional adulthood in the culture of the language is a “semiotician” since their fluency in the given language and culture implies that they are able to competently read the signs of the culture.

    The “tough” side consists of the fact that you need rigorous and exacting study to grasp the tools or the “code” by which the signs of the constitutive elements of a culture can be read or “decoded”. To get at this code, you must stand outside the culture and critically study it; and you must be a comparatist and a universalist of sorts, with a deep interest in how signs and their codes work within and between the diversity of human languages and cultures. It is the possession or deep awareness of this code that separates the naïve or lay “semiotician” from the professional and rigorous expert in semiotics. On the basis of this distinction, we can get at the fundamental theoretical and methodological assumption of semiotics which is that it is one thing to live in and be immersed in a language and culture; it is another thing entirely to study it rigorously and unceasingly in order to have ever deeper understanding of it. The two are not mutually exclusive, but to cross from one to the other, or to move productively back and forth from one to the other, you must be aware of this distinction.

    RS is one of a handful of Yoruba scholars of Yoruba culture and traditions who are not only aware of this distinction but actually embody and live it, knowing only too well that the survival of Yoruba language and culture, of indeed any Nigerian and African language and culture, depends on making and living this distinction. Like these other scholars and writers, RS is an unabashed defender of the Yoruba language and culture, especially with regard to threats posed from without by the zealotry of the Abrahamic religions and from within by those who, seeing no credible or usable cultural resources with which to successfully engage the powerful currents of modernity and its products and promises, blame their language and culture for lagging behind the richer and more technologically advanced nations and regions of the world. On this account, what is peculiar in RS is the fact that, perhaps more than any other scholar-activist, he has made this distinction between being totally immersed in your language and culture and standing athwart it in the wider context of other languages and cultures with whom your language and culture must not only coexist but also necessarily and inevitably commingle the basis of his political activism. It is now our common experience that any time that ethnicity or the so-called national question comes up in Nigerian political discourse, images and thoughts of reactionary irredentism and tribal chauvinism are conjured in our minds. This is not unjustified. But I would like to suggest that there are scholars and activists like RS in whom ethnicity or the national question is completely coextensive with revolutionary democracy. Listen to the man himself in the epigraph to this tribute: “If we are not careful, another struggle is going to come. This is because the contradictions will blow up the country again, maybe before 2015 or by 2015. We have not addressed the fundamentals of our politics. As I said earlier, breaking of Nigeria is not going to pay anybody. As a Yoruba man who loves his people, I am clear in my mind that a good Nigeria will be good for the Yoruba.”

    Congrats on making it this far, RS. “Iwo ati Banke maa lo’ra yin dale ni o’!

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Mbu’s style symptomatic of deeper national malaise

    Mbu’s style symptomatic of deeper national malaise

    It had been expected that given the demonstrable lack of professional detachment by Police Commissioner Mbu Joseph Mbu in the Rivers State political crisis, the police authorities in Abuja would be embarrassed into redeploying him as soon as the chance presented itself. Instead, the Inspector General of Police (IGP) has unabashedly attested to Mr Mbu’s professionalism and earnestly underscored the police commissioner’s aloofness from politics. Mr Mbu may be aloof alright, but it seems more accurately that he is aloof from the constitution of the Federal Republic rather than from Rivers State politics. What is clear now is that the police will stand pat on the Mbu affair, and the anomalies evident in the Rivers crisis, no matter how galling and humiliating, will endure for much longer than our patience can bear.

    Mr Mbu himself has been giddy with excitement over the Rivers crisis in which the bullish Governor Rotimi Amaechi has locked horns with an Abuja cabal led by the portly Nyesom Wike, a minister of state, his surrogates from Obio/Akpor Local Government Area, and increasingly unruly rented militant crowds. The cabal is in turn beholden to the presidency, and is indeed indirectly propagating and executing an agenda not at all disagreeable to President Goodluck Jonathan. The police commissioner has not only walked gingerly around the Abuja emissaries and their excitable and mostly violent proxies, as if on thin ice, he has also either waffled when it comes to tackling their malfeasances or become strangely tongue-tied when it comes to denouncing their lawlessness and provocations.

    The IGP’s endorsement of Mr Mbu is, however, not unexpected, though deplorable. While the crisis lasts, Mr Mbu will continue to prattle endlessly and, if need be, meet the defiance of the governor inch by inch, grammar for grammar, and eyeball to eyeball. This is because he is smart enough to know which way the cats are jumping in Abuja. He knows that while the president and his aides struggle to distance the presidency from the Rivers crisis, the truth is much more sobering. His long years in the Force, not to say his boastful baccalaureate from the University of Lagos, and his own innate predilection for loud and excited talk, have armed him to second-guess his superiors and fawn all over them. If the presidency says it is uninterested in and unconnected with the crisis in Rivers, his skilful use of quantitative methods teaches him to turn the statement into a null hypothesis and test it. Every such test he has made has repeatedly confirmed that Abuja would rather gladly bring the house down on everyone than tolerate Mr Amaechi for one day longer, irrespective of what the constitution says.

    And if Mr Mbu is foxy enough to indulge Abuja and wink and embrace its mischief, the more accomplished and experienced IGP could not be any less artful and indulgent. The IGP may protest that his assessment of Mr Mbu is honest, sincere and practical, and not coloured by any consideration of the whims of the presidency; however, it must be recognised that no one gets to the top of the police profession by being moralistic, principled and dogmatic. Both the IGP and Mr Mbu will continue to accommodate the presidency as long as it is required, and pussyfoot on lawlessness when it is safe to do so, whether orders come to them directly, indirectly or in whispers.

    Both the IGP and Mr Mbu rely on constitutional provisions to defend what they term as necessary aloofness and depoliticisation of the Force. The provisions, they argue, insulate the police from politics, and no one would be allowed to drag them into politics’ murky waters. In other words, they insinuate into the spirit of the constitution such loftiness and grandeur that neither the letter nor commonsensical interpretation of the constitution ever pretended to grant. The police ordinarily ought to be above politics, neither beholden to the money power nor to the lumpen. And this should be in spite of whether constitutional provisions put the police in the power of governors or the president. If this were so, it would indeed be a very lofty pedestal to occupy, and the police would be able to earn respect and the awe they crave.

    The reality is, however, different. First, no one, certainly not a visionless and fearful presidency, nor yet an unimaginative and backward-looking legislature, has been able to appreciate the need for state police or squirm at the contradictions of a federal constitution providing for a unitary police system. The proponents of unitary police argue that if police powers were conferred on states, they could be abused. This is of course nonsense. Do we not have the common sense to know that if you manufacture a car, you must put brakes in it? Second, every black man must feel humiliated that Nigerians have become so immobilised by fear of the unknown that they are unable to grasp how to make a decentralised police system work. Surely, we are not so lacking in gumption or so self-deprecating that we think only developed countries can run a decentralised police system.

    The police of course do not blame themselves for both the shortcomings in the 1999 constitution and its clear inadequacy in providing for the safety of Nigerians and their properties. However, it is beguiling but nonetheless futile that both the IGP and Mr Mbu, irrespective of the limitations in the letter of the constitution, are ascribing a nobility of spirit to a constitution whose shackled and defective spirit can simply not soar above the letter.

    Even if we find a solution to the Rivers impasse, it will doubtless be tentative, as everything is tentative in and about Nigeria. But now no such solution is near, for the Mbu conundrum – in which an appointed police officer looms larger than an elected governor – is symptomatic of the malaise undermining the peace, development and unity of the country. However, Mr Mbu, I think, is not the problem: he is simply exploiting the lacunae in the system to hold tightly to his position, and may in fact be privately galled by his own compelled volubility and indiscrete and ludicrous posturing. The IGP, who strikes many of us as urbane and thoughtful, is also not the problem. Against his better judgement, he may have found it inescapable to defend and endorse his police commissioner. As I once said in this place, his success as IGP, sadly, would not depend on his brilliance or wisdom, but on the vision, intelligence, detachment and patriotism of the president. If the president lacked these attributes, the IGP would be hamstrung, I had concluded.

    This, therefore, is the crux of the matter. It is unhelpful to lampoon Mr Mbu, even if he sometimes gave impression (some say proof) of his eager duplicity. It is unhelpful to castigate the IGP for feigning ignorance of his subordinate chiselling away at the democratic basis of governance in Rivers. And it is easy to blame the National Assembly for being so trusting of the presidency, so retrogressive in lawmaking and so protective of the powers of the centre, when in fact they have apparently never contemplated a country in the mould of the Nordic countries, and may never envision anything better for Nigeria than its dismal position in Africa. Who then is to blame?

    Let us pose the problem in a different way. Even if the presidency was not behind both the excesses of the police in Rivers and the lawlessness of Mr Wike, and in addition knew nothing of the madness that convulsed the House of Assembly recently with the predetermined aim of unnerving the president’s opponents, what lofty statements has the president made on the long-running crisis, and what noble deeds has he undertaken to cure Rivers and the system in general of the disgraceful and childish resort to undemocratic practices? Absolutely none. The president was not just silent on Rivers; he self-effacingly lunched into a declamation on democracy and the rule of law in his usual engaging but nugatory style. But it is not declamations the country needs. Even though we exaggerated his leadership qualities, it was hoped he would at inauguration avail us a fairly deep and logical insight into the content of his vision for Nigeria and, perhaps too, Africa.

    In the end, he proved as spectacularly distracted and specious as Chief Olusegun Obasanjo. Worse, he finds it difficult to appreciate the import of many of his actions, not to say his statements. Leadership is not simply about firmness or setting upon a line of action flowing from the advice of cabinet members and aides. It is about something deeper and variegated; something rich, luscious and instinctive; something great, coherent and noble – all going into the leader’s mind like dross, but coming out purged and processed into something much richer and more enduring, something festooned with crystal clear ideas of what to do and when, and something that transforms into pure and almost infallible judgement that emphasises the long view, and that creates and forges a great and incomparable society far better than any. However, ability must match ambition in order for a leader to be worth the title. Alas, as the Rivers crisis and many other challenging issues of the times have shown, and as the chasm between sense and nonsense denoted by the Mbu indiscretion shows, there is no indication whatsoever that we have a leader with a grasp of the moral imperatives of these times, let alone one suited for the complexities and hard choices of this age.

  • APC and new energy for democratic culture

    APC and new energy for democratic culture

    What is new about APC is that it is a group of politicians from different corners
    of the country who have sworn to commit to political progressivism

    The registration of the merger of four political parties into APC must be welcome news to lovers of democracy. The coming of APC has not brought to an end the existence of mushroom political parties in the county. But it has substantially reduced the number of parties that are in serious contest for the opportunity to govern the country. After the merger, apart from APC and PDP, there will still be some political parties masquerading as contenders for federal or state power, but such possibility does not diminish the fact that Nigeria is, with the arrival of APC on the political landscape, a polity with two main political parties. We congratulate politicians who have submerged individual egos and ambitions to merge into a party that is capable of serving as an alternative to the ruling party.

    What is new about APC is not the fact that politicians from various parties and regions are making efforts to work together for the sake of Nigeria. In the first republic, the northern ruling party, NPC, worked in an alliance to rule the country with the NCNC. It was an alliance of two out of three regions. The alliance left the dominant party in the Western region in loyal opposition. It was good for the country then that there was a party known for principle and ideology to serve as loyal opposition. Our democracy would have thrived if there had been no attempts by the ruling party then to turn the country into a one-party state, and the rest is history.

    The second republic also witnessed an alliance for the sake of sharing political offices between the dominant party in the North, NPN, and its counterpart in the East, the NPP. Again, UPN, the dominant party in the West chose to serve as opposition party. Again, the democracy of the second republic did not collapse because the opposition failed in its own role. Collapse came because the ruling party was incapable of governing the country effectively. It, after ruling in an effete manner for four years, still felt that it needed to rig the election to return to power in 1983. After returning to power, it was incapable of solving most of the problems facing the country, just as it could not in its first four years, and the rest is history.

    Babangida’s military autocracy brought a new political culture to the country. Whatever was the motivation, Babangida decreed into being two political parties, best known as a-little-to-the-right and a-little-to-the-left political constructions: NRC and SDP. The existence for the first time in the country’s history of a two-party system made options easier for voters who had had to choose at least from three region-driven political parties. It may not be clear why the 1993 national election was the freest and fairest in the history of the country, but it is not too far-fetched to assume that the clear-cut ideological positions of the two parties: one besotted to nurturing the status-quo and the other committed to transformation, must have helped voters to make their choices.The country’s opportunity to move away from its troubling political past was destroyed, not by the fact of two clear choices, but by Babangida’s decision to neutralize the advantage of the two-party structure that he brought into being. It is not surprising that Babangida is visibly happy with the registration of APC. It must remind him of the opportunity that was allowed to be lost in 1993.

    To say that APC is the first experiment of its kind in the country is to indulge deliberately in hyperboles. The PDP was formed as a trans-regional political group of individuals besotted to sustaining a political culture that had not moved Nigeria forward, from the time of NPC to NPN. What is new about APC is that it is a group of politicians from different corners of the country who have sworn to commit to political progressivism. In other words,unlike the self-acclaimed national party before it, which is interested in business as usual, APC appears to be poised to engage the spirit of change, and to do it with men and women from across traditional ethnic and religious lines. The merger that creates APC means that there are two broad groups of politicians in the country: those who believe that Nigeria is okay as it is and those who believe the country needs change on many fronts.

    Progressive politics is not about the opposite of what a non-performing political party does. A new governance model requires that there are new paradigms to be created and used to change the country for the better for its citizens. Commitment to social justice and equal opportunities is fundamental to any genuine transformative agenda. Such commitment is needed to drag Nigeria from its pre-modern state to modernity. There must be some stick-in-the muds that are likely to insist that all that is needed is for the country to get a new party with men and women who are ready to work for (and not against the interests of) the masses in terms of building physical infrastructure and creating jobs. The problem that has made it impossible for Nigeria to transcend the stasis of the last five decades concerns the distribution of power in the country. More specifically, it pertains to the need to interrogate existing distribution of power in our multicultural and multi-religious ‘state-nations.’ To attempt to do this is to make effort to solve the main problem facing the country: ensuring economic, social, political, and cultural justice.

    Confronting the largest party in Africa (a political grouping that perceives itself as born-to-rule at least for sixty years!) requires the sizable energy that APC certainly possesses and appears ready to deploy. As the APC continues to mobilize and galvanize citizens around the message of change, it must continue to urge its Think-Tank to think out of the box of Nigeria’s ‘nothing-is-wrong with our constitution or the structure of governance and that all that is required is to get supermen and women among us to be president and governors.’ APC must not ignore the call for true federalism, more so if it wants to achieve a noticeable measure of economic, social, political, and cultural justice in a country constituted by many nationalities.

    The enthusiastic welcome of the news of INEC’s registration of APC, demonstrated in several cities a few hours ago, indicates the intensity of the hunger of citizens for change, not only of content but also of form. Nigeria has for too long been structured and designed as a funnel that leaks from the top or the head. Over concentration of power and resources on the central government has turned states into mendicants carrying bowls to the central government for most of the funds used to keep most of the States alive. The age of bottomless revenue from petroleum may be coming to an end sooner than we are ready to apprehend. Diversifying (without appropriate infrastructure) the economy to withstand the shock from the fact that some of the biggest buyers of our oil are now becoming some of the biggest sellers of the product that sustains us is likely to take much longer than one or two post-PDP administrations.

    A unitary model of governance that is sustained by donations to states from the central government will continue to undermine efforts to move the country forward. This appears to be the era for not only a strong central government but also for strong state governments. In other words, one of the challenges facing APC, which PDP has ignored, is readiness to pluck the courage to re-design the template of governance, to return a truly federal system to Nigeria.

  • North’s unnecessary fears may create a federal monster

    North’s unnecessary fears may create a federal monster

    It is not yet too late for these representatives to put on their thinking caps before they bring more disaster upon the country.

    Without a scintilla of doubt, only northern fears, not national interest, especially concerning its ability, or not, to survive despite its untapped huge natural resources, could have led the National Assembly to so completely undermine the states whilst creating a centre with limitless powers in its constitutional amendment conundrum. So all-encompassing is the autocracy they are currently constructing that one cannot successfully be accused of exaggeration if he claims that Abuja is being imperceptibly turned to a monstrous incubus. All these, unfortunately, on the basis of a British -fabricated, but actually non-existent, higher northern population which would otherwise thump all known demographic principles. If they dispute this, let them publish the results of the one-day interaction with Nigerians on geo-political basis and see if the so-called massive ‘yes’ votes would not confirm an over reliance on results from one region out of three. It is no wonder, therefore, that of all the Local Government Chairmen’s Forum in the country, it is only the northern chapter, through its chairman, Mohammed Ali, that’s mounting pressure on the Senate to rescind its decision on local government autonomy.

    Waxing lyrical during the past week, Deputy Speaker, Emeka Ihedioha, gleefully announced to Nigerians that: ‘the House voted overwhelmingly to give full financial, administrative, executive and legislative autonomy to local government councils in Nigeria; making them a tier of government with a uniform four years tenure, regimenting their mode of exercising legislative power and abolishing Joint State Local Government Account which they replaced with the “Local Government Council Allocation Account.’ Like an over-exuberant birthday boy, he went on to say that henceforth, the so-called Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, would conduct elections for local government areas. Apparently, they forgot to abolish the office of the state governor. If only these self-serving legislators knew the meaning of a true federal system! And would they be kind enough to tell Nigerians where else on earth these monstrosities obtain.

    Let me, in the small space remaining, open their eyes and minds to the views, edited for space, of Chief Bola Ige, SAN, one of the few real democrats that ever graced the face of Nigeria, on local government. In an article he captioned ‘Man -Made Avoidable Local Government Troubles’ and which appeared in his column in The Sunday Tribune of 27 April, 1996, the legal luminary wrote as follows: “Anyone who has sound knowledge of the local government system, its history, theory and practice, not only in Nigeria, but also in civilised countries of the world, cannot be surprised at what is happening in various parts of the country since the Federal Military Government announced the “creation “of new local government areas. I personally have been shocked and pained by the violence that has since been unleashed.

    “But what we should admit is that the fundamentals of local government system, particularly in a federal set-up, have not been adhered to. One could even say that they have been violated.

    “There are modalities that govern local government systems all over the civilised world. The first is that a local government must truly be government at local level. In other words, the people of a given area must be allowed to come together, of their own accord, and in a spirit of agreeing to some sort of social contract, to run their local affairs. The community must of course be easily identifiable – usually they must be people of the same stock, or citizens who inhabit a given geographical area’.

    ‘That was what existed during the colonial times and during the era of the regions. That was also what happened when I was governor of the old Oyo State. In the north, local government system was based on emirates where they existed or administrative units where there were no emirates; in the west, it was based on the combination of the Oba-ship system and innate democratic inclinations of the peoples of Western Nigeria; in the east where the people were largely republican, the local government system was based on the clan. In all parts of Nigeria, the English and after them, the founding fathers of Nigeria – Awo Sardauna and Zik – never arbitrarily created local government councils and, in any case, being reasonable and knowledgeable politicians, they would never have done that.

    ‘The ideal thing is for any community that wants a local government to have it, as long as certain basic criteria concerning ability to be economically viable and rudiments of government are met. I always gave examples of local government councils in Europe and the USA to attest to this.

    “Unfortunately, the Murtala-Obasanjo federal military government began the nonsense that has remained with us. In fairness to Gowon’s regime, that government did not poke its nose into local government business. I guess that with the presence of seasoned politicians, led by Awo, in that government, such foolish mistake would not be allowed to happen.

    “On the pretext that better administration should be found for local government throughout the country, a Commission headed by Alhaji Ibrahim Dasuki was set up. In my opinion, the recommendations of that commission were the worst disaster to happen to local government system in Nigeria. For instance, it was from there that the idea of uniformity in size, scope and administration was introduced. I confess that I suspected a hidden agenda in the recommendations: in order to strengthen the administrative stranglehold of the emirates, all of Nigeria was advised to base its local government system on defined populations and elaborate administrative system. Fortunately, it never worked. And it will never work.

    “But I also had the suspicion that the military wanted to have a way of pulling more strings through manipulating the local government system. Dasuki Commission brought about the plague that is still afflicting Nigeria.

    Which leads me to the next point: In a federal set-up, the federal government must have nothing to do with the creation or running of local government. Nigeria is the only federation in the whole world where the federal government decides how, where, and when a local government council must run. In all civilised countries, and in all democratic countries, it is the state or provincial or regional government that legislates on local government.

    “The solutions are simple, but I doubt whether the Federal Military Government will take any suggestions. First, let the Federal Military Government hands off local government affairs, and allow the people to decide how many local government areas they want, their administrative set-up and their boundaries. State government must allow the people in a given area to determine their local government destinies.

    “Secondly, state governments should formulate guidelines for the setting up of new local government councils. They must be of universal application and not tinkered with. Once any community satisfies the criteria in those guidelines, they should have their own council.”

    Chief Ige’s fears are as potent today as they were when he penned them in 1996, and, watching this National Assembly create a looming disaster of an ultra strong centre, I have this nagging feeling that the PDP truly believes the hogwash that it will rule for 60 years as was first propounded by its now embattled, one-time chairman, Ogbuluafor. Otherwise, nobody in his proper frame of mind will suggest that INEC should conduct local government elections in the states which we know is intended to enhance their stranglehold through their now well-known ‘do and die’ rigging methods. At a time when the cancellation of a humongous WAEC and NECO with full staff compliement has been suggested, it is totally ludicrous that the National Assembly could approve that INEC, with mostly ad hoc staff, take up elections into all local government councils even if it were not already encumbered by constant allegations of bribe-taking like we saw in Ekiti State during the rerun election in 2009.

    It is not yet too late for these representatives to put on their thinking caps before they bring more disaster upon the country. After all, this is a legislature whose members earn the equivalent of $189,000 annually as against their counterparts in the U.K and France who earn $105, 400 and $85,900 respectively.

  • Palladium on vacation? If wishes were horses

    Palladium owes his readers a little apology. For some five weeks, the back page column of this newspaper bore a postscript announcing that Palladium was on vacation. He was not. He was in fact ill, and could hardly think about national issues, not even the presidency’s egregious constitutional affronts and meddlesomeness, let alone sit down to write. Though he is on the mend, he has struggled to write today’s pieces in order not to appear like he has permanently abandoned the battlefield and taken his loyal and even enemy readers for granted. Really, what would his enemy readers do without their weekly dose of provocation? However, I wish I had really gone on vacation.

    While Palladium was away, Dr Jonathan behaved imperially, forgetting the oath he swore to, and the need to sustain and nurture the leprous democracy handed over to him by former president Olusegun Obasanjo. (The late Umaru Yar’Adua presidency was an interregnum). It is in fact significant and fitting that the president recently described Chief Obasanjo as his father. Dr Jonathan of course meant his sonship in the metaphorical sense, but if only he knew how accurate he was even in the biological sense as well. Chief Obasanjo undermined democracy and the constitution, and rode roughshod over the states, persons, and political parties. Dr Jonathan, not to talk of his wife, has also ridden roughshod over the states, persons (be they governors or eminences grises), the constitution and parties. Chief Obasanjo will not flinch at betraying the constitution; neither will Dr Jonathan balk.

    Obasanjo could neither differentiate between democracy and monarchy nor draw a line between law and lawlessness. Dr Jonathan talks effusively about democracy and acts aggressively like a monarch. Palladium of course does not hate monarchy, for as he has argued in this place many times, democracy is seldom as competent as monarchy in filtering bad leaders from the number one seat in any country. After all, it took democracy to inflict Obasanjo and Jonathan on the country.

    While Palladium was away, the courts absolved Major Hamza al-Mustapha of complicity in the murder of Kudirat Abiola. This judicial thunder did not, however, peal as loudly as it exposed the buffoonery of the founder of the Odua People’s Congress (OPC), Frederick Fasehun. Dr Fasehun thought nothing of the anomaly of escorting the freed al-Mustapha to Kano; he also ascribed to his action a nobility of purpose and a grander task of representing and saving from retribution the entire Yoruba people. Politics can sometimes be comical, and any man can suffer from delusions of grandeur. But to degrade politics to the level of burlesque seems only reserved for those like Dr Fasehun who have become chimerical. To hear him declaim against his sidekick in the OPC and fellow federal contract seeker, Gani Adams, indicates the ugly and risible depths ‘revolutionary warfare’ has sunk, not only in the Southwest, but elsewhere, as the Rivers State House of Assembly disgracefully exemplified recently.

     

  • Finally, two-party system underway

    Finally, two-party system underway

    As the political careers of Lincoln, Churchill and de Gaulle demonstrated, it takes unusual and even cataclysmic circumstances to produce great leaders. Unusual leaders manifest in unusual times. However, when unusual times fail to produce unusual leaders, the society is endangered. It may take a few more years from now and exciting political outcomes before Nigerian historians and political scientists agree on whether the founding of the All Progressives Congress (APC) and the turbulence in the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) constituted enough grounds for the making of a great Nigerian leader required for the tumultuous times. But whether that leader is revealed or not, in 2015 or well after, there is no denying that Nigeria is ripe for substantial, if not fundamental, change, on account of the great political, economic and social contradictions the country has sadly had to endure in the past one decade or more.

    The registration of the APC was itself anticlimactic. Not only was there opposition to its registration by alleged PDP proxies, only few people were sure the leadership of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) could not be compromised by an immoral ruling party. And though it was needless and pointless for the PDP to stymie the registration of APC using the excuse of a dispute over acronym, no one was sure how far the ruling party was willing to go to discomfit the opposition. In the end, common sense prevailed, and a major opposition party was birthed last week. The new amalgamated party, with all the dangers associated with alloys, will hope to exceed both in reputation and achievement the records of its famous predecessors known to us as United Progressives Grand Alliance (UPGA) in the First Republic and Progressive Parties Alliance (PPA) in the Second Republic, notwithstanding the undeniable observation that the circumstances of their births were not too dissimilar.

    APC’s final appearance has doubtless met with euphoric responses from citizens harried by more than 14 years of unimaginative PDP rule, and analysts bored stiff by the fundamental staidness of describing rather than analysing PDP victories after every election. Now, pundits will have to earn their money, and citizens can look forward to real politics of issues, competence, geographic, and behavioural considerations. It is not an exaggeration to also say the country may well finally be on its way to a much more realistic and enduring two-party system, one that may ensure political parties work hard for votes and make those votes count. The country can also look forward to a more boisterous and reflective legislature, one the presidency will have to engage more respectfully and more intelligently than it had done so far. Indeed, not only are the possibilities endless, the emergence of the APC could very well be the tonic needed to guarantee the survival of democracy.

    Even before considering the prospects of the APC in future elections – and it is perfectly sensible to do so even now – it is necessary to look at the new party itself and assess its architecture. The easiest part is the coming together of the three main constituent parties in the amalgamation, to wit, the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) and the All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP). Staying together will be more challenging; and finding the right formula to win elections will be the most challenging. Once they win power, it is all but evident that they would do considerably and enthusiastically better than the tired PDP.

    The hardest part of the amalgamation is how the two leading parties in the coalition – the ACN and the CPC – will subordinate their strong identities to the new party and work towards forging a new character and identity, much stronger and idiosyncratic than their individual moults, and capable of resonating with voters, hammering out realistic and unifying political platforms, and fighting major electoral wars with well-oiled machines. It must be remembered that previous attempts by progressives to reach out to other parties never went beyond reaching an understanding with other parties through the instrumentality of coalitions. This, therefore, is the first time in Nigeria major parties under progressive panoply are fusing together across ideological divides. But progressivism, as all the progressive parties of Southwest origin have repeatedly demonstrated, is much more than merely a convenient vehicle or an ideological or philosophical force; it is a moral force encapsulating superior and almost theological arguments about how societies are founded, organised and governed. A progressive party, like any metal with unique linear expansivity, responds to external stimuli differently from a conservative or pseudo-progressive party by reason of its intrinsic properties.

    Despite the unending arguments in the Southwest about the progressive credentials of the ACN, there is little doubt that it is the foremost progressive party in Nigeria, and this is in spite of itself, its unorthodox definition of internal democracy, and its sometimes perplexing succession patterns inherited in part from its regional progenitors, the Action Group (AG) and the Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN). Indeed, to restrict the definition of progressivism to its internal democracy mechanism is to miss the more essential attributes of that political ideology as it relates to the pursuit of rapid societal change and protection and advancement of civil rights, among other things. Now, juxtapose both ACN’s positive paranoia on civil liberties and its doctrinaire progressivism with the pragmatism of the CPC on one side and the vestigial conservatism of the ANPP on the other side, and you begin to get a sense of the sacrifices the amalgams will have to make in order to confound the PDP naysayers. It will certainly not be an easy task, especially with both the ACN and CPC having been led by two mercurial personalities.

    The reasons the APC was formed must, however, not be forgotten. Its constituent parts seemed to have a foreboding of their impending destruction if they continued to stay disunited in the face of the obtruding PDP. They probably remembered the statement made by Benjamin Franklin before signing the US Declaration of Independence in 1776. He had said: “We must indeed all hang together, or most assuredly we shall hang separately.” The APC has chosen to take the American’s counsel, fully conscious of and willing to live with the drawbacks of lying on the same bed with strange fellows and loth to resign themselves to the hopelessness and helplessness of being slaughtered in every election. Surely, they are no gluttons for punishment. I think also that they considered the tantalising prospects of winning the 2015 polls and what great and might things they could in consequence do to reform and transform the country, which mighty things the PDP seems happily and indifferently oblivious of.

    If the 2015 polls were held today, and the APC had the good fortune of presenting the right candidate to face the underperforming President Goodluck Jonathan, the result is unlikely to be a close one. Quite apart from the fact that the president’s wife has not exactly been an asset, he has himself comprehensively alienated the Southwest, Northeast and Northwest. As for the North-Central and South-South, he is facing revolt in key, vote-laden parts of the regions, while his hold on the Southeast is only three-quarters sure. To reverse these positions will take a miracle by even the most studious, charismatic and dogged of leaders. But as everyone knows, Dr Jonathan’s main strength lies in his earthy, though often misplaced, candour. That strength unfortunately does not usually translate into votes.

    The scenario above assumes both the nomination of Dr Jonathan and the exactitude of the APC fielding a winning ticket. But here, precisely, is the dilemma the APC and indeed the whole country will face in the coming months. How would they draw the balance between what their hearts tell them about the kind of ticket the country needs for strong leadership and rapid, even revolutionary, transformation, though it be unorthodox and unconventional, and what their heads tell them about the kind of conventional-wisdom, religion-sensitive ticket that is in consonance with national pedantry, though it be counterproductive in the long run? It is in the nature of countries never to be able to resolve such dilemmas.

    The APC on its own will have to determine how safely it can break the mould and stretch the baffling dynamics of Nigerian politics to its elastic limit. More, it will have to determine what its priority is: to win the next election, even if it entailed a horse dose of hypocrisy, or to provide the kind of fiery leadership that will take Nigeria to the big league. Apart from the fact that these two objectives are often mutually exclusive, history tells us that some of the world’s greatest reformers took power in unusual circumstances thereby freeing them from the strictures that would otherwise hobble a leader produced by normality and conventional democratic apparatuses.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • WMN + WWW = WWM!

    Men should at least pretend that women are part of the human race and should not be beaten, scarred or raped

    I am sure you would like to know what that formula stands for, dear reader, but you will have to bear with me a little while I vent my anger and release it into space, or I might be forced to commit murder. On the other hand, I don’t want anything tampering with my housekeeping allowance. Indeed, I am so cross now my mouth is shut tight, my brows are in a deep scowl, and my eyes are so crossed they are literally looking at each other balefully. That is how mad I am about the spate of rapes weaving across the land: boys raping girls, men raping little girls, old men raping toddlers, young men raping old women, young men raping mad women, fathers raping daughters, fathers impregnating their daughters, fathers having multiple children by their daughters… Oh men, what is going on?! Why is it always the men?!

    Not too long ago, one of my readers, presumably a male, wrote in and asked me to say something on the rising wave of rape in the land. Then, it had not quite risen to the popularity it has since assumed in the country. I declined to because I felt rape is really best left to the police while we citizens concentrate on searching for money to purchase gari. Alas, my thoughts were misplaced, just like my hopes. The police are too busy with em, internal problems, to take much notice of rape. In short the police have failed in their duty to sufficiently frighten the men into totally submitting their libidinal will to reason. So, I have no choice but to pick up my pen, err, computer.

    True, there are natural expectations on both sides of the sex divide. Take the men; they expect their women to provide the 4Cs: cooking, cleaning, childbearing and companionship. They are What Men Need (WMN). As I always say, most men cannot boil water without burning it. And the woman who manages to burn food once in a year is taken to the cleaners. ‘Why is this food tasting burnt? Did you travel while you were cooking it? Do you know how much I worked to provide the money for it? You should go out and work and let me do the cooking.’ As Fela knew very well, ‘that na shakara’. Still, men take it for granted that women are taught these things in heaven before they descend to earth. That’s why they marry women who look like their mothers: they take the abilities in the chosen ones for granted because such women are primed to fulfil these needs for men. Who says cloning does not work? As soon as a female child is born, the father takes a good look at its arms to be sure they have sufficient crooks in them and the hips to be sure they are sufficiently wide enough and he nods to himself, ‘this one will fulfil her heavenly roles well.’ Obviously, men no longer see beyond their needs any more. Is this why some among them would even proceed to test their daughters’ role readiness by raping/sleeping with them? Haba! Please!

    In the interest of peace, and also to maintain world order, women go along and provide men’s needs, believing that men in turn know what women want and provide it. Women take it for granted also that men are primed from heaven to fulfil the wants of women. This is why the birthing women take a good look at the arms of the new born male to be sure they have enough strength in them to actualise some woman’s wants someday. They also check if his fingers can crook well enough to cock a gun some day. Tough world we are in, no? The difference is that women only stay at ensuring; they do not test. At least, we have not heard of a woman who sets out to have children by her male son. I have not said it does not happen; I only said we have not heard. As a father said to his son one day, ‘I have not said ‘don’t steal’; just don’t get caught.’ Seriously.

    The trouble is that, in spite of the strong arms and all, men still do not seem to know what women want. Once, men thought that if they dragged food home to the family, all would be right with the world. The women soon put them right there by dragging home sometimes bigger food. That’s why some women have come to now earn more than their husbands. Then the men thought if they built strong shelters for the family, keep out the wild elements and provide protection, all would be well. But the Cecilia Ibrus of this world soon set their minds at rest on that score. She and her ilk told them they could go hang with their shelters by procuring same in their hundreds. And I said ‘Tell ’em, sister!’ No, no, don’t get me wrong; I do not condone fraud but there’s just something about that spirit… So now, men are at a loss as to what exactly women want. And you know, when men are confused, they resort to… The story goes that the women had taken over the administration of a certain city and, to the consternation of the men, were even preparing to go to war for the city. The men simply got together to hatch a plan. They collectively got all the women pregnant and went their own merry way to fight their war themselves.

    Obviously now, there is an impasse: women know what men need (WMN) but men do not know what women want (WWW). To make up for their lack of knowledge and total confusion, men have been going around employing and displaying their strength in the market place. Imagine that. Good wine, they say, needs no bush. When a man begins to regard rape as an instrument of office and manhood, then he belongs in Jupiter where the people there do not ask questions, just like the early American settlers. Perhaps, that will mean evacuating all the men into outer space and have a world without men (WWM), who cares? If that is what we need to give the women what they want, then the price may be just right.

    So, what do women want really? Oh, wouldn’t I just like to know! One day, all a woman wants is to look delectable, have the means to look delectable, and be seen and appreciated by her chosen one to look delectable. Another day, when the fancy takes her, what she wants is to be appreciated for her brains. So she barges into boardrooms and causes a war or takes over, into corporate offices and becomes the boss, or wanders into some poor government official’s heart and takes over his job. Ask our politicians. Naturally, the men’s retaliatory weapon of hate is rape. When that happens, you just know it is a statement against all womankind. This is why the women are calling for the heads of the men in the formula: WMN + WWW = WWM (What Men Need + What Women Want = World Without Men). If the women cannot get that, let us try the next best thing.

    Let us try giving the female folk respect, from the littlest of them to the oldest. In this case, respect means consideration. Men should at least pretend that women are part of the human race and should not be beaten, scarred or raped. They should be treated with the utmost courtesy and nurtured carefully: i.e., given compliments, assistance, real love (not some pretentious thing) and companionship. After all, it is only wise to respect where one’s food comes from, especially if all one can do is burn water.

  • From the ‘Dikko affair’ to the Dikko committee

    From the ‘Dikko affair’ to the Dikko committee

    Nigeria’s younger generation may not know who the man, Alhaji Umaru Dikko is. Therefore, asking if they know what he represents (or at least used to represent) is superfluous. That is the tragedy of a nation whose many pupils do not know who the great sage, the late Chief Jeremiah Obafemi Awolowo was. A report, a few years back, indicated that right in Chief Awolowo’s hometown, Ikenne, in Ogun State, the only Obafemi that pupils in a school know is Obafemi Martins! They claimed not to have heard anything about Chief Awolowo. But that is Nigeria’s dysfunctional educational system for you; it is that bad. “A prophet”, they say, “is not without honour but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house”.

    Anyway, this write-up is not about Chief Awolowo; it is about Alhaji Dikko, who came into prominence in the Second Republic during the tenure of President Shehu Shagari, his brother-in-law. Ordinarily, many of us had since forgotten about Alhaji Dikko and would have preferred never to be reminded of that dark era that the man represented, but for reports last week to the effect that the 77 year-old man of the defunct National Party of Nigeria (NPN) infamy has been exhumed from wherever he has been hibernating all these years, to head the ruling Peoples Democratic Party’s (PDP) national disciplinary committee! Did I hear you say ‘disciplinary committee’? Yes, you heard me right; disciplinary committee. Other members of the seven- member committee are; Obanema of Opume Kingdom, Bayelsa State and King A.J Turner as deputy chairman, publisher of Champion Newspaper and member, Board of Trustees (BoT) of the PDP, Chief Emmanuel Iwuanyanwu, former deputy national chairman and BoT member, Alhaji Shuaibu Oyedokun, Hajiya Nana Aishat Kadiri, Barrister Hussaini Diraki and Senator Emmanuel Agboti.

    Those conversant with the story of Alhaji Dikko that we knew would readily say that with a man like him heading the ruling party’s disciplinary committee, then, the result is known even before the committee begins sitting. Unless of course the things the man used to do, he does them no more. I mean unless he has turned a new leaf, as they say.

    Just last week, I said something about the dearth of good people in the country. Well, some people will disagree with me and rather say that it is the failure of those in positions of authority to search for such people, or the reluctance of good people to make themselves available for public service because of the quality of people at the very top. What else could have made five governors run to Generals Olusegun Obasanjo and Ibrahim Babangida, in search of solutions to democratic challenges if not for any of these aforementioned reasons? What our people versed in Pidgin English would dismiss simply as no more person. What I am saying is that there must be a dearth of people to enforce discipline in the ruling party for the mantle of chairman of a crucial committee as the disciplinary committee to fall on Alhaji Dikko. At least not the Alhaji Dikko that we knew.

    It is sad that the Jonathan government, apart from doing business as usual, is also suffocating us with the same spent forces that have had their time in leadership positions but made a mess of it. Alhaji Dikko belonged in that school.

    His role in governance in the country dates back to 1967 when he was appointed commissioner in the then North Central State (now Kaduna State). He was later to be secretary of a committee set up by General Hassan Katsina to unite the northerners after a coup in 1966. In 1979, Alhaji Dikko was made Alhaji Shehu Shagari’s campaign manager for the NPN. He was Minister of Transport from 1979-1983; a position he held simultaneously with that of the head of the presidential task force on rice. Interestingly, it was in the latter, rather than the former, that he became a national issue. That rice had to attract presidential attention in that republic showed how terribly bad the country was run because the rice that Alhaji Dikko headed its task force was imported. Again, that is a matter for another day.

    Such was the diligence with which he served Nigeria then that General Muhammadu Buhari who became head of state after overthrowing the Shagari government on December 31, 1983, issued a list of former government officials accused of a variety of crimes on his second day in power. Alhaji Dikko, who topped the list, was accused of embezzling several million dollars in oil profits from the national treasury. Despite strenuous efforts to locate him, he simply vanished, leaving no trace of his whereabouts. He was eventually trailed to the United Kingdom where the Buhari government attempted to bring him back home in a crate with 1.2 x 1.2 x 1.5 meters dimension, in what was famously referred to as the ‘Dikko affair’. Thank God the mission failed; otherwise, Alhaji Dikko would have been brought back to Nigeria in a crate like some imported cargo! One had to go this far for our ill-fated younger generation to know that their beloved country has not just started to wobble and fumble; it has been like that for decades. The sad thing is that while many fellow backbenchers like us are finding their way out of the woods, we are getting more and more entrenched in it. Anyhow, fellow Nigerians, this is the man that our ruling party has thrust forward as chair of its national disciplinary committee!

    Without doubt, the PDP as it is is highly undisciplined. It therefore needs someone, a strict disciplinarian to knock some discipline into its members’ skulls. But one wonders where to start the discipline from, or what form of discipline the party is thinking of, especially when one considers the action of some of its leading lights, including President Goodluck Jonathan. Or, how else do you capture a president who hosted as winner, someone who lost an election conducted among only 35 people? How many good persons would want to serve in a government in which such illegality thrives? Maybe it is only the PDP that understands its concept of discipline that it wants instilled into its members, because there is discipline and there is discipline. The NPN that Alhaji Dikko was a prominent member of was everything but disciplined. A party that is disciplined would not claim to have landslide victory in an election which was visible even to the blind that it lost. Little wonder that the Shagari government’s ‘landslide’ victory eventually became what someone referrred to as ‘gunslide’, to the delight of millions of Nigerians who had watched with disbelief as the then NPN stole votes in broad daylight, the same way the PDP has done in some places.

    The multi-million naira question now is: can Alhaji Umaru Dikko give what he does not have? Unless the aphorism that one cannot give what one does not have is about to be proved wrong, or unless the kind of discipline the PDP envisages is the one associated with the NPN (for which the present ruling party itself has become notorious), then, the ruling party may be on the way to defining discipline in its own image, a thing that eventually led to the collapse of our inglorious Second Republic and ultimately, the ‘Dikko Affair’.

    All said, for good or for ill, my dear reader, join me in congratulating Alhaji Dikko over his new appointment and at the same time welcome him, once again, to national limelight, after many years in the cooler. I wish him and their PDP whatever they wish themselves.

  • For students’ sake

    For students’ sake

    The ongoing strike by members of the Academic Staff Union of Universities ASUU is yet another sad development in the education sector of the country. In recent years, universities have suffered one crisis or the other that has resulted in the declining quality of graduates.

    Lack of adequate budget allocation and necessary facilities has turned many government universities to glorified secondary schools and it is no surprise that our institutions are not among the best even in the continent.

    Disruption of the academic calendar for one reason or the other has become so frequent that students are no longer sure when they will graduate. A four-year course in some instances now last for six years or more.

    Despite the increase in the numbers of private universities whose fees are not affordable by many parents, the federal and state universities have been unable to cope with the growing numbers of applicants. Some parents have resorted to sending their children to foreign universities abroad and neighbouring countries.

    University teachers and other stakeholders have always drawn attention to the worsening situation with successive governments promising to address the situation. Past ASUU strikes have always been called off based on agreements which unfortunately have not been honoured by the government.

    The current strike which the union claims is due to the non implementation of parts of the agreement signed in 2009 would have been avoided if the government had not reneged on its promise.

    As it is, it is uncertain when the strike would be called off considering the apparent breakdown in negotiations between the government and union officials. For once, ASUU seems determined to ensure that the government makes concrete commitment this time around and is not leaving anyone in doubt that its members will stay away from the classrooms for as long as necessary to ensure that their demands are met.

    For too long, the government has paid lip service to improving the education standards at all levels. Budgetary allocations at state and federal levels have been too low to match the needs of the sector which is very crucial to the overall development of the country.

    If indeed the issue at stake is the annual release of N400bn for three years as intervention fund for public universities in the country is what is at stake in the strike which commenced on July 1, the government has to find a way of honouring the agreement even if it cannot release the whole amount as earlier agreed.

    There is no doubt that the universities need the intervention funds to address a lot of various challenges that is making a mockery of the university education being offered in the country.

    The infrastructures, in many of the universities are not only inadequate; some have become obsolete for the kind of education students need to meet the required standard for employment and other endeavours.

    How do we justify the situation where some graduates cannot defend the certificates they supposedly acquired after years of study. The decline in standard of teaching and research in universities is alarming and something urgent has to be done to reverse the slide.

    However, for the sake of students who are the victims of the strike, ASUU must be a bit flexible in its negotiation. While insisting on its demands being met, it must be willing to shift grounds on some issues which may not be easily resolved in a hurry under the present situation.

    The strike must not be allowed to last longer than necessary if we are not to further disrupt the academic calendar for 2012/2013 which is already behind schedule and has greater consequence for especially final year students.