The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sunday

  • Boko Haram: A multi-level failure of leadership

    Boko Haram: A multi-level failure of leadership

    Boko Haram is the result of a multilevel failure of leadership

    It is not for nothing that the recently departed Professor Chinua Achebe situated the problem of Nigeria squarely on a failure of leadership. This has again been poignantly certified true as the chicken has come home to roost. Boko Haram, it was discovered this past week, is already knocking on the doors of metropolitan Lagos and it took no less than 100 security operatives to put a Boko Haram cell therein to sleep. In the meantime, we do not know how many more are in the city, being primed for an opportunity to cause maximum damage.

    For most Nigerians then, Biafra was in faraway Afghanistan until that solitary plane flew into Lagos. With the Badiya, Ijora discovery, many eyes will now open to the fact that Boko Haram is no tea party.

    It is no use telling them that a single suicide bomb attack in Lagos will be the very beginning of Nigeria’s unravelling since disintegration is what they want.

    A lot of commendation has been showered on South-West governors because of the relative peace in the region, but a single Boko Haram strike in Lagos can shred all that. That exactly is how dangerous the security situation in the country has become and why all Lagos residents must sign on to this war. We must all become the ears and eyes of the security agencies which, in turn, must immediately advertise telephone numbers through which residents can pass information to them. I once gloated on this page that were the North attacks happening in the South, everybody here would have become a vigilante in his neighbourhood. To be effective,the security agencies need the full support of the local communities, even though I remain skeptical about the efficacy of this shooting war against a very mobile enemy.

    Without a scintilla of doubt, Boko Haram is the result of a multilevel failure of leadership and leading the pack in this, as the causative factor, must be the cultural practice that permits a rich individual to treat thousands of his compatriots like mere serfs who, upon being fed and given handouts, must begin to ‘rankadede’ them like they have no lives of their own. These powerful men do not appreciate what psychological problem they inflict on society thereby; since they think only of themselves. Indeed, their own children also graduate to become a burden on the poor like their fathers. Not unexpectedly, people so malignantly treated readily constitute a fertile recruiting ground for the likes of Boko Haram.

    Another major plank in leadership failure was the introduction of political Sharia.

    Seeing how rapidly it evaporated, though not its huge army of armed enforcers, I am not sure how its originator, now Senator, Ahmad Sanni Yerima , his brother copy-cat governors, and then president Obasanjo who, completely out of character, treated it with kid gloves, must be feeling today. It is common knowledge that Boko Haram was a peaceful organisation at inception. Without a doubt, the fact of many of its members subsequently joining the Sharia enforcers must have toughened and prepared them for today’s war against society. This must have made its members attractive to those politicians who later adopted them as a necessary wing of their campaigns. The fact that then President Obasanjo saw nothing wrong in the introduction of Sharia, in a non-Muslim country, did a lot to embolden both the politicians as well as their armed gangs who were mostly members of Boko Haram. These days, I laugh when Obasanjo puts Jonathan on the surgical table, viscerally putting him under the scalpel; when he points a finger at Jonathan, I can’t fathom where he thinks the remaining four are pointing.

    But much worse must be how northern leaders ensured that their people, especially children of school age, were educationally malnourished, preferring to turn them into Almajeris. Consequently, at the prime of their lives, rootless, uneducated and unemployed, if not unemployable, except as lowly menial workers, they become ready hands for the likes of Boko Haram. Unfortunately, when they commit crimes, like hacking down defenceless Youth Corps members or security men in the course of duty, they are assured, apriori, that they are beyond any punishment.

    Now the chicken has come home to roost.

    It is interesting that it was in Borno State, now hardest hit by Boko Haram, that a one-time state governor, reputed to be probably richer than the state, once gloated that newspapers could criticise him all they want, since only a negligible fraction of his people are literate enough to read newspapers.

    Rather than build schools or establish industries to which the energies of these young men could have been properly directed, what we see in the long years of northern political/military domination are Sheik-like houses built by individuals like they were intended to house entire towns. This is why I do not subscribe to all these theories about poverty being the reason for Boko Haram. At the very best, it would only be a self-inflicted poverty; inflicted by leaders who should have been concerned with helping the under class but chose to turn a blind eye.

    But if leaders in the north are guilty, the President, on whose table the buck stops, must carry the can. Although Obasanjo had been grossly unkind the way he prescribes contradictory solutions, President Jonathan has shown a vacuity that can only be astounding given his education and long years in the corridors of power. I am at a loss as to how the President will today differentiate between Afghanistan, Iraq and the country over which he presides. After he had been staggered into visiting the North-East, he got there and demonstrated a gripping unpreparedness; failing, unbelievably, to proffer a single productive way by which to end the Boko Haram insurgency. All we saw was some kind of sabre rattling, threatening elders he will, willy nilly, have to partner with on the long run.

    Let me conclude this article by offering Mr President an advice. What Nigeria needs, Mr President, is structural re-engineering which a compatriot, Wale Adeoye, recently put as follows: ‘To get out of this unending human carnage, this is the time to enter into genuine, constructive dialogue with Boko Haram. This must involve giving concessions for the right of the group to participate in democratic elections. This may sound awkward, but an Islamic Party controlling a part of the country should not be seen as antithetical to democracy, if the party enjoys the support of the majority.The siege mentality that defines our national politics in a plural society must vanish. Ethnic groups, environmentalists, and other groups that seek political power, driven by particular interests, either ethnic or religious, must be allowed to register their political parties and contest in their own area of cultural jurisdiction.’

    The Afenifere Renewal Group was saying the same thing when it advised as follows at a recent press conference: ‘It is our view that there is no better time than now to convene a national conference that would finally resolve the Nationality question that constantly and continuously pushes this country to the precipice.’

    This, Mr President, is restructuring by another name. You need not be unduly overwhelmed by considerations for 2015. If this country unravels, there will be no 2015 for you or anybody else.

    Be a statesman; convoke a national conference by whatever name, and save Nigeria.

  • ‘Before this generation shall pass’: our need for a true intergenerational dialogue (2)

    ‘Before this generation shall pass’: our need for a true intergenerational dialogue (2)

    I started this series last week with an opening epigraph from the Bible which is the following famous quotation from Christ in Matthew 24:34: “Verily I say unto you, this generation shall not pass till all these things be fulfilled”. Now, although it is not yet a million days since Jesus died, it is more than two thousand years and every single member of the living generation of those who heard this prophecy from him, old and young, women and men, died long ago. One of “these things”, one of the prophecies that Christ asserted that the particular generation he was addressing would not have passed before it was fulfilled was his second coming. As we all know, that particular prophesy has not been fulfilled even though in the more than two thousand years that have passed since then, scores of charlatans have claimed to be Christ come back to fulfill the prophecy. We even had one or two of such charlatans in our country, each with a very large flock of fervent believers and followers. Two of such bogus claimants to the second coming of Christ in our country come to mind: Odumosu, the “Jesus of Oyingbo” in Lagos; and Olumbe Olumbe Obu, the “Christ” whose site of alleged reincarnation was Cross River State.

    For those who might instinctively feel that my interest here resides in the fact that not only has every single member of the generation that heard the famous prophecy from Christ died a long time ago but that many generations have also come and gone and the prophecy is yet to be fulfilled, let me say with as much emphasis as possible that that is not my interest at all. To the contrary, my interest lies in the fact that, first, Christ was bold enough to make that extraordinary prophecy and, secondly, that he had a moral authority that members of all age groups, all generational cohorts either tacitly recognized or fully accepted. As this is a crucial observation, let me explain what I have in mind here. [Parenthetically, let me add that I actually believe that this prophecy of a “second coming” has been fulfilled many, many times since the death of Christ though not in the exact manner he envisioned it. But this is another matter entirely that I will probably take up in a future essay in this column]

    Christ died at approximately the age of 33. Moreover, most historians and theologians hold that his ministry lasted for just slightly more than three years. Thus, here was this young man who was not yet in middle age speaking to every member of the living generation of his day and getting to the core, the heart of matters that concerned every single one of them, old and young. In other words, Christ was one of those great moral reformers and visionaries in history whose message, whose “ministry” reached out across supposed generational divides precisely because the “generation” which they had in mind and about which they spoke was not only their own but the “generation” of everyone coevally alive in their day and age, all facing irreducibly common moral and spiritual crises that gave rise to equally common yearnings and aspirations.

    Since my “religion” is that of iwalesin, my reference to Christ in this essay is not an act of worshipful adoration. And I am not thinking of the example of Christ as a lone, exceptional or transcendental avatar outside of time and history – as virtually all Christians do. Indeed, I am thinking of some of the other great visionaries and reformers in history whose concern, whose passion, and whose authority embraced a notion of “generation” that included everybody alive in their country, their time or the entire planet. These figures included both men and women who, like Christ, died young and others who started their “ministries” young and lived to old age without ever abandoning the “mission” they began in their youth. Thus, the essential thing is not which age group, which generational cohort one belongs to but rather how one reaches across all generational groups to speak to issues of common concern and destiny to all. Let me cite the lives and examples of a few world-historical figures to illustrate this observation, this claim.

    Martin Luther King, Jr., died before he was forty and so did Joan of Arc who actually did not make it past her teens. When Fidel Castro made his famous “History Will Absolve Me” speech in 1953, he was only 27; and our own Anthony Enahoro was only 30 when, also in 1953, he moved the first motion for Nigerian independence. Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, Mother Teresa and Mahatma Gandhi all shared this extraordinary destiny: they started a life devoted to their country, to others and to humanity early in life and to the last day of their lives never gave up their vision for a better life for all. Indeed, what one commentator said of Martin Luther King, Jr., holds true for all the reformers and visionaries who did not make it to old age: “though a young man, he had the soul of a wise, old man” In a reverse logic, it could be said of the likes of Nelson Mandela who started their “mission” early in life and are extremely lucky to have made it to old age that though he is now an old man, he still has the spirit of an idealistic young person for whom possibilities for making life better and more dignified for all are limitless despite all the crises and challenges that we face. This is the moral core, the philosophical basis of the deep solidarities across generational cohorts on which rests a true intergenerational dialogue.

    Nothing I have so far said in this piece is meant to deny the profoundly disturbing existence or reality of deep and sometimes extremely bitter intergenerational divides that separate the older and younger populations of a country like ours and many others in Africa and other parts of the developing world. Such deep intergenerational moral, spiritual and expressive fault lines exist in many parts of the world at the present time. Perhaps the most paradigmatic of such sites of intergenerational war is to be found in slums and refugee camps in many parts of the world in which the conditions of life are so dire for all that all the sources of authority of the old are eroded and the young have no basis on which their sense of responsibility, their hopes for the future can find solid anchors and consequently, an either open or hidden but always simmering war erupts between the young and the old. This is the sort of a seemingly incommensurable and intractable intergenerational war that the epigraph for this essay from Samuel Beckett’s play, Endgame, tries to capture. For how more irreconcilable can this intergenerational conflict be than for a son to ask the father why he was “engendered” by the parent and for the father to reply that he did not know beforehand that it would be the kind of son who could and would ask such a question?

    Is this grim and spiritually desolate scenario from Endgame an appropriate analogy for the essential state of things between the older and younger generations of Nigerians at the present time? Metaphorically speaking, is present-day Nigeria the sort of vast sprawling slum, the sort of undeclared refugee camp for the great majority of its population that produces a breakdown of solidarity and mutual respect and reciprocity between the older and younger generations? With a median age of 19 and with the vast majority of our young people seemingly condemned to a future with little or no prospects at all, it would be against everything we know about human nature, everything we have learned from history not to expect a revolt of the young, regardless of the forms such revolts take, whether of criminal brigandage for extortionate ransoms; fanatical and brutally murderous religious terrorism; or armed, militant insurgency for resource control. Thinking of this, it is not difficult to imagine the short dialogue from Beckett’s play that is our epigraph this week as a sort of a perfect analogy for the non-existence of a true intergenerational dialogue in Nigeria today.

    But all is not unrelieved doom and gloom. Indeed, there is an ironic basis for hope and optimism in the very contexts that either directly or subliminally foster the “rebellions” of the young of the kind that we have in Nigeria at the present time. For these were the sorts of context that produced nearly all of the reformers and visionaries that I have mentioned in this essay: Christ, Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela. And as I have repeated again and again in this series, the world’s list of great reformers and visionaries down the ages to the present time has included women and men of all ages, from those barely out of their teens to those who were far advanced in age. By the same token, those who make the world so unsafe, so insecure and so unjust for their contemporaries that life becomes meaningless and without dignity for so many in our country, our continent and our world come from all age groups, the young and the old inclusive. To all such should our opposition and our resolve for a better world, a better legacy for those who will come after us, be directed.

    Postscript:

    As I was finishing the very last few paragraphs of this essay came the news, communicated by phone to me by my friend Femi Osofisan in an incredulous and anguished tone that our elder, Chinua Achebe, had just died. Stupefied, I immediately called Eddie Madunagu, Kayode Komolafe, Yemi Ogunbiyi and many others in the community of Nigerian literati, progressive journalists and radical democrats. I then checked the internet in the hope that this was a false rumour and not a confirmed fact. What I found gave some confirmation to the news and my spirits sank.

    As I write these words of this postscript, I do not have absolutely irrefutable confirmation that the iroko has fallen, that he is really gone from us. If it turns out that he has indeed made the great transition, then in the words of WS on the occasion of another great loss to us all, I say that I know that Chinua Achebe will walk tall among the ancestors. But if he is still with us on this side of the great divide, then, why, as an old African saw has it, that means that he will tarry much longer yet among us. He was/is one of a kind that was/is absolutely irreplaceable. And he was/is here and the world was/is not the same again.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Mr. President, remember January 2012

    Mr. President, remember January 2012

    Nigerians are not ready for high fuel prices under whatever guise

    Even as the fury generated by the presidential pardon granted ex-convict Diepreye Alamieyeseigha, former Governor of Bayelsa State by President Goodluck Jonathan was yet to subside, the President sprang another surprise: Nigerians should get ready for full deregulation of the downstream sector of the oil industry. In our context, they should be prepared to pay more for fuel. The President spoke in Abuja when he received the report of the graduating participants of the Senior Executive Course 34, 2012 of the National Institute of Policy and Strategic Studies (NIPSS), Kuru, at the Presidential Villa.

    “Why is it that people are not building refineries in Nigeria, despite that it is a big business?” President Jonathan asked. He provided what seemed to him the answer: “It is because of the policy of subsidy, and that is why we (emphasis mine) want to get out of it”. But who are these ‘we’? For me, the word ‘government’ would have been better in place of the ‘we’ because it is only the government and those feeding fat on public funds that are complaining about fuel subsidy. If President Jonathan is in doubt, he should call for a plebiscite.

    It is however instructive that, at about the same time the President was dropping the bombshell on Tuesday, the Federal High Court, Abuja, also dropped the knockout when it declared as unconstitutional, illegal, null and void, the controversial government proposal to deregulate the prices of petroleum products. Gratifying as this might be to the millions of Nigerians already traumatised by the misrule of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) government in the last 13 years, I would not want us to rely much on this victory for reasons I would mention shortly.

    The fact is that, nothing the President says can ever justify the so-called deregulation on the present template of importation. The question is, why has the PDP government not been able to construct more refineries in the last 13 years? It takes about 12 months to construct a skid refinery of about 30,000 bpd capacity. On the other hand, a mega refinery with about 100,000 bpd capacity and above takes between three and four years to construct, with an estimated cost of about $3.5 billion. With fuel subsidy now gulping more than one trillion naira annually, would it not have been better for the government to invest in refineries, even if it would later pass them on to private investors to manage?

    One of the questions that the President has not satisfactorily answered is why an oil-producing nation like Nigeria continues to import fuel. This is a country having four refineries with a combined capacity of about 445,000 bpd but which are operating at about 30 percent capacity. How do we explain this? And the government wants us to believe that they can never work well due to corruption or whatever. What kind of spirit is that? And we are being told stories about these refineries as if they never did well at any point in time. If they once did well, why are they the way they are now?

    Obviously the refineries have not worked well over the years not necessarily because they are owned by the government, but because their managers, in conjunction with successive governments, ran them aground, essentially through corrupt practices. I had to say this in response to President Jonathan’s allusion to the fact that refineries in Canada are working well because they are all private sector-driven. There are refineries in, China, the world’s second largest refiner, that are owned by the government and they are doing well. Why is ours different? Another reason why our refineries are dying is because those benefitting from fuel importation will never allow them work well for their selfish reasons.

    Unfortunately, the PDP government has not done much to address the issue. And it cannot because it is steeped in iniquities itself. When people donate billions to facilitate the building of a presidential library, or to facilitate the construction of a church in the President’s town, or to fund elections; that is the kind of result we get because the donors are not fools. Whatever they donate must be recouped somehow, and it is one reason why we may never get to the root of the fuel subsidy scam. How can government look the people it got money from to finance elections in the face and allow such people to be sent to jail? When that happens, the source of such slush funds will dry up.

    We should thank Bamidele Aturu for instituting the deregulation suit, and the judge for his courage. But we should not over-celebrate the victory because, as we know, our judiciary is not there yet. Lest we forget, the court where the matter has been decided is not the court of last resort. We still have the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court to contend with, and, trust the Jonathan government; it would want to appeal the judgment, especially if it is sure somehow it will have the last laugh at the Supreme Court. The point is that the matter is more of a political issue than legal. By the time we make it a completely legal issue and the government gets a favourable judgment at the Supreme Court, then it would make any action against its decision look like an illegality, which all right-thinking persons know is not true. This is not to say that the protests will not come irrespective of whether the government loses in court ultimately or not; with the trigger being high fuel prices.

    I find the President’s likening of deregulation to surgery, which initially is painful but leaves sweet memories thereafter, rather amusing. But the allegory is misplaced. Hear him: “To change a nation is like surgery. If you have a young daughter of five years who has a boil at a very strategic part of the face, you either, as a parent, leave that boil because the young girl will cry or you take the girl to the surgeon. So, you have the option of just robbing mentholatum on the face, until the boil will burst and disfigure her face, or you take that child to the surgeon. On the sighting of a scalpel of the surgeon alone, the child will start crying .But if she bears the pains, after some days or weeks, the child will grow up to be a beautiful lady.”

    This is highly witty, but the minus there is that President Jonathan did not tell us that the beauty can only manifest, other things being equal; that is if the surgeon to perform the operation is not a quack, for instance. For more than 13 years, the way successive PDP governments at the centre have been handling the ‘scalpel’ is enough to convince Nigerians that they will all end up in the morgue by the time the ‘surgery’ (deregulation” is completed by a government they have come to see as insensitive and inept, and one that is too tainted to fight corruption.

    I also agree with the President that “… you do not need a lifetime to change a nation. Under 10 years, Nigeria can change and people will not even believe that this is Nigeria again. Immediately you come up with strong policies in key sectors of the economy and keep it for 10 years, the change will be astronomical.” But his Papa Deceive Pikin party (apologies to Reuben Abati) has been in government for close to 14 (not 10) years now. Do we then take it that the ruling PDP has been feeding us with the wrong policies since then, hence our present sorry pass? And is that the party to trust to handle deregulation to our common advantage? I doubt. And I have the feeling I am on the same page with many Nigerians on this. That is why they must be ready to return to the trenches. It is not yet Uhuru. January 2012 beckons again!

  • Sanusi Lamido Sanusi’s insults

    Sanusi Lamido Sanusi’s insults

    All Sanusi’s effusions against the Yoruba count for nothing

    Courtesy elombah.com, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi’s vituperation on the Yoruba being the problem of Nigeria had a fresh life of its own on the internet this past week and it is only fair that we take a new and proper look at the messenger on our way to dismissing his virulent assertion as merely a fanciful and rootless shibboleth. One constant with the educated Northerner is that he is either decent or plain brash, disdainful, and out rightly disrespectful. This I should know having worked closely with then Dr Jibril Aminu, later Prof, in the early ’70’s, during the deanship of both Professors Ladipo Akinkugbe and Kayode Osuntokun at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Ibadan. Professor Aminu was, and remains cultured, decent and is as brilliant as are his distinguished senior colleagues. On the obverse of Aminu, however, is the boastful and loquacious Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, who for so long, has been pouring all manner of invectives on every section of of the Nigerian polity sans his ‘Aryan race’, the Hausa-Fulani. When Sanusi is not talking down to the entire nation like he is from outer space, he is claiming to know it all or putting himself forward as either the single holy malam in town or Nigeria’s only prince charming. Asked the other day, at the Minna Seminar on Security, why he garrulously goes to work in his ’emirate’ attire, he contemptuously replied that his turban is Resource Control cap; a condescending reference to the justified struggle people of the Niger-Delta had to fight to get anything tangible out of their God-given oil. Considering himself an untouchable, he had unilaterally been shelling his Kano state with unappropriated millions of naira from the oil resources like he owns Nigeria. This is a guy who will fight to the death to ensure that the National Assembly had nothing to do with how the Central Bank -a national institution- is run so he could run riot with its funds. Now that his brothers – whose lead protagonist he has become spewing forth infantile poverty theories – have again incinerated fifty plus Nigerians at a South-bound bus stop in his Kano, it will be interesting to see how much he doles out to both the dead and the injured, not to mention owners of the five luxurious buses that went up in smoke. That is the guy who, rather than be penitent, has been regaling Nigerians with who planned to stage the first coup in the country, conveniently forgetting that was nothing more than a plot by his forebears. And as to royalty, which he brandishes like a lightning rod, were Sanusi not a poor historian, he should have remembered how Abacha – a mere plebeian – dealt with that presumably untouchable institution. How rude and unfeeling can an individual get? How impudent and insufferable to start bad mouthing a race as distinguished as the Yoruba or Igbo?

    And Sanusi did n’t just start today.

    I never spared a thought for Sanusi – indeed, he never occurred on my radar, until he was named governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria in 2009 and there were those thoroughly acerbic newspaper comments on his person, apparently now, by people who must have known his antecedents.

    Desirous to ensure that a young man was not unduly shot down, I leapt to his defence. And to make a sense of whatever I was going to write, I decided to google our man. Although his pride came out shining like a thousand stars, I thought that should matter nothing if he was a good banker. He has since amply justified those who doubted his all round suitability for such a high post having copiously demonstrated, especially through his unguarded speeches, that though, a good banker he may be, he is a damn poor public servant; dispensing insults as generously as his whims dictate.

    Undue pride in what he is, and whatever he hopes to become, has colluded to fatally damage this ethnic chauvinist, who considers General Babangida and Abacha, in his words, ‘as people of a lower culture,’ but sees his own race, the Hausa-Fulani, which in reality symbolizes nothing more than a gobbling stomach, contributing nothing and irretrievably dragging Nigeria down in every respect, as the country’s super race. For ease of reference, I think we better quote the loud mouth seriatim. Said Sanusi Lamido in one of his expansive moments: ‘… the problems of this country have a lot to do with the shift in power away from the Fulani to individuals like Babangida and Abacha, products of lower cultures’. That, funny enough, is the character who says that “The Yorubas are the greatest obstacles to nation-building’.

    Yet, he must have readily salivated on the fact that I, a Yoruba, as well as some others like Dr Olajide Ogunlayi, had overlooked his distressing record of ‘academic’ publications, which are ALL about Sharia, Islamic Law and Women , instead of penetrating articles on Nigeria’s economic issues and challenges, to warmly endorse and defend his appointment , by none other than his Fulani compatriot, the late President Yar’ Adua. And, whereas, one would have expected the cheer weight of that office to temper his unnecessary effusiveness, Sanusi has continued, like a drunk, to insult the sensibilities of other sections of the country seeing himself solely as nothing more than a Fulani irredentist, gadfly and armour bearer. For him, there is no longer ‘the question of negotiating the difficult terrain of politics and developing true concepts of citizenship in plural societies’ as he once absent-mindlessly prescribed. Not only that. Were he not consumed by his self-importance, Sanusi should have benefitted from Muhammad Jameel Yushaa’s unsolicited admonition to him to ‘let us learn to respect one another and use the little knowledge Allah (SWT) endowed us with in building bridges of understanding rather than engaging ourselves in self glorification and the destruction of others’. Were that the case, he should have known why it’s unnecessary to rave and rant, attempting to diminish others.In spite of my fulsome endorsement of Sanusi as CBN governor in my 2-part article titled: ‘Psycho-analyzing Sanusi Lamido Sanusi’ , beginning Sunday, 6 September, 2009, I had also indicated my fears about the possibility of his being deliberately head-hunted to be the North’s deus ex machina for its having been allegedly short-changed during the banking consolidation exercise. That has turned out to be pretty uncanny given the free rein Hausa-Fulani itinerant currency dealers enjoy hauling money all over the place, a trade Sanusi would long have found a way to squelch were it dominated by people from tribes other than the Hausa-Fulani.

    It certainly cannot be too late in the day to teach Sanusi a thing or two about the Yoruba. I therefore reproduce below, the concluding part of my 2-part article under reference:

    ‘However, suffice it to say that he(Sanusi) missed the point in his characterization of South-West politics.This is because in the same way the Islamic faith has never accepted the dichotomy between Religion and Politics, mainstream Yoruba political thought is congenitally opposed to politics of paternalism, as practised in the North. Rather, it is driven, solely and in principle, by what we call the OMOLUABI precept. This is precisely why the South-West political landscape is strewn with the skeletons of opportunistic politicians who deviate from this time-honoured cultural prescription from whose group the North, unerringly, recruits its allies in the region’. Here, in Yoruba land, we know right from wrong and some things are simply anathema meaning: Yoruba mo ko to.

    Therefore, all these Sanusi effusions against the Yoruba simply count for nothing. We shall never be anybody’s plaything.

    Rather, it is driven, solely and in principle, by what we call the OMOLUABI mindset. This is precisely why the South-West political landscape is strewn with the skeletons of opportunistic politicians who deviate from this time-honoured cultural prescription and from which group the North, unerringly, recruits its allies in the region.

    Here, in Yoruba land, some things are simply anathema’.

  • The continuing onslaught: The rich ambush the poor

    The continuing onslaught: The rich ambush the poor

    •The rich so cherish the poor: they do everything to keep them in that condition

     

    During mass last week, the Pope Francis appealed for protection of the weak and poor. The new pontiff seems a humble person committed to humanity. Hopefully, he will sweep the stale air and crooked ways from the Vatican so the Catholic Church can be a church again. Not only Catholics but the world can stand to have a pontiff who wears common, plain robes but speaks in words touched by the spirit of divinity. For too long, we suffered religious leaders who wore divine robes only to speak in the spirit of what is common and worldly. May Francis be more than fine ritual and liturgy. May he be real and compassionate. Even at that, he will face hard opposition and sour disappointment. His counsel to protect the weak and poor was condign but it was only hortatory. Save for public attention, a pope commands little these days. Those in positions of power and wealth to make good his counsel paid him as little heed as they do the poor and weak of whom the new pontiff so touchingly spoke. In many ways, it is not an outmoded perspective to think of the world as a perpetual battle of good versus its opposite.

    A subtle global struggle is underway. The outcome will determine the course of nations and the welfare of billions of people. Hundreds of millions of lives will be made long or cut short depending on how the conflict unfolds. As long as man has existed, the rich and power have taken more from the weak and poor than they have given the humble masses. In prior ages, this dynamic assumed several names that highlight the foul play of which man is capable in pursuit of high affluence and great power. Slavery, serfdom, and indentured servitude are but the poor man’s basement view of the grand historic procession of the divine right of kings, noble aristocracy, manifest destiny, and the white man’s burden.

    Today’s struggle is the latest manifestation of elite man’s penchant for polishing his boot against the neck of the lowly. This time is has little to do with birthright or pedigree. It has taken centuries but science has largely shorn us of the myths of innate superiority of any race, people or class. This time the struggle is distilled to the most durable and persistence of social myths: the supreme worth of money. This myth has been sustained by that ever present thing called human greed. It has been legitimized by the advent of perverse social science known as classical economics. It has been made catholic by the advance of technologies permitting the transmission of information or money in the form of electronic pulses moving at the speed of light. Economic life has been globalized. With globalization comes uniformity. What might have been the way of a few nations and their allies has become the way of the world.

    On a universal scale, Money Power and its enabling philosophy, financialism, seek to place the rest of us under the lash. Thus far, they are winning because people were so deceived they believed no option existed but to accept their fate. Things are now changing. People are beginning to understand that few economic policies are objectively inevitable. Policies result from subjective preferences. To accept the policies espoused by the rich and powerful is to relegate most people debt peonage and reduce poor nations to colonial outposts of international finance in the same manner much of Asia and Africa were subjected to ownership by royal corporations in days of yore when imperial aspirations and discrimination against purportedly lesser civilizations were considered virtues to be nurtured and extolled.

    During the last one hundred years, global wars have been military in nature, i.e., the two world wars and the resultant Cold War. In the 21st century, the first war of global dimension is the purported fight against terror. Terrorism is a serious matter. Nigeria well knows the harsh costs incurred when terrorism takes residence. However, the alleged global nature of the war on terrorism is more in hyperbole than fact. Most people and areas are unaffected. In truth, the first global war of the 21st century is financial in nature. It is a battle where rich and powerful nations, instigated by their largest financial houses, seek to control the destiny of other nations by whittling their economic sovereignty so that the lesser nations become vulnerable to further machinations by the more powerful economies. It is this war, not the one against terrorism, that affects all of us. This war’s outcome will determine whether modern technology joins with humane social knowledge and understanding to forge a better world where poverty is less jarring and wealth more equitably shared. Or will technology be perverted by twisted ambition to bring hardship that is severe and disconnected from the world’s actual productive capacity? If the latter, then we have entered a period as doleful as the entrance into the Dark Ages. A thick, heavy cloud would have descended over the vast swath of mankind for no reason other than to sate the greed of a powerful few.

    As irony would have it, the epicenter of this fight is Europe much the same as Europe was the center of last century’s world wars. What Hitler could not accomplish through racial hatred and by strong bayonet, modern Germany now attempts to do through the manipulation of government and bank balance sheets. Germany seeks nothing less than to bring the rest of Europe to heel economically. Instead of the military blitzkrieg, Germany seeks to dominate Europe by brusque financial intimidation. It seems national tendencies don’t easily fade. When it comes to attempting to dominate others, the Germans dispense with subtlety. Bullying becomes the order of the day. Over the past two years, the euro zone has been a battlefield of rich versus struggling European nations. On one hand, Germany, using the European Central Bank (ECB) as proxy, has battled the southern tier of Europe. One by one, it has subdued these nations like a conquering invader. Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy have fallen down the maw of austerity. Toss in Ireland for a measure of geographic diversity. One by one, these nations plummeted into recession.

    Now, enter the most unlikely hero at the most unlikely moment. If this chapter in history has a benign conclusion, the small island nation of Cyprus may well be the proximate cause.

    Buffeted by the Greek meltdown, the Cypriot banking system is in crisis. The island’s second largest bank is overexposed to potential Greek default. If that bank goes down, the other Cypriot banks go with it. Thus, Cyprus needs a bank bailout of 16 billion euros in short order. It turned to the European bank for help. In effect, this was tantamount to requesting the financially martinet Germans for assistance. Viewing the Cypriots as profligate wastrels living beyond their means, the Germans conditioned help on the Cypriots donning a skin-piercing hair shirt. The Germans demanded Cyprus pay for the bailout, in part, by imposing a ten percent tax on bank deposits. This was a brusque and unusually draconian move.

    Germany and the ECB had strong-armed and intimidated relatively large nations such as Italy, Spain and Greece, to the extent of causing the Greek government to fold during the height of that crisis. German officials and European bureaucrats blithely thought they could steamroll tiny Cyprus which represented a fraction of one percent of the euro zone GDP. In their arrogance, they miscalculated.

    The move sent shocks through the world banking system. The highbrows in Berlin and Frankfurt (the latter being the home of the ECB) had stepped too far to grab too much. In order to stop bank runs, governments have insured private bank deposits since the Great Depression. This has been a totem of modern banking. The innovation strengthened depositor confidence and encouraged savings. In one swoop, the equation changed in Cyprus. The Euro giants were demanding the Cypriot government to shift from guaranteeing deposits to confiscating them for no compelling reason. Worse, roughly one-third of bank deposits were expatriate, mostly Russian. Thus, the euro giants were poking a finger in the Russian eye by essentially demanding that Russians involuntarily fund the Cypriot bailout. Clearly, European officials knew of this Russian presence in the banking system. Penalizing Russia also gave motive to this harsh tactic.

    News of the proposal predictably ignited a bank run which was only stopped when banks used various tricks and methods to dishonor depositor withdrawal requests. Those who thought the euro zone had exited crisis better thing again. If people in other troubled nations believe the medicine foisted on Cyprus may soon come their way, we will witness depositor withdrawals and bank runs in these nations the likes of which the world has not seen since the scythe of economic depression mowed down the European banking system seventy years ago.

    Yet, something peculiar happened in the Cypriot capital, Nicosia. Parliament balked at passing the confiscatory deposit law. With this, they rejected the German-originated bailout plan. Germany thought they had Cyprus trapped. Without the bailout, a major bank collapses and a national banking crisis becomes imminent. With the bailout’s confiscatory tithe on bank deposits and its fiscal austerity measures, the economy will lose its place as a preferred international banking center and will deflate due to lessened government expenditure. Similar to Greece, the bailout may avert rapid financial calamity by replacing it with a slower yet inexorable long-term diminution approaching acute recession or depression.

    Cyprus was being asked to select the means of its execution, either by gunshot or slow but sure poison. Banking on the risk-adverse nature common to most politicians, the euro bullies figured Cypriot parliamentarians would pass the legislation, thus avoiding an immediate financial showdown in favor of creeping disaster. The proud Cypriot lawmakers did what their colleagues in larger Spain, Italy and Greece lacked the spine to do. If they were to sink, they shall do so on their own terms, not according to commands from Berlin or Frankfurt. Finally, the euro giants had encountered resistance through this act of desperate courage. Given the smallness of the Cypriot economy, this was the wrong nation to take the stand but at least a stand was finally taken. Now electorates in Spain, Italy and Greece are irate that their lawmakers were not possessed of such nationalist courage when their moment to stand or fold came. As the winter becomes spring and weather moderates, expect street protests and political realignment in these nations as the people bristle under the harsh weight of unnecessary austerity.

    Despite the courage shown, Cyprus is still in dire trouble. It must devise a rescue package by Monday or the ECB pulls the plug on the vulnerable bank. Then collapse would no longer be imminent. It would have begun. The last time someone in this part of the Mediterranean survived such a predicament was when Odysseus navigated past the monster Scylla and Charybdis, the whirlpool. Yet, this offers the Cypriots no consolation. This feat took place several millennia ago and is the stuff of myth. The Cypriots must face the pressure of modern financialism which places little premium on national heroism.

    In the end, Cyprus will likely bend. It is too small and the pressure too great upon it. Being in the euro zone, the gallant island does not print its own currency. If it had a sovereign currency, the nation would have more policy space in which to maneuver. To a degree, it could inflate its way out of immediate crisis. This has problems but not as severe as those now faced. Cyprus has run to Moscow in search of kinder bailout assistance. The Russians will not do enough. Moscow will use Cyprus as a pawn in the grand game of geopolitics it plays against the European Union and NATO. Simply put, the island was ripe for the plucking. Exposure to Greece made frail the banking system. That it has untapped gas reserves makes the island a more attractive prey. “Cripple the economy, then take assets and resources on the cheap.” This is the new leitmotif of economic cooperation among nations bound as allies in an economic treaty and monetary union.

    The crisis should sound a caution to African nations. By all means safeguard your currency sovereignty. Any nation that uses the currency of another or pegs its currency to the value of another, has shifted too much of its financial decision-making to another nation. That other nation will exploit the unintended gift; it will not act with altruism. Consequently, Nigeria must discourage the growing practice of conducting domestic transactions in dollars. While this might benefit individuals, it saps the overall economy.

    West Africa must closely reexamine its pursuit of a monetary union that is partially based on the flawed European model. If the flaws are not resolved in this architecture, the union not only might cause imbalances between its members, it could make their economies more vulnerable to manipulation by foreign powers. Last, Nigeria and Ghana especially must be wary of the renewed flow of speculative hot money. Since the 2008 meltdown, western financial houses have largely been made whole by massive doses of government subvention. They are flush with cash. Due to the structural uncertainty of the euro zone and the low rates of return throughout the developed world, they do not have many places at home to park this money to earn handsome returns. Their eyes bulge as they look at the high interest rates in West Africa. They rush to temporarily park money here to profit from the high rates. We should be concerned. Lest we forget, a similar inflow helped foster the Nigerian banking bubble years ago. A subsequent outflow of the same money precipitated the banking collapse of 2008-9. This sudden and steep crash checkmated the banking system, almost crumpled the entire economy and obliterated the savings of hordes of forlorn investors. We must not allow a repeat so soon thereafter. We would be wise to impose capital and currency controls to prevent a repeat of this speculative roller coaster ride and its concomitant crash into the hard wall of financial reality.

    To safeguard African economies from the fate of Cyprus, we must unlearn the mainstream economics we have been taught. Mainstream economics preaches that sovereignty matters little. It says go for the most lucrative deal. The lesson of the euro zone is that the most lucrative deal today might not be the best deal for posterity. Joining the euro zone was clearly against the national interests of Greece, Spain and Cyprus. Perhaps Cyprus might escape but with difficulty. The best way to escape such a trap is never to enter it. No nation with a large population base has ever reached durable, broad-based prosperity without maintaining its currency sovereignty. To relinquish sovereignty is to relinquish your right to grow as you deem fit. In such a mean, ungracious era of human history, no wise nation will place its fate in the hands of a competitor. Enough said!

     

    08060340825 (sms only)

  • One blast too many

    One blast too many

    Just when we thought that the terrorists in the north will show some remorse by observing their so called cease fire to justify the call for amnesty for them, they struck last Tuesday at the Kano Luxury Bus Park killing and wounding many as usual.

    This particular bomb attack has really generated a lot of concern considering that it has an ethnic dimension which could lead to reprisals from the section of the country where the bus was heading to.

    Although no group has so far claimed responsibility for the dastardly act, the pattern of attack is typical of the past ones and there is no doubt that it is the same group of unrepentant fundamentalists who are still at work.

    Both the Christian Association of Nigeria and the Jamatu Nasir Islam underscored the grave implication of the Kano attack in their reactions in which they noted that it was capable of threatening the unity of the country.

    It is bad enough that the terrorist have refused to listen to voice of reason to sheath their sword and halt the senseless killing of innocent citizens in the Northern part of the country, to now deliberately resort to targeting buses heading for another part of the country where they have not succeeded in extending their activities to amounts to instigating ethnic clashes in the country.

    Already there are reports that some Northerners in the South East are feeling unsafe after the bus attacks, while some Igbo groups have warned that they can no longer tolerate indiscriminate killing of their citizens in the North.

    While the terrorists definitely don’t have the backing of indigenes of where they hail from, there is the danger of reprisal and counter reprisals if the targeted killing like the recent bus attack and others is not halted.

    The terrorists seem to be out to cause disaffection in the country and they should not be allowed to do so in the interest of the unity of the country. Their agenda is to achieve what they have failed to achieve through their past attacks with the new strategy of targeting buses heading for the Southern part of the country.

    They have tried hard to make living in the core Northern states dangerous particularly for non-indigenes and are very desperate to force them out if possible.  Even for indigenes their safety is not guaranteed as long as they don’t share the beliefs of the terrorists.

    For once, the government has to take necessary steps to checkmate the terrorists before they make the country ungovernable. The rate at which they keep striking is very worrisome and all options must be explored to stop them from denting the image of our country.

  • Nationals against the nation

    Nationals against the nation

    (Four pillars of instability)

    In its extreme formulation, the title of this column can be recast as “Nationalities against the Nation”. Nationalities are groups or people(s) with distinct cultures, linguistic coherence and a homogeneous spiritual, political and economic worldview who inhabit a nation-space. Nationals are bona fide citizens of a nation-state. But there ought to be a distinction between nationals and nationalists.

    Nationals are in the nation, but nationalists are both in the nation and for the nation. In other words, while there have been a sizeable number of worthy and illustrious Nigerian nationalists many of whom have lived for the nation and a few of whom have died for it, there is as yet no Nigerian nationalist class in the proper sociological sense of that term.

    Yet every nation requires a true nationalist class to move from being a nation in itself to a nation for itself. It was not for sheer brinksmanship that Admiral Horatio Nelson of Trafalgar presaged every naval battle with the memorable summons: “England expects every man to do his duty”. It was a call to martyrdom in the service of a nascent nation. With one hand already lost in battle, Nelson himself eventually succumbed to a solitary enemy rocket.

    In effect, then, what Lord Lugard created was a nation in itself, which was the best he could do in the circumstances. To become a nation for itself requires the sterling and heroic efforts of a truly Nigerian nationalist class that would then transform the chaotic amalgam to a coherent and organic nation. One hundred years and much momentous bloodshed and upheavals after, this has proved a costly and illusory mirage.

    A nation-space in a perpetual and permanent state of becoming is vulnerable to certain nation-destroying tendencies and activities. With the carnage in Kano this past week and the discovery of active cells in Lagos , it is clear that the Boko Haram insurgency is bent on tipping the nation into an orgy of religious and ethnic bloodbath the like of which has never been seen anywhere in the world.

    This is a dire moment for the nation. As it is currently constituted, the Nigerian political elite, particularly its dominant faction, is organically incapable of handling the challenge. The unforeseen contradictions of post-military anarchy and anomie have rendered the ruling party statutorily incompetent and incapacitated by its lack of transformative imagination and vision.

    Given the structural and systemic disfiguration of the nation, the PDP may win many more elections, but it is incapable of holding the nation together for much longer. A fixation with elections is electoralism in its worst and most berserk form. This is the time for the emergence of a truly nationalist class which will save Nigeria from political, economic and spiritual predators. Unfortunately for now, there seems to be none in the horizon. So by the time we all wake up from this nightmare in all its bloodthirsty absurdities, Nigeria may be gone.

    As it is at the moment, Nigeria is prey and hostage to four main predatory groups whose activities, wittingly and unwittingly, are mutually reinforcing in their nation-evaporating possibilities and potentials. Although they may have their arrowheads and clusters among certain ethnic groups, it is juvenile and delinquent bêtise to reduce this complex issue to a question of ethnicity or of some nationalities against the nation. Whenever and wherever nationalities have risen against the nation, it is always an elite-driven phenomenon.

    The four groups that Nigeria is vulnerable to and that have rendered the country virtually ungovernable are the following. First are the political terrorists who are using the power of political ascendancy and incumbency to unleash a reign of terror on the nation in order to secure and safeguard their temporary and transient advantage. They have broken all the rules of sober and civilized governance in this country and we are still counting. With their boorish and undemocratic conduct, they constitute the gravest nuisance to the nation.

    The second are the spiritual predators and religious terrorists who will stop at nothing in recreating the nation in their own image even if entire swathes of the country is laid waste and the nation itself is foaming with blood. They are savage and medieval tyrants who will stop at nothing in turning Nigeria into a theocratic state of their torrid hallucination. To their Stone Age and fundamentalist mindset, the very idea of a secular state is a horrific anomaly. Yet this is the very fundament of the modern nation-state paradigm.

    It is the theocratic state that is a modern anomaly, the exclusive preserve of societies transiting from first degree feudalism to modernity. Goodluck Jonathan is right to call Nigeria a secular state. A nation may be a multi-religious nation with freedom of worship guaranteed to its citizens but when a state becomes multi-religious, it means that every ascendant religious group can take its turn in spiritually gang-raping the nation without any regard for the core values that bind it. This is a classic enactment of Hades on earth.

    The third group are the economic terrorists who are bent on bringing Nigeria economically to heel. At the level of state actorship, they are those who believe that Nigeria is a sinking Titanic to be stripped of all valuables before the might hulk topples over. They are like raiders of a lost Ark. At the level of economic society are the petty and petit predators : hegemonic amputees who had lost potency and feel hardly done by a nation that had castrated them politically. As a result, they are engaged in all manner of economic sabotage against a nation for which they nurse nothing but seething animosity and volcanic resentment.

    The last group are the logical progeny of the first three, intellectual counter-terrorists and anti-state actors who deploy superior knowledge and advanced political consciousness to mount a devastating siege on the Nigerian post-colonial state in all its startling inadequacy and bankruptcy. They are products of the global rise in counter-hegemonic knowledge by which those who are outside of government know far more than those who are inside.

    Whether from home or from abroad, they deploy their intellectual firepower to telling effect forcing the hunter to become the hunted. In its extreme and adversarial version, it is an anti-terrorist terrorism whose aim is to exclude the excluders and which will stop at nothing but the reconstruction of the nation and the reconstitution of the state. After each encounter, the government looks so weather beaten and punch drunk that you have a sense that only gluttons for scarifying punishment would like to remain in power no matter the perks and perquisites.

    With all these forces ranged against themselves and against the nation and the state, it is not surprising that Nigeria often gives the impression of a nation permanently at war with itself. It is to be noted that apart from minor border skirmishes with Cameroons and Chad, Nigeria has not fought any external war since amalgamation.

    Yet the history of the country is a history of epic bloodletting arising from civil wars, coups, countercoups, civil uprisings, religious insurgencies, invasions, massacres, pogroms, tribal feuds, state executions and economic genocide. The enemy is entirely within, and Nigerians have been killing Nigerians ever since amalgamation.

    All lucky countries are not the same and every unlucky country is unlucky in its own unique way. In the crucible and roiling contradictions of national evolution, adversities often turn into advantages just as advantages turn into adversities. The ANC was founded in 1912, changed its original name in 1923 but did not come to power until the last decade of the last century. With all its ugly scars, apartheid turned out to be a unifying factor for the diverse and disparate ethnic groups of South Africa.

    The Sotho people who were subordinates within the context of the mighty Zulu empire simply turned to education and Christian modernity and were able to turn the table with their massive manpower. Yet unlike the Gikiyu/Luo/ Kalenji/Masai maelstrom which continues to hobble modern Kenya and the majorities/minorities struggle for power which has stymied Nigeria’s march to authentic nationhood, nobody ever hears of the ANC fracturing along ethnic lines, despite the worst efforts of the Mangosuthu Buthelezis.

    This was because the ANC was primarily and principally a politically conscious intellectual organization waging an ideological warfare against apartheid. Forged in the cauldron of an unjust and ungodly system, the ANC acquired the discipline, the fortitude and the political clarity which promote national spirit and consciousness above the petty demands of ethnic animosities. Apartheid was an equal opportunity barbarity and not even the fair skinned Indians could pass.

    Nigeria may not be lucky in the lottery of colonial conquerors. But it is to the credit of the British colonial masters that after decades of neglect and negligence, they finally roused themselves to provide the institutional framework by which the new nation would be governed. The constitution so bequeathed was not, and could not have been, a perfect document since the colonial masters themselves were not altruistic arbiters.

    But at least there were nascent institutions. It was left to a Nigerian nationalist class to improve upon for the greatest benefit of the greatest number of people. This was unlike what happened in Portuguese overseas possessions. As the first true nation-state and founding colonial power, armed with raw brutality and without the intellectual sophistication of later modes of modernity, Portugal simply regarded its overseas possessions as forcible extensions of the metropolitan mainland. Indeed at a point in history, the entire Portuguese royalty relocated abroad and ruled from Brazil until the bubble burst.

    This was why in virtually all the Portuguese overseas holdings, from Angola, the Cabinda enclave to Mozambique through Guinea Bissau, a national war of liberation had to be waged to rid the nations of their colonial incubus. It has proved very costly and draining for the countries and for Africa. Till date, Guinea Bissau which was conceived as a Portuguese overseas plantation remains without any viable political institution with armed bandits parading as soldiers while political warlords and drug cartels rule the roost.

    Nigeria has not been so unlucky. But there is a limit to legendary luck without commensurate political praxis. The four pillars of national instability enumerated above, in combination or as individual calamities, can tip the nation into a sudden implosion or engender its catastrophic dissolution into warring ethnic nationalities. This is particularly so of the Boko Haram war against the state and the nation.

    Despite the bluff and the bluster, Goodluck Jonathan appears to be at his wits’ end. The national hopes invested in his administration have all but evaporated. You know a ruler is beaten black and blue when he begins to make offensive and insensitive noise against the spirit of the nation. He has been hinting darkly about the removal of the “remaining” phantom subsidy even when the national uproar caused by the last is yet to subside.

    The president has shown a bizarre and inexplicable prodigality in expending social and political capital both at home and abroad. The ship of state is once again at the mercy of elements. This week, the Americans tellingly excluded Nigeria from a democratic summit. By virtue of its size, military and economic might, Nigeria ought to be an automatic choice. If this is the international verdict on Jonathan’s tenure, the national verdict is bound to be more devastating.

  • Boko Haram: the road not taken

    Boko Haram: the road not taken

    There needs to be a national conference or constituent assembly involving Boko Haram

    Shortly after Boko Haram launched its terror against Nigeria, I wrote a longer version of the article below. The hope then was (as it is now) to urge our rulers to approach this new political challenge with creativity and courage, rather than over relying on the mantra of our country’s indivisibility passed down by military rulers. The new tempo of violence by Boko Haram, particularly in Kano, and the new layer of violence from Ansrul directed at foreigners that came to the country to add value, as well as the ‘Enough is enough’ response of Igbo and Christian groups necessitate the re-featuring of this article.

    There is no doubt that Boko Haram now has the reputation of being the greatest informal threat to Nigeria’s unity. The civil war was a formal threat. It was not individual Igbos or groups of them that declared war on the nation. It was the Nigerian military government in the Eastern Region that did that. In a way, the Biafran war was a government-to-government conflict. Individual Igbo men and women did not have any objection to the worldview of Nigerians in other parts of the country; they felt unsafe in northern Nigeria and were called home to safe grounds by the government of their region.

    At the beginning, the Boko Haram’s war was against Muslims who were not considered by the group to be orthodox enough, those that were found in or near beer parlours. Later, the war was taken to government institutions and international organizations, such as police stations or the United Nations office in Abuja. In its present state, BokoHaramists direct their violence primarily at Christians.

    At the infancy of the Boko Haram menace, conservative pundits described advantage and disadvantage of dialogue and discipline as mutually exclusive while liberal pundits see them as complementary approaches that are available to government. The dithering and temporizing that marked government’s response in the first year of Boko Haram’s outing grew out of the uncertainty generated by the schools of dialogue and punishment. Most northern leaders and institutions called for dialogue as preferred option, citing the UmaruYar’Adua’s adoption of Amnesty for Niger Delta militants as an enviable model for Jonathan to use.

    The road not taken so far is to recognize the imperative of apprehending the subtext of Boko Haram’s message. The surface text of the sect’s message is about the violence to government institutions and now to Christians. The subtext is that the sect wants to engage the rest of the nation on how to re-organise or re-structure the multicultural and multi-religious character of the nation. It should not be too hard for federal and state governments and their advisers to come to terms with the subtext of Boko Haram’s messages. Members of the sect want to live in a region or a country (if they succeed through terrorism) that is organized and ruled on the basis of Sharia jurisprudence and religious intolerance. In effect, the sect wants to change the nature of the Nigerian state.

    It is conceivable that the federal government can muster enough force to defeat Boko Haram. But it is not likely that this will automatically kill the idea that drives the sect, particularly the sect’s obsession with religious intolerance. Just as it is with all wars and conflicts, there is always room for talk to prevent major conflict or to end it. This is why treaties are signed after full-scale wars, to usher in peace. This is also why talks are held to pre-empt wars. We went to Aburi to work against having to go to war with Biafra, but the rest is history.

    It is still not too late to call a conference of all stakeholders in the Nigeria project. It is reassuring that the federal government has emphasized the importance of unity in its rhetoric against Boko Haram. But the federal government does not need to be obsessed about national unity to the point of not seeing that Boko Haram is calling for a negotiation of the character of a united Nigeria. BokoHaramists are asking for a true situation of unity in diversity. It is not the unity part of the country’s goal that is at stake; it is the diversity part of it that appears to be at issue with the fanatic sect.

    The federal government needs to provide leadership for a national conference on how to keep the country united, rather than waxing eloquent on the dogma of indivisibility of the nation. The insistence on legalism as excuse for not having a constitutional conference has become obsolete in light of Boko Haram’s increasing violence. The legislators that claim that no other group should be allowed to create a new constitutionappear to be as helpless as the executive on the issue of Boko Haram. If Boko Haram is not contained, it appears capable of running the legislators out of town. Nigeria needs a constitutional conference to negotiate the place of cultural diversity in its territorial unity.

    There needs to be a national conference or constituent assembly at which Boko Haram and its supporters are given the chance to participate in negotiating with other ethnic and religious groups in the country a new federal constitution that addresses religious diversity, rotation of presidential power, freedom for federating units to live according to their preferred values, etc. Any group that feels it cannot participate in a federal system should be given the option to check out of the federation.

    This is the time to let sponsors of Boko Haram know that no citizen or group has the license to exploit the nation’s obsession with unity at all costs. This is not the time to believe that the mantra of indissolubility is good enough to neutralise the danger posed to the country’s unity by Boko Haram and now Ansarul. This is the time to stop playing the ostrich. This is the time to get realistic. Nigeria is certainly losing grip of its rod of unity at the instance of Boko Haram and its sister-organisation, Ansarul.

  • Achebe departs in a blaze of controversy

    Achebe departs in a blaze of controversy

    I see Chinua Achebe differently from how others see him. Some see him rightly as the grandfather of African fiction, and others simply but also accurately see him as the father of African literature. Yet others remember him as the hard-hitting literary critic that in 1975 disembowelled Joseph Conrad for his book, Heart of Darkness. But most people, whether critics or plain connoisseurs of great books, remember him as the delightful author of Things Fall Apart, an incomparable book that has sold more than 10 million copies and has been translated into more than 50 languages. Chinua Achebe (1930-2013) lived well and died at a ripe old age after bidding his country goodbye with a rousing, controversial book, There Was a Country. In a literary career spanning more than 50 years, Achebe churned out scores of works in nearly all areas of literature.

    Achebe’s death on Friday morning is of course bound to elicit great obituaries from gifted editorial writers, many of them enchanted by the literary giant’s life and times. The death will also unleash a cornucopia of reviews and criticisms of his works, complete with projections of how relevant he would be in the decades and centuries to come. Most of the reviews will of course focus on his five novels, some of his essays, and his controversial non-fiction memoir on the Nigerian civil war viewed from the Biafran perspective. A few may attempt comparisons with contemporary writers, and others will unearth salient themes from his works to enrich future generations and provide cultural and political anodynes for a country in distress. Of course, too, most of the analyses and tributes will attempt a balanced examination of the writer, his on the one hand weighed against his on the other hand. Indeed, barely hours after his departure, tons of essays on the legend, many of them probably prepared beforehand, have been broadcast or published.

    Shortly before There Was a Country was released, I had written a short but questioning review of the controversial book. The review was limited, as it concentrated on a small aspect of the book released by the publishers to tease the public. It turned out in the end that that teaser was central to considerations of the book’s strengths and weaknesses. In my limited review, I was careful not to use it as a measure of Achebe’s literary endowment, whether that endowment is constricted or expansive, or use it as an indication of his life and times. That would have been most inappropriate, for a man of such copious output and prodigious talent could not be sensibly dismissed or characterised by one book, let alone a section of that book. I am not also going to pretend to use all or nearly all his works to define his essence, for that would also be a presumptuous endeavour. Nor would I attempt to compare one of his books with another, say, the gentle accessibility and simplicity of Things Fall Apart with the brilliance and complexity of Arrow of God.

    Whatever anyone may say of Achebe’s learning and worldview, whether he was deep or needed to be deeper, or whether he was thematically narrow in range or breathtaking, or whether he was controversial and disagreeable as a person or open-minded, gregarious, agreeable and universalist as an author, the important thing for me is that he had character and, needless to say, a curious and familiarly exciting point of view. There is no point trying to examine his literary competence. By every yardstick, he was an exquisite and exceptional writer, and he contributed immeasurably in birthing and giving fillip to the African perspective of literature. There are many fine writers the world has forgotten, or with time will forget. But there are a few who, regardless of the classicalness or mundaneness of their works, will be remembered for a long time. Like politicians and conquering generals, there are always a few additional and indescribable intangibles that qualify a man for greatness. Once these intangibles are absent, there is no amount of genius that can redeem the situation. And once they are present, there is no amount of ordinariness or lesser qualification that can attenuate it.

    Achebe’s character can thus be viewed from two perspectives. One is in terms of his character as a person, and the other is in terms of his character as a writer. What I find impressive about Achebe is how passionately he exuded both characters, as a person and as a writer, shorn of contrivances. Indeed, it seems to me that the leitmotif of his life and work could not be divorced from his Igbo identity. However, embracing that identity was a matter of choice for him, not compulsion. It coloured some of his works, just as his politics could not transcend it. It may be too early to determine what influence that identity would have on his legacy now or in the future, but it made Achebe the enigmatic and mercurial person he was. It didn’t matter to him that critics pointed out the dissonance between his lofty image as a great writer and the limiting parochialism of some of his pet views; all that mattered was that he summoned the fortitude to stick to his views. He had an unquenchable zeal to be himself, and he had the talent to nurture and sustain that zeal.

    As a writer, he cared even less what reservations anyone might have about the messages he furnished in his works or how trenchantly he projected his point of view. He belonged to the old school of great writers who despised taking refuge behind harmless, defanged words and imageries. His criticism of Conrad, for instance, was strident and, in some parts, downright abusive. In the same manner, his characterisation of some of the key political players during the Nigerian civil war was sweeping, exuberant and pugnacious. You may not agree with him, but you could not ignore him, for he had a poignant way of conveying his views. You may disagree vehemently with him, but you had a sense of his presence, his convictions, and his character. After all, I disagree with the American poet and critic, Ezra Pound’s impressionable theory of economics, and find his admiration for fascism shocking, but who could deny or resist the exquisiteness and brilliance of his poetry, particularly the Pisan Cantos, notwithstanding the circumstances in which the poem was penned shortly after World War II?

    Achebe was a pathfinder, and, as I indicated in this place when I wrote a short review of his latest work, his reputation as a writer is secure, notwithstanding the multiple indiscretions of indulging in historical fallacies. As much as the inimitable Mark Twain tried to philosophise in some of his works, notably The Mysterious Stranger, and as classical and supremely engaging as many of his works were, such as Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, Old Times on The Mississippi, and Innocents Abroad, he never rose to the level of a philosopher of any appreciable talent. Achebe, too, never quite made it as an original thinker, nor perhaps ever tried. But he achieved greatness as a writer of immense ability, as the general editor of the Heinemann African Writers Series, and as a mentor, literature teacher and trailblazer.

    His books did not win as many prizes as he probably coveted or merited. But those books are with us for all of eternity to help sustain his huge legacy. His aspirations for Nigeria were left unfulfilled, and he even spurned the half-hearted attempt by the Olusegun Obasanjo and Goodluck Jonathan governments to honour him, but he departed these shores with the consolation that he repudiated his country’s maladies as vigorously as he could manage and as cathartically as he felt he needed to mitigate the injury occasioned in his mind by widespread leadership incompetence.

    It is no mean achievement that Achebe departed at 82, the second of the famous literary quartet God bestowed on Nigeria, Christopher Okigbo having achieved immortality ahead of the rest. As the many panegyrics written in honour of Okigbo have proved, absence really does make the heart grow fonder. From now on, many panegyrics will be written to the departed Achebe. Britain may no longer have its Dickenses, nor Russia its Dostoyevskys, nor France its Molieres, nor Ireland its Shaws, for the world has become a parched or at best middling literary landscape, but at least we still have our Wole Soyinka and J.P Clark, the two surviving members of the quartet. What we do with them is up to us.

    Achebe’s life and death symbolise the continuing mockery of our inexistent national identity. There is no poet’s corner in Abuja to bury the legend, or any other legend for that matter, for neither do we have a national identity to subdue individual ethnic identities, nor do we have leaders with a sense of history to conjure symbols that could underscore that identity. Achebe will probably be buried in his hometown, the final act in his repudiation of a country that has neither proved itself worthy of its great sons nor risen to an enviable height by the cumulative and stirring effects of the accomplishments of its great daughters.

  • Kano, amnesty and amnesia

    Kano, amnesty and amnesia

    For some, the killing of more than 70 persons in a suicide bomb attack on a bus park in Kano last Monday makes the case for granting terrorists rampaging across northern Nigeria amnesty, more compelling.

    I beg to disagree. If anything, this stomach-churning slaughter of innocents by faceless cowards should embarrass all those making the amnesty argument.

    As an instrument for bringing peace to strife-torn countries, the amnesty has its place. But it works best where the issues involved are largely political or more general crimes. It is more difficult to accept where the matters are sectarian or religious, and where the potential beneficiaries are bestial killers who unapologetically target unarmed civilians – even children.

    Those pushing the case for amnesty for Boko Haram militants think they have latched on to a magic bullet that will make the current misery of northern Nigeria disappear. But they are mistaken for a number of reasons.

    Firstly, mass killings have become ritualistic over the last five decades in the north. What Boko Haram is doing today is not different from what the followers of Mohammed Marwa aka Maitatsine did in Kano, Kaduna and other places in the 70s and 80s. In that period, thousands of people lost their lives as adherent of his sect clashed with other groups and security agencies.

    Interestingly, Maitatsine saw the reading of any other book but the Koran as paganism. He preached against the use of radios, watches, bicycles, cars and undue accumulation of cash – doctrines which bears an eerie resemblance to what Boko Haram – Western education is sin – propagates.

    Today’s horrific killings may be shocking, but all those not afflicted with amnesia, will see that they pale in comparison to what happened to a certain Gideon Akaluka in Kano in 1994.

    He was an Igbo trader resident whose wife was accused of desecrating a page from the Koran. Confronted by irate accusers, Akaluka fled to the Bompai, Kano police station for refuge. Soon the mob tracked him down and demanded that the police hand him over. They quickly obliged.

    Right there, before people who were supposed to enforce the law, he was beheaded and his head impaled on a stake. The gory trophy was then paraded triumphantly round the metropolis by the ‘all-conquering’, singing and chanting mob. No one was ever brought to justice over that act of bestiality, neither were the police ever punished for dereliction of duty.

    Hardly a year passes in the north without terrible and inexplicable killings triggered by sectarian or political causes. Over a week in February 2000, more than 400 persons were killed in Kaduna State following riots that accompanied the introduction of Sharia law.

    After three days of rioting across the north in November 2002, over 100 people were killed after THISDAY newspaper published a controversial article following the botched attempt to host a Miss World pageant in Nigeria.

    I doubt if anyone is keeping count. But the death toll in the lingering communal clashes in Plateau State since their onset must be somewhere in the thousands. The outrages continue today, unfortunately we have become so desensitised to mass murder that the abominable numbers no longer shock us.

    This mass slaughter is errant behavior that has continued because it has never been confronted in any serious manner over the years. Rather than bring peace to the north, amnesty will be a reward for bullying conduct. Another set of thugs will rise up conscious of the fact that politically-correct politicians will one day band together to pat them on the back.

    The second reason why this amnesty business will not wash is that the current insurgents are a totally different kettle of fish because of the time of their manifestation. Whereas their forerunners like the Maitatsine sect were a local phenomenon, Boko Haram has well-established ties not only with the routed Islamists in Mali, but also with the global Jihadi movement.

    It continues to thrive because some of those it targets are not motivated just by a need to escape justice. They are not the dregs of earth pushed into criminality by poverty. Some like Farouk Abdulmuttalab are the scion of the rich classes seduced by romantic notions of jihad sold by the terrorist Al-Qaeda network.

    When President Goodluck Jonathan said government will not extend amnesty to ghosts, some criticised him – saying Boko Haram were not faceless because some of their suspected members were in jail. But who do we have in jail other than some hungry 18-year old paid to place an IED in a public square?

    These are errand boys whose only contact with anything that approximates sect leadership is some disembodied voice at the other end of a phone line. A serious matter like amnesty cannot be discussed with clueless messengers or so-called leaders who won’t show their faces.

    Boko Haram bigwigs are not in jail, neither are their sponsors. They are so ashamed of their evil deeds they hide behind balaclava masks to address the media. If I were responsible for the Kano carnage that killed more of my people than my supposed enemies, I would be ashamed too. This is the third ground that makes it virtually impossible to contemplate any such measure for the sect.

    When the Niger Delta militants signed on to the amnesty deal, they all crawled out of the creeks and were shipped off to Aso Rock for photo opportunities with the late President Umaru Yar’Adua. The world was at last able to put faces to shadowy characters with exotic names like “Tompolo,” “General Shoot-at-Sight” “Ogunboss” etc.

    Although they had used unlawful, and often violent means to pursue their cause, but their fight against the economic rape of their region and the decades-long environmental degradation was a noble one that even mainstream politicians could identify with. The same cannot be said of Boko Haram. Which major northern politician wants to be associated with this despicable group?

    Several months ago they named some major northern figures to negotiate with the Federal Government on their behalf. Within hours the would-be peacemakers were falling over themselves trying to put distance between them and the group.

    Of course, there is the rump of Boko Haram led by one Sheik Abu Mohammed Ibn Abdulazeez which says it now wants peace. But before we get ahead of ourselves, we should ask how many legions of terrorists this chap commands.

    One thing I know is that he has absolutely no control over the Kano killers. Neither does he have any hold over the Ansaru faction which claimed responsibility for the execution of seven foreign hostages two weeks ago.

    Rather than wasting time on this amnesty talk, government should be thinking of developing capacity for fighting the terrorists. After 9/11, when Al-Qaeda caught the United States cold, the Americans created the Department of Homeland Security as part of their comprehensive response. They didn’t choose the easy way out by offering amnesty to the enemies of all that they stood for.

    Today, the major national security threat facing Nigeria is terror, not some cross-border invasion by any of our neighbours. That is why the balance of our security spending should tilt away from conventional forces towards building up intelligence and counterinsurgency.

    Let’s fight for justice and human values for once. This unhealthy stampede to offer amnesty is akin to surrendering to fringe elements who through murderous tactics are making us lose our humanity. Let’s grow a spine and say no to evil.