The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sunday

  • The delusions of today’s men

    The delusions of today’s men

    I read Dr. Reuben Abati’s article titled ‘The Hypocrisy Of Yesterday’s Men’’ (3rd Feb.2013) which was published in virtually every newspaper in the country with amusement. He sought to ridicule and demean those of us that served President Olusegun Obasanjo’s government and that are not very impressed with the performance of his boss. The fact that we asked President Goodluck Jonathan to account for the 67 billion USD that he squandered from our foreign reserves has clearly upset him. We dared to ask about the money and so we were singled out and targetted for a tongue-lashing and a long lecture from the Presidency. Yet we remain undeterred. This is how weak governments that have nothing to offer and something to hide always behave.

    They come after their perceived enemies with full force and they are petty and oversensitive. This is all the more so when they lack experienced hands and when they do not have anyone with deep insight or wisdom about the art of governance or politics within their ranks. In his response instead of answering our questions, addressing the issues or making any pertinent and sensible points about the numerous allegations against his principal, Abati chose to go on a delusional and self-serving joy ride.

    He simply refused to address any of our numerous concerns but instead indulged vainly in what can only be described as an utterly vulgar and distasteful form of intellectual, spiritual and psychological masturbation by telling us that he and his master were ‘’today’s men’’ who needed no lessons from the ‘’men of yesterday’’. The essay was nothing but the usual smear campaign and a crude attempt to intimidate which has been the hallmark of this Government whenever they are faced with even the mildest form of criticism. I will not dignify most of the insulting and childish submissions that Abati indulged in with a response other than to say that he told a shameless and pernicious lie when he wrote that as Minister of Aviation I ’’shut down Port Harcourt Airport for two years’’ and ‘’allowed grass to grow all over it’’. This is false. It is a classic case of disinformation coming from a man that is obviously suffering from a very low self-esteem.  It is clear that Abati, who is a journalist, has forgotten the most important tenet of his profession which is that ‘’facts are sacred and opinion is cheap’’. Ordinarily one would have ignored his bitter rant but it is important that I set the record straight for the sake of posterity. The facts are as follows.

    Port Harcourt International Airport was closed on Dec.10 2005 after the Sossolisso Air crash in which 100 people were killed. The crash affected the runway of the airport very badly and consequently the then Minister of Aviation, Professor Babalola Borishade closed it. I was redeployed from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism to the Ministry of Aviation in November 2006.

    This was 11 months after the Sossolisso crash took place and that Port Harcourt Airport had been closed. It is clear from the foregoing that I was not the one that shut down Port Harcourt Airport. When I took over at Aviation my priority was to carry out all the necessary repairs at Port Harcourt Airport and to open it as quickly as possible. I was saddened to discover that in the previous 11 months before I got there nothing had been done and the contract to repair the runway had not even been awarded. Consequently within a month of my being appointed Minister of Aviation we set to work and awarded the contract to Julius Berger at the cost of 3 billion naira. 50 per cent of the money was paid up front and Julius Berger set to work immediately. The runway was fully completed and the airport in pristine condition before I left office on May 29th 2007 just 6 months after I awarded the contract. However despite this the airport could not be opened before we left because the runway lighting system was still in the process of being installed. The Yar’adua government went ahead and opened the airport a few months after we left office even though the runway lights had still not been installed. The record shows that from the day that I was appointed Minister of Aviation and the time that our mandate ran out 7 months later my staff at the Ministry and Julius Berger worked night and day on the runway project at Port Harcourt International Airport in order to ensure that we finished it in record time. And this we managed to do. It was my project. I sourced the money for it, I paid for it, I forced the contractor to move fast on it and I finished it. The fact that the Yar’adua administration did not complete the lighting system and open the airport for another few months after we left office, even though the runway was ready, is for them to explain and not for me. Even though nothing was done at that airport for 11 months before I got to Aviation, once I was appointed we swung into action immediately.

    I repeat that it was under my watch that work commenced, that it was rebuilt, that it was completed and that it was fully restored and after that the airport was ready to be fully utilised. Given these facts how Abati can peddle the lie that I was the one that not only closed the airport but that I also kept it shut for two years, did nothing there, caused it to remain idle and allowed ‘’grass to grow all over it’’ honestly baffles me. I was Minister of Aviation for only 7 months and not 2 years and within those seven months, from scratch, I did all the work that needed to be done in order to make the airport functional again. I am proud of the fact that we succeeded in meeting our target and completing the job.

    Abati also so asserted that I closed down ‘’other major airports’’ whilst I was Minister of Aviation ‘’for the purposes of renovation’’. Again this is not true. Not one of the four major airports in the country were closed down for renovation works or any other reason whilst I was Minister of Aviation. And neither, to the best of my recollection, did I close or suspend the operations of any of the smaller airports except perhaps for safety reasons. As a matter of fact the opposite was the case. I actually installed and completed the sophisticated Safe Tower Project in three of the four major airports in the country, resurrected and funded the Tracon Radar System which is operational in our country today and which gives us full radar coverage in our airspace, upgraded the facilities in many of the old smaller airports and granted permission for the establishment of new airports in places like Gombe. Quite apart from that we not only stopped the terrible cycle of plane crashes that was prevalent at that time but there was not one aircraft that crashed under my watch and no loss of life from the air under my tenure. I am the only Minister of Aviation in the last 10 years of our country that can boast of that and yet Abati seeks to tarnish my name, stain my record and rubbish my efforts with his lies. All this and far more and Abati accuses me of ‘’running the aviation sector down to a state of near collapse’’. For that I commit him to God’s judgment. It is obvious that he is just being malicious and dishonest. I take strong objection to his specious lies, his brazen falsehood and his distortions of fact. The suggestion that I closed Port Harcourt Airport and neglected it for two years, that I closed other airports for renovations and that I ran the aviation sector down to the ground is what I would refer to as a figment of his malicious, overactive and fertile imagination. It is a  glaring mendacity, a brutal assault on truth and an affront to my sensibilities. I find it utterly reprehensible and repugnant that a man that is entrusted to speak for the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria can indulge in such petty lies.

    Let me end this contribution by pointing out the fact that being ‘’yesterday’s men’’ does not mean that some of us cannot be ‘’tomorrows men’’ as well. Only God knows what lies ahead for each and everyone of us. So when Abati glibly writes people off as if they will never be in power again it is a sad reflection of his lack of experience and naivety. It is God that determines our tomorrow. It is He that lifts men up, that pulls them down and, sometimes if it be His will, lifts them up again. There are countless examples of that in our history. Finally I have a few questions for President Jonathan and his ’’todays men’’.

    When will they take President Obasanjo’s advice and finally do something concrete about Boko Haram and our security situation? Does the fact that at least 4000 Nigerians have been killed by these terrorists in the last two years under their watch not bother them? How can they sleep well at night with all that innocent blood that has flowed and precious lives cut short whilst they were at the helm of affairs of our nation? More innocent souls have been killed in the last 2 years by terrorists than at any time in the history of Nigeria outside the civil war. How does President Jonathan and his ‘’today’s men’’ feel about winning such a dubious and dishonorable title? Does he still regard Boko Haram as ‘’his siblings’’ who he ‘’cannot hurt’’? Why has the President refused to visit the good people of the north east despite the fact that dozens of people are still being slaughtered there by Boko Haram every day? Moving to the issue of corruption and the economy when will our President and ’’today’s men’’ answer the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom David Cameron’s question and tell him what they did with the 100 billion USD that they made from oil sales in the last two years? When will they answer Obi Ezekwsile’s question about how they squandered 67 billion USD of our foreign reserves? When will they answer the question that Nasir El Rufai asked sometime back about how they spent over 350 billion naira on security vote in one year alone?

    When will they answer the many questions that Dr. Pat Utomi and many other distinguished and courageous leaders and ’’yesterday’s men’’ have raised about the trillions of naira that have been supposedly spent on oil subsidy payments in the last two years? When will they implement the findings and recommendations of the Nuhu Ribadu report on the thivery that has gone on in the oil sector? When will they cultivate the guts and find the courage to respond to a call for a public debate to defend their abysmal record?

    When will these ‘’today’s men’’ stop being so reckless with our money? Why would our ‘’today’s man’’ FCT Minister budget 5 billion for the ‘’rehabilitatioin of prostitues in the Abuja’’? Why would he budget 7.5 billion naira for a new ‘’FCT city gate’’? Why would he budget 4 billion naira for a house for the First Lady? Why would the Federal Government of ‘’todays men’’ budget 1 billion naira for food in the Villa? Are these the priorities of ‘’today’s men and women’’?  And all this when Nigeria is back in foreign debt to the tune of 9 billion USD and is still borrowing, when local debt has hit almost 50 billion USD, when graduate unemployment has hit 80 per cent, when 40 per cent of Nigerians do not have access to good food and ‘’are hungry’’ and when 70 per cent of Nigerians are living below the poverty line? Is this the vision of ‘’today’s men and women’’? If so may God deliver Nigeria.

     

    •Fani-Kayode is a former

    Minister of Aviation

  • Kalu and Abia politics

    Kalu and Abia politics

    Of recent, the media has been inundated with the infantile vituperation of some journalists of Lagos based media trying to defend their benefactor, former Governor Orji Kalu, who likes to seek attention where none exists.

    I have read the accounts presented variously by the media and I am able to decipher that they are all headed in one direction, to create noise in abundance. But it is not his fault, he wants to divert attention by mocking at our collective and corporate intelligence. Are those noise makers not aware that their benefactor is now gallivanting in a political valley and wilderness, and therefore seeking desperately to gain undue attention by telling them to attempt a comparison between him and Governor Theodore Orji?

    No amount of money can purchase integrity because it is not a commodity. What I find difficult to understand is why Kalu thinks he can always fool all the people all the time. He is angry because he has failed to supplant the incumbent governor of the state with his former deputy; he was beaten flat in his own game. In as much as we want to set records straight, I will try to avoid replying him and his workers word for word because doing so will give him undue attention and comfort since his motive is mainly to be seen as someone who is in popularity contest with a sitting governor.

    The rejection of Kalu both in PDP and Abia is not the fault of Governor Orji but his own fault and everybody knows why. Today, he is saying he left PDP because of Obasanjo, tomorrow he will say Jonathan is a bad man and the next time he will abuse PDP and Orji, all to no avail. Governor Orji was a civil servant and was later redeployed to Government House where he played the role of an administrative and intellectual back bone of Kalu’s government to the extent that he was considered good enough to become governor, at a time the EFCC and Obasanjo were at the heels of Kalu. This led to his incarceration since Kalu was under immunity while Ochendo (Orji) was presumed to have had prior knowledge of the financial recklessness of Kalu. Everybody knew Ochendo’s incarceration was a blessing in disguise because without it he could have failed in that election. The massive support he received was as a result of protest vote in Abia State and not because of Kalu.

    Governance is soldier go, soldier come, and not a private estate of any man, who is trying by all means to reckon with the elites of Abia State, who have, in conjunction with the people of Abia, said with one loud voice, ‘enough” of politics of brigandage in Abia’.

     

    •Onyechere is Special Adviser, Public Communication to Abia State Governor, Theodore Orji

  • Eagles on Iroko

    Fair is fair. Even a government at bay deserves a lucky break, so it is understandable if Goodluck Jonathan decides to milk the goodwill redounding from the Eagles’ spectacular resurrection in South Africa. By an amazing and profound coincidence, the old eagles died in South Africa about two and a half years ago. Now, they are being reborn in the Country of Good Hope. It has been a moveable feast of fluid and flowing football. Messi beaucoup, boys!!!

    Nobody ever gave them a chance. Snooper for one did not. After physically witnessing the epic fiasco in South Africa, yours sincerely vowed never to watch the miserable rogues again this life time. Sometimes last week, snooper was fumbling with the remote control wondering what time later that evening Stephen Kessi’s jaded journeymen would be dismissed by the dreaded Ivorians.

    But the match was actually on. After watching for only a few minutes, snooper concluded that this was a new breed of Eagles. The boys have succeeded in unlocking the secret of their great ancestors. This was classy football at its sublime summit. After the brilliant dismissal of the Ivorians, the eagles went on to surpass themselves in a superlative shellacking of the Malians.

    Last Wednesday as the eagles were putting the Malians through the grinder, the entire country went still. Not a pin drop was heard. All the major streets of Lagos were deserted. Nigerians have gone to worship the only god they worship in unison: the god of soccer. Even armed robbers and kidnappers suspended operations. After the “service,” the streets erupted in jubilation and wild celebrations.

    Thanks again, boys for rekindling our hopes in a battered and beleaguered nation. Perhaps in the end, nothing can beat the description of the Malian goalkeeper who said that his team played Brazil and not Nigeria. To be compared to the greatest footballing nation in the world shortly after being dismissed as lax and laggard lame ducks is a tad short of the miraculous. so whatever happens this afternoon is a splendid bonus. Well done boys.

  • Intellectual Slavery and the Colonial Subject

    Intellectual Slavery and the Colonial Subject

    A fool and his intellectual capital are soonest parted. As it was in the beginning, so it it is proving to be at this late and probably closing phase of western domination of the universe. As the Black month unfolds, it is appropriate to dwell on the issue of intellectual slavery and the mental constitution of the colonial subject. The greatest wars take place in the territory of the human mind, and it is the unchallenged domination of this vital front by the western imagination that is responsible for its six-century domination over the rest of the world..

    There is a consensus among anthropologists that slavery has always existed in human society. It is an offshoot of warfare. Old Britain, for example, was a colony of the Roman Empire. People have always colonised and enslaved each other. But intellectual slavery, that is the mental colonisation or the deliberate and systematic inferiorisation of the other, has achieved its most potent form and formula with western imperialism and its variant of modernity.

    Physical enslavement and actual colonisation can be savage and abusive of human dignity, but intellectual slavery, because it works insidiously at the level of the mind, is even more cruel and exacting. Once a people’s mind is conquered and enslaved, the dominion and domination naturally extend to other domains such as the political, the economic and even the spiritual. The mentally enslaved is thus comprehensively de-humanized, that is stripped of their humanity— which makes the work of the conqueror easier.

    So it is, then, that today, the Black person, unlike the Chinese and Indians, has no viable religion of his own, no economic system, no political institution, no traditional epic genre as Isidore Okpewho has spent a life time refuting, no literature as they impishly and impudently told Wole Soyinka as a Knight’s fellow in Cambridge, no culture as they taught Chinua Achebe, and of course no history but a barbaric void as Lord Hugh Trevor-Roper grandly claimed.

    Having been a combatant in the global theatre of mental decolonisation for over three decades, snooper is not often amused by the antics of the mentally colonised. But one must not fail to notice when some delicious ironies appear in the horizon to lift the universal gloom about the unhappy fate of the Black person.

    Just as the Black month of February was unfolding, there on television was a group of retired Nigerian rulers together with the incumbent stoutly defending the government decision to spend billions of naira to commemorate the centenary of the amalgamation of the protectorates of Nigeria. There is a lot to celebrate about the amalgamation, they all chorused as if on cue and without any sense of irony.

    It was a most beguiling and historic snapshot, particularly with the most combatively unenlightened among the lot railing and thundering with the usual combustible gusto. There may be a lot to celebrate about Nigeria despite everything. But the amalgamation was not a Nigerian event.

    The “Dual Mandate” of Lord Lugard is a famous piece of fiction and a pious fraud since there is no evidence to show that the overrun nationalities ever gave their consent. It is a consecration of empire and imperial might, a testimony to its awesome power of colonial coercion and ability to territorialise and reterritorialise Africa at will.

    If this singular feat of human supremacy should be celebrated at all, it should be by relics of empire glorifying the might and power of their ancestors and not the descendants of those who were herded in like human cattle. The celebration and commemoration of one’s own enslavement is a classic instance of mental colonisation and the most depressing example of Afro-Saxony in recent political history. By the same token, the Japanese ought to commemorate the arrival of Commodore Perry on their shores, and the Chinese the seizure of Hong Kong.

    Yet as we have hinted, a lack of self-awareness and its ironic possibilities is a logical corollary of mental slavery. The Secretary to the Federal Government was widely quoted to have repeated Lord Lugard’s words with warm approval that Nigeria was “the product of a long and mature consideration”. Snooper will like to ask the burly and amiable Anyim Pius Anyim if any of his ancestors was present at the deliberation.

    If the Nigerian officials had wanted to be fair to themselves and to history they ought to have gone a bit farther in time to the Berlin Conference which began in 1884 and effectively saw to the colonial partitioning of old Africa. It was in 1884 that Henry Morton Stanley, the footloose Welsh explorer who managed to fight on both sides of the American Civil War, arrived in Berlin clutching a raft of treaties with traditional African chiefs who had willingly signed away their possession in exchange for meretricious trash.

    Next year, it will be 130 years since 1884, even though the Berlin Conference actually concluded in 1885. Since this tradition of frittering away immense natural resources has continued in Africa, particularly in Nigeria, we must not be afraid of celebrating and lionizing our worthy ancestors. Where it comes to a celebration of self-dispossession, the Nigerian government must accord this date a priority over mere amalgamation.

    But there may be more mundane matters hiding under this grandiose nonsense. The goat eats where it is tethered, says a famous Cameroonian proverb. Even if one cannot discount an element of deliberate mischief in all this, it is noteworthy that virtually all the newspapers reporting on the centenary extravaganza published a curious picture of Anyim with his mouth apparently salivating with intent. It could not have been at the prospects of the giant Ohaozara yam or rice from his native Ishiagwu.

    What will Equaino, Du Bois, Blyden, Martin Luther King, Cheikh Anta Diop, Azikiwe, Nkrumah, Macaulay, Senghor, Sapara Williams and all the avatars of the great project of mental decolonisation say about this desecration of history by the ruling elite in Nigeria? How will Frantz Fanon, the great psychiatrist of cultural deracination and political schizophrenia, describe the ruling class that presides over the current post-colonial anomie of Nigeria?

    It should be noted that while this capitulation to neo-colonial slavery is going on in Nigeria, two great sons of the Third World, one a Nigerian, the other an India and both Nobel laureates in different fields, are engaged in stellar decolonising projects. Soyinka and Sen are two of a different kind, but both are united in their passion and affection for their respective countries and continent.

    While in a new book, Wole Soyinka is deepening and refining his time-honoured quest and engagement with the recovery and recuperation of a noble and heroic African past as a weapon for confronting the neo-colonial devastation of the continent, Amartya Sen is chairing a committee in India to revive Nalanda, the world’s oldest university, after an 800 year recess.

    Soyinka surely has his Marxist and neo-Marxist critics who accuse him of romanticizing Africa’s feudal and unedifying past. The debate and the fundamental flaw in this argument are beyond the purview of this column. But suffice it to note that the decolonizing project is more than a matter of life and death for its heroic protagonists. Exile, humiliation, torture and death have been their lot. The question is: why has it proved so costly proving to the rest of the world that all people are equal and that even if Africa is no longer at the cutting edge of civilisation, it was at least the cradle of current civilization as evolved?

    The reason is the size, scope and scale of ambition of western modernity. For the first time in the history of the world, we have a vision of modernisation which can only expand and grow by denying or suppressing everything that came before it and by obliterating all that is parallel and contemporaneous to it.

    Hence the costly struggle to re-establish the Egyptian foundation of western modernity and the momentous inspiration it derived from classical Islam. Once the link and the trail of human achievement are re-established, the myth of the primitive Africa savage is very hard to sustain indeed. And so by the same taken is the project of mental colonisation..

    In 1809, more than half a century before the outbreak of the American civil war, the Abbe Henri-Baptiste Gregoire, sent a manuscript of a new work to Thomas Jefferson, a founding father and the third president of the United States. The book was a celebration and commemoration of essayists, writers and scientists of African extraction who had found their way to the west. It was titled, De La Litterature des Negress.

    As we have had cause to note in this column, despite his principled opposition to slavery, Jefferson’s view of the intellectual capacities of black people was notoriously truculent and characterised by savage dismissals. In an infamous passage from his Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson noted thus of the African American: “It appears to me that in memory they are equal to whites: in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous.”

    This remarkable diatribe was coming on the heels of the literary exploits of the trio Equaino, Cuguano and Sancho, former slaves of African descent, who seized late eighteenth century literary London by the scruff of the neck and were feted in all the leading saloons of England’s capital for their astounding feats of imagination. Being very well-connected to the metropolitan circuits of the old world, Jefferson could not have been unaware of the literary triumphs of these exemplars. Perhaps it was a case of prejudice compounded by deliberate ignorance. Gregoire’s treatise could have been a well-aimed and profoundly clandestine attempt to help Jefferson modify or moderate his unhelpful worldview.

    But it was an uphill task. The same views resonate in the works of European intellectuals and philosophers such as David Hume, Emmanuel Kant, Friedrich Hegel and even Karl Marx. As far as Marx was concerned, India and the African continent lost nothing in the wanton destruction of their old culture by the European conquerors as it was a culture shot through with idiotic superstitions and morbid myths.

    Nowhere else in human history had there been such a systematic and concerted attempt to cast a whole race as inferior. It was a pan-Western project of mental colonisation in which conservative, liberal, reactionary and radical intellectuals shared a unified vision of the world based on collective mental conditioning and the assumption of the “natural” superiority of western modernity.

    The consequences of mental colonisation are still very much with us, despite the cessation of physical colonisation,. They can be seen in nation-states that are inferior and poor copies of the original, political institutions that are not up to scratch, political elites that are a miscegenated breed of thieving nuisance, economic systems that are uncritically and uncreatively borrowed without any thought for the local conditions and in borrowed religions that lack race-specific nutrients.

    It will take a new intellectual elite with a new dream of Africa and a new visionary conception of human redemption to free the Black race from the clutches of mental colonisation. Before this mental revolution, all political revolutions are null and void..

  • ‘Messi’ and the opposition hordes

    ‘Messi’ and the opposition hordes

    It was billed as mission impossible by cynics who have seen past attempts at mergers and alliances by political parties fizzle at the altar of outsize egos and gargantuan ambitions. And, the speed with which four major opposition parties announced the formation of the All Peoples Congress (APC) was, to say the least, dizzying.

    Of all the reactions to the event, the one I found most entertaining was that by the national chairman of the ruling Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP), Bamanga Tukur. At a time when Nigeria’s football team, the Super Eagles, decided to shock a jaded nation with its exploits in South Africa, it was not surprising that Tukur would succumb to a sporting metaphor to respond to an equally unscripted political development.

    “If they have the strength why do they come together?” he wondered. “If you go for a contest you have the striker, you know Lionel Messi, PDP is Messi in the contest. They (opposition) are not a threat at all, it is better; it will inspire PDP to action.

    For the uninitiated, Lionel Messi is the pint-sized Argentinean dynamo who plays for the top Spanish La Liga side, Barcelona. He is quick, consistent and skilful beyond belief. Those are not words that you would ordinarily use to describe the PDP – a lumbering, bumbling, unwieldy assemblage of disparate interests welded together for so long, by the sole fact that in 13 years it has remained the surest path to power at the center.

    I didn’t expect Tukur to react to the news by saying he and his party men were shaking in their boots. Although, PDP’s National Publicity Secretary, Olisah Metuh, did issue a statesmanlike statement welcoming the merger, some leading members of his party have been to quickly dismissive.

    On the face of it they have grounds to be so cavalier. In 2011, Muhammadu Buhari’s infant Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) and the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) went into a late-hour mating dance. The alliance effort was half-hearted, but more critically, it was grievously ill-timed coming as it did just a few weeks before polling day.

    Many will also recollect another chaotic attempt at electoral collaboration in 1999. By the time of elections, leaders of the Alliance for Democracy (AD) who had dashed in and out of the nascent PDP and All Peoples Party (APP) for all manner of reasons, found themselves boxed into the South-West.

    The only way to power at federal level was to cooperate with the then APP which appeared to enjoy some popularity across the northern states. It turned out the APP’s supposed strength was exaggerated. Some of its leading lights like Umaru Shinkafi whom the AD-APP alliance was depending upon were roundly trounced. More than incompatibility, the 1999 failure was more because the collaboration was rushed – leaving no time for adequate mobilisation of the people and familiarisation with the political platform.

    Again, one of the reasons why such mergers and alliances had failed in the past was down to the presence of larger-than-life figures who led the potential partners, and whose ambitions stood in the way of genuine cooperation.

    When they were alive the ambitions of the likes of Chief Obafemi Awolowo and Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, were considerable cogs that made any talk of cooperation between the defunct Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN) and Nigeria Peoples Party (NPP) little more than a pipe dream.

    Many will see in the APC that same challenge given that Buhari still dreams of reaching the presidency. Some in the new partnership believe he remains a hard sell in other parts of the country, and prefer he anoints a younger individual around whom the new party can rally. But there’s no sense that the general has decided to sacrifice his aspiration. The only light at the end of the tunnel might be that the other parties have decided to live with the reality that the general will run one final time.

    Of course, many PDP strategists believe Buhari can never win an election in Nigeria. That much has been said by Dr. Doyin Okupe, Public Affairs Adviser to the President. Since we are still throwing football metaphors and analogies around, I might just add that in politics as in sport anything is possible. The current Super Eagles team at the African Cup of Nations went there unheralded. Many expected them to be humiliated by Cote d’Ivoire. Today, they will be playing in the finals against another underrated and unheralded bunch of no-hoppers – Burkina Faso!

    I suggest that rather than laugh and think that it will be business as usual, the PDP should be worried for all manner of reasons. Even if the opposition does nothing else, they have managed something major with the creation of the APC given their differences and the personalities who have agreed to subsume parties where they were once lords and masters, and join a bigger team where they will just be one of the major players. In Nigerian politics that is not something to sneer at.

    Will there be disagreements? Of course, there will be. Will someone people suddenly make an about-turn when they fail to get what they hoped for? Depend on it! Will some people starting carping about a lack of ideological purity? Of course, they will.

    But like the pragmatic former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, once told his nitpicking colleagues in the then opposition Labour Party: even if you have the best ideas you can never do anything about them for as long as you remain in opposition. His message was clear: Labour had to downplay the ideological grandstanding and find ways to make themselves electable.

    In the very existence of the APC today, Nigerian opposition politicians are finally waking up to the reality that PDP could govern for 60 years, as they have threatened to, unless they find a way to make themselves electable.

    Another reason the PDP should worry is that the key pillars in the new party have strength in two zones with the greatest haul of electoral votes: North-West and South-West. With that as foundation and with pick-ups in other zones, they can easily make the constitutional requirement of winning one-third of votes cast in two-thirds of the states of the federation. Believe it or not, there is a clear path way to Aso Rock for the APC.

    Lying like a time-bomb in the belly of the PDP is the President Goodluck Jonathan factor. Will he run or will he not? After the bitter zoning battles of 2011, and the unwritten understanding that he will govern for just one term, another bid by the incumbent is bound to fracture the party – to the benefit of a new, credible platform with a realistic chance of going all the way.

    Another factor the ruling party has to be concerned about is PDP-fatigue. Across the world the electorate often gets to a point where they just become bloody-minded, tired of the same old faces, and would gladly throw them overboard if there is a credible alternative in sight. Margaret Thatcher was kicked out by voters after 13 years in power for similar reasons. Come 2015 the PDP would have been in power 16 years non-stop.

    As a kid growing up in the 70s, I became familiar with a particular brand of analgesic called APC. The new opposition party can turn out to be Nigeria’s pain killer if its leading lights can show that their desire to get into power in order to implement their ideas is far greater than all their egos put together. That is the real challenge: forming the new party was the easy part.

  • Chime’s hide and seek

    Chime’s hide and seek

    On Thursday, Enugu State Governor Sullivan Chime flew back to the country as quietly as he jetted out last September. His return brought relief on the one hand, and profound grief on the other.

    I explain. Chime’s departure was on medical grounds, as everyone later came to know; so his return is good news. In fact, as this piece shaped up, part of the story was that he was eager to pick up from where he left off. I rejoice in the governor’s recovery, knowing that life, even for the rich and privileged, is in the hands of God. But I am deeply troubled by the fact that Chime and his managers failed to use the opportunity of his return to correct the grave mistakes surrounding his departure over four months ago. One reason for this is that neither the governor nor his handlers realised they were in error in the first place.

    Leaving Enugu in the third week of September, the governor divulged little information beyond the fact that he was proceeding on his annual leave and that his deputy would govern the state in his absence. There was no indication of where he was headed. There was no word on how long he would be away. Neither was anything said about his real mission, his health. That was wrong and it brought Enugu people no joy, neither did it do Chime himself any good whether as governor or politician. Such executive silence was in utter disregard and disrespect of the people who voted him into power. Enugu people and the entire country were clueless as to the state of their governor’s well-being, just as they had no idea when he would be back home. Such behaviour of leaders suggests that the people they lead count for little and are not qualified to know their leaders’ health status. This is in spite of the fact that those neglected people provide the money with which the leaders feed and fund their privileges. It smacks of downright disregard.

    Chime’s silence created a vacuum filled only by rumours and speculation, both unhealthy for the people, their governor and their state.

    It was a grave error his administration failed to correct upon his return. The blunder of silence at departure would have been corrected on his return with full disclosure and a heart-felt apology. Such humility would have appeased the people and rallied them behind him with prayers and thanksgiving. Also, such humble dispositions have a way of not just winning the people over but also helping the leader to realise his immortality. For sometimes, leaders fall into error thinking they may possess some superhuman qualities. They imagine they cannot fall ill, but when they do, they think it best not to let lesser mortals know.

    This is erroneous and harmful, for we all have a headache or flu now and then. Our economic strengths may vary, as may also our options of where to seek remedy, but ailment is no respecter of persons or status. The sooner our leaders came to grips with this fact, the less secretive they would be about their state of well-being.

    “I have recently been told that I am one of the millions of Americans who will be afflicted with Alzheimer’s Disease… At the moment I feel just fine. I intend to live the remainder of the years God gives me on this earth doing the things I have always done…I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life. I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead. Thank you, my friends. May God always bless you.”

    President Ronald Reagan wrote those words in August 1994 as doctors diagnosed a disease without cure. Goodwill messages flooded his California home. He was aged 83 then, but lived for 10 more years before succumbing to pneumonia. Were Reagan a Nigerian, perhaps only his wife Nancy and one or two other people would have known what ailed one of America’s most memorable commanders-in-chief.

    All over the world, the health status of national leaders is not such top secret, except in old Communist and totalitarian regimes. Former United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s health challenges are public knowledge. She has spoken of her concussion and blood clot near her brain. Chelsea, her daughter, has not held anything back. Neither has her father, President Bill Clinton who, himself, has well-known health issues of his own.

    On these shores, things are remarkably different but Chime’s health secrets are nothing new. They only conform to an ugly standard set by even more powerful forces.

    On November 23, 2009, then President Umaru Yar’Adua was flown out of the country and did not return until February 24, 2010. In the period, everything that should not happen to a country, happened to Nigeria. Amid concerns over his well-being, there were agitations as to the direction of the country, considering that no handover instructions were left. In fact, Yar’Adua’s aides made such capital of the fact that the ailing president could run the country from anywhere in the world. When his condition was very bad, his minders said it was splendid.

    Late last year, the whole country was enveloped in a cloud of needless controversies surrounding the health and whereabouts of First Lady Dame Patience Jonathan.

    When will our leaders demystify themselves and learn to value the people they lead?

  • The lost century

    The lost century

    Those who said Nigerians are the ‘happiest people on earth’ obviously knew what they were talking about. This is one country where you find the e go better expression on everyone’s lips, no matter how bad things are. No one is willing to confess negative. And that has its basis in religion, the opium of our people. That, I guess, is the source of our perpetual ‘happiness’. The only snag is that I have not found any link between that ‘happiness’ and life expectancy because it is also a fact that people who are happy tend to live longer than those who have sadness all around them. If our happiness is genuine, then we should be among the people with high life expectancy. At 47- 48, the lowest in the West African sub-region, we cannot say we are doing well. Yet, we are ‘happy’.

    That ‘happiness’ is apparently behind the Federal Government’s decision to celebrate the centenary of the amalgamation of the northern and southern protectorates to form what is now known as Nigeria, by Sir Frederick Lugard (known simply as Lord Lugard), in 1914. Although Nigeria as a country will be 100 years old next January, the commemoration of the amalgamation began on Monday, with the centenary anniversary dinner held at the State House in Abuja. We knew this was what the government would do when, sometime ago they started flying kites as to the importance of the amalgamation. As a matter of fact, what would have come as a surprise was if the government had decided otherwise. Anything that involves spending is welcome by our public officials for obvious reasons; there is always money to make, whether the country is mourning or celebrating. Forget about whether, as the government said, the events would be funded solely by the private sector. The fact is that we know how to waste money. Indeed, this is another laurel that is waiting for us to clinch.

    With the government’s decision to go ahead with the celebration, the people who do not see any cause for celebration have been told they have no point. Yet, I guess if we were to subject the issue to a referendum, most Nigerians would have rejected the idea of celebration because there is no way it is going to affect their lives or meet them at the very point of their needs. But here we are, the nays have had it again; again on our behalf. However, now that those who should take the decision have decided that we must celebrate, the cost should be borne by the government. Obviously, the government quickly came out to say the celebration would be funded by the private sector to disabuse the minds of Nigerians that the celebration is meant to make some few Nigerians richer from the public till. This shows the level of distrust among the people, of the government.

    But I prefer the government sponsoring the celebration not just because that is the right thing to do since it (government), is the one that sees the sense in celebrating the anniversary. Secondly, from experience, when our private sector bears such cost, it is the average Nigerian that they ultimately transfer it to. The private sector is no Father Christmas. Moreover, it has its own problems, many of which the government has not been able to solve. Also, we know the price we paid (and we are still paying) since the 2011 elections. Such private sector ‘assistance’ rubbed on us economically, it also cost us a lot in terms of moral rectitude; it has blurred our vision as we have not been able to think straight since then, acting as a corrupting influence on virtually all areas of our lives.

    This apart, if the private sector bears the cost of the celebrations at the centre, what of the states? What would the states do with the Unity Square that each of them is expected to build in their capital which would be unveiled during the nationwide ‘unity rally’? Is it the private sector that would bear that cost too, and other programmes that the states might want to do? Yet, many of these states are having cash crunch. Yet, they would have to look for ways to fund these projects that have no direct bearing on their people. What do we need unity square for? How does that engender unity? As a matter of fact, when we say we are organising ‘unity rally’, it is an admission of the fact that there is disunity in the country. Yet, General Yakubu Gowon introduced the National Youth Service Corps Scheme in 1973 to enhance national unity, among other objectives. If that and other programmes have not succeeded in uniting us, then we should not kid ourselves that ‘unity rally’ would.

    It is unfortunate that Nigeria’s case is like that of a hunchback who is carrying a load and people say the load is bent. Is it the load that is bent or the person carrying it? Many people believe Nigeria’s problems started since the 1914 amalgamation. I would not know whether to agree with them or not; and my point is informed by the fact that the country once worked within the framework of the amalgamation. But, whether we accept it or not, the country is no longer working. Without necessarily looking for an alibi for why the Goodluck Jonathan administration has not done well, I agree that most of the problems predate the present government. But we cannot divorce the government completely from the sorry pass in the country since the return to democratic rule in 1999, some 13 years plus, when the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has been in power. That is why I find it comical when the president or some of his aides make allusion to the same statement that the country’s problems predate the present government. They conveniently forget that the present government is also a PDP government and, ipso facto, an offshoot of the Olusegun Obasanjo administration that begot the Umaru Yar’Adua government in which the present president was the Number Two Citizen. So, if they say we should not blame President Jonathan for our country’s problems, they should be honest enough to admit that the PDP has not been of much use to Nigerians since 1999. That is the import of what they too are chorusing.

    Even former President, General Ibrahim Babangida, also said that the mistakes of past administrations are putting pressure on the country today. He did not say what the mistakes were or the past administrations that made them. Will we say those mistakes were those of the heart or the head? Again, the self-styled president did not tell us. Even then, we know. He was also quoted as saying that even Lord Lugard who did the amalgamation gave it a life-span of 100 years. Apparently, Lugard did not envisage that crude oil would be found in commercial quantity in the country then. If there is anything that is still holding this country together, it is not because the country’s leaders by and large worked towards its unity; rather, it is because of oil. We need to see the oil dry up first to see whether Lord Lugard was right or wrong.

    All said, Nobel laureate, Prof Wole Soyinka once said his generation was a ‘wasted generation’. In the same vein, this century appears irretrievably lost, so, let’s look forward to the next. And, in order not to have the same verdict when that century ends, we have a lot to do. And this is not talking politics; it is not just about governance or winning (or fixing) elections; it’s about good governance which is as easy to identify (as obscenity), when we see one.

     

  • Mali and how to strangle your economy in one easy step

    Mali and how to strangle your economy in one easy step

    •In times of war, a word of wise council is to be sought above the chatter of anxious men.

     

    This is a column in two parts. The first movement concerns Mali. The latter portion centers on the despondent economic news coming out of Europe and America.

    Given some comments I received last week, there is a need to refine points raised in last week’s submission on Mali. Some comments received were quite instructive. Others revealed that many people view complex events too simplistically. Because the violent Islamists in Mali seek to impose a vile existence, these commentators reasoned that the French-led western intervention is an unalloyed positive. Some people even claimed the piece backed the Islamists. That they missed the crucial point of the piece is likely attributable to my imprecise and clumsy pen. Indulge me as I try to clarify the central theme of that piece in hope of helping people discern the motives of the great powers.

    The violent extremists are not the children of Islam; they are spores of evil. However, just because the West now fights them in Mali does not render the intervention altruistic or mean the outcome will redound to the benefit of Mali or West Africa. The situation is tragic because it allows only a choice between bad and worse. In such straits, we opt for bad because it is less onerous; it does not present a happy occasion. That the jailer severs one man’s leg at the knee but maims yours only at the foot is not a proper cause for elation.

    Many applied the adage “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” to the crisis. Because the radical Islamists are an incendiary scourge, the western guns opposing them must be friendly these people reason. Sadly, they take the hoary maxim out of context and thus take false comfort in it. The saying applies when the third party has no significant relationship with you and no vital interests contrary to yours. If that party has interests colliding with yours, better toss the maxim out the window. Otherwise, it will lead to certain folly through imprudent policy. During World War II, Germany and the Soviet Union wanted to consume Poland. They allied in the despicable endeavor of dismembering a sovereign nation for no legitimate reason save the love of brigandage on a grand scale. Afterward, Germany used seized Polish territory as its forward platform to invade the Soviet Union. This is not to imply that Western designs in the Sahel are as sinister as Hitler’s machinations. Western nations are calculating; they are not irrational madmen. No, this example is a cautionary one. The domain of the great powers is not a simple place. The shortest distance to a desired point is never a straight line. Shadows serve as the filament of light in this world of intrigue within intrigue. In this place, the enemy of your enemy may well be your enemy.

    Such is the case in the Sahel. He who fiercely battles the Islamists does so for their selfish interests. Hopefully, the jihadists will be defeated; most likely they will fade into the ocean of sand to bide their time. The West will appear to have saved the day. But for whom? African leaders must think strategically. The people on the street are free to applaud the Europeans’ heroics. National leaders cannot afford the frivolity. They must formulate strategies minimizing the influence foreign militaries have in the region or risk lurching toward a new form of inferiority redolent of that old evil called neo-colonialism. Again, WWII provides the apt lesson. While Germany threatened, America and the Soviet Union allied against it. The minute Berlin fell prostrate, America and the Soviet Union descended into a Cold War.

    It is natural to feel relief that France has grasped the cudgel in Mali. This relieved sensation should block us from questioning why this was not done in Libya. Had they deployed troops in Libya, Mali would not have erupted. Tactically, it would have been easier to contain the Islamists along the narrow strip of fertile Libyan coast than to chase them the length and breadth of Mali. Moreover, the current Libyan government would have been strengthened. Where did the West think the jihadists would go after Gaddafi’s departure? Did they think the fighters would seek to vacation on the French Riviera? Months ago, the jihadists established several camps in southern Libya. Yet nothing was done about these camps although their very presence indicated the extremists were plotting a southern strategy. It was almost as if the West dared the jihadists to do what jihadists do: make war.

    Mali has become a beachhead for the western counterattack against Islamic insurgency in the Sahel. Coincidentally, the battleground of northern Mali reportedly has large quantities of uranium. The area lies adjacent to confirmed deposits in Niger. No wonder France has turned into a charging bull. Nuclear reactors supplies 75 percent of Gallic electricity. Having your soldiers deployed in the vital areas is a head start to getting your hands on the precious commodity. The fracas will also deter China; the West believes the meddlesome Chinese might sell their offspring to consummate a deal but they are not ready to fight for one.

    America has announced it will operate a drone airplane base in Niger. American troops also have deployed in Mali as advisors. AFRICOM has finally arrived by stealth, under the guise of emergency help. Several years ago, African leaders steadfastly opposed AFRICOM’s deployment on the continent. They blanched at a vastly superior, imperial military having a permanent presence on the continent. Since then, AFRICOM has searched for the slightest aperture through which it could set boot on African soil. They found the crack when a stream of non-black African jihadists funneled into the Sahel. This raised such apprehension that African nations forgot their stance against AFRICOM. Now, western deployments are greeted with indiscriminate applause.

    The deployments will arrest the fall of Mali. This is good. However, Africa must brace itself for the blowback. The Malian crisis will not be fully resolved under the present constellation of factors. The Tuaregs will likely remain embittered. Consequently, the northern tier of the Mali and Niger will become the Sahelian equivalent of the eastern region of the Congo. The government’s writ will have no currency in these badlands. However, exploration and mining will intensify, feeding French energy needs and the coffers of western firms. Meanwhile, western military deployments, under the guise of training, will sprout throughout the region. Previously barred entry through the front door, AFRICOM entered the house through the hole in the roof caused by the Libyan debacle. Most people will see this as a needed level of new security. History says otherwise. No long-term American deployment in a developing nation suffering an insurgency has ever relieved that nation of the insurgency. Usually, the deployments make a grander mess of things. This is the future that now beckons. There is no reason to applaud it. Now, on to economics.

    Western governments are not so busy in the Sahel that they don’t have time to choke their own economies. Europe and America stumble along the road of austerity like zombies in a trance. These countries relish a close relationship with economic disaster. Spain’s unemployment rate has reached a historic high. Greece falls so deeply into depression that many of its citizens no longer can afford heating oil to see them through the winter. They resort to burning tires, and furniture as well as chopping down trees for firewood. The nation that was the world’s first democracy has been demoted to the Third World. Europe’s third largest economy, Italy contracted by 2.3 percent last year; this year’s shrinkage is predicted to be worse. The Netherlands joined the recession parade late last year. The German economy, Europe’s largest, slowed during the last half of 2012. The UK faces an unprecedented triple-dip recession, experiencing its third sustained downturn in less than four years. America’s economy also shrank by a small margin during 2012’s final quarter.

    These nations share a common economic trait. They all persisted with fiscal austerity despite preponderant empirical evidence against this approach. They are like the madcap adventurer who places his finger under the descending guillotine blade. Upon seeing the severed finger, he reasons he will be safe if he puts his head under the blade because the thickness of his neck will protect against his head’s amputation.

    The pain caused by austerity is beyond a sad joke. It is sadism practiced by governments now servant to those who inhabit the strongholds of finance and power. These people and their servants derive malevolent glee at watching the poor scamper about like small insects trying to escape before the descending boot crushes them into the turf. If only they were forsaken, the poor could make it. However, austerity has added burden to their burden. There is no escape or recovery. There is only dismal endurance. Light has perished from their lives. The complex theories of mainstream economics have escorted the people into a modern Dark Ages that need not have been. It is tragic and mean because it is all so unnecessary.

    Yet, the princes of high money insist on austerity because it benefits them if no one else. Governments continue slashing their budgets, particularly funding for the poor and underclass. Millions of people have been set adrift. England now suffers the most dumbfounding example of stubborn adherence to discredited policy since Chamberlain walked backwards into WW II by appeasing Hitler in hope that the hyena of Berlin would tire and be sated if fed a generous snack of small, defenseless nations to devour.

    Not shackled by membership in the Eurozone, England has its own sovereign currency. Thus, it can run fiscal deficits without fearing insolvency. Instead, what PM Cameron and his Tory brethren most fear is an insolvency that will never come. Thus, they force feed austerity to their countrymen as a warden feeds gruel to his inmates. Repeatedly, Cameron has promised that austerity would grow the economy. Each time he has repeated it, the claim has failed him. Now the country borders on a rare triple-dip recession. Yet he cannot concede the error. He keeps promising prosperity is around the corner. It may be around the corner but sadly not the corner toward which he leads the nation. When Cameron stands on the international stage to berate Nigeria or any other nation for economic wastage he stands as a self-righteous thrower of stones living in a glass hut. The pain he inflicts on his economy is of the same magnitude as that for which he denigrates Nigeria. His misdeeds are also done for the corrupt purpose of bettering the moneyed elite. Consequently, the man has no more right castigating Nigeria than a drunk has fulminating against a drug addict for engaging in substance abuse.

    The shrinkage of the American economy is directly attributable to a reduction in government spending. Still, both Democrats and Republicans waltz toward a deal whereby they will brusquely cut the federal budget by several hundred billion dollars. This will plunge the nation into a recession that will bear President Obama’s name.

    Despite the books and theories written by the prominent economists paid and made by Big Money, nothing substitutes for the truth. The more governments impose austerity in a time of economic weakness, the more their economies falter. Being a clerk to Money Power, the IMF traverses the world seeking out vulnerable economies it can stifle, contract, and deflate. This travelling show often tours Africa selling its enervating wares. Africa consumes the defective products with good humor; but the good humor does little to mask our bad poverty. Austerity should be jettisoned before too many people are force to consume the flesh of their own diminution. Unless African nations break the intellectual shackles to forge independent-mind policies that grow their economies for the benefit of the people, they will consign their populations to an existence hounded by a poverty so relentless and omnipresent that it shall become synonymous with life itself.

    In this vein, news that West Africa pursues a monetary union is discomfiting. The contemplated regional union is eerily similar to the Eurozone architecture. The flawed structure of the European monetary union intensified the economic downturn of that area. A monetary union strips nations of their currency sovereignty. A nation with a sovereign fiat currency can run government deficits that spur growth without fear of becoming insolvent. Once a nation agrees use a currency over which it is not sovereign, the nation becomes slave to the currency. The country can no longer run deficits to spur the economy because it is no longer the producer of its own currency. The nation is reduced to the status of any common shop or household. It can go bankrupt and thus is prone to austerity as protection against such an outcome. This is a steep price to pay for the ephemeral, uncertain benefits of a common currency. West Africa should rethink this move lest it repeat the mistake Europe made. The costs for West Africa will be steeper because its economies are frailer than their Western European counterparts.

    The critique of austerity and financialist policies is a recurrent theme of this column. I do this not to bore but to warn you of what is to come unless we begin to think for ourselves. These policies are inhumane at best. They also don’t work. The policies do the opposite of what their advocates espouse. This outcome goes beyond GDP statistics and government accounting ledgers. The contest of progressive, pro-growth policies versus conservative austerity policies goes beyond ideology. It will dictate whether African governments will be sufficiently equipped to educate our children, build the roads and bridges that open to a more placid future, and care for the elderly and infirmed. It will determine whether the general economy is sufficiently healthy to produce jobs giving the average man the chance at a decent wage and dignified life. It speaks to whether Africa can free itself from the past or remain prisoner of it. In the end, we must decide whether we live for ourselves and author our own fate or serve as the stationery upon which someone else writes their own story.

     

  • A heart to thrive

    A heart to thrive

    Everyone knows that you need more than wings to fly. More than anything else, you need a heart. To make a success of anything, you require more than tools or tutelage. You need a heart to fly, a fire to propel you.

    Only a few years ago, planes were falling off the Nigerian sky at an alarming frequency, plunging people to a most horrific death. It wasn’t that Nigerian pilots could not fly an aircraft. Nor was it that the planes were wingless or not altogether airworthy. The aircraft were crashing simply because there was no heart to ensure safety in the air. Without such a heart, therefore, no one prioritised the installation of obligatory flying aids. Nor was the right orientation in place for ground personnel. The result was the unforgettable catalogue of air tragedies of the Obasanjo years. The moment the right heart came the planes flew began to fly peacefully in the Nigerian air space.

    Hard-nosed football coaches look for this sort of heart in their players especially the strikers. A good pair of legs is not enough. Nor is ball control. Do you have enough push, an insatiable hunger to put the ball behind the opponent’s net? Attackers are rested if this fire is not in their belly.

    We need such fire to successfully tackle every challenge facing this country, including insecurity. These days of Boko Haram bloodletting, we have read that virtually every world power has lent us their security and intelligence services to help tackle terrorism. The other day, we read again that the Jonathan administration appealed to Britain for help in this regard.

    If outsiders help, it is all well and good, considering that no nation is, or can be, an island. But as a people, we need a heart of our own to confront evil. External help is welcome but it may not endure. Beyond the obligation stirred by our common humanity, the West will only help us or anyone if the gesture will benefit its people one way or another. There are interests to protect, new grounds to break and virgin frontiers to explore. Beyond that, you are essentially on your own. We need a heart to survive before the helpers come. We need a heart to survive while they are here. And we definitely need a heart to stay alive after the helpers are gone.

    Such a heart has eluded the Nigerian leadership. In spite of assorted national mantra, slogans and other forms of rhetoric, leadership has perpetually failed the nation and its people. Why? No heart to swing things. No heart to fly.

    A few examples won’t go amiss. Our leadership has consistently expended a lot of energy and cash to project a polished Nigerian brand to the world. We have been urged to dress Nigerian and to love the local fabric. But what effort has been made to revive the abandoned indigenous textile industry that should spin out the fabric?

    The Ministry of Works takes a handsome cut of statutory funds from the federal purse but has failed to build roads or repair damaged ones on which our perish every day.

    Every government has trumpeted its iron-cast resolve to put corruption out of the Nigerian space, but the monster continues to grow in stature nevertheless. It continues to cripple everything we hold dear. Providing electricity, for instance, has since become an unsolvable puzzle essentially because of corruption.

    Some might say we lack most of the things we need to take off. No. We have everything we need. We do not lack resources, whether in human or natural form. If crude oil were for drinking, I believe we have enough of it to serve every family three times a day. But its abundance has ironically not always guaranteed its availability nor stopped us from importing fuel at a huge cost. Our human resources have also been helping to build overseas nations. But we cannot build ours. Why? We lack a heart to convert resources to assets, deployable to the common good.

    Boko Haram has set everyone’s teeth on edge. Last week our prized federal lawmakers were in an uncoordinated marathon race, beginning from their hallowed seats and terminating in the open space outside the legislative chambers where they felt safe. A security officer was later to dismiss the marathon as a needless product of an empty rumour. But you won’t blame the frightened lawmakers any more than you will chide a man who was robbed by someone wielding what he suspected was a toy gun. Who will wait to find out if a Boko Haram threat is a baseless rumour, or that a robber’s weapon is actually not made of iron?

    So bring in the British anti-terror experts, but we must bear in mind that we need much more than them to live peacefully in this country. We need a heart to protect our own, and a new order that puts premium on the human life, even that of a single individual.

     

    First published September 25, 2011

     

  • Steal the Central Bank of Nigeria, plead guilty, go home free

    Steal the Central Bank of Nigeria, plead guilty, go home free

    I had intended to commence, this Sunday, a series of articles on the refreshing re-engineering presently afoot in the South-West courtesy of the A C N governors in the region, a pan-regional renewal of infrastructure, education, agriculture and ground-breaking social security programmes for the elderly so heartwarming Chief Obafemi Awolowo would give the architects a thumbs up from his grave since they are earnestly working towards the happiness and well-being of the greater majority of the people which the Avatar unequivocally prescribed as the raison d’être of a good government. That, however, was before the news broke of an insensitive Abuja High Court judge sentencing one John Yusufu, a self-confessed thief of N32.8billion Police Pension fund, to two years imprisonment with an option of a measly N750, 000 fine which the convict promptly paid. Interestingly, less than 24 hours after that judgment, an Ikare Magistrate Court in Ondo State sentenced an accused to three years imprisonment for stealing a telephone handset worth N17, 000.

    More nauseating than Mr Justice Talba Mohammed’s unthinking judgment is the fact that the EFCC, with all its effete posturing about corruption, was privy to this unconscionable arrangement. This is obvious from the following statement by the agency: ‘The Commission is of the view that the option of fine runs contrary to the understanding between the prosecution and the defence wherein the convict consented to a custodial sentence with the forfeiture of all assets and money that are proceeds of crime’. Little wonder the convict knew well ahead, exactly how much he was going to be fined. With things as they stand in the country today, the EFCC must reckon as the greatest motivator of corruption. Where in the civilised world, other than Nigeria, would such a rogue walk away with a slap on the wrist? Did Mardof get a plea bargain in the U.S? Is whatever money or property seized more important than the immoralities EFCC is inculcating in the citizenry through these brazen compromises? Where is the money paid by the likes of former governor Lucky Igbinedion and co in past plea bargains or where are the houses forfeited to government in all these ludicrous paddy paddy bargains? Were they not all sold within their cabal? If a man could literally walk free from such humongous heist, why would unemployed graduates not go into armed robbery and some jobless miscreants into kidnapping? As it stands today, EFCC deserves to be completely scrapped. It was no surprise that another government agency, the Code of Conduct, was reported to have summarily quashed the case of one of the co- accused persons in whose account at the United Bank of Africa a whooping N500 million was found, freed allegedly on the intervention of the wife of a very senior government official.

    Since the news broke, I have heard lawyers of all hue rationalising plea bargaining. I make bold to say that while this may be provided for in our law books, it is absolutely unhelpful in a Nigerian society where corruption has become, not only endemic but, systemic. Whichever way you turn, all you hear are public servants stealing, no longer millions but, billions of naira given the certainty that no punishment awaits them. Impunity has taken over the land and when anti-corruption agencies make a sham of going to court, all you get is what the Abuja judge dispensed here as punishment -a huge joke and the same reason Ibori was treated here in Nigeria as a paragon of honesty only to be shamefully jailed in the U.K.

    What a rudderless government we have and what a spineless people we are turning out to be? What a country? Why will the world not call us thieves? Coming so soon after a British court described one-time governor Ibori as a common thief in state house, who in the world should respect any Nigerian? Are these judicial officers, supposedly operating in the temple of justice, so uncaring they can vomit any judgment, however inane? Granted that this judge cannot single-highhandedly re-write the law, (but) was he obligated to offer the criminal an option of fine knowing full well that a cow thief in a part of this country could have a limb chopped off? What impunity, and, again, is there a single reason young Nigerians should not go into armed robbery or kidnapping when men and women constitutionally empowered to moderate our values through the instrumentality of law are so unthinking? Going by the level of listlessness routinely displayed by the judiciary, shouldn’t every Nigerian be a criminal of sorts since criminality pays so handsomely? And by the way, hasn’t it been suggested this same judge it was who ruled that Kenny Martins had no case to answer in another police-related case where sleaze was strongly alleged? Doesn’t he realise that hundreds of thousands of poor retired old men who had served this nation to the best of their abilities are victims of this heist and that some of them actually die, queuing for this same pension? God, give us judges: men and women in their dignified robes, who will know that they are chosen by you, though appointed by man, to perform what essentially is a solemn function to the edification of your name, rather than simply see it as working for a meal ticket.

    Lord, give us responsible judges.

    Questions ad infinitum, but let us get to the nitty gritty of this thoroughly revolting case. We have in this country, a party which, as I often describe it, has held this country under its stranglehold for close on 14 years and always with about three quarters of members of the National Assembly. For these many years, has the National Assembly been so irresponsible it did not know that even if you steal the entire Central Bank of Nigeria, all you get is a 2-year jail term? Did they consider this equitable to the offence? What then is the responsibility of the Committees on Judiciary in both the Senate and the House of Representatives, or does it stop with the squandering of funds and allocation of state of the art cars for so-called committee work? Of course Nigerians will not be surprised their representatives are too blinded by graft and greed to notice such inequities.

    This case is so nauseating you want to puke.

    Where now is PDP’s so-called Ethical Revolution, that shibboleth, like Vision 20 20 20, and its cousin, Rebranding, through which they once ate the nation raw. PDP is never short of such grandstanding rhetoric. Trending now is their Centenary anniversary and Senator Ayim Pius Ayim, Secretary to the Government of the Federation, is throwing his entire weight into it. By the time the dust settles on this too, Nigeria would have been short-changed to the tune of billions of naira. Didn’t former minister Ezekwezili, only last week, ask them questions as to how they squandered a colossal $67 billion; an amount no West African country, beside Ghana, can boast of in a given financial year?

    That is PDP with its ideology of ‘share the money’.

    And what manner of people are we? Are we so consumed with the challenges of life and living that we have become so spineless? Must we take just about anything when, as you read this, Egyptians, in spite of an emergency declared by government, are still out there on the streets protesting against some draconian decrees by the Morsi government?

    .And as somebody has asked, why are the two major religions silent on this evil plaguing our country? What are the moral and ethical tenets driving these religions that they cannot lead their adherents out on a massive anti-corruption demonstration as is routinely done in other countries? And concerning the Bible and the Quran which these rogues, counting on the mercy of God, do not take seriously, shouldn’t our constitution now prescribe that public officials should swear on Ogun – the god of iron – and such like gods which show no mercy to criminals? Shouldn’t our traditional religionists place a curse on those rabidly raping this hapless country? At least one remembers General Obasanjo once suggesting we fight purveyors of the apartheid system with African juju.

    If these nation wreckers are so unrelenting, l will suggest it is time unforgiving African gods are unleashed on them for the sake of fatherland.