The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sunday

Constitution review: Time this national assembly got serious

Whether at the corporate level, as in when the Chairman of its Publicity Committee speaks, or individually as in Senator Smart Adeyemi haranguing us, reminding us he remains a journalist and would think nothing of leading a demonstration, it has been sabre rattling galore, threats and more threats, against any sensible voice that asks the National Assembly to drop, like hot potato, this their diversionary and, ill-advised, pre-occupation with wanting to make local governments an unprecedented, third federating unit to the Nigerian federation. What remains to be heard from these supposedly grassroots- loving National Assembly members is their readiness to abandon their stupendous, out of this world, quarterly forays into the national treasury which the Central Bank Governor once calculated to be in the region of 25 percent of the annual national budget. No, their love of country does not extend that far but it is our hope and prayer that somebody, somewhere, will have the presence of mind to demonstrate the political will to let them know it is evil to continue a waste which even the United States cannot afford, and which Nigerians know only too well is arbitrary, as it does not have the approval of the Revenue Mobilisation and Fiscal Commission whose primary responsibility is to fix salaries and allowances. It is also hoped that they will climb down their high horse, eat the humble pie and be gracious enough to accept that there is nowhere under the sun you have three federating units in a federation.

Rather, what the civilised world has come to know is a federation of the centre and the composite states and this principle and practice had long been cast in stone.

This is the simple truth governors like Rotimi Amaechi of Rivers State, Kayode Fayemi of Ekiti and Musa Kwankaso have this past week, and for the umpteenth time, tried to drill into them. But this has cut no ice with them since their primary intention is to divert our attention, and rather than accede to the popular demand of reducing their unearned, completely immoral allowances that eat up billions every three months, they want to replicate additional centres of ‘independence’ at both the state House of Assemblies and Local Governments by providing the two with constitutional provenance to ravage the treasury as they will be answerable to no higher authority. That way, they would have succeeded in muting the peoples’ opposition to their own financial recklessness at the federal level.

In order to perfectly understand this looming travesty of a constitutional review, we would need to quote, at some length, the views of governor Rabiu Musa Kwankaso who described this plot against the people most poignantly in a recent newspaper interview.

Dismissing the entire constitution review as a charade which will add no value to the lives of Nigerians whose needs are potable water, good roads, improved agriculture and other life-changing amenities, the governor said:

“You see, what we have in the National Assembly is what they want to transfer to the 36 state houses of assembly. Only the Almighty Allah can moderate what is happening in the National Assembly today, nobody else.

“We hear that some get N45 million or N50 million per quarter. This amounts to N15 million per month and half a million naira per day for every member, whether you are speaking, whether you are in the beer parlour enjoying yourself, you are getting that every day. What sort of business will you do in this country to get half a million naira every day?”

’Were these honourable members alive to their responsibilities and not keen merely to further create centres of unnecessary waste of national resources, they should need no lectures in realising that state governors are in a much better position to understand the needs of the people more than the most astute Local Government Chairman. They would also have known, without being told, that local governments exist solely as an arm of state governments for the propagation and execution of state programmes and policies at that level. All these chest-beating and sabre rattling by the National Assembly amount to nothing more than a sterile fishing expedition which is bound to fail at the end of the day.

Everything about local governments, its creation, its numbers and administration, should completely be under the purview of state governments which can much more meaningfully arrive at the appropriate number of local governments required for its needs. It will, therefore, be a mere waste of time for the National Assembly to attempt to formalise its many threats by granting autonomy to local governments because, we the people, more than the governors, will prevail on the state Houses of Assembly to ensure that fails.

Finally on constituency projects, what exactly should, in a corruption-free society, be the concern of the legislature with executive functions beyond its oversight function? What their colleagues in the U.S do- and they should be happy to be so compared – is to request that packs be approved for specific projects in their respective states and these, unlike here, are never executed by individual legislators but go straight to the approved projects. For Christ’s sake these people are there to make laws and conduct oversight functions; not become emergency contractors for projects that get mostly abandoned halfway as such funds are most often misapplied – apologies, Late Augustus Aikhomu.

This misnomer, if we remember, is a direct result of a succession of PDP rigged-in, weak and unsure presidents who subsequently had to do everything to crave the support of the National Assembly especially in passing their heavily compromised budg

ets. Should the practice continue, however, then our emergency honourable contractors should go learn from their colleagues from Ekiti –all A C N members – who pulled together most of their constituency allowances totalling millions of naira and have put it at the behest of the state government for the execution of a gigantic agricultural project which will fundamentally and positively impact the lives of their people back home rather than using Abuja to launch their miserable wars against their state governors as we are beginning to see in convoys running into convoys.

For once, the National Assembly should get serious and do something tangible for the poor Nigerian masses its members milk ever so easily and unscrupulously before its next coup against the Revenue and Fiscal Mobilisation Commission, as always happens; even if they have to borrow illegally from banks to meet their greed.

Happy birthday ebino topsy

Had I not so suddenly lost an uncle who impacted my youth so much, I should have , this past weekend, been ‘jollificating’ with my friend of 48 years; the one and only Chief Ebenezer Babatope, aka Ebino Topsy, who turned 70 to the glory of God.

Awe, what did we not do together, what risks didn’t we take as young, budding radical intellectuals who, albeit, decided to make University Administration our forte; and actually founded its Association where, with the likes of Talib Umar,later Federal Permanent Secretary, Pat Adaba, later Deputy Governor of Kogi State and our dearly departed Charles Balogun, who would later serve as Executive Secretary NISER, we were all ranking officers? Tinu and I send you and Biola our fraternal greetings and pray the Almighty God to continue to keep you and all yours safe. Amen.

January 27, 2013
Making a mess of Mali

•In the space between Hades and Hell lies the reality of war

Landlocked and straddling the edge of subsistence in the best of times, Mali has slipped into the lap of chaos. Trapped between the evil of the past and that of the present, the sleepy, bucolic state has transmogrified into a battlefield between the West and that which the West dreads: violent radicals seeking to establish a society based on a mutant understanding of Islam on any inch of dirt to which they are able to stake claim no matter how wretched the soil. Bit players in this showdown are the Malians themselves. The sad motif recurs. Once again, Africans become the dangling branches of a strange tree planted on their land. They are the recipients, not the makers, of their destiny.

For decades, Mali complied with the neocolonial instructions of the western powers. The nation was heralded as a model of African development and democracy. Little of this was African and not too much of it was development or democracy. Having invested significantly in Mali, the West had to proclaim Mali worked well in order to vindicate the neoliberal molding of that nation’s political economy. The West dubbed the country a resounding success; the West was guilty of false advertisement. The nation’s progress was shallow and transient. Even this progress in miniature was not a homegrown, organic occurrence; it was imported in the briefcases and tutorials of Western subvention. In effect, Mali stood on borrowed legs. Borrowed limbs are never enough to prevent a tumble for the limbs always return to their master.

The nation’s slow descent would have gone unattended by foreign hands but for the Libyan crisis. Libya represents an abject lesson in foreign policy humility. Libya should have remained an internal affair. Western claims that Gaddafi was intent on massacre in Benghazi is not substantiated by objective evidence. Gaddafi never threatened such a thing. The claim was a manufactured pretext for Western intervention to oust the hated dictator though he posed no threat beyond his borders.

So confident in their superior power, Western nations believed they could firmly control the crisis and its aftermath. They were wrong. In operation were complex undercurrents and riptides the West did not even recognize, let allow comprehend. Gaddafi was a ruthless man whose rule constituted a grave disfavor to his people. A man who cannot govern his impulses cannot wisely govern a nation. Yet, he served as warden in a harsh, parlous neighborhood. His demise loosed destructive forces which he had contained despite his long tryst with mental derangement. These forces would leave Libya to find homestead in weak, decaying Mali.

On one hand, Taureg irregulars from Mali had allied with Gaddafi. The dictator’s relationship with the Tauregs served both countries. It shored Gaddafi’s security machinery while being a release valve for Taureg separatist pressure in Mali. When Gaddafi fell, the Tauregs went home with war hot on their minds. Their return transformed meandering separatist activity into a purposeful, well-armed independence movement.

So eager to undo Gaddafi, the West allied with radical Islamists to reach this goal. The union dissolved as quickly as it had come. With Gaddafi, the West was assured extreme Jihadists were not welcomed in Libya. Now that he is gone, violent radicals who once had no say now seek to control Libya and have poured into Mali for the same purpose.

Although foes in Libya, Tauregs and Jihadists joined hands in Mali. Mainstream news reports claim the Jihadists have taken over the insurrection, embittering and sidelining the Tauregs in the process. These reports must be taken with a grain of suspicion. Dissension between the two groups has occurred but probably not to the extent the media claims. Reports of Taureg-Jihadist scrimmaging are infrequent and do not imply a total split. Moreover, it seems unlikely that ad-hoc contingents of foreign intruders could advance so adroitly over unknown terrain without significant local help.

War often is bought on the cheap but its end always is a costly purchase. In this exchange, the world purchased war with Libya and acquired an unwanted one in Mali. For the West, this is a considerable mistake causing its nations to expend resources they would have rather kept inactive but on the ready. For Africa, the crisis is a bulging error. Supporting the West in a war that did not need fighting, sub-Saharan Africa has brought to its doorstep a war it must fight but one for which it is ill-suited.

Opportunistically focusing on Mali, the Jihadists realized the country was a chicken ready for plucking. The government was in disarray and the army in tatters. Key Taureg commanders and soldiers had defected from the army to join league with their brethren returning from Libya. In an instant, the balance of military power had shifted in Mali. Regional and domestic dynamics had suddenly turned the low-simmering Taureg revolt into the dominant power. When Jihadists entered the fray, the balanced tipped more unfavorably against the demoralized government. In short order, the rebels seized the northern half of the nation and advanced toward a strategic airfield, important water and agricultural installations and ultimately, toward the capital. The demise of the government in Bamako seemed ordained. Enter the French to save its former ward.

The previous years of western investment in Mali have come to naught. America has engaged in the unreliable business of training West African militaries for years under the Trans-Saharan Counterterrorism Initiative, the precursor to today’s AFRICOM. Until the coup, the Malian army was considered one of its achievements. The coup calls into question the utility of American military training to the goal of democratization. After all, the putsch was engineered by a captain who had been one of the primary beneficiaries of intensive American training. Sad coincidence? Perhaps. More likely it is form of caveat emptor regarding struggling African nations and Western military training. Upon purchasing a rabid wolf, one must not be surprised or declaim too loudly when it rips at your leg.

The struggle for Mali is now portrayed as one of democracy versus religious intolerance, the West against the Jihadists. This portrait ignores the genuine internal fissures that afflict Mali. Tauregs ignited this rebellion for reasons they believe important. Land and water grabs by Western and Libyan firms linked to the West threaten Taureg economic interests. Without settling these issues, the crisis in Mali will not be resolved. As long as Tauregs are disgruntled, Jihadists will find an alcove among them just as they do with frontier tribes in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen. Sadly, events have taken on such a martial trajectory that political discussions will be precluded for the time being.

The French have rapidly deployed well over a thousand troops and have commended daily bombardment of the Islamists’ forward positions. This decision was not a sudden one. The French had a counteroffensive contingency plan on the ready. Paris hoped the Malian army would have been better at self-defense, thus making French direct intervention unnecessary. When the army crumpled like a cheap box, the French were forced to act.

Once France made its dramatic entry, African nations were duty bound to follow. Yet, this situation gives sad testimony to the present state of many African nations. Instead of looking toward an independent future where the nation can plot its own way, Mali is left with the choice of falling into the hands of its colonial master or of falling prey to the excesses of vile zealots. No doubt, the former comes with strings attached. The latter comes with the danger that one’s head might be detached at the slightest perception of heresy.

Consequently, the nation is left to choose between bad and worse.

All of this places African nations in a diplomatic bind. The French objective is to stop extremists from gaining a toehold from where they can hatch plots against France. While this may give respite to Malians, French concern s more to stop the extremists than to help Mali out of the bog. However, ECOWAS’s objective is to restore the American dream of constitutional democracy and free markets to Malian soil. The French have firepower but a limited objective. ECOWAS has less firepower yet the larger objective.

There will be friction between the two allies. This will be resolved to France’s liking. The military division of labor will be that France controls the airspace. French troops will protect Bamako and other strategic points. Some French troops will engage as skirmishers to halt radical advances and to probe for alleys of counterattack. The French are unlikely to commit themselves to a significant ground assault. In essence, the French are in a holding position. They are biding time for ECOWAS to deploy. Once deployed, ECOWAS troops will be expected to take the frontline to spearhead the decisive counteroffensive with the aid of Western aerial support. This accords with the division of labor used in Libya. Just as in Libya, the conflict in Mali will take months to determine if this truly becomes the division of military labor between the West and Africa. Such gradualism will heavily test the capacity of African nations but suits Western interests. The longer the war, the larger the profits for the Western military complex. Moreover, the weaker other African states become due to this exertion, the more leverage the West will have over them.

Already, the trouble in Mali has not stayed in Mali. Mayhem has spilled into Algeria in dramatic and lethal fashion. The deadly hostage episode there will not be the last in that nation. Ironically, Libya announced it had closed the border with Mali due to the unrest. Tripoli apparently feared the desert winds would blow back into Libya the unrest Libya had chased into Mali. As such, the border closure is a sad joke. Additionally, the weakling Libyan government does not control the streets of its own capital. How does it think it can regulate a distant border separated by hundreds of miles of desolate sand, heat and lawlessness?

Perhaps the most salient news this week was a CNN report confirming United States Defense Secretary Panetta’s previous statement that American unmanned drone bombers may soon fly Nigerian airspace. This confirms America sees a direct, growing link between Al Qaeda and Nigeria’s Boko Haram. Given the violence Boko Haram has unleashed on innocent people, the American position incites an emotional appeal. Hardliners and Old Testament, eye-for-an-eye apostles will applaud this move. Yet, the logic behind it is deceptive and dangerously so. The policy’s bottom line is to kill Boko Haram leaders in retribution for their murder of the innocent. This is easy to conceive but nigh impossible to implement simultaneously with precision and decisive effect.

Pakistan and Afghanistan are the laboratories were drone experiments have been conducted the longest. The drone campaigns have succeeded in killing thousands of people, many of them the intended terrorist targets. But many have been unarmed innocents whose only crime was to reside in close proximity to the bombs’ targets. Despite the years of strikes, neither Pakistan nor Afghanistan is better off. Both are rife with violence. For every terrorist slain, another is recruited. The same goes for Yemen and Somalia. While effective tactical killing machines, drones have demonstrated only negligible strategic value in defeating the organizations of terrorism.

In Nigeria, terrorist leaders hide in more urbanized, densely populated areas than in Pakistan and Afghanistan. If drones are used in this environment, more innocents will be killed here than in the other nations. Yet, like Pakistan and Afghanistan, it is unlikely the drones will decapitate the target organization.

Resort to drones only makes strategic sense based on the conclusion that Boko Haram will collapse if a few key members are silenced. However, if Boko Haram is an amorphous affiliation of gangs and sub-sets, drones will do no better in Nigeria than in Pakistan. Instead, constant bombings will raise anti-Western sentiment to a higher pitch. For every innocent person killed, two will come to sympathize with or join Boko Haram. The empirical evidence indicates that drones contribute to a war of attrition where the thing mostly attrited is peace. Drone use tends to radicalize populations affected by the bombing. Tactical kills are registered but the objective of ending terrorism grows more distant because bombing is reviled by the people on the ground. This is the human factor that drone advocates ignore. Ending an insurgency is predicated on shifting the goodwill of the people away from the insurgents. Yet, assassination by drone is a campaign more vindictive than victorious. If drones are deployed, America would have tossed the hearts and minds of the people into the gutter.

Should Defense Secretary Panetta have his way, planes dispensing death will soon be overhead in northern Nigeria. These planes belong to a military superior to any in Africa. That foreign military will decide which Nigerian is a terrorist and will make the decision based on secret factors of which no Nigerian will be aware. This will take place in the skies over Africa’s strongest nation. To say that colonialism is dead is to mouth one of the world’s seven greatest fables and no one presently remembers the other six.

In the early 20th century, the gunboat was the preferred instrument of strong-arm diplomacy. In the early 21st century, the gunboat has been supplanted by an unmanned aerial assassin, the drone. While the devices have changed, the mean calculations rationalizing their usage remain constant. Scientific man has advanced but political man remains a beast that prowls on all fours. He perverts science to create machines that fulfill selfish objectives more incarnadine than intelligent, more feral than fine.

Africa has entered a dangerous period. Mali is the first nation forced to walk the slim precipice between the neocolonial interests of the West and the rapine ways of extreme Jihadists. Instead of determining its own fate, an African nation once again has become the playground for the machinations of others. Sadly, Mali will not be last of our nations made to take the dire walk. The weaker the nation and its institutions, the more likely it will be to fall into the swell. This is a moment for the nations of the continent to marshal their scarce resources to take the lead in rescuing Mali and not merely trying to hold the extremists to a stalemate. It is beyond time for the nations to marshal their diplomatic courage, wisdom and foresight to forge a coordinated, strategic response to the twin dangers (neocolonial encroachment versus jihadist chaos) made manifest by the Malian crisis. The time is late. Soon the clock strikes twelve.

08060340825 (sms only)

January 20, 2013
Sanusi talks shop

On January 15, at a dinner organised by the Northern Reawakening Forum (NRF) in Abuja, the Central Bank of Nigeria governor, Mallam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, once again managed to shock Nigerians out of their wits with his high-octane denunciations of societal foibles. Demonstrating the constancy of spirit and viewpoint that has made him even more famous than his sometimes puzzling financial panaceas ever attempted, Sanusi piquantly suggested that all socio-cultural and religious organisations, which he believed impacted society wrongly, should be banned. He stopped just short of calling for the abrogation of religions altogether. It was probably apparent to him that even for a radical, calling for the scrapping of a religion would have been every whit suicidal.

In the words of this puritan hater of societal quirks: “When I was approached to speak on the economy at the forum called the Northern Reawakening Forum, my initial reaction was that I don’t go to these regional and ethnic groups because I have very strong views against Arewa, Afenifere, Ohaneze and other regional and ethnic groups. And I think these regional and ethnic groups should be banned; including, by the way, Ja’amatu Nasril Islam (JNI), and Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN). They should be banned because they are not religious organisations; they are not cultural organisations; they are political associations in disguise of religion and region.”

Sanusi, it is evident to every Nigerian now, is an iconoclast. He is as fond of demolishing reputations, when he thinks they are built on shallow foundations, as he is eager to destroy symbols of our childish fancies, be it in religion, in politics or in the economy. No one is too high or too low for his shrill attacks. All he asks of himself is whether the object of his scorn is deserving of attack. Once convinced, he does not shirk a fight, and he gives it his impudent all. But by calling for the scrapping of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) and the Ja’amatu Nasril Islam (JNI), two of Nigeria’s leading religious umbrella associations, he seems to take his iconoclasm to new heights. And by adding into the mix his abjuration of ethnic groups such as Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF), Afenifere, and Ohaneze Ndigbo, which he disdainfully dismissed as noisome masquerades for pestilential political interests, he climbs what his detractors describe as monomaniacal fondness for self-preserving posturing.

But while it is true that Sanusi’s fiery denunciations have increased in amperage over the years, he makes his enemies squirm even the more because he is seldom misguided. For instance, his description of invitees to Aso Villa as effete champions of dishonest causes can hardly be faulted, for this is as true of Niger Delta militants as it is true of northern and southwest leaders, many of whom have risen to prominence by dint of their capacity for mischief, betrayal and general villainy. His observation that religious leaders perennially engage in the most opprobrious romance with power is so apt that he even seems to underestimate public revulsion against the alliance between religion and politics.

Sanusi’s observations offer an opportunity for a reconsideration of the place and role of religion in national life, that is, if we are capable of such introspection. And though the CBN governor doubtless sounds stiff and sanctimonious in his denunciation of umbrella religious associations, like all his other pithy remarks on the economy, National Assembly profligacy, malodorous aviation policies, and banking malfeasance, he still makes more sense than most public officers.

Rather than take on Sanusi for his daring and irreverence, it may be time for religious leaders to ponder whether in fact they have not become overly political in their dealings among themselves and with the people in power. Religious leaders seem to us to exult when the powerful worship with them and sit in the front rows, and lend personal and state support to multi-million naira religious projects. There is today less emphasis on the content of a man’s character than on whom he portrays himself to be. It is indeed very apparent that our society is laid waste by the scale of our wrongdoings and the sanctimoniousness of our religious observances, with neither religious nor political leaders, nor yet cultural paragons, anxious to bell the cat for change.

Nigeria is one of the most religious societies in the world today. But religion has profited it little, though some cynics point out it could have been worse had there not being at least a public gesture towards some religiosity. The country’s civil service is weak, mediocre and corrupt. The country’s leadership itself, though it revels in the appurtenances of a mosque and a chapel at the State House complex, is increasingly felonious, overtly compromised, and subverted by special interests and overweening cabals. There is no altruism anywhere, and no patriotism left in anyone’s bosom. With depravity elongated and held so high, it is no wonder that the society is wracked both by guilt and by violence.

Sanusi rightly frets that the evil compromises ethnic and religious groups have entered into with the men in power have sunk the country. But the answer may not be in their proscription. If they are proscribed – and this is not possible anyway, no matter what the letter and spirit of the constitution say – other perhaps more insidious groups would simply take their places. Nature abhors vacuum, it is said. What has the country offered in place of socio-cultural organisations? Do we have a sense of nationhood? Contrary to the Lugardian ratiocination suggesting that unity is a physical, geographic thing, the fact is that it is a psychological and spiritual thing. Any deep thinker knows the ethereal rules the real in the same way the spiritual rules the physical and the intangible rules the tangible. Until the nation becomes the mathematical locus of attention and the steely core and substance of our being and existence, ethnic nationalities will continue to offer cultural and psychosocial affinities for groups to bond and coalesce.

Sanusi and many northern leaders, including the Sultan of Sokoto, Alhaji Sa’ad Abubakar, have suggested corrupt leadership and poverty predisposed the North to the violence and lawlessness it is witnessing today. The real problem is much more nuanced, as this column has sought many times to clarify. A leadership is first weak before it is corrupt. More, the breakdown being witnessed in the North is a function of the weakness of its binding symbols. Politics no longer offers that bond around which a sense of northern identity could coalesce; nor, sadly, does religion offer safe anchor, for this too has been deeply corrupted and its sinews corroded by years of abysmal politicisation and reckless exploitation.

No society can cohere without a substance or a person around which to coalesce. Once a society loses its inner core, its soul or its mind, it will begin to fracture badly. The remnant sense of northernerness which the people of the North still have today was partly a creation of the Sardauna of Sokoto, Sir Ahmadu Bello, as it was a creation, in a different sense and under a different era, of Uthman dan Fodio. There must always be something or someone to give a society its sense of being or drive. Modern analysts, like US President Barack Obama during his visit to Ghana, talk of creating strong institutions rather than strong personalities in order for stability and peace to be engendered. This is only true when that society is already driven by persons or sets of values that propel it into greatness and competitiveness. Except during occasional periods in their histories when they require strong personalities, many Western societies have sets of values and lodestars to propel them into greatness. Nigeria does not have either a set of lofty values or even the strongmen to give the country form and substance.

Since amalgamation, the Sardauna was the first and the last to play that role for the North; Chief Obafemi Awolowo for the West; and Dim Chukwuemeka Ojukwu, more than the great Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, as I have argued in this place before, for the East. In the absence of these eminent men, their societies will need a set of values, religious codes, and cultural templates to make their societies cohere. The denudation of these values and codes and templates, which in the case of Nigeria are at different stages, much more than poverty, predispose societies to anomie. Indeed, what make Nigeria to maintain a semblance of stability are the socio-cultural organisations which Sanusi deprecates. The groups have been corrupted, as the CBN governor notes, and religions attenuated by the anthropomorphism of our various cultural antecedents, but they still have their uses.

We can discern from the imprecise thoughts of Mallam Sanusi the salient message that our society is endangered by many factors. My opinion is that that danger comes principally from a lack of knowledge. We must strive to understand what ails us first before we find the panaceas. There is no competent national leadership that understands what must be done, and the regions are decaying into anarchy and unraveling into fragments depending on what stages of leadership failure or value attenuation they are. Mr Obama speaks of strong institutions. But he speaks only about a minute part of the truth. After all, Richard Kagan, Paul Wolfowitz and the neo-conservatives could not have designed the failed New American Century project if they did not have a sense of America’s manifest destiny (Global leadership anchored on military strength and moral clarity). What is ours? Through their prisms, the Southwest was reminded of its sense of being by Awo, the North by Sardauna, and the East by Zik/Ojukwu. Who has tried to define for Nigerians who they are, what the Nigerian dream is, and what its manifest destiny should look like? If this definition had been made, it is doubtful whether any rational leader, let alone a sensible historian, would suggest that, of all things, we should be celebrating the centenary of Lugard’s amalgamation.

January 20, 2013
Jonathan’s shocking comments after visit to Police College, Lagos

After Channels Television broadcast the incredible rot that has overtaken the premier police training facility in Nigeria, the Police College, Ikeja, Lagos, an enraged President Goodluck Jonathan paid a flying visit to the institution. Reports indicate he was deeply moved by the sorry state of the facility. However, the reaction of the president to the rot must have truly baffled every Nigerian. Rather than wonder how the rot escaped the attention of the government and police authorities for so long, or even marvel at the incompetence of senior police officers in allowing the rot to graduate to that magnitude, the president turned his rage on the people he suspected connived at the television documentary. In his view, the broadcast was meant to embarrass his government. This president is truly baffling.

According to newspapers, the president paid an unscheduled visit to the police training college. And after he toured the college’s decrepit facilities, he asked the flustered commandant of the college, Police Commissioner I.F.Yerima, three questions. Read the account of this newspaper: As the president made to enter his car, he suddenly paused and faced CP Yerima to ask him a few questions.Then came the first question for the College Commandant: How was Channels TV able to penetrate and record the mess without detection? The CP had no answer.

The second question followed: When was the recording done. Again there was no answer.

The Commandant turned to his deputy and other senior officers to assist him in answering the President’s questions, but none was able to help him out.

The President then quipped: “This is a calculated attempt to damage the image of the government, as the college is not the only training institution in the country.”

He soon entered his car and left.

It does not require clairvoyance to know that the presidency will wield the big axe. As far as the trainee policemen are concerned, as long as the situation is remedied, they couldn’t care less whose head was taken to the guillotine. But given the rot in the police facility, quite like most barracks have fallen into near disuse, is it any wonder that on graduation the law enforcement agencies, particularly the police which had complained bitterly of neglect, adopt brutal and unfeeling methods in tackling crime and suspects? In all, let us hope that the president’s anger would spur him into taking measures to renovate police training facilities all over the country rather than punishing those he feels are complicit in the television broadcast.

January 20, 2013
When silence is golden

One of the prominent features of modern urban living is the firm grip that Nigerian religious pundits have over our early morning sleep. I tell you, the prison warden’s grip over his prisoners cannot come anywhere near it. Each dawn, I am rudely pulled out of my dreams by the vehemently inconsiderate shrills of religious men and women from mosque-church loudspeakers calling me to pray or shout ‘Amen’ willy-nilly when all I want to do is get a little more sleep. Sometimes, I wonder what the gates of heaven and hell must really look like – perhaps they are lined with marketers touting the advantages of the two places. It is quite enough to make me appreciate the age-old adage which I whisper repeatedly to myself: Silence is golden! Silence is golden! I think somewhere in my sub-conscious, I believe that if I repeat the sentence long enough, the noise will stop. It does, but well into the sunrise, when it is time to get up anyway. Grrrr! They always win but someday, I intend to win too.

So, from sunrise to sunrise, the average Nigerian seems to be surrounded by nothing but noise; which he seems to take in his stride. If the irreverent loudspeakers of religious or music shopkeepers are not assaulting our ears, then party persons are doing their stuff right into them. And now, we have to contend with the noises of and from mobile phones. Recently, I saw a cartoon showing a man and a woman at a dinner date in a restaurant. Instead of doing the reasonable things such as looking deeply into each others’ eyes, holding hands or, at the least, eating, they preferred to talk into their individual phones. I just thought, the blessed things that had been invented to keep the world out were being used to bring the world in.

Even more recently, I read of our dear federal government, which never tires of putting its foot in, obliging our Nigerian farmers to purchase mobile phones willy-nilly. Come now, I am thinking, is it for lack of mobile phones that we have no food to eat? Ever heard the children’s refrain, and I think I have used it here before, for want of a shoe the horse was lost and all that? Well, we have a new take on that. For want of a phone the farm was lost; for want of the farm the farmer was lost; for want of the farmer the citizens were lost; for want of the citizens, the country was lost.

Honestly, I had no idea we still had farmers, let alone farmers whose farm lives would depend on the mobile phone. I have since regarded Nigerian farmers, and I mean no disrespect here, as charming antiques who made themselves but have been relegated to the shelves for posterity as showcases for aliens who once lived here. I thought no one, least of all the government, cared about their existence. No one, least of all, even knew their uses. The Nigerian farmer is the least considered of the low. Seriously again, I mean no disrespect either to them or the government, but all at once, too much is happening and too late. Suddenly, the government seems to have turned around, seen the farmers and exclaimed, oh look, the farmers!; let’s see what the mobile phone will look like in their grubby hands. And so, it is even now shoving the strange things into the farmers’ calloused hands and asking them to grin into the camera. I tell you, I tell you.

Growing up at my grandmother’s, a worthy farmer in her own recognition, I believe I have had a few farm experiences; not what you would call the heavy duty kind, but somewhat enough to help me know which end of the yam to dip into my plate of palm oil at lunch. Now, you believe me, don’t you? Of course, in the course of gaining my farm education, I also came across a few farmers. Yet, in all those days, I never did come across one farmer who sat down moaning that his greatest problem in life was not being able to talk to his neighbours. No sir; to talk to their neighbours, most farmers simply hollered. Believe me, I have heard whole conversations enough to fill your ears conducted over the air waves and over long distances. The golden silence was sufficient to ensure perception. WHY DID YOU NOT COME TO THE FARM YESTERDAY? YOU WERE SICK? YOU THIS LAZY THING, WHAT DO YOU THINK YOUR WIFE’S PEPPER-SOUP IS FOR, SLEEPING? NO, YOU DO NOT HAVE THE STRENGTH FOR MY WIFE’S PEPPER; YOU WILL COLLAPSE. FOR THAT, WHEN YOU FINISH ON YOUR FARM, COME TO MY FARM AND SERVE YOUR PUNISHMENT. And the laughter rang through the air, pure and delightful, energising the work.

True, farmers are no longer what they used to be; but honestly, in Nigeria, who is? It is quite clear that the problem of the federal government at any season seems to be that it never realises that the people are often smarter, more advanced, knowledgeable and forward thinking than it is. For some queer reason, however, it seems to think that it is always smarter, more advanced, knowledgeable and forward thinking than the people, so it thinks that it can think for the people. Big mistake. The farmers have told the government that they do not want mobile phones. Each farmer can procure his/her own phone or their children will. Yet, the government insists on going ahead. Why?

Come, government, let us reason together. Pre-paid mobile phones have habits of consuming money either to purchase them or to run them. On whose account can that be charged to: the farmer’s anticipated profit, or will there be a regular subvention from the government for that? More importantly, what is the phone for – to talk with the government or their neighbours or their families? Most farmers are tired of talking to the government: it has not listened to or heard them so far, and is even now not hearing them say they do not need or want the mobile phone. To talk to their neighbours, they visit; and to talk to their families, they send SOS. Even most importantly, a large number of our farmers do not have the required literacy to manage those demanding things, and who is to teach them? But what do you know? The government insists it knows what the farmers want: mobile phones. I suspect those phones are coming from a source which has tied the supply of fertilizer to the purchase of the phone to farmers. In other words, the government has done what it thinks to be some neat packaging of ideas and products without considering all the issues.

I honestly do not know how this phone thing can work. Do you know sir how many phones will be spoilt, lost or stolen within a week of taking delivery? Besides, how on earth can a phone enhance the growth of a farmer’s farm or his farming methods? Listen, dear government, what farmers need is a facilitated access to soft loans from banks so that they can have some long-term plans for their farms and be able to purchase items they want such as fertilizer or tractors on the open market like anyone else. Fertilizer can be subsidized; even end products can be subsidized but not at the expense of the free will to grow. Then, each can move from subsistence farming to large-scale farming at their own pace. Otherwise sir, you just may hear your phone lines crossing one day and someone saying, ‘Eh hen, Baba Sikira, now I have a phone; are you going to let me take Sikira as my third wife now?’ Then you will appreciate, as I have done, that silence is golden.

January 20, 2013
PDP: United only by the illicit, not manifesto

…Bowing to the wishes of Nigerians, General Abubakar unveiled an eleven-month transition programme, which will terminate on May 29, 1999. The “five fingers of the leprous hand”, which operated as “political parties”, namely, the UNCP, CNC, NCPN, DPN and GDM were dissolved. Nigerians were now free to form genuine political parties to compete for political space without the suffocating tailoring by agents of the state. The G-34, which was now established as an embodiment of the hope and democratic aspirations of Nigerians having demonstrated courage when it was convenient to show docile acquiescence became the rallying point of a blossoming trans-ideological movement willing to offer leadership to Nigerians.According to Chief Solomon Lar, the first elected chairman of PDP, the G-34 captured the excitement of Nigerians “because of the quality and integrity of its members”. To him, Nigerians were no longer willing to gamble away their future to fortune seekers who dominated the failed politics of the Abacha era. As a consequence of sustaining the momentum of democratic struggle, the G-34 attracted several political associations that shared the vision of a truly formidable national political platform.On August 19, 1998, several political associations including the All Nigerian Congress (ANC), Peoples Consultative Forum (PCF), Social Political Party (SPP) Peoples Democratic Movement (PDM), Peoples National Forum (PNF) and twenty-five other associations resolved to form a political party known as the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). The overriding goal of the new party was to bring together all patriotic and like-minded Nigerians into a single formidable political party capable of organising and making productive the energy of the people.’

Obviously not many of them, members of the largest ‘rally’ in Africa, would ever know that the above extract came from the official website of their party, the Peoples Democratic Party. And this is so for many reasons. For one, the venerated ‘quality and integrity’ Chief Solomon Lar spoke so glowingly about are long gone with the winds but much more importantly, the party and its original raison d’être have changed so fundamentally since former President Obasanjo’s entry into it that were the likes of Abubakar Rimi and Okadigbo to suddenly resurrect today, they would not as much as recognise the party they risked all to form.

Readers will remember that to mould the party in Obasanjo’s image, and, almost unprecedented in the annals of political party evolution, the maximum civilian ruler and leader of the party, as he then was, caused all members to be de-registered and decreed a fresh registration. So mystifying, but self-serving was it, that even Atiku Abubakar, his Vice President and, technically, the No. 2 in the party, was casually humiliated in his own village when he was refused registration only for the entire party leadership to later beat a retreat and head to his office, tails behind their backs, to present him with a membership card at Abuja, the federal capital.

All this history becomes relevant now that leaders of the leading opposition political parties in the country are, for the very first time ever, working seriously towards ending the reign of impunity by a political party that has, far more than the military, pulverised the country beyond the widest imagination of its enemies in its 13-year strangle-hold. It is heartening that for the same first time, these opposition party leaders have all verbalised their readiness to subsume all narrow interests, personal, regional, political or economic, in the larger service of the country we call our own.

Nothing confirms this seriousness more than the recent launch of the manifesto of the incubating merger, an event which witnessed the presence of nearly all the relevant leaders of the agenda. Those who could not make the occasion physically, were specifically represented. To understand the import of that event is to appreciate that without a manifesto, a political party is nothing more than a rally –read PDP- the clueless party that continues, unabated, the ruination of Nigeria with each of its leaders, as President, coming with either a 7-point Agenda which the current CBN governor, at his confirmation hearing advised should be reduced to one, or one nebulously called a Transformation Agenda but singularly devoid of any positive transformation.

Beginning from Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel’s address to his Tamworth constituents in preparation for the 1835 British general election, a political party manifesto has come to be known as the public declaration of the aims, objectives and policies of that political party, especially where issued ahead of a coming election and to which the electorate can hold it, in or out of power.

It will be recalled that all we can remember of PDP’s manifesto or that of the late Yar Adua’s campaign at which Nigerians could not quote him on one single subject was: PDP: Power!, as then President Obasanjo played the role of campaign spokesperson.

In my recent 3-part article on corruption, I drew attention to the fact that salvaging Nigeria was the duty of all and that the worst we could do is leave the country to continue its present path of retrogression under the lead of the PDP.As you read this, the party is again in the news for the wrong reasons; for jejune reasons completely unexpected of a ruling party in a country like ours. Whether at the Wadada Plaza, where the falcon can no longer hear the falconer, or in Adamawa State as in sundry other states, especially in the South West, where its one-time poster boys have since been banished to political Siberia, it is war; total and unremitting war, the very end of which none can predict with any measure of certainty as the countdown to the presidential roforofo unfolds. It needs be said, however, that the ‘casus belli’, this time around, is tied to Obasanjo’s unedifying marriage to impunity. Time and again, he has indulged in these thoroughly illegal and indecent ‘fehingbe pons’ –acts of impunity- until now that Kashamu, who though a party financier, is young enough to answer thrice to a single Obasanjo call, has decided that enough was enough and decided to fight him eye ball to eye ball. Unlike what happened elsewhere, Obasanjo had merely decreed who should be what, at the South West PDP zonal congress, but as is usual in his home state of Ogun, he is being told again that there is a limit to one- ups-man ship. The silly things he rammed through PDP governors then in Oyo, Osun, Ondo and Ekiti, he never dared try with governor Gbenga Daniel of Ogun State, and where he did, he failed signally.

Nothing any longer unfazes a PDP member, whatever his level in the party; not thieving of billions of pension funds, not stealing billion dollars voted for modernisation of roads or the power sector nor are they collectively averse to creaming Nigerians off billions of naira claiming that ships which never visited any port on the African continent, indeed, actually delivered petroleum products at Apapa.

But it gets far worse when a President, elected on the platform of such a party, looks askance, with such rogues left free to go about their illegitimate businesses and presidential aides eagerly trying to exculpate him with the spurious claim that the presidency is not the judiciary; conveniently forgetting the aphorism that the buck stops at the president’s table. Of course, it must be conceded that ours is now a poor caricature of the American president who knows that he occupies, not the coziest but the hottest, part of the kitchen.

In the weeks and months ahead the 2015 elections, indeed from now on, given the vacuity and the all-round negativity of the Peoples Democratic Party on Nigeria and its peoples, I intend, God willing, to do my utmost best in promoting the manifesto of the emerging merger in the full knowledge that it will provide the much- needed elixir for the hapless citizens of an abundantly resource -rich country which has, unfortunately, been more than blighted by a succession of rigged-in, soporific and inane, PDP governments at the federal level.

That much I promise.

January 20, 2013
Awo, Jan 15 and the phantom of an Igbo coup

“In most of the Tiv Division, people had to carry green leaves to be left unmolested. There was the pathetic story of a peasant who forgot to do so. Some rioters reminded him of this by carving a leaf with a knife on the skin of his hand.”
Headlines, August 17, 2003, Vol. 435 page 7

The young captain who was the Chief Detail escorting the Supreme Commander to Ibadan had made up his mind. Brandishing a hand grenade, Theophlous Danjuma, commanding a mutinous detachment from the Nigerian 2nd Battalion had caged in the Government House before moving in to confront his unsuspecting quarries, the Supreme Commander, General Aguiyi Ironsi, and his host, Col. Francis Adekunle Fajuyi. Fajuyi was the celebrated hero of the UN operations and the first Nigerian officer to be awarded the British Victory Cross. The Supreme Commander and his Governor host did not get it until the captain still caressing his grenade, with all audacity, accosted them and violently stripped them of their epaulets. In the military tradition, such brazen truculence by a very junior officer is more than mutiny. In the military eye, that brazen indiscipline is tantamount to instant execution of the hapless senior officers. With those officers condemned, this unprecedented effrontery by Theopholous Danjuma ensured the bloody change of the Ironsi Government. Unlike Nzeogwu and the Jan. 15 boys, the young captain, took no prisoners. Indeed, Major Kaduna Nzeogwu had prophesied that any coup operations without the demobilisation of the Supreme Commander was a suicide enterprise and therefore, had preferred to personally head the Lagos operations. His colleagues were rather impressed by the myth built around the Sarduana, Premier of the North, another main target who indeed was the orchestra that was playing the scotch earth policy against the so-called “Tiv Rioters.” Kaduna Nzeogwu, describing the Premier as a “bloody Civilian,” warned his colleagues that the Jan. 15 operations would derail if the General was not demobilised.

After all, Aguiyi was the first black man to command a United Nations contingent in the Congo. Before the Revolutionaries Ironside, was doing the impossible as long as the Crocodile was flagging in the field in place of his official pistol. (please see Chris Okigbo, NZEOGWU: THE UNFINISHED REVOLUTION, Snaap Press, Enugu, 20012] Col. Martin Adamu, Danjuma, Col Muritala Mohammed, arrowheads of the Araba coup, July 29th , 1966 wanted the Supreme Commander dead, primarily for their coup to succeed. To be cut down also was Col. Adekunle Fajuyi, for the historical fact that the former Governor was in the know about the Jan. 15 uprising and actively supported the Revolutionaries. Chris Okigbo in his soon to be released account, revealed that in the operation ‘Charming Girl,’ Col. Adekunle Fajuyi was the Commander at Lanlate, Abeokuta, of the mock battle, preparing the Jan. 15 boys ahead of their strike on the D. Day. Also, Adekunle Fajuyi, in drawing up the aims of that January 15 revolution, insisted that the release from Calabar Prison of Chief Obafemi Awolowo would proceed his eventual announcement as the Prime Minister of Nigeria.

An officer and a gentlemen, when eventually the coup failed, it was he and his colleague, Col. Odumegwu Ojukwu, who resisted the “northern officers’ demand to the Supreme Military Council, asking for the hanging of the young Revolutionaries.

The account, which gave the death choice to Fajuyi in solidarity with his cornered Supreme Commander is, therefore, without collaboration as the mutineers had deliberately gone for the senior officers, epaulets, sentencing those fine officers to a slow and gory end.

Furthermore, the infantile impression that Col Unegbe, the Quarter Master General, was shot because he would not hand over the keys to the mutineers is a marine story.

Why would a planned coup and its operatives depend on a locked armoury to procure their fire arms in a night every second counted. And when they shot the Igbo Colonel without retrieving the keys from him, how come they continued with the operations and almost succeeded but for the betrayal of another Igbo officer, Major Obienu, who did not show up with his Reece platoon from Abeokuta?.

All said and done, the January 15 Revolution stopped the genocide against the Tiv freedom fighters. The early ‘60s blizzard against the people at Gboko, Tombul, Adikpo, Lafia and Daudu was commanded by Col. Pam, who later was promoted Adjutant General. His unprofessional use of the military against the people affronted Major Chris Anuforo, the Commander of the Reece unit at Gboko. Chris was so agitated with the treatment meted out to the Tivs that on the night he had the gun, he personally went for Col Pam.

The Second Battalion at Ibadan was commanded by Lt. Col Largema and he was the officer who moved the soldiers into the streets to cause mayhem in support of the marooned Premier, Chief S.L.A. Akintola. He also tutored him on how to use fire arms and the Premier on that night opened fire against the soldiers who came to arrest him. Unlike his Deputy, Fani Kayode, who cried like a woman, on sighting the soldiers, Akintola fought and died like a man.

Jan 15 restored normalcy, brought to an end the bleeding in the streets of Yorubaland. Contrary to Danjuma’s persiflage and propaganda to respected Guardian Columnist, Dr Edwin Madunagu, falsely demonstrating that the Jan 15 Revolutionaries targeted ‘our Brother Officers.’ The boys did not ‘murder Danjuma’s brother officers’ to install an Igbo hegemony.

Rather, our over twenty years of research is reading a shocking result. The January15 Revolution, in the perspective of the African political development, was a move from Nigeria with the destination of engaging in the final liberation of South Africa from Apartheid. In his last statement to his mother, Nzeogwu was fatalistic, “Nnee, that’s why you cannot count on me. I’m not going to be married, because I am going to die in the battle field,” Nzeogwu consoled his mother who was worried that her son was not planning like the other officer friends of his to get married.

A putshe that was motivated by the horrendous death of Patrice Lumumba plus the unacceptable antics of the ten percenters, sacrificed the cream of the first generation of the Igbo fine officer corp. Danjuma’s hallucination and the false perspective of chroniclers of the Nigerian Civil War history aided the waste of the Igbos, climaxing in the 1967 recorded first Black aon Black genocide in Asaba 1967.

As we celebrate another January 15 anniversary and miss Nzeogwu and his patriotic prophesies, why did we not hear from Awo or his school on Jan 15 until the sage passed on? And why have the Tiv nation maintained over 50 years of ungrateful silence? Whatever, was Col. Atom Kpera and Lt. Katsina part of the January 15 strike force?

January 20, 2013
Greedy legislators? Try Kenya

people who think our legislators are the worst in terms of their desire for primitive accumulation and ostentatious lifestyle will tender unreserved apologies to them when they see what their Kenyan counterparts earn, and are still yearning earnestly for more. As a matter of fact, I now believe that truly, it is one who has not travelled far that does not see squirrels with hunchback; if one travels far, he is likely to see ants that are lame.

That exactly was the impression I got on reading the story of Kenyan lawmakers who want extraordinary end-of-term bonuses and other mouth-watering pleasures. They want their bonuses tripled; they want diplomatic passports for themselves and their spouses, bodyguards for life, of course paid for by taxpayers; they also want State burial for themselves when they die, a thing reserved only for their president and notable achievers. Thank God the legislators have President Mwai Kibaki to contend with. At least twice in three months had the legislators made the demand, and twice had Kibaki turned them down.

And, as if to prove that they were actually being driven by what a newspaper called ‘eccentric greed’, the lawmakers, in their lack of regard for time and space, did not even care that they were repeating the demands in their last act before the parliament closed for the March 4 elections. One would have thought they would have been mindful of the coming polls, and at least pretended as if they cared about reelection or the people more than they did about themselves; but they didn’t. “But even the most cynical among us would not have bet on the lawmakers sticking their hands in the public pocket on the last day in office … one would have expected that politicians facing an election would have had the decency to exit without creating a ruckus”, the Standard Newspaper said on January 12. If the Kenyan lawmakers’ prayers had been answered, the taxpayer would have incurred an extra cost of two billion shillings to pay the higher bonuses alone, to people considered by the electorate as already overpaid, lazy and corrupt. As a matter of fact, Kenya’s lawmakers are seen as among the best paid in the world.

I know Nigerians are very clever; (most of them now take Panasharp) they would therefore want to remind me that $107,200, the end-of-term bonus being demanded by the Kenyan lawmakers (about N17,152, 000) is only a fraction of what our National Assembly members take for Constituency Project; that is true. But you can only see the sense in my point when you note a few things about Kenya. Kenya’s lawmakers earn about $13,000 (N2, 080, 000) a month, the bulk in tax-free allowances. This may look small, but is no doubt huge in a country where an unskilled urban labourer may earn as little as $60 (N9,600) a month, and with a per capita GDP of $800. In 2011, the legislators refused to pay back taxes demanded by the government, then bought new seats, worth $2,400 (N384,000) each, for the members in the chamber. For a country facing a ballooning wage bill to meet pay raises for teachers and doctors, and at a time when economic growth has slowed and unemployment remains uncomfortably high, this is simply outrageous.

So, when compared to their Kenyan counterparts, we will see that our own National Assembly members only want to be spoilt a little, unlike their counterparts in Kenya who want to be spoilt big, irrespective of whether their pleasure would amount to pain for the average Kenyan. I will give you just one example to prove that our legislators here care about how they spend public funds in a way that it won’t tear the people’s pockets. Just a few weeks back during the unnecessary debate on how much we should sink into our vice president’s palace (remember I told you then we don’t just spend or procure when the issue is such high-class project, we sink money into projects), whether it is N14billion, or N13billion or even N16billion, one of our senators who himself was enraged by the big big billions being mentioned for the project rose in defence of the people by rounding up the figure to a moderate N10billion, which he felt was adequate. Instead of clapping for him, some of us still condemned him because we did not think our Number Two Citizen deserved to live in such opulence. I can only imagine the kind of embarrassment we must have caused the gentleman vice president by subjecting his abode to such debate in the market square.

Back to the Kenyan legislators. Who says they do not know what they are doing by making those extraordinary demands? When you see people who spit on the ground and quickly rub it with their foot, it is because they know what spittle could be used for. After skinning the Kenyans while in office, the legislators need life bodyguards in retirement lest they get torn to shreds by the people. Of course they need State burial so Kenyans would also be responsible for their funeral expenses. After serving the people so lazily and corruptly, there cannot be a better way to complete the insult than to ask the people to pick the bills of their burial as well. I think they must have heard from the Yoruba people here that Aye l’Oyinbo nje ku (the Whiteman enjoys till he dies). Kenyans have to carry the responsibilities of their legislators in life and death.

Bad as our own legislators could be, have they been asking for diplomatic passports for their spouses? Bad as our lawmakers are, I have not seen anywhere that they ever asked us to give them bodyguards for life, maintained by the taxpayers. The best we see is for those of them who have the means or have stolen enough, to acquire bullet-proof jeeps. There are no accident-proof cars yet; otherwise Nigerian lawmakers and political office holders generally would scramble to have some. May be this is an area Nigerians have to pray to God to grant the White Man speed, wisdom, knowledge and understanding to manufacture accident-free vehicles to at least spare these leaders from knocking down the people they lead in their attempt to get away fast from God-knows what on our death traps called roads! Bad as our legislators are, I have also not seen them asking that they be given State burial when they die. So, we can now see clearly that if we compare children, we will flog one to death for the other.

The point is that people do not appreciate what they have until they lose it. We may never appreciate our crop of legislators until they travel to Kenya to see how their Kenyan counterparts are doing it and return to insist on the same measure, after being bitten by the Kenyan bug. Unlike the Kenyan legislators who would rather follow dead bodies to the grave in their quest for insatiable wants, our own lawmakers know the limits of their greed. At least they are not as lazy, corrupt and overpaid as their Kenyan counterparts. We owe our Senate President David Mark and House of Representatives Speaker, Aminu Tambuwal, a debt of gratitude for the enormous sacrifices they are making in order to make laws for our good governance!

January 20, 2013
For Mali, for Nigeria

More than ever before, Nigeria has been at the receiving end of attacks from terrorists operating from not only within the country, but from members of the international network of terrorists’ organisations that are determined to make the country one of their major bases in West Africa.

Some of those arrested for various terrorists’ related offences in the northern part of the country have been found to be non-Nigerians who sneak into the country to carry out their dastardly acts which have left thousands of persons dead and property destroyed.

The Boko Haram members behind most of the terrorists’ attacks in the country are reported to have received weapons and training from the Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Magreb (AQIM) which has gained a foothold in Mali and is gradually spreading its influence to Mauritania and Niger.

As The Times of London rightly noted in its January 18 editorial, titled: Today Mali, tomorrow Nigeria for al-Qaeda, the biggest prize for the al-Qaeda would be the destabilisation of Nigeria to the southeast. Evidence abound that the insurgent group is determined to accomplish their goal and everything has to be done to stop them.

The Chief of Army Staff, Lt-General Azubuike Ihejirika, during the week confirmed that Mali-trained militants are in the country and security agencies are working together to track them down.

It is against the background that the Federal Government ordered the deployment of 1,200 Nigerian troops to join the African-Led International Support Mission to Mali. Much as we have not been able to effectively contain the various conflicts in the country, we cannot afford not to be bothered about the situation in Mali.

Undoubtedly, we are currently facing daunting security challenges as President Goodluck Jonathan admitted in his letter to the Senate to seek approval for the deployment. But true to his claim, our proximity to the Sahel region makes the regional intervention compelling to avoid a spill over to Nigeria and other West African countries with grave consequences on the security, political stability and development efforts.

The deteriorating situation in the north of Mali, where the terrorists had taken the law into their own hands in total disregard for the government of the country, requires swift response and the time to act is now before we all get consumed by the actions of the lawless gang who don’t have any respect for human lives.

Good enough, Nigeria is intervening in conjunction with other African countries based on the resolutions of the United Nations Security Council in response to Mali’s request for an international military force. The best strategies must be adopted to avoid a failed mission. The troops must be well equipped and taken care of to enable them go all out to accomplish the task of routing out the terrorists.

Minimum force except where maximum force is the only option should be applied for the sake of the people who have been held hostage under and subjected to all forms of inhuman treatment in the guise of enforcing Islamic injunctions.

January 20, 2013
Nigeria a giant by 2050?

Forecasters are at it again. A projection has gone out that Nigeria may, by the year 2050, become one of the world’s leading economies, enjoying a handsome 13th position among 20 nations of the world. The forecast, published last week, came from PricewaterhouseCoopers, an accounting firm. It sounds good, doesn’t it? In fact, the report suggests that even lowly Vietnam could also join Nigeria in outpacing such developed economies as Australia in a mere 37 years. The reason for this, PwC economists believe, is that developed economies are still struggling to recover from the recession of 2008 and 2009, while emerging ones like Nigeria and Vietnam have been “relatively insulated despite the slowdown of 2011 and 2012.”

According to the projection, the area Nigeria may out-muscle other economies is in purchasing power parity or PPP. Economists say PPP is a theory which states that “exchange rates between currencies are in equilibrium when their purchasing power is the same in each of the two countries.” They explain that this simply means “the exchange rate between two countries should equal the ratio of the two countries’ price level of a fixed basket of goods and services.”

Non-economists, like this columnist, understand this to mean that by 2050, the naira could be strong enough to fetch Nigerians goods and services of appreciable value, not minding the geographical location. By this lay perspective, the miserable, flip-flop tale of our national currency would have since been forgotten, replaced by a respectable profile of power and value. By this same unsophisticated appreciation of the PPP forecast, I should hit the roof for the good times are not so far off.

But I won’t, for this piece of projection hangs on nothing else but a mighty, big IF. Nigeria can become an economic giant in the world IF…Nigeria can be a giant in the world IF it can put a few things in place. Nigeria can overtake the leading economies, all things being equal.

That is the language of economists; it is their stock-in-trade.

The accounting firm’s forecast makes little sense to me, for obvious reasons. It reminds me of the 2020 mantra much trumpeted by the late President Umaru Yar’Adua administration. It was projected that by 2020, which is now only seven years away, Nigeria will be among 20 industrialised nations of the world.

Industrialised nations are giants. As such, they have power and voice. As giants, they are reckoned with. When their leaders speak, no one pretends not to hear. That was the league our country was projected to join by the year 2020. But as everyone knows, no nation climbs to that platform merely by imagining it just because motivational speakers say whatever your mind can conceive you can achieve. Everyone knows that no nation attains giant status without stable electricity, good infrastructure and, crucially, a credible anti-corruption stance.

PricewaterhouseCoopers even reckons, though, that nothing is easy. “Nigeria,” it said in that projection, “could be the fastest growing country in our sample due to its youthful and growing working population, but this does rely on using its oil wealth to develop a broader based economy with better infrastructure and institutions as regards rule of law and political governance and hence support long term productivity growth –the potential is there, but it remains to be realised in practice.”

Now, that’s where the frustration of these forecasts lies. We all, including non-economists, know what the forecasters know. They know, like we do, that our oil should make us wealthy. The economists, like all of us, know that we have a young, schooled, skilled and energetic population, willing to work and turn their country around. We know that we have all it takes to join the big league.

But just as all that is clear, so is it also beyond question that we are our own biggest enemies. It is paradoxical. Nigeria’s potentials have so far failed to enrich it. Its oil has not lubricated its engines. Rather it has remained a source of perpetual worry, eliciting a pile of questions. Why, for instance, have otherwise lowly nations, without oil, even in Africa, outpaced us in development? PricewaterhouseCoopers believes Nigeria’s oil can support “a broader-based economy” but why has that economy continued to elude us? We know that nothing can be impossible for us and that we can do all things with the riches God has lavishly given us. What we don’t know is why even the simplest of things seem too difficult to accomplish.

Forecasters seem to wonder why our infrastructure is woeful. They worry about rule of law. They are concerned about governance, about accountability. They know that these things matter.

Truth is, so do we. We have always known what they know. So, what use are their projections?

January 20, 2013