Category: Ropo Sekoni

Ropo Sekoni

With climate change and population growth and the culture of the cattle rearers, if you have 50 cows and they eat grass, any route to your water point, they will follow it, it doesn’t matter whose farm it was…The first republic set of leadership was the most responsible leadership we ever had. I asked the minister of agriculture to get a gazette of the early 60s which delineated the cattle routes where they used meagre resources then to put earth dams, wind mills even sanitary department…So, any cattle rearer that allowed his cattle to go to somebody’s farm is arrested, taken before the court, the farmer is called to submit his bill and if he can’t pay, the cattle are sold, but subsequent leaders, VVIPs (very very important persons) they encroached on the cattle routes, they took over the cattle rearing areas…So, I tried and explained to him this has got nothing to do with ethnicity or religion. It is a cultural thing which the respective leadership was failing the nation—President Muhammadu Buhari 

 

PRESIDENT Buhari’s closing remarks at the recent Ministers Retreat in Abuja re-enacts the importance of the saying that every moment in politics has a significance. At a retreat in which the president used his opening remarks to call on his ministers to defend actions of the government as aggressively as possible, he also used the end of the retreat to appeal to the country’s elites to be less aggressive in criticizing his government and for elites to see the difference his government has made in the last five years, despite two recessions within the five years of his rule. Of interest for this column today is the story of President Buhari’s response to President Trump’s question about the killing of Christians in Nigeria before and during 1918 when the two leaders met in Washington.

The gist of President Buhari’s response to President Trump is that whatever killings must have happened in Nigeria had nothing to do with religion or ethnicity, but just with culture. It will be hard for sociologists to accept President Buhari’s distancing of culture from ethnicity or religion, but that is not the focus for today’s piece.

Buhari’s explanation to Trump on the centrality of culture to the killing of farmers by herdsmen recognizes the role of what many pundits have referred to as culture war or conflict in most of the cleavages in Nigeria—political, social, and economic. But what is significant about this recognition of conflict of worldviews in the country is not limited to farmers-herdsmen interactions. Nigerians themselves—farmers, herdsmen, drivers, fishermen, and others have acknowledged that cultural differences can impact positively or negatively on the country, depending on how effective government’s management of cultural diversity has been.

Relatedly, Nigerians have drawn attention on many fronts to the adverse effects of holding on to a worldview or lifestyle that can threaten the stability of the country. For example, there have been complaints about the appointments made by President Buhari himself. This includes the fact that all security agencies have been given by the president to people from the north during the first and second terms. Even in his second term, the two ministries in charge of agriculture were given to people from the north, even when there are two types of agriculture in the country–dryland and wetland agriculture. Many cultural groups  have also complained about failure of the current government to bring anybody to book for violating citizens’ right to life and property, despite acknowledgment of security agencies that many of such violators of the rights of Nigerians are even foreigners who look Nigerian.

Many Nigerians have interpreted Buhari’s appointments as an illustration of acts of internal colonialism. More recently, citizens are also worrying about Buhari’s government’s preoccupation with Water Resources Bill, Ruga Programme, and Grazing colonies. The last these programmes are believed by critics to be new attempts to re-create the grazing corridors started by British colonialists over 75 years ago.

Given that every cultural group in a federation has the right to practice its own culture without prejudice to other cultural groups, the challenge before the president in the remaining three years includes nurturing cross-cultural understanding that will prevent any cultural group from seeing the culture of any one group of people as the norm and the culture of others within the federation as deviance. It is, therefore, the role of government in a multicultural federation to prevent differences in culture or worldview to ruin many advantages that should in normal circumstances accompany cultural diversity.

While the culture of over 200 cultures may not be easy to change into the culture of one specific group, it is still feasible for the Buhari government to respond to the challenge of reducing conflict between cultures—Islamic, Christian, Animist as well as to the other two raised by President Buhari–Climate change and Population growth.

Climate change is a global matter and Nigeria seems to be cooperating with other countries on this issue and needs to remain enthusiastic about giving attention to environmental assessment for all projects—public and private. Furthermore, the government’s renewable energy initiative needs more attention than it is currently receiving. Several years ago, the federal government announced that about 40 federal universities would soon be provided with solar power. This promise is yet to be fulfilled. At a time that animal virus is believed to have created covid-19 pandemic, it is no longer advisable for government to allow pastoralists to allow their animals to have unregulated access to streams and rivers across the country. All ruminants should be restricted to ranches to prevent water contamination.

Moreover, there is need for policies that can take advantage of technologies that can prevent further environmental degradation. Some of such technologies had been used to turn deserts into thriving communities. Dubai is one such example and Las Vegas is another. The challenge facing Nigeria may not be to get stuck to pre-colonial occupations but to modernize traditional vocations like cattle production, by using science and technology to facilitate cattle production without sentencing cattle farmers to a nomadic life in the 21st century. For example, recycling rain water and de-salinizing salt water for transfer to users wherever they are can reduce culture conflict more effectively than ignoring the risks of herdsmen following their cattle to anywhere there is a sign of water, without worrying about the feelings of farmers on the way to such water.

Controlling population growth requires more investment in public education from the government. The effect that 12 years of compulsory public education can have on years of reproduction in the country, as it does in many other countries with emphasis on public education for boys and girls, cannot but be substantial. Moves by several governors to end Almajiri system is a good beginning for population control. But free and compulsory public education for children between 5 and 17 years of age ought to start across the country once the pandemic permits. Nothing says that Nigeria should allow the projection by external agencies about Nigeria having 400 million people by 2050 become a reality.

Lawmakers, now in the process of amending the 1999 Constitution blamed for failing to provide a constitution that is conducive to preventing avoidable culture conflicts, ought to listen to citizens on demands for a better constitution for a federation of diverse cultures.

Ropo Sekoni

Whether those who govern Nigeria recognize that divisiveness is on the rise in the country or not, the recent show of tribalism over the withdrawal of an invitation first given to the governor of Kaduna State, Nasir el Rufai, to speak at the 2020 Nigerian Bar Association conference peeps into the country’s subconscious.

Even after el Rufai had said that withdrawing an earlier invitation sent to him to speak at a conference of lawyers amounted to one less speech for him to give and that he would still write and circulate the speech he would have given at the conference, a collection of lawyers from Jigawa still went ahead to form New Nigerian Bar Association. This column observed when this matter first surfaced that withdrawing invitation from el Rufai was tantamount to killing an ant with a hammer and that it was indecent (though not illegal) to not allow Rufai to say his mind at a conference of one of the country’s most cerebral associations, regardless of his antecedents.

By the same token, the Jigawa group is also deploying a missile to kill a rabbit, by the group’s attempt to politicize what ordinarily should have been a matter of concern to the NBA and its members through the kind of intervention that has recently come from senior members of the NBA from northern Nigeria about the need to give cultural diversity a chance over fragmentation of an association with an enviable history as one of Nigeria’s pillars of democracy.

But  the interest of this column today is not in the politics of naming of organizations in the country; it is about how over sensitive Nigerians have become in the last few years on too many issues. Is this kind of occasional exteriorization of the subconscious necessarily a bad thing? No, nothing helps the individual better than surfacing his/her subconscious to increase the chances of coping with some aspects of what troubles him or her. What is worrying is the quick relapse to see many things from the prism of geopolitical struggle in a context that is primarily established for nation building, rather than for struggle for domination by any of the groups in the country.

In this respect, within the two weeks of the withdrawal of invitation to el Rufai to speak, all manners of caucuses had emerged to demonstrate the ease with which Nigerians can opt for fragmentation and at the same time generate counter forces to supply rational arguments about the importance of making diversity work in a federation of cultures.  Therefore, the emergence of a group of northern lawyers to counter the option of a group of Jigawa lawyers on why NBA, an organization with ancestors that go back to days before the Amalgamation, seems for now to have poured water on the threat of secession from NBA by creators of New NBA.

Instructively, the communiqué of the meeting read by the current Acting Chairman of Arewa Lawyers Forum: “We have unanimously agreed to support his (Olumide Akpata’s) leadership of NBA, and we hereby restate our true allegiance to NBA and disassociate ourselves from the ‘New NBA’ or any splitter group whatsoever making the waves in recent weeks as a new association/body of lawyers in Nigeria…We understand that NBA has historically and in recent times been fraught with several challenges, but we are indeed assured that NBA under the leadership of Mr. Olumide Akpata will surmount these challenges and birth an all-inclusive Bar that will work for all lawyers in Nigeria regardless of any part of the divide one may belong” seems to have brought more rational intervention to the matter, at least for now.

One lesson that may not be obvious is the seeming volatility of politics of identity in the country. It is not that there is no reason for practicing identity politics in a multicultural federation, it is that such political practice ought to be recognized by all as part of the game of multicultural federation if one group is not to be subordinated by others. For example, the theme of el Rufai’s speech was to be about identity or Who is a Nigerian? But more importantly, more than at any other time in the history of Nigeria including the period of the civil war, has the discourse of identity politics been as dominant a trope as it has been in the last few years. Yet, there is no other time that the rhetoric of national unity has been more strident that it has in the last few years. If professional politicians cannot see what they are not doing right to lessen the politics of fear among groups, then professional political scientists and political sociologists need to come to the assistance of ordinary citizens.

Obviously, there are many signs in circulation to make a true believer in unity in diversity or diversity in unity feel uneasy in many parts of the country: recurrent news of foreigners terrorizing citizens in many parts of the country; rise in cases of kidnapping, banditry, killing of Nigerians from other parts of the country and even from within the same state, allegations and counter allegations of religious domination, etc. These are matters that should seize the attention of handlers of federal and state governments. No problem goes away by itself; every social-psychological problem—actual or perceived–requires attention and intervention of those charged with sustaining a feeling of belonging by members of each of the plural cultures that constitute the federation; otherwise, such problems would sink into the subconscious or  struggle to come to the open and spark controversies that can heat the polity, borrow a Nigerian vernacular idiom.

Further on the NBA, an association of trained minds to nurture, like journalists and judges, democracy, ought to be reminded by the advisory, “if gold rusts, what will iron do?” The affairs of NBA, like those of many other professional associations in the country, are influenced  by the proverbial Nigeria Factor, the obsession with politics of attention. In other climes, conferences of professional bodies are opportunities for such associations to renew the values of such professions. It is at such meetings that innovative talents in the profession or related professions or vocations promote new ideas capable of extending the frontier of the knowledge that powers the profession. It is at such gatherings that professionals hear new ideas about how to add more value to what they do and experience critical and meta-critical attention that can strengthen such professions.

When professional associations politicize their conferences by inviting political figures with or without backgrounds and no evidence of new knowledge to improve the profession, other than the noise that practicing politicians carry because of the power temporarily housed in them, the risks are huge. Most of the ideas that become game changers in all professions are made at conferences devoted to ideas about improvement of such professions. It is the practice of using platforms of professional groups to stroke the egos of politicians or so-called big names that, in the first place, must have led to inviting and dis-inviting el Rufai and the disruptions from his supporters. On the positive side, it is reassuring that there are still many lawyers across the country that are preoccupied with not only unity in the NBA but also with the need to sustain an ethos of democracy and good governance in Africa’s most populous multinational federal democracy.

Ropo Sekoni

 

Almost half of humanity will face water scarcity by 2030 and strategists from Israel to Central Asia prepare for strife–Chris Arsenault

 

Unequal power relations within states and conflicts between ethnic groups and social classes will be the greatest source of social tensions rising from deprivation…Water too often is treated as a commodity, as an instrument with which one population group can suppress another…. Water scarcity is an issue exacerbated by demographic pressures, climate change and pollution—Ignacio Saiz

 

NIGERIA with its controversy-breeding bill on ownership and management of surface and underground water has started to act as if it is a helpless victim of water stress. Instead of adopting an approach of problem identification and search for sustainable solution that have worked in other climes, members of the House of Representatives have chosen to use a military-authored approach that had hobbled development in the country for the past half a century: obsession with centralization of governance processes and domination of subnational units by the federal government.

As this column had argued since the first appearance of a bill in the 8th National Assembly  to take control of management of water resources away from the states and transfer it to federal government’s long list of exclusive functions, the re-presentation of the bill in 2020 has failed to do the rigorous strategic thinking that finding solution to any form of water stress in any part of a country requires.

The Executive Bill on federal take-over of management of all sources of water—ocean, rivers and streams with their banks, and underground water across Nigeria–suggests an effort to remake Nigeria into an over-centralized unitary state: “As the public trustee of the nation’s water resources the Federal Government, acting through the Minister and the institutions created in this Act or pursuant to this Act, shall ensure that the water resources of the nation are protected, used, developed, conserved, managed and controlled in a sustainable and equitable manner, for the benefit of all persons and in accordance with its Constitutional mandate.”

Another clause: “States may make provisions for the management, use and control of water sources occurring solely within the boundaries of the State but shall be guided by the policy and principles of the Federal Government in relation to Integrated Water Resources Management, and this Act.”

These two clauses and others including the power of a federal department to issue permits for use of water in individual states to be controlled by federal principles (whatever that phrase means) seek to threaten the fundamental character of any federation. Where are the data to confirm that the current management of water in individual states violates the principle of rational use of water? What in the history of public administration in the country confirms that the federal government has what it takes to manage water more effectively than the communities that had housed and managed such water resources for centuries? What data confirms ineffective or inefficient management of water available in each state of the federation to make this ’emergency rule’ approach to water in a federation justifiable? It is befuddling that lawmakers in the 9th House have chosen to ignore the importance of data and knowledge that approval of a bill to remove control of water from governments closest to the people to a central government distant from citizens (not subjects) requires.

Rather than a law to increase the functions of a central government that is distant from where water is used to sustain life, what other countries that have data-driven recognition of water shortage have done is to use scientific knowledge to solve a problem that political engineering cannot solve. State representatives in the national assembly should not have the power to surrender water that subtends and sustains the land in their constituencies to the central government without full consultation with subnational governments and citizens at the level that the law is designed to dispossess of the water that subtends the land. This bill is too fundamental to the essence of Nigeria as a federal republic. Like the Land Use Act, it should be a matter for constitutional amendment that state legislators after due consultation with their constituents would have a proper voice in turning into a part of the country’s Basic Law.

Where is the wisdom that came from citizens when the bill was first introduced and defeated? When the executive bill first surfaced in the 8th Senate, citizens openly advised the federal government to use the route of constitutional amendment to determine the wisdom of withdrawing power over management of water from subnational governments that have constitutional power to manage use of land—the Siamese twin of water in human experience.

Undoubtedly, water is acquiring by the day the force to threaten political stability in many countries that prefer political engineering to the power of knowledge. As Anders Berntell has once acknowledged, the Boko Haram and Al-Shabaab terrorist groups owe significant part of their radicalization to growing lack of natural resources, including water that has reduced chances of people to make a respectable living in the countries affected by Boko Haram and Al Shabaab. Nigeria as a country below the Sahara Desert ought, in the interest of sustainable development, to think proactively about the future of water supply for its teeming population, but not through disempowerment of communities that house rivers, streams, aquifers, and boreholes, as there are more effective and more sustainable ways to solve the problem of water stress in parts of the country.

A bill that is likely to overheat the polity and stoke the flames of ethnic and inter-regional tension is not the way to solve a global problem: Water Stress. Instead of a bill to politicize the growing water scarcity in Nigeria, the thing to do is for Nigeria to ‘technologize’ this challenge, by applying benefits of new knowledge to solving water scarcity and stress in all parts of the country. Making management of water resources an exclusive federal function does not guarantee an end to water stress, especially in the context of rising population that is projected to make Nigeria the third most populous country in the world by 2050. This kind of law can be a source of strife rather than a solution that many other countries have tried to solve.

What is needed is for the central government to think out of the box and strategically, like Israel, Morocco, UAE, Brazil, Australia, India, and Peru, to name a few.   For example, India and Peru are increasing their water supply by capturing rainwater and storing it for agricultural purposes. Israel uses ‘Osmotic System’ of de-salination that makes sea water good for human consumption. Many countries modernize the traditional method of groundwater re-charging, a process that collects water during the rainy season to store underground for future use. In a situation in which sea water occupies about 70 percent of the  human planet and use of international water resides with national governments, a new method of de-salination made possible by scientific innovation is a proven way to end water stress, without stoking the flames of regional or inter-state tension and political instability.

Transferring management of water resources to the federal government, instead of looking for solutions to water scarcity where it exists, is choosing an oppressive political solution to a problem that requires scientific solution, proven to be effective in other countries. Water stress is a global problem that can be solved with technology, not political domination of subnational units. Providing adequate power for over 400 million Nigerians by 2050 is not likely to be achieved by pushing management of water resources to the central government in a federation. One advantage of technology is that, when wisely used, it can remove many issues that spark conflict or tension in traditional or pre-modern societies.

Nigeria is already fighting on too many fronts: Boko Haram, Islamic State of West Africa, internal banditry with assistance from foreigners according to the Inspector General of Police, kidnapping, and the pandemic that has pushed the country in the direction of recession. It is foolhardy for the executive and the legislature to foment wittingly or unwittingly another crisis in the guise of search to solutions of national water stress that is yet to be determined scientifically.  Nigeria is not alone in the world; it should not be afraid to benefit from best practices  on a global problem in other countries.

By Ropo Sekoni

There is no better time for public affairs columnists to examine many issues pertaining to politics and governance than now, when many of the nation’s politicians are overtly or covertly itching to open the ritual of jockeying for the nation’s presidency. Today’s piece will discuss many topics, for fear of not having the opportunity to do so because such important matters stand the risk of being eclipsed by new flow of issues from the country’s fertile soil for matters arising.

The first of the hot issues is the discovery by the country’s security that foreigners are a major factor in rising insecurity in the country. While the Coordinator, Defence Media Operations, John Enenche, briefed the public about successes of the Operation Sahel Sanity and other efforts in different parts of the federation, he announced that his forces discovered foreigners in possession AK47 acting as part of the criminals on the prowl in Sokoto.

This discovery by the Nigerian military is not news; similar discoveries had been made by the police two or more years ago when farmers complained about herdsmen chasing them with AK47 out of their ancestral land. Even the director of Immigration Services and Governor Nasir el-Rufai of Kaduna State told the nation several years ago that foreigners from other West African countries were part of kidnapping, banditry, and murder of farmers identified by farming communities as Fulani herdsmen.

The news that we have not received from the military this time is whether any of the foreigners or Nigeriens seen harassing Nigerian citizens inside Nigeria with AK47 weapons recently were killed or arrested. If they are still alive, Nigerians would like to know more about their motives for coming to destabilize a country that has been a good neighbour to Niger Republic, to the extent of offering an extension of Nigeria’s Lagos-Kano rail to Maradi, presumably at no cost to Niger Republic. After a thorough investigation, the matter of citizens of ECOWAS countries serving as terrorists in Nigeria deserves to be taken to ECOWAS court, and if possible, to other relevant international bodies.

Relatedly, the latest announcement by the Inspector General of Police: “We have realised that most of the banditry has an international dimension. The bandits come from outside the country. We arrested Sudanese, Nigeriens and Malians, among other nationals…We also believe that because of what is happening in the North-East and the fact that the military troops are doing a great job in the fight against insurgency there, most of the bandits are running toward the North-West of the country and we have evidence…When we operated in Kaduna, Birnin Gwari, where we attacked a group of bandits, we realised that most of them came from Islamic State of West Africa, who are terrorists, kidnapping for ransom” is instructive.

This statement is significant, not for what it says but for what it has not said. Why would the IGP end this public enlightenment with a statement about efforts by President Buhari, without mentioning what the Police Force plans to do, to reduce public anxiety about rising insecurity from foreigners from neighbouring countries and from the Islamic State of West Africa?

Incidentally, Major-General Enenche was the military spokesman that almost dismissed the claim by international intelligence two weeks ago about increasing threat to Nigeria’s security from the spread of Islamist terrorism in the Sahel. Ironically, the same major general has witnessed the opportunity to sight terrorists from Niger Republic with lethal weapons in criminal acts in one of Nigeria’s spiritual centers and almost around the same time that the IGP realized the presence of Sudanese, Nigeriens, and Malians among perpetrators of heinous crimes against innocent Nigerians, especially in the Northwest. Now that the Police and the Army are on the same page with respect to the international dimension of insecurity in Nigeria, let us hope that sooner than later Nigerians will be able to sleep with both eyes closed.

Another viral issue is the withdrawal of invitation to the governor of Kaduna State, Nasir el-Rufai, to serve as one of many lecturers at this year’s Nigerian Bar Association Conference, where many lecturers that are not necessarily less controversial than Rufai have been invited to give speeches. It is puzzling that the country’s learned men and women trained to appreciate plurality of perspectives would be so afraid of hearing views that may be outlandish or unconventional from el-Rufai, more so at a time when Rufai had just  thrown out one of his facile theories: being human  is antithetical to identity politics!

To this column, the issue at stake is not Rufai; it is the culture of democracy in our land. The oxygen of democracy is freedom of expression. Granted that the Nigerian Bar Association is a private institution in the technical sense of the word, it is, doubtless, an association that  luxuriates in contestation of ideas, more so that lawyers make a living as operators in a market of ideas. NBA should not have allowed complaints from some of its members to encourage the organization to be upstaged by the Kaduna governor who must be savouring every bit of the attention that withdrawal of the invitation to talk at what is considered a prestigious organization is likely to engender.

Nothing requires members of NBA who have personal or professional grievances against Rufai to attend his session at the conference. I will not be surprised if  the country’s media space is not dominated in the next few weeks by the withdrawal of an invitation extended to el Rufai by organizers of the NBA conference.  This time around, the NBA has killed an ant with a machete—an irrational use of resources.

The final theme pertains to economic governance. The news from China about the opening of a Cocoa Marketing Board in Hunan Province of the world’s most populous country should be a challenge to governors of cocoa-producing states in Nigeria and to the federal government that has taken advantage of China’s readiness to assist Nigeria in the development of its infrastructure. The launching of the African Cocoa Marketing Centre in Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province, is billed to start by buying cocoa mainly from Ghana and extending this huge business opportunity to other African countries.

If this Chinese initiative had come in the 1950s, Nigeria would have been one of the first three countries including Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire that China would have approached on what could have been a game changer for cocoa farmers in West Africa. With a population of 1.4 billion people with a projection to have 550 million middle-class consumers by 2022, any African country in the business of cocoa production has a huge market to respond to, especially now that there is convertibility of currencies between Nigeria and China, without having to go through buying and selling of dollars in the parallel forex market.

It is no longer necessary to bemoan wrong choices made by Nigeria’s rulers in the past. There is no good excuse for Nigeria to fall out of the club of top cocoa producers in the world after the rise of petroleum. Governors of cocoa producing countries—from the Southwest , South-south to the Northcentral—should not be left out of the new cocoa rush that is about to start from China. The Association of cocoa producers across the federation now has good reasons to be a doing rather than a talking organization. Nigeria can do whatever Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire have done to make the two countries first places to visit for cocoa products in Africa.

Nigeria’s loans from China must be larger than the combined indebtedness of Ghana and Ivory Coast to China. The new Cocoa Marketing Centre in Hunan Province provides a good chance for Nigeria to trade with the world’s largest middle-class population. This is the right time for governors of cocoa-producing states in Nigeria to remind the Central Bank about its cocoa initiative and for individual states to put their cocoa farmers to work, to take advantage of China’s new economy.

Ropo Sekoni

 

 

THE title of today’s piece is borrowed from an American economist who assisted Nigeria in the writing of its first Development Plan for 1962-1968. The book, Planning without Facts: Lessons in Resource Allocation from Nigeria’s Development, is not fully about Nigeria, but it makes the case that absence of facts vitiates plans and misleads those in charge of policymaking and implementation. It seems that over 50 years after Stopler’s warnings, Nigerian planners—political and professional—are still severely hobbled by lack of critical facts to development and  by lack of right attitude to data mining and storage.

How else is one to interpret the recent revelation that about 32 million under-five children in Nigeria do not have birth registration or birth certificates? If this is true, it means that plans made in respect of education, health, and food production and distribution leave out about 15 per cent of the people, if we put the country’s population at 200 million. What the omission of 32 million children from plans made by the central and subnational governments suggests is lack of faith in facts as one of the fundamentals of modern governance. Extremists would even say that this shows that people in power and governance in the country have no respect for the citizens whose votes bring them power and prominence.

There is no better justification for retrieving this piece from my archive and updating it than a recent announcement by the chairman of the population commission who warned that only its commission under the control of the central government in Abuja has the power to register new births across the federation. This suggests that the obsession over centralism sees no use in the importance of sharing registration of new births and issuance of certificates of birth by the federal and subnational units, especially the local governments into which children are born.

The federal government’s obsessing over territorial control of this important source of vital data for planning ought to have, without prompting from activists for federalism, recognized the urgency of data from registration of births or issuance of birth certificates as crucial to proper governance at all levels. It is befuddling that the population commission feels easy that the representative of Unicef at the event at which the commission re-enacted its monopoly over birth data also announced that “57 percent of children in Nigeria do not have their births registered.”  Instead of boasting about its monopoly of power over issuance of birth certificates that is at less than 50 percent success rate, the population commission opted to flaunt the power that it seems unable to deploy to the benefit of the country.

By way of digression, Nigeria used to have politicians and civil servants who knew the importance of data. There was a story told to me and Mr Dapo Olorunyomi during the NADECO struggle for democracy by Chief Anthony Enahoro, then in exile. The gist of the story was about the importance of data for planning and implementation of the Western Nigeria Free Education Scheme in the 1950s. The topmost civil servant in the country then was Chief Simeon Adebo. He had come to tell Awolowo that enrollment in the schools in border towns around Asaba in Western Region and Onitsha in Eastern region, Ekanmeje (in today’s Kwara) then in Northern Region, and Otte  a border town between Western and Northern Regions was noticeably higher than projected. So were numbers of school children in many other border communities along Ikare-Lokoja Road higher than initially projected. Awolowo as premier was reported to have said that it was risky for the region to deliberately keep its neighbours illiterate in the middle of the 20th century and then called for more data about border villages in the region so that Western Region’s Ministry of Education could plan for such neigbours justifiably as hungry for education as their counterparts in Western Region.  This digression is not designed to preach Awoism; we already have too many current governors from the old Western Region claiming to be Awoists.

The objective of this anecdote is to remind contemporary politicians including federal executive and legislative officers and state governors that data or facts may not be as dangerous or useless as they may seem. Where they are accurate, data help to improve efficiency, transparency, and accountability in governance. It is strange that governors and civil servants in many states are no longer as concerned about data as their parents who served in government in the 1950s were. If they are, they would have disagreed with a central government that gives sole power over birth certificates to one agency with a history of inadequate capacity to collect accurate data on population distribution in the country.

For example, when the virus of ghost workers first broke out in the country, it was in respect of the central government, but now each state government provides its annual or seasonal number of ghost workers in its public service. None of the states feels ashamed to announce in another year the number of ghost workers and pensioners caught in its annual fishing expedition for ghosts in the public service sector. In a culture of deep respect for data or facts, it should not be easy for ghost workers to resurrect every year as they do in Nigeria.

As Nigeria prepares for the post-pandemic new normal, state governors need to embrace the search for accurate data in all aspects of public life within state jurisdiction: number of children born in each local government each day and proper documentation of such births with a photograph of the child’s face. In many countries, each new infant’s picture is taken, fingerprints and footprints are captured and stored for transfer to central government’s data bank and toward requesting a national identification or social security number for the new child whose birth is believed to automatically change the equation. The same respect for data applies to death. Even as people die in response to the pandemic, it is not likely that information about such deaths are available to enable the office of humanitarian affairs revise the number of its monthly beneficiaries. It will not be surprising if most of the people receiving welfare payments do not have any evidence of their birth in Nigeria.

Although the old belief that population figures in Nigeria are hardly agreed upon by the country’s constituent nationalities that are cognizant of the geopolitical significance of population figures persists 60 years after the country’s first official census, this should not discourage governors from collecting accurate data on the people in each of the local governments in his/her state. Embarking on such regular data drive is not necessarily to benchmark with what comes from data collected by census enumerators every ten years, but principally to enable the governor know how many people to plan for in every budget year.

It is puzzling to travel through states carved from old Western Nigeria and see that many streets do not have names and many houses do not have numbers. How can any government—central or subnational—make credible development plan without accurate data? We cannot and should not continue the culture of planning without data that periodic disputes about distribution of population across the country had sparked in the past to continue to make subnational units—states and local governments—hostile to bio and other forms of data needed for effective governance.

Waiting for restructuring and the autonomy it may bring to each state to reconfigure politics and governance at the subnational level should not prevent local government chairmen and governors from accepting the inevitability of data to governance at every level. Nothing in the current centralist constitution prevents governors and local governments from collecting and storing data for use in subnational governance, once they do not use subnational data to poohpooh numbers collected through issuance of birth certificates or counting of heads by the central government.

With more than 32 million young Nigerians unaccounted for in the nation’s records, is it surprising that UNICEF has reported that about half of Nigerians engage in open defecation?  Will anybody be surprised if the promises made by the federal government to improve sanitation across the country in collaboration with the states miscarry after implementation of such plans? 22 of the 36 states are said to be without facilities for registering the birth of those rhetorically and euphemistically referred to as ‘leaders of tomorrow’ by politicians. Is it inconceivable that 50 per cent of the country’s ‘omitted children’ also have another 30 million of mothers and fathers with no birth certificate or birth registration records? Is such a dire situation one that should embolden the population commission to beat its chest as the sole owner of the process of collecting data on new births, instead of looking for creative ways to collaborate with subnational governments to access data needed by all levels of government presumably preoccupied with improving the quality of life of each citizen?

By Ropo Sekoni

 

While Nigeria waits for professional biographers of Chief Bode Akindele to explain his ease to  remain a patriotic Nigerian without necessarily owing allegiance to any political party in power, it is proper as the world celebrates the life of this man of excellence in many aspects of life to examine his vision of business and society.

In his writings, speeches, and interviews, Chief Akindele defined himself as a patriot in Mark Twain’s sense of the word: “Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.”

Chief Akindele’s self-portrayal is best illustrated in his autobiography, I Did it God’s Way among other writings, speeches, and interviews he gave in the over 70 years of his life of work and eminent accomplishments.

He captured the essence of his contribution in his chapter on ethics, where he described his life as a combination of the ethic of business and ethic of care.

Not being a man that sought attention during his lifetime but worked and gave in a manner that attracted attention to him, Chief Akindele’s boundless energy for business and philanthropy provides an opportunity to look at his contributions to Nigeria’s development, without being a politician.

Today’s piece is a public tribute to a man with whom I interacted closely for the last 30 years of his of life of work and charity.

When Chief Akindele said in his autobiography: “The inspiration for writing this book came from two sources. First, it is intended to be a testimony to God’s grace in my life.

Second, it is my hope that my experience in life should have something positive to teach our young people and upcoming professionals and businessmen and women in particular, and all our youths in general,” he provided some rubrics with which to evaluate his contributions to various demographic groups in the country—women, the youth, and the Nigerian community—from the village to the national level.

Long before the word feminism, gender parity, gender balance, gender democracy became a part of defining modern democratic life in Nigeria in particular, Chief Akindele had been demonstrating commitment to women empowerment in the country.

Apart from using his Bode Akindele Foundation under the coordination of  Archbishop Ayo Ladigbolu to assist widows and orphans through donations of facilities and money to lessen the pains of this vulnerable group,  the Parakoyi of Ibadan (the chieftaincy in charge of matters of business and industry in pre-colonial Yoruba society) also gave special consideration to women in many other ways.

His employment from the beginning of his business was a gender-sensitive one. Women always had the same opportunity for employment in all his ventures.

And Parakoyi promoted such opportunity in his hiring patterns. For example, when the chief had one of Africa’s largest fishing companies (Obelawo), he gave considerations to women that needed credit facilities to, in his own words, “prevent mothers who needed to care for children from losing their chosen means of livelihood as retailers of seafood.”

In the tradition of his philosophy that “Politics is not meant for everybody and as a matter of fact, you don’t have to be in politics before you contribute your quota,” Chief Akindele provided many higher education institutions—University of Ibadan, Federal University of Technology Akure, Redeemer’s University, and Wesley University with generous grants to improve each institution’s competitiveness in specific areas of training—computer science, business administration, technology, etc.

“Providing facilities that can improve the quality of education that our youths get is one way to prepare them for leadership positions in the nation and in the world”, he said many times at many of the annual June 2 birthday anniversary gatherings in his Apapa home.

For a person whose loyalty was for his country rather than for any particular government, it was not surprising that he was awarded the Order of the Federal Republic (OFR) several decades ago for his meritorious services to the nation.

Any surprise that Chief Akindele received honorary degrees from several Nigerian universities for his contributions to business knowledge and promotion of knowledge in the country and the world?

In his capacity as a voracious traveler, Chief Akindele never failed to observe models of philanthropy in the various continents he had business and personal reasons to visit.

It was thus in character when in the last decade of his life, he added to the Bode Akindele Foundation’s programmes a new collaborative initiative with the Good Worker Ministries International, the University of Ibadan, and Federal University of Technology Akure, named Bode Akindele Yield Initiative (BAYI) under the coordination of retired Archbishop Kehinde Stephen.

This is Parakoyi’s second philanthropic intervention in the preparation of Nigerian youths for a life of work, service, and leadership: “The primary objective of BAYI is to develop millions of focused and well-oriented Nigerian youths as innovators, entrepreneurs and leaders.

My inspiration through God’s help is to be of benefit to mankind. This inspiration led to the establishment of the Bode Akindele Foundation (BAF) in 1985 which has been involved in several special projects. Some of which are dedicated to the development of our youths.”

In programmatic terms, BAYI’s activities include “Capacity Building, Skills Acquisition, Innovations, Entrepreneurship, Creativity, Research and  General Youth Development through provision of knowledge and skills in the following areas: Renewable Energy, Sustainable Living through informed attention to Climate Action and the Environment; Training in Artificial Intelligence (AI) for youths; Vocational and Entrepreneurial Skills Development through creation of cottage industries and other small and medium scale business initiatives; Innovative and Multiplier Agriculture; Leadership Skills Promotion; Drug Abuse Prevention and Treatment and Care; and Sports Development.”

These activities for youth empowerment represent a bold and generous effort by Chief Akindele to relieve the government of some of its responsibilities, not as a paid government contractor but as a supporter of the cause of national development.

With the waves already being made by BAYI, Chief Akindele’s ideology that we do not need to be politicians to make contributions to national progress, is illustrate, like charity projects under Bode Akindele Foundation, Parakoyi’s other maxim that “when a businessman focuses on the country rather than on a particular government, he puts himself in a good position to plan for human progress in such country.”

Chief Akindele’s patriotism or love of Nigeria, given a symbolic expression in the naming of his personal seaside house in Vinaros in Spain Nigeria House, is one of many ways the global businessman has promoted the name of Nigeria on the global scene.

Long before globalization became an indispensable part of the new world order, Chief Akindele agreed with his internal business partners that investing in the economy of other countries should not be an exclusive economic activity of the Western world.

He took some of the profits he made from doing business in Nigeria to own business in over 60 countries in four continents to create more resources to invest more in the Nigerian economy.

He did this without abusing the culture of his foreign hosts, thus acting as a good and friendly ambassador of Nigeria in many countries with or without official Nigerian embassies.

In addition, Parakoyi was a generous donor to patriotic causes designed to improve the quality of life of citizens at home and in diaspora.

The young Ibadan man that started a trading business with his father’s large sitting room as a warehouse before going national and later going global also succeeded in doing something that biographers should explore, the fulfillment of his ambition to move what started as a pop and mom business to a global corporate business(s), Modandola Group in Nigeria and Fairgate Group in Europe that can self-sustain and self-re-generate after his life and not at the expense of his children’s right to choose their  own way of life.

CBA, Rest in peace and long live your legacy and idea about love of one’s country: “A caring businessman, like a caring government leader, is more likely to generate trust and love from people than a business person or ruler that sees nothing beyond the bottom line in monetary or power terms.”

 Ropo Sekoni

 

Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife—John Dewey

I order to attain to the goals of economic freedom and prosperity, Nigeria must do certain things as a matter of urgency and priority. It must provide free education (at all levels) and free health facilities for the masses of its citizens—Obafemi Awolowo

THE Minister of State for Education, Chukuemeka Nwajiuba, recently announced that the federal government is about to hand over public schools not doing well to private sector players: “We are going to be changing to the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM), curriculum and enhance it…Also, we are stepping up with private sector players because we have realised that we cannot do it alone.

It is essential we bring everyone on board through public-private partnerships…For instance, we have a lot of public schools that are not doing well; so, instead of building new schools, let us concession some of these schools to those who have the capacity to adopt and close-manage them very well…These are the kinds of projects we want to do and I proposed this when I was the Chairman of TETFund.”

This policy announcement needs more elaboration. There are many issues raised in the announcement that should be of interest to citizens, especially parents of pupils of the country’s public education system.

One of such questions is whether the minister is taking his authority to give public schools for adoption to private sector players from the federal government’s Public-Private-Partnership (PPP) legislation or is basing authority for such transfer of public resource to private players on his ideas when he was at TETFund.

The federal government’s policy on PPP includes joint efforts between the government and the private sector in creation of new infrastructure, expansion, and refurbishment of existing assets.

Areas of public infrastructure approved for PPP arrangement include Roads and Bridges; Ports and Railways; Inland Container Depots and Logistics Hubs; Gas and Petroleum Infrastructure; Water Supply, Treatment and Distribution Systems; Solid Waste Management; Urban Transport Systems; Housing; Healthcare Facilities; and Educational Facilities (my emphasis).

Does the minister’s decision to concession schools that are not doing well to “those who have capacity to adopt and close-manage them very well” include transferring management of such schools beyond the infrastructural aspects to contractors?

If what is to be transferred to private managers is just provision of the infrastructure of schools that are not doing very well, that policy will be within the framework of the government’s items slated for collaboration between government and private contractors.

Afterall, most of the buildings in public schools including federal unity schools were built by contractors, just as many public housing projects are usually handled by contractors.

The only thing that will be new is transfer of maintenance of such physical facilities to individuals or organizations, other than the school and the government.

But if the minister includes management of the curriculum, teaching, and administration of public schools in the PPP system, then citizens ought to be given opportunities to discuss efforts by government officials to offshore teaching and learning in schools funded with taxpayers’ money to private owners.

As such decision is likely to affect philosophy and integrity of public education, it is not a matter that should be decided behind the backs of citizens and their representatives in the National Assembly, for whatever such effort may be worth.

PPP is a model that is gaining ground across the globe and even in Nigeria. Chief Obafemi Awolowo launched public education in Western Nigeria with a model of PPP between faith organizations (churches and mosques) and the government in a joint effort to fund and manage public schools, before migrating to the model of full-scale public education now in existence in many parts of the country.

Although Nigeria’s private sector may be doing better in terms of efficiency than the governments—federal, state, and local, there are not many countries with more efficient private sector than Nigeria and with traditions of successful public school system that have driven public education with private managers, beyond building of physical infrastructure and school facilities.

While it is in order to offshore building of schools and managing of physical facilities of public schools, it is, for obvious reasons, risky for any country to leave the job of public education—teaching, learning, and administering (now managing) the process of teaching and learning in the hands of contractors, regardless of how proficient such private-sector managers may be.

As provider of a common good made possible by taxes from citizens, the government remains the most qualified sector to operate public schools.

Accountable governance may require that government cuts waste and enhances efficiency in public schools, but doing this should not include attempts by agencies of government—collector of citizens’ tax for the purpose of public education among other functions–to transfer management of schools as public sites of learning and teaching to businessmen.

Scotland, the first country in the world to start public education in the 17th century, still produces one of the five top quality public education systems in the world in 2020, if the results of Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is anything to go by.

And Scotland has not contracted management of its school system to entrepreneurs. On the contrary, it has assisted its local governments to manage such schools with constant monitoring by the tier that holds tax funds in trust for citizens.

There is no doubt that there are problems with education, especially public education in Nigeria today: substandard physical infrastructures; underfunding of schools by the government at all levels; poor quality of teachers and of teacher preparation/certification; and over bureaucratization of public school management that fueled corruption, which in turn, worsens the state of public education in the country.

If offshoring physical facilities and managing them can reduce corruption, thereby leaving more money for providing relevant education to citizens in the interest of national development, this column congratulates the minister of education.

But if by “close-managing schools that are not doing very well,” which the chairman of the education committee in the House, Julius Ihonvbere, has characterized as the new normal, refers to transferring management of the process of providing teaching, learning, and research, this column believes this is not the path to take.

Our governments, especially federal and state, have experimented with various models of public education in the past—PPP (in terms of grants-in-aid to operate schools with religious organizations), nomadic, and Almajiri.

What the governments have not done well in the last four decades is leaving managing of public schools at the community in which schools are located. Instead, governments have created huge bureaucracies around education to suffocate and frustrate people directly involved in educating young citizens.

By transferring building and maintenance of public school infrastructure and physical facilities (including supply and maintenance of assistive technology for teaching and learning) to private partners, so much distraction would have been eliminated for teachers and school administrators, thereby leaving those charged with managing the academic component of public education with more time to concentrate on their own area of expertise, instead of  being saddled with negotiating with contractors.

And separating academic from real-estate concerns  should give the governments opportunities for deferred payment to private partners and to provide adequate funding for those areas that cannot wait for deferred payment: quality teacher preparation/certification; respectable salaries and benefits for teachers; academic enrichment incentives for students; unfettered access to public education for children to receive equal opportunities for learning; etc.

There seems to be nothing in the federal government’s framework for PPP described at the beginning of this piece that supports “concession of  some public schools that are not doing very well to those who have the capacity to adopt and close-manage them.”

For the benefit of public conversation, the minister of education should explain to citizens what this policy entails.

By Ropo Sekoni

 

Finally, what started as an effort on the part of the Senate on May 19, 2020 to address the country’s police system has ended one and half months later with the passing of a law whose highlight is providing a 4-year tenure for the Inspector-General of Police.

The new law falls into the category of a concept I had used several times in the past on this page—Karounwi.

This is a concept in Yoruba semiotics that refers to a process of giving an audience the impression of doing something substantial while in reality the outcome of the action taken is mostly about creating an impression on the audience, rather than achieving any substantial outcome.

Nowhere is the effect of Karounwi more evident in the new law than in the admonitions that surround “Police Act CAP P19 LFN 2004 (Repeal and Re-enactment) Bill, 2020” which seeks to give stability to the office of the Inspector-General of Police, by ending the current situation of leaving the Inspector-General’s tenure to the whim of the president by replacing it with a fixed 4-year tenure.

All other aspects of the law look more like wishes of the senators, rather than any effort to change any process. For example, the part of the law that says: “The national policing plan should be made with inputs from the Police Force Headquarters and all the various police formations nationwide,… setting out priorities, objectives, cast implications and expected outcomes of Policing for the next succeeding financial year in order to change budgeting from a top-down approach to a bottom-up approach” does not amount to much.

How else has the national police been functioning other than through coordination of its plans and budget from the Police Headquarters which is the operational base of the Inspector-General?

Another Karounwi provision: “That the police abide and enforce certain constitutional provisions, particularly fundamental rights of persons in Police custody under chapter 4 of the 1999 Constitution (as amended) and other international instruments on Human rights to which Nigeria is a signatory (including of provisions that reiterate the importance of fundamental human rights and advocating for their observance).”

The question that should be on the mind of the average citizen is was there ever a time when the police was permitted in the law of the land to do otherwise?

Read Also: Senate pegs tenure of IGP to 4-year single term

The most worrying part of the new law is the provision that changes the name of “Nigeria Police” back to Nigeria Police Force.”

What is troubling about this seemingly innocuous change of name is its fidelity to to the name given to the central police under colonial rule.

How human rights-sensitive is a police force to citizens in a democratic state?  The name preferred by the Senate is reminiscent of the concept of policing in the colonial days as provision of lethal force to beat the natives into line, an abiding aspect of the Northern Nigeria Constabulary that served as the nucleus for the Nigeria Police Force.

By 2020, sixty years after Nigeria obtained independence from Great Britain and several decades after many former colonies had adopted more citizen-friendly names to define their police-citizen relations, Nigeria’s senators prefer to stay attached to the colonial epithet, instead of  expunging this offensive characterization of the police in a sovereign nation-state as an occupation force to terrify citizens (the natives), as the current policemen and women are wont to do in the country.

It is puzzling that even after the trans-national repudiation of police systems that were designed like the Nigeria Police Force of the colonial era or  post-Reconstruction era in the United States and other parts of the world, Nigeria’s senators still feel compelled to hang on to a police force that citizens have viewed since colonial times more as an occupation force, rather than a protective agency.

It is also perplexing that the reason given to hang on to a name that should have gone with the colonial past is that it has not been possible to amend the constitution that has felt enamored by that name, to the extent of putting it in a constitution given by military dictators to the current ‘post-military’ democratic government.

While congratulating the senators for giving a fixed tenure to the Inspector-General of Police, this column seizes the opportunity to remind them that most of the world is arguing for a more liberal ideology  and a more citizen-friendly police system that the Nigeria Police Force has appeared to be for too long.

It will serve the interest of Nigeria of the post-pandemic era if our senators read and listen to news about efforts in other democratic countries to nurture a life-affirming process in governance values, more urgently than before.

The Karounwi mood was already evident on May 19 when the Senate Ad-hoc Committee on Nigeria Security Challenges recommended that the Senate take the committee’s recommendations to the president about reforming the police.

The recommendations then did not include giving the Inspector-General a fixed 4-year tenure, but they included urging the executive to direct the Ministry of Police Affairs and the Inspector-General of Police to “decentralize the police command structure into 13 zonal commands, each with operational and budgetary powers.”

The part of this recommendation in the new law tepidly says that community policing be strengthened and that it should be made binding on the lGP to adhere to policing plans.

Beyond Karounwi legislative projects in the senate, such as the one under discussion, there are several areas of Nigeria’s security and cost-effective governance that should catch the attention of the current senate at a time that the coronavirus has called for rethinking by lawmakers.

One of such tasks is for the senate to provide leadership for putting an end to a legislative practice referred to as Constituency Projects. It is now news that citizens have been opposed to this practice initiated during the Obasanjo presidency as pork for politicians, a practice that is too wasteful to be carried into the post-pandemic economic reality.

Another one that can bring accolades to the senators for patriotism is for them to be open to a reform of the current bicameral legislative system.

This looks like the right time for the country to cut its coat according to its cloth, rather than staying hooked to an American system copied to replace the parliamentary system.

If this requires that a new agenda for constitutional amendments is needed, there can no better time to embark on policies to save cost than when Nigeria is in the process of obtaining over $22 billion loans, in addition to borrowing from local pensions accounts for projects.

A unicameral legislature that is full-time should be enough for a country that is just re-inventing itself from dependence on petroleum into an agriculture-driven economy.

It will be futile to encourage the Senate to end payment of pension to executive leaders—national and subnational—as the senators are likely to move back from amendment of the constitution.

The longest a president or governor can serve under the current constitution is 8 years. This is only 25 percent of a person’s formal work-life in the country.

It should be enough compensation to president, vice president, governor and deputy governor for the Senate to  call for payment of double the last contribution from employer and employee into the pension funds of each of these political leaders who have chosen to ‘serve’ the country for 8 years.

The same benefit should be given to legislators, regardless of how long they serve in that capacity. Lawmakers should not find this task difficult, realizing that President Buhari himself said in 2015 that he would continue to receive his pension, without taking another salary from the government.

These are already tough times, and if economic forecasts are anything to go by, the post-pandemic years may be tougher economically.

In most democracies, it is the legislators that are expected to make it a point of  unfailing duty to make laws that advance democratic governance and prevent the rise of any form of absolute rule, which to many citizens a unitary police force in Nigeria illustrates.

This time, senators have missed the opportunity to remove the kind of threat to democracy  and respect for human rights that a colonial-type of police force embodies.

By Ropo Sekoni

As usual, Nigerian Meteorological Agency (NiMet) has predicted again that Lagos and many other parts of Nigeria will experience heavy rainfall this year. This is not the first time in the last five years that the scientists engaged in NiMet would give such warning. What is concerning is the attitude of the country’s political leaders to forecasts by NiMet and toward other scientific forecasts or predictions about other aspects of life in the country.

This column is not only about meteorology’s contributions to life in the county but also about contributions of other scientific warnings from Nigeria and outside the country as well as about the nonchalant attitude of  political leaders to value of scientists, despite the high rhetoric from politicians about the importance of science.

Given the efficiency of NiMet to alert the country about vagaries of the weather from year to year in the last five years, it is surprising that many communities continue to be flooded, thus calling on governments (when they care) to dip into ecological funds to deal periodically with consequences of flooding rather than with how to avoid flooding. The joy of meteorological service includes bringing benefits of  this branch of science to citizens and to government leaders, to enable leaders to expand the space or spirit of governance to include reducing pain and cost by responding to warnings, more so when such warnings look like repetition from year to year, as it often does with meteorology.

For example, has environmental science been given adequate attention, no certified town planning office would have approved building on the alluvial plain between Lagos and Ogun States including the area adjoining the long bridge on Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, which experiences flooding  every year. Time will tell if the flood water that now washes away the minerals in the soil in this part of the country would not happen this year, despite early warnings about rainfall for this year. If the average individual listens to NiMet by carrying umbrella or raincoat against rain, political leaders and their policymakers ought to do whatever is necessary to make sure that the same spot does not get flooded for five or more years in a row. What annual flooding tells us is that something is wrong with our city and town planning or land use policy.

Just as it pays to listen to weather advisory, so is it necessary for government leaders to heed advice from scientists on other aspects of the human condition. The jury is out on whether Nigeria could have been like New Zealand, if we had shut our skies to people from China and Europe once we got the first wind of possibility of an epidemic becoming a pandemic. Where political leaders show respect to science by following its recommendations derived from rigorous investigation, citizens generally cultivate more faith in science.

The recent example from the president of the current world capital of science and technology in respect of advice from scientists about the best way to respond to the pandemic should be enough to discourage leaders of other countries from second-guessing scientists. Once some citizens in the United States recently gauged that their leader has alternative solutions to lockdown other than those recommended by scientists, they threw away their face masks, jettisoned culture of social distancing, and called insistently for full reopening of the economy. Some even started to drink disinfectant, hoping that this would prevent being infected by coronavirus.

And here in the homeland, some of our governors have been in denial on-and-off since the emergence of the pandemic. For example, the rest of the country has been appealing to the governor of Oyo State not to throw children under the authority of their parents back in schools, as doing so would further endanger the children and the community. Nobody believes that the state does not have anything to gain by preparing its students for examinations. The worry is about the timing. Now is the time for the governor to worry more about the safety of children and their parents than about WAEC, NECO, and other examinations that can be taken during safer seasons.

In Kogi State, the governor for months have distanced himself and the innocent people of his state from the benefits of science, as he makes a religion of swearing to the falsehood that his state was more protected than others elsewhere on earth from coronavirus infections. For example, efforts by the Cross River State to convince NCDC and the rest of the country is free of cases of covid-19 seem to have come to an end after the recent release by the University of Calabar Teaching Hospital of  confirmation of a case of coronavirus infection in Calabar after proper testing. The NCDC and Cross Rivers authorities have been at logger heads over methods of testing and test results, as if Cross River has superior knowledge of this virus than other experts in 35 other states of the federation.

Now that ‘one case of covid-19 infection’ has been proved by Cross River State’s flagship university, the challenge is for the state to find out how many people have or might have died of this deadly virus since the onset of the pandemic. It will be enough if all that can be achieved with this investigation is to avoid a repeat of what happened earlier in Kano, when the governor claimed there were mysterious deaths in northern Nigeria’s most populous city, long after people had been dying of covid-19 in Lagos, Abuja, and other places.

Relatedly, governors of many states across the country are still in the habit of making passionate pleas for full opening of mosques and churches, despite the daily increase in number of new infections across the country. Shortly before Lagos State walked back from the order on reopening of praying stations, some church and mosque leaders were rumoured to be lobbying politicians to allow pastors to pray for 500 congregants at a time and in the same place. It is not clear how many men and women of faith in our country have been following international news about suspension of pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina this year. If despite the promise of tourism that annually awaits pilgrimage, the supreme political and religious authority in Saudi Arabia opts for losing such money in order not to disrespect the humanity of their fellow human beings across the globe, then it should be a no brainer to Muslim leaders in Nigeria lobbying for full house in mosques and praying fields. What is crucial at present is for Nigerians of all faiths including atheism to be saved from covid-19 so that they can live to pray in whatever form they prefer after the pandemic.

The point of re-telling stories about response of some states to the pandemic is to remind our leaders about the importance of science and data for proper governance. It is true that there is nobody in government at present with experience about the 1918 pandemic and nobody expects any governor to become miracle workers, but once there is an opportunity to hear from certified experts from NCDC and WHO about implications of a pandemic, the rational thing to do is for leaders whose decision one way or the other can affect the lives of many people to follow recommendations of scientists to the letter.

There are examples of several leaders across the globe who have doubted the facts of science and data. Such countries may have the resources to deal with millions of infected cases, but Nigeria that is taking loans and grants from all directions cannot afford to take such chances.

Scientists exist to make life easier for everybody and it costs governments and parents much money to train scientists. The best of epidemiologists across the globe have confirmed that there is no place that cannot be touched by pandemic when it occurs, more so if the pathogen is one that is airborne.