Ropo Sekoni

 

 

Why the comments of the British Prime Minister should bother African leaders is that Mr. Johnson is not only a minister of a sovereign nation, he is also Britain’s coordinator on behalf of the Queen of the affairs of the British Commonwealth of Nations

Consider Uganda, pearl of Africa, as an example of the British record. Are we guilty of slavery? Pshaw. It was one of the first duties of Frederick Lugard, who colonised Buganda in the 1890s, to take on and defeat the Arab slavers….And don’t swallow any of that nonsense about how we planted the ‘wrong crops’. Uganda teems, sprouts, bursts with vegetation. You will find fruits rare and strange, like the jackfruit, hanging bigger than your head and covered with green tetrahedral nodules. Though delicately perfumed, it is, alas, more or less disgusting, and not even Waitrose is pretentious enough to stock it…So the British planted coffee and cotton and tobacco, and they were broadly right. It is true that coffee prices are currently low; but that is the fault of the Vietnamese, who are shamelessly undercutting the market, and not of the planters of 100 years ago….If left to their own devices, the natives would rely on nothing but the instant carbohydrate gratification of the plantain … the colonists correctly saw that the export market was limited….The best fate for Africa would be if the old colonial powers, or their citizens, scrambled once again in her direction; on the understanding that this time they will not be asked to feel guilty—Boris Johnson

 

 

AT the peak of the anti-racism protests in Bristol against the killing of African American, George Floyd, Britain’s Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, called bluntly for retention of statues erected in memory of past British men considered legendary: “They teach us about our past with all its faults.” This remark led to unearthing of longer statements made in the past by Johnson in fond memory of exploitation of Africa in his writings before he became politically famous. This revelation has led to several comments from different corners of the globe. But one voice that has been silent is that of political leaders of African countries and their media miracle workers in respect of Johnson’s cheapening of black or African humanity by slave trade and colonialism.

Public affairs observers that may not be versed in diplomatic finesse may be tempted to take the silence from African leaders, their media aides, and supporting intellectuals as an illustration of the Stockholm Syndrome, a psychological tendency of a hostage to identify with his or her captor. It is, however, remarkable that leading members of Johnson’s political community are already taking him to task on his far-right views on major disorders in the human society: racism, slavery, and more recently, colonialism.

Incidentally, members of the British parliament have already taken Mr. Johnson to task on his unsavory comments. For example, a member of the opposition Labour Party, Dawn Butler, said about Johnson’s comments: “Boris Johnson is the prime minister of the United Kingdom. The history of the UK, Windrush, empire, colonialism should be told with sobering accuracy. …In order to make sustainable progress we need the current PM who has power and privilege to reflect on what he has said and written….I urge the PM to review his previous articles, books and statements and to re-examine them through the brutal lynching that he watched of George Floyd and say whether he regrets anything of what he has said, done or written in the past.”

Why the comments of the British Prime Minister should bother African leaders is that Mr. Johnson is not only a minister of a sovereign nation, he is also Britain’s coordinator on behalf of the Queen of the affairs of the British Commonwealth of Nations. It is significant that the Commonwealth includes many members (if not majority of the association) from Africa, such as Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Tanzania, etc., not to mention other countries in the Caribbean with majority of African descendants with enslaved and colonized ancestors, such as Jamaica, Trinidad & Tobago, Barbados, Antigua, etc.

The rest of today’s piece will discuss a crude survey I conducted after hearing Mr. Johnson’s comment on the importance of the role of Britain in the Atlantic slave trade and colonialism. To prevent myself from getting unduly agitated, I forwarded the UK Guardian’s report about Mr. Johnson via WhatsApp to 10 randomly selected names on my list of contacts. Without any foreknowledge of the social and occupational status of the 10 recipients randomly selected from a list of over 200 contacts, five of the recipients turned out to be blue-collar workers without college degrees and the remaining five were professionals with advanced degrees and many years of experience.

Given the unexpected responses I received after forwarding texts on Mr. Johnson’s comments in respect of the damage of monuments in England in the wake of the protests over the killing of George Floyd, I feel obliged to share the views of  recipients with readers of this page. I am not doing this because of any relevance of Nigerian comments about degree of ‘mis-education’ of Johnson about slave trade and colonialism, but principally because of the level of frustration contained in the comments of people across social classes about African political leaders. The comments of nine out of ten respondents may be scary to some while it may be salutary to others, depending on the ideological orientation of individual readers.

The five comments from people without college degrees blame African leaders since independence for the comments of Mr. Johnson: “Wetin sef. What is our own with one man talking about Africa in London or Bristol? Our problem for Africa is our own leaders. No roads, no electricity, no water to drink, no security, no peace in our own place. People say sef that Nigeria dey beta when Oyinbo were here. The shame is for our leaders o, not one man wey talk his own talk for Bristol or London.”

Another said, “What is your business with how the man thinks about his forefathers, how many forefathers that are worth remembering do we have in our own country many many years after the British left us alone?” The most troubling comment from the first group came from a resident plumber in the estate where I live: “If the British want to come back, what is wrong with that? They have a job to come back to do here—break Nigeria into the pieces it was in before they left and stop directing Nigerian leaders from their own peaceful place. Their Lugard has caused Nigeria more problems than the people of Nigeria appear ready to solve peacefully.”

Of the five middle-class respondents, one was unequivocal about the inappropriateness of Mr. Johnson’s comments: “What kind of seasoned journalist with training at Eton and Oxford and a prime minister of a country that once built the largest empire in modern times would make such flippant comments? Has he taken time to read Eric Williams, Walter Rodney, C.L.R. James, Paul Lovejoy, W.E.B. Dubois, Frantz Fanon? Such effort would have exposed the author of the forwarded text to the importance of a new historiography that can bring him closer to the postcolonial universe.”

The remaining four descended harshly on political leaders—traditional and modern—in Nigeria and across sub-Saharan Africa for failing to act responsibly during the slave trade, the colonial period, and in the many decades of independent rule by African politicians. One specifically castigated many traditional rulers who collaborated with enslavers from the east and the west and venerated colonizers for the benefits they could reap from such disorder, just as many still do today to government leaders that they project as omniscient or infallible, even when the reality shows as many feet of clay as one is willing to countenance.  Another person said, “Singapore was colonized like Nigeria, Kenya, and Ghana. Why has Johnson not referred to Singapore as a land of plantain eaters? It is those in power over us that we need to blame, not Johnson who has nothing but praise for those he sees as pushing the agenda of the United Kingdom. Many leaders across Africa are busy trying to colonize other nationalities within the same country”

The final comment: “Talking about the British coming back to their former colonies? Mr. Johnson is just being euphemistic. Did they ever leave? To those who can see, African leaders are already salivating about the coming back of the British Commonwealth that was degraded by the United Kingdom during its membership of the European Union. Many across Anglophone Africa have already started romancing British politicians in anticipation of the goods, aid, grants,  gifts, and loans that they expect from the revival of the Commonwealth, without asking about the reason for the renaissance of the Commonwealth put to sleep for decades by its sole owner.”

Undoubtedly, ten commentators, as free as they might be, in a population of 200 million people have no statistical value. But the comments of the few people presented in this piece does give readers and leaders that care to look around them a peep into the subconscious of some Nigerians and other Africans about the African condition in the 21st century, over half a century after colonialism.

 Ropo Sekoni

Buhari is right to hope that replacing May 29 with June 12 as Democracy Day can accelerate the healing process

This year’s Democracy Day, the second since the merging of June 12 with May 29 celebrations of the return of democracy to Nigeria, provides an opportunity to discuss the transition between a people’s festival and a hegemonic festival on the centrality of democracy to Nigeria’s survival as a multinational federation.

Until last year, Nigeria had two distinct annual festivals or rituals to mark the importance of democracy. One was simply called June 12 by most participants in the festival, but the June 12 event was primarily concerned with the place of MKO Abiola in the country’s journey from the annulment of presidential elections of June 12, 1993 under the military dictatorship of Ibrahim Babangida to the post-military elected government of Olusegun Obasanjo. June 12 until 2019 was a regional affair; it was actively celebrated in the Southwest and was primarily concerned with stories about how Abiola sacrificed himself to bring democratic governance back to the country, after an election that could have allowed him to govern the country as a democrat had been cancelled. In addition, June 12 used to provide a motif for activists against military and its afrer-taste to continue the struggle for unfettered democratic rule beyond Abiola’s life. June 12 also gave citizens opportunities to discuss democratic deficits that NADECO had not been able to remove with the struggle for democracy between 1993 and 1999, largely because of the rush to election in 1999.

Such discussion in the years after the coming of Obasanjo’s presidency includes auditing the struggle by NADECO in the manner of cost-and-benefit analysis. During many of such years, people at the June 12 festival, regardless of their access to power, were able to exchange ideas with government leaders on such deficits in the post-military democracy, as 1) failure of NADECO to delay the election of Obasanjo until after a constituent or sovereign national conference to deliberate on proper re-federalization of the country; 2) failure to prevent imposition of a military constitution on the country in 1999; 3) need to reform the police system to make it suitable for federal democratic governance; 4) need to reform generation and distribution of revenue across tiers of governance and reinstate fiscal federalism to diversify and strengthen the country’s economy; 5) reform education; and reinstate fiscal federalism such as; change back to the parliamentary system from the presidential system first imposed by Obasanjo in his first coming as military dictator; etc.

But those who enjoy taunting OBJ suddenly started to ask him to do what they were sure he would not do: make June 12 the country’s Democracy Day for reasons best known to him. That demand remained on the table until the coming of the presidencies of Umaru Yar’Adua and Goodluck Jonathan. To keep the noise on special recognition for Abiola down, President Jonathan flew the kite of naming the University of Lagos after Abiola. This offer created a new level of noise too much for Jonathan, and the matter was put to sleep until 1915, when General Muhammadu Buhari ascended the presidency.

Those who would rather have something to show for Abiola’s sacrifice by way of creating a national monument in his name became more aggressive when General Muhammadu Buhari became elected president during each of the four years that Buhari celebrated the Democracy Day created by Abubakar and Obasanjo. And in 1918, Buhari conceded one year before the election of 2019 to replace the May 29 Democracy Day of Obasanjo with the June 12 of Abiola’s sacrifice of himself to the cause of democratizing Nigeria, and the rest is now history.

When President Buhari remarked that the proclamation to merge June 12 and May 29 annual festivals was a “part of the process of healing and reconciliation, I approved the recognition of June 12 as Democracy Day and invested the late Chief M.K.O. Abiola and Babagana Kingibe with National Honours, as I did with the late Chief Gani Fawehinmi….The purpose was to partially atone for the previous damage done in annulling the Presidential elections of that year,” he warmed himself into the hearts of many NADECO chieftains, families/relations, and admirers of Abiola for his martyrdom.

And Buhari is right to hope that replacing May 29 with June 12 as Democracy Day can accelerate the healing process, just as the courage shown by Abiola in the struggle for democracy incontrovertibly overtakes whatever excuses authors of May 29 as Democracy Day were able to provide. It is not surprising that Buhari seems to have obtained more political and emotional mileage for the change, much more than authors of May 29 have been able to garner.

But having just completed the second of the new Democracy Day ritual, it is clear that the central function of June 12 celebration—reminding the ruling group of the country’s deficits in the practice of democracy has been erased by the renaming June 12 as Democracy Day. For example, during the 2019 celebration, apart from the honors and awards given to Abiola including naming the national museum after him in recognition of his passion for sports, every aspect of the ceremony has assumed the character it had under the Obasanjo presidency.

In both 2019 and 2020, Democracy Day has taken the form of a hegemonic ritual that allows the ruling group to catalogue its achievements and list or re-list its priorities, with little reference to old and new challenges to democratic culture in the country. After the opening in 2019 military parade in a country that has been governed for 24 years after restoration of democracy, no mention about the orthodoxies established by the military—such as a constitution imposed on the country to reinfoce such orthodoxies was made in the speech of President Buhari. This is despite the fact that demand for re-federalization was part of the core of demands for restoration of democracy in the country and despite Buhari’s own election pledge in 2015 to “entrench the spirit of federalism in the constitution.”

Similarly, the 2020 Democracy Day speech does not recognize any challenge to democracy outside the president’s complaint about lack of perfect relationship between the government and the press, as if such relationship is in the interest of democratic governance that accepts that the press is a watchdog for democracy. If special days—national or international—are created so as to raise awareness on the part of citizens about objectives of the values the special day has been designed to enrich, the two Democracy Day speeches since 2019 have been about re-affirmation of orthodoxies that need to be interrogated and re-invented. The focus has been on telling or re-telling narratives of the government in power, rather than to exchange ideas with citizens about areas of needed improvement. In the two speeches so far, the president’s speech writers have crafted the speeches as if they were manifestoes designed to refrain from touching controversial or burning issues of democratic governance in the country.

However, President Buhari is not at fault. The culture of the May 29 Democracy Day was already established to serve the function of a power-legitimation ritual. It was democracy activists that had three goals on its agenda—de-militarization of the polity through recognition of Abiola’s presidential mandate given to him by citizens at the 1993 election; restoration of federalism in Nigeria after several decades of military dictatorship; and return to parliamentary system of government to replace the presidential system imposed on the country by military rule—that asked for a new name for June 12 in addition to raising monuments in Abiola’s name that need to ask themselves how much they have gained and lost in the bargain.

If  such cost-and-benefit analysis by NADECO leaders of fusing June 12 and May 29 democracy festivals leaves a hole in the discourse on democracy as the preferred mode of governance in Nigeria, there is certainly a need for new initiatives to allow governments in power to savor the moment through an annual ritual devoted to praising its efforts and promoting its vision while a new national democracy festival is created to prevent a ruling hegemony from appropriating the voice of the forces for change, thereby surrendering the power to define democracy in the land solely in the hands of  governments in power.

In the years after the merger of June 12 and May 29 Democracy festivals into one, may MKO Abiola continue to rest in perfect peace, while the nation searches for a new motif to drive a new democracy-enrichment discourse.

Ropo Sekoni

 

Creation of centres of excellence is laudable, but our political leaders and policymakers need to borrow from the cliched saying: “What is worth doing at all, is worth doing well

 

 

WE argued in the first piece of the series last week that the federal government’s new energy to establish 12 centres of excellence for the study of science and technology in the country is a right move in the right direction. We concluded the page by calling on government at all levels to pay significant attention to the levels that prepare students for university placement—primary and secondary education. Today’s column will discuss what the governments ought to do, to ensure prospective students for the centres of excellence are given the right training in primary and secondary schools that can enable them to benefit from the rigorous training that such centres are obliged to provide.

The emphasis today is on the need for adequate investment by federal and state governments in improvement of learning and teaching in public primary and secondary schools. Failure to do this may be tantamount to putting all resources in the country on curing coronavirus at the expense of malaria which has in the country the history of killing a higher percentage of patients than coronavirus. To leave pre-tertiary public education in the prostrate state that it has been for decades while raising the level of training in tertiary institutions to cutting-edge standards is to dumb down quality of training that is required of  the centres of excellence and to frustrate students fed into them from substandard schools, thereby increasing the level of waste of meagre resources. In simpler formulations, creation of centres of excellence is laudable, but our political leaders and policymakers need to borrow from the cliched saying: “What is worth doing at all, is worth doing well.”

Areas of mandatory change with respect to primary and secondary education include improvement of teacher preparation; improvement of physical conditions of centres of learning/teaching; improvement of curriculum at both primary and secondary education levels; increasing modes of teaching and learning through additional investment in technology; and moving from rhetoric of provision of electricity to reform of the energy sector, by taking advantage of sources of renewable energy, to enable schools to perform the tasks needed to achieve the new normal for the post-pandemic era.

This column has told federal, state, and local governments several times since 2007 about the imperative of funding public education adequately, if the governments are committed to producing citizens that can compete with its so-called development partners in the unfolding global market of ideas, skills, goods, and services. For the resources committed to public education to achieve the goals for such investment, it is, first and foremost, important for the government to reform education in many ways, starting with the quality of teacher preparation.

For far too long, the country’s education policy has viewed teaching as an inferior profession. It is for this reason that it has been possible for students that failed to obtain five credits in WAEC or NECO secondary school leaving examinations and those who obtain scores below 50% at the Joint Admission & Matriculation  Board examinations can enter colleges of education to train to become teachers with scores that candidates for other disciplines cannot use to enter tertiary institutions.

With this policy, the government sends the signal that teaching is a below-average discipline or profession into which those who cannot study other disciplines can enter. Any wonder then that even civil or public servants doing policy work also believe that teachers do not deserve salaries and benefits as generous as other categories of public servants lucky enough not to be consigned to teaching service? In countries that are considered to be at the cutting edge in many professions including education today, such as Singapore, Japan, Finland, China, North Korea, Scotland, those selected into the teaching profession are top-notchers of their graduating classes in pre-tertiary and pre-professional institutions. In Nigeria, even students who enter teaching professions do so with the unexpressed or hard to express feeling of being candidates left behind after the real harvest of brains is over. Such feeling is in contrast to the feeling of their counterparts in advanced countries that choose to deploy their best brains to work in the Knowledge Industry that is designed to reproduce future leaders.

Furthermore, is there any surprise that teachers are the first professionals to be skipped if money at any level of government is not enough to pay salaries of workers? Is it strange that teachers suffer the most humiliating treatment while seeking their pension or experience the most delay in processing their applications for car loans when such perquisite existed? If truly, the teaching profession is the mother of all professions, then our government has acted for long in ways to suggest that it discriminates against motherhood in its rating and ranking of eligibility to obtain tertiary training and in determination of compensation for years of post-secondary training among professions.

Consequently, the motivation of the federal government to want to compete with development partners in production and application of knowledge to solving problems of the society—evident in the establishment of 12 centres of excellence at the tertiary level— should hold true for teaching and training of primary and secondary school students interested in studying science and technology. There ought not to be any need for N.C.E. training 60 years after independence nor for making the teaching profession look like a soft discipline for people with no capability to do anything else. This is a right time to make professional teacher training a four-year university-level programme and with requirements for post-baccalaureate continuous or lifelong training while on the job.

In addition, the government needs to provide more aesthetically pleasing classrooms and school environment for primary and secondary public schools. Children in Nigeria, like children elsewhere, need to study under inspiring physical conditions. Pupils get more motivated in pleasant environments than those who feel stuck to learning in buildings without windows,  classrooms without roofs, schools buildings without toilets, or classrooms with leaking roofs, more so when students are being taught science and technology as disciplines that create physical transformations. It is more cost effective to pump more money into upgrading physical conditions of schools than to pass as much money as our governments pass currently to those in political power—executive or legislative.

Similarly, studying science not only requires better classrooms than most of the classrooms in most public schools in the country today. Students also need science laboratories that are well equipped for experiments and that are fire-proof as much as is humanly possible. So do primary and secondary school science and technology students need to work in laboratories that have access to electricity at all times and in towns that have functioning fire-fighting systems or in villages that can be reached by fire fighters before accidents cause fires that destroy the community. These are matters policymakers overlook when the focus on determining the needs for establishing public primary and secondary schools.

Another area calling for reform is the curriculum. Preparing young ones for stellar careers in science and technology requires modules in creative and critical thinking that can enrich students’ curiosity while also enhancing their innovativeness. Science and technology are disciplines and professions that require freedom to search for answers to problems, much more than they need forcible homogenization or uniformization  of management of school systems by governments. So also do students who are to be trained to appreciate and excel in the study of science and technology require provision of cutting-edge teaching and learning methods at the primary and secondary school level. Such training opportunities are provided through technology in countries that Nigerian children are expected to compete with when they enter colleges designated as centres of excellence.

Undoubtedly, each of the changes required to nurture adequately prepared candidates for Nigeria’s centres of excellence in federal and state universities requires more funding governments find important to provide for the primary and secondary public education. And federal and state governments ought to be ready to put their money where their mouth is, as the country migrates to cutting-edge teaching and research centres of excellence.

Concluded

Why in the world would the Nigeria Police wait until doctors called a sit-at-home strike before assuring doctors that police officers would treat doctors and other health workers as their counterparts in other countries are treated-essential workers?

By Ropo Sekoni

Given that Nigeria had not been exposed to this magnitude of disablement by a pandemic till now, it is not surprising that many unexpected hiccups had occurred in the management of the lockdown by the police. Hence, not many people were surprised when the police mistook terrorizing citizens as indispensable to keeping order during lockdown. But the new report after six weeks of lockdown of police harassment of frontline medical workers in Lagos is one matter that should not have happened, not after reports by  human rights groups of unnecessary violation of human rights in the guise of enforcing lockdown protocols.

Why in the world would the Nigeria Police wait until doctors called a sit-at-home strike before assuring doctors that police officers would treat doctors and other health workers as their counterparts in other countries are treated—essential workers? After Secretary to Government and chairman of the Presidential Task Force on the pandemic stated on the day the lockdown was extended: “The measures, exemptions, advisories and scope of entities allowed to reopen under phase one of the eased locked down, shall be maintained across the federation for another two weeks effective from 12 midnight today (18th May 2020 to 1st June 2020),” why would complaint by the Nigerian Medical Association about harassment by the police drag till the point of sit-at-home strike?  Why should it be hard for police officers to realize the importance of doctors at this time?

Shouldn’t the police have sensed the danger of pushing doctors into a sit-at-home strike at a time of national health emergency? In many countries, frontline health workers during the pandemic—doctors, nurses, medical technicians—are not only given free passage; they are conveyed to hospitals and their homes in hospital vehicles and most of the time with police men to ensure fast passage for this group of workers during emergencies. The training given to the average police officer on managing the public during emergencies ought to have been adequate to sensitize the police to the role of doctors during an epidemic, let alone a pandemic. It is embarrassing that in a country with just about four doctors to 10,000 persons, doctors need to beg police officers for recognition as essential service provider at a time of national health disaster.

The Nigeria Police has been in the news since the first round of lockdowns and in ways that are not favorable. The Human Rights Commission complained during the first two weeks of lockdown about police killing of 18 people in the name of enforcing lockdown protocols when the virus itself had killed only 12! Hear the response of the police spokesman on this allegation: “The commission should have given details of those killed by the police, their number, names and places where they were killed to enable us take appropriate actions.”  If this is the best that a police spokesman can do on an allegation of such importance, then the Nigeria Police Force deserves immediate reform.

Similarly, the Nigeria Governors Forum has recently complained about failure of the police to enforce the presidential order banning inter-state travel during the second round of the lockdown: “Conscious of the very grave implications of the brazen breach of the presidential order restricting interstate movements and equally conscious of the fact that the nation’s security agencies, particularly the police, have the responsibility to enforce law and order, including the presidential ban on interstate movement. We are worried about reports of alleged complicity in the said breaches by those who are supposed to enforce compliance with the directives of the president.”

The irony of the statement by the NGF must have been lost on the NGF whose members constitute majority of members of the Nigerian Police Council, a body that has ultimate power to call the police to order. In a way, the indiscipline in the Nigeria Police is within the jurisdiction of the Nigeria Police Council to remove, and governors are the most qualified to provide leadership for such reform.

The second matter arising from the pandemic is a positive one. President Mohammadu Buhari’s recent creation of a committee to prepare recommendations of the Steve Oronsaye Panel on Rationalisation of Ministries, Agencies and Parastatals for implementation is good news. Like other countries cognizant of the need to respond to known and yet-to-be-known economic and social effects of the pandemic, the decision by the federal government on reducing the cost of governance is salutary, especially that it is coming from a government that in the last five years  seemed to have sworn to stick with the status quo in many respects.

Doubtless, the Oronsaye report had existed one year before the election that brought President Buhari to power in 2015. Even President Goodluck Jonathan who initiated the move to right-size the federal government with the aim to cut the cost of governance chose to put implementation of the recommendations in the cooler after releasing a white paper on the panel’s report. This was easy for him to do because the country’s economy was not threatened as much as it has been since the pandemic.

Even President Buhari and his party did not feel any need to start preventing waste of resources outside the fight against corruption, largely because of optimism about the demand for petroleum in the international market to reverse any decline in the price of the black gold. But the new decision by the federal government to look for ways to conserve resources by returning to the Oronsaye panel’s report is a sign of needed pragmatism on the part of the Buhari administration. If better economically placed countries are already embarking on reforms in preparation for post-pandemic world, it will be myopic on the part of Nigeria’s government to look away from the urgency of reform, particularly any reform that can be considered low-hanging fruit.

The government’s long-awaited readiness to right-size government is timely, coming after substantial review and reduction of the 2020 budget by about 20%. It will be shameful for Nigeria to keep funding agencies and ministries that overlap in objectives, activities, and outcomes. It will also be embarrassing for the country to wait for multilateral organizations to ask Nigeria to cut the cost of its governance, as a condition for taking a loan or seeking loan forgiveness.

Perhaps after successful implementation of the recommendations already in existence, the federal government ought to look at some of the ministries it has created or resurrected in the last five years. If there is just one police force, why resurrect a ministry of police affairs? Why should we separate the analog and digital aspects of the economy? What does the Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development do that cannot be done by Federal Emergency Management Agency while the social development component of the ministry is transferred to the current ministry of youth and sports?

It is apt that the federal government is seeing ahead the importance of proactive response to fallouts from the pandemic. It is also realistic for the federal government and state governments to accept that many things will have to change as full implications of the pandemic further appear. One thing is clear, with or without intervention from the government, things will no longer be the same after the pandemic, but it is wiser for government at all levels to intervene and not leave the future of the country to chance.

 

Ropo Sekoni

 

It is rather strange that after children of northern elites started going to Western education system, boys of parents from poor homes in the north were still left with only Islamic teachers

Of three major pre-modern cultural practices that had gained national and international attention in the last half century—patriarchy, female circumcision, and Almajiri—the one that has been most resistant to change is the Almajiri system.

Events since the coronavirus pandemic have suggested or are suggesting that the system may soon experience major restructuring or reform.

It has not been for lack of efforts that the Almajiri has not been reformed in Nigeria before now. The concept was not created in Nigeria, but it has enjoyed several mutations while in Nigeria.

The first practice of what is known today as Almajiri occurred in the Kanem-Bornu empire in the 9th century with the name of Tsangaya according to historians. The Kanuri Tsangaya is believed to have been a borrowing from the Arabic Al Muhajirun—a person who migrates to gain Islamic knowledge from famous Islamic teachers.

After the coming of the Fulani to Nigeria, the practice of releasing young people to migrate to other places to learn the Quaran, Hadith, Tawhid, and a measure of Arabic language teaching grew in Fulani and Hausa communities to the point that Kano became the capital of Almajiri education in West Africa, even long before colonialism.

In pre-British theocracies of Kanuri and Sokoto empires, the state supported Almajiri as part of its civil society system. It was then easy for Almajiri learners and teachers to engage in full-time teaching about Islam and Arab culture, perceived by political leaders to be critical to the continuity of the theocracies.

After consolidating its control over Northern and Southern Protectorates, the British stopped support of Almajiri schooling with public funds, and the de-funding of Almajiri under colonial control marked the beginning of changes in the philosophy and practice of Almajiri.

Western education had started taking roots in southern Nigeria through Christian missionary schools long before the 1914 Amalgamation of Southern and Northern Protectorates and  free primary education later became accessible to all children in Western Region as from 1955 under the premiership of Obafemi Awolowo.

But in the north Almajiri remained the major school system for most children, even after Western-type education had been introduced to Northern region. And Almajiri school continued in the Northern region with a combination of community support and self-efforts on the part of young boys who had left their parents to receive instructions at the feet of Islamic teachers.

Consequently, Almajiri children started fending for themselves through begging and helping Islamic teachers to assist with chores on farms or in business.

In short, the Almajiri system became increasingly privatized and as the population in the north grew, Almajiri boys started adopting survival-of-the-fittest tactics in the new colonial economic system that was adopted in the years beyond 1960.

After several decades  under various military dictators and later elected presidents, the new economy that required literacy in English and various skills to find jobs in government and private sectors started driving young children who had sworn to devote their lives to Islamic teaching into activities hitherto associated with beggars, touts, urchins, thugs, and eventually terrorists.

How did Almajiri grow into a social problem for this long and to the extent of compelling northern governors to bring an abrupt end to the centuries-old tradition? Had the British colonial government not just de-funded the programme without looking for a new way to marry it with the secular education he had promised the whole world to bring to colonized peoples, perhaps things would have been different today.

For example, the Awolowo approach of combining government grant with contributions from faith-based schools could have been introduced at the beginning. Muslims in Yorubaland at the beginning of the 20th century had schools that enjoyed the same government assistance with Christian missionary schools.

And children in Muslim schools were exposed to both secular and religious education. In Ondo, where I grew up, children in such schools also had opportunities for after-school hours to reinforce Quaranic education.

It is rather strange that after children of northern elites started going to Western education system, boys of parents from poor homes in the north were still left with only Islamic teachers.

This piece is not to discuss the politics of Almajiri school system but to celebrate attempts to end the project and, hopefully, bring Almajiri boys into mainstream secular learning that made it possible for members of their age group born into richer and more powerful homes in the north to train in Western school system to become engineers, doctors, bankers, economists, lawyers, and professors of Islamic theology and Arabic language.

The dichotomy between Islamic education and secular education should not have been so pronounced were there political leaders who had enough education to understand the usefulness of what became for long in northern Nigeria two mutually incompatible knowledge systems—Makarantan Boko (Western education) versus Makarantan addidi or allo (Islamic education).

Like the rulers of UAE, current modern governors came to the realization that there couldn’t have been a Dubai without secular and scientific learning, just as Awolowo did in the 1950s when he  called on Nigeria to invest massively in education to enable the young ones have a future of work, progress, profit, wealth, and security.

But it is important for Northern Governors Forum to ensure that the rhetoric of change in this respect does not overshadow or ignore the praxis. Since 1976, the federal government had been trying to find solutions to the crisis of Almajiri in a country with ballooning population in a growing global market economy, where employment depends on a menu of skills that expertise only in Islamic or Christian theology cannot replace.

The efforts of the federal government in the late 1970s were washed away because Almajiri was seen by the rulers at the state levels then as internal affairs to subnational governments. More recently under the presidency of Goodluck Jonathan, over 100 Almajiri schools (though infinitesimal in the context of out-of-school children in the north) designed to marry the two curricula have been reported as having been left empty.

However, the method of closing down Almajiri by the governors could have been more sophisticated and life-enhancing that it was. Packing Almajiri boys and men into trucks on homeward journey to rejoin their parents in other states at the peak of coronavirus pandemic is tacky.

Rushing boys and young men who grew up in Kano, Jigawa, Sokoto, or Katsina, etc., to  their so-called ancestral homes in the middle of a pandemic seems callous.

Worse still are reports from various southern states about smuggling of Almajiri-looking boys in lorries ostensibly supplying essential materials from northern states to their southern counterparts. If it is wrong to move Almajiri boys from Kano to Jigawa at a time of coronavirus pandemic, it is wicked to move the boys to states that they had not visited before and at a time they were in a precarious state of health.

If this report and the claims are not fake, it is important for the federal government to conduct proper investigation into why and how this had happened under the watch of security officers deployed to police inter-state travel ban.

It is not too late for the federal government to intervene in the distribution of Almajiri boys to presumed states of origin or any other state for that matter. A more humane way to end Almajiri is for the federal government to take-over the process and make provisions for Almajiri boys to benefit from free Universal Basic Education programme in their adopted states, after which they can relocate to wherever they prefer to live after having the literacy to function in new environments.

The federal government should build additional Almajiri Education Centers to supplement the 165 that former President Jonathan had built.

Though not much of an optimist about international assistance, I still believe that most of the rich democratic development partners of Nigeria are likely to be happy to assist Nigeria to end a system that they too had complained so much about.

At this stage in the bid to reform Alamjiri, it is proper for lovers of modernity and modern united Nigeria to give as much encouragement as possible to Northern Governors Forum for their courage (if not for the timing and style as I had observed earlier) to confront the specter of Almajiri anti-Boko obsession.

Nigeria needs men and women of piety in all the faiths that exist in the country, just as it needs to buy into the quest for knowledge and trust in science required to build a united federation that is ready to compete in the global market of goods and ideas.

Northern Nigeria has a model to emulate—the United Arab Emirate, where secular and religious education cohere to create the Middle-East’s first country of choice for visitors from across the globe.

Ropo Sekoni 

 

 

These are not only hard times for the whole world but also the right moment for individual countries to re-invent themselves

 

 

IT is clear to those who pay attention to signs in their lives—be they individuals or countries—that these are not only hard times for the whole world but also the right moment for individual countries to re-invent themselves in preparation for post-pandemic reality. The coronavirus pandemic has created a new awareness of the place of human beings in an interconnected world—easy to spread diseases that started one country to all the continents. Nothing has demonstrated the equality of us all before nature better than the reality of coronavirus pandemic. Many countries, especially those the pandemic met in a situation of reasonable preparedness for eventuality and those countries, like most of the postcolonial states in Africa that received the pandemic in a state of economic paralysis, have been forced by the pandemic to look back at their folly.

Regardless of whether petroleum becomes a victim to the pandemic, the post-Covid19 moment in Nigeria will be ripe for reform, as the country is likely to come out of the pandemic much poorer and less capable of make noticeable presence in the life of citizens any better than it has been in the last 20 years. And whatever reforms the country chooses to make should include preparing for post-petroleum ethos that may come, despite assurances by political leaders of return of petroleum to its former economic importance in Nigeria’s economy and governance. The complication of Nigeria’s decades of failure to nudge the country in the direction of politics of peace and prosperity before the pandemic will still require self-reform, if Nigerians seek to live in a country that spends its resources on nation building, rather than on geopolitical scheming by any ethnic group in charge of the national government.

In a recent paper, “Nigeria’s Economy After Oil: How should we prepare?”  by Bode Agusto, the author called for three strategies considered crucial for Nigeria to move beyond dependence on revenue from petroleum: Improve income distribution; better manage population; and grow output. These three suggestions capture important aspects of needed economic reform. And many spokespersons for the federal government would say that many of the suggested steps to change the old economy are already receiving attention at the table of the Buhari administration. However, such steps are so far baby steps, especially that until now, reliance on oil revenue remains crucial to the economy, thus explaining what seems like collapse of the nation’s economy once the pandemic arrives and oil revenue collapses.

While those currently in power are likely to continue to poohpooh calls for political restructuring, even after it occurs to them that circumstances of post-pandemic era are too obvious to discountenance, it is important to stress that the ace is now more in favor of those calling for political cum economic reform than ever before. It is those who see the wisdom in changing the course of the country from insistence that national politics be played like geopolitics (with emphasis on sharpening skills of whichever ethnic/religious in power to dominate others) that need to endure in struggling for what is right for Nigeria and by implication for the rest of sub-Sahara Africa. But it is necessary for those committed to re-invent the country to give more attention to the paradigms that seem to dominate political discourse, authored largely by politicians benefitting from the status quo and public intellectuals that share their ideology of power in a multiethnic polity and society.

One of such paradigms popularized by opponents of demand for political restructuring is the notion that the country’s greatest fault lines are ethnic and religious diversity.  British colonial administrators and anthropologists had claimed  that pre-colonial nationalities in Nigeria were not good enough to cope with the demands of modern nationhood as individual nation-states, hence the decision to bring several nationalities (tribes to use the words of Frederick Lugard) into one large multiethnic state with the possibility of becoming a ‘supra-ethnic’ state. The sorry part of the one-century old colonial political anthropology is that many of our own post-colonial intellectuals seem to have interiorized the folk theory about the inapplicability of the Westphalian concept of nation precolonial states on the ground in 1900, such as Edo, Hausa, Oyo empires, to name a few. At the time that Lugard veiled the rationale for creating a unitary Nigeria in 1914, each of the Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba, Edo, Kanuri states or empires was larger than Holland, Belgium, Ireland, and many other independent states in Europe and Latin America.

Instead of joining what has amounted to tiptoeing around existence of multiple ethnicities and faiths in Nigeria, it is necessary for autonomists to address promotion of post-ethnic federation as  a development or political mantra. There is no concept or practice in modern history of post-ethnic federation. No nationality in modern history has willed itself to death so that it can cohabit in peace with its neighbors in the same political space. So, to hope that Nigeria’s salvation lies in the ability of its nationalities to self-erase in preparation for a supra-ethnic Nigerian identity is an illustration of mindless denialism. Belgium, Switzerland, Canada, South Africa, Brazil, Ethiopia are examples of modern multiethnic federations, and none of them has been able to annul its cultural diversity. Not even the United Kingdom that created Nigeria has achieved a post-ethnic imagination; otherwise, Sturgeon and Johnson would not have talked about a four-nations approach to handling the pandemic, where four nations refer to England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland.

Similarly, the school of thought represented by those in power in Nigeria that the absence or elusiveness of national unity is the cause of Nigeria’s lack of development is another distraction. This thinking looks more like naming the cause of an action its effect and the effect as cause. The challenge for serious political and economic thinkers is to look for the root of elusiveness of national unity in the country. Is elusive unity rooted in absence of justice, fairness, and equality in the country? Can it be traced to the history of introduction of replacement of political reintegration of the country after the Civil War with geopolitical games during regimes of military dictators from the north or southern dictators beholden to northern leaders?  For example, can lack of trust generated by President Buhari’s preference for fellow northerners or Muslims for head of every national security agency diminish sense of belonging in sections of the country discountenanced in the president’s nominations for national appointments?

Tiptoeing around religion is like tiptoeing around ethnicity. There were many faiths in the space that became Nigeria before the colonialists came. For example, Yoruba and Hausa traders who wanted to make a living from their vocations by trading with other nationalities without intending to rule over anybody mixed freely regardless of religious affiliation. And about 90% of the country’s population are still doing so today. Can it be that a narrow band of political leaders has become an obstacle to national unity so that it can fearmonger with the mantra of national unity? The answer to a multireligious society that has worked elsewhere is to make the polity of such country constitutionally secular.

Under the current nominal federalism designed by military dictators to keep the country together through distribution of petrodollars to states and local governments while keeping the hands of those subnational governments tied behind their backs to innovate, it is rational for sincere patriots of a multiethnic Nigerian state to start thinking proactively about consequences of what Nigeria’s economy may be like after the pandemic—oil or no oil. It is a good time for Nigerian leaders to benefit from a Yoruba proverb: Otosi ko ni idi lati beru ayipada (a poor man or country has no reason to be opposed to reforms).

The post-pandemic global ethos is likely to be different from the one in which development partners have more surplus funds to give aid to countries that have not grown out of seeking aid for over half a century of independence. For now, development partners may be enthusiastic to provide aid, grants, and concessional loans to Nigeria out of the feeling that continued epidemic in any part of the global market is dangerous to all continents. Many of the countries willing to assist Nigeria now may not even have enough for their own citizens after the pandemic.

Restricting reform to just economic diversification is not enough to meet the needs of Nigeria in the years ahead. A situation in which revenue in Nigeria continues to be transferred to 36 states that have been rendered impotent by over centralization of fiscal powers is more likely to hurt economic diversification than it can help it. Despite whatever may be the preference of a section of the political landscape and international policy wonks of Nigeria’s ubiquitous development partners about demand for political reform, the sensible way for Nigeria to prepare for the years beyond the pandemic is to restructure its polity and its economy, not one without the other, for growth of peace and prosperity.

 

Concluded

Ropo Sekoni

What matters most is that citizens’ expression of their displeasure was loud enough

The two preceding articles under this title focused on what has become in the wake of COVID-19 a common concern: immediate and long-term consequences of the pandemic for the world, with focus on Africa and Nigeria. Today’s piece is about what is likely to await Nigeria in the post-pandemic years, particularly the kind of changes Nigerians are likely to demand.

In the two preceding pieces, we discussed observations of various categories of stakeholders about the future of Africa—an African Group of Scholars, Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, and the Secretary to the Federal Government of the Federation—with all calling for reform of governance in Nigeria, stressing that the pre-pandemic template for governance in Nigeria and most of Africa requires change in preparation for the reality of post-pandemic years in the continent and in individual countries. In particular, the piece for last week also gave illustrations of governance deficits that are evident, even in the ways that governments in Nigeria have responded to the pandemic.

The hypothesis for today is that needed changes for post-pandemic years in Nigeria should include an overhaul of the country’s political, economic, and social systems. Readers of this column must have noticed that citizens who were not regular commenters on the country’s governance came out in large numbers on social media to rain curses on those in charge of governing Nigeria over the years, including those currently in the saddle.  And these curses started when the coming of COVID-19 to Nigeria met the country in disgraceful state, one that is too comatose to respond to any disease of the magnitude of coronavirus. Many of such commenters worried openly while countries which were in the same income group with Nigeria sixty year ago, such as North Korea, could respond with confidence to Covid-19 while Nigeria was already with bowls in hand to beg for grants and loans from the international community.

Just about each national handicap that most Nigerian citizens seemed to have become immune to—lack of adequate electricity supply, lack of access in most communities to potable water required for new standards of hygiene and sanitation; overcrowded housing facilities with poor ventilation; inadequate health facilities; embarrassing number of destitute citizens salivating for food; and continued threats to security of life and property—became more irritating to citizens who otherwise would look for solace in mosques and churches, more so when such spiritual facilities were already closed to users. Others got incensed by the extent of the country’s helplessness in relation to countries with lower GDP than Nigeria, such as Senegal having surplus test-kits to export. Most embarrassing was the global campaign of pity and handouts for Nigeria and most of Africa on account of the pandemic. And the only revenue earner that has sustained Nigeria for half a century—petroleum-lost its value, thus exposing the nakedness of what many Nigerians fondly refer to as the ‘Giant of Africa.’

It should not matter whether those ruling Nigeria had the opportunity to feel the heat of the bile that had come out of mouths and pens of some of those they rule. What matters most is that citizens’ expression of their displeasure was loud enough for presidential aides and those of ministers and lawmakers not to miss.  Given the pain-filled cries of the people in the last four weeks, there is no wonder that nonpartisan scholars and even partisan state actors have found it necessary to acknowledge that those with opportunities to govern Nigeria till the coming of Covid-19 have not done right by the people and thus need to initiate systemic change.

A Yoruba proverb says: Igba ti oran baa wolu, ni omoran ibe n gbe opele jade (when disaster comes to a community, the wise ones are bound to search for cause and solution). The saying requires that those who should know or desire to know why Nigeria is in difficulty to provide essential infrastructure ought to speak up, especially now that the only cloth that has covered the country’s nakedness—petroleum—is literally in tatters. It is, therefore, motivating that speakers across the social spectrum—from the most educated and independent to the most underserved or ignored by governments have been speaking through channels available to them—traditional and social media. But there is no better time for citizens to increase the volume of their voice than now, before the ecstasy of the end of covid-19 stimulates the kind of amnesia that seemed to have inoculated majority of citizens against outcomes of incompetence of their rulers over the years.

How did Nigeria come this paralysis? In 1960, Nigeria obtained independence on a federal constitution that shared power between federating units and the central government. The constitution gave adequate fiscal powers to the federating units of Eastern, Northern, and Western regions (and later Midwestern region) to raise revenues that could fulfill the responsibilities allocated to each of them while also raising revenue for the central government to meet its own obligations on behalf of the federation. The constitution also guaranteed that 50% of revenue raised in each region from natural resources would belong to the state and the rest passed to the central government. The 1960 Constitution remained in force until 1963 when a republican constitution replaced it. The 1963 Constitution keept intact the provision for sharing of responsibilities and fiscal powers between the national and subnational governments.

But successions of military rulers after the civil war started to erode powers of the federating units. Military heads of state through decree after decree created more states out of the finite federal space regime after regime  between 1975 and 1996. In addition, military rulers designated 774 local governments for recognition in the 1999 Constitution. The reason emphasized by succession of military regimes for creating 36 states and 774 local governments was, as it is now for proliferation of agencies, about the need to bring government close(r) to the grassroots, ‘the people that governments exist to serve.’

But creation of states and local governments followed increase in revenue from petroleum and was accompanied by erosion of the powers of new states, including the power of subnational governments to raise the revenue needed for them to administer the states. At the same time, more fiscal powers were snatched by military dictators for the central government in the many years that constitutions were suspended by coup makers. One major fiscal change included legislation of statutory transfer of funds to states and  local governments from the federation account, into which most revenues collected in the country, including sales tax collected from states and local governments were warehoused. This policy of subnational governments receiving funds to pay salaries and other benefits to workers in the 36 states and 774 local governments replaced almost imperceptibly the pre-1967 federal requirement for each subnational government to generate have capacity to generate revenue to meet the needs of its people and pass surplus to the central government.

State governors or administrators (whichever the Supreme Military Council chose to call those given military posting to states) understood that they were there to obey orders, more so that the funds to use to do their work were believed to be at the discretion of their principals, military heads of state. And military dictators continued to focus attention on the fossil energy sector to enable military rulers make the money needed to give orders to their representatives in the states. Almost imperceptibly, Nigeria grew from year to year as an oil producing country without qualms about depending on imported materials in all other sectors of the economy. The concentration of fiscal powers at the center and the corruption such concentration of resources engender, which President Buhari promised voters in 2015 to end by “initiating action to amend our Constitution with a view to devolving powers, duties and responsibilities to states and local governments in order to entrench true Federalism and the Federal spirit” have been further unpacked by the pandemic, thus making imperative overdue reform of architecture of the country’s governance and the organization of its economy.

To be continued