The Nation Newspaper

Category: Ropo Sekoni

How negative is politicisation of crime?

The way our political leaders use words may require that Nigeria create its own words to express its unique realities.

The extent that words, especially English words have lost meaning and relevance in Nigeria within the governance community and even within the media that report words and actions of politicians and public officers is hard to imagine by the average newspaper reader and television audience.

For example, in the last few months, particularly since the rise in incidence of kidnapping in different states, politicians and their image makers have emptied the word politicisation of significance. Politicisation has become a word to scare citizens, confuse them, and mislead them. Efforts to read more meaning into politicising did not gain traction just in respect of public discussion of kidnapping. Last year, this word acquired more value among politicians. When citizens first started complaining about lapses in the country’s security, government spokespersons warned citizens about politicisation of security. Because the country was planning for elections then, most people considered such formulation as natural in the context of electioneering.

The impression that overloading of the word, politicise, has created for many average citizens, may be that non-state actors should not talk about security or insecurity. What exactly is security for, if not for citizens in a world that accepts that the primary duty of a government is to secure citizens and properties? This state duty has stimulated governments in both democracy and autocracy to create and sustain military and law enforcement forces to protect citizens from external attacks/internal terrorism and against criminality—internal and international. In an informal discussion with a fellow mass communicator, he told me that what the government means by politicise refers mainly to misinterpretation or distortion of government actions by members of political opposition!

The way our political leaders use words may require that Nigeria create its own words to express its unique realities. Members of political opposition are still citizens and they should have the right to speak on matters of insecurity or criminality in a country that they can call their own. Whatever may be the negative perception of political partisanship in the country, it is an exaggeration for ‘politicising security’ to be labelled as hostile to good governance. On the contrary, such politicisation should be considered as constructive criticism, for the simple reason that once a nation’s security starts to wane, such nation’s foundations also starts to collapse.

There was no surprise when this word returned in full force a few weeks ago when citizens across towns and villages cried for help from the governments—national and subnational. But it is important that citizens are encouraged to understand that it is the vision of those in governments across the globe and in positions to influence policies that create and sustain specific forms of crime control systems. Criminology experts, such as British scholars as Tim Newburn and Paul Rock in The Politics of Crime Control and their American counterparts such as Brandon C. Welsh and David P. Farrington in The Science and Politics of Crime Prevention: Toward a New Crime Policy have drawn the attention of the modern world to the fact that politics is as close to crime control and prevention as the neck is to the head.

In today’s Nigeria, the federal government is constitutionally the branch of government in charge of crime control. There need not be blame games between opposing political parties or contrarian citizens and government officials about an umbilical cord between the government and law enforcement in the country. If citizens feel paralysed by the current law enforcement system, it is the duty of the government in charge of law enforcement to research in collaboration with experts on why and how to fix whatever problems or challenges that may call for solution. For example, since the existence of postcolonial Nigeria, how many times have Yoruba people complained about the fear to practice their traditional economy of frequent interactions between, the urban and rural areas of the Southwest? When the level of noise about insecurity in the region became the talk in every bar, bus, and church, and mosque, it should signal danger for all patriots and believers in the integrity of Nigeria as a united territory.

It is worrisome that none of the abductors in the many cases reported so far has been detected, prosecuted, and punished. No other group can ensure this other than the government and its public order maintaining agency, the police and related security organs. As an emergency response, the decision to deploy soldiers to control flash points along highways is encouraging. But there should be a system to comb the forests where kidnappers hide until they come unto the highways to abduct innocent citizens. For example, in other climes, drones would have been hovering over the rainforest and savannah of the Southwest round the clock. The laws governing non-state actors’ use of drones are tougher than what exists in advanced countries, but there seems to be no problem for governments to use drone for surveillance anywhere in the government.

Relatedly, there was a report that the governments of Ondo and Ekiti states had deployed drones to assist the police and other security agents in respect of rising cases of kidnapping in their jurisdictions. But there has been no report as to what the drones had seen and recorded in the forests of southern Ekiti and most of Ondo State. If findings from aerial survey of the two states that have become poster children for kidnapping are classified materials, our governments should let citizens know this while assuring them that necessary actions are being taken to protect citizens.

It is not just the governors that can share important information with opinion leaders in the communities. Traditional rulers whose remit also includes protection of citizens in their kingdoms should assist the governors in many ways, more so that most of the forests used to be known as Kabiyesi’s land in trust for the citizens. However, it is reassuring that governors and traditional rulers are talking to the president; they also need to talk regularly to citizens to give them direly needed assurance. Other democracies even inform their citizens where to visit and when to visit certain countries or communities. Such regular communication between modern and traditional rulers may become useful at a time of emergence like the one on our hands in Southwest and other communities.

One thing that most observers of the country’s security challenges may miss when they express their frustrations about insecurity is that, though the constitution gives all powers in relation to crime control to the federal government, there is nothing in our constitution that stops the state and local governments from creating and supporting crime prevention initiatives. For example, how many new villages or settlements scattered across Yoruba forests are occupied by criminal elements? How many local vigilantes have been deployed by state or local governments and traditional rulers to comb the forests from Shaki to Okitipupa and from Ikole to Ilaro?

I still remember when I was a young boy in Ondo during the colonial era, anytime there was a case of kidnapping in town, the Osemawe of Ondo would send out his mass communicators to warn parents about becoming more vigilant and men about being more alert to their surroundings. The Osemawe would also mobilise his community security men and women to the forests to support citizens in the villages. This example about Ondo is not to suggest that the Osemawe of today may not have been mobilising people in his jurisdiction or that other Yoruba monarchs have not done so since persons from their kingdoms have been kidnapped. The observation about traditional crime prevention strategies is just to remind one another that crime prevention is a universal behaviour generally not forbidden by any constitution, unlike crime control that in some cases is an exclusive matter to one tier of governance.

The persons that have been identified as kidnappers that suddenly stop flow of traffic on busy Benin-Ore, Lagos-Ibadan, Ibadan-Ikire-Ife-Ondo Roads, and many other highways across the country come out of the forests when they need to do so. Where do the criminals hide while waiting for their catch? The local government has the constitutional freedom to frustrate criminals from taking refuge in the forest. While talks about re-designing the architecture of security and of governance continue, it is necessary for states and local governments to establish joint task forces to engage in crime prevention, an intervention that can facilitate the job of federal security agents deployed to states and local governments and that can monitor the efficiency of such law enforcement workers.

This may not be the best of times for many communities across Nigeria, particularly those in the Southwest whose local or informal economy depends largely on free movement between towns and villages. But this is a right time to heed the saying, even by Nigerian security experts in relation to Boko Haram, that security is not only the responsibility of federal government’s security agencies. As a matter that should interest all citizens, crime prevention is an activity that should attract all forms of authority in all communities.

July 28, 2019
Victims and victors of the Nigerian condition

Chief Reuben Fasoranti became a personal victim of a country he had worked very hard to improve since he became a member of the first class of the University College of London in Ibadan. And his victimhood is an unusual one. He has not personally been tortured, harassed, or unjustly detained by the state as it often happens in non-democratic states. He has been tormented vicariously through the violent death of his daughter on a national highway at the hands of kidnappers. The killing of his daughter, who was neither a politician nor an activist but a law-abiding Nigerian woman, Funke Olakunrin. along a highway in a state that Fasoranti himself had spent his intellectual energy to nurture, as school teacher, school principal, commissioner of finance in young Ondo State, leader of Afenifere, a socio-cultural organisation traditionally perceived by many Yoruba people as standing for values of Freedom for All; Life more Abundant, a home-spun slogan for ideology of social democracy for Nigeria in the era of Chief Obafemi Awolowo.

Even in his depressed state, Pa Fasoranti is still preoccupied with his search for a good Nigeria. In the tradition of a patriotic and forward-looking elder, and with the torment of having his daughter violently killed written all over his face, he called on the country’s president in the following words: “President Muhammadu Buhari has called to commiserate with me. But all I need from the president is to find solutions to these killings in the country.” With such statement at a time of extreme personal pain arising from inadequate security in his country, he demonstrated what real patriotism calls for, a stoic response to personal pain for the sake of achieving a better public order for the larger community. This is the stuff of which tall men that this our land deserves are made.

There must have been several victims of kidnappers whose names do not ring bells, like Mrs. Olakunrin’s in the country. Even for stellar social statisticians, it must be hard to know how many such invisible Nigerians had lost their lives to kidnappers and murderers on the highways in the last few months. Personally, I know of a relation of a close friend of mine who was kidnapped at Omifon, a few miles from where Funke was gunned down. In his own case, he was lucky to have been kidnapped and kept in the rain forest of Omifon for days until his ransom of N1million arrived from his generous church members. Details of this man’s kidnapping and suffering in the forest for four days did not get into the media because of his invisibility. It is encouraging that Pa Fasoranti’s demand from President Buhari is no longer for his daughter but for the sake of invisible men and women that may be killed if security across the land is not restored in good time.

Paradoxically, as citizens agonise about lack of safety and security, the government commences the process of granting amnesty to illegal aliens in the country. The amnesty for illegal visitors is not to leave the country within six months of promulgation of the policy. In the words of the president, delivered by the Secretary to the Federal Government, “I am declaring a six-month amnesty period for illegal migrants already in the country to submit themselves to the Nigerian Immigration Service (NIS) for the purpose of this registration…. The registration will be carried out without any payment or penalties. I’m enjoining all migrants staying in Nigeria whether regularly or otherwise, to take advantage of the amnesty window to register with the NIS.”

Mass amnesty for illegal migrants is, without doubt, a radical departure from killing of Nigerians, for example in South Africa and Libya. Furthermore, the president’s amnesty to yet to be numbered aliens is a radical departure from what happened to Ghanaians in 1984 when they were asked to leave Nigeria in droves. Nigeria is likely to be seen by children of Ghanaians as being unusually liberal for offering free residency permits to undocumented Africans in 2019.

Giving amnesty to citizens is also likely to encourage the new African Continental Free Trade Agreement. But the issue is the timing of amnesty amidst the heat of the tension created by reports that many kidnappers believe or perceive to be foreigners, especially to those victims who have had the opportunity to have being within ear-shot of their abductors. Why is the federal government in a hurry to ‘e-register’ illegal immigrants that government characterised as ‘irregular migrants.’ Sunday James, Nigeria Immigration Service spokesman and a Deputy Comptroller of Immigration had told The Guardian: “It is not illegal migrants; it is irregular migrants across the country we are registering. What we are doing now is to register every non-Nigerian.”

But what makes a migrant irregular and not illegal? Who determines how many of such irregular migrants are already in the country? What motivates the federal government to give free residence status to migrants that have not petitioned for resident’s status? Any why is the mode of registration online? These questions are important because of the security implications of unconditional amnesty to migrants who have violated the country’s laws by not presenting valid entry documents and have not themselves asked for change of status? This policy in juxtaposition with cries by citizens about insecurity can create puzzles in the minds of many citizens that the federal government needs to solve.

Mr. James’ further comment: “People are trying to misconstrue this directive by Mr. President. People should stop giving ethnic colouration to good plans by government. It is good for Nigeria. At least, it would help in our security situation, governance and planning.” Citizens have a right to expect that it is the duty of their government to protect them from threats from Nigerian nationals and migrants from other nations—be they legal or illegal, or regular or irregular. It is not fair for public officials to assume that any time citizens complain about government policies, they do so out of preoccupation with ethnic politics.

Immigration legislations and executive orders in all democracies are subject to input from citizens by way of debates or lodging of public complaints. It is the duty of the government in a democratic federation to educate citizens about policies that may affect their safety and security, without being seen as spoilers by government officials. At least it is possible for people to enter Nigeria from many countries in West Africa and Central Africa. Therefore, the emphasis should not be on people who have complained just about irregular migrants of Fulani descent. Nigerian nationalism justifies posing of questions and expression of worry about an amnesty policy that has volunteered to throw resident’s permits at fellow Africans that may not be more value-added individuals than the millions of jobless young men and women in Nigeria.

In a democratic federation where access to land is constitutionally a state matter, how rational is it to have a policy of mass amnesty that is valid for six months and without any input from the National Assembly? Such opportunity provides opportunities to legislators from various parts of the country to suggest quota, categories of immigrants that will not add to the burden of public order and become public charge to states that are struggling to pay the new minimum wage and to reduce the number of months for e-registration. All of these posers are important to ensure that new waves of irregular citizens do not join those already inside during the six months of the amnesty.

A time that Nigerian leaders are citing disadvantages of increasing desertification, rise in criminal acts between herdsmen and farmers at the instigation of migrants from other countries, fear of population explosion within Nigeria, and rising crisis of confidence about the country’s capacity to secure its own citizens is not an appropriate time to have a presidential amnesty for an undetermined number of migrants—be they Yoruba from Benin Republic and Togo; Fulani from Niger, Mali, Chad Republics; and Ibibio or Ibom from the Cameroons. We need to reduce the number of Nigerian victims of insecurity before we extend unsolicited benefits to immigrants that avoided proper entry into the country. Such benefits can wait until the country is able to determine the number and preparedness of such immigrants to benefit from unconditional amnesty.

July 21, 2019
El-Rufai and re-naming of old myths

But the most important myth that el-Rufai’s speech has revived is the notion that the north is a disadvantaged section of Nigeria.

We have the largest number of poor people in the world, most of them in northern Nigeria. Nigeria also has the largest number of out-of-school children, virtually all of them in Northern Nigeria.
Northern Nigeria has become the centre of drug abuse, gender violence, banditry, kidnapping and terrorism. We have also been associated with high divorce rate and breakdown of families. These are the challenges that confront us. This is the naked truth that we have to tell ourselves.
We must, therefore, as leaders at all levels have a conversation about the way forward for our part of the country. Because increasingly, as many of you must have seen on social media, we are being considered as the parasite of the federal economy, even though, that is not entirely true. Because northern Nigeria still feeds the nation. The richest businessman in Nigeria is still Aliko Dangote, not someone from southern Nigeria, thank God for that.
So, we still have a lot to be proud of. We should be proud of our culture and tradition, as well as unity. You hardly can find someone from northern Nigeria convicted of 419 or being a Yahoo boy. That is something we should be proud of.
We are generally considered to be more honest and less corrupt than other Nigerians. That is something we should be proud of. In addition, our demographic superiority gives us a very powerful tool to negotiate in politics. And that is something we should be proud of, and we should preserve. So, we have every reason to unite and not be divided—Nasir el-Rufai at The Northern Youth Summit on ‘Awakening the Arewa Spirit.’

The copious quotes overleaf from Nasir el-Rufai’s speech that has in the last few days sparked a controversy especially in the social media are deliberate. Being able to go back and forth between what el-Rufai said and the author’s reading of the text and subtext of his speech will make for easy reading of what, for lack of a better formulation, I have read as re-naming of old myths. For those who are eager to apprehend the thesis of today’s piece on what has almost become an overgrazed speech by commentators, the thrust is that since independence, many of our political leaders have been recycling the same or similar theses vis-à-vis the nation’s diversity, unity, and development, an evidence that very little fresh thinking about a persistent problem with unity has become a national political hobby.

Identifying the various audiences for the speech in Kaduna is helpful to appreciating the layers of meaning in el-Rufai’s speech. The audiences include the old north (imagined by many in the past as a political monolith, otherwise seen as exemplar of the Arewa Spirit); the new north (as a region of formally defined states of diverse nationalities); the south (as Otherness to the North), El-Rufai’s fellow political elites; and the primary target of the speech (the youth identified by the governor as 80% of today’s population of the north). Correspondingly, the myths that el-Rufai has used the recent speech to re-name require identification early in this piece. They include the 60-year old theory of the disadvantaged north; the obsession with unity before and after the civil war in Nigeria; and the mantra of homogenisation of Nigeria through policies of ‘Even Development’ through revenue sharing and de-federalisation of the country, to mention a few. In other words, el-Rufai’s theory of Nigeria’s development borrows significantly from many of the slogans popularised by northern rulers since 1960.

The Spirit of Arewa, which el-Rufai has encouraged the youth to restore, seems to be the old myth of a monolithic north stimulated by a policy of gradual assimilation of minority nationalities into a distinct Hausa-Fulani ethos. It is not clear what type of renaissance el-Rufai has designed his speech to achieve for the north—the old monolithic north or the north of diverse nations living in harmony in an atmosphere of mutual respect. Regardless of whatever form the re-awakening in the north is designed to take, it is important for readers of el-Rufai to recognise that it will have implications for Nigeria as a federation. It is, therefore, not surprising that el-Rufai’s speech has received more attention than normal.

For example, if the goal of Arewa renaissance is to return to one Northern region of the era of Sir Ahmadu Bello versus two competing Southern regions (of the days of Awolowo and Azikiwe), Nigeria’s search for a unity in diversity or diversity in unity may add more miles to the country’s journey to a modern multi-ethnic federation. Those who say they have no concern about what happens to the north as a region may be too myopic to see the implications of a two-nation (north and south) structure in which emphasis is on geopolitics rather than on federal politics in the entire country.

But the most important myth that el-Rufai’s speech has revived is the notion that the north is a disadvantaged section of Nigeria. This construction returns the country to its past of series of affirmative action initiatives that seem to have failed. That capital-intensive affirmative actions have achieved providing Aliko Dangote with a state of origin address, and, arguably a region without a known record of 419ners and feeding of the country’s 190 million people, suggests why a re-awakening has become necessary in the 19 states of the north. If the north remains, despite producing Nigeria’s wealthiest man, the least educated and most impoverished region of the modern world, there is an urgent reason to revisit the ideology of even development in the country. Such re-visiting will include looking at the system of revenue allocation and concentration of powers and resources in the central government.

Many policies and projects that southern regions have accepted as vital to building a harmonious inter-regional existence, including decades of the south’s concessions to the northern region in respect of special quotas on admission, education and skill institutions; creation of Nomadic education, Almajiri education, aggressive irrigation of northern states to stem the effect of the Sahel on northern states, etc call for re-thinking. If despite all of these, the north after being in political control of Nigeria for two-thirds of the nation’s life is in 2019 similar to Afghanistan, then the fight against corruption has to be taken as far back as the years of many international loans taken by the country for development since 1960.

In fairness to el-Rufai, many of the things he has said may be exaggerated but many of them seem true. For example, the claim that the south is developed may pass for facile generalisation. If the south is as developed and educated as he has claimed, the impact would have shown, even on the north, because development begets development. From his brave comments about rulership in the north, El-Rufai seems to have seen the root of the problem of the north—lack of good governance by self-preoccupied rulers. What he has chosen not to see is the root of the problem of the south, whether, for example, the lack of development in the north has begotten lack of development in the south. Admittedly, his remit at the Arewa Youth Summit in Kaduna was to open a discussion for a new vision in the north. What he shouldn’t have done is professing to be an expert on development in or of the south, especially that he has shown little evidence of the kind of civilisation many states in the south prefer to bequeath to their children, having lost most of their own destiny to the last three decades of Nigeria.

But with his intervention, el-Rufai has created a new motif about geopolitical development discourse not only in the north but also in the south. But this intervention, as bold as it sounds, has ignored discussion of the root of underdevelopment or lack of development in the north and cosmetic character of the ‘development’ he has seen in the south. For example, since 1960 Nigeria has been embroiled in the crisis of managing its diversity in a way that can create conducive environment for concrete and ascertainable development of all parts of the country. If anything, el-Rufai’s call for re-awakening of the Arewa Spirit may be repeating the mistakes of past without realising it. Any call for re-awakening in the north calls for apprehension of why the Old Arewa of Ahmadu Bello era, once advertised as a regional model for the rest of Nigeria, seems to have evaporated.

Finally, many of el-Rufai’s critics, especially those from the south, have ignored an important aspect of his speech: his boldness and ambition. How many governors in southern Nigeria from all the parties – ruling or non-ruling – can speak openly about the presence or absence of progress in their individual states or cluster of states or region? How many of the southern governors can brainstorm with their youths on sources of underdevelopment in their areas of the country? How many southern governors can engage citizens in their jurisdictions on the likelihood of el-Rufai’s speech to be both a direct message to the youths of the north and a parable to the rest of the country? Many of el-Rufai’s critics ought to remember that this ‘activist governor’ is a fertile source of insight into the subtext of the governance of Nigeria.

July 14, 2019
Water: first source of life and now of power in Nigeria?

Water stress is now a global problem that can be solved with technology, not politics or law.

Whisky is for drinking; water is for fighting over.—Mark Twain
Some hypothesise that increased water shortages around the world will lead to wars. The current Syrian civil war has been cited by many, including Dr Peter Engelke, senior Fellow at Washington-based think tank Atlantic Council, as a recent example. “Between 2007 and 2010, Syria experienced one of the worst droughts in recorded history…. Anders Berntell, executive director of 2030 Water Resources Group, a multi-sector water resources body, also suggests a link to Boko Haram and Al-Shabaab, whereby young people “realise that, as a result of the lack of natural resources, degraded land and lack of water there are no livelihood opportunities… There is no future for them. They become easily targeted.” They are more easily radicalised…. All of which would predict a bleak future – but some nations have worked out solutions. And they’re impressive ones that the rest of the world can learn from.—Tim Smedley
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

I have deliberately overloaded the epigraph today, to demonstrate that water stress affects many parts of the world and that what is striking about the attitude to it in Nigeria is the difference between the way Nigeria’s federal government thinks about growing water stress and the way countries like Australia, Israel, and UAE, think about it. As we will argue later, other advanced countries think about applying technology to their water problem while Nigeria prefers to deploy legislation to its own.

Nigeria as a corporate body and as individuals have already started to act as victims of water stress, by attempting to cure headache with decapitation. The 152-clause Executive Bill on federal take-over of management of all forms of water: surface and underground suggests an effort to remake Nigeria into a 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.”

Clause (5) reads: “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 have emptied sub-national units of the country of any significance by threatening the fundamental character of the country. Rather than a law for passing by the national assembly, the intent of the law to own all forms of water—actual and virtual—degrades the federating units and reduces them to appendages to the central government. State representatives in the national assembly do not have the power to surrender water that subtends and sustains the land in their constituencies to the central government. This bill should be withdrawn and brought back as constitutional amendment. It is too fundamental to the essence of Nigeria as a federal republic.

Why would the central government want to treat water the way it has treated petroleum and gas—turning water into a commodity that it can also control exclusively and share like petroleum and gas. Undoubtedly, water is acquiring by the day the force to threaten political stability in many countries. As Anders Berntell has once acknowledged, the Boko Haram and Al-Shabaab terrorist groups owe significant part of their radicalisation to growing lack of natural resources, including water that has reduced chances to make a respectable living for young people in the countries affected by Boko Haram and Al Shabaab.

Other experts have also traced the anger and anxiety of herdsmen to threats to their pre-modern occupation and livelihood. Almost three decades ahead of projections on water-driven conflict between nations or sections of the same country, like Nigeria, the president’s bill before the Senate on making control and regulation of all surface and underground waters an exclusive function of the central government seems to be an avoidable heating of the Nigerian polity and society. What is needed is a blueprint to make water available to all sections of the country through use of innovative methods already being employed in other countries. It is not surprising that the bill is already stoking political and regional tension.

Just within hours of the Senate’s preliminary debate of the Waterways Bill, the nation seems to be divided, because the bill, if passed into law, has the potential to threaten national unity. The recent meeting of South-south governors and the communique that ensues from it: “We also agreed that the bill currently making round in the national assembly which we understand is an executive bill on management of water resources. We are of the view that the provisions of the bill are offensive and obnoxious; we disagree with the centralised control of water resources as we are already dealing with the problem associated with over centralisation of our country and we have agreed that the bill should be immediately withdrawn by the federal government and further consultations be made on that” have, as expected, sharpened what is fast-becoming Nigeria’s entry into what is already seeming like high-voltage hydro politics.

Without mincing words, this bill is anti-federalism. Introducing a federal take-over of management of water resources at a time that the ruling party had established committees to make recommendations on restructuring and devolution of powers is one bill too many. Federating units are land-owning units and water—surface or underground—sustains land. Any bill that seeks to cut management of land from management of water wittingly or unwittingly seeks to de-nature the federation.

A bill that is likely to overheat the polity, 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 stress in Nigeria, the thing to do is for Nigeria to ‘technologise’ this challenge, i.e. apply benefits of new knowledge and technology to solving water scarcity in all parts of the country. Making management of water resources an exclusive federal function does not guarantee an end to water stress in the context of rising population that is projected to make Nigeria the third most populous country by 2050.

What is needed is thinking out of the box and ahead, like Israel, UAE, Brazil, Australia, to name a few. These countries are increasing their water supply by capturing rain water and using an ‘Osmotic System’ of de-salination that makes sea water good for human consumption. A new method of de-salination made possible by scientific innovation is the way to end water stress without stoking the flames of regional tension and political instability. We left provision of power in the hands of the federal government half a century ago while we should have given such powers to sub-national governments. We are today bound to provide power at a much higher cost than we would have done decades ago. Transferring management of water resources, to the federal government, apart from such trans-country rivers like Niger and Benue, is to offer a solution to a problem that is not properly identified. Nothing seems to have broken that this bill is to fix. Water stress is now a global problem that can be solved with technology, not politics or law. 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.

This piece first appeared in 2018 when Water Resources Bill first appeared. With the pledge of APC and PDP presidential candidates to push for approval of the bill upon re-election or election respectively, republication of this piece is to enlarge the new debate as it opens.

July 7, 2019
State/LG responsibilities: beyond NFIU controversy (2)

Governors’ loyalty to the current constitution might be at stake if they failed to raise their voice against any regulations the governors believe challenge their constitutional rights.

As this column mentioned last week, the attempt by NFIU to prevent states from creating any obstacles to local governments to have access to the funds transferred to the local governments as and when needed by the LGs may be seen, as many lawyers and governors have done, as a threat to the 1999 Constitution. The column last week also drew attention to histrionics of democratic discourse that taking NFIU to the judiciary for judicial interpretation of the constitution may enact, and that at the end of the day it is the politics of the country’s constitution, now under-countenanced by the warring groups, that may dominate the country’s political discourse after judicial or administrative resolution of the conflict between NFIU and NGF. The focus of the piece today is on the concerns that have not been shared by anti-corruption police agents in NFIU and believers in the states as the safest bankers for transfers to Local Governments deposited in joint accounts with the states.

Issues that seem to have been eclipsed by the wrangling between NFIU and defender of state sovereignty or superiority over the local government tier include first and foremost the character of the 1999 Constitution. In the spirit of rule of law, individuals and groups have unfettered right to defend the letters and spirit of a constitution in force, just as the NGF had already done. Governors’ loyalty to the current constitution might be at stake if they failed to raise their voice against any regulations the governors believe challenge their constitutional rights. But the point of today’s piece is to argue that regardless of how this challenge is resolved, issues about the rightness of a third tier of government military rulers saddled the country with in 1999 are rather than disappear are likely to become more strident as the country embarks on discussion of 2023 elections. The political discussion of constitutional provisions donated to Nigerians by the authors of the 1999 Constitution will remain alive, at least for those who are ready to think further about the three tiers of government bequeathed on the eve of departure of military rulers to the country in 1999.

Those who want to substitute their voice for the voice of the people in determining the country’s Basic Laws may accept the view that the current constitution, if allowed a chance to live for a long time, is bound to become acceptable to those who think that rejection of the constitution should have occurred since it was handed over to General Olusegun Obasanjo after the 1999 elections. Those who believe that the country’s democracy has been short-changed by the nature of the constitution that has given birth to elected governments and the many constitutional provisions that citizens might have thrown out had they been given the right to participate in negotiating the terms of the constitution are likely to remain critical of the constitution that they view as circumscribing or constraining political aspirations of citizens.

From the way political officers have related to sections of the constitution vis-a-vis joint state and local government accounts into which transfers to LGs are deposited for safe keeping, there is no doubt that many state governors regardless of their ideological stance—reactionary or progressive—have concerns about what the relationship between states and local governments should be. Correspondingly, citizens at the LG level and politicians and civil servants in the service of local governments have their own worries or concerns about the system of three tiers of government. But from anecdotal evidence, it seems that many non-state actors in many regions, especially in the Yoruba region have more worries about the logic of sharing revenue to the federation into three tiers of government—national government, 36 states plus FCT and 774 local governments. It is such people that the constitution is silent about and that the courts and even NFIU may not have reasons to worry about as they argue and search for solutions to who should have sole authority over LG funds warehoused for LGS in a joint account belonging to states and LGs.

Dictators in charge of governance in the decades of military rule created thy myth of even development of the country. This myth called for policies of giving each section of the multiethnic federation a piece of the national pie or cake. All the apostles of even development—from Obasanjo to Buhari—through the ethic of sharing revenue on the basis of number of states and local governments that were not constitutionally negotiated by the people are likely to see the 1999 Constitution as reflective of the will of the majority. It is, therefore, not surprising that such individuals or groups may not have any problems with the constitution that NGF is defending against the actions of NFIU.

But many including this columnist, who do not believe in sharing national wealth to a number of states fixed by agreed principle of creating states and a number of local governments that can be determined only by sub-national levels, are unable to gloss over the flaws and deficits in the 1999 Constitution that deserve immediate remediation. For obvious reasons, funding of governments in Nigeria—federal, state, and local—does not belong to the list of global best practices. For example, the countries that Nigerian leaders run to for investment, aid, and assistance on many areas of life are the United States, followed by Europe, and now China.

Apart from the fact that practice of federal system by two of the three major sources of investment and assistance to Nigeria do not have three tiers of government that depend on allocation of funds from the federation account. For example, in places like Germany, United States, Canada, and other federations, if a province or state has local governments, such units are not codified in the constitution of such countries, unlike in Nigeria where local governments are treated by the constitution as federating units and now as autonomous units to the states by NFIU.

There is no doubt that there are governors and even local government political officers that will prefer the current system that relishes sharing federation’s revenue across 36 or 37 states and 774 local governments. Nevertheless, there are millions of citizens, especially in Yoruba states with a long history of joint revenue generation governance and integrated development. Such people are also of the opinion that a time that economic diversification is the driver of the nation’s economy is the best time to do away with three tiers of government designed to live on a model of governance powered principally by revenue allocation system authored by military dictators.

A time that seems conducive to dispensing with constitutional provisions that authorise allocation of funds to 774 local governments and sustain the sovereignty of states over their sub-parts is also a good time for governors and citizens to demand a constitutional reform that can make Nigeria be like other working federal democracies. Such struggle for reform may be a better alternative to wrangling over who guards the money to send to local governments. This aspiration may defeat the short-term advantages of monthly or quarterly allocations to local government, but in the long run may return Nigeria to the pre-military governance philosophy that has not brought much-touted even development to Nigeria.

June 30, 2019
State/LG responsibilities beyond NFIU controversy (1)

The popular perception of LG system is that local governments are sites of jobs for the boys from generous governors.

The latest in ‘governance news’ in the country is the controversy between on the one hand 36 governors across party lines and on the other hand local government professionals and citizens who believe that functions and funding of local government in a federal republic are due for reform. And the argument of the Governors Forum from a constitutional angle reinforces the need to think anew about how to promote democracy and enrich federal governance in our country, without being resistant to mechanisms to block corruption and without states losing needed influence on local development efforts.

There are too many issues about state and local government relations for our governors to limit arguments about who should manage the funds allocated from national revenue to subnational governments to strict constructionist interpretation of provisions of the constitution in respect of state/local government account. Such a narrow view of which level of government should manage inter-government transfers may eclipse the importance of the role of local government in promoting democracy and development at the grassroots level. The matter at hand should not be just about governance protocols in terms of ‘Transitional versus Operational account.’ More importantly, it should be about constitutional politics, particularly nurturing of a political culture that can respond effectively to citizens’ demands for a federal system that promotes at the same time decentralisation, local accountability, citizen participation, and state-wide integrated development.

Read Also: FG, States, LGAs share N616.198bn in April

Because of the special character of Nigeria’s political history under decades of military dictatorship and subsequent failure of post-military governments to demand de-militarization of the polity, Nigeria since 1999 has been saddled with a constitution not negotiated by free citizens, even one quarter of a century after the exit of the last official military ruler. For the past 24 years, the concept and practice of three tiers of government have defined the governance of the country. Most constitutional federal democracies have two tiers of government. Under such dispensation, any transfer from the central government to the local government, generally seen in such countries as part of state or provincial units, is done through the state or provincial government. In addition, managers of such state or provincial governments generally have no culture other than to pass such transfers in a transparent manner to the designated receiver.

Surprisingly, the authors of Nigeria’s three-tier system have chosen to send local governments’ share of revenue from the Federation Account through the state in what is constitutionally referred to as Joint State and Local Government Account. For many years, nobody bothered about whether money sent to the states for onward transmission to local governments reached those who manage that level of government until the era of fighting corruption emerged. Relatedly, the problem at hand may not be only about whether a federal agency established to frustrate corruption has a role to play in how and when local governments can access the funds constitutionally meant for them, it is also about why state governments would want to be seen as preferring to prevent a federal agency from ensuring that funds allocated from the Federation Account reach the legal recipient intact and in good time.

Since the advent of post-military governance in 1999, the level of government with the least experience of and benefit from democratic governance has been the local government unit. Citizens in most states since 1999 have not enjoyed the right to choose local government chairs and councillors to govern them as they should. Many local governments have been ruled in the last 24 years by appointed chairmen functioning as sole administrators. And local governments that were allowed by governors to hold elections have had an average of one year of democratic rule in the 4-year tenure of most governors. Even the 1999 Constitution that institutionalised three-tier system constructed the local government as the inferior tier that in theory deserves a tenure of three years while the central and state tiers have non-negotiable 4-year tenure.

The consequence of a half-hearted third tier has been that people at the grassroots, where majority of citizens live, exercise their right to govern themselves to the whims and caprices of state executives. Many citizens at the local level consequently feel alienated and thus indifferent to issues they believe to have been designed by military founding fathers of the 4th Republic to be a predatory relationship between the state and the local government. Any surprise that it is only local government civil servants that have expressed any opinion over the controversy between NGF and NFIU on local government funds? The silence from other constituencies including former or current LG sole administrators and the few that have benefited from occasional elections approved by governors captures the extent of the alienation of majority of citizens at the local level. Even ordinary citizens whose lives are supposed to be improved by 22% of the federation’s revenue could care less, apparently because of increasing level of alienation vis-a-vis a non-performing local government system.

The most important issue thrown up by the insistence of NFIU to ensure that local government allocations get to the local communities that own such funds in full and on time is about how to extend proper democratic rule to where it should matter most. Undoubtedly, governors are right to insist that they should have a say in the development of sub-units of their states. The need for governors to be able to coordinate local and state development projects in the interest of proper integration requires that there be no full autonomy for local government, just as the way that states do not generally enjoy independence from the national government. However, there is no wisdom in governors struggling to hold tight to money deposited in a joint account for local governments. What governors ought to worry about is ensuring cooperation as senior partners with local communities to achieve integrated development across the state. The popular perception of LG system is that local governments are sites of jobs for the boys from generous governors.

There are many more important issues that governors ought to consider in relation to fostering inevitable cooperation or collaboration between local communities and the states they constitute in a federation. To protect the integrity of states for much longer, governors may want to call for a review of the military policy of allocating 22% of Federation’s revenue to 774 local governments, where much of the funds go into sustaining a traditional layer of bureaucracy. For example, why should the country get stuck to monthly or quarterly allocations to 774 local governments to pamper traditional rulers in a republic and at a time the nation’s economy is being re-designed for productivity rather than spending windfalls from petroleum? Governors ought to worry about accountability and transparency at the local level, rather than about verbal gymnastics of ‘Transitional and Operational bank accounts.’

Thus far, it is reassuring that 36 governors from different political parties are united on the danger in allowing any agency of the federal government to toy with any provision of the constitution in respect of the supervisory power of a state over its local governments. However, given the reluctance of post-military leaders to listen in the past to citizens’ demand for referendum on issues of importance to citizens, the current governors’ enthusiasm to prevent what might feel like de-coupling state and local governance ought to encourage citizens to urge their governors to initiate bills that can correct the anomalies in the 1999 constitution, especially the insistence on three autonomous tiers of government.

It is important for governors and citizens to imagine that there may be dangers or disadvantages—cultural, political, and economic—in sticking to three autonomous tiers in a multiethnic federation with plural worldviews or cultural and social orientations. In the long run, any effort to break the Siamese connection between the state and the local government is likely to cause more problems than it may solve in the short-term. Governors have already demonstrated readiness to protect the interest of states as they see them. In the spirit of avoiding short-termism, the civil society and individual citizens in each state ought to urge their governors to refrain from the wrong problematique. What governors ought to defend or prevent is not constitutional mistakes of the past; governors ought to call for constitutional amendments that can lead the country back to a well-coordinated and productive two-tier governance system that has brought progress and stability to advanced federal democracies.

June 23, 2019
Insecurity in the land: the Adegoke Adewuyi phenomenon

Rev Adewuyi has sabotaged efforts of Yoruba patriots and organisations to save citizens from abductors.

Most of the instances of inter-communal and inter-religious strife and violence were and are still as a result of sponsorship or incitements by ethnic, political or religious leaders hoping to benefit by exploiting our divisions and fault lines, thereby weakening our country…. For the next four years, we will remain committed to improving the lives of people by consolidating efforts to address these key issues as well as emerging challenges of climate change, also resettling displaced communities and dealing decisively with the new flashes of insecurity and banditry across the country—President Muhammadu Buhari’s Democracy Day Speech

Opening today’s column with a quotation from President Buhari’s speech at the Eagle Square during this year’s Democracy Day celebrations is not for the sake of textual analysis and interpretation of a speech that is perhaps the most encouraging of President Buhari’s speeches since 2015. The material overleaf draws special attention to two crucial issues that may not have been unknown to the general population: Buhari’s acknowledgment that a main source of the country’s malaise can be traced to political and religious leaders and the president’s public declaration of his commitment to “deal decisively with the new flashes of insecurity and banditry across the country.”

Even if most citizens have been unaware of the nefarious role of professional clerics, popularly referred to by their followers as ‘men of God’ in the country, the recent apprehension of Rev. Adegoke Adewuyi is enough to convince sceptics among the population and lend credence to President Buhari’s revelation that some religious leaders across faiths are fertile sources of strife and violence in the country.

For those who may not have followed the story of Rev Adewuyi, he is a 31-year-old man whose main occupation is to assist citizens to be favourably positioned for prosperity while alive and for eternal peace in Paradise after the end of their sojourn on earth. His main employer is the Methodist Church, contrary to claims in the social media that he was an employee of a Pentecostal church already known across Africa as the religion of prosperity and miracles. For over five years that Adewuyi has been a priest, nobody could have suspected him as a potential criminal, until a few days ago when he was reported to have served as the kidnapper and the kidnapped in the same act.

Rev. Adewuyi has been reported to have abandoned the prestige-laden clergy for the world of high crime: planning and executing a smooth kidnap to raise illegal revenue, and in the process, take undue advantage of the trust he has gained over the years from presenting himself to the larger community as a man of God whose words should be trusted. Members of the church he pastors or shepherds instantly believed the story that Adewuyi had been kidnapped in Ado-Ekiti, for which church members went bowl in hand to collect funds towards Rev Adewuyi’s ransom, until the police deployed modern technology to unveil Adewuyi’s criminality. Adewuyi was unmasked by the police who removed the veneer of faith that covered his real self, exposing a hardcore criminal. So much for a man whose name should under normal circumstances not have found space in a column like this.

The concern of the rest of this piece is about how Rev Adewuyi’s brand of kidnapping has served as metonymy and metaphor for many of the country’s tribulations. As a kidnapper, Adewuyi is a physical representation of moral depravity, and as a religious leader, he has, unbeknown to him, become a sign for interrogating many half-truths about political and religious experiences in many parts of the country. In both capacities, Rev Adewuyi, who has, according to the police, confessed to kidnapping, has also admitted that he has in his adult life served as a purveyor of a text of spirituality that has been subtended by a subtext of criminality. He has held the former to the public and hidden the latter under his own skin. Interestingly, he tried to make a white-collar crime of a heinous one.

That both texts merged and came into the open in Ado-Ekiti last week have demonstrated some similarities between the man of God and the man of power in Nigeria. Both thrive in the business of deception, except that the average man of power in Nigeria has not been as adept as the professional man of God in covering his/her dark side: corruption serviced by high rhetoric of commitment to public service. In literary terms, the Brother Jero in Nigerian politics has been obvious to citizens for a much longer time than the Brother Jero in the country’s religion. At Rev Adewuyi’s instance, the Genie has been pulled out of the bottle and in the village centre.

For long, especially since the reign of military dictators and civilian collaborators, a culture of decline in values has been growing in the country but many citizens have been pushed into religion and made to accept the religious space as the only oasis in a desert of corruption presumed to be dominated by politicians. And members of the clergy across faiths have succeeded substantially in winning the confidence of their followers as their shepherds. To the average citizen, no men and women who claim to have been “called” and who relish announcing their “anointment” to the world have not been so unmasked as Adewuyi was in Ado-Ekiti recently.

The publicity given to the Adewuyi phenomenon so far has been justified. The region of the Southwest into which Adewuyi must have been born has been turned into a site of fear since the steep rise in kidnapping “by strangers and foreigners” in the last few weeks. Many patriots have been having sleepless nights as they run back and forth to Abuja to seek solution to the crime and scare of abduction on the highway and in the forest, only to be embarrassed by an indigene of the region who chose to kidnap himself and reap ransom from such act. Rev Adewuyi has sabotaged efforts of Yoruba patriots and organisations to save citizens from abductors. Many have claimed that all the abductors are either local or foreign herdsmen or members of Islamic State of West Africa (ISWA). And one Rev Adewuyi, someone perceived by many to be holy and above the temptations of the world has chosen to kidnap himself for money and to embarrass fellow countrymen searching for solution to a crime capable of depopulating the region. Unknown to Adewuyi, his actions seem to have succeeded in eclipsing the main narrative about the search for security of life and property for all citizens in the federal republic, regardless of where nature and culture have put them.

If Rev. Adewuyi, the self-abductor and his accomplice, Sunday Oluwadare Adewole, had not confessed to planning and executing the kidnapping of the former, many people in the Nigerian Christendom would not have believed the police over him. Having obtained confession from Adewuyi the way the police had done with Evans many years ago, the police with the support of the media ought to ensure that each step of the trail of Adewuyi and Adewole receive optimal amount of reporting until the completion of the trial. Under the new political ethic of Next Level, all agents of kidnapping in all sections of the country and from all occupations should be made to receive their comeuppance, without delay.

For politicians who have succeeded in the past to convince Nigerians that the problem of corruption and inertia is deep rooted in the older generation and only nascent within the youths, what answers do they have for Adewuyi’s behaviour? The reverend gentleman is only 31 years of age, a youth in all societies. It seems that Adewuyi at 31 years of age and in a full-time job with safe tenure has exposed the exaggeration in such facile theorizing. There is no better time to search more rigorously for the cause for moral and ethical decline in our federation.

June 16, 2019
June 12: a balance sheet

Surprisingly, seventeen years of elected governments have not alleviated the problems that arose from June 12.

Two unrelated developments in actual and symbolic engineering of our polity in the last two weeks have encouraged republishing of this article which first came out two years ago under the title of “June 12 Plus.”. The first development is presentation two weeks ago of an executive bill that seeks to put management of surface and underground water solely in the hands of the federal government. The second development is President Buhari’s decision last week to enrich the ritual of June 12 by promising to move celebration of Democracy Day from May 29 to June 12 as from 2019 and the award of posthumous national honour to MKO Abiola.

A well-deserved ritualisation of June 12 took place last Sunday. As usual, this year’s ritual of remembrance of the period of loss as a device to engineer reform went well in most of the Southwest states, leading to public holidays in some states, street marches in others, as well as reinforcement of twenty-three-year old call for true federalism in others. Today’s article is to remind readers of goals the June 12 struggle has not achieved and the new thorns thrown on the road opened by June 12 to re-federalization and full democratisation of Nigeria.

Historically, the June 12 struggle had three goals: restoration of MKO Abiola’s presidential mandate given to him by the fairest and freest election in the country’s history; de-militarisation of the country’s polity; and return of federal system of governance to the country. After the death of Abacha and later of Abiola in circumstances that continue to raise questions till today, the struggle lost its first goal. The second goal was partially won at the time General Olusegun Obasanjo became president at the end of General Abubakar Abdusalaam’s transition to democracy in 1999. But Obasanjo’s presidential election was not guided by any visible constitution to let citizens and candidates know what they were bargaining for. And the third goal, re-federalisation of the polity, had been hanging in the air ever since. Even after four post-military presidential elections, Nigeria is still saddled with a constitution crafted behind closed doors by military rulers and with concentration of power in the federal government at the expense of subnational governments in a ‘federal republic.’

Surprisingly, seventeen years of elected governments have not alleviated the problems that arose from June 12. On the contrary, the period of post-military rule has aggravated the unsolved problems left behind after Abiola’s death and the transition to civil rule that followed it. However, the narrative of re-federalisation remains alive even 23 years after annulment of Abiola’s election, but its retelling has been hobbled by confusion arising from several quarters. NADECO at home and abroad suffered some gradual hemorrhaging since some of its members came to political power in the Yoruba region. Only a few of the governors/lawmakers elected since 1999 and a few NADECO leaders remained vocal in calling for return to functioning federalism.

The frustration of efforts to restore federalism has taken many forms. NADECO became war weary after the death of Abiola and became excited by the promise of return to civil rule by the Abdulsalami Abubakar government. The excitement of periodic elections in a country that had been denied such opportunities on-and-off for many decades of military dictatorship created complacency for uncritical voters. Some found creation of mushroom organisations as vehicles for demanding federalism and as a means of staying politically and socially relevant in their communities. Many others see June 12 as a fitting time to repeat the demand for restructuring while others would rather not be bothered for calling for the advantages that restoring a federal governance system can bring to regional and national development.

Ironically, a former chieftain of NADECO-abroad, now leader of the All Progressives Congress, opened a hydrant on the fire of re-federalisation a few days before this year’s June 12 anniversary when he announced that federalism is not a priority of the new administration. Many who voted for a New Nigeria in 2015 are already feeling confused by the pronouncement of the chairman of APC and President Buhari’s media assistant who characterised the call for federalism as a distraction from the ruling party’s priorities. But the following statement in the highlights of APC manifesto: Initiate 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, does not suggest that an item in the highlights of the party’s manifesto is not a priority item. From information available to the electorate, the manifesto of APC emphasizes re-federalisation or reforming the existing largely unitary system through amendment of the 1999 Constitution. If the spirit to do what was promised is no longer there, it is important for the party to say so. And I believe doing so should go beyond an ex-tempore assessment of Buhari administration’s priorities by the ruling party’s chairman.

More than two decades after NADECO’s struggles for democracy for electoral and cultural democracy, Nigeria is still largely at the same point that it was after the election of the first post-military government of Obasanjo. The partial de-militarisation achieved through election of Obasanjo as a civilian and of subsequent civilian presidents and lawmakers remains as limited as it was in 1999. The constitution that presents a unitary system as a federal one is still intact. And the largest chunk of the nation’s revenue is still going to the central government that has no direct constituents to service while states and local governments that house and provide direct service to citizens receive much less than the central government. The imbalance between subnational and national governance is even getting worse as petroleum fortunes become more unpredictable by the day. States are now leaving on bailouts and loans. Instead of constitutionally returning power and freedom to states to be more productive, they are now at the risk of losing power over water supply and management of water resources in their communities.

‘June-twelvers’ who have remained committed to the ideals and goals of June 12 deserve to be congratulated for not becoming despondent after two decades of a constitution that is afraid to come to terms with the demands of managing a culturally diverse country. Since 1966, Nigeria has been trying to find its way to the map of modern development. Rather, it has been moving from one crisis to the other, a situation that has degraded and continues to degrade the lives of citizens across the country.

In another 48 hours, Nigeria will be marking with festivities the ‘commissioning’ of a new Democracy Day on June 12, 2019. Of course, finally turning June 12 into an intangible national heritage is likely to bring smiles to the faces of MKO Abiola’s wives and children, political associates, and even many activists for de-militarization of the country’s polity, the revelry of this year’s June 12 must not be allowed to eclipse the larger goal of consolidation and enrichment of democratic governance.

For example, recent developments in the security sector should remind activists for cultural democracy about the problems of holding tight to many aspects of re-engineering of Nigeria that military dictators had done. That many parts of the country now live in fear because of kidnapping, in addition to Boko Haram’s terrorist activities in the North-East suggests that the problem with security may not be limited to inefficiency of individual policemen and women or lack of adequate technology for protecting lives and property of citizens. If anything, the fear of citizens to move in space in the interest of their livelihood because of the impish nature of kidnappers or violent herdsmen should call for new attitude and thinking. Political leaders at all levels need to see the need to ‘de-programme’ themselves of compulsive denialism in respect of over centralisation. Everything that is happening in many communities, especially the fact that many communities are infested by kidnappers that abduct or kill innocent citizens in the forest and on the highways without being caught calls for a new police system, to replace or complement the existing one that has been hobbled by over centralisation.

Apart from the last paragraph in italics, today’s piece had appeared on this page before.

June 9, 2019
Femi Ojo-Ade (1941-2019): Lessons from a people’s professor

Students and colleagues knew him for student-centred teaching, even before the theory or principle became infectious across continents.

On March 19, Professor Femi Ojo-Ade, University of Ife’s first professor of French (and Nigeria’s second after Abiola Irele) and first Professor Emeritus of French and Francophone Studies at St. Mary’s College in USA, died. On June 7, family members, friends and colleagues, former students, and members of the community of writers will assemble at All Saints Anglican Church in Yaba, Lagos to bid him final farewell. Ironically, Ojo-Ade’s body will be returning for burial from one of the famous sites of the exile he never tired of reminding about the need to embark on the ethic of further self-humanisation to a home he did not desist from warning about the dangers of self-degradation.

Femoo, as his colleagues at Ife used to call him on the soccer field, at social gatherings, and academic seminars as a mark of endearment, had spent his fifty years in academia to create models in various aspects of intellectual life-from teaching and relations with students, academic and research programme development, to prolific critical and creative writing. Lessons learnable from Ojo-Ade’s academic sojourn in the many countries in which he had taught: Brazil, Gambia, Nigeria, and the United States include student-centred teaching, collegiality with associates in his many countries of professional activities, and commitment to freedom and justice in his critical and creative writings.

This writer first met Ojo-Ade at a conference on African literature in Madison, Wisconsin in 1976 at which he did what came across as undisguised deconstruction of intellectual elite. In his opening remark to his paper, he observed in a bald language the hidden desire of conference academics to enjoy the privilege of upward mobility provided by the string of academic degrees behind their names, mostly at the expense of the people, such academic degrees, are designed to be assisted to live a good life. Just about every conferee in the hall looked at his neighbour for confirmation.

Ojo-Ade’s castigation of the African intellectual and of the Western intellectual of Africa at that conference got a re-echo decades later in the preface to his Black Gods: “So, armed with our fledgling bourgeois concepts, we trotted off to the metropoles…to seek the golden fleece and to attain the utmost in Civilisation. Our bastardised souls fell easy prey to all forms of moral and psychological colonisation. Excellent students that we were, we quickly learned to beat the hypocritical, dehumanising, and materialistic master at his own game….Black Gods, that is what we are, thrown out of white heaven into Black Africa, but ready to rule over our kith and kin like true agents of the civiliser.” This disclosure of Ojo-Ade’s preoccupation with justice to the kith and kin of all human settlements as part of the remit of the elite—intellectual, political, economic, and cultural—have permeated his teaching, scholarship, human relations, and creative writings.

At Ife, where he spent half of his teaching years and at St. Mary’s where he ended his professional life, Ojo-Ade was famous for his teaching style. Students and colleagues knew him for student-centred teaching, even before the theory or principle became infectious across continents. Many of his classes were held in his capacious office with more comfortable seats than were available in regular classrooms. He was popular for teaching language and literature largely in a dialogic and Socratic manner, putting emphasis on interactive learning and lacing his teaching with periodic doses of humour that put his students at ease.

His style and mien endeared him to his students to the extent that he also acted as unofficial counsellor to many of them. In all the languages he mastered: English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, and Yoruba, Ojo-Ade demonstrated flair for expressing profound ideas and light-hearted jokes in a seamless flow that made his audience eager to listen to him. Even though Femi did not officially get on the list of those accused by military dictators of “teaching what they were not paid to teach,” he as an admirer of Frantz Fanon did not fail to include insights from Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed in his process of knowledge exchange with his students and colleagues at faculty seminars.

Ojo-Ade was friendly to and protective of not only his students but also of his colleagues across disciplines. Whether as department chair or programme director, he was jovial with colleagues and ready to extend his contacts within and outside the country to his them, once he was convinced that they could benefit from such exposure. He was enthusiastic to sell Brazilian cultural studies to his associates. In addition, the survival of the study of Portuguese at Ife beyond the cutpurse years of Structural Adjustment Program resulted from Ojo-Ade’s insistence that Portuguese is not just a foreign language in Nigeria but also a language of re-connecting divided children of African descent in Africa and Brazil. In this respect, he also campaigned for the teaching of Yoruba in Brazil, a rare insight about the role of culture in soft diplomacy in a fast globalising market already in the crib at the end of the 20th century, a reality that was not visible to many of the critics of his insistence that University of Ife needed to own a house for his year-abroad programme in Brazil.

Largely, it is in the writings of Ojo-Ade that his ethic of justice to and empowerment of those he called ‘kith and kin’ finds the most powerful expression of what can be described as the aesthetic of humanisation of the postcolonial person—be he or she a descendant of the enslaver, the enslaved, the colonial master, or the colonised person, now in any form of power over others.

Subjects in his critical and creative writings include race and culture, national and international politics, and globalisation. And the ideology that permeates his works is clear across genres: the imperative of justice and equity. For example, in his Ken Saro-Wiwa: a bio-critical study, he debunked the claim that the government of Sani Abacha was protecting the economic interest of Nigeria: “That question may have been wrongly put; for, Saro-Wiwa’s struggle was not just against an oil company. Precisely, it was, and is, against Nigeria, and those people trying to transform the place into their private property in the name of patriotism.” In another of his critical works, Home and Exile: Abdias Nascimento, he connected the issues of race, injustice, slavery, colonialism, and globalisation: “Once again, it is all about Africa, and Africa is black. Black, for too long a victim, an object of ridicule and opprobrium, a slave continually denied his humanity even as the world is being supposedly harmonised from a universe of differences into a global village where the purveyors of diminishing distances are parading myths of equality, justice, and human rights.”

In his book of poems, Exile at Home, Ojo-Ade focuses on the flaws of leadership at home in postcolonial Nigeria and similar countries: “My generation, the one coming directly after Wole Soyinka’s wasted generation, must understand the thrust of these poems…. How do you recognise your role in the race towards the precipice when you have failed to assume responsibility for your own destiny left to decay and destruction in the hands of robbers and rapists and renegades claiming to be saviours?”

A recurrent theme in the over 25 publications of this fertile mind is the absence of justice at home in Africa and abroad in Europe and North America. Just as he did in his Ife days, even when he is mordant in his criticism, he never till the end harbour any hatred against those criticised in his works for failing to do the right thing in Africa and elsewhere. This is his last testimonial from his last employer, St. Mary’s College: He combined a deep love for his native Nigeria with a cosmopolitan restlessness and commitment to world citizenship. Femi loved people, institutions and countries with his eyes open to their imperfections but believing in their promise. He had a warm heart and was a passionate conversationalist.”

While thanking Molara, the children, and members of the Ojo-Ade extended family for sharing him with the world, his admirers welcome him back home for the journey to the final home, which the Yoruba have constructed as the world of the ancestors saddled with looking after the world of the living and the unborn.

June 2, 2019
Security initiative: the north present, and the south absent?

There is a need for a public commitment by southern governors to planning to solve the problem of insecurity, the North has started

A week ago, northern governors resolved to end insecurity in that part of the country. At the meeting, the 19 members of the Northern Governors Forum deliberated on many regional problems they believe to be crying for solution. Two issues stood out: establishment of a joint financial institution to accelerate the region’s attainment of financial independence from the central government and finding holistic solution to “insecurity currently bedeviling the region and various ways and means of dealing with the situation.” Some would consider the decision of the northern governors a little late, given the magnitude of security breaches in many northern states while many would say ‘better late than never’ and congratulate the region for taking a good move to stop a bad situation. But citizens from the 17 southern states may be wondering about the silence of their governors on security issues in the south.

Imitation is a fact of life in all sectors. Good governance is to a large extent a product of imitation, just as the spread of democracy results from the will of countries to emulate good governance processes or ‘best practices’ in other countries. If governors in the southern region are still assessing the security situation, they need to act fast, especially that the citizens under their jurisdiction are living in fear for their lives. The situation is very bad in the Southwest, thus calling on governors to act immediately, to prevent further killing and kidnapping of citizens in the region.

It is a no brainer that governors from the south from all political parties would know, as much as their northern counterparts, that President Buhari should be open to suggestions from the three zones in the south on how to solve the problems of security in the country. It is also constitutional for the government of any state or region to do what Northern Governors Forum has decided to do; providing a plan to the country’s president on how to end insecurity. There is a need for a public commitment by southern governors to planning to solve the problem of insecurity in the land. If anything, the North has started an enviable initiative in this respect and this initiative deserves to gain the attention of southern states.

If, for whatever reasons, the southern states have difficulties in organizing a Southern Governors Forum to think together like their northern counterparts, nothing should prevent governors in each of the three southern zones to act and talk about how each of them wishes to address the danger of dwindling security. Although the ideal thing would be for the three zones to organize a southern governors forum to address this urgent matter, it is still acceptable for each zone to do something to assure its citizens that governors in each zone has not chosen to ignore the pains of their citizens at the instance of marauders. It is, however, remarkable that the Southwest Governors Forum has renewed its mission for another four years. The zone should not delay on launching its own Security Advisory Initiative to assist President Buhari and the federal legislature on a matter that means so much to life and property in the region.

Without doubt, governors in the southwest would have been receiving information from citizens in the region regarding sudden changes in their lives since the onset of herdsmen-farmers conflict and more so since phenomenal rise in cases of kidnapping in various parts of the region. Without exaggeration, citizens in our region are living in fear because of violent kidnappers in different parts of the region. Given that a major driver of money circulation in the southwest is constant traveling for cultural reasons, a situation, such as now exists in the region, which makes traveling a source of anxiety is bound to slow down circulation of money between Yoruba people in the big cities and the villages and towns in the Southwest.

Currently, many Yoruba people with the courage to take the risk of traveling out of their regular stations now park their vehicles and patronize public transport between Abuja, Lagos, Ibadan and other cities and towns in the Yoruba region, in the hope that traveling in rickety commercial buses would save them from kidnappers. This is not happening. Commercial buses are reported to have been stopped by kidnappers. Of course, a combination of those who reduce traveling out of their stations and those that go by public transport cannot but affect the economy of many towns and villages that depend on weekend visitors from the urban areas.

Many petrol stations between towns in the Southwest no longer have as many customers as they used to have for fueling vehicles and buying snacks. For example, the population of women who sell food items along the highways in the region has been getting smaller by the day since inter-city roads have become theatres of operation for kidnappers. In many Yoruba towns, more money is circulated between Friday and Saturday than in the rest of the week, but many towns in the region are now receiving fewer of their children living in big urban economies like Lagos and Abuja, apparently because such visitors are now afraid of risking being kidnapped between towns.

Apart from security problems in states visibly threatened by terrorists like Boko Haram, it is conceivable that northern governors have also observed drastic changes in the flow of inter-city travels in their respective states and that such awareness may have influenced the decision of northern governors to work on plans to assist the federal government towards reinforcing the country’s security. That a few days after the meeting at which such decision was taken, the committee has been able to start work suggests how urgent northern governors view the security situation in their region.

Whatever may have slowed down southern states from embarking on a similar plan needs to be addressed by southern governors, especially Southwest governors. Given that there may be invisible obstacles to forming and sustaining a Southern Governors Forum, there is no reason for any of the three zones in the south to wait indefinitely on establishing dialogues with their citizens on how to make their communities safe from kidnappers and bandits and how to make farmers in the rural areas safe from harassment from herdsmen. It is, therefore, necessary that Southwest governors provide leadership for study and recommendations on how to improve the region’s security, just as their northern counterparts have set out to do.

Moreover, it is not in the interest of any region to fail to make recommendations to the federal government on solutions to security problems in each region. Regardless of how busy Southwest governors may be on other matters of governance, they need to respond fast to troubling security deficits in the zone. Threats to the way of life of citizens in the region are rising and require immediate attention of not only governors but citizens as well. Readiness on the part of Southwest governors to contribute to direly needed templates on peace and safety for all is part of functions of any government that is working towards unity, harmony, and development. It is thus proper for governments in the southwest to arrange bi-partisan committees to prepare the region’s blueprint on security in the region and the country.

Ideally, no region should fail to respond to the challenges facing a country to which we have all made contributions from the era of decolonization to now. But the Yoruba region should show public interest in seeing, like their northern colleagues, the importance of doing a thorough analysis of the current security challenges and making recommendations to the federal government. There should be no reason to make citizens in the southern states look like orphans with no parents to plead the region’s case. And it is not wise to keep mum over the region’s security and unintentionally leave room for suspicion, especially if at the end if only recommendations on how to secure the country by northern governors reach President Buhari.

There is a Yoruba proverb worth selling to realistic leaders: Ki omo ma ku, aa ni fi nnkan baba re se oogun (To save a son from a deadly disease should not require sacrificing his father). In political language, national and continental unity, though important, cannot justify sacrificing of innocent citizens in any part.

May 26, 2019