The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tatalo Alamu

  • The rise of the unemployment industry

    The rise of the unemployment industry

    Haba, Comrade Abba Moro! It seems the struggle to turn the world into one vast workers’ paradise can make one to forget how it works with a huge crowd of actually unemployed people seeking only three square meals a day. There is nowhere else in the world where the masses are packed into a constricted space like that without some massive consequences. And it is not likely that we are ever going to see a more worker unfriendly act from a comrade to prospective workers.

    Like every other tragedy in Nigeria, the current one also comes with its own paradox. One thing that must be of curiosity to the sociologists and political scientists of this diseased and dysfunctional nation is the rise of the unemployment industry in the country. Please permit the amazing oxymoron. Unemployment is industry. In Nigeria, catering for the jobless and fleecing them in the process is big business.

    This historic heist is manned by a capillary network of crooks, conmen , confidence tricksters and assorted confederates who find lucrative employment in unemployment. The higher the level of unemployment, the bigger the growth and expansion of the unemployment industry and its capacity-building for joblessness. The greater the number of our unemployed youths roaming the streets or crowding the stadia, the better the prospects of the unemployment industry. This is one unique industry that thrives on de-industrialisation and the massive flight of capital. Better still, it is the industrialization of poverty and misery.

    Snooper has lived in many countries in the world, but has never seen where a person becomes a multi-millionaire or even a billionaire from generating and managing unemployment. But this is what is happening. At a cool one thousand naira per head, the individuals behind this heinous scam would have raked in a billion naira if there were a million job seekers. If Nigeria were to double its current unemployment production capacity, the revenues accruing can be humongous indeed.

    Why collect money from over seven hundred thousand applicants when the actual vacancy is just below six thousand? Most of the vacancies, in any case, would have been filled even before the multitude commit pen to paper. In this particular case, the contracted consultancy was discovered to have last filed its annual returns with the Corporate Affairs Commission in 1998. This is nothing but social cannibalism at its most hair-raising. To seek to work in the Nigerian Immigration Service has become the surest route to terminal emigration to the land of the unreturnable.

    While we recoil in disbelief at the recently discovered forest of horror in Ibadan where human parts are openly stockpiled, we must also not forget stadia where the unemployed are packed like sardines before being sent summarily packing. As the Jurassic Age stares us in the face all over again, the entire country resembles one vast forest of horror.

    Franz Kafka would have been clucking away in his grave . There are times when actual reality in contemporary Nigeria trumps the most ghoulish and improbable of fictional creations. It was Kafka, the master craftsman of vicious and fatally entrapping bureaucracies, who once penned a short story titled, The Hunger Artist. It was about a man who turned professional teaching people how to endure hunger and manage the pangs of compulsory fasting.

    But let us be clear about this. There are certain professions which disgrace and dishonour humanity. Profiting from poverty, hunger, misery, want and joblessness is one of these. It is a scandalous indictment of humanity and the mental health of our society. It is even more scandalous when the offending agency is a government parastatal under the ministry that is in charge of the internal security of the nation. It calls to question the internal security architecture of the entire country.

    This is not a scandal that can be treated with kids’ gloves, hoping that it will go away of its own accord, like so many other scandals that have plagued this administration. This is about our youths and the flowers of the nation. In sane and civilized climes, there would have been by now, a flurry of resignations over the tragedy that led to the death of so many of our unemployed youths. But that would be the day in Nigeria.

    But there is a limit to which even an anarchic society can thrive on disorder as its organizing principle. Once again, it is being rumoured that the supervising minister of the offending ministry and his accomplices are being shielded because they are protégés of a powerful functionary of the state. The official is said to have boasted that nothing on earth can touch his minions.

    The Jonathan administration is remarkable for its serial breach of the trust and confidence of the populace. Hence, its low esteem and the dramatic decline of its authority and legitimacy. Once again, Goodluck Jonathan is letting the opportunity slip by to lay the foundation of institutional order as the bulwark of any civilized and sane society.

    We have a word of honorable advice for the president. Having succeeded in pacifying and placating a substantial fraction of the elite with rustling tea leaves in Abuja, he should not add open discontent and rebellion from the margins and from the down under to his shopping list of political palavers. This is the surest and fastest route to an apocalyptic meltdown whose outcome will make Somalia a child’s play. Given the government’s celebrated incontinence, the omens in that direction are very dire indeed.

    The Fourth Republic has become the graveyard of institutional order in Nigeria. Before they come into their own as neutral arbiters acting with impersonal rigour, institutions require leaders of strong ethical persuasion and formidable moral stamina to guide and guard them through teething tutelage. Institutions are repeated gestures eventually routinised and burnt into human consciousness through accumulated practice. To nurture and grow this requires leaders of deep integrity, honour and principle.

    Let us take an example from our next door neighbour and rival. In the era of post-military democracy, Ghana appears to have left us at the starting block. Through accumulated practice, Ghana has virtually institutionalized periodic elections as the acceptable democratic mechanism for electoral change. It has always been a close run thing, featuring all the potential fault lines of regionalism, religion and ethnicity, but sanity always prevails. On the other hand, post-military democracy in Nigeria has witnessed much rancor, violence, disregard for rules and conventions and much presidential delinquency. The institutional mechanism for lawful and peaceful change is deliberately famished, stymied and stultified.

    With an eye to his electoral fortunes, Dr Jonathan is obviously wary of moving against political appointees who give his administration such a bad name and an unsavoury reputation. In a country where ethnic heroism is better respected than ethical heroism, he can hardly be blamed. But in the end, his presidency is going to be judged by its quality rather than the length of tenure. In the long run, somebody will have to pay for the horror and stench coming from the moral collapse of the Nigerian presidency.

    The stampede of the unemployed youth of the country resulting in needless death requires some immediate restitution even if it is at the purely symbolic level. The circumstances of this national tragedy are so glaring and questionable that a criminal investigation for corporate manslaughter ought to have commenced. If unemployment is going to be a business, it does not require culpable homicide. And neither can the fallout be contained by business as usual panel-beating. That is known as government by default and dereliction.

  • I too knew Ogona Robert Itua

    Death stalks everywhere in the land. From the far North to the deep South, the entire country has become one huge killing field. It has never been like this. The citizens are overwhelmed by death-fatigue. You never know whose number will come up next. Say goodnight to somebody and be foolish enough to assume that they would still be there in the morning.

    Before then, the circumstances of death seemed hazy and eerily unsettling. But while trawling the old Saturday edition of a national newspaper last weekend, Snooper was confronted by the unmistakable proof of mortality. There on page 67, in an article titled Expressway to death, was the picture of Robert starring at the world with his trademark deadpan calmness.

    Robert was our favourite electrical miracle worker and refrigerator technician. He was very proficient and professional. He had a puckish sense of humour and abundant self-confidence. Only once did he overreach himself when he dabbled into an area beyond his core competence. It ended in a fiasco and with Robert in hiding for quite some time. When he finally emerged from preventive self-evaporation, he was all smiles, as if nothing had happened. Snooper quickly cut his losses at this point.

    On Monday February 10, Robert who also worked as a technician with Zenith Bank, was going to Ajah on the Lekki-Epe highway. While attempting to cross the road, he was knocked down by a reverend gentleman who was driving recklessly against traffic. The servant of the Lord attempted to flee but was apprehended by police. But unfortunately, it was too late for Robert. He gave up the ghost in the early hours of the following day.

    That same morning as if by some bizarre intuition, Snooper decided to call Robert after a long absence. After the phone rang out twice, it was a lady that picked it. An even more eerie conversation ensued.

    “May I speak to Robert?” Snooper requested.

    “I need to know who is calling” the lady insisted with a calm voice. After introducing myself, there was some silence and hesitation from the other end.

    “He is late”, came the terse response.

    “Oh no, I didn’t ask him to come”, Snooper mumbled, trying to make sense of this.

    “Sir, Robert died this morning. He was knocked down yesterday. I am still in the hospital”. The news struck like thunderbolt. Snooper hung on speechless. It took minutes for this to sink in. Poor Robert has been added to the grim statistics of manslaughter in what is fast becoming an axis of death for pedestrians. May his gentle and amiable soul rest in peace.

  • Okon storms the National Confab

    After his numerous scams to get enlisted in the National Conference failed and fell with a resounding thud, Okon decided to take matters and the law directly into his own hands. As usual, he had barged in spotting the snow white uniform of a decorated butler in the services of some colonial potentate with a carved bronze walking stick to match. The old boy was quite a sight to behold. Grandstanding but with his legs barely standing under him, the crazy boy immediately opened fire.

    “Oga, I wan quickly reach dem yeye confab for Abuja. He get one old man I wan beat up”, the mad boy announced eyeing snooper as if he was the old man.

    “Really? Go ahead. I don’t think you will live to regret it”, snooper sniggered with much mirth and malice.

    “I go regret to live if I no wire dem baba well well”, the crazy boy retorted as he stormed out. Two days later and by an amazing coincidence, snooper was on recce at the venue of the Confab when his attention was drawn to a commotion at the accreditation stand. Lo, it was the selfsame Okon. After being savagely frisked to the point of exhaustion, he was asked to produce his letter of accreditation. Pronto, some heavy duty recharge cards flew out of Okon’s pocket and clattered on the table.

    “What is this?” one of the clerks demanded testily.

    “Abi na Etisalat you dey take do am?” Okon queried. The clerk flew into a rage.

    “Listen, where is your letter of accreditation?” he screamed at Okon.

    “I don tell you say if you no want dem Glo and dem MTN, I fit get Starcomms, abi dat one don pafuka sef? Dis yeye grammar no go take you reach far”, Okon insisted. At this point, an old man came forward, trying to apply the wisdom of Solomon.

    “Okay sir, which group are you representing?”, the old man asked Okon with the suavity of a native healer.

    “I dey represent dem HAN, Houseboys Association of Nigeria”, Okon replied in a strangely subdued voice. The earlier punishment was taking its toll. The old man broke into prolonged hiccup accompanied by loud laughter.

    “Han ko, hun ni”, the old man jeered with tears of mirth streaming from his face.

    “Dem houseboys boku for dem confluence. Why you wan join dem? Dem don reach 492 sef”, another old man sneered.

    “So how dem come better Okon? No be dem problem we dey talk about be dis? Okay wey TAM?” Okon demanded.

    “Who be Tam sef?” somebody queried.

    “Na dem ogbologbo professor. He no dey. He don do him own for dem Muri time” ,somebody volunteered.

    “You see now, yeye people!” Okon growled. “Tam be feeding and transport money. TAM be turn around maintainment. Abi if you say make I turn go back Lagos, na empty hand man go take go?” At this point, an officer in mufti who had been watching the whole drama with mounting displeasure suddenly thundered. “Arrest this man as a Boko Haram suspect!”

    Like an Olympics pole vault champion, Okon leapt to freedom and took to his heels.

  • On form and social discontents

    On form and social discontents

    We have received quite a robust and large volume of responses to the piece last week which was titled The coup against capital. As usual, the responses range from the peevish, the perverse to the profound. In their different ways, they all speak to the social and intellectual ferment in the country today. A thousand conferences about the state of the nation are currently on-going and only a political fool would ignore the dire and ominous signals.

    One of the joys of the columnist is reading these intellectual slugfests, not just when they cross swords with the writer but when they cross swords among each other, that is when the commentaries become meta-commentaries producing their own contextual and inter-textual tensions. They speak to far from finished business, one hundred years after amalgamation.

    An amalgamation is not designed to produce a unified society or a homogenous national consciousness. To get by, Nigeria has always relied on exceptionally strong individuals who impose consensus from above until the national fabric gives way. From Lord Lugard himself, to Ahmadu Bello in the First Republic, Babangida’s democratic chicanery until the master scam overwhelmed the scam-master, Abacha’s frantic terrorism until prostitution became a noble profession again, Obasanjo’s messianic despotism until the Third Term fiasco exploded in his face and now Goodluck Jonathan’s beguiling political levitations.

    It is trite to observe that an unhappy society also provokes formal uneasiness among its serious and genuine writers. How do we capture the turbulent and toxic realities of these unhappy times without doing fundamental damage to the integrity of writing and the writer? This is what has been described as the unhappy consciousness at the stylistic level.

    An abiding concern of many readers of this column is about its mode of production; its obdurate and incorrigible stylistic bravura. There is often more than a hint of desperation and frustration with the columnist. Just tell us what you want to say in plain English or get lost. Many think that the mandarin and elitist style is massively alienating and therefore an exercise in intellectual futility.

    A very good friend and ardent fan of the columnist, Dr Ezenwa F’ Chizea, roused Snooper up last Monday and rued laconically: “My friend, who are you writing for?” Before Snooper could volunteer an answer, the redoubtable son of the Omu of Asaba, roared: “These things are too intellectual and deep for most readers!” In this, there was a hint and subtle plea to the absconding academic to return from whence he came to disturb the peace of the polity.

    Actually, this is an old ghost and Snooper is more than happy to rouse the old apparition once again this morning. We publish an old response about Snooper’s stylistic engagement, titled, Advertisement for My Style. We do not add or remove a word. Written 28 years ago in Newswatch, it is as if nothing has changed in this much abused country, as if the nation has remained frozen in time and space. But this is nothing but a reflection of the travails of a society in the throes of a traumatic transition. Think back. Things do change, but sometimes it appears for the worse. What sustains some of us is what Antonio Gramsci has called pessimism of the intellect but optimism of the will.

  • Advertisement for my style

    “The style,” says Comte Buffon, an 18th Century French biologist and popular writer, “is the man himself.” In my much younger days, I viewed this statement with scorn and disrespect. I had then, this unrelenting hostility towards all maxims. This was because of what I considered their premature arrival at the “truth.” Well, I used to console myself, what else do you really expect from a buffoon?

    It does appear, in retrospect, as if Monsieur Buffon was right, that the joke was probably on me. When you read Wole Soyinka’s prose, you come away with the impression of a man of immense vitality: a human Mississippi; tempestuous, charging and laying waste acres of lies and deception. The urbane lucidity of Chinua Achebe’s works speaks of immense self-possession, of a man of considerable charm and reticence. Charles De Gaulle, another master, wrote the French language with the same authoritarian elegance, the same oracular conviction and irritation with small men and minds, which is a projection of his towering personality. And Jean-Paul Sartre’s often clumsy syntax and deliberate refusal to write “well” bear eloquent testimony to his everlasting contempt for the virtues of the French middle-class.

    I must confess that there is a bit of all of these gentlemen in me, which makes maters even more tricky. Having conceded this, I must also submit that there is a sense in which a writer’s style itself might serve as an index of the social unease of his generation. For the truly creative mind, style is a question of infinite possibilities and endless permutations. A particular stylistic tendency, then, may be nothing but a particular response to grave social pressures.

    When I was invited to write this column, I promised myself that I would review the reactions to it after a year. Before the advent of this column, one thing that had been sadly lacking in Nigerian journalism, despite its enviable strides in the past decade, is the direct and sustained involvement of people within the ivory-tower in journalism. This has been the case in several western and oriental societies. It is, indeed, a tribute to the vision of Newswatch editors that the floodgate has since opened with several people within the ivory-tower writing for several magazines on a regular basis.

    The reactions to this column have been varied and quite interesting. One accusation that keeps cropping up is that the writer’s syntax is often difficult and his vocabulary invariably inaccessible. D.A. Olaosun fired the first salvo, attacking the writer for polysyllabic madness. It is interesting, however, to observe that a few months later when this column wrote a rather friendly piece on Awo, the same Olaosun of Surulere wrote to say that he found the piece very illuminating.

    In a fit of anger, another reader wrote to ask whether I was the Wole Soyinka of Newswatch, a development which effectively ruined my lunch that day. And after writing a particularly devastating and irreverent piece on Jesus Christ and our church leaders, somebody wrote from a Seminary near Ijebu-Ode telling me about how “truly impressive” a writer I was.

    But perhaps, the most touching reaction of all came in the form of a full-length rejoinder from somebody who is a chief typist in a ministry in Kaduna State. Titled: Squandering of Opportunity, the letter bears quoting at length. It charges: “By speaking in a language which only the privileged few, who have benefited from an elitist form of education, can understand, you are, perhaps unknown to you and by implication, entering into negotiations with the oppressor… and squandering our chances of dealing devastating blows to the present unjust order.”

    Several important issues are raised in these rejoinders and they speak for the social and intellectual ferment in the country today. I must admit right away that this column is not modeled on the canons of “lucidity” and “simplicity” which are taught in Fleet Street and American night schools of journalism. It is indeed such “simplicity” which is ironically opened to misappropriation by our dominant culture. This column confesses to intellectual tyranny. It is not one that is designed to be run over with a bottle of beer or read over a bale of suya in our country clubs. I believe that the ruling class already has enough circus-clowns, court-jesters and intellectual acrobats attending to its needs.

    The intellectual intransigence of this column must then be located within the context of a society overtaken by mindless materialism, a society in which subsidized illiteracy is part of an elaborate power game. Only a style that is at once tempestuous and tyrannical, I believe, can match the dynamics of these tempestuous and tyrannical times.

    It might, of course, be legitimately objected that such an authoritarian style risks massive alienation, that the “message” might be lost in a jungle of inaccessibility. Such an objection ignores the seductive power of tyranny. A badly digested idea is like a huge piece of bone lodged in the throat, you can neither swallow nor easily throw it up. Only a style imbued with such suffocating alienation can come to terms with the massive alienation of this terrible age.

    As for the “message” being lost, this particular issue of whether the “masses” can and must be taught has been one source of my constant irritation with the left in this country. This talking down to the masses in all its arrogant condescension and we-know-it-all bravura would have been laughable in its astonishing innocence but for the fact that it contains the seeds of left-wing fascism. The greatest teachers of this age are hunger and misery. No amount of simplistic prose and simplistic analysis of our condition can supplant the hard teachings of these modern masters.

    This column, then, must be seen as a child of its time, an attempt to enhance our political and literary culture and a desperate intervention against the philistine culture that has been foisted on us by our elites. Perhaps, future generations in a Nigeria rid of toil, misery and feudal chicanery will stumble across it and glimpse behind the style and the man the ugly scars of these unhappy times.

    First published in Newswatch, October 22, 1986.

     

    Feedback. Re: The coup against capital

  • Re: The coup against capital

    Snooper, your co-ethnic saw to it that those of your brethren; made prostrate by military defeat, who showed, and still show the most valour in capital accumulation and husbandry, were rendered destitute. See how far they’ve come from 20 pounds per diem. While we moan about metropolitan capital flight, let us ponder on self-inflicted injuries.

    – Obinnna77

    It is not for lack of trying or the possession of the requisite branial capacity that tempered our tendency for the accumulation of capital. Rather, it was the nature of the traditional economic system that was adopted by some African societies. We were basically an agrarian society. The Yoruba for example adopted the Aro system which was a communalistic form of arrangement in which members of a particular commune took time to work on one another’s farm. This is hardly a system that encourages capital accumulation. Add to this the fact that the legal tender of the Yoruba, for example, was the cowrie shell. It was not enough to accumulate capital, but one must be able to carry same around for business transactions. It thus required men of immense might and main to ferry a million in cowrie shells from one location to another. With the advent of paper money, moving capital was made easy.

    – Rufus O.

    Neither Abacha nor Mobutu, the two avatars in this piece, was a capitalist. We should be asking why the capital formations attempted by Abiola, Iwuanyanwu, Odutola, Dantata, Ojukwu, etc., did not make it to the stock exchange. Or, if they did, why they soon fizzled. We should ask why Adenuga and Dangote watched on the sidelines as Nuhu Ribadu was trashed while he was fighting for the discipline necessary for capital sustenance.

    – Omotaye Omobosede.

    The Zairois and Nigerian political histro-political paths are hardly the same. Nigeria did NOT have a Sergeant Joseph Desire Mobutu in 1966….could NOT have had. We KNOW those who created Mobutu…..the Nigerian HISTORY created an Abacha. Nigeria, even now, is NOT the near-tragedy the Congo has become, the paradox is that the historic fault lines of Nigeria collectively cushion Nigeria from falling into the abyss. Their existence may yet induce Nigeria into a working federalism or it may well be the components will go their separate ways….though that will be a sad commentary on the valiant efforts that have gone to save the union.

    – Oluwole Omotaye Omobosede.

    Yes, sir Congo cannot happen here, reason why the foetus of Abacha tyranny was clinically aborted before it reached maturity, thanks to patriots like WS, late Alao Aka-Bashorun, Barrister Femi Falana, Dr Beko Ransome Kuti, Ndubuisi Kanu, Colonel Abubakar Umar Dangiwa, one Prof A Williams, et al. Legendary luck be damned, there are Nigerians super patriots working round the clock, burning the midnight oil so that this fatherland will actualize its manifest destiny, if it is still standing bloodied but unbowed despite the thousand cuts it has sustained and continues to endure from its traitorous diabolical offspring ,it has nothing to do with luck, it has all to do with the indomitable spirit of its noble patriotic offspring waging titanic battle and war on tactical and strategic level to keep the the soul of this fatherland sacred and noble. As to this question of yours “Is there a historic or genetic conspiracy against capital and its useful accumulation in Africa?”

    I will respond that yes there is a historic conspiracy against capital and its useful accumulation in Africa, after all the thematic focus of colonialism is primitive accumulation of capital through barbaric and primitive exploitation of the colonial subjects and his resources, and when colonialism metamorphosed into imperialism and neo colonialism ,brutal, rapacious and unscrupulous under valuation of neo colonial subjects and his capital(property) became the norm, reason why original inhabitants of Lekki were uprooted from their property ,which was latter upgraded and reevaluated to worth millions, and then parceled out to the neo colonial running dogs, whereas all that was needed to be done was empowered the original owners by given them deeds or C of O to their land and develop the land ,so as to enhance the value, thereby enabling them to use the title to access capital.(for further enumeration sir, I urge you to read the Peruvian economist Herman De Soto on this issue), where are still waiting for what is going to become of Mkoko.

    As for anti Okonjo I aver in the past that she is a Trojan horse, her first time around was as a debt collector for her western masters, and having accomplished that ,she was sent on another errand, that of destroying our fatherland economically, so as to make it regionally politically ineffective and irrelevant ,hence incapacitate it to actualize its manifest destiny, and in the process hand over our sovereign wealth to Goldman Sachs, an accomplice. But Sir, you know what, all this shall pass, we are indomitable, we are exceptional and we shall overcome.

    – Bola Awoniran.

  • The coup against capital

    The coup against capital

    (On the modern ruins of Gbadolite)

    Is there a historic or genetic conspiracy against capital and its useful accumulation in Africa? More than its self-inflicted political and spiritual wounds, the perennial and perpetual inability to accumulate and valorise capital is the festering sore of Africa. Even where there is a fundamental breakthrough, the Mansa Musa syndrome takes over. How many first generation businesses survive far into the next generation? Yet you turn any corner of England and you find tailors since the eighteenth century, florists since the nineteenth, bankers since the seventeenth, clothiers since the nineteenth etc.

    Perhaps the urgency of the situation must permit us to frame the question in a more desperate and despairing manner. Is the Black man’s brains genetically wired against capital accumulation? Or is there something about the societal configuration in Africa and its autochthonous formations which continually resists and rebels against being co-opted into the orbit of untrammelled capitalism? Is this a fall out of the hunter-gatherer phase of human existence or a case of errant but stubborn localism frustrating the forces of capitalist globalization?

    This is not a question of racial inferiority or lack of fundamental ability for capital capacity building and holding. After all, there are successful black entrepreneurs in post-apartheid South Africa and the western world. To be sure, there is nothing pre-ordained or inevitable about the triumph of western modernity and its capitalist mode of production. The west has been able to impose its economic vision on the rest of the world as a result of its military superiority and spiritual ascendancy.

    There were English slaves in the court of the Ottoman emperors. A survey once came up with the startling conclusion that despite the thunder and tinsel of modern capitalism, the golden and happiest period in England was the Elizabethan epoch. The compulsive generosity and willingness to share without looking back in times of plenty that we notice in certain traditional societies speak to some alternative life styles that could have moderated and modulated the traumas of modern capitalism.

    But since Africa has been frogmarched to the frontiers of western modernity, there is nothing anybody can do about that. The problem is that you cannot redistribute wealth that has not been created by labour and human exertion. To do so is to indulge in starry-eyed idealism which is another word for infantile radicalism.

    Let the lore not race ahead of the leitmotif. There are intellectual debts and obligations to be paid and discharged. In a famous essay titled, The Revolution against Capital, Antonio Gramsci, the great Italian journalist, philosopher and outstanding radical theoretician, argued that the Russian Revolution was a revolution against the grain and a social earthquake against the fundamental tenets of Marxism.

    The revolution crashed all the gears of Historical and Dialectical Materialism. The ideal conditions of a burgeoning capitalist state and a rampart proletariat were simply not there. Russia was a backward society, with a rudimentary version of capitalism and an underdeveloped workers class.

    Yet it happened. The Russian Revolution occurred despite the unpropitious circumstances. It was eight days that changed the world. This was due to the sheer ferocious voluntarism and heroism of the Soviet leadership. They had conjured something out of nothing. In effect, it was also a revolution against Das Kapital, Karl Marx’ opus, as Gramsci’s subtle dig would suggest.

    It is arguable that the subsequent tragedy of the Russian people and the revolution itself stems from this fundamental contradiction. But that is neither here nor there. Sometimes, you need barbarity to drive out barbarism, as somebody was to quip. History itself is a horoscope of horror.

    It is useful in passing to say something about this rare gem of an Italian political theorist and outstanding patriot. A mortally afflicted hunchback, Gramsci wrote virtually all his works in the most crippling and inhuman of circumstances. Yet he was unmoved by his personal misfortunes. At a point, he constituted himself into a one man think tank against fascism in Italy. When the Italian authorities finally tired of his intellectual provocations, Mussolini sent him to jail with the war cry: “We must prevent this brain from functioning for twenty years!”

    Unfortunately for Benito Mussolini, you can only imprison the man and not the mind. It was in prison and from horrendous captivity that Gramsci did his most productive and outstanding work. These days when you hear of American tenured professors under the comfort of five-star hotels noisily quarrelling about whether Gramsci was a Marxist or not, you begin to feel sorry for the sheer attenuation of the human spirit.

    This general debility of the soul and attenuation of the human spirit is at its most compelling on the African continent. Here, the revolt against capital and capitalism is on the grand stage and it is unlike any other thing witnessed in the history of mankind. The BBC crew were at their best and most devastating in a recent panoramic survey of the diseased hulk of old Zaire. Nothing can match the modern tragedy of this potentially prosperous country with its infinite natural resources.

    Everything has been laid to waste in a series of wars without a formal front or frontier. The country itself had long regressed into a state of nature with the inhabitants reminding one of the feral denizens of a vast human zoo. For a moment, the camera zeroed in on the ruins of Gbadolite, Mobutu’s birthplace and home to his fabled marble palace. This scandalous eyesore must rank as the greatest indictment of the coup against capital in post-colonial Africa.

    The whole place was in ruins. The airstrip from which Mobutu used to import his barber and daily venison from Paris— that is when he was not gorging on locally grown giant maggots washed down with pink champagne— had been reclaimed by nature and now home to savage reptiles. The palace itself lay in utter ruins with its gold-encrusted Jacuzzis. What cannot be looted had been vandalised, and what cannot be looted and vandalised had been overtaken by desuetude. This is the most compelling evidence of insanity among Africa’s post-colonial leaders.

    In a 31 year career, Mobutu looted and stole his country blind. At a point, the vicious kleptocrat even had the temerity to lend his “personal funds” to the country. Congo is one vast crematorium of wasted capital. If Mobutu had used just a fraction of the capital violently expropriated from the Congolese people to grow education and build factories, the country could have taken off. In the end, Congolese capital returned to metropolitan capitalists who needed it most. It was Mobutu’s greatest coup against the Congo people and Africa.

    As the National Conference unfolds tomorrow, the dire view from the old Zaire must concentrate the minds of Nigerian patriots. The two African giants are often compared. Nigeria’s luck, unlike the Congo, is that it is powered along by a micro-pluralism of countervailing power centres which ensures a negative equilibrium at least. Succeeding military and civilian despots have done their damnable best to upset the delicate apple cart. But divine fate and Nigeria’s legendary luck have always seen them off.

    But Nigerians cannot be complacent about this fabled good luck. Until General Sani Abacha stole them blind even as he culled off their leading lights, many Nigerians believed that the kind of fiscal anarchy and privatised tyranny that characterised Mobutu’s Congo could not happen in Nigeria.

    But just short of five years, aided by modern technology and his contempt for conventional stealing, Abacha almost beat Mobutu in his own game. Yet when he died, there was no evidence that Abacha ever ploughed back a fraction of the money he looted from the treasury into any productive economic venture.

    Apart from his magnificent castle in Kano, Abacha did not leave any viable or visible economic monument. In a historic addendum, the United States only last week dismissed the former Nigerian despot as a vicious kleptocrat while impounding his stashed loot. African capital has returned to metropolitan capitalists with plenty of insults to the bargain.

    In the light of this unending kleptomania among African rulers which has returned the blighted continent to the Stone Age while the rest of the world marches on to new frontiers of civilisation, the original question must now be framed in a more fundamental manner. Is there something wrong about the genetic wiring of Africa’s post-colonial elite?

    In a curious paradox, it is Nigeria which provides the key to unlocking the problem. Whenever a fundamental economic crisis is framed as a political quarrel among squabbling elite, we may be sure that there is a red herring somewhere. Away from the hysterical cat-calls and strident abuses, this is a more productive way of framing the problem of the missing 20 billion naira, the Sanusi ouster and the culture of political and economic impunity on all sides.

    In her first tour of duty as Finance Minister, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, paid off all of Nigeria’s disputable debt in one fell swoop and swore to rid the nation of its international profile as a chronic debtor-nation. Many doubted the wisdom and even sanity of this economic strategy but decided to watch and pray. In a cruel and ironic twist of fate, the same debt profile has opened up again with alarming implications and under the watch of the same Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala.

    Judging by all available data, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, in her second tour and now as the coordinating Minister, is presiding over the worst spell and spree of kleptocracy in the history of the nation. All she could now do is to wring her hands and hint about oil as a curse—a theoretical no-brainer for sure. Meanwhile, the presidential airline boasts of at least ten planes in its fleet while the British Prime Minister goes about on commercial flights. In Abuja, it is said that they now sell one million naira per bottle champagne.

    In the case of Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, how can anybody justify or rationalise the bizarre feudal munificence by which under his watch the Central Bank of the nation became one huge financial almshouse dispensing largesse to anybody in sight? What is the modern theory of economic management behind this bastard feudalism, or is this a classic case of avant-garde political radicalism fronting for economic and social retrogression?

    In a general culture of lawlessness and impunity there is nothing to choose between impunity at the micro-level and impunity at the macro level. They are just two sides of the same bad coin. This is not the time for any partisan equivocation. Nigeria has been poorly served by its undeserving political elite. It will take a character-changing event to effect any rectification.

    But it is not a situation that can subsist for long. Once it was said that the Congo could not happen here. And then General Abacha came along. Even in a civilian dispensation under an ascendant faction of the political elite, the coup against capital continues. It is useful to recall that at a point Mobutu also indulged his cruel fancies in a sham National Conference. As a thousand mysterious militias and unknown gunmen continue to put Nigerians to sword at will, let the fate of the old Congo and the ruins of Gbadolite concentrate our mind for once.

  • Dem dey fight and dem dey chop

    (Baba Lekki solves a state riddle)

    On Friday morning as snooper nursed his wounds from internet felons who had hacked into his account and sent a message round the globe that yours sincerely was down on his luck in some Ukrainian hovel, Okon crept in wearing a massive scowl. He was brandishing a picture of Nigerian leaders backslapping and grinning from ear to ear at the recent centenary extravaganza.

    The centenary celebrations had elicited quite a fierce controversy from affronted citizens who dismissed the whole farce as a misbegotten misplacement of national priorities. A master of unforced errors, Jonathan had chalked up a couple of own goals on that one. Having contributed to the opening debate, yours sincerely refrained from joining the fray. But the crazy boy appeared inconsolable.

    “Oga I think dem say dis magomago people dey fight? Come see how dem dey laugh and dem dey yabi after dem done finish dem country. Which kind fight be dis?” the mad boy exploded.

    “Okon, go away. Hackers have finished me. They have stolen my password”, Snooper moaned in distress.

    “Oga, why you no get failword?” the mad boy demanded. As Snooper chased him away, it was a forlorn and dejected Okon who went in search of Baba Lekki for a solution to the state riddle. The old crook cleared his throat.

    “You see Okon, you are a fool. Na dat one dem dey call Sunny Ade and Obey fight” the old man grunted.

    “Baba wetin be dat? Abi dem Area Five leaves don scatter your head again?” Okon sneered.

    “You see, when you be small pikin and your yeye mama never pick race, he get dem two musicians, Obey and Sunny. Dem dey carry rumour say dem dey fight and we go dey buy dem record yafuyafu. Small time I dey wonder say dis dem Sunny Obey fight, how come one of dem no dey hospital and one of dem no kaput sef? I come follow dem yeye musicians to dem Empire Hotel for Idi Oro where dem dey eat and dem dey make merry. I come lose my mind.. I come order dem make dem dey fight kiakia or I go finish dem. Naim dem come pick race. So na Sunny Obey fight be dat. When crocodile dey chop dem dey cry”, the old man submitted’

    “Kai, kai na Amadiora go scatter dis yeye people!”, a deflated Okon yelped and collapsed into a heap.

  • Georgia on my map

    Georgia on my map

    (An evening with the Green Eagles)

    Atlanta!!! What a beautiful name , and a beautiful city to match! You must give it to the Americans, whatever other misgivings. They have a knack for coming up with cities of breathtaking beauty, with names infused with brilliant and magical symbolism. Atlanta, Memphis, Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Phoenix, Los Angeles, New Orleans—which presupposes an old Orleans, and many more. It takes some breathless confidence in one’s manifest destiny as God’s anointed nation to take these old world names and infuse them with new world possibilities.

    The Americans thought they were founding the world anew; a new nation with shinning possibilities which will serve as a beacon for others; a great new human citadel on the hills which would be impossible to ignore and unwise to trifle with. It did not occur to them that the foundation of this new world was laid on the brutal expropriation and summary annihilation of some older civilisations. The native Indians themselves had probably pillaged some earlier and older civilisations. This is a classic example of creative destruction which the world will learn to forgive and forget in order to move on.

    So, when the cultural hubris of founding a new world works for America, it works spectacularly well, creating beauty out of the ugliness of man’s inhumanity to man and glittering monuments out of the back-breaking labour of the formally and informally enslaved. In the western world, you do not need to be formally enslaved to be a slave, as the white underclass are finding out. All that is required is to be on the wrong side of the economic orrery, which is the case for ninety nine percent of the populace.

    When cultural hubris becomes political hubris, it leads to the apocalypse of Vietnam and the Dante’s inferno of contemporary Iraq. It did not occur to America that the Vietnamese are a proud, doughty and hardy race who would not brook being politically dictated to by a young brash country. They had been doing their own thing for almost a millennium before America came to be. The lessons were never learnt.

    It was noted by George Santayana, the fabled Spanish philosopher, that those who refuse to learn from history are condemned to repeat the past. When America was invading Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein, the old chicken rustler from Tikrit, they were told that it was not easy to change the mindset of a people formed over a thousand years overnight. Democracy cannot be externally imposed. It can only be internally induced through a slow transformation of mindset, attitude and institutional impedimenta. Trillions of dollar after, the result is the apocalyptic mess and roiling carnage of contemporary Iraq and the liquidation of American fiscal liquidity.

    Almost two thousand years earlier, the captured and enslaved Israeli tribe had captured the tragic dilemma for humanity and posterity in a moving elegy and on the same confluence of Tigris and Euphrates rivers:

    By the rivers of Babylon

    Where we sat down

    And then we wailed

    When we remember Zion

    For the wicked carried us away in captivity

    And required from us a song

    How can we sing King Alpha’s song in a strange land?

    But tonight, Wednesday, 5th of March, in the year of our lord, 2014, an arctic freeze had overtaken normally warm and cosy Atlanta. Everybody was dressed like a Siberian wayfarer, and this in early March. Incredible. A glum and icy reserve had taken over the normally jaunty populace. This was not the Atlanta one was used to. A denizen of its more familiar haunts and of the old and imperious state of Georgia itself, Snooper was returning after a ten year leave of absence. Ray Charles, the old crooner of the magical metropolis, would have stirred in his grave, bewildered by the frosty formality.

    The great and good thing about America is that it is a land of ceaseless self-invention. You leave a city for one year and upon your return, you are lost in the maze of new developments and glittering new suburbs. Within a decade, Atlanta had undergone an amazing transformation. Tonight, one was beginning to feel like good old Rip van Winkle who had come back from the dead. Could this magical emporium be the new Atlantis? And then panic began to give way to certainty and certitude as the mind locked into the central highway with the sign to Macon and Birmingham in Alabama.

    You now had a measure of the old geography. To the South East of Atlanta and about three hours journey by road or an hour by air lay the beautiful historic city of Savannah in all its Gothic gorgeousness. Like a beautiful treasure, Savannah is frozen in time, a classic example of a living city as one vast alluring museum. It was said that General William Tecumseh Sherman was so enthralled by the surreal charms of the city that he refrained from putting it to sword. He had offered it instead as an 1864 Christmas present to Abe Lincoln.

    It is not just the weather and urbana that are changing in America. Everything else appears to be changing as well. The Capone Capitalism by which America was able to impose its will and might on the rest of the world appears to have run its course. Some other Capone nations are appearing on the hazy horizons. Good old Babylon and the old Western nemesis of Afghanistan have upended the American apple cart. There is time for everything.

    Consequently and even more dangerously, democracy itself appears to be losing its shine and gloss. While China with its state capitalism, its audacious and cheerfully authoritarian system, routinely lifts more people out of poverty and the debt trap into a rapidly expanding middle class, the Obama reform has virtually collapsed under the weight of an institutional gridlock and democratic deadlock. Developing nations are not unlikely to notice the dangerous developments from America.

    The Chinese, like some of their fabled generals of literary lore, appear content with watching America slowly dissolve under the weight of its own historic contradictions without firing a single shot. The Russians are not so sanguine or strategically savvy. Under Tsar Vladmir Putin, it is unlikely that the west has heard the last from Russia. The old Russian bear is not dead after all. It has only recovered from its catatonic stupor. While America is wringing its hand about what to do in Ukraine, its response oscillating between studied equivocation and downright confusion, Putin is relentlessly raising the stakes. Russian hyper-nationalism is proving far more dangerous than communist radicalism.

    Lest we forget why we were actually in Atlanta, it was to watch the Green Eagles play their Mexican counterparts. Soccer is unarguably the single most unifying factor for Nigeria and Nigerians. As it ever so happens with the nation itself, most Nigerians who follow the Green Eagles are gluttons for punishment often enduring disastrous defeats or dismal self-destruction on the field of play. Four years earlier after watching the Green Eagles in Durban plunge to the very nadir of their fortunes in a remarkably inept display which saw to their ouster from the World Cup, yours sincerely had vowed never to have anything to do with the national team again.

    But hope springs eternally from the Nigerian heart. Besides, there is no killing the eagles. They have ratcheted up some fine and impressive performances under the able generalship of Stephen Keshi. They have emerged from the depths of despair and destruction to give some outstanding displays. For Snooper, what did it was the moment Mba’s winning goal crashed through the Ivorian defence on the team’s way to winning the last African championship. It was a marvelous outing. The eagles of yore were back.

    By a remarkable coincidence, Atlanta was also the scene of the Eagles greatest triumph till date when they won the soccer gold medal at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. Snooper had been watching the classic game against Brazil with his son in faraway in England. It was past midnight when Brazil suddenly went three goals up to Nigeria’s lone goal. With an angry scowl, the boy headed for bed claiming that he was tired of further punishment.

    In one of the most remarkable upsets and incredible come-back in footballing history, the eagles went on to beat Brazil and to outclass Argentina in the final . Eighteen years later, and at the same venue of the Eagles greatest triumph, one was hoping for another outstanding performance against another notable Latin American footballing nation. The atmosphere was electrifying.

    Strangely enough, the massive din from a million Mexican vuvuzela reminds one of the end of the Aztec empire when a handful of Spanish adventurers put the ancient civilisation to sword. It could have been part of the military strategy of the Aztec warriors, but many believed that the din could only have come from the offended Gods of the Aztec people. This evening, it is the Aztec hordes that seemed to have invaded America. It was as if Mexico itself has emptied into the massive Georgia dome in Atlanta and spilled over to adjoining areas. It was an endless column of men, women, the young and the old, all draped in green.

    The Green Eagles refused to be fazed by the overwhelming numerical superiority of the Mexican supporters. Even at the nadir of their fortunes, something could always be said for the superb confidence and militant self-belief of these boys. It is a self-belief that often tips into overconfidence and sheer irresponsibility. But they seemed to have reined this in for now.

    After some opening cautious probes from both sides, it was obvious that the match was evenly poised in terms of physique and flair. The Mexicans have had some outstanding successes with their junior teams, and some of these boys are now beginning to come through and into their own. Ranked nineteenth in the world soccer pecking order as against Nigeria’s forty seventh, the Mexican whizz kids could be forgiven for initially thinking that this was going to be a routine work out against inferior opponents.

    In the event, it was the Eagles that first took the battle to their opponents, but the Mexicans immediately responded. This culminated in a series of misses on both sides. Judging by the dramatic manner in which the vuvuzela went quiet, it was clear the Mexican crowd were not expecting the kind of robust response and daring incursions from an African team. But towards the end of the first half, the Mexican team increased pressure on the Eagles and the goalkeeper was forced to make a series of brilliant saves.

    For most of the second half, the match stalemated into a technical affair with some good chances fluffed by both teams. The Mexicans in particular did not appear to have much appetite for adventurous forays, preferring to catch the Eagles on the offensive rebound. At the end of 90 minutes, there was nothing to separate the two teams. Although the match ended in a goalless draw, it was by no means dreary and unexciting.

    Yes, Stephen Keshi seems to have the nucleus of a very good team. This was not the dismal eagles one watched in Durban, South Africa almost four years ago. Some of the new eagles, particularly Leon Balogun, held their own. But a lot of work still needs to be done. Legendary failings persist. The strikers still seem to lack the killer instincts of all predators. Rather than calm marksmanship in front of goals, there were too many blind and wild shootings.

    Mikel Obi had a good game, but he is too much of a defensive ball-holding midfielder to function as a creative playmaker. The Eagles still need that visionary libero and game-changer who can impose his will on the midfield even as he determines the tempo and pace of the match with perfectly weighted passes. Let the eagles’ officials watch this match again. The forward often had to drop deep to collect the ball while making their way forward. It points to the absence of the master midfielder. It is our prayer that Keshi finds this supremely gifted Nigerian before June.

    On and off the pitch, what cannot be taken away from Nigerians is a natural flair for the dramatic. You cannot beat Nigeria when it comes to what is known as chutzpah. The classic instance of chutzpah is the case of the young fellow who killed his parents but then went on to ask the court to be lenient with him on the grounds that he was an orphan. On Wednesday morning in Atlanta, Snooper made discreet inquiries about the Minister of Sports, Bolaji Abdullahi, an old pen-pusher on the back page of This Day. The Nigerian official chuckled and then grunted: “Sir, he has just been fired!!!.”

    Your mind immediately raced to WAWA, the colonial acronym of frustration about the impossible ways of Africans. WAWA means West Africa Wins Again. You cannot win Nigeria, as they will say in pidgin English. But this sudden political execution notwithstanding, Nigerian officialdom was at its most impressive and productive in Atlanta thanks to the likes of Demola Olajire, Ayodeji Tinubu, Chris Green, Musa Ahmadu the Secretary of NFF and Honorable Godfrey Gaiya, the Chairman of the House Committee on Sports.

    With his understated old world charms and civility, Aminu Maigari, the Chairman of NFF, stands a very good chance of leading the Nigerian Football Federation to greater glory. It has been a beautiful night in Atlanta. Georgia will be on the mind for a long time to come.

  • Local government and its discontents

    Local government and its discontents

    Chairman of the occasion, keynote speaker and honorable Commissioner for Local Government and Chieftaincy Affairs, Distinguished Chairmen of Local Government Councils and their vices, Secretaries, Council Managers, Supervisors, honourable councilors, Body of Permanent Secretaries present and of course members of the Gubernatorial Advisory Committee, it is with great pleasure and a sense of occasion that I welcome you all to this workshop for our local government personnel taking place in this iconic building.

    The Lagos City Hall tells its own story as a symbol of the struggle to deliver service to the people at the grassroots level. This hall is a tribute and monument to the power of the people to forge ahead, and to grab their own destiny in their hands. In the heydays of colonial municipalities, the Lagos City Council was one of the best run municipalities in the world, approximating to the western standards of efficiency and integrity. As a state, Lagos is easily and unarguably the revelation of the Fourth Republic.

    So, whether as a protectorate, colony or later state, Lagos has always taken the lead for the rest to follow when it comes to service delivery. This is probably due to the cosmopolitan nature of the state, the high level of political consciousness and the above average level of education of its citizenry. From Governor Babatunde Raji Fashola through his illustrious predecessor, Senator Bola Ahmed Tinubu and stretching all the way back to Alhaji Lateef Jakande and Brigadier Mobolaji Johnson, it can also be said that this state has been particularly blessed with a steady succession of visionary and outstanding leadership. Needless to add that the local council in various parts of the nation has also served as incubator and nursery for some of our most famous politicians.

    For this glorious legacy to be sustained, it is important that we take another look at the issue of local government and adequate service delivery to the people. As it has been famously observed, all politics is local. Local government may be the third tier of governance but it is the first realm of the people. The local government is the first line of assault whenever there is a breakdown of the sacred covenant between the governed and the governing. It is the first port of call for an enraged citizenry.

    In certain societies, city councilors are often deemed to be more important than parliamentarians. The election of the Mayor of London often generates more excitement and political tension than the national elections. To the average New Yorker, the mayor is more important than the state governor or even the president. But for Rudy Giuliani’s energetic and hands-on approach things could have turned out much worse in New York on September 11th, 2001.

    Let me quickly state that this is not a fault-finding workshop. It is a fact-finding mission meant to rub mind among those who have been in the field with a view to probing the problem from source and finding the way forward. The workshop itself is coming up against the backdrop of the proposed National Conference. That conference itself presupposes that something is structurally amiss with the country. The structure of local government in Nigeria is a crucial link in the chain of structural disorder that has hobbled Nigeria and stalled its march to authentic nationhood. Once again, this frontline state and home to the first real megalopolis in Africa has taken the lead and liberty to begin the dialogue ahead of the gathering of the nation.

    It has been argued by many that the crisis of local government and service delivery to the grassroots is itself merely a symptom of a more fundamental crisis: the structural crisis of the nation itself and the absence of genuine political and fiscal federalism. In the misbegotten unitarist logjam, the federal government even bypasses state governments to reach the local governments which are their sub-autonomous structures thus insinuating a subtle rivalry and unhealthy tension into what is supposed to be complementary structures of the state. This is an anti-federalist absurdity writ large by lack of organic vision and conceptual rigour about the true nature of federating units.

    In this same state, it has taken the daring and ingenuity of a Bola Tinubu to create the technical equivalent of local Government Councils in order to bring service faster and closer to the people. The ensuing battle with the federal authorities has already entered the folklore of a nation and its maladaptive institutions. Although everybody seems to have acquiesced with the status quo and the Lagos model is being copied in some other states, the judgment of the Supreme Court dismissing the nascent local councils as “inchoate” subsists.

    Yet all of this would not even have been necessary had everybody understood the fundamental tenets of federalism as a bottom -up process rather than a top-down state injunction. Rather than being chosen for them by government, people choose their own local governments in functioning federations. In the United States, once people agree to tax themselves and are willing to provide themselves with a specified list of deliverable services, they can legitimately be regarded as local governments. At a point, the number of such local governments in the United States stood at over forty thousands. By 1974, Britain with half of Nigeria’s population had over 14,000 of such councils.

    Perhaps the key to unlocking the crisis of local government and federalism in Nigeria lies in the issue of taxation. Once people truly pay for certain services, they are more willing to see them delivered and on time. But once it is not really being funded by them, they can afford to relax and be indifferent. Taxing heightens civic consciousness and awareness. It is a natural law of nature for people to take a dim and dark view of the imprudent management of the proceeds of their sweat and toil.

    The fear of popular reprisal and jungle justice breeds a sense of responsibility and decorum in officials. The present system of providing local governments with largesse from some bogus Federation Account without any inbuilt mechanism for accountability and transparency in the management of funds breeds corruption and incompetence. The quietude of the civic populace and of civil society in Nigeria can be directly linked to the fact and awareness that it is oil revenues that provide the feeding bottle for all. Nobody is outraged anymore when outlandish sums are said to have disappeared from the treasury.

    We can see the logic of hardy self-reliance play itself out in the old community structure and draw appropriate and strategic lessons for the present. When they established community grammar schools through arduous self-taxation, the old communities always saw to it that they set the rules and procedures through which the institutions operate and usually mount a round the clock surveillance to see that laid down rules and regulations were being adhered to. Any infringement was swiftly and expeditiously punished either physically or through a resort to metaphysical hell-raising.

    It worked. By 1904, the old Egba city-state had been able to solve the problem of official corruption and sanitation. This was because it combined the efficacy of old communal ties with the harsh formality of modern state structure. The later allowed it to impose and raise tax with the efficiency of a modern bureaucracy while the former allowed it to tap into the old primordial consciousness of the populace for punitive deterrent.

    Although there has always been a measure of corruption even in our traditional societies, the advent of oil and massive revenues accruing from this has led to the swift collapse of values and unprecedented corruption in Nigeria. The problem with oil production in Nigeria is that it is merely extractive, with not much labour invested and no value added whatsoever. Its revenues can then be seen as mere manna from heavens.

    The result is the complete pollution of the moral reservoir of the nation. Since oil revenues do not arise directly from taxation and indirectly from the sweat and tears of the citizenry, it can be frittered away at will. Since the retention of the proceeds are not tied to any test of performance or ability to internally generate revenues at local, state or even federal levels, it leads to the most egregious forms of embezzlement and fiscal recklessness.

    This fiscal recklessness and monumental corruption have their multiplier effects which then become mutually reinforcing. Since they feel that nobody has actually paid for them, urban denizens do not feel any pang of conscience when they steal the street lamps meant to illuminate their movements when it is dark. Neither do they bat an eyelid when they cut off railings or dig up concrete slabs meant to safeguard their very lives in traffic chaos. Since oil is available, they evade taxes and rates as conscientious objectors. And since the revenues they misappropriate are not traceable to the labour or direct exertions of the people, government officials at all levels can get away with murder. The result is the anarchy and social anomie that stare us in the face.

    Just as Inca gold brought ruinous inflation and eventual destruction to old metropolitan Spain, oil has become the modern curse of Nigeria. It has brought about the complete negation of political and fiscal federalism. It will be too much of a shock therapy to ask for the imposition of a moratorium on oil extraction in Nigeria. The patient may die from the radical surgery. But unless we find a way back to the fundament of effective taxation compelling a more effective service delivery, we will continue to joggle in the jungle of mismanagement and ineffective service delivery. I thank you all.

    Opening remarks at the workshop on reforming Local Government for effective service delivery on Tuesday, 25th February.