The Nation Newspaper

Category: Banji Akintoye

  • Letter to Gen. Buhari

    First of all, I congratulate you warmly for winning the nomination of your party for the presidency of Nigeria.

    Though you and I are different in ethnicity and religion, we have many important things in common. I am about two years older than you – which means that if you and I had been Yoruba boys  born in the same Yoruba town or village, we would have belonged to the same age-grade association ( with us Yoruba, age-grade loyalty is traditionally a very important factor of life).  Moreover, you and I were young adults in an era, the 1950s, when our up-and coming country of Nigeria was a source of great pride to its citizens, and an emerging titan eagerly awaited by most informed people all over the world. The three regions of our federation (East, North and West) were engaged in an ambitious rivalry for progress and for improvements in the quality of life of our people. They were able to do that and achieve considerable successes because our constitutional structure gave them much leeway to manage their own affairs within the common Nigerian family. We arrived at independence in 1960 believing that our country was set on the path to becoming the Blackman’s world power of modern times.

    Unhappily, now that you and I have arrived at our grand age of near 80, there is nothing left of our country’s ambitions and pride – indeed, there is hardly anything left of our country itself. Relentlessly crooked up, violated, robbed and depleted since 1960, our Nigeria seems now to be stumbling towards its demise.

    As you prepare for your election, I decided to write you this open letter concerning our country, because I know you will understand the pain and expectations behind my words. The purpose of most of Nigeria’s rulers since 1960 has been to weaken and even destroy regional and local initiatives in order to gather all power, control and influence together at the federal centre. Their success in doing that has enabled them to remove the management of development far away from our people, and to institute at the federal centre a viciously corrupt,wasteful and incompetent monstrosity.  Reduced to the status of beggar clients of the federal robber barons, the state governments, as well as the local governments, collapsed and fell in line as submissive incompetents and mini-robbers.

    In the process, real and productive enterprise quickly declined among our people, as the best and most ambitious rushed to join the ranks of the sharers of fraudulently acquired wealth from the public coffers. Our schools and universities, our public service, our police force, our military, our judiciary, all our governmental agencies (electoral commission, secret service, central bank, ports service, immigration service, public examination bodies, etc) – all collapsed under the weight of crooked control, massive corruption and generalized disloyalty. Poverty descended mightily into our country and became the lot of the overwhelming and increasing majority of our people. Our government itself admits that, today, about 70% of our citizens live in “absolute poverty” and that that percentage keeps increasing. With the growing poverty have escalated horrific crimes, a culture of dishonesty, a rush of our youths to Salafist fundamentalist terrorism, and mass flights of the educated to other lands – all of which are compounding the poverty.

    From your well-known record as a leader of our country, I know that you are not only aware of these things, but that, in common with many members of our generation, you are seriously pained by them. I confess that I was very angry with you during your brief stint as military ruler, 1983-5. First, you seemed to me to be power-drunk at the time – because you made no distinction between the corrupt who had been stealing and sharing public money under Shagari and those who were known to have been resisting the robbery. I belonged to the frontline of senators who were well known to have, on the floor of the Senate,  resisted the mass corruption, and yet your military government detained me (and many like me), and I languished for four months in prison without any accusation – even without being asked any question by any official.

    And then, you and Idiagbon expended most of your obviously shining  capabilities in pursuing nebulous and amateurish programmes like WAI (War Against Indiscipline), when what our country really needed was (after you had fiercely shot down corruption as you did)  to massively divert our enormous oil revenues into investments in the lives of our people – through programmes for expansion and diversification of education, modern job skills development, entrepreneurial  development, small business development, promotion of modern farming, policies for improving the quality and reputation of our labour force and thereby attracting investments and businesses into our country, policies for promotion of exports, etc. Put a people to work and persistently multiply the economic opportunities available to them, and the attraction to prosperity through competitive enterprise will gradually suppress indiscipline in their land. Fanciful programmes like WAI can have no lasting benefit or future – as I hope you must know by now. That is why the man who ousted you, Babangida, was able quite easily to wipe out all the patriotic gains of your regime.

    Furthermore, I though t it was a pity that you did not appear to recognize that the over-centralization that was being given to our federation was the foundation of our ills as a country. You were wrong in thinking that punishing the corrupt leaders would destroy corruption abidingly. What is needed is to change the system into which corruption has been built. In our country’s case, we needed (and we need) to reduce the magnitude of our federal government and empower our lower levels of government, nearer the people, to bear most of the burden of development. Then we need to give recognition and respect to our various nationalities in building the system – which should mean that our larger nations would each constitute a state, and contiguous groups of our smaller nationalities would be assisted to form states, just as the Indians sensibly and profitably did in the 1960s.

    By refusing g to go that route, Nigeria has abysmally depressed its nationalities. For instance, my Yoruba nation came into Nigeria in 1914 as easily the fastest modernizing nationality in Black Africa; and we entered into independence with Nigeria in 1960 as the development front-liner and pace-setter in Africa. Today, we are a battered, poor, and disoriented nation, and most of our achievements have been wrecked, thanks to our being part of a Nigeria that destroys its peoples. Every other Nigerian nationality has similar stories to tell. My brother, I am, by nature and by upbringing, averse to merely lamenting an evil development; I act to change it.  My potential urge, even as I write this, is to exert myself with others like me towards pulling my Yoruba nation out of Nigeria if Nigeria will not change course – and that is something that we Yoruba are perfectly capable of achieving if we start upon it. And the same is true of some other persons and nations.

    In short, let’s not ignore or minimize the danger of Nigeria’s dissolution. I know you have what it takes to save Nigeria. I wish you luck in your election – and I wish Nigeria luck.

  • The trouble with Nigeria

    Leaders of the Western world never cease urging the countries of Black Africa to embrace “democracy”. For instance, when President Obama, a man of African descent, stood on the soil of Africa in Accra, Ghana, he took the opportunity to speak the message of democratic governance to all of Africa – and in a strong and family language that no white leader of the Western World can ever do.

    Most informed members of the Black African elite understand the goodwill behind the message. The modern history of our world has demonstrated very definitively that human freedom, reliably democratic political life, and strong institutions that have integrity, are the only really sure way to bring order, success and prosperity into the lives of countries and peoples. As Obama put it in Accra, what Africa needs is not strong men but strong institutions. “We must recognize the fundamental truth that…development depends on good governance”.

    Unfortunately, there has persisted in the West’s message of democracy a very serious flaw. Even many of the best voices from the western world seem often to say that democracy comprises not more (or perhaps not much more) than elections and elected governments. Often, elections are treated as proof of democracy. But, in many cases in Sub-Saharan Africa, elections are designed merely to address the concerns of the international community. And what that commonly results in is that, while pundits in the western world may go on applauding a country for holding elections, the country’s rulers may actually go on actively preserving and practicing seriously undemocratic governance – including bluntly refusing (in a country of many different peoples) to yield to the desire of the component peoples for some measure of local autonomy that would enable them to manage some of their unique affairs, systemized rigging of elections,concentration of all power and resource control in a central government.

    No other African country practices this split-personality governance more than Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country and home of one-fourth of all Africans. In 1999, the series of Nigeria’s military dictatorships which started in 1966 came to an end, and since then Nigeria has been ruled by elected governments. Even so, successive elected governments have upheld in this unfortunate country, a determinedly undemocratic and crooked system of governance, controlled by a political party which can only be described as fascist. Founded in 1998-9, the PDP declared that its mission was to rule Nigeria forever. In regions of Nigeria where the people have human-rights, religious tolerance, and democratic, traditions (especially the homeland of the 50 million Yoruba people of the Nigerian South-west), PDP chieftains declared that the people must be “conquered”. And the process of conquest has continued relentlessly since then.

    Especially over the Yoruba, who are regarded as unbreakably stubborn in defence of their traditional values, the process of conquest by the PDP has been unbelievably brutal. The PDP-controlled Federal Government makes no secret of its belief in its right to rig federal and state elections, and to impose its cronies over state and local governments throughout Nigeria. In the 1999 elections, the Yoruba rejected the PDP massively and gave the control of their six states to another party. In response, when elections came in 2003 and 2007, the PDP Federal Government went wild, declared that the elections were a “do-or die battle”, and massively cooked up the outcomes. The rigging of the 2007 elections at federal and state levels was so blatant that international observers who saw it published a report which stated that the elections, “in the view of Nigerians and the many international observers alike, were the most poorly organized and massively rigged in the country’s history. In a bitterly contentious environment, outgoing President Obasanjo and his Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) acted with unbridled desperation to ensure sweeping, winner-take-all victories, not only in the presidency and federal legislature but also in state governorships and assemblies. Characterized as a “do-or-die” battle by Obasanjo, the campaigns and elections also witnessed extensive violence, including over 200 people killed”.

    The brazenly falsified results gave the PDP presidential candidate 70% of the votes – a victory “bitterly disputed by many Nigerians, including broad-based, religious and civil society groups”. “It has pushed the country further towards a one- party state and diminished citizen confidence in electoral institutions and processes…undermined Nigeria’s capacity to manage its internal conflicts…badly damaged the country’s international image…thus diminishing (Nigeria’s) credibility to serve as leading force for peace and democracy throughout West Africa’. The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), “vigorously manipulated by the presidency, virtually abdicated its responsibility as impartial umpire. Inefficient and non-transparent in its operations, it became an accessory to active rigging. Similarly, the massively deployed police and other security services helped curb violence but largely turned blind eyes to, and in some cases helped in, the brazen falsification of results”.

    That is Nigeria’s brand of democracy – as concocted by the PDP. Behind it at its foundation was a phalanx of retired military officers (all billionaires from stolen public money), and a major part of the northern Nigerian Islamic leadership who are bent on using the power of the Federal Government to impose a jihadist brand of Islam, as well as the dominance of their essentially small Muslim nationality, on all of Nigeria. PDP’s mode of recruiting members in all parts of Nigeria has, from the beginning, been to enrich members of the elite in all regions with public money, and to assure them of electoral victories through election rigging.

    It therefore does not matter what region, or what nationality, a PDP president comes from; he will rule as a PDP corruption manager, and as a staunch defender of the excessive powers of the so-called Federal Government over all of Nigeria and over all of Nigeria’s resources. He will revel in his power to treat the state governments as clients of the Federal Government, to brutalize any nationality that he chooses to despise, and to unduly and unfairly empower and enrich his own nationality among the nationalities of Nigeria. The current president, Goodluck Jonathan, proves all this mess most profoundly. Even though he comes from the South-south region whose citizens have always led the opposition to federal excesses, he refuses to touch any effort to curb those excesses, but revels in them. Though he no longer enjoys the support of most of the founders of the PDP, he nevertheless keeps the PDP corruption heritage going strongly. For him, the Yoruba nation has been the nation to despise and marginalize.

    The system of public corruption controlled by the PDP is impossible for any Nigerian opposition to do anything about. It has destroyed the moral life of Nigerians, and turned Nigeria into a country in which even the best and brightest citizens must turn away from real enterprises and wait on crumbs from public corruption. It has destroyed any trace of professionalism and integrity in all public agencies – the electoral commission, the police, the secret services, even the armed forces, and the courts.

    There is no question that the PDP will rig the presidential and other elections due in 2015. The big question is how different Nigerian peoples will respond this time.

  • How Nigeria destroys

    How Nigeria destroys

    The great danger of being part of Nigeria today is that Nigeria tends massively to corrupt everything and everybody. There is hardly anything to look up to in Nigeria. In most directions that one may look, the beckoning is perpetually and relentlessly towards the low, the ignoble and the graceless. Most of the privileged and influential seek nothing but their own. In the reckoning of the typical powerful and influential Nigerian, the masses of ordinary Nigerians are, at best, cannon fodder for the reaching of his warped goals – and at worst, just despicable beings deserving to be ignored in their poverty, their ignorance and their hopelessness. The famous writer, Wole Soyinka, once wrote a book with the title The Man Died. Man with the higher qualities and nobler passions of man has almost totally died out in Nigeria.

    Recently, in some other place, I pointed out one relieving feature in this generally depressing Nigerian landscape – namely, the strong spirit of religious tolerance and accommodation among Yoruba Muslims and Christians in a Nigeria in which most other Muslim peoples have turned the great religion of Islam into the reason for the massacres of their fellow men, the destruction of whole settlements, and the disruption of a whole country. But, unfortunately, in the realm of partisan politics, no such relieving feature exists anywhere in Nigeria – not even among the Yoruba. Everywhere in Nigeria, party politics has been bestialized into a horrible and unrestrained civil war in which prominent politicians set up whole propaganda outfits to lie perpetually and to cruelly besmirch opponents – and hire young men to attack, harass and murder political opponents. And the goal of all the beastly lying and the satanic plots to murder is never to gain political positions for the purpose of serving the interests of country and people; it is to enhance the politician’s access to the country’s money and other resources. Hordes of young people are easily available for recruitment because they are unemployed, poor, and desperate to earn some income – even if it is income from the hand of Satan himself.

    All things considered, I believe that most informed observers would agree that one of the saddest aspects of this political debauchery in Nigeria is that it has become strongly entrenched among the Yoruba people, in the Yoruba South-west, too. This is one of the worst among the terrible legacies that Nigeria has bequeathed to any Nigerian nation. It should never have found acceptance and root in Yoruba soil. The Yoruba are the inheritors of nearly 1000 years of a supremely orderly political system and governance which respected the sovereignty of the people, emphasized respect of the rulers for the ruled, established powerful instruments for the moderation of the conduct of rulers and influential notables, and made government a reliable servant of the people. In modern times, when the European system of elected governments came to Nigeria in the 1950s, the predominantly Yoruba Western Region easily led Nigeria in orderly democratic politics, free and fair elections, and government that powerfully advanced the well-being of citizens. But today, the Yoruba seem to be very eagerly throwing away all their own wonderful political heritage and avidly grabbing Nigeria’s horrible political heritage.

    Sadly, in today’s Yoruba South-west, persons elected or appointed into state governments come into office breathing fire and brimstone against political opponents, thereby destroying orderly cooperation between the constitutional arms of government, and generally giving the people whom they rule the terrible image of an unruly and barbarous people. Yoruba politicians serving in the federal government think that their duty is to launch attacks on Yoruba state governments controlled by other parties, and to use federal power and federal agencies to humiliate and disrupt such state governments. Most leading Yoruba politicians are armed with militias of cronies who are employed in such despicable tasks as mindlessly lying against their boss’s opponents, carrying out assassinations, disrupting the activities and meetings of opponents, and killing at random in order to instill fear into opponents.

    In the background to all these is the fact that party membership has been robbed of all meaning. The politician who is powerfully seeking his party’s nomination for an election today, if he happens to lose the nomination, has no qualms whatever about becoming a contestant for the nomination of another party by tonight. Even a politician who has been loyally elected into government on the platform of a party, has no pangs of conscience at all about deserting his party for another party – he does not think of himself as having any duty to the persons who laboured to get him elected. In the context of all this horse trading and betrayal, the traditional sensibilities of Yoruba people are being massively distorted, and Yoruba traditional commitment to good governance is being ruthlessly destroyed.

    Thus, for the most part, governors, elected representatives, and political leaders among Yoruba people today are not leaders and rulers of their people in any meaningful sense; they are  brigands and desperadoes seeking nothing other than the chance to steal public money and to build up huge wealth thereby –  so as to be able to squirrel money out of Nigeria for hiding in secret bank accounts abroad, for buying expensive real-estate properties in other lands, for taking girlfriends on expensive trips, and even buying expensive houses for girlfriends, abroad.

    These acts of brigandage contribute greatly to poverty among their people. Of course, the accumulation of all power and resources in the hands of the federal government, and the general mess being forever compounded by the federal government, are the taproot of poverty in Nigeria. But state and local politicians, by their profligate behavior and betrayal of their people, add enormously to the poverty in two ways. In the first place, their stealing of public money adds much to the failure of state and local progammes of development. They leave very little chance of success for plans to improve the schools, to improve state and local roads and water supply, to assist businesses and increase job opportunities for the people, etc.

    In the second place, the wild, noisy and unruly politics tends to drive or keep good businesses and employment opportunities away. There are great amounts of investment capital seeking to come from the richest countries to virgin countries worldwide, but no businessman or investor would ever want to bring his investment or business to a place where political life is unstable and frequently agitated. For some of the states of Nigeria, including some states of the South-west, promises by the governors or aspiring governors to attract businesses and improve employment opportunities are mere lies. Their disorderly politics makes any fulfilment of such promises impossible. Stable and orderly politics is the first requirement of economic development in any country or state.

    All that I have said here about the Yoruba South-west are true of the rest of Nigeria. Indeed, some parts of Nigeria are much worse than the South-west. The crucial point about the Yoruba of the South-west is that they started off in modern times with a great and enviable political heritage and that, rather than build on that heritage, they have been junking it in recent times.

  • What election rigging may soon do to Nigeria

    What election rigging may soon do to Nigeria

    As a peasant farmer’s son, I knew that there were certain climbing parasitic weeds that we boys had to prevent at all costs from showing up in our father’s cocoa farm. Make the mistake of allowing them to grow there and they will climb and kill the cocoa trees.

    To the processes and health of democratic politics and society, election rigging is a killer parasite. It is the most vicious among the demons that have been gradually killing Nigeria since independence. Those of our influential politicians and top civil servants who strategized in the dark to rig our newly independent country’s first elections – the 1964 federal elections – may not have known the ultimate outcome of what they were starting. But we Nigerians of subsequent times now know that they planted the parasite that will, as things are now going, almost certainly kill Nigeria.

    Once election rigging establishes a presence in an avowedly democratic society, it is virtually impossible to remove – and the reason for that is that it titivates and romances one of the darkest and most powerful instincts of the human psyche – the urge to power, influence and glory. If others before you in positions of power in your country have rigged elections for themselves and their friends and gotten away with it, why would you not do it for yourself and your friends too? The outcome can only be that the persons in power will become more and more skilful in doing it. And the ultimate end will only be some kind of collapse of the society.

    Realistically, therefore, it seems very unlikely at this point that we can sustain Nigeria for much longer than now. It is not a question of whether or not we love Nigeria. Of course, very many of us love Nigeria and would wish that it would live on and become a great and powerful country in the world. I can never tire of saying this – that, as a young Nigerian in the 1950s and early 1960s, I grew up and matured  in a time when being a Nigerian was a huge pride in the world, and I cannot forget that or let it go away easily. But that is a totally different matter from the realities that I perceive all around me today. I love my friends and wish they would never die, but I know that, being the naturally fickle humans that we all are, we will all die – each in his or her own time. I love Nigeria, but I fear that a country that has become as sick as Nigeria has now become, and without any measurable effort at remedy too, will die and fizzle out, probably soon. It is very painful to me to write this last sentence, but at least some of us must boldly and clearly leave record of our fears and warnings about what is being done to our country today. No human country can possibly survive the periodic assault by the power of election rigging and its accompanying disruptions, especially when these are also allied to other deadly monsters like massive public corruption, massive poverty and hopelessness, massive inter-people animosities, massive religious intolerance and aggressiveness, and massive leadership and managerial incompetence.

    Among most Nigerians at home and abroad, and among most informed observers in most parts of the world, Nigeria’s coming elections of 2015 are arousing serious fears and questions. The vibrations emanating from Nigeria about the elections speak mostly of competing determinations to settle issues by crookedness and violence; they also very pointedly portend conflict and ruin. All over the country, people are no longer speaking of the well-known election rigging methods of the past, but of mind-bogglingly high technology rigging devices and methods of today. Fears that the federal government and its agencies (INEC, the Nigeria Police, the SSS, and even parts of the military) are bracing to carry out the most horrendous election rigging in Nigeria’s history are frightening masses of people and making others shake their heads in wonder. In Nigeria’s north-eastern region, one of the world’s most violent Islamic fundamentalist terror groups is expanding its massacres, kidnappings and destruction, as well as its area of control, and preparing to extend its devastations to the rest of Nigeria. Significant groups of leading citizens in the North-west and the South-south are escalating their already troubling sabre rattling. Openly and loudly, secretly and quietly, Nigerians in their millions are saying that 2015 is likely going to be the year of Nigeria’s implosion that many in the world – including well-informed agencies of the United States government – have been predicting or warning about for years.

    In fact, no serious-minded person now expects that the 2015 Nigerian presidential elections are sure to end peacefully in victory for any side. The talk of rigging is so totally universal and so trenchant among Nigerians. And the reasons for that are obvious and understandable. In over 50 years of the existence of Nigeria as an independent country, Nigeria has not succeeded – or even sincerely tried – to nurture federal agencies and public servants that can be relied upon to do their duties as impartial umpires in the political process. Politicians controlling the federal government at any time want the top police, secret service, electoral officials, and electoral tribunal judges, to see themselves, and to operate, as partisans of the ruling political party, and the officials, for the most part, do just that. They are therefore widely and profoundly distrusted by all other parties and groups. Naturally, to have a chance to compete reasonably at all, these other parties dig in and strive to influence and buy the officials of the federal agencies – which they sometimes succeed in doing.

    Therefore, whichever side is declared winner by the widely suspected electoral officials, or adjudged winner by the electoral tribunals, the other sides will very loudly and insistently claim that rigging has been done. And then, there is likely to follow the violence that some significant groups have been preparing for, and the rolling out of the sophisticated weapons that various groups have built up. And what may follow after that is impossible to tell – other than that countless Nigerians may lose their lives, that more may be displaced from their homes, and that the widening chaos may overflow and drown much of Africa.

    And yet – and yet – no notable Nigerian group is urging that the persons who rule and lead Nigeria should stop and look into this whole situation. No notable group is seriously suggesting that concerted efforts be made to halt the looming disaster. All that the rulers and influential politicians are talking about, all they are bent on securing, is “victory” – that is, victory for their own particular groups and desires. Simultaneously with the scenes of President Goodluck Jonathan’s victorious and jubilant declaration of his candidacy for the 2015 presidential election in Abuja last week, there appeared on television worldwide the horrifying sight of tens of Nigerian students who were blown to pieces at about the same time by a suicide bomber in a college in the Nigerian Northeast.  To the sane world, Nigeria has become something unknown, unknowable, and baffling.

  • The Jonathan heritage

    When the question arose in 2010 about a successor to President Umaru Yar’Adua who had fallen in the course of national service, I was one of many who automatically and instinctively supported the then Vice-President Goodluck Jonathan. As far as I and the group I belonged to were concerned, the constitutional position was clear and unassailable on the subject.

    But, apart from the constitutional propriety, we had other more serious reasons to support Jonathan. In our view, the fact that Jonathan came from a minority southern nationality was a God-given asset in the prevailing situation of Nigeria. And his minority nationality was not just any minority nationality; it was the minority nationality which had since independence suffered the most egregiously from the Federal Government’s insensitive and roguish attitudes to the oil wealth in the Niger Delta, and which had stood in the forefront of resistance to the Federal Government’s brigandage. As a university student in the early 1960s, I had been personally acquainted with Isaac Adaka Boro; and Ken Saro Wiwa and I had trodden the academic corridors of University College Ibadan and University of Ibadan at roughly the same time and shared a little together in some activities of the students’ community.  Among us therefore, there was strong generational and other kinds of loyalty for these Delta heroes, as well as for their kinsmen who had died fighting by their side, and for the millions of their people who had been, and were still being, brutally pauperized by the side-effects of the oil industry assisted by the inhuman neglect by the rulers of Nigeria.

    Even more importantly, and above all else, a Jonathan presidency obviously held out, in our assessment, the strong probability that the Nigerian federation would at last be properly restructured and that Nigeria would be saved. The complex mess in which Nigeria had landed itself by 2010 had, without any doubt, been caused by those who had controlled Nigeria since independence and who had gradually destroyed the federal make-up of Nigeria and replaced it with an all-controlling federal establishment. To have a minority man from the Delta as president for some years would, we hoped, at least begin to resuscitate the federal structure of Nigeria – and thereby give Nigeria a new chance to revive, survive and go on to thrive.

    It has not happened. Apparently, no matter who is president, it cannot be done. Another southern president, Obasanjo, could not do it too. President Jonathan says he wants to seek one more term, and the constitution seems to make that available to him. During the recent National Conference, some leaders at the conference confronted me with the question whether, on the basis of the Nigerian Constitution, President Jonathan could legitimately run again, and my answer was yes. My answer is still yes.

    But both that question and my answer are beside the real point. The real point is whether President Jonathan should be running around about re-election now – all things considered.

    If Nigeria was only shaking by 2010, it is actively ripping apart today. Rather than getting ready for the 2015 elections, significant sections of Nigeria are amassing weapons and getting ready for a civil war. Many even openly avow civil war intentions, and threaten to kill, maim and destroy if what they want is denied them. And from what is now generally known, Nigeria does not command the will or the means for stopping any Nigerian group that is seriously bent on violence and destruction. We all know that – there is no room left for self-deception any more.

    In the three states of the North-east – Borno, Adamawa and Yobe, representing about one-sixth of Nigeria – Boko Haram is now no longer a mere insurrectionist rebel force; it has become, for most practical purposes, the holder of an alternative country – according to Boko Haram’s leaders, a Caliphate separate from Nigeria. Observers on the spot report that most of the important bridges linking these three states with the rest of Nigeria have been destroyed and that Boko Haram’s flags now fly over almost all the towns and villages. I am still inclined to refrain from making any derogatory statement about the Nigerian armed forces, but most observers have now learnt to watch the performances of the armed forces rather than listen to their words in this struggle with Boko Haram. Questions about who started, who is supporting, or who is using, Boko Haram have become essentially academic. Whatever source Boko Haram is getting its support from must be substantial and solid, and Nigeria does not seem to command the capability to counter that effectively.

    Most serious of all, and over-arching all else, is the fact that economic forces are arising that are likely to begin to undermine Nigeria’s already fragile political strength. The main pillar of the Nigerian economy, oil, has run into trouble. Until this past June, the world price of oil still stood as high as $115 per barrel. It has now fallen to under $80 and continues to fall – with the probability that it may fall below $70 soon.

    For Nigeria, some factors make these falls particularly troubling. Even if the falls come to be temporary worldwide, Nigeria may have longer lasting problems. The United States, the largest buyer of Nigeria’s oil, has almost suddenly increased its own domestic oil production in the course of the past year or so, resulting in predictions that America will begin to cut down on oil imports soon – and even soon become a net exporter of oil. Another major buyer of Nigeria’s oil, China, is now experiencing a deceleration in its economic growth, resulting in declines in its oil imports. Moreover, China has been turning more and more to Russia for its purchases of oil. And to make the situation worse, Nigeria is widely reported to be exporting less and less oil – because of greatly increased stealing of oil in the Niger Delta oil fields – through the practice known as “bunkering”. Nigeria has thus entered into a big prospect of unpredictability in its oil incomes.

    And now, the time may have come for Nigeria to suffer for the folly of depending on oil predominantly and doing almost nothing about developing other resources.  The quickest way to get a feel of Nigeria’s economic troubles is in the states of the Nigeria federation. Many months ago, a Nigerian Senator alarmed the country about the terrible financial conditions of the states. According to him, many states were becoming unable to pay the salaries of state employees, and many states were borrowing money to keep their services going at all. Soon after, the governors themselves, in the Governors Forum, confirmed these things. From all reports, the situation is getting out of hand right now, as state officials are having to return to their states from Abuja with less and less money than their states are entitled to.

    What Nigeria needs from President Jonathan is to give Nigeria a clear picture of all these troubles. In these circumstances, his seeking re-election is a distraction. We almost certainly have reached the point at which we Nigerians must determine the future of Nigeria. Rather do it peacefully than let us stumble on into chaos and massive conflicts.

     

  • Cry, raped country! – 2

    Nigeria is revving itself up for something big and earth-shaking – something that does not look good at all. We Nigerians can change it; but we will not. From all directions, the holders of irreconcilably extreme positions are beating the war drums.

    A former Head of State, General Buhari, arguably – and in fairness – one of the best of Nigeria’s former Heads of State,and a well-known Muslim leader in his own right, signs up to seek his party’s nomination for the 2015 presidential election. Surprisingly, even from his own home base, mighty guns are booming to shoot him down. From there, significant members of the ethnic and religious elite violently reject him, and call on the powers of heaven to push him off from running for the presidency. The loudest of their feared ulama, the renowned Ahmad Gumi, favours us Nigerians with an exposition of the philosophy behind their rejection of Buhari. Gumi says that a major part of their reason is that, though corruption is a bad thing, Buhari’s ousting of the Shagari presidency for its corruption, and Buhari’s war on corruption thereafter, offends God and cannot be forgiven by God!

    “Don’t be surprised” Gunmi tells Buhari. “You may need to understand that Islam being a pragmatic religion allows the use of Zakkat and public wealth as an instrument to pacify and lure influential people for the sake of righteousness, peace and stability. In modern governance today it translates into the security vote.Thus men are also controlled by money. So if your policy of governance is obsessibly centered on sealing tight the use of money you will have great problem with men”.

    In short, God opposes Buhari’s candidacy because Buhari is prone to seeing corruption as an evil that must be eliminated, instead of seeing it as an evil that can be used to “lure” men into the ruler’s religion and into submission to a designed order of control. The military governments, all led by Northern Muslims, that created Nigeria’s present institution of “security vote”, he says,  did so in order to give Nigeria’s rulers large amounts of money to use to convert and subdue Nigerians – without having to fear any auditing. Since Buhari is very likely to “seal tight” the use of money for corruption, Buhari is very likely to “have great problem with men”.

    Thus, the opposition to Buhari’s candidacy among the inner caucus of the Arewa North elite is too ideologically rooted and too solid to be willed away – in fact, too solid to be dispelled by Buhari’s victory in an election. At the heart of what they obviously want is a full return to unlimited Northern control – to a president like Shagari or Babangida, in the hands of whom corruption will be used powerfully to subvert and emasculate the elite of all parts of Nigeria, while the government goes on diverting resources unfairly to the North, using the powers of the federal government to subdue the rest of Nigeria to Fulani control, to pursue an agenda of “full Islamization” of Nigeria, to further weaken the principle of federalism, and to further reinforce  federal control over every aspect of our lives and our country’s resources.

    They are in effect serving notice that if Buhari wins, they will give him “great problem” – and Nigeria knows what that can mean from past experiences. Those who have been threatening war and mayhem as means to the solution of Nigeria’s problems, and who have been serving notice that they will “kill, maim, and destroy”, must be counted upon as meaning what they are saying.Some of them admit, at least indirectly, that Boko Haram is an instrument of theirs; others say that, in addition, a Mujaheeden militia is ready to go into action. These are no ordinary times; leaders who count only on success through politics-as-usual in the coming situation are preparing a feast of suffering and pain for their own people.

    The same Northern inner caucus that absolutely rejects Buhari also rejects Jonathan absolutely. In fact, Jonathan is, for the purpose of the 2015 presidential election, their Great Satan. The only kind of presidential candidate that will be acceptable to them is a Hausa-Fulani Muslim candidate selected on the platform of their old PDP before Jonathan – rather than one selected on the platform of the APC. In bits and pieces, information is coming out in the open media about their preparations for the moment when Jonathan secures the nomination of his party for another term – preparations including massive legal challenges of Jonathan’s candidacy in the courts, massive riots and attacks on southerners resident in the North, Boko Haram and Mujaheeden strikes across Nigeria, and even an attempt at a military take-over.

    Quite naturally, these extreme demands are forcing opposing extreme responses to evolve. Stories of an arms build-up in the South-south have surfaced repeatedly in the media for over three years. Many prominent citizens of the South-south have warned seriously against any attack on the Jonathan presidency, or insisted that, for 2015, it is either Jonathan or ‘No Nigeria’ – and warned Jonathan not to think of giving up or caving in. And hardly any informed or observant Nigerian doubts today that the South-south peoples, plus perhaps the Igbo who have been the principal beneficiaries of the Jonathan presidency, are ready to fight it out this time.

    Some of Jonathan’s men have tried feebly to widen his support in the South, and to nurture an all-Southern solidarity. But he has never invested any serious loyalty into the effort. For the most part, about the only peoples he wants in critical positions in his government – especially positions relating to the management of Nigeria’s economy – are, first, the Igbo and, second,  the South-south peoples. Even some among the South-south elite are said to be complaining about this imbalance. Some Yoruba (like Dr. Adesina Akinwumi, Federal Minister of Agriculture) are known to be giving excellent service in their positions, but, on the whole, there is not much reason for the Yoruba nation to feel  welcome in the Jonathan presidency – a situation that leaves many able Yoruba who would have wished to rally around Jonathan impotent.

    As the hostile divide between the hostile warriors of the two extreme positions grows and threatens to destroy Nigeria in 2015, the Yoruba position holds the only possibility of peaceful resolution and Nigeria’s survival. As a nation, the Yoruba want a secular modern Nigeria in which religion shall be kept out of governance, the individual shall be free to hold and propagate the faith of his choice, the nationalities shall be respected in the making of the states of the federation, the allocation of powers and resources shall enable each state to promote its economic development competently, and the federal government shall ably supervise inter-state relations, represent Nigeria in the world, and defend Nigeria.

    Obviously, what Nigeria desperately needs is that this Yoruba position be accepted by all Nigerians. Among the two extreme sides, whichever side accepts and adopts this position is likely to win the overwhelming adherence of the Yoruba – and more likely to win the 2015 presidential election and save Nigeria. But – that is not likely to happen. Confusion, conflict and disaster are more likely. It is sad.

  • Cry, raped country!

    For my column last week, I chose the title: “Nigeria refuses to take heed”. I opened with the paragraph: “In the history of the world, there must be very few countries that have been frequently and persistently warned about their impending collapse as Nigeria is being warned. At home and abroad, very many persons, including statesmen, intellectuals, journalists, ordinary citizens of Nigeria at home and abroad, etc, some of them people of goodwill who are interested in Nigeria’s well-being and success, are warning that Nigeria could soon disintegrate”. And I closed as follows: “Unhappily, and very unfortunately for Nigeria, the men and women who guide the Nigerian ship of state choose to ignore all the warnings – determined to continue to manage the affairs of their country in their accustomed, destructive, ways…It is as if a huge and malevolent force has grabbed Nigeria in its grip and is pushing or pulling Nigeria through an evil whirlwind towards some sort of predetermined cataclysm!”

    In the background to my writing those words and these – in the background of all our lives as Nigerians these days – the unbelievable drama of influential Nigerians raping and degrading Nigeria goes on unrestrained. It is surrealistic. It is as if we Nigerians are a sub-human sub-species of the human species – incapable of recognizing, appreciating or desiring the higher values of human life, and confidently absorbed in snatching at, and scrambling for, whatever is low and degrading, and only appetite-satisfying, in the making of man.

    “Cry, Raped Country” will be my theme in this column in the next few weeks. I am starting today by calling on Nigerians to cry over the inhuman ways in which our leaders have brutalized the lives of the people of our Niger Delta, the source of almost all our country’s income today.

    From the general picture of rape and bestialities, a photograph displayed on the worldwide web grabs and holds my attention this morning. It is a photograph taken in our oil-rich Niger Delta in 2012, near the village of Nembe in Bayelsa State. The earth and the vegetation in all directions are black from oil spillages that have, apparently, been going on repeatedly for decades. The stream through the scene carries a surface layer of black crude oil. It is lifeless and serene, because the oil has long killed the fish, the frogs, and all other aquatic life. Dead trees stand like ghostly witnesses to the devastation that we have done in this place. In the distance, a wild fire rages on –most probably from some natural gas being destroyed by flaring.

    Thus in one single snapshot, this lone photograph captures the multi-faceted picture of our brigandage and shame as a country. Our Niger Delta produces virtually all the enormous revenues that keep our Nigeria alive. But we are content to let the Niger Delta die, and to let its inhabitants perish. From privileged positions as a Nigerian Senator and member of the Senate Committee on Petroleum and Energy in 1979-83, I saw some of the beginning of the environmental degradation of the Niger Delta in 1982, and I was horrified. From all accounts, the situation has grown progressively worse since then. Worldwide economic experts and international agencies say that the Niger Delta probably experiences more oil spillages than all the other oil-producing countries of the world put together.

    Because our leaders and rulers are too busy salivating at the sight of the enormous cash flowing daily form the oil revenues, and too engrossed in schemes for stealing the money, they have no room for concern for the destruction that is going on in the Niger Delta. Various courts, Nigerian and international, have judged at various times that some of the major oil-exploring and oil-mining companies engaged in the Delta do too little to prevent oil spillages, and do virtually nothing to clean up after oil-spillages have happened – things they would never dare in other parts of the world. They leave the oil pipe-lines which they have constructed across the face of the Delta to age, corrode and break, spilling countless barrels of crude oil per minute – sometimes for months. Nigerian government sources have it that more than 7,000 spills occurred between the years 1970 and 2000. In a report issued in the 1980s, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) admitted, “We witnessed the slow poisoning of the waters of this country and the destruction of vegetation and agricultural land by oil spills which occur during petroleum operations. But since the inception of the oil industry in Nigeria, more than twenty-five years ago, there has been no concerned and effective effort on the part of the government, let alone the oil operators, to control environmental problems associated with the industry”.

    The situation has hardly changed today. Moreover, more and more in recent times, the impoverished folks of the Niger Delta have been pushed into contributing to the oil spillages – through the practice known as “bunkering”. To find ways to survive at all, daring youths from the villages started to risk their lives to venture into the dangerous terrains in order to steal crude oil for sale, usually having to sabotage the oil pipe-lines to achieve their purpose.According to some reports, this practice has grown into a big underground industry, and is still growing.

    The general situation in the Delta is made worse by the practice of gas flaring. Natural gas is commonly associated with petroleum in the ground, and is commonly released when the oil is mined. In most other oil-producing places in the world, care is taken to tap the gas for sale or to re-inject it back into the earth. Oil fields in Europe take care of 99% of the associated natural gas in these ways. But in Nigeria, all the associated gas is destroyed by flaring away. It is estimated that, in this way, Nigeria loses about $2.5 billion every year. But gas flaring also increases the poisoning of the country and constitutes a serious threat to the people’s health. Both the Nigerian government and the oil companies readily agree that oil flaring is bad, wasteful and dangerous, but no effective step has ever been taken to curtail it.

    The destruction of much of the Delta’s farming land, and the poisoning of the rivers and creeks, resulting in the wiping out of fish in large parts, has destroyed much of the traditional means of livelihood of the people. It is estimated that over 10% of the ecosystem has been thus destroyed – and that the destruction may reach 40% in the next few decades. An international agency, Amnesty International, estimates that more than 70% of the citizens of the Niger Delta live on less than one US Dollar per day. The oil spills do not only destroy farmlands, crops and fishing places, they also contaminate drinking water sources. And such contamination poses very serious dangers of disease (especially cancers) to the people.

    In summary, Nigeria is grossly unfortunate in its leaders and governments. God gave Nigeria abundant means to prosper; but the Devil hijacked the persons who rose to leadership positions among Nigerians and turned them into monstrously greedy self-seekers – and destroyers of their people.

  • Nigeria refuses to take heed

    In the history of the world, there must be very few countries that have been frequently and persistently warned about their impending collapse as Nigeria is being warned. At home and abroad, very many persons, including statesmen, intellectuals, journalists, ordinary citizens of Nigeria at home and abroad, etc, some of them people of good will who are interested in Nigeria’s well-being and success, are warning that Nigeria could soon disintegrate.

    For many years, the warnings have been coming in various shapes and sizes. But we can only pick and choose a few here. Almost from the day of independence, some valiant youths of the Ijaw people of the oil-producing Delta territories served notice that they rejected the situation whereby their homeland produced all the oil wealth upon which Nigeria depended, and suffered all the environmental degradation of oil production, but was neglected by Nigeria and left to suffer in poverty. Their protest was treated as an affront to Nigeria and, again and again, they were punished as criminal insurrectionists. As a result, a strong tradition of revolt was bred in the Delta – a tradition that continues today with powerful secessionist strains, even though the current president of Nigeria is a child of the Delta.

    The people of the Western Region were Nigeria’s frontline achievers, and were phenomenally industrious and confident, until 1962 when the controllers of the federal government decided that the Western Region was too self-sufficient and needed to be disrupted and stopped. The plot disrupted the Western Region, initiated the decline of Nigeria, produced stubborn revolts and a very destructive civil war, and led Nigeria onto the path that now seems to lead to possible disintegration and dissolution. But Nigeria has sustained the tradition whereby every controller of the federal government views the South-west as, in various ways, a land of rebellion. The root of it all this is that the Yoruba people are tenacious holders to their traditional cultural values – of freedom and respect of the individual, the servant-hood of governments, the inalienable right of the people to choose their own rulers, the right of each person to hold and practice the religion of their choice, the duty of a community to accept and respectfully include foreigners, etc.

    Yoruba voices are forever warning and urging Nigeria to respect the Yoruba nation’s cultural sensitivities and allow the Yoruba to manage their own affairs according to their own cultural values in the context of Nigeria. And they never forget to add that all other Nigerian nationalities have the same rights – for which reason they persistently urge that Nigeria be structured as a proper federation based sensibly on the nationalities. But Nigeria ignores these entreaties and warnings, tries to subdue the Yoruba by marginalizing them in the policies of, and shares in, the Nigerian federal government and, if possible, reduce them into a poor and helpless nation in Nigeria. More and more, therefore, the Yoruba are being left with little choice other than to wish and seek for a separate country of their own out of Nigeria.

    More than the Yoruba, the Igbo nation has been more able to compromise with the controllers of the Nigeria federal government. Even so, their experiences have been very close to those of the Yoruba in the history of independent Nigeria. Their desires are to develop, like the Yoruba, their homeland, and, with all other Nigerians of all nationalities, to be free, as Nigerian citizens, to reside and prosper in all parts of Nigeria. At some point, their response to the excessive presumptions and pressures of the controllers of the federal government led to an Igbo attempt to separate themselves from Nigeria – resulting in a civil war that generated much destruction and loss of lives in the Igbo homeland. Because the northern political leadership that has controlled the federal government for most of the time since independence seem to be convinced that that civil war has subdued the Igbo, Nigeria is disinclined to pay serious attention to the voices and aspirations of the Igbo nation in the affairs of Nigeria. Like the Yoruba, the Igbo are being left with no respectable option than to seek for a separate country of their own. The dream of Biafra therefore remains a very virile dream for most Igbo people – a very potent warning which Nigeria is ignoring at Nigeria’s peril.

    Warnings that should never have been ignored have also frequently come from Nigerians of note. Until his last days, the veteran Nigerian nationalist, Chief Tony Enahoro, never ceased urging Nigerian leaders and rulers to restructure the Nigerian federation appropriately and thereby terminate Nigeria’s decline. I am looking in particular at one of his last public lectures in which he said “if we desire to create a viable federal structure and warm relationships among our nationalities, we have to design a formula under which we can live equitably together and the formula must provide for the recognition of the existence and corporate integrity of the nationalities”. He added that Nigeria was no longer being kept together by love or desire, but by force and coercion. The Nigerian Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka, has repeatedly urged for changes in the way that Nigeria’s affairs are being managed. Once he added, “if nothing happens…I don’t rule out Nigeria breaking up. That is what happens to a failed state”.

    From foreign dignitaries and important international agencies, the warnings are legion. In 2005, an agency of the United States government warned that Nigeria was heading towards breaking up in 15 years. In 2013, a research group for an arm of the U.S. government repeated the same. Journalists from all corners of the world who happen to visit Nigeria are saying the same over and over. Only last week, the World Bank, the highest monitoring agency of the world’s economy, announced that Nigeria is one of the leading contributors to global poverty, and that, as things stand in Nigeria now, Nigeria will still be one of the leading contributors to global poverty in as far in the future as 2030. In any other country, that kind of warning would be sufficient to move the rulers and managers of society to begin to hurry to change a whole lot of things. Not so Nigeria.

    Unhappily, and very unfortunately for Nigeria, the men and women who guide the Nigerian ship of state choose to ignore all the warnings – determined to continue to manage the affairs of their country in their accustomed, destructive, ways. Quite often, indeed, they choose to bristle at the warnings, and to accuse the people doing the warnings as enemies who are trying to destroy the image of Nigeria and even of Africa. It is as if a huge and malevolent force has grabbed Nigeria in its grip and is pushing or pulling Nigeria through an evil whirlwind towards some sort of predetermined cataclysm. For most of us Nigerians, there is almost nothing more to do than to surrender to the inevitable – and wait in trepidation. In the 1950s, a song in a popular movie had the words “Que sera sera – what will be will be.” What will be will be!

     

  • Nigeria’s cloud of uncertainty & insecurity- 2

    I started this column last week with the words: “We Nigerians live in a cloud of uncertainty… It is impossible to imagine any other country comparable to ours in this. Uncertainty and insecurity pervade every facet of our lives as a country”.

    In that first article on the subject, it was not possible for me to touch more than a few areas of Nigeria’s life of uncertainty and insecurity. I intend now to touch some more areas.

    A few weeks ago, our Federal Government celebrated before us – the nearly 170 million of us ordinary Nigerians – the great news that some international monitoring agency had declared the economy of our Nigeria as the largest economy in Africa. We were supposed to rejoice at such wonderful news. But, in reality, was there anything to celebrate? Did the announcement put any improvement into the economic life of any of us?  Absolutely not.

    In fact, a very huge negative was soon to follow as far as international announcements are concerned. According to an October 9 report in the Vanguard, the World Bank has published the horrible, but not surprising, information that Nigeria is one of the foremost contributors to poverty in the word! It added that Nigeria is not only “currently contributing heavily to global poverty”, but also that “Nigeria will be one of the ten countries that, in the year 2030, will remain as the main contributors to global poverty”.

    What does that mean? It means that, while most countries of the world would have, by 2030, moved ahead in economic development, and would have greatly improved the quality of life of their citizens, the citizens of Nigeria (if Nigeria still exists by then) will still be sunk in deep poverty. Nigerians will still be among the poorest folks on earth. Nigerians will still be among the world’s most backward humans, the ones  who have the least access to such dynamic values as regular electricity supply, pipe-borne water, good roads and transportation services, modern and efficient agriculture and food production, quality education, good health-delivery services, good inflow of foreign investments, efficient foreign trade, business opportunities, fair employment opportunities and family incomes, dependable security services, access to economic opportunities in general, good quality governance, etc. In short, poverty, even “absolute poverty”, will continue for a very long time to be the lot of most Nigerians, while almost all other peoples of the world would have marched on to richer, more productive and more comfortable lives. It is a bleak prospect – a depressing prospect. It is the ultimate in uncertainty and insecurity of life.

    Let us look in another direction. As far as the 170 million of us, ordinary Nigerians, know, next year, 2015, is the year of our general elections – the year during which we will elect our President, Senate, House of Representatives, State Governors, and State Houses of Assembly. That sounds simple, clear and certain enough – doesn’t it? It does on the surface.  But our country happens to be Nigeria – and what you see on the surface in Nigeria has little to do with certainty or reality. In fact, one day this past week, a columnist in a national newspaper felt compelled to ask the question, “Are they preparing for elections or for a civil war?”

    We ordinary citizens have no way of knowing for sure; as citizens of Nigeria, we are entirely in the hands of factors and forces beyond our knowledge or understanding. If our rulers and leaders were preparing for elections, why are they doing the things they are doing now? From the little bits of information seeping through to the public domain from time to time, there is no doubt that different groups of Nigerian politicians are secretly shopping for arms and ammunitions abroad and smuggling them into Nigeria. Various official reports paint a frightening picture of weapons smuggling into Nigeria as the 2015 elections approach.

    The smuggling rose sharply in 2013 when, according to official reports, the amount of weapons seized by the authorities was seven times as much as the amount seized in 2012. Since 2013, the volume has continued to rise steadily. The Nigerian Customs Service (NCS) and the State Security Service (SSS) are under escalating pressure trying to detect and seize caches of weapons being smuggled. Large containers of weapons, usually concealed with legitimate merchandise, have been detected and seized at the Apapa ports, Port Harcourt Port, various airports, and various border posts – such as the border of Benin Republic with Oyo State, and, particularly, the border of Niger Republic with Sokoto State. In recent days, this atmosphere has been further heated up by the revelation of secret arms purchases by Nigerians in South Africa. The Federal Government’s claim that the purchases are official hardly lowers the heat.

    Moreover, the language of Nigerian politics sounds more and more these days like the language of hostile nations heading towards collision and war, rather than the language of a country’s political parties angling for electoral advantage. We hear such language of war or threat of war from most parts of Nigeria these days – usually mostly from the North-west, and least of all from the South-west. But, no other Nigerian politician (or pseudo-warrior) has uttered a more infamous threat of war than the one which emanated from the Arewa North in the past week, and which is now circulating around the world. Though I quoted chunks from that threat last week, I must quote some more or repeat some today. Nigerians need to hear more of it.

    Demanding that the presidency of Nigeria must be given to the Hausa-Fulani in 2015 and to no other Nigerian of any other nationality (because “Allah has given it to the Hausa-Fulani” alone), he threatened:

    “No Goodluck or anyone else will stop us from taking back our power next year. We will kill, maim, destroy and turn this country into Africa’s biggest war zone and refugee camp if they try it…Many say we are behind Boko Haram. My answer is what do you expect? …We …will fight back in order to keep it (the presidency). They have brought in the infidels from America and the pigs from Israel to help them but they will fail. The war has just begun, the Mujahadeen are more than ready and by Allah we shall win”.

    Well, those of us ordinary Nigerians who have been expecting that we shall have general elections next year must now begin to ask serious questions of ourselves. As things look, it seems we will need to struggle to prevent many armies from springing into action in Nigeria in 2015 – two armies from the Muslim North (a re-energized Boko Haram striking all over Nigeria; and a Mujahadeen army comprising well-armed infiltrators into the ranks of the Northern cattle herders already well deployed all over the South and Middle Belt); a South-south army; and South-east and South-west armies springing hurriedly into existence. Will there still be a Nigeria after all these would have gone into action?

  • Nigeria: Living in a cloud of uncertainty

    We Nigerians live in a cloud of uncertainty – a heavily dark cloud of uncertainty. It is impossible to imagine any other country comparable to ours in this. Uncertainty and insecurity pervade every facet of our lives as a country.

    Even when we engage in the simple act of voting to elect our rulers, none of us can be sure anymore what we are doing. We are not sure whether the ballot paper in our hand is real; we are not sure whether the thumb-print we append to the ballot paper will vanish or physically move to another location. And even after we have rejoiced that the candidate of the party of our choice has been announced as “elected”, we are not sure whether he will not change his party affiliation before the next morning.

    It is the same uncertainty and insecurity in all the more serious things of life. If a Nigerian is being menaced by criminals these days, he cannot be sure whether it is safe to call the police for help. Not even such special public officials as judges of courts can be sure of protection by the police in their courts. Every well-to-do Nigerian and members of his family live in the constant fear that kidnappers can suddenly rob them of their freedom and joy. No ordinary Nigerian walking in the streets can be sure these days that he will ever arrive at his destination or ever make it back home.

    We used to be sure what government meant. We used to be sure that government, be it federal, state or local government, was the government of all citizens. Those days are gone. Whether the government will offer protection to the people of any Nigerian town these days depends on the people’s ethnicity or the colour of the political party cards carried by most of them. Progressively since independence, it has become perfectly “normal” for the leader of any Nigerian government (whether federal, state or local), while appointing public officials into his government, to shut out the citizens of large areas of his domain and to  fill all government offices with his own kinsmen only. No Nigerian now seriously expects that the men and women who occupy public offices are there to serve him as a member of the public – even if they belong to his own ethnicity or political party. Public officials go to their offices only to take care of their personal shares of the “national cake”.

    As Africa’s largest and naturally richest country, and as Africa’s greatest benefactor of African countries in the throes of liberation wars during the 1960s, we Nigerians used to be fairly confident everywhere in Africa. As owners of Africa’s strongest military, we Nigerians used to be fairly proud of our military’s contributions in peace-keeping operations on the African continent and in other parts of the world. Other African countries used to have a modicum of respect and love for us Nigerians, and used to welcome us happily into their towns. Those days are gone. If you are a Nigerian desiring to flee the unemployment, poverty, corruption and violence of Nigeria, and thinking of relocating to another country in Africa, you need to think more deeply and watch your steps most seriously. In most African countries, the people don’t want us Nigerians anymore. Familiarize yourself with the accounts of what is happening to Nigerians in other African countries these days – how Nigerians are being randomly accused of drug trafficking by their neighbours and violently set upon in more and more countries, how Nigerians are being attacked, wounded or killed by mobs, how Nigerians are having their properties destroyed or confiscated, and how Nigerians can no longer depend on some governments for fair treatment or protection – and how some leaders of governments commonly ridicule Nigeria and Nigerians. In more and more countries in Africa, being a Nigerian has become a hazard; settling down or doing business no longer has much certainty beneath it for a Nigerian. The ever worsening stench of Nigeria’s image makes sure of these developments.

    Until over a decade ago, the Nigerian army used to be widely regarded as the star of the international peace-keeping operations in countries like Liberia, Guinea, Sierra Leone, etc. Today, the overwhelming image of the Nigerian military is that it is so corrupt as to be incapable of standing to fight such a rag-tag army of fanatics like Boko Haram. We Nigerians know that the truth in the situation is that the fundamental disunities of Nigeria have caught up with the Nigerian military and destroyed its professionalism and morale. The Nigerian military know that they are fighting not only against Boko Haram, but also against a whole lot of influential Nigerians. We no longer have a country that can sustain an effective army. In fact, ours is no longer a country that can sustain a viable modern country in any serious sense. Just now, all we are doing with Nigeria’s existence is playing children’s games; but children’s games, sui generis, never last long.

    This past week, Nigeria’s battered image, and the world’s declining hope about Nigeria, took yet an incredibly heavy hit as people read on the world-wide web a statement credited to an important Nigerian. Whatever frail rudiment of certainty has been left of Nigeria in the minds of the world is crumbling right now as more and more people in the world are reading that unfortunate statement. I hesitate to identify the maker of the statement – beyond saying that he is a very eminent Northern Nigerian. But here are some quotes from his statement:

    ‘’When I say that the Presidency must come to the north next year, I am referring to the Hausa-Fulani core north and not any northern Christian or Muslim minority tribe. They can grumble, moan and groan as much as they want…They owe us everything… because we gave them Islam through the great Jihad. We also captured Ilorin, killed their local King and installed our Fulani Emir. We took that ancient town away from the barbarian Yoruba and their filthy pagan gods. It was either the Koran or the sword. Allah, through the British, gave us Nigeria to rule and to do with as we please. Since 1960 we have been doing that and we intend to continue. The Igbo tried to stop us in 1966, and between 1967 and 1969 they paid a terrible price. They…have been broken. We will kill, maim, destroy and turn this country into Africa’s biggest war zone and refugee camp if they try it. Many say we are behind Boko Haram. My answer is what do you expect? The war has just begun, the Mujahadeen are more than ready… If they don’t want an ISIS in Nigeria, then they must give us back the Presidency and our political power”.

    After this kind of tirade, need anything more be said about the uncertainty that engulfs Nigeria? Where is anything like hope here?