The Nation Newspaper

Category: Banji Akintoye

  • Nigeria: How countries fail and fall

    The country named Yugoslavia in south-eastern Europe broke up in 1990, after 72 years of existence. While it existed, it was similar to Nigeria of today in many ways. Like Nigeria, Yugoslavia consisted of many different nationalities – the Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Bosnians, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Albanians, etc. Britain had thoughtlessly pushed many nationalities together to create Nigeria in 1914; Britain and France also thoughtlessly pushed many nationalities together to create Yugoslavia in 1918.

    Like Nigerian leaders, Yugoslav leaders were never able to manage their inter-ethnic relationships amicably. Like Nigeria therefore, Yugoslavia was always unstable, always about to break into massive inter-ethnic conflicts, always seeming about to collapse. One of the nationalities, the Serbs, were always obsessed with the ambition to dominate the other nationalities and the whole country, and that ambition led them into actions that frequently threatened Yugoslavia with disruption.

    During the Second World War, 1939-45, Yugoslavia, like most of Europe, suffered under German Nazi conquest and domination. A resistance movement of Yugoslav people developed to liberate Yugoslavia, and adopted communism. When the war ended, this communist group, under a leader named Joseph Tito, became the rulers of Yugoslavia. Tito and his communists ruled until 1980.

    The communist rulers hated the inter-ethnic troubles and adopted many tough measures to keep them under control. Until Tito died in 1980, therefore, the world heard very little about the Yugoslav inter-ethnic troubles.

    But, in reality, the inter-ethnic divisions did not go away. It is almost impossible to make inter-ethnic divisions in a multi-nation country go away. Each nationality took thousands of years to develop as one people, with one culture, one national image, and one national pride. If it happens that some nationalities find themselves combined as one country, the only successful approach is that each of the nationalities should be carefully respected, and that each be given some autonomy to manage its own unique concerns in the country. The only sustainable structure for the country therefore has to be a federal structure, and the federating units have to be, as much as possible, based on the nationalities. We see this in the Union of India, in Switzerland, and even in Britain – the country that created Nigeria. Wherever attempts are made to force the nationalities to surrender their individuality and integrity in order to unify the country, disharmony, hostility, violence, and ultimate collapse are usually the outcome.

    After Tito’s death, most of Yugoslavia’s ethnic leaders did try to save the country. Throughout the 1980s, they held national conferences to find a settlement. But the Serbs (the largest of the nationalities, though not a majority in the country) foiled all the attempts. The Serbs would not accept any agreement that did not guarantee their dominance. The country slipped gradually on – until it finally exploded in 1990.

    The explosion started when two of the nationalities, the Croats and the Slovenes, announced secession and proclaimed themselves as separate sovereign countries. The Serbs mobilized a large army and tried to suppress them, but more nationalities then followed and announced secession. Yugoslavia descended into a horrendous conflagration.

    The lesson here is clear. When different nationalities, each living in its own homeland, different in culture and religion, are forced together into one country, and the leaders of the various nationalities cannot agree on how to manage their country equitably and harmoniously, dark forces of rivalry, envy, fear, ill-will, hatred and domination, are often generated in the hearts of the nationalities against one another. That is what happened in Yugoslavia. It has happened in many Black African countries too.

    Signs of these dark forces have been gradually growing in Nigeria, especially since Nigeria’s independence in 1960. Sure, many of us Nigerians do desire that Nigeria should become harmonious and peaceful, continue to exist, and become a prosperous and powerful country. But, there exists the perpetual fact that the political elites of Nigeria’s various peoples do not know, and have never known, what it takes to make a country like Nigeria work. One of the largest of the nationalities, the Hausa-Fulani, because they were seriously behind the rest in education at independence, harbour the belief that the only way they can be anything in Nigeria is to hold perpetually to federal power and dominate all the other peoples of Nigeria. In the context of efforts to sustain this ambition, Nigeria has descended steadily into decline, a culture of electoral fraud and violence, and of mind-boggling corruption. Of course, most of the elite of the various peoples of Nigeria, eager to benefit personally or collectively from this confusion, have delved down into it – with the result that Nigeria’s problems have become essentially insoluble.

    In the vortex of this horrible situation, many attendant evils have grown. For instance, it has become widely acceptable for citizens of various nationalities to vent very disrespectful attitudes at one another. Those who, taking advantage of Nigeria, migrate to other peoples’ homelands and choose to live there and take advantage of the opportunities there, now think that the proper kind of behaviour is to be viciously disrespectful of their hosts, and to indulge in aggressive and unruly claims and insults against their hosts.

    Anybody who makes a habit of reading what Nigerians write on the internet against each other’s nationalities would wonder why Nigerians are claiming to be citizens of the same country. The Nigerian filthy kind of mind now regularly produces persons who give much time, energy, and intellectual effort to writing whole treatises to fabricate falsehood about one or other nationality, and to assert that cultural achievements known to belong to that nationality do not, in fact, belong to that nationality – or, even, do not exist in human experience.

    But these kinds of behaviour are not limited to the lowest fringes of Nigerian society, they also feature even in very high levels of Nigerian society. Under the Abacha and Abdulsalami military dictatorships and the Obasanjo civilian dictatorship, there arose a spirited effort to persuade Nigerians that their various nationalities do not exist or should not exist, that such nationalities are essentially myths – myths that are dangerous to the identity and progress of Nigeria, and that deserve to be suppressed out of existence. In those years some persons working for, or under the auspices of, the Nigerian Federal Government favoured Nigeria with serious writings which informed Nigerians that it is backward and perverse to include any consideration for our nationalities in any plans for Nigeria’s future, and that the nationalities are no more than myths. Even today, some prominent citizens still think that it is their patriotic duty to Nigeria to remind Nigeria of these things.

    It is therefore not strange that these adversarial patterns of relationship are today producing some actions and trends that may soon push Nigeria to its demise. A few years past, the frightful news began to surface that persons belonging to one Nigerian nationality were from time to time bursting upon peaceful villages belonging to other nationalities in the Nigerian Middle Belt, wantonly killing the villagers, destroying the villages, and occupying the land. Continued year in year out, this development has now assumed the stature of genocide.

    And this terrible outrage has now spread beyond the Middle Belt to the Southern regions of Nigeria. In most parts of Nigeria today, the outcry is up about armed and murderous Fulani cattle herders who lead their cattle to destroy farms, and who then attack farmers who protest, kill farmers and their families, and wipe out whole villages.

    By and by, Nigerians are getting to know more and more about these killers. We now know that some of them are Nigerians and many others are non-Nigerians. Of the non-Nigerians, Nigeria is now hearing from some official sources that these are in fact not cattle herders but militiamen from Libya – the ones that Ghadafi trained as his private army who, after the fall of Ghadafi, fled southwards to West Africa. The question is now agitating Nigeria as to how these trained terrorists have invaded Nigeria without the Federal Government doing anything to stop them – and even without the government alerting Nigerians that Nigeria has been invaded. Many are asking, is it possible that some influential Nigerians, intent on conquering and subduing the rest of Nigeria, have hired Libyan militiamen and added them to the Fulanis who have been massacring various peoples of Nigeria?

    Some days ago, President Buhari lamented that many Nigerians want Nigeria to be dissolved. Happily, he added that he would do everything to keep Nigeria together. But, in the light of the mutually hostile trends in Nigeria, is it surprising that more and more Nigerians peoples would wish to cease being part of Nigeria? This is an example of how countries fail and fall apart.

  • PMB: Return to the drawing table

    Today, most of us Nigerians live in poverty. About 70% of us are estimated to be living in “absolute poverty” – meaning that we are barely keeping alive with just about one U.S. dollar a day. The days are gone when parents who sacrifice to give their children education can hopefully wait for those children to graduate and come back to help. It is sad to watch bright young graduates roam the streets jobless endlessly and, in desperation, turn to crime or terrorism.

    But it has not always been like this in our country. When I was a boy in the 1950s, we youths lived in great hope. Commonly, as we were graduating, we had letters of employment in our pockets. Weeks later, we were usually able to borrow money to buy our first cars. We were then able to help our parents – and our younger brothers and sisters with their education. Life was orderly, predictable and filled with hope – and with determination to succeed in life, and to help others to succeed.

    All this life of certainty and hope was rooted in the circumstances created for us by our leaders and rulers. My Western Region, under Chief Awolowo’s leadership, was doing best in the country, but the Eastern and Northern Regions too (under Dr. Azikiwe and Sir Ahmadu Bello respectively) were doing well. Schools were springing up everywhere, and so were modern roads, water supply, and electricity supply. We did not have petroleum and its enormous revenues in those days, but region by region, local government area by local government area, our people were vibrantly engaged in a common push for progress and prosperity – and the results were showing everywhere.

    Unhappily, since 1962, and until now, we have gradually and foolishly thrown away all this hope-filled scenario. It all started when the politicians who controlled our federal government at independence decided that the regions were too independent and needed to be subdued under federal government’s control. Targeting the strongest of the regions, the Western Region, they embarked on their ill-advised crusade against the regions in 1962. They disrupted, subdued and broke up the Western Region. But the crisis they thus initiated spiraled out of hand, generating military coups, genocidal pogroms, an outright civil war, and federal administrations (military and civilian) hell-bent on federally micro-managing all the affairs and resources of our country. Petroleum began to pour out its revenue bonanza in these years, and that created, for the controllers of the federal government, an added incentive to seize control of all our country’s resources. To make the total federal control sustainable, the controllers of the federal government decided to begin to use part of the oil revenues to bribe, buy, subvert and emasculate the elite from all over Nigeria, to make the total federal control acceptable to them. Public corruption became an avowed tool of governance in our land.

    At three different times during this growth of insanity, sanity and hope tried to rear their heads. First, in 1975, a young military officer named Murtala Mohammed seized power and, surprisingly, launched into a spirited war to kill public corruption and the widespread indiscipline that accompanied it among our leaders and rulers. Some of his initial methods were hard and painful, but his sincerity was never in doubt – and the promised goal of return to orderliness, progress and prosperity was intoxicating, especially among Nigerian youths.  But the influential enemies of his kind of goal got him killed within months, and got him replaced with other kinds of military men whom they could trust.

    Then, secondly, in the years from 1976 to 1979, when these military rulers promised a return to elective civilian rule, the former leader and guide of the era of progress and prosperity in the former Western Region, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, pulled together a broadly national group of patriotic Nigerians which then designed very ambitious programmes for the renewal of Nigeria’s progress and prosperity. Their goal was to transform Nigeria into a country of educated and skilled working youths, bubbling enterprise, modern farms, crowded industries, a magnet for investments from all over the world, and the source of massive exportation of goods to the rest of Africa and the wider world. As background to all this, they proposed to restructure Nigeria into a rational federation, in order to diversify the bases of enterprise and progress again, and to enable the peoples and federating units of Nigeria to share in the new transformation in their own ways and thereby make their own contributions to the growth of Nigeria’s prosperity. These programmes immediately became considerably popular countrywide, and the group seemed very likely to produce the next civilian Federal Government of Nigeria as well as the governments of many states. Hope began to revive among Nigerians. But the military rulers became instantly incensed against this group, preferring the group that was organizing to elevate corruption as Nigeria’s system of governance – the group that was determined to give the Nigerian elite the best of chances to acquire huge personal bounties, through corruption, from Nigeria’s oil revenues. The rest of this story is well known – especially the final story of how the military rulers manipulated the 1979 presidential election for the group that they preferred. There then followed four years (1979-83) of blisteringly corrupt governance.

    Then, thirdly, sanity and hope suddenly intruded onto the scene again. A military officer named Muhammadu Buhari, assisted by a no-nonsense younger officer named Tunde Idiagbon, pushed the corrupt group out of the government and embarked on investigating and punishing the corrupt politicians. By then, however, the forces of corruption had become far too powerful. Buhari and Idiagbon were soon pushed out – and then replaced by the military officer who now holds the record as the master architect of corruption in Nigeria’s life. All that has followed since has kept along the path that he charted for our country. This is how we have become what we now are – namely, a country where public officials steal trillions of Naira, where some politicians pocket billions of Naira or even dollars in loot, where powerful citizens buy million-dollar houses for their concubines abroad, where governors and their cronies buy jet aircraft for personal use, where federal legislators earn more than the president of America, where more than 70% of citizens live in “absolute poverty”, where the lack of infrastructures massively discourages enterprise, where more than 70% of youths are unemployed, where crime has virtually destroyed all sense of security, etc.

    But, yet again, the same old Buhari is back – this time as an elected civilian president. He has launched a war against public corruption again. And, again, most Nigerians welcome it.

    Yes, it looks and sounds good, but what are Buhari’s chances of succeeding? Those like me who have seen this kind of welcome effort two times before cannot help being skeptical. As I watch Buhari, I am painfully convinced that he does not know what he needs to do to win this war. And people around him say that he does not know how to listen to other people and use their wisdom.  He seems to think that finding and punishing corrupt big men is all that is needed – but he is flatly wrong. Corruption is much more deep-seated than all that. As he is proceeding now, he is likely to keep chasing corrupt big men without real success, until his four-year term comes to an end – if they will leave him to keep chasing them around for that long.

    Buhari needs to return to the drawing table and, with his men, reconsider the approach to this mammoth problem.

    If he does that, I believe that he and his men will almost certainly find that the approach needs to be more comprehensive. One cannot leave in place, and revel in, the system that upholds corruption, and then hope to eliminate corruption. It will not work – and the effort will only frustrate and burn Buhari. If Buhari sincerely desires to set this country on the right path, then he must seriously embark on convincing Nigerians to come with him to restructure and reorder the country. He will need particularly to persuade the elite of his own Hausa-Fulani nation who have generally believed that they have a special stake in the system as it has been concocted. He will need to persuade all of us that we have all been losing egregiously and need to turn around. He can succeed if he sincerely tries. Otherwise, he is likely to fail – and, for Nigeria, that could be a terminal disaster.

  • Why Nigeria is never sure of its future?

    It is difficult – extremely difficult – for Nigeria to hear well or to hear the truth. And most of that is because the multiplicity of the political elites of Nigeria’s multiplicity of nationalities and cultures have so distorted and polluted Nigeria’s basic truth. They are all so focused on their personal political and material gains that they no longer can hear or perceive anything else about Nigeria. They cannot hear any message clearly, and they make it impossible for Nigerians to hear any important message clearly, or to benefit coherently from it. If Nigeria has been declining for decades, that is the most fundamental reason.

    Two days ago, I was privileged to be invited by an organization of Nigerian youths to a meeting in Lagos. The purpose of the meeting was to bring youth leaders from as many Nigerian nationalities as possible together to discuss how to prevent further inter-ethnic violence in Nigeria – how to promote and sustain inter-ethnic peace. It was immediately clear that the Nigeria that these youths perceive is vastly different from the Nigeria that the political elite perceive. Unlike the political elite, these highly educated youths know that Nigeria is a country of hundreds of ethnic nations, each of which deserves to be respected in the building of Nigeria. They know that the refusal to enshrine such respect into the structure of the Nigerian federation is the cause of many of Nigeria’s ills –inter-ethnic disharmony and conflicts, public corruption, and horrific poverty. They know that the politicians hardly ever pay serious attention to the needs and suffering of their ethnic nationalities. Above all, they want to proceed to establish avenues for contacts and exchange of views among youths throughout the country, in the interest of their various peoples and of Nigeria.

    These youths are right. The basic FACT and PROBLEM of Nigeria’s existence is that Nigeria is not a nation – a nation being a people group with their own homeland, their own culture and language, and their own self-image, and therefore their own unique expectations, ways of doing things, of enforcing their own national moral laws, of rewarding or penalizing their members, etc. A multi-nation country like Nigeria, to survive for any length of time, must be very thoughtful and careful in managing the inter-relationships among its component nations. If the country’s management of those inter-relationships is poor, unduly demanding and aggressive, and generates stress for some of the component nations, then the country cannot possibly be stable or peaceful – and it runs the risk of quickly breaking up.

    That is the basic summary of the history of independent Nigeria since 1960. By aggressively pooling all powers and resources together in the hands of the Nigerian Federal Government, we have created a powerful demon that could destroy Nigeria. In this column and in other writings, I have said these things repeatedly, and as clearly and loudly as I possibly can. Now, I say them again. Without restructuring Nigeria, without basing our states on the realities of our nationalities, and without taking away many of the powers and resource-control now held by the Federal Government and vesting them in the state governments, Nigeria will break up – probably violently, and probably very soon.

    Everything of significance emphasizes the truth that Nigeria is being destroyed by us Nigerians. As an important example, look at what is happening to our economy. The sharp falls in crude oil prices of these days are having a devastating effect on Nigeria because, according to the moulding of our economy by the Federal Government, the income from crude oil is the alpha-and-omega of our economy. Before crude oil started to become important to our country in about 1970, our country was doing quite well on some cash crops (cocoa from the South-west, palm produce from the South-east, and groundnuts from the North). We were also, on the whole, fairly productive peoples in food-crop farming, livestock farming, fishing, etc. From the 1950s, we were also beginning to develop as an entrepreneurial and gradually industrializing country.  But just as crude oil was beginning to emerge as a main contributor to our economy, our cash crops were transferred to federal control. The Federal Government, hugely over-impressed by the growing oil bonanza, focused its attention on the oil alone and, through inattention, allowed the cash crops to perish. Discouraged and lacking the governmental support systems that had been helpful to them under regional control, our farmers turned away from producing the cash crops. Nobody noticed this disaster as it developed – but it was a process of submitting the lives of our people to poverty. By the 1960s we were the largest exporter of groundnuts in the world; but by the 1980s, we had disappeared as a serious exporter of groundnuts. The same disasters befell our cocoa and palm produce exports.

    We became the poor country that we are now – the country in which 70% of us live in “absolute poverty”, where true enterprise has become unpopular, where dishonesty and crookedness threaten enterprise, where all state governments and local governments subsist only on monthly federal dolls from the oil revenues, and where most prominent citizens live on hand-outs or outright robberies from the oil revenues.  It is a country in which the Federal Government has seized control and destroyed education at all levels, and wrecked the universities that we proudly owned in the early 1960s. It is a country from which industries are fleeing, and which investors mostly avoid. At the youth meeting, I learnt a new word. One of the speakers said that we started as an “underdeveloped” country; then we rose to become a “developing” country; and now that we have declined and are declining, we are an “under-developing” country. “Under-developing”! That is a new word. World-wide, we have become notorious as a viciously corrupt country – a country to be avoided by decent humans.

    In the process, we have destroyed all love among our various nationalities, and spread confusion over our youths. Read the letters posted by Nigerians on the world-wide-web daily, and you will be horrified at the perpetual drivel of hate and venom that Nigerians spit against one another’s nationalities. In the past few years, let us not forget, some leading Nigerians have been importing and storing weapons – so as to be prepared to arm their own particular nationals to kill masses of other nationals when the time comes. Where do the Fulani herdsmen, mostly illiterate nomads, get the sophisticated weapons which they seem to now have aplenty? How did they get the training to use these weapons? We are ready for the Rwandan kind of genocidal insanity – only, if it comes, it will be thousands of times larger and more horrific than in Rwanda.  We also seem to be preparing for Sudan’s Janjaweed kind of terrorists. What respectable reason do we still have left for regarding ourselves as countrymen? We are destroying a country that had so much promise at independence.

    Can we possibly revive our country and guide it again onto the paths of stability, progress and prosperity? Can we possibly regenerate love and respect among the various nationalities of our country? In a few more months under President Buhari’s leadership, we are likely to find definitive answers to these questions.

  • Nigeria: Way out

    Almost exactly two years ago, while a National Assembly was meeting in Lagos, I did a general survey of my country’s affairs and, in utter dismay, wrote my article for that day – under an earlier name for this column. Early this morning, I read that article again, and I am shocked that it is still a good statement about my country’s life – that essentially, nothing has changed or is changing. Yes, President Buhari is hitting at public corruption, but no real success is being reported from that fight, and most other things remain unchanged. This past week, a Nigerian wrote a widely publicised article under the ominous title “Buhari might be the Last President of Nigeria”. Yes, a lot of us Nigerians are worrying, and I am therefore reproducing today that article of mine of two years ago. I particularly want President Buhari to see it. Here it goes:

    “These days, I am often profoundly puzzled whenever I look at Nigeria. From all significant indications, Nigeria is gradually deconstructing. Commonly, what held together fairly well only yesterday is today markedly disintegrating.

    And the most troubling part of it all is that nobody – no Nigerian of note – seems to be aware or care. The politicians go about their nebulous games of politics with their usual crookedness and vicious manipulations while the country they lead or hope to lead crumbles inexorably.

    Nigeria is disintegrating. Our very best ploys at self-deception have become too fragile to hide that fact. This past Monday, July 14, TV stations worldwide carried scenes in which Boko Haram hoodlums mocked the “Bring Back Our Girls” demonstrations. Watching that sickening satyr, no self-respecting person would wish to be counted among Nigerians. A friend who watched the news in faraway California grabbed his telephone and called me and asked, “Listen, is there no government left in your country?”

    No, there is nothing substantial left in Nigeria. Except of course the royalties and rents from the oil of the Niger Delta. Those fees are now the totality of what we call Nigeria. If they were to disappear, or even seriously diminish, Nigeria would vanish almost immediately. Participation in politics, all of governance, service on the judiciary, the police, the other regulatory agencies, and most of what we call business  – all are underpinned and motivated by the sharing of bounties and grafts from the oil revenues. A real country no longer exists here.

    About three months ago, we were elated when our president inaugurated a National Conference. Many of us hoped that a National Conference would sort out many of our deadlocks and tangles. It is not happening. Nothing so constructive is possible in Nigeria. After bruising its path through some decisions that seemed fairly valuable, the conference has now capped everything with an overwhelmingly disastrous decision – namely, the decision to increase the number of states in the Nigerian federation from 36 to 54. Yes, 54 states!

    For years now, there has been no doubt that having as many as 36 states has been hurting our country. It resulted in small weak states that the federal establishment has easily been able to roll over and subdue states incapable of developing their resources or resisting poverty among their citizens. This has distorted our federation, increased poverty among our people, and generated widening insecurity and conflicts. In spite of these experiences, our National Conference has now decided to increase the number of states. And we all know why. Most of the persons gathered in the conference are politicians or aspiring politicians whose only serious desire is to create more opportunities for themselves to become state governors, deputy governors, commissioners, advisers, contractors, etc. It is about creating more outlets for sharing the oil money. Nigeria’s well-being is not a consideration – because, of course, Nigeria and the citizens of Nigeria do not exist as far as most of our politicians are concerned.

    Naturally, a lot of informed Nigerians are speaking out – and most of them are proposing that the mirage called Nigeria be terminated, in the interest of all concerned. Among such statements by prominent Nigerians, I am looking at a few right now.

    Some days ago, one of our most prominent citizens, former vice-chancellor of one of our leading universities, Professor Ango Abdullahi, granted a public interview. From his chosen angle in Nigeria’s political life, Professor Abdullahi has been undoubtedly one of our most successful politicians. But, in the bruising tensions and conflicts of the politics of a Nigeria that has no core of values, no generally accepted game rules, and no commonly shared goal, he is becoming exasperated. It is therefore not surprising that even he is now saying that he would gladly accept the breaking up of Nigeria – in fact, that the Hausa-Fulani leadership of the Arewa North would gladly subscribe to the dissolution of Nigeria, if that is what others wish.

    As things stand today, there is not much doubt about what Nigerians wish. If Nigerians were asked  today about their wish concerning Nigeria’s future, most are likely to agree that the failed experiment of Nigeria should now be given up peacefully, and that the brutalized and suffering peoples of Nigeria should be given a chance to re-discover hope for themselves in smaller countries of their own. We have come that far.

    I also have before me a piece written by another Nigerian intellectual who writes: “It is high time we dissolved this big beast called a country”.  He adds that Chief Awolowo and his contemporaries in the 1950s “believed a big, strong and prosperous Nigeria like the emerging United States would take its rightful place on the world stage and be the pride of Africa and the black world. Instead, ever since, Nigeria has stubbornly refused to be anything other than a global disgrace. Now is the time to split the country…We want a good-bye-to-all referendum now.  And the National Conference sitting in Abuja should make itself useful by setting a date for one.  Enough is enough”.

    However, there are two big questions that people keep asking about our parting. One concerns the sharing of the huge oil revenues; and the other concerns the fact that large numbers of citizens now live beyond their ethnic homelands. Professor Abdullahi touches upon the first, and his position is that the oil does not belong to any one section of Nigeria, but to Nigeria as a whole. Significant Northern leaders have said repeatedly that it was Nigerian money that developed the Delta oil industry, and that they will go to war rather than lose the oil.

    The bottom line being suggested to the oil situation, therefore, is that if we are to be able to part peacefully, we must find a generally acceptable solution to the sharing of the oil revenues. Two years ago, a Nigerian scientist resident in the United States offered a constructive solution to this problem. His proposal is that Nigeria’s parting settlement should include a clause providing for continued sharing of the oil revenues among the new countries for an agreed number of years (five or 10 years) after the parting. Each new country would thus have an assured amount of oil revenue for a number of years as it strives to take off. For the implementation of this, an international commission, participated in by the United Nations, will be charged with the revenue receiving and sharing, for the agreed number of years. Among the pluses of this arrangement, it will bring peace to the Niger Delta oil industry – peace that it has lacked for decades.

    For the second question, the solution would have to be a cast-iron agreement and guarantee for the protection of non-indigene folks where they choose to remain in any new countries.  According to countless intellectuals who have explored this subject, no non-Yoruba folks have any reason to fear in a new Yoruba country. That is at least one plus for the future. Hopefully, other new countries will follow suit.

  • PMB: Ponder on the words of Atiku Abubakar

    Many Nigerians did not read, and most do not remember, the memo which former Vice-President Atiku Abubakar sent to the 2014 National Conference. That is a pity. I have re-read it, and I must urge all lovers of this country to read it. Coming from one of the most eminent personalities from Northern Nigeria, it deserves to be ranked as one of the most important, one of the most patriotic, documents in Nigeria’s recent history.

    In particular, President Buhari, whom we elected on his promise of CHANGE, should read this document carefully and thoughtfully, and then respond to it. He has stolidly refused to respond to the countless calls on him to consider some agenda for restructuring our federation. He cannot now continue to do so without risking the loss of his credibility. That does not mean that we do not appreciate his fight against corruption; but it does mean that his anti-corruption fight does not, and cannot, touch the roots of Nigeria’s failings as a country.  Any claim to be making change without attending to the need for properly restructuring this federation of many nations is flatly unconvincing. We who support Buhari care very much about his evolving image and heritage.

    The following are the significant sections of the Atiku memorandum. The words are entirely his – with only minor touching to save space or to highlight sections.

     

    “What We Can Agree On

    A major reason why Nigeria is not working is the way we have structured our country and governance, especially since the emergence of military rule in 1966. We can agree that the federal government is too big, too rich, and too strong relative to the federating states. We can agree that there is too much centralisation of resources and concentration of power at the federal level.

    Nigerians would not have been calling for a National Conference, sovereign or not, if we were meeting our people’s basic needs, including food, shelter, education, security, energy, and transportation infrastructure, if we were putting the country on the right path and every segment of the country feels equitably treated. And we would unlikely see people describing as a mistake the amalgamation of the northern and southern parts of Nigeria 100 years ago.

     

    Unitary Federalism

    Therefore, many of our challenges are governance issues which can be tackled by a serious government committed to uplifting our people. To me then, the National Conference should design a political and governmental system that empowers local authorities and gives them greater autonomy to address peculiar local issues, and enhances accountability, while contributing to the general good of the country.  Such a robust federal system would reduce the tensions that are built into our current over-centralised system.  While the relationships among Nigeria’s ethnic and religious groups are important, the National Conference cannot expect to create a federating structure that coheres with our ethnic identities.  Those identities are not only numerous but cross-cutting as well.

    Although our regional arrangement in the First Republic was not perfect – and did have its tensions – it certainly made for more local autonomy and better quality governance than what we have today. Our current structure, which can best be described as “unitary federalism” (a contradiction in terms), was created under our military regimes in the context of rising ethnic tensions and violence, an unfortunate civil war and the sudden rise in revenues from crude oil rents.

    As more power was concentrated in the centre, the federal government appropriated more resources and expanded its responsibilities. All of these were done in the name of promoting national unity. And the process was relatively easy as the unified command structure of the military ensured little opposition. Military governors/administrators in the states could not defend greater autonomy for their states against their commanders from the nation’s capital: they were merely on military posting.

     

    How to Fix Nigeria

    Therefore, fixing Nigeria, to me, will require reversing decades of over-centralisation of power and over-concentration of resources at the centre. That is, it requires federal retreat or a degree of retrenchment of the federal government. The features will include:

     

    1. Fiscal federalism (which allows the component states to keep their resources but allows the federal government taxing powers)
    2. Devolution of powers to states and local governments (e.g. state and local control of education, health, roads and other infrastructure)

    iii. State and local police to augment the federal police (with clearly defined roles and jurisdictions)

    1. Independence of key democratic institutions, security and anti-corruption agencies.

     

    Facts & Realities

    We need to eschew emotions and knee-jerk reactions and examine these issues critically.  As is to be expected, interests have been formed and entrenched so that calls for devolution and decentralisation (mostly from the south) have been met with very strident opposition (mostly from the north). It is as though the over-centralisation of power and concentration of resources in the federal government benefit the north more than the south. Nothing can be further from the truth. In my view, and the evidence is there for all to see, the excessive dominance of the federal government has been detrimental to the development aspirations of all sections of this country.  It is precisely why we now rely almost exclusively on oil revenues, which come mainly from a small section of the country. It is what has, by extension, killed our agriculture, local control of schools, and promoted corruption that has eroded the quality of our public and even private institutions.

    I come from the north, and I can tell you that government’s reliance on oil revenues has virtually destroyed the economy of the north, and no part of Nigeria has been left unaffected.  I readily acknowledge the role of oil revenues in expanding our infrastructure such as schools, roads and irrigation facilities. However, were oil prices to suddenly drop significantly, the country, every part of the country, will be in even more serious trouble than we are today.

    Yet this is a country which, while I was growing up, had federating units that were able to send their children to school, build roads, universities, ports, factories, farm settlements, etc.  I had all my formal education in northern Nigeria and it was the Native Authority and regional government that funded it, even paid me to go to school. Three of the first generation universities, UNN, ABU and OAU were built by the then regional governments.

    We must stop assuming that anyone calling for the restructuring of our federation is working for the breakup of the country.  And the notion that over-centralisation and an excessively powerful centre is equivalent to national unity is false.  If anything, it has made our unity more fragile and our government more unstable.  We must renegotiate our union in order to make it stronger.  Greater autonomy, power and resources for states and local authorities will unleash our people’s creative energies and spur more development. It will help with improving security. It will help give the federating units and the local governments greater freedom and flexibility to address local issues, priorities and peculiarities. It will promote healthy rivalries among the federating units and local authorities. It will help make us richer and stronger as a nation.

    Let us consider restructuring our federation on the basis of the current six geo-political zones as regions and the states as provinces.

    Let us look at our First Republic Constitution for guidance.  It is a constitution that resulted from hard bargaining among our leaders then, leaders whom no one would accuse of lacking in patriotism or developmental zeal.  Let us look at our history, for example the history of our education management and social provisioning in the First Republic and compare that with the current situation. Let us also look at other working federations around the world such as the United States, Canada, and India.  What we will learn from them is that states or provinces and local municipalities have greater autonomy over their resources, development choices, and wage structures, among other things. There is no reason for the governor of Lagos State to earn the same salary as the Governor of Kogi State or for a teacher in Mubi to earn the same salary as the one in Abuja or Port Harcourt, given the widely varying costs of living, productivity and revenue generating capacities across the country.

    In a nutshell, the national conference should produce proposals that enable us have a smaller, leaner federal government with reduced responsibilities, a tax-focused revenue base, and a true federal system with greater autonomy for the component states and localities to control their revenues and their development”.

  • The world about to end?

    Do you remember that this world was supposed to come to an end on Friday, December 21, 2012? Yes, a big noise was made about this in the months, and even the years, before that date. And even though December 21, 2012 passed like all other days, the belief that the world will soon suddenly end has remained strong.

    And believe me, a whole lot of people are still preparing for it in very many countries.  And such people are taking countless ingenious and creative steps to ensure that they and their families would survive when the end suddenly comes.  The Noah of the time of the Biblical flood received instruction from God about how he and his family should survive. The would-be Noahs of today are adopting countless survival measures, based on the enormous store of mankind’s knowledge of technology.  Being a historian by training and profession, I am attracted to watching what these folks were doing – mostly in the technologically most advanced countries of the world.  Altogether, it is an awesome spectacle of man at his smartest, his most technologically savvy, his most foolish, and his most funny.

    The Noah of the Bible received his fore-warning from God that the world in which he was living was about to be destroyed.  So, where did our own folks in today’s world get their fore-warnings from?  From an endless number of sources. Many who are Christians claim that they got their warnings from God – from some special reading of some books of the Bible. Of such Bible books, the most popular with these folks is the last book in the Bible – the book of Revelation.  Very many claim that from reading the book of Revelation, plus of course other Bible books like Daniel and Ezekiel, they have come to the very certain knowledge that the sudden end of the world is just around the corner.

    But other powerful warnings of theirs come, not from the Bible, but from certain prophecies in more recent human history. Of these, the most authoritative, according to the Doomsday believers, is the calendar created hundreds of years ago by the Mayan civilization which existed in Central America, and which became extinct at about the beginning of modern times. The evidence available to us show that the Mayan civilization was very sophisticated in many things – especially in architecture, astronomy, astrology, and the reading of the stars.  For many years now, archaeologists and anthropologists have told the world that the  Mayan calendar is so highly sophisticated that it contains  correct records and predictions  of stellar happenings dating all the way back to 23,000 BC.  They have also told the world that this mysterious Mayan calendar stopped abruptly on December 21, 2012, the day of the Winter Solstice when the Sun annually stands at its lowest altitude above the Earth.  From this, many people conclude that the Mayan calendar includes the prediction that the world would come to an abrupt end on December 21, 2012, or soon after that.

    Human imagination quickly added a flood of other “prophecies”. An ancient North America people called the Hopi had a tradition which said that five words would be created in succession and that as each perished its successor would appear; that each would exist for millions of years and then perish, for its successor to appear. This Hopi tradition claimed that four worlds have come and perished, and that the fifth world, which would be the last world, is our present world which has been in existence for many millions of years and which is now due to perish. Believers in the Doomsday prophecies quickly added this Hopi tradition to their picture – as proof that the world is about to disappear.

    But there are many other prophecies – written prophecies attributed to known authors in our modern world. The greatest of these modern prophets is Nostradamus, a Frenchman who lived in the early 16th century. Nostradamus wrote down his prophecies, and today we have books of his prophecies in libraries across the world. Those who have studied his prophecies say that he clearly prophesied the coming of Napoleon Bonaparte, Adolf Hitler, the First and Second World Wars, the assassination of President John Kennedy, and many other events in our modern world. They also say that he prophesied that the world would end through a number of cataclysmic events – such as worldwide earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, enormous wars, and fires falling from the sky. He is said to have identified Napoleon and Hitler as the first and second Antichrists spoken of in the book of Revelation; and to have prophesied the coming of the third and last Antichrist not long after Hitler.

    Not surprisingly, the Doomsday people developed very fascinating scenarios of how the world would end. Their most interesting end-point scenario is that a large piece of blazing rock – an asteroid – from space would hit the earth. According to their fascinating calculations, an asteroid measuring about one mile by one mile by one mile, if it hit the earth, is sure to hit with 10,000 times the destructive power of the greatest atomic bomb that man has ever produced. Under the impact of such a devastating force, the earth would be so massively disrupted as to bring all life on the earth to an end. Its immediate impact would destroy all houses on the earth, and incinerate most of the earth’s surface. A thick cloud of dust and smoke would envelope the earth for many years, radically changing the earth’s climate. If there were human survivors, they would be very few and scattered, and they would find themselves in a world from which all signs of human civilization has disappeared. They would have to start all over to create the basic elements of human civilization.

    And so there arose the people who call themselves Doomsday Preppers – that is, humans who are determined that if they survive, they would have some basic things with which to keep their lives going, and with which to start civilization all over again.  Believe me, these people are not kidding; they are very serious. Their preparations include many carefully thought-out measures. To be sure that if they survived they would have food and water to continue to live on until they could produce some crops, they have created underground food dumps in various locations and taught their families how to find the dumps. They included seeds in the dumps, as well as simple hand tools for scratching the earth and planting seeds. They calculated that other survivors who had no preparation and therefore no food or water might become desperate and begin to attack those who had such supplies. Therefore, a major part of each Doomsday Prepper’s preparation is to buy guns and teach his family how to use them. Many Preppers have built underground bunkers, or otherwise specially fortified homes, where they and their families would be able to live in safety until life becomes safer. Some groups have even formed companies or clubs to build large underground bunkers where small communities of survivors could live.

    Perhaps the greatest thing which demonstrates the mighty seriousness of Doomsday Prepping is an international seed dump built in the far north of Norway. Here, the inside of a mountain has been dug out to create a large frozen warehouse where millions of carefully preserved seeds from all over the world have been stored. Similar but smaller versions of this have been built in some other countries. The idea is that if Doomsday does come and everything on the earth is incinerated, the few humans who survive may find ways to take advantage of the seeds hidden in these secret warehouses.

    Well, we may laugh at these things. But, on second thoughts, we cannot but pay respect to man’s ingenuity, and man’s thoughtfulness about his future. Also, we cannot but wonder why we Nigerians – indeed why we members of the Black race in Africa – seem so unconcerned about our collective future, why we never seem to be able to make orderly preparations for our future, and why the prominent ones among us are invariably obsessed only with grabbing all power and all resources for themselves – without any concern for the group’s future? For instance, when we Nigerians came into possession of enormous revenues from petroleum, side by side with widespread predictions that petroleum was likely soon to fade out of the world economy, why did our leaders not use the revenues to prepare for our future in a serious, orderly and sustained manner? Why is such a disaster as this replicated in virtually all Black African countries? What is wrong with us as a race? Who, ultimately, are we?

  • PMB: Don’t we need to tackle these corruption pillars right away?

    President Buhari’s War on Corruption is starting a revolution in our land. Of course, most Nigerians are still sceptical, but the President’s resoluteness is gradually building trust, and even excitement. It is becoming believable that large numbers of the leading citizens of our country are likely to hear the prison doors slam behind them – for abusing our people’s trust and brutalizing our country. Panic is growing among the most influential and most powerful men and women of our land, and the euphoria of owning enormous bank accounts (and cash warehouses) of stolen public money has turned into a nightmare.

    But how can the war against corruption be possibly won if certain factors in our practice of politics remain unchanged? I refer to the use of huge amounts of money by our politicians in all aspects of politics. We have reached a point where every politician must somehow bring incredible amounts of money into politics, and spend incredible amounts on politics on a daily basis, with the assurance of earning bountiful profits therefrom. Politics is no longer about serving the people and the country; it is about money – about being able to find the money to stay in the game, and about coming out at the end with indefensibly large fortunes.

    Things were not like this before – at least, until as recently as the last years of the 1990s. When my people sent for me to come home from University College Ibadan in 1964 to stand election to become their representative in the Nigerian House of Representatives, they knew that I was only a Graduate Student and that I had no money, and indeed no assets, anywhere (besides a used Volkswagen Beetle which I was using for my Ph.D. research).Yet, when I sent back home to say that I could not face an election because I had no money, they got angry with me – and they forgave only when I went home, penitently apologized, and surrendered to their will. They said I didn’t need any money – and I hardly spent any. Yet, I was winning the final contest very grandly until the party I belonged to decided that we should boycott the election because of the massive rigging going on in some other parts of Nigeria. In 1979, I won the election to the Nigerian Senate with almost no money. In 1999, one my young close friends won election to the position of governor upon only a meagre budget. These experiences were by no means unique; they were more or less general.

    Unhappily, things have changed totally in the past 15 years. The whole electoral process has become so viciously corrupted and monetized that no politician can now win his party’s nomination without vomiting a whole fortune, and every candidate for the final contest in any election must borrow or steal enormous fortunes to be competitive at all. One of my”sons” had to borrow N450 million to win a senatorial seat. Another worked through his businessman brother to raise N700 million, mostly by borrowing, to win a senatorial seat. One father in a South-west state is said to have sold his house to help his son win his party’s gubernatorial nomination. Unfortunately, his son lost to another candidate who could wield a larger arsenal of cash. These experiences are by no means unique; they are common in virtually all parts of Nigeria.

    The typical Nigerian elected public official (at federal, state or local government level) is therefore not a public servant at all. He is a greedy, money-grubbing, money-stealing, monster. He is desperately driven by the urgency to pay the debts he contractedfor gettinginto the position he occupies – and then return home stinking rich. This is his real full-time job; his duties as a legislator or executive public official are, quite often, entirely secondary. And this is a very major pillar of Nigeria’s public corruption. It is the reason why members of the Nigerian government at all levels go to great inventiveness to find ways to get big shares of public money. It is also the reason why they must give their subordinates and officials sumptuous accesses to public money. In effect, the Nigerian president, governor or local government chairman is a coordinator and purveyor of theft and corruption. Nigerian legislators must claim a phoney “sovereignty” for the legislative body they belong to – because they need to be able to corner off much of public money for sharing among them. It is in this way that corruption became the foundation of Nigeria’s culture of governance.

    But that is not all. As the widely impoverished Nigerian populace became aware of the great wealth being stolen by their public officials, they gradually became adepts at taking some share of the stolen money. Every public official is therefore forever confronted by his constituents for money and financial support – money for basic feeding of their families, for paying children’s school fees, for paying hospital bills, for meeting funeral expenses, wedding expenses, travel expenses, ritual expenses, etc. Among the impoverished elite, most have learned to live (and even to become rich) on “dignified” handouts by public officials. As for the impoverished masses of the people, there is no time or place for dignity – and their demands for money from their public officials can often be quite brutal. A local party dignitary forced his legislator to buy him a used car; four weeks later, he was furiously angry with the legislator – because the legislator had meanwhile not given him any money for four weeks! It is that brutish.

    Still, that is not all. Political meetings are the main vehicle of the democratic political process, and such meetings are supposed to be gatherings of independent citizens coming together to consider the affairs of their groups or parties, communities, districts, states or country. But in the sickening slush that Nigerian politics has become, political meetings have become big money affairs. The party or leader or representative that calls a meeting must now put up enormous amounts of money to underwrite it – in various handouts to each person who comes: travelling money, feeding money, lodging money (if the meeting spills from one day to the next), pocket money to return home with. Nigeria hardly ever experiences today the kind of political meetings that my generation of political activists knew –gatherings of independent and self-supporting citizens, proudly coming to hear, express their minds, and contribute. Even the smallest political meeting of today demands a mighty budget and puts a big financial burden on the politicians.

    So, each politician or elected public official spins constantly in a whirlwind of frenetic material and financial demands and, therefore, his need for stolen public money becomes larger and larger and more and more pressing. It is to be wondered how our present legislators are coping with the changed situation being created by the Buhari War on Corruption. These men and women entered, as usual, into huge debts to win elections in 2014 -15, hoping to have access as usual to vast amounts of stolen public money. But now the Buhari revolution is frightening people away from stealing and sharing public money. How will these men and women fare?

    In summary, the Buhari presidency must delve right-away into this problem of political monetization with a view to curbing it. Otherwise, it will be impossible to carry through with the War on Corruption. In many countries, there are laws controlling and limiting electoral expenses, and laws making it compulsory for electoral candidates to disclose to the electoral officials the money they have raised for elections (and the givers) as well as the accounts of their electoral expenses. In many countries also, the amount of money anybody can give to a politician or public official, or to an electoral candidate, is stated under the law. And in many countries, it is a crime for an electoral candidate to give any money or gift to potential voters. I am not necessarily advocating any particular law. All I say is that we cannot possibly leave our present situation unchanged while claiming to be fighting a War on Corruption. President Buhari needs, urgently, to act about these realities.

  • Nigeria and petroleum

    From all indications worldwide, the era of the petroleum boom is over. The era started in the opening years of the last century, the years of the great discoveries that have shaped the modern world – namely electricity (and its applications in lighting, radio, television and, ultimately, the computer), the internal combustion engine (and its applications in automobiles, trains, aeroplanes, power-driven ships, power-driven production machines, etc), various chemicals, and others. Petroleum was discovered as the best source of fuel for the internal combustion engine, and it rapidly became a very huge factor in the economy of the world. Countries that could produce the crude oil found themselves awash in cash.  Nigeria joined this highly favoured league of countries gradually in the years after Nigeria’s 1960 independence. By the 1990s, Nigeria was one of the leaders of the league.

    Even in the most euphoric years of the petroleum boom, there were always voices warning that the boom was not likely to last long. Some geologists thought that the amount of oil below the surface of the earth was finite – and that there would, someday, probably soon, be no oil left to mine.  At the same time, developments in technology increasingly indicated that alternative sources of energy would soon begin to compete with petroleum – and might soon knock petroleum from its throne as the world’s king of energy sources. Almost daily, there have been, throughout the past many decades, bigger and bigger news of the growth of these alternative sources of energy – solar, wind, new applications of electricity, super-batteries, etc. In various countries, engineers, inventors, entrepreneurs and businesses have been hurrying to take advantage of the changing paradigm. In country after country, leaders and policy makers took steps to re-align their countries’ economies to these growing changes.

    But, unfortunately, the rulers and policy makers of our country, Nigeria, did not respond to the changes. They were so overwhelmed by the enormous wealth coming from crude oil that hey continued to build everything on the hope in crude oil. Those who controlled the power of the Federal Government resolved to themselves that they only must control the crude oil and all its in-flowing ocean of cash. From that they soon arrived at the decision that the Federal Government must control all resources – minerals, coastlands, lands along rivers, Value-added Taxes, and even the management of the exports of agricultural products such as cocoa, groundnuts, palm produces, gum Arabic, etc.  Gradually, federal power inculcated inefficiency into the management of all these resources. Nigeria almost totally disappeared as an exporter of some of these agricultural products. Our farmers who used to earn fairly good incomes from their produce became widely pauperized.  To be able to accumulate all these resource control at the federal centre, our federal rulers gradually created smaller states (and without any real principles), so that the states would be impotent entities amenable to federal control and manipulation. State and local initiative and energy in development declined sharply, and poverty became the lot of most Nigerians. Meanwhile, the endless ocean of cash in the control of the federal rulers became an object of greed and rapacity, and our country became the victim of perhaps the world’s most vicious culture of public corruption.

    The outcome now is that the coming of the long-prophesied end to the petroleum bonanza has found our country in a terrible situation. Our present rulers find themselves in conditions that nobody could have imagined only a few years ago. The price of oil has declined from over $110.00 per barrel to about $30 in only one year. Worse still, various conditions in the world oil market are edging the Nigerian oil out of the market. The leading buyers of Nigerian oil are no longer buying our oil, and the ones that replaced them for some time are also moving away now.  Even when we offer to sell at discounted prices, we are not succeeding in getting reliable buyers. It is rumoured that even our federal ministers are not being paid their basic salaries and allowances, and that funds for the implementation of ministerial duties are simply not available.  The drastic decline in foreign exchange earning is forcing our Naira to decline incredibly, and this is causing food prices and other prices to rise dangerously in our marketplaces. Altogether, we have created the conditions that appear now to be likely to push our country into very serious problems.

    When one looks at this whole situation, one must wonder about our rulers. Is it that they have been incapable of seeing what the rest of the world has been seeing in the petroleum economy in the world? Or is it that they saw it but just didn’t have the innate ability, or the basic love of their country, to respond as needed? As this problem has approached closer and closer, how have our leaders been able to give most of their time to stealing and stowing away the large amounts of money that we have been reading about in the press in the past few weeks?  On the whole, what kind of country is ours?

    There is a small desert emirate named Dubai in the Middle East. Like most parts of the Middle East, Dubai is rich in oil. When their oil bonanza began to reach a peak in the 1970s, their rulers were, of course, elated about the new oil wealth, but they were also mindful about what informed voices were predicting about petroleum in the world – namely, that the petroleum boom was not likely to last very long in Dubai. And so they paid attention, and began to evolve policies – policies that would use the oil money to build Dubai into a rich land that would still be wealthy and strong after the oil boom would have ended. Looking at the oil boom and the predictions, their foremost leader of the time, Sheik Rashid Al Makhtoum, is said to have made the following strange statement: “My grandfather rode a camel. My father rode a camel. I drive a Mercedes. My son drives a Land Rover. His son will drive a Land Rover. But his son will ride a camel”. What he was saying is that in the traditionally poor landof Dubai where his forebears had ridden camels, the oil boom was making it possible for him and his son to ride sophisticated cars. It might also make it possible for his grandson to ride similar cars.  But if Dubai’s rulers did not use the oil money sensibly to build a prosperous Dubai, the oil boom would end and his descendants would return to riding camels.

    Al Makhtoum saw the oil wealth as a brief blessing that would soon end; but that could be used to build a Dubai that would be rich for a long time in the future. In contrast, Nigerian rulers saw the oil money as a tool to make themselves rich now, while leaving Nigeria unchanged. What would happen to Nigeria after the oil boom has not concerned them. The difference is staggering. Dubai’s leaders designed programmes that would use the oil money to make Dubai rich in tourism, shipping, mass communications, and finance. Today, Dubai is a glowing gem of the earth, and folks from all over the world want to go there for one reason or another. Nigeria is the quintessentially poor country and, for the most part, Nigerians are the proverbial “wretched of the earth”.

  • Corruption: Questions for President Buhari

    When President Buhari started the war against corruption, he started a worthy struggle, a direction that our country desperately needs. His prosecution of that war is still commendable as far as it goes. But there are already potent indications that this war may soon plunge into some sort of confusion.

    Already, from some of our eminent voices, as well as from the mostly unheard voices of the masses of our people, troubling questions are being asked about the agenda. Some days ago, one of our country’s most respected Christian leaders proposed that the war against corruption should end simply with the recovery of stolen public money. He suggested that once the thief has surrendered his loot, our government and law enforcement agencies should do nothing further against him – indeed that he should be left alone. The implication of this is that recovery of stolen public money is the end purpose of the whole war. But very many citizens are wondering whether this is right.  What about our laws? Are we now maneuvering ourselves into a new culture – one more destructive than the culture of corruption, a culture in which our country’s laws will become negotiable. If a Nigerian be accused of a crime, will it become sufficient for him to send influential relatives and friends to beg the rulers of the land or make some retribution which the rulers arbitrarily deem acceptable? Is this the future we are striving towards? A sort of primitive ‘pre-law’ society?

    A few days ago also, another eminent Nigerian, former President Olusegun Obasanjo, proposed in the course of a public discourse that President Buhari should start the war on corruption from the highest level – that is from the presidency itself. Apparently, he was not thinking of asking anything other than that the probes should start from Buhari’s own presidency. It would appear also that he did not think that his question could have wider ramifications. To his surprise, someone in the audience asked him whether he meant that the probes should extend all the way back to the Obasanjo presidency. The former president sidestepped the question in his response and preferred only to remind his audience that it was he who had created the legal instruments that are now being used by President Buhari to fight corruption. In that, he is right; but most Nigerians would still want to ask him if it would be right to limit the probes only to the present.

    Nigerians know that the era of unrestrained public corruption in our country started in 1966, or at the latest, 1979. The big question is this: Can we really destroy the culture of corruption if we deal with the thieves of the past six years only and leave those of earlier years to luxuriate in their loot? Moreover, is this a war against federal level corruption only or will it also take on functionaries of state and local governments also? And then there is an overarching question: Can we really be said to be killing corruption if we are doing it only amongst the highest public officials only? What about the deep roots that corruption has dug into other levels of our society? Afterall, no nook or cranny appears to have escaped the scourge! Are we going to do something about senior civil servants who regularly take bribes from folks seeking civil service jobs? Or those who dream up phantom contracts, award them to phantom contractors and pay the contractors for the phantom completion of the jobs? How about university officials who take bribes to manipulate university admissions, or those lecturers who coerce their students to buy shoddy handouts or give various types of gifts as a condition of passing the examinations? What shall we do about the rampant passing of bribes at all levels of public service, customs service, immigration service, passport office, driver licensing offices, land administration offices, etcetera? How about the rampant practice of bank employees stealing from their employers and customers? Or the general fear of Nigerian employers about the tendency of Nigerian employees to cheat and steal? For that matter, will we do anything about the perpetual rumour that church officials also steal from church coffers? The list is endless!

    In short, how far do we, as represented by the Buhari presidency, intend to go with this war on corruption? These questions are now emerging because not much is being told us Nigerian citizens by our government. All we hear is a constant stream of stories of mind-boggling amounts of loot that has been detected and sometimes huge amounts that have been returned by the thieves. The president has started the most important war in our country’s history – a war for which he deserves our commendation. But he is not talking to us as he should about it. Perhaps it is his military background that predisposes him to believe that his government can fight this overwhelming war alone. He needs to consider that he may be wrong. This is a war that all Nigerians are mightily interested in. We want it to be won. We have all had enough. We therefore want to understand what is happening in this great war. We want to be able to help in whatever small or large way we can. We know there are powerful forces hiding in the shadows, waiting for an opportune moment to wage a counter-offensive. We perceive the rumblings of corruption’s fight back already. President Buhari will need us, the masses of common Nigerians, to resist that counter-offensive. He needs to prepare us accordingly. He must begin to do that now. He must leverage all the authority of the presidency to do so. This is a war for all Nigerians who love their country and want her to become prosperous and respectable. We are in a fight for the very soul of our nation. Those who seek to keep corruption alive and well are akin to vampires who care nothing for their victims but seek only to suck the very lifeblood out of her. President Buhari has begun the rescue of Nigeria from those predators who would bleed her dry and indeed have been doing so for decades. Many hands they say, make light work. Not that this work could ever be light. But it can be made lighter by the participation of millions of willing Nigerians. President Buhari must harness their involvement. Ultimately, this great war will only be won when most of us citizens accept the mantle of ‘corruption fighter’. When love for country supersedes desire for convenience. When we return to the days when dishonesty carried a stigma and thieves were shunned by decent, upright citizens. Then and only then, will we win this war on corruption.

  • Presidential or parliamentary system: Which is better for Nigeria?

    There is a subject which is very crucial to the well-being of Nigeria, but which we Nigerians never give the seriousness it deserves. I refer to the question whether our country should be governed under a presidential or parliamentary system. From time to time, someone raises this question and a few other citizens respond to him, but then the debate quickly dies down. Yet, as a citizen with experience of Nigerian politics and government since the 1950s, I cannot get rid of the feeling that we will, someday, have to resolve this question quite definitively.

    We Nigerians have experienced two different systems of government since our country began to have a constitution in the early 1950s. We started off in 1952 with the British Parliamentary System. In this system, the members of parliament were elected by us citizens at the General Elections. From 1952 to 1966, we had a total of five parliaments, that is, a federal parliament, and a regional parliament for each of our four regions – East, North, West and Midwest.On the floor of each parliament, the parliamentarians then elected the Prime Minister (in the case of the Federal Parliament), or Premier (in the case of each Regional House of Assembly). The Prime Minister or Premier then nominates his ministers for his colleagues in parliament to accept.

    In this system, a minister is responsible for the management of his ministry, the council of ministers is jointly responsible for the direction of affairs, and the chief executive (Prime Minister or Premier) is just first among equals. The council of ministers considers and approves the plans and programmes of ministers, and ensures the place and harmony of such plans and programmes in the over-all direction of the government.  Each minister presents and defends his plans and programmes (that have been approved by the council of ministers) on the floor of parliament, usually with additional backing by the Prime Minister or Premier.

    The Prime Minister or Premier, as well as the ministers, are responsible for making programmes and plans acceptable to the legislature, and are usually subjected to questioning by the legislators trying to satisfy themselves before giving approval. The Prime Minister, the premiers, and the ministers are also responsible for presenting the reports of the executive government to the legislature. To ensure success in parliament, the Prime Minister or Premier and his ministers must keep their party members in parliament well informed about, and satisfied with, their plans and programmes. On the whole, this is a system characterized by joint responsibilities, systemic accountability, copious informing and persuading. In such a system, the Prime Minister or Premier was very far from being a “Sole Ruler”, and could not easily give vent to his whims and caprices.

    But in the 1970s, under the thick shadow of military rulers and heavy influence of military rule, Nigeria’s leaders gathered in Lagos and chose the American Presidential System for our country. We did not know the nuances and possible pitfalls of this system then; but now we know them – and they are many and serious. For one thing, the presidential system makes the political process, with countrywide presidential elections and statewide gubernatorial elections and senatorial elections, far too expensive. No Nigerian who (like me) has taken part in the system, who has been through its heavy expenses and usually heavy debts, can deny that these enormously expensive elections have been a major factor in the boosting of corruption in our country’s political life.

    For another, the system concentrates power and responsibilities too heavily in the hands of the President or Governor. It has had the effect of turning our presidents and governors into virtual autocrats, their colleagues in the executive arm of government into mere waiters-on, and our legislators into glorified outsiders. Some Nigerian intellectuals have just completed a joint book in which they have pooled together their various and widespread studies of the steadily growing impotence of legislatures, the growing dictatorial tendencies of presidents and governors, and the enormous influence of the whims and caprices of presidents and governors in our governmental system. Because presidents and governors tend to view their administrations as their exclusive personal mandates, our country has been sustaining heavy financial losses through poorly digested, unreasonably chosen, and inadequately discussed programmes and projects, through presidents’ and governors’ tendency to insist on having their own ways in the making of government policies, and through thoughtless abandonment of programmes and projects initiated by predecessors.

    Furthermore, the system has made the position of president or governor so insanely desirable to our politicians, that the quest for it has become a major source of conflicts and confusion in our political system. And finally, on the whole, the system has contributed greatly to the destruction of the professional quality of our civil service and bureaucrats – and this has been a major factor in the general decline of the quality of governance in our country.

    This concentration of power in the hands of chief executives has proved culturally difficult for some Nigerian peoples to live happily with. Left to choose their own system of government, there are Nigerian nationalities that would hardly ever choose the presidential system – peoples (like my own Yoruba nation) who are used, in their history and political traditions, to shared responsibilities, mutual respect, and accountability, among the rulers of society.

    The generally arrogant and thoughtless directions given since the 1960s to the ordering of the governance of our country have dragged our country down in many directions. It is my considered opinion that the choice of the presidential system has been one of the worst steps we have ever taken, and I humbly propose that Nigeria should return to the parliamentary system.

    However, if any state in our federation chooses to run its affairs by a presidential system, it should be free to do so. The fundamental philosophy behind the whole idea of a federation is acceptance of, and respect for, difference. For some historic reason, a number of nations, living in their different homelands, find themselves joined together as one country, sharing one sovereignty.  To be able to relate to one another harmoniously, they evolve a federal system of government – in which each nation governs itself in its own way, in the general context of their whole country. There are variations in system among the states of the United States of America, the states of the Indian Union, and the cantons of the Swiss Federation. Even in such a minor particular as traffic regulations, there are differences from state to state in the United States of America.

    In the matter of mode of government, there might be differences in the ways in which our states would design their constitutions. For instance, even if there continue to be a president in Abuja and governors in some states, I seriously doubt that we Yoruba will ever have governors if we are allowed to choose our own system of government. For years now, we have seen what governors look like – and the general Yoruba opinion is that being ruled by governors is quite ugly. It is not so much our men that are ruling in this ugly way, it is the system that is ugly and warped in nature. We Yoruba as a people throughout our history have been very good at structuring and managing the principle of balance of powers in government in order to prevent the abuse of power. We would rather be ruled by a council of ministers, in which a Premier is only first among equals, in which each minister or commissioner bears definite responsibilities, and in which all are members of our elected legislatures and are responsible, on a daily basis, to our legislatures. That’s the kind of people we are. That is the kind of system charted for us by our political history and culture. And that is the kind of system I would strongly recommend for our country.