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Category: Jide Osuntokun

The Senegalese democratic revolution

Senegal has always been French’s demonstration of colonial success in West Africa. During the First World War, the French in 1917 made the Senegalese Blaize Diagne a member of the French Republic’s cabinet in charge of recruitment of troops from the French Colonial Empire particularly in Africa. This would have been inconceivable to British authorities. This was to indicate that metropolitan French people and the people in the French empire had equal rights and responsibilities as expected from the French colonial policy of assimilation of all colonised people into the French culture and civilization. Even though most of these troops came from outside Senegal, they were all called “Tirailleurs Senegalais”. The number of them who fought in the war against the Germans on the Western Front was close to about a quarter of a million. The impact on them and their suffering is captured in the anti-war novel by Erich Maria Remarque entitled in German Im Western nichts Neues translated as All quiet on the Western Front and published in 1929. The suffering of these black troops is vividly captured by their portrayal of being so cold that they smoked ceaselessly and the ember of their cigarettes provided easy targets for sharp shooting troops on the German side.

The point I am trying to make is Senegal of all colonial territories occupied a special place on French minds. Until after the Second World War L’Afrique Occidentale Francaise (French West Africa) was administered from Dakar the capital of Senegal until local politicians in some places such as the Ivory Coast began to resent this fact. Senegal itself was not economically viable and it depended on the resources of the other French West African territories particularly the Ivory Coast to survive. It depended on groundnuts exports and its climate was too hot to permit the kind of crops on which France’s other colonies thrived. The few colonial administrators and merchant class and the petite bourgeoisie in Senegal were not large enough for the French policy of assimilation to have the expected impact because the vast majority of the peasants were outside the loop of French cultural influence of assimilation. Nevertheless the critical mass of the assimilated educated people were almost always loyal to the French and separating from France was totally outside their considerations.

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When French West Africa was dissolved to permit local development, the economy of Senegal depended largely on subsidies from France and this largely influenced the politics of Senegal before and after independence.

The father of independent Senegal, Leopold Sedar Senghor (1960-1980) had served in the French post Second World War government that he was given the assignment of writing in prose the Fifth Republican constitution. He was so good with the French language that he was honoured with elevation to the French Academy, the first African to be made a member of the L’Academie Francaise. Leopold Sedar Senghor was so totally absorbed with the French culture that when the likes of Sekou Toure of Guinea and his colleague Modibo Keita of Mali advocated in the 1960s for colonial independence from France, Leopold Senghor wanted a policy of “Association” with France. In short, he managed to put Senegal on a conservative path that the Senegalese presidents who came after him toed the French line in international and African affairs with Francophone economic and military dependence on France including stationing of French troops on African territory and keeping of Franco African reserves in Paris and having currency that was tied to the French Franc. His successors Abdou Diouf (1981- 2000) Abdoulaye Wade ( 2000-2012) Macky Sall (2012-2024) did nothing to upset the apple cat of subjugation to France even when they claimed to be one kind of socialist or the other and when the French president, General Charles de Gaulle was testing atomic bombs in the Sahara, even Leopold Senghor who was a brilliant but complicated politician ,poet and philosopher, refused to completely champion African interests. This is particularly so in his involvement with the negritude movement which celebrated things black particularly culture without drawing the conclusion of the absurdity of black subordination to whites economically and politically.

Senghor’s contribution to the negritude movement started by Aime Fernand David Cesaire from Martinique in the French Caribbean, Leon – Gontran Damas and himself was a complex idea of separating politics and culture and the discrimination against black peoples while glorifying things black without pointing out genocide against African culture being wiped out to be replaced by French culture through the colonial policy of assimilation. Restricting negritude only to cultural life and not the politics of France in the 1930s and after was not embraced by admirers of the idea of negritude because followers later drew their conclusions despite what the likes of Senghor felt. This long preamble is to put in context the politics of Senegal now.

The present politics of Senegal illustrates the sharp turn from those unabashedly subservient to France and those who feel they have to break free from the past. Even though President Macky Sall struggled through the tempestuous period of his presidency against opponents and even those in the camp of Abodoulay Wade, President Macky Sall wanted his supporters to remain in power and used every trick in the game to support his prime minister Amadou Ba was the government party candidate but the people especially young people led by Bassirou Diomaye Faye (44) and his alter ego, Ousmane Sanko (47) were in prison for months while Bassirou Faye was released a few weeks from the prison to contest the recent election that made him president; his boss Ousmane Sonko, barred from contesting and promptly threw his support for Bassirou Faye his lieutenant who was also supported by ex-President Abdoulaye Wade in the several times postponed elections . The new president who has now appointed from prison, Ousmane Sanko as prime minister has demonstrated the unity of direction of the new democratic revolution. The prime minister has appointed a cabinet of young people to tackle 20% unemployment problem facing the country. This new regime of Bassirou and Ousmane has emphasised a cultural departure from previous presidency by showing off in dress and culture by embracing even personal things like the young president having and publicly showing off his two wives .The country is also on the cusp of becoming energy sufficient producing its own gas and petroleum and publicly calling on France to stop meddling in African affairs almost echoing what leaders of Niger, Mali , Guinea and Burkina Faso have been saying under their new military regimes.

What is happening in democratic Senegal is a lesson from which the whole of West Africa can learn from. We cannot remain static in the way we do things and expect different results. We must embrace our youth and listen to them because the future belongs to them. We need to be united in a racially polarised world and be inward looking in order to solve our problems and to resolve our ethnic and religious differences. Senegal is luckier than many other African countries in the sense that it is ethnically united despite the years of rebellion of the people in Casamance against the central government. For all of us in West Africa and Africa as a whole we have more in common than what separates us. Senegalese democracy is well established moving from governing party to opposition winning elections. Senegal and Ghana remain the flag bearer for democracy in West Africa and Africa as a whole .We can only wish Senegal under its two new leaders success and warn them of outsiders trying to sow a seed of discord between them emphasizing what may ideologically separate them.

April 11, 2024
Ibadan and urban renewal

Ibadan is an historic city founded around 1830 by migrants particularly Oyo migrants after the collapse of the Oyo Empire in the 1820s because of internal problems and external attacks from jihadists who were Muslims of Fulani, Hausa, Nupe and Oyo origin and in many cases led by Yoruba Muslims and political malcontents whose ambition trumped group interests. Other migrants came to Ibadan as a result of the Owu wars precipitated by the attack on the Owu kingdom by the Ife and Ijebu between 1821 and 1826.

The Owu kingdom had through ambition tried to overwhelm its neighbours the commercial town of Apomu from 1812 which had probably received Oyo’s clandestine support precipitating almost a century of internecine wars in Yorubaland in which various sub ethnic groups tried to resolve the question of Oyo imperialism in Yorubaland against independence of various sub ethic groups like the Ife, Igbomina, Ijesha, Ekiti, Akoko, Egba, while the Ijebu and Ondo were marginally touched by the various wars. In the process, new centres of power such as the new Ibadan republican imperium replacing the Oyo Empire and rising on its ashes to become a formidable force in Yoruba land. Others like the Ilorin in the northern part of the Oyo Empire formed a new centre of power with Islam providing cement unifying the Ilorin Kingdom later becoming an emirate on the lands of the northern half of Igbomina, the Ibolo, the Erin, northern Ekiti and other northern Yoruba groups.

It is a complex story which has been expertly dealt with by people more versed in Yoruba history than myself like the late professors, J. Ade-Ajayi, Adeagbo Akinjogbin, Emmanuel Ayankanmi Ayandele, J. A Atanda , and professors Banji Akintoye, Tony Ijaola Asiwaju who are very much alive and before all of them, the venerable Samuel Johnson whose history of the Yoruba blazed the trail. The Yoruba people are the most studied and written about in the whole of Africa.

I thought I could write a short preamble to this piece on Ibadan without going too much into Yoruba history but alas, I still have to say something because the past foreshadows the future. Suffice it to say that Ibadan is the child of Yoruba history and it came from the crucible of the Yoruba internecine wars which actually began 1797 with Oyo/Owu attack on Apomu and terminated with the British defeat of Ilorin in 1897 when it was defeated to end the armed interregnum between Ilorin and Ibadan .

Ibadan‘s cosmopolitanism is epitomised by the fact that its first Bashorun was Lagelu, a warrior from Ile Ife. Ibadan has grown without the benefit of physical planning from the 19th century to the present. The few attempts to impose some kind of planning on the town in the 1950s by building the Bodija Estate was like a drop of water in the mighty ocean. There has been one or two estates at the outskirts of Ibadan but they have been too little and too late. The main sprawling city, a conurbation without industries, has remained a collection of settlements and villages linked together and competing with each other and only linked together by culture but with each lineage with having its own different histories.

In this disparate origin and growth lies Ibadan’s strength. It welcomes all and sundry while expanding in all directions sharing boundaries with Egbaland and Ijebuland and culturally related Iwo, Oshogbo, Ife and Ede and Owu territories. Originally where Ibadan is today was part of Egba territory. The cosmopolitan origins and growth of Ibadan has been limited to Yoruba peoples and non-Yoruba groups though existing within the confines of the city are infinitesimally few. There has never been any argument about who owns Ibadan and ownership of Ibadan has largely been domiciled within the numerically superior Oyo/Owu group of its founders.

Today, Ibadan remains the largest city in tropical Africa followed by Lagos, Kano and Ogbomosho. Political enumerators may say something different sometimes saying Lagos and even Kano are larger and more numerous than Ibadan but objective observers know the truth. Yes Lagos may have more people crowded in its small territory but Ibadan remains the largest city in Nigeria and one can drive for fifty miles within Ibadan. This size has been a hindrance to its development. When it was the capital of the entire Western Region stretching from Ikeja to Warri, there were enormous resources to redevelop it but the government of the day had more things to struggle with such as universal education, health and social welfare and besides, Ibadan was the centre of the NCNC opposition to the ACTION GROUP government from 1951 to 1960 so there was no incentive for massive redevelopment of Ibadan apart from building the Bodija Estate and expanding the various GRAs (Government Reservation Areas).

Since 1963, the resources that fed Ibadan has dwindled and now Ibadan is the mere capital of Oyo State while Lagos, Ogun, Osun, Ondo and Ekiti states now have their own capitals in Ikeja, Abeokuta, Oshogbo, Akure and Ado-Ekiti to cope with. Despite this fact, Ibadan remains the cultural capital and second home of great number of the Yoruba elite outside Lagos. This means we all have a stake in its development and quite a substantial number have property in the city.

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This writer is an Ekiti man by birth but an Ibadan man by domicile. Some members of my family have been in Ibadan attending the government college since 1940 while I was in the grammar school for my HSC in 1961 and 1962 and the University of Ibadan in 1963. A member of my family built the Bodija Housing Estate. I say all this to show I am not just a “Johnny just come” to Ibadan, I am as good as a “son of the soil”. I have therefore a stake in the health and prosperity of Ibadan.

Ibadan today is the capital of Oyo State. The city has I think 16 Local Government Administrations (LGAs). If the resources are well managed, there is no reason why the roads today should be so ragged and poorly maintained. Road maintenance is neither neuro-science nor rocket science that we need to go and import experts to help us. Lagos has always maintained its road without resort to foreign expertise. When jobs are given to Julius Berger Construction Company, the job is done by Nigerian artisans.

It is true that Lagos has more money than Oyo. Yes this is true and this is because they are more ingenious than Oyo. Thank God, Oyo is now trying to collect “Land Use Charge”. I suggested this to the Oyo government more than 20 years ago when Lagos introduced the measure. Introducing it now is too late and too little. With the suffering in the land, this is not the time to impose new levies and new taxes. Yet Ibadan, Ogbomosho and Oyo city roads and others must be maintained. Government just have to find the money to do the job. The disillusionment with our government is so pervasive that anything that can be done to raise our spirits is in the right direction. Driving out of our homes and returning home on moon craters like roads are very dispiriting. There are so many things that make people unhappy in Nigeria of today. Our money is almost worthless; we have no pipe borne water, no electricity, no roads, no security, no health facilities, no security, no food, no sense of purpose, and no financial security. Please let our city roads be mended. The cost of tyres is sky high and all of us car owners and commercial travellers and even pedestrians need good roads. Kidnapping gangs wait for their quarries at the bad portions of the roads to grab people.

There are a million and other reasons why roads maintenance is important. Let Oyo State government come to Ibadan and help us. Government is about people. It exists for the happiness of the majority of the people. If it cannot do this, it ceases to be a government and the people have a right to look elsewhere.

April 4, 2024
Inauguration of Academy of International Affairs

After months of existence the Academy of International Affairs (Nigeria) was inaugurated in the Rotunda of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Abuja on the morning of Monday, March 25 in a ceremony chaired by the amiable General Yakubu Gowon, former head of state of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. The academy is the brain child of Akinwande Bolaji Akinyemi, professor of political science, former Director-General of the Institute of International Relations and better known as former foreign minister under the military president of General Ibrahim Babangida in the 1980s.

Professor Akinyemi is most remembered for his innovation in the foreign ministry especially for his policy of sending young Nigerian professionals under the Technical Aid Corps Scheme (TACS) to assist needy countries in Africa and the developing world, a rather ambitious scheme which the country in these days of scarce resources is finding difficult to fund. He also tried to suggest Nigeria’s membership in a new organisation of what was called “Concert of Medium Powers” more or less some watered down replacement of the then moribund Non-Aligned Movement. This suggestion was laughed out of court by people who felt Nigeria because of its apparent successes in championing the liberation cause in Southern Africa was beginning to punch above its weight internationally.

Even from this short preamble in this piece, my readers can imagine the debate we have in the academy on issues that are already settled! That’s the nature of academia. Professor Akinyemi boiled in the argumentative tradition of academia and the executive tradition of political headship of a bureaucratic department is well suited to his role as president. Some of our originating membership have left; new members have been invited to join while some of our nominees did not receive approval. Whatever the case may be the academy has evolved from our collective efforts. The academy as presently constituted is made up of academics in the fields of international relations, politics, diplomatic history, international law and diplomacy, economics and retired ambassadors with advanced degrees and service in international institutions and posting to international missions, some former ministers and military generals with peace-keeping experience. Membership will definitely grow in the future as the academy settles down in its work of clinically looking at the operations of Nigerian foreign policy and how it can be improved. This academy is strictly speaking, an academy, independent of government and it will as it goes on, criticise the government, applaud it and make solicited or unsolicited suggestions when the occasion arises.

I say this to clear the fog of some people thinking it is another government institution since it was launched in the rotunda of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It will also through lectures and symposiums raise issues that may be relevant to the overall development of our country. This will not be restricted to issues of foreign policy alone, but to the overall economic development of the country knowing very well the interconnected nature of foreign policy with domestic political and economic development.

As if to signal its future direction, it invited a distinguished Nigerian professor, Okechukwu (Okey ) Oramah, CON, the managing director and chairman of the Board of Directors, African Import-Export Bank (Afreximbank) to give a lecture titled – The “AfCFTA Natural Resources And Development Capital Formation In Africa”. The lecture had a serious impression on the audience which included representatives of the presidency and a statement from the vice president’s office said that the lecture will be subjected to clinical analysis for its possible inclusion in the various ingredients going into government economic policies.

The cursory impression on me even before close reading is that the professor is suggesting that the failure of Africa’s development is due to scarce capital and over dependence on foreign capital and that the solution is to rapidly build up capital using our natural resources both agricultural and mineral which can then be deployed for the various development projects particularly building of physical infrastructure without which we cannot develop. This suggestion is not totally new but there is a counter political suggestion of using all available resources and other peoples’ resources such as loans to build up enough capital for investment.

I agree with Professor Oramah’s suggestion because our political and economic leaders in the past were not totally committed to national development. When in 1983, I suggested in a public lecture by our then vice president, Dr Alex Ekwueme that Nigeria should borrow a leaf from the book of the government of the oil-producing Canadian province of Alberta by setting apart a portion of its oil proceeds as Sovereign Investment Funds for future on the basis that no one generation should expend all the resources of the country, our vice president angrily retorted that the policy being suggested by me had no practical application in Nigeria that was in a hurry to develop. There is now a sovereign investment funds which came too little too late in 2011 or thereabouts when Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala was finance minister.

The inauguration of the Academy of International Affairs Nigeria will be remembered for the personal comments and remembrances of General Gowon and his clerical Protestant Anglican root and how this connected him and Professor Akinyemi and his family and how religion has been a cement binding people of different ethnicity and region in Nigeria. Thank God for modern technology because those of us who were not in Abuja but are members were surprisingly asked to say a few words. Since I was not told beforehand, I mumbled a few words of gratitude to Professor Akinyemi, General Gowon who as Head of State ordered all university teachers who were on strike to pack out of university houses and rented accommodation. I was a lecturer in the University of Lagos then. This led to senior university staff’s decision to build their own homes outside the universities.

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My brother Kayode of blessed memory was one of them. If I was told before, I would have told him how others and myself carried the torch of higher education to Plateau State when we were part of the staff of the University of Ibadan, Jos Campus thus opening up the minority areas of Nigeria to higher education with no personal benefit but the reward of being pioneers.

Let me end this piece by saying serving in the Ministry of Foreign affairs at least in the past when we were engaged in helping in the liberation of Southern Africa was not a piece of cake. It came with considerable danger of possible assassination, sabotaged aircrafts by agents of South Africa, Portugal and Rhodesia and their Western sponsors. Some of us have personal stories to tell.

March 28, 2024
NASS leadership and plight of Nigerians

The dispute about how much parliamentarians particularly in the Senate are paid as constituency allowances gave some of us observers cause for worry. The amount of billions of Naira each MP gets, if true, demonstrates either insensitivity or outright irresponsibility. If true in a country where the monthly minimum wage is a mere N35,000, it amounts to dangling a red flag before a raging bull. Is it surprising that a few days after the revelation have witnessed a spate of strikes in our higher institutions apparently because the staff there feels if there was this kind of money in the country they should also share in the booty.

The parliamentarians earlier on at the beginning of the session bought themselves each expensive four wheelers some of them armoured at humongous cost to the Nigerian exchequer. There is also the accusation that the 2004 budget has been padded by up to N3.4 trillion. This is at a time when it seems the country is apparently bankrupt merely surviving by printing paper money that has brought the Naira so down that those who had saved money all their lives are finding out that their savings have been reduced to outright nothingness.

Is the way the government is spending money the way we are going to get out of our economic mess? This is at a time when the inflation is well over 25% and when the Naira is virtually worth nothing internationally. There must be a rational reason for our parliament to be behaving as if it wants to bring the roof down on our heads. Perhaps this raises the issue of our expensive presidential system of almost absolute separation of powers, giving each branch the power and licence to run parallel budgets irrespective of our dire economic straits. We have now discovered that this American system we are currently copying is totally inappropriate for our economy. This is why the parliamentary system is most appropriate because if we had a parliamentary system, we would hold the prime minister responsible for the spendthrift propensity of our parliament but in our current system we cannot hold the president responsible because he is not in control of the Senate and House of Representatives.

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If we were to allow our people to decide our form of government, I have a feeling they will abolish the Senate and reduce the size of the House of Representatives by half and membership would be on part-time basis while the size of the executive would be radically reduced. Government is about people; they cannot be wallowing in poverty while their governing elite are stuffing themselves with Naira. What are the people getting from a bloated government in which salaries of officials are totally unrelated to the economic reality of the country?

If Nigeria were the UAE or Kuwait or Singapore and our country was working, no one would worry about what leaders are making as long as everyone could see that the national income was growing. But we are not the aforementioned countries. We just have to cut our cloth according to our size.

Those of us who are old enough can still remember when the Naira was king in West Africa and among global currencies. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Naira exchanged at almost two dollars to one Naira; we bought cars for anything from N2000 to N10,000 and this ranges from Japanese cars to German Mercedes with French Peugeot selling from N3000 to N5000. Those were the days and no young person believes us when we say “there was a country “as Chinua Achebe said and how true!

When I was at the University of Ibadan between 1963 and 1966, the ambition of most bright students was to excel and be like our lecturers and professors. In those days, professors earned the same as cabinet ministers – a little higher than permanent secretaries. The amount was just about £3000 a year, that is £250 a month and it was enough to have a decent life and to educate your child in Cambridge or Oxford universities as some of our professors did. University teachers avoided politics like a plague. May be that was a mistake but that is the truth. Nobody wanted to be rich. People just wanted to have enough to have a roof over their heads, a car to take them around and to educate their children. The currency was stable and even when we changed the Nigerian pounds to Naira it remained still stable.

Our problems started with the stupendous increase in our national revenue following the Israeli-Arab war of 1973 and the Arab oil embargo which spiked the price of crude oil and Nigerian oil revenues. The military intervention in Nigerian politics from 1966 to 1999 with the thieving Shagari interregnum, released the corruption genies from the bottle and we have not been able to put them back until now when we seem to have lost total control of our economy. Economy ticket by air to London used to cost N300 now it costs about three million naira. All this happened in our lifetimes! Our story is like that of a fool who would soon part with his riches.

This reminds me of a personal experience. When I was in Germany between 1991 and 1995, the foreign allowance paid to our ambassador was a fifth of what the Ambassador of Singapore and Zimbabwe were paid. I thought that was odd but understandable. The reason for such a disparity in Singapore and Nigerian treatment of their envoys was that Singapore was comfortable with that high remuneration and could afford it. But for Zimbabwe, it was outright foolishness. I doubt if it can even maintain an embassy in Germany today not to talk of paying their ambassador. I hope this is not our fate if we refuse to moderate our demands on our scarce national resources. The philosophy in Singapore is and was that their officials were paid so high that only greed would make any of them dip their hands in the national coffers and this is one of the reasons for their success. Despite the humongous salaries and allowances our members of parliament give to themselves, this has not stopped their cupidity for filthy lucre in their raid of MDAs while supposedly carrying out their oversight functions .

March 21, 2024
Need for urban renewal in Nigeria

Nigeria is the most urbanized country in Africa and the southwestern and north-western parts of the country bear the mark of decay arising from the long history of urbanization without much planning and consequently needing urban renewal most.

The point needs to be made that the totality of urban Nigeria needs some kind of a Marshall Plan of tearing up and reconstructing to put us in the 21st century. Before the advent of colonialism, the pattern of settlements in the two most affected parts of Nigeria was large urban and mainly city kingdoms and hierarchical political organizations. In the Northwest, one had city kingdoms like Kano, Katsina, Daura, Kebbi and Zazzau( Zaria) and in the Southwest, one had Lagos, Oyo, Ibadan, Ife, Ogbomoso, Abeokuta, Shaki, Ijebu Ode, Benin, Ilesha, Akure and the various Ekiti city kingdoms.

The Southwest remains the most urbanized part of Nigeria and Africa. There were other puny settlements even in some of the regions identified as places of considerable urbanisation but they would not qualify to be described as urban settlements before the coming of colonialism. Such settlements which later developed into urban settlements include Bauchi, Gombe, Maiduguri, Wukari and Yola. In the Niger Delta were to be found the small Itshekiri settlement of Warri and further east were to be found Nri, Onitsha and the coastal city states of Bonny, Abonema etc . But I am more concerned in this preamble with the precolonial conurbations – not the ones that developed following the colonial intervention as important as they may be.

With the coming of the British and their interest mainly in trade, several trading centres sprang up and developed into towns and cities and the precolonial cities and kingdoms expanded into cities and urban conurbations. New ones like Maiduguri, Yola, Makurdi, Gusau, Sokoto, Kontagora, Jebba, Lokoja and Jos expanded or sprang up and have grown into administrative centres of states in modern Nigeria. What is true of the north is true of the south and particularly of the Southwest and the Southeast and the Niger Delta as well.

In the North-central part of Nigeria, old towns like Ilorin, Bida, Lokoja became administrative centres. Colonial cities like Makurdi, Enugu, Owerri, Aba, Port Harcourt, Jos, Kaduna, Maiduguri and Minna have now joined old cities like Lagos, Kano, Ibadan, Ogbomoso, Abeokuta, Katsina, Sokoto, Ilorin Osogbo, Ilesha, Ado Ekiti and Zaria to add to the collection of towns and cities undergoing decay albeit of different proportion needing urban renewal of one type or the other. Our job has therefore been cut out for us because urban decay becomes visible when one travels the length and breadth of Nigeria.

I believe where to start is from the easiest of the problems which is infrastructural upgrade of our urban environment and city roads. This belongs in the constitutional province of the states which had usually abandoned their responsibilities to the federal government. The states should be persuaded to earmark at least 20 percent of their annual budgets for the next ten years for upgrading the roads, sewage, street lights, gutters, markets and greening of the cities and demanding ventilation of all the houses where they do not have little things like windows especially at a time when meteorologists have predicted global warming.

Cities like Lagos, Ibadan, Ogbomoso, Oyo, Ilesa, Ile-Ife, Ilorin, Ijebu Ode, Akure, Ado Ekiti, Benin, Warri, Onitsha, Aba, Enugu, Port Harcourt, Kano, Kaduna, Katsina, Zaria, Sokoto, Jos, Bauchi, Yola, and Maiduguri have serious tasks to deal with. The yardstick of success is to find out how liveable these places have become after a decade. If life continues in this dreary and harsh environments as it is now, it means more work needs to be done. But this is where to start at the village and city levels in all the states of the federation.

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We must have a strategy to develop this country from bottom up. All the talk in Abuja is not affecting anybody but the politicians in the parliament and the executive and MDAS and their various parastatals. If we are able to improve the living standards of the people by making their environment much more tolerable than it is now, this country will be on the giant march to physical development. We can begin this journey from January next year instead of beating about the bush about what to do. When states are busy with their herculean task, they will all be united on the demand for structural reforms of this Humpty Dumpty of a nation called Nigeria. The positive part of this suggestion is the massive jobs it would create.

The federal government will be left with the hard task of picking up the pieces of infrastructural development of the federation such as building railroads, ports, harbours, airports and houses at a massive level as well as infrastructure for communication and electricity without which a country cannot develop. If the federal government is challenged by what goes on at state levels, then we will have a cooperative and competitive federalism that we had in the first republic. All this will require a level of social and political mobilisation necessary for overall development. This will require all hands being on the deck and massive job opportunities leading to near full employment and with jobs being made available, insecurity will reduce if not disappear entirely. Inflation may accompany these enterprises but the situation will stabilise overtime if we shut ourselves from unnecessary importation which is the bane of modern day life in Nigeria today.

What is the aim of government if not the happiness of the people being governed? . Development is all about people. The point is that very few people are happy in the Nigeria of today. I do not blame the present government or even the previous one. Our problems have been caused by the cumulative maladministration of all the governments since the coup d’état of 1966. It is not only young Nigerians who are finding some kind of solace in emigration; we the parents left behind are living a sad life. We cannot see our children except on WhatsApp and the internet. Many of us have become recluses and only come out to go to mosques and churches. Many are now selling family heirlooms and houses for fear of what happens to our properties when our souls join the souls triumphant.

Even while still alive, the harshness of lives without flowing water and electricity has made life unnecessarily unliveable. Even people who used to have air conditioning are now abandoning them because of erratic electricity and the galloping cost of power. In short, this is not the best of times for all of us and we need to see the government addressing the difficulties confronting Nigerians who just merely want to live a life worth living away from our present existence.

March 14, 2024
Starving despite wide agricultural land?

When I was very young during the colonial days, we did not import food before we ate. As far as I can remember, agriculture and agricultural development belonged in the realm of local government particularly the towns and villages. The same thing was true of education and other things which have now been appropriated by either the state or federal (central) government.

In the early 1950s when I was in primary school, every school had what we called “School farms”. I don’t know what people in Lagos had but I have a feeling they must have had school gardens because of the scarcity of arable land in the Lagos colony. But in my place in Ilawe Ekiti where I was born, we all had school farms. It did not matter how young or old one was, there was always a time devoted for farming. When it was time for harvest, it was a big celebration marked by drumming, dancing and eating. In my place we only planted yams, corn, groundnuts, vegetables, peppers, onions, tomatoes and other edible vegetables. At harvest, there was public sale of our products and whatever was left was shared among teachers, students and the clergy since most of our schools were sectarian schools established by the various churches that were around in those days.

When I entered Christ School, Ado-Ekiti in 1956, we continued with the same tradition and added more things that we produced. Agriculture was then properly provided for in the school curriculum. Wednesday morning in alternate week was devoted to agriculture. Piggery and poultry were then introduced in addition to growing of root crops and vegetables. Most of the operations were done by students who belonged to agriculture society by choice. The whole thing was supervised by an “Agriculture master” who had very light academic teaching. At harvest time the entire school feasted on the produce from the school farm during the day of harvest celebration and the agriculture society became popular because of the free pork shared with other students. The intention in students’ participation was to generate interest leading to many of them going to agricultural schools set up by all the regional governments of the country to train extension workers in agriculture to show our peasants the way forward in agricultural development in the country. Later, the Awolowo government of the 1950s established farm settlements to engage the overflow from free primary schools who could not find places in the very few secondary schools and “Modern schools” specifically established to absorb them. The Awolowo schools were copied by Michael Okpara and Ahmadu Bello, respectively premiers of Eastern and Northern Nigeria.

The upshot of this was that agriculture, both peasant and modern, were made available in Nigeria. Unfortunately we did not progress towards industrial agriculture of large commercial agriculture involving the use of modern tools on large estates.

Throughout the years of Nigeria’s development, our largely peasant agriculture has never failed us. Perhaps that is where we went wrong. We should have developed vast agricultural estates either as state venture or private enterprises to produce food for home consumption and export particularly in the years of huge oil earnings in the 1970s. Now the urban population is swarming with young people who have refused to go to the farms but have been attracted by the bright lights of the cities and are only interested in white collar jobs or at worst in riding motorcycles to ferry people around in unproductive and unprofitable ventures sometimes extending to criminal tendencies. To augment their incomes, the urban proletariat and poor peasantry have taken to crimes of kidnapping and country-wide brigandage to fend for themselves and to satisfy their tastes and unrealistic desires based on their exposures to global television and cheap films. All this has led to shortages all round and we must do something about it.

The greatest tragedy that a country can face is starvation. It is natural for people and even animals to do everything to feed themselves. Self-survival is the first law of nature. No matter how many soldiers or police we may have, man must first answer the law of nature. We have a reached the critical point where we have to find food for everyone. We once had “Operation Feed the Nation” during General Olusegun Obasanjo’s military administration and program of “Green Revolution” during the presidency of Alhaji Shehu Shagari. We had great intentions then but they did not translate to reality.

I remember everyone was called upon to grow something behind or in front of their homes to reduce the cost of food imports. The program of the “Green Revolution” put enormous resources and emphasis on large dams and large estates of rice, corn, and wheat. We have to revamp the programs and go back to them and this time make them work. The growing population of Nigeria which we have refused to curb will not permit failure this time. We must do something about our galloping population and our open borders which allow people from Niger, Chad, Benin, Togo and other West Africans to flood our borders. If we don’t tackle our population problem, we will not solve our food problems. The solution of our population problem is both internal and external. We must all ask ourselves what we as individuals have contributed towards them. Ask how many children and grandchildren you as individuals have contributed to the rising population creating a future population bomb. Gone are those days when having many children are signs of affluence and power. Today they are signs of poverty and problems.

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Now that we are beginning to seriously look at the structural configuration of the country, we should begin to realise that structures go beyond politics and the economy, pivotal as they appear. Structure should include production particularly who and where things are produced. We should look back to the future so to say in the ways we run our country. The closer we are to the grassroots in agriculture, the better and more profitable and productive we are likely to be. The same thought should inform security and policing. The more secure we are at the village level, the more we are likely to be at the national level. The more secure we are, the more food secure we would be as a nation.

It is also generally hazarded that the more food secure a country is, the more politically stable and economically viable a country would be. If a country is stable and secure at home, the more it would be able to wield influence and power abroad. To be where we want to be internationally, we must first be able to feed and secure ourselves. A hungry man is an angry man and an angry man cannot think rationally. A mad man is entertaining but no one wants to be a parent to a mad child. This is the situation facing us where the subject of our conversation these days is the cost of tomatoes, peppers, onions, bread and rice. A serious country’s concern should go beyond food which has in most countries been assumed to be normally available whether locally produced or imported.

March 7, 2024
Another Trump-Biden duel

It is almost certain that President Joseph Biden would have to face the former president, Donald J. Trump in the election for president of the United States in November 2024. All the Republican challengers for nomination with the exception of the indomitable Indian former governor of South Carolina and former USA ambassador and permanent Representative to the United Nations, Nikki Haley have been roundly defeated by Trump leading to their dropping by the way side.

Despite the latest defeat in her own state of birth, Nikki Haley has vowed to continue the race until the end of the nomination process. Her hope is based on the possibility of Trump being shamed out of the competition when he is convicted and possibly jailed in one of the numerous civil or criminal cases he is facing in the various courts in the USA including the Supreme Court of the USA. Although Trump has said he could contest from prison and if he wins he would pardon himself. Anything seems now possible in “Trump’s United States. He is facing so many accusations and trials that any normal politician would have thrown in the towel and walked away from the presidential election. But Trump has worked himself to a frenzy and convinced himself and his supporters including Vladimir Putin, president of the Russian Federation that he is being persecuted by his political opponents.

President Joe Biden has been accused of weaponising the judiciary against Trump in order to make him ineligible for the presidential election. To be fair, the Democratic Party in some instances may have been after Donald Trump but the fact is that he has made himself very vulnerable. The Democrats did not make him encourage a mob to attack Congress, bribe a porn star or rape Jean Carroll a lady in Supermarket dressing room in 1996 or 1995 in New York or made him to call the state of Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to find him votes to win a state-wide presidential election in 2020 or to manipulate bank papers to favour loan applications in New York and, et cetera.

Nikki Haley seems to feel Trump will be caught in the web of the various civil and criminal cases surrounding him. She feels when the Republican Party gets to this denouement, it will be forced to literally beg her to step in. Whether this will happen or not, we are not sure if the grandees of the party will not find somebody much to their liking than this Indian lady especially in a racially polarised Republican Party far from its roots in Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party. This is where we are and are waiting for “Super Tuesday” when a decisive moment of several states primaries are held and pollsters predict Trump will finally knock out the Wiley Nikki Haley.

The question to ask is why is Trump so strong that he can’t be held down so to say. In 2016 he boasted that if he shot a man in New York Broad Street, he would get away with murder. Just last week he claimed he has become very popular with blacks because of his several convictions that blacks see him as a fellow victim in their American experience!

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Although nobody takes him seriously when he talks like that but he is probably reflecting American traditional love for the outliers than for a conformist. If the Democrats do not find a solution to Trump, they will prove Trump right come November 2024 when as Trump has predicted he would tell President Joe Biden, “You are fired” bringing to an end the doddering end to a presidency that never caught the imagination or fancy of Americans no matter how well it has performed. President Biden has been very decent in office. He has tried very much to unite the Americans in an inclusive presidency in which he has given prominence to blacks, Jews, women, sexual minorities, Spanish Americans, native Americans, Asian Americans and young Americans. He has generally genuinely made those who would have been shunned aside feel welcome. This unfortunately is why he is so unpopular among those who feel they are the owners of America, those who used to be called “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant or WASP”. This is the core of Trump’s support who feels it is losing out of the demographic makeup of America under threat of flood of immigrants from Latin America Asia and Africa.

Trump has said many times that he doesn’t want immigrants from the “shit countries“ and that he would rather want people from the Scandinavian countries to come to America . He is saying openly what white Americans are saying in their closet and behind closed doors. This is where the Republican Party is now at. This racism and illiberal tendencies are spreading not just in the USA but there are variants of it in France, the Netherlands, Hungary and other parts of Europe, the Middle East and other parts of the OECD countries and the challenge we face in Africa is to rise to the challenge so that we can keep our young people at home whose energy we must harness to develop our abundant natural and agricultural resources.

The Democratic Party must not surrender the leadership of the liberal democratic world to an ascendant illiberalism and isolationism. Since Americans appear not to like the weak and lame figure that Joe Biden casts on the whole world in contradistinction to the vigorous image America has of itself, President Biden out of abundance of patriotism and love for democracy he constantly defends, declare his lack of interest in re-election and allow a more vigorous and young person to carry the flag of his party. This will be a great sacrifice for his party that has done so much for him giving him platforms as a congressman, senator, vice president and now president. This is not too much to expect from President Biden if he wants to save his legacy and to preserve the United States’ place in the world.

A Tump Presidency may unleash the dogs of war in Europe and Asia if it abandons NATO in Europe or attacks China on the grounds that he is defending Taiwan. The alliance system that has kept the world safe since the end of the Second World War may be frittered away in a fit of personal braggadocio. If by error of omission or commission he lets Trump walk again into the White House, history will be severe in its criticism of President Joe Biden. It is not an argument to say there is no alternative to an 81-year old president judging from the bevy of Democratic senators and governors from whom one can be chosen.

February 29, 2024
The plight of Nigerian universities

I have written and agonised over the plight of Nigerian universities many times in the past at public lectures and in the newspapers not because I am an incorrigible critic of governments’ handling of these institutions but because like Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu said about Biafra – “I was involved” and I cannot be unconcerned about the plight of the universities.

I cannot tell my story about my life as an adult without saying something about Nigerian universities. First as from 1963 when I entered the University of Ibadan, I had been involved in the growth, development and problems and prospects of the Nigerian universities. After earning a PhD in 1970 in one of Canada’s oldest universities – Dalhousie University in 1970, I came back to join the University of Ibadan in 1972 at its Jos Campus in what without my knowing it then, establishment of universities in Nigeria was to become a political instrument in trying to resolve some of the knotty political and socio-economic problems of Nigeria. The University College of Ibadan in Jos then constituted an opening first salvo in the federal government’s approach to make higher education available to people in the minority areas of Nigeria.

When the then young and brilliant Dr Jibril Aminu was appointed Executive Secretary of the National Universities Commission in 1975 by General Gowon, he came with an agenda of broadening the admission opportunities for young Nigerians into tertiary educational institutions apart from the universities of Ibadan, Lagos, Ile-Ife, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, the University of Benin and the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. Apart from the universities of Ibadan and Lagos, all the other universities belonged to the then regional governments of the West, East, the North and the Midwest. From the onset, the universities were regionally concentrated in the south because of the demand and university education was not the priority in the north where there were very few secondary schools to feed the only university then established in the north.

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There may have been a government directive to Aminu to begin the expansion of university education nationally. The government had just come comfortably and confidently out of the civil war between 1967 and 1970 and the country was awash with petro-dollars after the doubling of the price of crude oil following the Arab-Israeli war of 1973 in which the Arabs tried to use the price of petrol against the West. The period also fell into the period of the “3Rs” Rehabilitation, Reconstruction and Reconciliation which was the post-civil war policy of the triumphant Gowon government. Thus the politics of location of the new universities was quickly settled. The new universities were to be located in Jos to take over the facilities of the Jos campus of Ibadan in the city. Others were to be established in Maiduguri to use the facilities of the then existing northeast government’s College of Advanced Studies preparing students for higher education. Others were to be located in the oil-producing areas of the south in Port Harcourt, Calabar. The University of Benin belonging to the Midwest government was to be taken over by the federal government and universities of Sokoto and that of Kano inheriting the existing Abdullahi Bayero College of Ahmadu Bello were established.

Special role of agriculture and technology were emphasised in the establishment of the special universities in Makurdi, Abeokuta, Bauchi Yola, and Akure which not only reflected the agricultural and technological needs of the country and along with the universities in Kano, Maiduguri and Sokoto, reflected the power equation in the Murtala Muhammad/Obasanjo government of 1975 and post-General Muhammad’s assassination in 1976.

All I can say is that the establishment of these universities brought tremendous opposition by the old guard in the Nigerian universities community who reasonably argued that standards would be lowered in admission and academic promotion following scarcity of qualified students and staff. The establishment of these universities became intertwined with the usual North/South arguments about the lopsided development of the country and the unequal power distribution and economic contribution of different parts of the country and the interminable ethnic conflicts in the country which in the past and the present have retarded the progress of the country. The universities have many times become victims of these conflicts leading to exodus of great university teachers and students and with many universities established and all drawing from the federal exchequer, the individual funding has gone down and with the duplication of departments, facilities, programs and the struggle for good teachers the quality of education has gone down but not as down as the old professors feared and Professor Jibril whose determination in executing the policy of expansion would presumably go down in history as one of those who democratised higher institution in Nigeria.

In solving the problem of quality control, he expanded the NUC from a normal Federal Grants Aid Commission into a powerful educational and politico-economic organ of educational development. He was most pilloried for his effort but I think history will be fair to him. The approach to the expansion was Cartesian with careful analysis and planning including opening of Nigerian universities’ offices in Cairo, Washington, Ottawa, Canada and unifying the old universities offices in London under one rubric. They were charged with aggressively pursuing staff training, staff recruitment, library and equipment sourcing as determined by the new universities in Nigeria including the old ones.

Of course the former vice chancellors whose universities had offices in London previously did not like the new system but had to live with them and I and others who manned these offices bore the angst and opposition to the new dispensation. On the whole, the new system worked unlike now when it is announcements of new universities either as part of after-dinner speeches or through casual announcements by the NUC without serious planning of sources of funding and staff. The result is that states, individuals, sectarian religious bodies, joined by the federal government, are struggling to beat themselves in the establishment of universities that has resulted into our country having a cumulative 262 number of universities comprising 147 private universities, 63 state universities and 52 federal universities of different hues and characters. Some of these universities are universities in name only and water will soon find its level.

Some of the private universities will die natural death of lack of financial breath because of lack of patronage. Some of those running the universities do not have proper appreciation of the university idea. Why will some of the management of these universities be flogging their students as a way of discipline? This outrageous incident happened in a state university where students were lined up and made to kneel down and whipped mercilessly by tough guards specially recruited to teach the young students lessons they would never forget. One hopes this idea of physical punishment will not be our contribution to higher education in the 21st century.

We have been reduced to the laughing stock of the whole world. The present government should rise to its responsibility and stop the present nonsense of establishment of new universities and put in force efforts to consolidate the existing institutions.

February 22, 2024
AFCON aftermath: Between hope and disappointment
- By Samuel Akinnuga
So much happens every day in Nigeria, but last weekend was a loaded one. In less than one week, the reactions to two developments have been so intense such that whether you choose to reflect on the tragic incident or the enlivening sports fiesta, you would still be lost for words in capturing what should not have happened and what could have been. Truth be told, it appears to be more of a compulsion than a choice seeing that these developments remain two of the biggest subjects in Nigeria at the moment.

Had the outcome of the African Cup of Nations (AFCON) final match between Nigeria and Ivory Coast been different, the mood across the country would have been markedly triumphal. And this would have been in spite of the buffetings on virtually all fronts which the country grapples with. If we had won, nothing else would have mattered as much as having the ‘mouth’ to prove that we are ‘Giants of Africa’. We would still be conscious of the value of the Naira and the associated issues, but we would have been happier to let that concern take the backseat, even if for a few days. I can already imagine that our Ghanaian and South African friends would not have heard the last of it. The banter that went back and forth on some action added some spice to action on the pitch of play. I must admit some comments went overboard, but we love ourselves, regardless. These things happen.

Everyone would admit that for as long as the AFCON lasted, it provided a respite that we direly needed to make our distress more sufferable. We needed some distraction strong enough to arrest our attention from our sobering realities. It took the game of football being played away in Ivory Coast for us to forget the challenges back at home. Through the one month of fierce competition, the thrills and surprises definitely made this edition of the AFCON one of the best in history. The fact that some of the ‘big boys’ were sent home before the knockout stage was quite something to watch. We are grateful to God and the Super Eagles for the brilliant outing at the AFCON. They gave us bragging rights, but they gave us much more: they gave a reason to be happy being Nigerian.

At the peak of our dominance during the competition (and this was the day after our victory over South Africa), my very good friend who is Ghanaian texted: ‘I’m super jealous of what your team is doing at AFCON. But I have no option other than to support you because I have a Nigerian family (with a laughing emoji).’ I happily replied: “We wholly welcome your support (with a wink emoji).” I was filled with great pride. That semi-final match against South Africa was by far the most breath-taking of all the matches we played. The tension in the game caused me to take a break from watching at some point. I couldn’t take it. Overall, we did well and can be proud of our high points at the competition.

In my reckoning, there is one major truth that the AFCON reinforced: As a country, agreeing on issues is a rarity but when it comes to football, we are mostly on the same page. We love the game. We are energised and united by the spirit. We leave our cares and worries momentarily for the thrill of winning. The way I see it, football for us is just different when the national team is playing. More than anything, we love the fact that it brings out the Nigerian in us. None of us is ever anything but Nigerian when the Super Eagles play. All you need to do to confirm this is to check out the attitude of viewers the Super Eagles score or win. I’ve never seen two men attempting to confirm their ethnicities before deciding for a brotherly handshake or a spirited hug when we do well. Even when we don’t, the solidarity is evident. We love ourselves like that. In those moments, there are no guards up; no tribal consciousness, just pour love for the country.

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When the Super Eagles play, it’s over 200 million on the pitch. When the Super Eagles win, it’s a shared victory. Of course, we don’t like to lose but football has its ways: you win some, you lose some.

The AFCON has come and gone, but we are left with some major lessons. By far the most important for me is the fact of winning when it mattered most. We did not win when it mattered most. We had a tremendous run up to the final: didn’t lose a game and conceded only one goal in open play. We became better with each game from the group stage up to the final. For some reason, we switched off in the final game. I can’t possibly know what happened but it didn’t appear that we came to the game hungry enough to win it. Interestingly, our opponents were a familiar foe. We had defeated them in the group stage, and it was clear then that the Super Eagles was a much better team. What then happened!

I’m not saying this as a football expert but as a passionate Nigerian who thinks we could have clearly done better when it mattered most. The Elephants of Ivory Coast came from being one of the best losers at the group stage to winning the trophy on their own turf. The hosts went home with the trophy. That is quite a story. Congratulations to them! Congratulations to us too for the great run. I’m sure we will do better in subsequent editions. The Super Eagles made us proud and we will always be rooting for them. Go Super Eagles! Viva Nigeria!

I chose to end this piece on a rather sober note.

Words would not be enough to describe how heartbroken I’ve felt since hearing the news of Dr. Herbert Wigwe’s passing last Saturday. The tragedy was compounded by the fact that his wife, son and Otunba Abimbola Ogunbanjo were victims of the same ill-fated incident. I have still not gotten over the pain and deep sense of loss that I felt when I came across the news.

I did not know Dr. Wigwe personally and I did not need to in order to appreciate the scale of his impact and contributions to our country, and indeed, our continent. The imprints are everywhere. The powerhouse that is now Access Holdings is a pride of the continent. He and his associate built that from Nigeria – a poster achievement of the possibilities here. I have no doubts that his achievements would offer great inspiration to current and succeeding generations of entrepreneurs and business leaders across the world. His loss is a terrible national tragedy. My thoughts are with the Wigwe and Ogunbanjo families. May the souls of the departed rest in peace.
February 15, 2024
How to tackle insecurity in Nigeria

The media thrives on bad news but, hardly can one find the media celebrating good news anywhere in the world. A dog biting a person hardly finds a place in newspapers but when a man bites a dog, it will be screaming headlines in newspapers. Outbreak of war or violence are welcome occurrences to journalists but hardly can one find a newspaper screaming headline saying “peace has broken out” somewhere in the world. This makes one sometimes doubt the authenticity of some news especially in these days of “fake news”. We must take with a pinch of salt all exaggerated piece on violence reported in our newspapers and electronic media. Of course it is a well-known fact that Nigeria is ravaged by insecurity, manifesting as armed brigandage, kidnapping, armed robbery, forceful entry, car snatching and many other unexpected gangsterism. Everyone knows that there must be reasons for these sordid occurrences.

If I am to put one cause to all this, I will say it is the bad economy besetting the country. We have not had before this terrible economic situation that we have had in the last decade. We have a situation of total misery and mismanagement of the economy in which corruption ruined the country while the people in charge appeared not to care a hoot about the consequences of the effect of a pilotless country. The tragic situation piled up one upon the other until the situation became almost irredeemable.

There was so much money in the economy that the CBN decided to adopt unusual policies of peremptorily changing the currency without adequate preparation by printing a fraction of the currency in circulation and then arbitrarily asking people to ration whatever currency notes they could get and then fixing a date after which the old notes would be of no legal tender. The result was that irrespective of what one had in the bank, everybody suddenly became poor because they couldn’t get their money from the bank. It became so bad that it became a matter of brawling and strength to collect whatever little money banks were disposed to give their customers.

While this was going on, the government announced dates for new elections and a new census. Many of us thought everyone in government had gone mad. In spite of court judgement, the government refused to change until it became clear that there was going to be a revolt unless government moderated its stance. There was complete disconnect between the government and the governed. Even after some moderation, the scarcity of currency has still not abated. If government cannot handle mere currency change or renewal, the question of running a modern economy must be like performing neuro-surgery! With this economic impasse, it is no wonder that the economic mess in our economy is showing off in galloping inflation, shortage of foreign exchange and all round shortages in an import dependent economy. On top of this, the violence in the rural areas of the country which has led to farmers running away from their farms because of the problems of transhumance and primitive animal husbandry. It is common to find cattle eating crops of farmers some who are armed and ready to resist. This has led to rural pre-peasant revolution!

I bought some gari over the weekend and when I asked the lady selling the gari why it was very expensive, she answered that there was no more cassava on the farm! Rice which in recent years has become a staple in Nigerian homes has also become unaffordable, yet we are always told about huge harvests of this same crop! Who is fooling who? Yams are also not within the reach of ordinary people because of poor salaries not just of poor artisans but even that of the déclassé middle classes. The way things are in Nigeria, we may have to depend on charity to feed our teeming population which is becoming a time bomb unless there is a policy to control its explosive growth. This huge population has become a cause of the insecurity in the country.

In the 1980s one could drive safely from Lagos to Maiduguri or Sokoto with no molest on the road but now only an intrepid driver will do that without being waylaid and killed on the road. The size of our country and its huge population, have become a disincentive to its citizens or to investors because capital would go to where there is peace not just to huge markets.

Within the context of this essay are its solutions. The route to peace is embedded in finding a solution to the economic problems facing the economy. Without development, there can be no peace. Depending on a mono economy in which export of crude petroleum and gas take preeminent position and yet subject to the vagaries of gyrating fall and rise of prices will get us nowhere. We must have a mixed industrial economy in which we can build up our forex and have a stable currency guaranteeing our future. Those of us who are elderly have discovered that we have been robbed because inflation and the collapse of the value of the Naira have made the plea to save money a useless advice. This is not the way to encourage savings and foreign direct investment. If we have good economy, the current insecurity will be dissipated. Whatever insecurity we have in a situation like that will be manageable. If we have a good economy we will have resources to have great security and armed forces that cannot be easily overwhelmed. A good economy will lead to peace and concord in which the destructive forces of ethnicity and tribalism will gradually disappear. Example of this is evidenced in China and it is also happening in India despite its multitudinous languages, population and religions. Building a developing economy will not be easy; it will require a strong government that will lay more emphasis on development than on democracy!

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I know as a matter of fact that all present democracies started as oligarchies, before over time, they became one form of democracies or the other. The oldest democracies like Great Britain and the United states went through monarchies, aristocracies, oligarchies, liberal democracies before finally becoming representative democracies. France went from monarchy to revolutionary democracy and back to liberal democracy. America was a slave-owning democracy. It was only in the 20th century that women there were granted the suffrage. Germany and Japan were monarchical dictatorships before becoming military dictatorships and now democracies. Development in most of the OECD countries took precedence over democracy ab initio. After development took place in China and the Russian Federation and most of the countries in Eastern Europe, those countries now practice some kind of democracy in which members of the propertied class have some kind of democratic rights. This is so at least in case of Russia and the countries formerly behind the Iron Curtain.

Even America practises what one can call armed democracy in which ownership of guns for protection of it is a democratic right. This is why some members of the middle class in Nigeria have been seriously advocating possession of firearms to protect themselves, their families and their properties. We can have the democracy we can manage in which nobody would be a prey to others without a chance of self-defence. I don’t think we have reached that stage yet! But we need to be careful because armed populist governments like those in our neighbouring countries pose danger of simple answers to serious economic and security problems like those we have in our country.

February 8, 2024