Category: Jide Osuntokun

It’s almost a month since President Vladimir Putin ordered his troops’ invasion of Ukraine after fighting the same country for the past eight years leading to Russia’s seizure of Crimea in 2014 and now the detachment of the Donbas  region of Eastern Ukraine made up of coal-bearing Donetsk and Luhansk regions which had been in rebellion for the past eight years sponsored by Russia on the grounds that Russian speakers were being persecuted in what president Putin called the emotive word “genocide” without a scintilla  of proof. Right from 1991 when the USSR dissolved into 15 “independent” states, nationalists in Russia, the dominant centre of power, had dreamed of somehow recreating the Russian empire which stretched from its European centre of Saint Petersburg to Vladivostok on the extreme Siberian east and down to the Caucasus, making the empire part-European and part-Asian with many nationalities, religious and racial group spread across 11 time zones. When Boris Yeltsin, the first president of the new Russia from 1991 to 1999 handpicked Vladimir Putin after eight years of his shambolic and drunken leadership, the world did not know what to expect of the diminutive former KGB operative. Putin came into office in 2000 determined to bring back the glory of Russia and to put it back to the status of super power which he felt his country belonged in spite of the denigration by the United States which began to openly say Russia was a medium power. By that time, the Russian navy was almost non-existent and the Russian economy was largely dependent on export of gas and crude petroleum to Western Europe like most countries in the Middle East and North Africa and including Nigeria. It was the case of a former super power despite its thousands of nuclear war heads reduced to watching the United States arrogating the role of international policemen and restructuring the international system according to its own rules and designs. This was manifested by the eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Organization (NATO) and the military intervention in places like the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and threats of intervention in Venezuela and Iran without consideration of the interests of other powers like Russia. With the privilege of hindsight, the period after 2000 should have been used by the USA and its European allies to help Russia adjust to its reduced status without humiliation and help the country develop a consumer-based economy linked closely with the West and not taking the advantage of the weakness of Russia to expand its military alliance to the gates of Russia especially realizing the purpose of NATO was to stop the westward ingress of communism into Europe. NATO’s continued expansion into the frontiers of Russia gave the alliance an offensive rather than a defensive posture. The placement of intermediate missiles in some of the new member states like Poland, Rumania and Bulgaria upset the Russian government and tilted the balance of power in favour of NATO.

This is the background of the Russia’s wicked attack on poor Ukraine, a small 41 million people country, justly struggling to be free and to be allowed to find an independent place in the comity of nations. The mistake Ukraine made was its decision to want to join NATO in order to preserve its independence which strictly on its own merit was a wise decision but in the context of being a culturally related country by history and traditions and sharing long borders with Russia, was a wrong decision especially when the United States began to have more than unusual interest in the independence of the country.

The NATO members knew admitting Ukraine into its organization was a redline for Russia. This was why they denied the country’s admission into NATO. Ukraine should have sought neutral status like Austria, Finland and Sweden. This would have been acceptable to Russia and Ukraine in the fullness of time could have even become a member of the European Union perhaps with Russian acquiescence.

In all the 22 years of Putin’s power in Russia including of course those years his sidekick, Dmitry Medvedev (2008-2012) served as president at Putin’s pleasure, Putin was determined to defend and possibly reincorporate what he called Russia “Near abroad” back to Russia motherland. This dangerous policy could possibly include dismemberment of countries like Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia in the Baltic and Kazakhstan in order to bring back into Russia, their Russian-speaking people. Putin had militarily intervened in Georgia in 2008 and supported Russian-speaking people in breakaway South Ossetia. Russia militarily supported Transnistria part of Moldova to breakaway from Moldova between 1990 and 1992 and Russian troops have remained within internationally recognized boundaries of Moldova and Georgia without respect for international law. This aggressive tendencies of Putin have also influenced the North  Atlantic Treaty Organization’s determination to challenge Putin and possibly stop him in Ukraine by arming Ukraine to resist the Russian aggression and to possibly weaken Russia through economic sanctions that it will not be able to continue its wars of aggression in the various former territories of the former USSR which he seems to be determined to put under Russia in a new reconfigured empire without respect for the wishes of their people as long as he satisfies the desire of the minority Russian-speaking people in those countries. His policies are reminiscent of the reasons of language and ethnicity that led Adolf Hitler into Poland, Austria, and Czechoslovakia during the crisis leading to the Second World War.

There are politicians in Europe who now see accommodation with Russia as “appeasement” with which Europe dealt with Hitler until his appetite for territories became insatiable. It is simply amazing how leaders of NATO and Russia used the imagery of the crisis in Europe in the 1930s to justify their current policies. Putin talks about denazification of Ukraine while the West sees him as almost a reincarnation of Adolf Hitler who must be stopped before he plunges the whole world into a Third World War, a war in the words of President J.F. Kennedy “the living will envy the dead” because the global atmosphere would have been so poisoned by radioactive fallout that those who didn’t die in war will wither away painfully gradually afterwards as victims of cancers and other withering diseases caused by radiation.

What is the way out? My suggestion is that President Joe Biden should be prevailed upon to ask Ukraine to accept the status of an internationally-guaranteed neutral state and foreswear ever joining NATO. Russia should be prevailed upon to sign an international treaty guaranteeing Ukraine’s and the independence of the Baltic States.

The sanctions imposed on Russia should be gradually lifted, subject to Russia’s good behaviour and respect for international law and norms of international relations based on peaceful and diplomatic negotiations and resolution of inter-state problems without resorting to violence. The global economy has become so intertwined that if a major country like Russia is delinked from it, it will have major repercussions globally. Secondly pushing nuclear-armed Russia into economic doldrums and its people into poverty will create instability and possible irrational behaviour by its leaders which will not augur for world peace. It is a cliché to say the world has become a global village. We cannot continue to think as if we were in the 19th century of politics of balance of power when in fact we are now in a century of balance of terror when careless mismanagement of crisis can possibly lead to thermonuclear war in which no one would survive and there will be no victors but all of the world’s people will be vanquished.

It is not too late for the Russian war in Ukraine to be wound down and Russia and the West commit themselves to rebuilding the infrastructure and houses damaged during the war in a joint enterprise to bring aggressors and victims and their supporters together. All other lingering issues that could possibly lead to conflict should also be brought to the table while a solid Russo-NATO treaty of understanding should be signed. The way for world peace is really through trade and economic relations which as far back as the 18th century Adam Smith had suggested and which we saw  positively in the globalization of the last century which  Donald Trump and the neo-conservatives in the United States had done their damned best to undermine to the detriment of global peace and the promotion of “war parties” in the major countries of the world and prevention of “perpetual peace which is the highest political good according to Immanuel Kant (1724-1804).

Since the petrol shortage hit Nigeria in the past few weeks, it seems one of the victims is the collapse of the garbage collection program of Ibadan the biggest city in tropical Africa. Since Governor Ajimobi’s era, Ibadan ceased being the dirtiest city in Nigeria. He took on with all seriousness, the task of cleaning the vast agricultural conurbation which Ibadan is. This is very much unlike the conurbations of industrial cities in Europe and America that are sustained by the huge tax base derived from large numbers of industries from which revenues are collected to keep their huge cities in reasonable healthy conditions.

Ibadan on the other hand suffers from not having a large tax base and government is reluctant or afraid to levy taxes on the people as it is done in Lagos through property and land use tax. The result is that Oyo State government that should be one of the richest in the country appears to depend on monthly allocations from the federal distributable pool based on population and land mass majorly. We all know that the so-called population of Nigeria is largely based on guess work and demographic fraud. Oyo State which has the two largest cities in Nigeria namely Ibadan and Ogbomosho comes among the medium populated states in the country. The four million or so people supposedly inhabiting Oyo State can be easily found in the Ibadan sprawling city stretching for perhaps 40 kilometres from Asejire Water Works to Idi Ayunre/Cocoa Research Institute of Nigeria and  spreading like that in all directions. As by population, Ibadan would beat several of the states of Nigeria not only in size but most especially in population if there was no fraud and bias in demographic enumeration. The reality of course is that Ibadan is just the capital of Oyo State that has been cheated in terms of revenue allocation through census manipulation by the powers that be. What Oyo State must do is to ensure that it finds a way to mobilize internal revenue through smart taxes that will be judiciously used to develop this huge city and embark on urban renewal and also the maintenance of roads and bridges and repatriating the hundreds of thousands of beggars who are a blight to the city and a nuisance to natives and visitors. Ibadan must not be notorious for filth but should be famous for its history, peace and accommodation for people coming from all over Nigeria and Africa if they come with good intentions and with capital to help create jobs and assist in the development of the city.

Several years ago when I was in graduate school in Canada, a certain Professor Brian Farley was coming to attend a conference at the University of Ibadan. I gladly sent through him a letter to my brother, Kayode at the University of Ibadan Medical School where he was a professor of medicine. On Professor Farley‘s return from Ibadan, I met him and inquired about his impressions. He was happy to tell me about the university and how high the university was held in the global academic circles but like the typical cynical English man that he was, he said Ibadan was the dirtiest city he has ever seen and wondered how people were able to live in such a place without succumbing to widespread viral or bacterial disease.

Needless to say I was not amused by this professor’s comment which I felt was pretty much of a summary of an obvious situation to me no matter how much it hurts. I know for sure that houses here have no running water toilets, nor do most houses have dug out latrines. You then ask me how human wastes are disposed. I bet they are still disposed as when Ibadan was founded in 1830 by going to the surrounding bush to defecate. Household refuse and garbage are also treated the same way or dumped on the streets and in gutter when it rains for the fast moving rivulets to carry them away. This is what accounts for the filth in the city.

Of course Yoruba people use a lot of wrapping leaves and now cellophane for moimoi, eba, amala, iyan and other favourites and disposal of leftovers is also a major cause of urban pollution and degradation. In recent times, the cost of diesel at N450 a litre is prohibitive and the contractors collecting the garbage in Ibadan and perhaps in other cities in Nigeria appear to have abandoned their unprofitable ventures. Unless government is ready to renegotiate such contracts where they exist or get directly involved in garbage collection, our cities are going to be overwhelmed by rats spreading Lassa fever to our people who have to live in these filthy environments. Government cannot say it has no money to keep our environment clean. It is the duty of government to bring appropriate legislation to solve the problem and it is the responsibility of us citizens to pay whatever is legally expected of us as long as it is reasonable and not punitive.

One thing that has become clear in these past years of so-called petroleum bonanza is that nobody, except salary-earning workers, pay taxes because government seems to be satisfied with oil revenues collected from the foreign oil majors and which are irresponsibly wasted or stolen. Since these are not taxes paid by the people, it appears the people don’t care about the looting going on around them. This is a pity because the civic lessons implicit in taxation is missing and the oversight taxpayers would have shown in how their taxes are being spent is also missing to the detriment of public finance in the country. This is why the people keep quiet while looting continues but the moment people have to pay for government services, they will wake up to their supervisory responsibilities and I believe there will be consequent reduction in thieving and looting  as it is in other countries.

Governor Seyi Makinde who seems to want to be seen as “action governor” should set up an emergency urban road maintenance group like the old PWD (Public Works Department) of my youth that would go round all cities in Oyo State starting with Ibadan, the capital, mending broken down roads and carrying out minor repairs on roads and bridges. For example, for almost a year now, the long stretch from the flyover on Molete Road to Oke Ado is potholed everywhere beginning in front of the old Ayo Rosiji’s house and under the flyover bridge. For goodness sake, the standing disgrace of a building on Ibadan Grammar School road should be pulled down because that is the first thing a visitor sees when coming from Lagos to Ibadan through Molete.

The governor should also study the way Lagos State generates revenue through land use and property taxes. In doing this, the local governments must be told once this is done, they must not begin to introduce tenement rates since the state government has already taken over local governments’ duty of collection of garbage and maintenance of local roads.

Garbage bags must also be made available for sale of course through the shops for proper bagging of garbage. Thirdly a social welfare department should be created to go round the cities to round up vagrants, beggars and mad people for proper government care and possible rehabilitation and those fit should be sent back to their places of origin. Fourthly, the state government should set up an urban renewal committee including people from the appropriate departments of urban planning, forestry and horticulture in tertiary institutions to help spruce up Ibadan and help cover our shame of filth.

Now that a new Olubadan is to be crowned in the person of  Dr. Lekan Balogun, a former progressive man politically-speaking and a scholar and by all accounts a modern man who should be interested in bringing his domain into the 21st century, the government should build around him a committee of renewal and renovation of Ibadan. Perhaps this is the time for proper naming of streets and simply numbering them as in other cities in Nigeria. If well done this will attract international attention and possible funding.

I remember when I was ambassador of Nigeria to the Federal Republic of Germany in 1993, I attended a world conference of mayors of global cities representing Lagos our then capital city. The meeting was held in the beautiful Swabian town of Karlsruhe. I made a presentation about Lagos saying it had a population of well over 10 million and almost bragging about it. Then discussion followed. The first thing the burgermeister (mayor) of Karlsruhe said was that no underdeveloped country can effectively and efficiently manage such a monstrosity! Even though I did not agree with him publicly but in my mind I knew he was speaking the truth. It’s the case with our urban sprawls in Nigeria be it Ibadan, Lagos, Kano, Ogbomosho, Kaduna, Ilorin. The towns that are moderate in size like Abeokuta, Akure,  Ijebu Ode, Sokoto, Jos, Ado – Ekiti and  Enugu, Oshogbo,  Iwo , Ilesha, Owerri, Uyo and Port Harcourt lend themselves to easy development and modernization.. We are however stuck with the likes of Ibadan, Lagos and Kano and among the three huge conurbations, Ibadan is lagging behind. This is a challenge Oyo State must face and overcome.

Ethiopia, the most historically important country in Africa has been plagued by serious political crisis eventuating in cruel civil war in which Tigray, a rebellious state is fighting against the federal government of Ethiopia. Unfortunately, it is the common people of Ethiopia who are paying the price. Ethiopia is in the volatile Horn of Africa where people of different cultures are lumped together and where the three monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam were to be found in the past. Ethiopia is an ancient country that existed millennia before the birth of Christ. It was founded according to its myth of origin by King Menelik1, the son of Queen of Sheba and the Israeli King Solomon. Some part of it like Axum and Cush were well known in ancient times as centres of civilizations belonging to the same cultural area that produced the great civilization of Ancient Egypt.

In medieval Europe, the place used to be referred to as the land of Prester John, a mythical Christian king in Africa. The country before the disastrous attempted colonization by Italy which ended when Ethiopia inflicted a military defeat on Italy in 1896 was ruled by emperors descended from the Solomonic dynasty. This dynasty provided a rallying point for Ethiopia in times of foreign invasion or national implosion. In modern times, Emperor Haile Selassie who ruled as regent from 1916 to 1930 when he was Ras Tafari Makonnen and as emperor from 1930 to 1974 was able to mobilize his people to resist the forces of Benito Mussolini, the fascist dictator of Italy in 1935 when he tried to wipe out the humiliation Italy suffered from the Ethiopian military defeat of Adowa in 1896. The free world aided the emperor who escaped to Britain but returned to the country in 1941. Since the end of the Second World war, the country has been held together in spite of the fissiparous tendencies pulling the country apart by the strong government provided by the emperor and after the emperor was overthrown in 1974, by the military which continued the era of strong central government.

The country has passed through various military governments which of course lacked the kind of legitimacy the Solomonic dynasty had. There was an attempt during the brutal rule of Colonel Haile Mariam Mengitsu from 1977 to 1991 to build a socialist ideology around the military regime when he was General Secretary of Ethiopian Workers Party. Many opponents were murdered and all opposition was suppressed. People’s homes were seized and given to the poor under the guise of proletarian revolution. Eventually the regime was toppled by the Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) and Mengitsu fled the country to Mugabe’s Harare and possibly now to South Africa for political asylum. After some period of instability, a democratic left wing government under Prime Minister Meles Zenawi from Tigray as leader of Tigray Peoples Liberation Front ( TPLF) was installed in 1991and 9191. He ruled the country with the traditional Ethiopian harsh rule brooking no opposition until he died in office in 2012. He introduced the idea of ethnic federalism into Ethiopia, an idea pregnant with future problems as we can see today. He brought a lot of economic development to the country and began building the mega dam on the White Nile whose origin is in Ethiopia with the idea of generating immense hydroelectric power to industrialize the country.

This great development plan could possibly bring Ethiopia into future war with Sudan and Egypt whose very lives depend on the uninterrupted flow of the Nile into their countries. It was during his regime that Eritrea which had been fighting to secede from Ethiopia was granted independence and the new Ethiopian constitution granted full autonomy to all the country’s provinces with the power to secede if any wanted to do so. Apparently, the framers of the constitution never imagined any group would like to take up the option. The secession of Eritrea, the former Italian colony from Ethiopia turned the country into a landlocked country with serious implication for its economic development because for years Ethiopia and Eritrea remained in state of belligerency. Ethiopia and Eritrea are peopled by same people separated by colonialism.

When Meles Zenawi died, he was succeeded by Hailemariam Desalegn Boshe who remained in office from 2012 to 2018. He came to office with great experience having served under Zenawi as deputy prime minister and also served as minister of foreign affairs. Like others before him, he faced the intractable problems of poverty, population explosion and unemployment .This has created a lot of dissatisfaction  in the country and this problem was inherited by the current prime minister, Abiy Ahmed Ahmed, who came to office with a lot of promise of unity in diversity. Ethiopia is almost 60 % Christian and 40 % Muslim. Some writers claim that the Muslims are actually in the majority. Ahmed himself is of the Pentecostal Christian faith with an Oromo Muslim father and a Christian mother from the Amhara group. He therefore, represents an ecumenical factor in a highly religiously plural country.  The complex religious situation of the country is illustrated by the fact that Haile Selassie became Regent in 1916 when the young emperor Lij Eyasu declared himself a Muslim and pledged allegiance to the Ottoman emperor, a tactical mistake in the time of the First World War which sealed his fate and he was never seen again and probably withered away in some prison in the country. A year after Abiy Ahmed came to office, the young prime minister signed a peace accord with Eritrea, ending the years of conflict with his neighbour. He also tried to bring unity among the usually quarrelsome Ethiopian people. For his efforts, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for peace in 2019, which critics now say was rather premature.

The present crisis has some religious and ethnic undertones. The government of Tigray had locked horns with the federal government over electoral schedules. It went ahead to hold elections into its regional parliament in disregard of federal opposition to it. When challenged, it overran federal military depots in its region and this led to federal onslaught on it which initially succeeded to a point leading to hundreds of thousands of refugees pouring into neighbouring Sudan as well as creating hundreds of thousands of internally displaced poor Tigrayans. Most of the people in Tigray are orthodox Christians. Because at the heart of Tigray is ancient Cush and Axum an area with thousands of years of history dating to before the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ. The federal forces were joined by forces from the Eritrean republic presenting a strange and unusual situation in which a neighbouring foreign country joins another country to levy war against a breakaway province. After suffering severe losses and wanton massacre of its people, the Tigrayans beat back both Federal Ethiopian forces and their Eritrean supporters who were apparently taking revenge on the Tigrayans who had fought them during their war with Ethiopia. It got to a point where the Tigrayans were at the gates of Addis Ababa with possible blood bath because Abiy Ahmed began to arm Ethiopians against the Tigrayans in what he called a patriotic war to save the country. Hundreds of thousands of Tigrayans living in Addis Ababa were arrested and interned or allegedly killed. This is where we are militarily and there has been intervention from the Western countries particularly the United States to mediate in the conflict. An African Union committee under former president Olusegun Obasanjo has mediated without success.

There is obviously no military solution to the problem because none of the combatants can win a clear victory. The country is in a strategic place in Africa close to the tinderbox of the Middle East and before one knows it, there will be foreign war merchants ready to sell weapons and to assist the two sides leading to much suffering of the poor people and destruction of ancient historic sites in the country. Africa has kept quiet watching from the sidelines when, if the spirit of NEPAD (New Partnership for African Development) we’re still alive, there ought to have been sent to Ethiopia before things got to this point an APRM (African Peer Review Mechanism) to warn the government of Ethiopia of the need to handle the situation with care rather than waiting for war to break out before constituting the Obasanjo Committee. Certainly the spirit of NEPAD should be kept alive by the AU Commission. It should not die with the exit from office of Olusegun Obasanjo and Thabo Mbeki!

The complexity of the Ethiopian problem needs to be tackled by friends of the country in Africa and we should not wait for the USA threatening to impose sanctions and cut off aid from the country before serious efforts to find a solution are put in place. African leaders should begin to take pre-crisis intervention measures in the continent before actual crisis ensues. If this had been done earlier on, we probably would not have had the military incursions in government in Mali, Burkina Faso and Guinea where leaders in the sub region watched a deteriorating situation without intervention until it exploded in predictable coup d’état. The spirit of self-examination that was embraced by the idea of APRM was to nip in the bud crisis before flowering into reality. It is not too late for an extraordinary meeting of the African Union to be summoned to Addis Ababa to impress on the government of Ethiopia that the AU cannot continue to be headquartered in a war-torn country and that a government of national unity must be formed to save the country and Africa from embarrassment.

It is no longer news that our greatest problem in Nigeria is insecurity. Unfortunately this problem has given rise to other problems such as the lack of foreign investment and consequent unemployment. It has also led to food insecurity because farmers are afraid to go to their farms. Construction of roads and railways are hampered by fear of kidnapping of expatriate foreign supervisors thus hampering infrastructural development and economic development because without infrastructure, there can be no physical development necessary to move goods and people around the country.

These are the obvious negative and observable effects of these problems caused by insecurity but there are other problems of social and psychological nature which unless critically examined, one may not see the bearing of general insecurity on them. Insecurity creates fear, sorrow and doubts about the human condition and general unhappiness about life which could lead to psychological problems and mental breakdown of many young people who do not see a good future under the prevailing insecurity in the country. Many of these young people are taking the insane steps of going to Europe by the Sahara desert and the Mediterranean Sea and getting killed and drowned in the process. The reasons for this insecurity are many and of various dimensions. The fundamental reason is underdevelopment causing massive youth unemployment.

Underdevelopment itself is caused by a variety of things such as corruption, political instability, poor educational system and absence of the rule of law both of which constitute what the World Bank calls “intangible capital” critical to development. Absence of this manifests in poor planning and  there is also the problem of absence of technical know-how which leads to absence of innovation which is critical in creating small and medium sized enterprises which are critical in solving the problem of unemployment as has been demonstrated in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

Insecurity also feeds into the problem of low foreign direct investment because it is only where investments friendly environment is present that foreign investment goes. The only way therefore to break the vicious circle of unemployment feeding into insecurity and insecurity causing unemployment is to frontally tackle the issue of insecurity.

The problem of insecurity  has been with us for a while but it has been exacerbated by the unwillingness of the present administration to tackle this problem when it began with herders killing farmers first in the middle belt of the country before it spread all over the country. For ethnic, religious and reasons of common consanguinity, herders who are Fulani were allowed to get away with murder and crimes of ethnic cleansing. Land owners were asked to love their attackers or to choose between keeping their lands and losing their lives. The victims are now naturally fighting back thus creating chaos all over the country. Criminals who now see profit in kidnapping for money have joined in the general commotion and have even abandoned their previous jobs as farmers, herders and even some criminally-minded students have abandoned their education to become highway robbers and kidnappers seizing young students and men and women of means and demanding they be ransomed for money or else be brutally wasted.

The local Fulani terrorists have been joined by foreign ones in ethnic solidarity. Local criminals are also in the field sometimes parading themselves as Fulanis. In this endeavor, religion plays little role since Muslim Fulanis are killing Muslim Hausa and  Muslim Yoruba and Ibo terrorists are killing fellow Ibo Christians to cite a few examples. It is a war of all against all.

Read Also: Southwest and metamorphosis of insecurity

The spread of this madness to the Lagos-Ibadan expressway is a matter of time. Even though the Southwest zone of the country has somehow been spared from the total chaos of the Northern and Eastern part of the country, but it had also witnessed substantial amount of violence, armed robbery, banditry and herders on farmer violence and kidnapping for ransom originally imported there but it has now developed a life of its own. The road construction on the Lagos – Ibadan road and the heavy traffic on the road had before now made kidnapping a bit hazardous for bandits but as construction progresses, the finished part of the road without the usual traffic snarl has attracted kidnappers especially from the north. The northern kidnappers after selling their cows and handing the proceeds to the owners of the cows sometimes take to kidnapping which has proved more lucrative than herding cows. Sometimes local boys who are unemployed join them or provide local intelligence for those coming from outside the area.

The Ijebu stretch of the Lagos – Ibadan express road is more notorious than any other section of the road. Some have suggested that the bandits operating on the road are probably harbored by northern people in the highway settlement in Iperu/Sapade area and I think the police should keep their eyes on the people of this area. There is need for Lagos, Ogun and Oyo states police commands to mount joint patrols on the road. Ogun State police must remain permanently vigilant on the ground to make the government’s investments on road construction and rehabilitation worth its while. There is the need for highway patrols by the police to be brought back as was the case in the 1970s. Perhaps the Federal Roads Safety Corps need to be armed to confront these highway kidnappers and robbers.

The easiest way to kill the economy of this country is to make the roads unsafe. There is no need for anyone to exaggerate the importance of the Lagos – Ibadan expressway to the economic well-being of the country. It connects the port of Lagos with the hinterland of the Southwest and the northern, South-south and south-eastern states. The fragile Nigerian economy will collapse with the insecurity on this road. Whatever it will cost the states and federal governments to secure the road must be expended. The much ballyhooed Amotekun must justify government’s support for it by getting engaged on this road. Arms must be provided for it to do the job. If Aminu Masari, the governor of Katsina State is providing guns for local people  to secure their lives and property, our governors must not shy away from their responsibility. Perhaps we need to raise the issue of local policing and restructuring of the security architecture of this benighted country again before the situation gets to a point where we do not have a country again.

It is not Lagos- Ibadan road alone that is not safe. Even Abuja – Kaduna expressway with all the presence of the military, police, Department of State Security and the federal government and diplomatic missions is not safe. I don’t know when last I have gone home to Okemesi in Ekiti State because all roads leading there are infested by marauders, kidnappers and gun toting herders of Fulani ethnicity. In this kind of pervasive insecurity and fear, who is going to come and invest in our country?

Our own local people are not even investing in our country not to talk of foreigners because no one can guarantee the future stability of the country. My son-in-law who is from Ghana told me he is building some flats in Accra for the future of his family. I congratulated him for this and I immediately felt that I will be the last to ask my son to bring his American loan to invest in Nigeria for a future that is at best dicey and uncertain. This is the situation the problem of insecurity has brought to Nigeria. It is not just Islamic attacks of the Boko Haram and ISWAP type and the Fulani terrorism of the northwest and north central that are destroying Nigeria, the general insecurity caused and occasioned by them and the general absence of the rule of law and certainty of punishment for crime is ruining the country and destroying its future.

The president keeps saying he will not leave the problem of insecurity to his successor and that he has ordered his security forces to destroy the various terrorists disturbing Nigeria. I say amen to the president’s promise but cynics will say this is the eighth year of President Buhari’s presidency and argue that morning shows the day as childhood shows manhood.

My reply is that it is never too late. Perhaps a miracle can happen in the evening months of the Buhari’s presidency. We have no choice than to believe that President Buhari will deliver a secure land to his successor. That will be a legacy worth summoning the last energy of his being.

I don’t want to be a killjoy but I am afraid this piece will appear as a denigration of the railway exploits of Rotimi Amaechi, the minister of transportation in the Muhammadu Buhari government. A year ago after reading the propaganda in the newspapers about Nigeria’s railway age coming more than two centuries after the first steam locomotive engines hauled a train along the tramway in an ironworks in South Wales precisely on February 21, 1804, I decided to go and see with my own eyes the coming of the golden era in rail transportation in modern Nigeria.

By the way, we were not just seeing railways in Nigeria for the first time. In fact, the first railway was built in 1898 to connect Lagos with Abeokuta before it was extended gradually to northern Nigeria terminating in Kano. Thanks to Sir Percy Girouard, the French-Canadian governor of Northern Nigeria between 1908 and 1909 and whose main interest was railway construction rather than being obsessed with Indirect Rule ideology of the Lugardian era. Why we are celebrating the new railway age is because it is replacing the narrow gauge of 3feet 6 inches (1,067 millimetres) with the standard gauge of 4feet 8.5 inches (1420mm).

Railway transportation was pioneered by an English engineer, George Stephenson (1781-1848) and this was one of the most important technological inventions of the 19th century and was a key component of the industrial revolution in England and the rest of Europe. If we are just entering our own railway age, it follows then that we have a long way to go in our industrial revolution trajectory and unless we industrialize we will remain hewers of wood and drawers of water to the rest of the world.

Out of curiosity I went last week to the railway station in Moniya, at the outskirts of Ibadan on the road to Iseyin. It is some kind of terminus of the Lagos-Ibadan railway before it commences its northern journey to Kano perhaps in the next decades when many of us would have joined our ancestors! The station is named appropriately after Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the father of the old Western Nigeria. It is a modern station but it is not connected to any road except a bush path leading out of the station. Anyone not familiar with its location will reach Iseyin before turning back to Moniya in search of the elusive station. This was my experience recently. There is a signboard somewhere on a grassy knoll pointing to the direction of the station. After I was directed by the local people to the location of the station I was amazed that such a station is sitting in the bush all by itself except a park that could take a few vehicles. This is probably an unfinished project even though it has been commissioned by the president and there have been pages upon pages congratulating the minister of transportation for his stellar achievement! Many of those doing this probably have not bothered to visit the stations along the route and the major terminus at least for now in Ibadan. It seems the Chinese builders of the railway must have said we have delivered a rail project and the station and how you get to the station is none of our business!

How does one build a station without road to link it with the road connecting it to the city it is supposed to serve? Will the Chinese do this in their country or in any other country but Nigeria where anything goes! I think the minister should order the contractor to go back to site and build a well tarred and lit double carriage road bringing in and taking people out of the so-called modern station. Anything short of this is an insult to all right thinking Nigerians. This project is being done with borrowed money from China and paid to Chinese contractors. I believe it is our right to tell them to do a proper job while we still have our voice. They can wait to bully us and seize our property in future if and when we fail to pay our debt to them. The customer is after all always right.

If the Chinese fail to do the job properly, the governor of Oyo State should complain to the president and then embark on linking the station with a well laid out road and with appropriate lighting to reduce insecurity.  Any forward looking administration whether at state or federal levels should realize that anywhere in the world the land around a major railway station is prime land. Even though the land surrounding the Obafemi Awolowo station is still bush, it will become prime land in future. The land should be immediately acquired by the railway corporation or by Oyo State so that there is no encroachment on the land or continuation of current unplanned development. The place is presently being taken over by shanties and all kinds of huts selling food as if we are still in the 19th century.  If this is not done, we will in a decade or two find this modern station surrounded by the usual urban filth and squalor typical of tropical African cities.

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Perhaps the Oyo State government should designate special busses to carry people to and from the railway station from 5am to 9pm when the last train arrives Ibadan. This should be a profitable route to clean city buses and we should not wait for the unruly “danfos”to make a mess of the transportation business around the railway station.

What I am saying is not rocket science or neuroscience, it is just common sense. We should all in this country get engaged with the process of governance so that nobody pulls wool over our eyes, so to say. If money is being borrowed supposedly to build us modern infrastructure, we owe it to ourselves but particularly to our children and grand-children who will pay these debts to cry out when shoddy jobs are done in the name of this benighted country.

The railway station in Ebute -Meta in Lagos happily sits on already developed road and one had come to expect that accessibility to other stations along the same new railway will and should not be the subject of criticism which would not have been necessary if there had been proper supervision of this particular project. Or are we to wait until the University of Transportation in Daura takes off before the right thing is done?

While on railway development, can one ask when the East -West railway will be built? Why are will fixated on North-South railway development when we know that the East-West railway will be more viable and more profitable. Any loan borrowed to develop such a route will be easily repayable because of the volume of trade and number of people likely to use the railway rather than building railway lines traversing huge spans of the land that is thinly populated. If the decision is made strictly on economic viability, the Lagos – Calabar/Port Harcourt line with stops in Benin and Warri would have made more economic sense than the Ibadan – Abuja line to link up with the Abuja- Kano line because this southern line would have linked the port of Lagos with the hydrocarbon-producing part of Nigeria and whatever revenue generated there can then been available for railways built for political considerations. This is the way borrowing money for infrastructural development makes sense. The idea of borrowing money for development is that such projects would be a catalyst for further development at maximum rate because speed is the essence of development in the modern world.

We need to tap existing hydrocarbons resources before these resources lose value in the next three decades because of our commitment to join the rest of the world to reverse the industrial use of greenhouse gases that are damaging the environment. The upshot of what I am saying is that there is a need for a holistic assessment of the railway projects and also making sure we get value for money being spent.

I am not suggesting that there is no plan at all. Whatever plan there is cannot be all that new. Since the 1980s, such plan has existed. I remember the late Navy Captain Mike Akhigbe as governor of Lagos laying out the Lagos- Calabar/Port Harcourt railway plan which according to him would open the immediate coastal area south of the line for rapid development. This plan which must have been done at considerable cost probably lies somewhere in the government archives as with other plans for the physical and constitutional development of our country. We must learn to build on the past so that the present can have a meaning and the future can make sense. All civilizations stand on the shoulders of previous generations and future civilizations build on the present in a dynamic developmental continuum. This is the way to go whether in the new railway age or in any development planning. We do not have to begin every planning on a tabula rasa!