Category: Jide Osuntokun

Professor Bolaji Akinyemi deserves all the encomiums that have been poured on him to mark his 80th birthday. He has marked his birthday in a classy way befitting an academic of exceptional brilliance. I was glad I was able to make it. I wouldn’t have been able to do it but for the intervention of my friend Ambassador Dapo Fafowora who was lost by academia to diplomatic bureaucracy. It was he who called my attention to the virtual celebration of Bolaji’s birthday.

We are all very proud of Akinyemi for his stellar achievements in the realm of foreign policy and diplomacy in both theory and practice. In the academic study of international affairs in Nigeria, Akinyemi comes second to the late Ambassador Lasisi (Lawrence) Fabunmi whose thesis on the Anglo – Egyptian condominium administration in the Sudan, a Ph.D of the University of London in 1959 blazed the trail of academic studies in international relations by Nigerians. Oxford University’s D. Phil in 1969. Our friend Olajide Aluko followed suit with a doctorate at the London School of Economics (LSE) with a dissertation on Ghana and Nigeria’s relations around the same time with Bolaji’s completion of his Oxford doctorate. Several other scholars have found their niche in one area of Nigeria’s or Africa’ place in the international arena. It is however incontestable that Akinyemi brought the study of international relations the high profile it has now acquired in the Nigerian universities.

Akinyemi comes from a solid middle class background. His father, the Reverend Canon Akinyemi, was a graduate of the famous Fourah Bay College, Freetown Sierra Leone, a college of the University of Durham. He was the principal of Ilesha Grammar School and was a cleric of the Anglican tradition.  He was a parliamentarian representing the rural area of Ijesha land in the Western House of Assembly. He was a member of the Action Group, led by Chief Obafemi Awolowo. Ijesha land at that time was dominated by Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe-led NCNC (National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons/Citizens) the town of Ilesha in those days was dominated by the NCNC titans of Babatunji Olowofoyeku and Joseph Odeleye Fadahunsi.

Bolaji’s father was a strict disciplinarian of the old school and he did not spare the rod. Bolaji grew up in a large family of five boys and a girl. As can be expected, he had to fight for his lebensraum, to use a loaded German word in a very competitive family. He was number two in the family coming after his older brother Akinwunmi who schooled at Christ’s School Ado Ekiti and later became a physician. I believe Bolaji wanted to be like his brother. This probably accounts for why after leaving Igbobi College in Lagos, he came to Christ School in 1960, following the footsteps of his brother to immerse himself in studying the basic sciences of Chemistry, Biology and Physics for the Higher School Certificate. Growing up in political environment led him to develop avid interest in politics and world affairs. It was in this circumstance that he took part in an essay competition conducted by the embassy of the USA and won. His mastery of the subject attracted the attention of the embassy officials who then arranged for Bolaji to participate in a youth forum in the United States in 1961. This was how a young man studying to become a medical doctor became eventually a doctor of political science.

He studied at Temple University in Philadelphia USA (1962-64) Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, Medford Massachusetts USA (1964-66) Trinity College, Oxford,England 1966-69).

On returning home obviously at the end of the civil war in Nigeria, he joined the University of Ibadan as a lecturer in political science. It was from here that he was appointed Director- General of the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs in 1975 after the coup d’état against General Yakubu Gowon whose regime after nine years had become fat and corrupt. The General Murtala Muhammed’s regime became extremely involved in the politics of African liberation. Akinyemi provided the regime with the intellectual power necessary to mobilize not only Nigerians, but Africans behind the nationalist fervor behind the new Nigerian assertiveness in dealing with not only South Africa but even its traditional allies in the West that were not used to the kind of dynamism seen in Nigeria. It was like there was no foreign ministry at that time and even the foreign minister, Brigadier Joe Nanven Garba relished being at the NIIA and being seen with Bolaji Akinyemi and his academic colleagues. Bolaji was a mere 34 years old young man. His energy knew no bounds. He had as his administrative secretary, Abubakar Muhammadu Rimi who later became the tempestuous governor of Kano in the 2nd republic. Akinyemi organized seminars around the issues germane to Nigeria’s development such as Nigeria and her neighbors, federalism and politics in Nigeria, economic integration of West Africa, the liberation struggle in Southern Africa, Nigeria and Brazil, Nigeria and the commonwealth, Nigeria and European economic community, Nigeria and OPEC and so on and so forth. He turned the NIIA to beehive of policy discussion and began the practice of the head of state annual policy statement on our country’s diplomacy. He held the post of Director General until he was replaced by Ibrahim Gambari under the NPN-led government. He was appointed professor of political science by the University of Lagos in 1983. It was while he was at the University of Lagos that Babangida sought him out in 1985 and appointed him foreign minister at the age of 43. Babangida could not have made a better choice because while Bolaji was Director- General at the NIIA, he had been visiting professor in European and American universities.

It was as foreign minister that he really made his mark. His legacies includes starting a Technical Aids Corps (TAC) modeled after the peace corps program of the young president J. F. Kennedy which tried to make young Americans go to the developing parts of the world to share their knowledge and thus build up support for America in the world . Bolaji saw Nigeria as the ultimate power in Africa and the black world. At that time Nigeria was awash with petro-dollars and he felt we could share our fortune with the rest of the black world in Africa, the Caribbean and Oceania. This proved to be very popular with young Nigerians and the program has endured till today. His development of the concept of a Concert of Medium Powers in which a group of countries in Africa, Latin America, Asia and Europe could come together as mediators in international conflicts was seen as a duplication of the Non-Aligned movement which Bolaji apparently found unwieldy. Needless to say this didn’t fly amidst withering criticism.

As minister, he was directly involved in facilitating peace between Libya and Chad and between Mali and Burkina Faso in 1987. He was seized with the issue of liberation struggle in Southern Africa, a carryover from his Murtala Muhammed/Olusegun Obasanjo days of the late 1970s. It was under him that Nigeria became a frontline state in Africa’s struggle for the liberation of Southern Africa.

In spite of his stellar performance as foreign minister, he was summarily dropped in a cabinet reshuffle two years after being made minister. Only Babangida can give reasons for this but rumors had it that his intended rapprochement with Israel was not favorably looked upon in the north of our country. Some in ABU, the hotbed of northern academic radicalism led by Bala Yusuf Usman erroneously said Bolaji’s wife who is a Catholic was Jewish and that this accounted for Bolajj’s softness towards Israel. After his tenure as minister, Bolaji went back to academia but continued his engagement with politics until the  Moshood Abiola  conundrum when he was so involved with the revalidation of Abiola’s mandate that when Abacha’s tyranny began, he had to flee to Britain and joined forces with NADECO to see the end of Abacha’s tyranny. He narrowly escaped from being kidnapped in Benin Republic by goons sent after him and his colleagues in Benin.  In 2007, President Umar Yar’Adua chose him as deputy chairman of a committee to make recommendations for a reform of the electoral system. They worked very hard but no radical reforms were instituted. When President Jonathan set up a national body to give the country a new constitution after he took over from Yar’Adua, Akinyemi was one of those called to offer his expertise and the recommendations they made remain locked up in the archives to gather dust.

Akinyemi’s contribution to the history of modern Nigeria remains imperishable. This contribution was most time undermined by petty jealousies, envy by his colleagues who did not have the same opportunities that Akinyemi had. In retirement, Akinyemi seems to devote his immense ability to nurturing the development of  a virile Yoruba movement within the overarching Nigerian search for unity. During most of these times I worked with Bolaji Akinyemi and his NIIA sponsored my research on Nigerian/Equatorial Guinea relations which became a blueprint for Nigeria’s policy to that neighboring country.

My readers should permit my use of the familiar Bolaji in referring to this great man that I have known for close to 70 years! Bolaji is a fine and handsome man but under the beautiful exterior is steel. Bolaji when young had hot temper which only age has tempered. He served his country with absolute honesty and integrity with little material acquisition to show for it unlike many people who had less opportunity to serve and made little or no contribution to the nation as Bolaji did. He can at least rejoice that a grateful nation honored him with the highest civilian accolade of Commander of the Federal Republic (CFR).

How I wish all our problems of yesteryears would have disappeared and expired with the just ended 2021.  Of course nothing of this sort will happen. It is the nature of man and our misfortune that national problems are not easily solved as we would wish. It is not our fault that our languages and cultures differ. In any case, we played no part in bringing the multitude of tongues in Nigeria together as one country. The British obliged us with the problems. They were not ignorant of what they were doing. They were possibly motivated to either create a problem that would forever hobble us down so that their controlling hands will ever be needed in our national affairs as “neutral umpire” for the foreseeable future, or they genuinely believed that a nation could be formed out of the crowd of languages in our embryonic country. That former plan of theirs, on later evidence, proved to be true. Wherever the British went in the centuries of creating problems all over the world, they always left legacies of knotty problems of disunity. It had nothing to do with racism, at least not initially. The British learnt this great lesson of divide and rule from their former rulers the Romans. “Divide et impera” became a useful strategy in the hands of most imperial powers all over the world, in Europe, Asia, and Africa, the old continents, before Europe spread its conquest all over the world. This strategy proved useful to the British in its conquest of India between the 17th and 20th centuries. The same strategy was used by them in the carving out and conquest of their colonies and protectorates in Africa. Even in their former colonial empire in America before the 13 American colonies broke away from them in 1776, they favored the Southern states with their slave holding economy over the industrializing and free enterprising Northern colonies. From Ireland just across from the United Kingdom to Canada, it was the same divide and rule strategy that prevailed.

On coming to Nigeria, the strategy of divide and rule had been tested and there was no point deviating from what was tested and proven method of control of subject peoples. They had ample opportunities to so divide the country using the Niger and the Benue rivers into two relatively equal parts but they chose the evidence of unfinished and evolving history over geographical, administrative tidiness and ethnic consanguinity. In this way, they created enduring divisions between peoples in Nigeria which has unfortunately manifested in the present political imbalance and north – south dichotomy. A neater division of the country would have facilitated quicker integration and possibly lessen the political division in the country and a more balanced federal system among equals in terms of territory and population would have been much easier than the lopsided so-called federation we have where one section overwhelmingly dominates the rest put together.

The question can then be asked that if Nigerians understand this problem, why can’t they do something about it? Chief Obafemi Awolowo, a man before his times, had in 1947 suggested that in order for the unity of the country to endure, the administration of the country must be along federal lines. The rising elite in the northern part of the country led by Ahmadu Bello arrived at the same conclusion. Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe the leader of the people of the Eastern Region by 1951 was of the opinion that the daemon of language separatism could be tamed, and he favoured a unitary form of government. Azikiwe’s point of view was based on his own circumstances of birth and where he grew up. He was born in Zungeru and did not know his father’s region of birth until he was nine years old and also spent his teenage years in Yorubaland in Lagos. He therefore saw the language barrier as not unbridgeable because he spoke and understood Hausa and Yoruba along with his own Ibo language. His childhood friends were Yoruba people and it took him quite some time to realize that in politics blood is thicker than water. Awolowo and Ahmadu Bello were more realistic about our situation. Both felt that Azikiwe’s Ibo people who had little resources in their homeland were naturally driven to move out to other areas of the country that were better endowed. In doing this and to the annoyance of their hosts, they paid little attention to their local sensibilities. The British stoked the fire of ethnic divisions by pandering to northern views over those of their southern compatriots by sometimes being more “northern” than the northern leaders themselves.

Sir Hugh Clifford, the successor of Sir Fredrick Lugard said in 1921 that if war were to break out in Nigeria, it was likely to have been between British officials in the North against their counterparts in the South! Throughout the process of negotiations towards sovereign independence in Nigeria, the northern view always triumphed over the divided southern views. The southern division was based on the inability  of Azikiwe  to rise above immediate gains in his political alignment with the North and a more forward looking assessment of the situation would have made him to force the issue of inequality by aligning with his southern political colleagues even though temporary opponents.

It was not that Nigerians were not aware of the dissonance in the national harmony. The struggle for creation of states which Chief Awolowo and his political party, the Action Group, championed before and after independence was all about building a balanced federation to take care of the permanent fissiparous tendencies afflicting the nation. Critics of Awolowo would say he was driven by enlightened ethnic interest of reversing the fact that unless the country was divided into its natural ethnic units he and his largely Yoruba supporters had no way of gaining power and that the geographical location of the Yoruba gave them the advantage of success if the country was restructured along ethnic parameters as advocated by Awolowo and his Action Group political party. When the previous three regions became four, it was the West with the lesser population that was broken into two to deny the proponents of states creation the chance of ever coming to power at the centre since their home base had been whittled down to a smaller size than before.

When the civil war broke out in 1967-70, 12 states were created in Nigeria, six in the North and six in the South synchronizing the division roughly along fairly discernible ethnic fault lines. The division was not perfect but it for the first time attempted to remove the deadweight of ethnic domination in the centre to the point that some cabals around General Yakubu Gowon, the head of state, began to have the idea of minority ethnic rule as the panacea for solving the problem of ethnic struggle among the major ethnic groups of the Hausa, Ibo and Yoruba. This romanticism did not last long before the majority groups struck back under General Murtala Muhammed and later Olusegun Obasanjo. Since 1979, politics of ethnic domination came back with a willing southern group playing the role of a horse to the northern jockey! Nothing has changed since then despite the series of civilian and military regimes that has ruled the country. Where under Obasanjo and Jonathan the south provided the leadership of the country, it was at the sufferance of the north which was the puppeteer while the southern leaders remained the puppets. Yet it is clear that a lasting and enduring polity would exist only when there is equality of political power equitably distributed. The recent agitation for “resource control “true federalism”, “fiscal federalism”, “restructuring” are harking back to the warped origin of the country. It will not be easy to find an acceptable way of distributing power within the regional and ethnic formations in the country but there is no alternative. The only alternative – “to thy tents oh Israel” is too ghastly to be seriously considered.

We may never have a proper solution to our problems but we must try and understand them because it is when a mad man realizes that he is mad that his healing of his madness begins. The upshot of what I am saying is that we cannot like the ostrich bury our heads in the sand and think that nobody sees us. The greatest legacy Muhammadu Buhari can do for our country is to put in process the means by which, through national negotiations, we can arrive at about six or maximum eight reasonably viable federal units into which power will be substantially devolved while the centre coordinates enumerated powers of  finance and currency,  customs and immigration, aviation, transportation, defense and foreign affairs with all residual powers  notably, police, education, agriculture, coastal ports and airports, health and social welfare, and others lying in the province of the new states. This is the only way to a viable and secure future. Without these issues being finally settled, there will neither be local nor foreign investment to tackle the problems of development, unemployment and consequent insecurity.

The Soun of Ogbomosho Oba Jimoh Oladunni Oyewunmi Ajagungbade III in Yoruba parlance has gone to the roof (Aja) this is because in Yoruba traditional belief, a king does not die, the same way the departure of a king or queen in England is announced  as the “ king/queen is dead , long live the king /queen “. The Yoruba also say “Oba ku Oba/Baba ku” which means the king is dead but the king or father remains alive. The official announcement by the Oyo State government of the transition of His Royal Majesty Oba Oyewumi, CON , CFR, brings the curtain down on 48 years of Ogbomosho history.

Prince Oladunni Oyewumi was born on Friday, May 27, 1926 to Oba Bello Afolabi Oyewumi Ajagungbade II and Ayaba (Queen) Seliat Olatundun Oyewumi. He ascended the throne on October 24, 1973. His great grandfather, Oba Oluwusi Aremu the fifth Soun of Ogbomosho reigned from 1826 to 1840. His grandfather, Oba Gbagungboye Ajagungbade I reigned from 1869 to 1871 as the 10th Soun. His father Oba  Bello Afolabi Oyewumi Ajagungbade 11 reigned from 1916 to 1940 as the 15th Soun. There are other ruling houses in Ogbomosho but the Ajagungbade family has been the most successful in Ogbomosho. The recently departed Soun was one of the youngest children of his father and to protect him from possible harm because soothsayers had correctly predicted that he will be an Oba one day in future, his father sent him away from home to Ibadan for his early education at Saint Patrick’s School Oke Padre in Ibadan after which he returned to complete his vocational training at Ogbomosho People’s Institute. He learnt how to weave and his mastery of the art of weaving determined his future commercial trajectory of trading to neighbouring towns and to Ilesha from where he went further to Jos in Northern Nigeria in 1944 following the footsteps of relations of his mother who invited him to come to northern Nigeria because of the limited opportunities in Ogbomosho.

When he arrived in Jos, he enrolled in extra mural studies to improve his education particularly the mastery of the English language. From Jos he would travel to Lagos to buy articles of trade which he then brought to Jos by railways. Soon he became agent of European trading houses based in Lagos. His business grew by leaps and bounds. He was noticed by the colonial authorities and British tin and Columbite miners in Jos who patronized him for European types of goods and beverages. He was a very sociable man and the rising African middle class of teachers and administrators and the growing community of miners got to know him very well. This was particularly the case in Jos and Bauchi. He also cultivated the friendship of the expatriate community who in spite of the local penny-pinching racism of the whites against the Africans treated Prince Oyewumi as an equal. He was invited to their dances and even allowed to dance with their wives. He had a gangling and tall personality and spoke good English and unlike the primitive local people on the Jos plateau, Prince Oyewumi had no feeling of inferiority and threw himself completely in to anything he did whether at play or at work.

By 1951 when agitation for local Nigerian participation in politics came up, the Sardauna of Sokoto, Ahmadu Bello, the leader of the Northern Peoples Congress whenever he visited Jos called on Prince Oyewumi who he called “Ciroma “for political support. Prince Oyewumi naturally responded with material support as would be expected from the richest African in Jos. By this time, Prince Oyewumi had agencies of several European firms particularly the French trading company la  Compagnie Francaise de L’ Afrique Occidentale (CFAO) which later  invited him  to France in 1954 from where he secured the monopoly of the distribution of the French sugar brand Saint Louis. He also visited Germany and Holland to secure the distributorship of Becks beer and Heineken beer respectively. He amassed substantial amount of money from his business and went into property business building several houses in Jos and a hotel and warehouse in the centre of the town which he named TERMINUS hotel. He has replicated his hotel business in Osogbo and Ogbomosho believing in the adage that charity begins at home. He also built in Ogbomosho, the Royal Crown Hotels. On getting to the throne in 1973, he tried to establish several industries in Ogbomosho without much success. He also dabbled into the shipping business in Lagos and like most Nigerian enterprises, the policy environment was unfavourable because of the inability or reluctance of the federal government to protect local industries.

Read Also: Buhari mourns Soun of Ogbomosho land

Ogbomosho is located in the savanna belt and because of this, the town could and cannot support agricultural enterprises like production of cocoa rubber or timbre. This has had tremendous negative impact on the city. There are no jobs for the local youth and this accounts for the wandering nature of Ogbomosho people. They are to be found in Ghana, Ivory Coast, Togo, and Benin and in the large cities of the north like Maiduguri, Jos ,  Kaduna, Bauchi, Kano and smaller places like Sokoto, Katsina, Gombe, Zaria and Minna. Many of the Ogbomosho people are Muslims and in colonial Nigeria, it was relatively easy for them to assimilate into the wider Muslim population of the north until recently when regionalism and ethnicity crept into the factors of political advantage where it now does not matter whether one is a Muslim or not, because ethnicity seems to trump religion in the fierce struggle for power in Nigeria. The Soun found this difficult to understand especially in view of the lifelong friendship he had with people from the north of Nigeria. He knew on first name terms people like Ahmadu Bello and  Abubakar Tafawa Balewa and Ibrahim Dimis who humiliated the prime minister Abubakar Tafawa Balewa when he defeated him in the federal elections of 1959 before he was somehow rigged out.

Prince Oyewumi tried very much to avoid involvement in politics but this was difficult for a man of his stature and means. When the Action Group crisis broke out in 1961 during the party’s Jos convention, he strained himself to intervene with both Chief Obafemi Awolowo and his deputy, Chief Samuel Ladoke Akintola. He as an Ogbomosho patriot, was troubled by the events of the newspapers‘ portrayal of Chief  Ladoke Akintola  as a traitor to his leader . But being distant from Ibadan, he could do nothing to change the course of events. Not even the royalty in Ife, Oyo, Ijebu Ode and Abeokuta could do so. The influential Yoruba grandees in Lagos intervened fruitlessly and it seemed Yoruba land was bound to violence until the coup d’état of  January 15 1966 killed Akintola, the greatest Ogbomosho man of our times. This left a permanent scar on the Soun that when Governor  Rashidi Adewolu Ladoja  and his deputy, Alao Akala, an Ogbomosho indigene  started having problems, the Soun called Akala that he should make up with his boss and  that he did not want the name of Ogbomosho in the mud  again by people saying an Ogbomosho man cannot be trusted. During the dictatorship of  Sani Abacha, he sometimes called the Soun to ask for his advice and so did Generals Babangida and Olusegun Obasanjo. The Soun would have wanted to be left alone but these military men who had known him since his stay in Jos will not leave him alone but as a wise man he always found ways to give general answers  without  committing himself to whatever questions he was asked.

Ogbomosho is such an important place that it had within recent past produced two or three Are Ona Kakanfo (Generalismo and military commander of the Oyo empire). Without the military might of Ogbomosho that is just a short distance from the Fulani front line in Ilorin, Yorubaland’s history would have been different from what it is today  as it is still chaffing under the consequences of the Fulani destruction of Ancient Oyo.

Oba Oyewumi left an indelible mark on Ogbomosho. He was the first Soun to wear a beaded crown signalling that he was a first class Oba with five local governments in his domain. His reign witnessed the founding of the Ladoke Akintola University with its imposing teaching hospital, a federal polytechnic, the building of a modern palace, high court buildings, township stadium, federal secondary school, and several secondary schools.

The tempo of development certainly picked up during his reign that he left the rambling town of close to a million souls the fourth most populous city after Ibadan, Lagos, and Kano much better than he found it. His most important contribution was peace because when he came to the throne, things were so bad that sometimes in the 1960s, a Soun was beheaded during a revolt against government policies about taxation with the local sovereign paying the price of bad policy of the state government during the Nigerian civil war.

If there is a particular thing the Soun should be remembered for, it his contribution to education of his people and his highly educated children including  two ladies who are professors and other children in various professions including law, business , the social sciences and business which says much for a Muslim ruler.

“Erin wo !Ajanaku sun bi Oke!”

I don’t want to borrow from Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth 11 and describe this year of our Lord 2021 an Annus horribilis (horrible year) as her majesty described some years ago when everything that could go wrong in her family went wrong as witnessed by breakdowns of the marriages of her children, princes Charles and Andrew and that of Princess Anne. This year has not been a great year for most countries in the world because of the ongoing struggle with coronavirus pandemic and the growing concern with global climate change and its manifestation in unseasonably high temperatures, rainfalls, flooding, snow storms, coastal erosion, sea rise, destruction of bio -diversity and many bushfires all over the world.

Midway in the year, things brightened up with what seemed to be apparent decline in the incidence of the Covid-19 outbreak. But by the beginning of the third quarter of the year, the decline was replaced with an uptick in the coronavirus pandemic in most parts of the world particularly in the Americas and Europe. Somehow, West Africa for reasons not clear to many scientists remains relatively stable despite low vaccination. This does not mean people are not being affected nor does it mean people are not dying of the coronavirus. I have personally lost a few of my friends and academic colleagues. But the incidence of the disease is not as dramatically severe as it is in America, Europe and India.

People have suggested that the relatively young population of our countries may be responsible for this.  Other reasons adduced to explain the low rate of morbidity and mortality is the fact that we are outdoors people because of the high temperature of our subcontinent. Because of low level of electricity supply, we don’t lock ourselves in our air conditioned homes but rather open our windows wide open to cool ourselves and because of this air circulation helps to keep at bay whatever viruses that are prevalent in our houses.

Whatever the reasons may be, we have been reasonably lucky in the tropical areas of Africa but not in the temperate southern and the Mediterranean areas of North Africa with their cold weather. We have however suffered from the downturn in the global economy because of our hopelessly dependent economy on the global North. The situation has been very bad for the past two years. Because of the low production in the rest of the world to which we sell our hydrocarbons of gas and oil, prices have been generally low because of low demand for the past two years. Even the sudden rise in the hydrocarbons prices since September is seen by the Western world as a threat to their economies and the United States has coordinated release of oil from their strategic petroleum reserves with countries in Europe and Japan to bring down prices despite the unease in oil producing and exporting countries. Even if Nigeria has benefited from recent increases in prices, the effects have not percolated down to the struggling and suffering people of the country. This is s because our economy is imports dependent. The western and Asian worlds from where we get supplies simply increased their prices in relation to increase in oil and gas prices. We have thus become victims of imported inflation. Cooking gas, drugs, basic food like rice and wheat flour, vegetable oils, even cows coming from Chad, Central African Republic, Niger republic and other parts of West Africa have doubled in price. Locally produced food crops seem to be in a race to catch up with expensive imported ones. Now we are told that we will pay N340 per litre of petrol next year. This price was apparently arrived at because we buy refined petroleum at the high prices prevailing abroad since we do not refine crude petroleum in Nigeria. We have four refineries which are all broken down and the Dangote refinery has continued to shift its commissioning ever forward. In spite of our pleas to the government to sell these damned refineries or give them out gratis to whoever can make them work preferably to the companies that built them, our governments since 2007 have not acceded to our request; rather they continue their old practice of the annual budgetary allocations to repair them which a cynic described as the “cocoa farms” of politicians and those in the corridors of f power.  The result of this and the pervasive corruption all over the place is that governments have very little left for capital development after paying salaries. Even salaries are sometimes paid by borrowing foreign loans from the Chinese who may in future pick and choose which of our infrastructures they would take over to pay our debts. I hope they will mercifully take over our ports and their entrance and exit roads which this current government for seven years has not been able to fix.

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The infrastructure deficit of the country, whether in terms of electricity, and particularly rail and roads, has compounded the insecurity and further undermined the poor economy of the country. A country that is stationary and not moving is a dead country. Roads are uniformly bad in Nigeria. Intercity roads that are under construction have been going on for decades. The Lagos-Ibadan road linking the country with Lagos, the commercial emporium of the country has been under reconstruction for the past decade and there is no alternative road while reconstruction continues interminably. The Abeokuta- Lagos road that could have served as alternative is virtually impassable. The Ikorodu- Sagamu road that could have been redeveloped as alternative remains the way the British left it in 1960 when they were leaving the country. I am surprised that the security services particularly the military do not seem to know the implications of Lagos being cut off from the rest of the country by a hostile power like Captain John Beecroft of the British Royal Navy did in 1851 presaging the eventual take over and conquest of Nigeria in detail. Most of the attacks on people are at the unmotorable parts of our roads and states like Ekiti, Osun and Ondo  are almost cut off from the rest of the country because of bad roads.

Is there any end to these tales of woes in sight? Nobody knows when our problems will gradually come to an end. What I can say is that we have not had things this bad before. We now have a situation where we cannot go and see the graves of our parents and siblings who have gone ahead of us. We fear taking to the roads to avoid joining prematurely our dead parents not because we are sick but because of fear of bandits, terrorists, Fulani herdsmen who seem to value the lives off their cows more than the lives of fellow country folks who are peacefully traversing the land or engaging in farming to feed themselves and their fellow citizens. Initially when these killings started, we pleaded with the federal government which controls all the security forces in the land, to descend heavily on these terrorists but the government demurred apparently because of ties of consanguinity with these terrorists. Now when the problem has metastasized the government is fighting a rear-guard action against them which one hopes is not too little and too late.

One is tempted to give up. But what alternative than optimism do we have? All of us cannot like the youth of Nigeria begin to look for escape through the Sahara desert and the Mediterranean Sea. We cannot run to Angola, Southern Africa, Kenya and Ghana where we are treated with contempt which we richly deserve as a people who frittered away all our opportunities and chances and are now running all over the world like beheaded chicken before giving up. December signifies the end of the year and the hope of a new beginning next year and it is a month in which we can look forward with optimism because it is the month of ADVENT. This is the month we commemorate the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ. The word “ADVENT” is derived from the Latin word “Advenire” to arrive so the ADVENT signifies the glorious arrival of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ which we mark on December 25 every year. Whatever fears we may have about the new variant of the coronavirus, we should all hope for a better tomorrow. In spite of the global anxiety over the new variant, Omicron, I believe what some of the virologists in South Africa are saying, that it is not more dangerous than the prevailing delta variant and  that the fear of it coming from “the dark continent” may be the reason for  the knee-jerk reaction of cutting transportation links with Southern Africa by the global North and their allies in Asia and elsewhere and that the current vaccines will still suffice to handle the medical problems associated with the virus and its various mutations. We shall overcome some day! On our own internal insecurity problems, there are indications of a turn around. This is because the federal government has woken up to its responsibility and perhaps because the terrorists have reached their optimum level of nuisance and reached the nadir of destruction and are realizing that others are ready to defend their own territories and means of existence and that destroying the economy has led to the downturn of demands for their cows. Whatever the case may be no condition is permanent and those who may have been sponsoring and abetting them may also have realized that it is lose-lose situation.

I have a dream that soon our country after restructuring will once again find its place among the great countries in this world with a chastened leadership that has learnt its lessons from our current tragic situation.

On Thursday, November 18, in Lagos, precisely at Ikeja, I stopped to buy some yams from some Hausa maidoya as Hausa people call yam sellers.  I put on my Hausa language cap to facilitate easy communication and to ensure what we call in Nigeria ”good market” that is, favourable price. I asked to buy six tubers of yams. The maidoya was quite nice to me especially when I spoke his mother tongue. He asked me to pay N15,000. I told him I was in a hurry. This was because in Hausa market culture what he did was permissible. You normally begin from the top and walk your way downwards. But I was in a hurry so I said “Nawon gaskia?” That is, what is the last price? He then started putting the yams in my car and swearing “Wallahi  Maigida, it is N8,500”. At that point against my best judgment, I gave him N6000 for the five yams thinking I was being generous. He refused bluntly and took his yams from me without calling me back when I slowly began to move away from his makeshift stall.

On my way home, I began to ask my driver whether yams had become that expensive for everyone because I thought being in a car may have led the maidoya to mistake me for a rich man who  had too much money but little sense!  As a widower, I am familiar with what is going on with prices in the market. I then told my driver that if yams are now too expensive, I would shift to eating bread. My driver asked me to perish the thought because a big loaf of sliced bread now sells between N700 and N800. I am not keen on bread anyway.

Cooking gas has moved rapidly from about N3000 to N9500. The galloping price of gas is global. I was in Britain recently and everyone was complaining about cooking and heating gas. This was during the recently concluded COP26 when people were pledging to cut greenhouse gasses emissions to zero within 50 years so as to bring global warming to 1.5 Celsius above preindustrial global temperature. While saying this, countries like China and India were saying they could not do this without damaging their economies. Britain and even the USA were still warming their homes with heat from coal. Where I was staying was so cold that I complained every day while the landlord claimed he had just installed environmentally correct heater which he had not fully mastered. Needless to say I was happy to return to good old hot Nigeria despite our problems.

Back to the issue of Nigeria and galloping inflation. A cylinder of gas is now selling at N9500 and yet we are a gas-producing and exporting country. Of course I know we can’t breach our contract with our customers without losing market share in these days of immense competition especially when hydrocarbons use is under serious challenge by the green economy. We are of course still foolishly flaring our natural gas which we have been doing since 1956 because of our lack of know how in spite of our hundreds of petroleum engineers!

A bag of rice has moved from N8000 to between N26000 to N32,000 depending on which type you want. The price of guinea fowl which I was eating without my friends knowing they were cheaper than chicken has also doubled from N2500 to N5000. I told my son that I was no longer able to eat Akara because the lady who prepares it says the price of vegetable oil has hit the roof. She now makes me moi–moi and ekuru which I actually like not because they are cheap but because ekuru is solid Yoruba food and very few people apart from rural folks know how to eat and enjoy it! But there is a snag: beans have doubled in price. What about gari? That one too is not for the poor! Its price has doubled! What about elubo from which amala/oka is made? That one too has developed K-legs. The one made from cassava called laafu I am told is available. I honestly don’t like that because of the possibility of cyanide poisoning according to researches of Professor Kayode Osuntokun my late brother. The elubo from yam is very expensive because the cost of yams has gone up astronomically. The elubo made from green plantains is even more expensive since some researchers said green plantains are good for people suffering from diabetes.

Growing up in Ekiti in the 1950s and seeing trucks of plantains being ferried to Lagos confused us children. We used to tell ourselves that there must be many goats in Lagos that needed to be fed with plantains because in Ekiti of my youth, plantains were used to feed goats! I eat dodo (fried ripe plantains) once in a while but not like young Nigerians who can’t eat rice unless it is accompanied with dodo. Now I am told that even though this is plantains season the stuff is not readily available. You ask why? The answer is that the herders and their cattle have eaten them in the farms. Furthermore, farmers have to run for their lives because of the fear of herders who also kill and rape.

Don’t mention the price of fruits, bananas, oranges, tangerines, pawpaw, name them; their prices have gone beyond the roof. The reason for the high cost of local fruits is that everybody is now eating them because the price of imported fruits is tied to the rapidly-diminishing Naira.  If I feel this way, how will my driver survive? Gone are the days of huge pounded yams and bush meat!  Chicken seems to have come home to roost with insecurity breeding food scarcity and impending famine. Onions, tomatoes and peppers without which an African cannot eat has gone beyond the reach of an average housewife. When you ask the women in the market the reason for this inflation, you are likely to be told that the Naira has fallen and you then ask against what currency and our illiterate market women, who may not have seen the dollar before, will chorus the Naira has fallen in relation to the dollar. One is tempted to say what has the dollar got to do with peppers, tomatoes and onions? Of course the foreign imported fertilizers, transportation cost and other farm inputs and what the farmers eat and take like drugs to stay well are all denominated in dollars.

Now we come to imports. Pump price of petrol is going up everywhere including Nigeria. Americans and Europeans and Asians are all complaining about the price of petrol/ gasoline. While our government may be happy because of the revenue coming into its coffers as a result of the recent high price for crude petroleum, the rest of the world is jerking up the prices of the drugs, machinery and automobiles we buy from them. In our unique situation of inability to add value to our raw materials from cocoa to crude petroleum, we are importing expensive petrol from refineries in Europe and passing same to our consumers. If not because of the fear of people’s revolt against the soaring price of things, the price of imported petrol should be selling at double their current prices.

I bought a litre of diesel for over N300 in Ibadan last week. Imagine! We have no electricity and we cannot afford to buy diesel. Two weeks ago I slotted a card of N10,000 into my meter in Ibadan on a Saturday and by the following Wednesday, it was gone. I was shocked. What about other things that we need to stay alive like drugs? Well one has to buy what will keep one well. When I was sharing my story of woes with a much younger friend, he said he couldn’t afford sardines and eggs for his children. It was then I glorified the name of the Lord that I have left worrying about such things to my children who have to minister to their children.

We have serious political problems in Nigeria. The Yoruba people usually say that once the poverty of food is removed, one can at least face more serious problems. But what we have is food insecurity compounding general insecurity in the country. We have serious unemployment problems in the country. Young people cannot find jobs. Men who should be married and raising their own children are still living at home with their parents creating a situation of depression and melancholy all around. A cynic once said recession is when your friend loses his job but depression is when one loses his own job. It seems we are in a depression in Nigeria with an economy that is not growing while the population, particularly of the jobless youth, keeps exploding.

I shudder what will happen during the coming Christmas and new year festivities when young men without money will be looking for money by all means necessary. This is not a good time to be a Nigerian!

I do not know what the government can do to alleviate the situation. Perhaps a 50% cut in salaries of political office holders and running costs of government at all levels. The extravagant padding of budgets of ministries, departments and parastatals as revealed in the recent defence of budgets in parliament revealed that those running the affairs of government are totally disconnected from the economic reality of Nigerians. If we can find a way of reducing costs of government, it may be possible to do some kind of social welfare package that would help the young poor so that we old people can sleep with our two eyes closed.

Professor Oluwatoyin Falola is being conferred this week the Doctorate of Literature degree, (D. Litt.) the highest academic laurel one can win in the Humanities by the University of Ibadan. I don’t know of any Nigerian or foreigner who has been conferred this highest academic degree of the University of Ibadan by consideration and assessment of his select publications as Falola. He therefore deserves our congratulations and celebration.

Falola had his undergraduate and graduate education in history at the University of Ile- Ife now Obafemi Awolowo University. To have gone this far is a testament to how excellent the University of Ife was in its golden years.  Falola previously held the Frances Higginbotham Nelle Centennial chair in History at the prestigious University of Texas at Austin. Professor Toyin Falola is currently a world celebrated professor of History and African Studies at the same university. He is Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker chair in the Humanities and University Teaching Professor at the same university. He has held visiting professorships in some American, Japanese, British and South African universities. He has attracted generous research funds from several academic foundations including the US library of Congress. His scholarship has received recognition all over the world and the breadth and profundity of his publications are simply amazing.

I do not know any historian anywhere in the world who can beat Toyin Falola’s written fecundity. As a budding historian during my youth, I used to marvel at the scholarship of British historians like A. J. P. Taylor and Allan Bullock who were respectively Regius professors of modern history at Cambridge and Oxford universities in the 1960s. The importance of being a Regius professor is that one derives one’s emoluments by a special endowment of the Crown and it is the highest academic recognition in the UK. It was generally known that the two of them did not like each other and sometimes belittled each other’s scholarship through savage reviews of each other’s publications.

Allan Bullock was known and appreciated for his biography of Adolf Hitler. His book Hitler: “A Study in Tyranny “ attracted worldwide attention while Professor A. J. P. Taylor’s book “The Origins of the Second World War “ was a masterpiece which tended to blame the rise of  Hitler on the unfairness of the Versailles Peace Treaty of 1919.  These two had other publications in their sterling careers which included as public intellectuals through their writings in the Sunday Times and London Observer. Other historians that I admired were Fritz Fischer, the professor of history at the University of Hamburg whose book “Germany’s War Aims in the First World War” which is my field was a classic. S. T Bindoff’s “Tudor England” was a must read. The American historian, William Langer’s books on Imperialism were compulsory reading for any student of imperialism of the 19th and 20th centuries. Now in my old age, Toyin Falola has made the achievements of my academic heroes almost pedestrian not to talk about those of my teachers and myself. It is not easy for me to say the like of Toyin Falola is not likely to bestride this land again. I have read many of Falola’s publications; I cannot put a number on his books but they are not less than 40 and some read like literature, after all there is an old fashion school of history which believed that good historical writing is literature. If it were not so, Winston Churchill would not have won the Nobel Prize in 1953 for his history of the English-speaking people. Professor Falola is not just an historian, he represents the best traditions of social science. In many parts of the world including some parts of the United States’ history belongs to the social sciences. If there is any argument about the place of History in the Social Sciences, Falola’s scholarship provides a bridge between the Humanities and the Social Sciences. History is to the Social Sciences what Mathematics is to the Physical Sciences and Engineering.

Professor Toyin Falola is presenting his latest work “Understanding Modern Nigeria: Democracy and Development” published by Cambridge University Press on November 17 to apparently celebrate his conferment of the D.Litt. (not Honoris Causa), this time but by academic assessment. He already has loads of honorary doctorates, 12 at the last count, from foreign and African universities including state and private universities and recently by the Federal University of Lokoja. In his latest work which covers 690 pages, Professor Falola takes his readers on a promenade on post-colonial Nigerian politics and society covering such themes as ethnicity, democracy and development. This book although likely to overawe if not overwhelm its readers by its voluminous length of 690 pages, will definitely mark a turning point in the study of Nigerian modern history and politics for the foreseeable future.

Professor Falola is not just an historian, he has sometimes participated in events of epochal importance and significance such as the “Agbekoya” peasants rebellion in Western Nigeria in the 1960s. His recall and research into this episode of Nigerian social and economic history is captured in his book  ”Counting the Tigers Teeth: An African Teenagers Story” in which  he narrates his recollection  and research of the peasant revolts and his witness to history  and “A Mouth Sweeter than Salt”  is a biography of Ibadan and his own autobiography woven together in a beautiful fashion in which the historian grows with his subject and is an observer of the growth of one of the most authentic African cities. These two books were published some years ago and attracted many prizes and world-wide acclamation.

He has published so many books and edited many more that I will be doing injustice to his efforts if I begin to single out a few. But permit me my readers to mention a few I have enjoyed reading and from which I have gained knowledge and wisdom. These books about 20 or more  include such titles as “Colonialism and Violence in Nigeria”, Ibadan: Foundation, Growth and Change 1830 – 1966″, “ Violence in Nigeria: The crisis of Religious Politics and Secular Ideologies “, “ The Power of African Cultures”, “Nationalism and African Intellectuals”, “ The African Diaspora: Slavery, Modernity and Globalization”, “Economic Reforms and Modernization in Nigeria 1945 to 1965”,

“Development Planning and Decolonization in Nigeria”, “Praise of Greatness: The Poetics of African Adulation”, Cultural Modernity in a colonized world: The writings of Chief Isaac Oluwole Delano”, “ Understanding Ogbu Kalu”  with Aribidesi Usman, “The Yoruba from prehistory to the present”, “ Yoruba Gurus: Indigenous production of knowledge in Africa” with Ann Genova, “ The politics of the Global oil industry “, and “The Humanities in Africa, knowledge production, Universities and Knowledge transformation of society”. Perhaps because of his lack of Arabic knowledge he has not made more than cursory look at Northern Nigerian history in his historical curiosity.

What Falola has achieved in academic scholarship is just beyond human understanding. Falola in his youth dabbled with socialism. I remember reading his first books before he left for the United States. He used to employ Marxist analysis to interpret Nigerian history. I was not surprised because I also and other colleagues began our academic lives mouthing socialist slogans. My older brothers actually refused me accepting Russian scholarship in 1966 after leaving the University of Ibadan for fear of socialist radicalization. Of course Falola has gone beyond socialist fascination to his present realism of taking the world as it is.

Among those of my teachers who have gotten the national merit award for historical scholarship included the late professors J.F. Ade. Ajayi, Emmanuel Adiele Afigbo and the Izon historian, E. Alagoa  who is very much alive. I do not know why Professor Emmanuel Ayankanmi Ayandele who blazed the trail for prodigiousity in research, scholarship and publications which Falola is following was not given the national merit award which those of us his students and colleagues believed he deserved before he passed on into eternity.  I am also not sure why up till now, Falola has not received the National Merit award but I can guess. I think the volume of his work is usually found to be so overwhelming that decision makers, not the assessors, are intimidated. But whatever the reasons may be, Toyin Falola on all counts deserves consideration for an award. Apart from his scholarship, Falola has mentored several young academics and students through his Toyin Falola conferences held periodically in several African universities. Toyin Falola’s recorded interviews of contemporary leaders in academia, culture, traditional and modern politics provide rich oral history for the present and the future. I hope he can use his considerable resources to interrogate why Africa despite the thousands of professors in the sciences and engineering has not made any headway in adaptation of science for Africa’s development.

The Glasgow Scotland’s Conference of Parties (COP) to the United Nations Convention on Climate Change UNCCC) is the 26th in the series since COP 1 which met in Berlin 1995. It has taken the world this long to arrive at what the British prime minister,  Boris Johnson in his usually colourful words described as the midnight hour for the world to take decisive actions to reverse its perilous path towards global self-destruction. This destruction would come because of continuing dependence  for industrial processes and other needs of mankind on hydrocarbon energy sources which produce greenhouse gasses heating up the global environment to well over 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial global temperature.

I have two personal stories to share with readers. I was Nigeria’s ambassador to the Federal Republic of Germany (Bundesrepublik Deutschland) when the first Conference of Parties to the UN Convention on Climate Change was held in Berlin. My experience captures the dilemma facing many countries. Our delegation was made up the Director General of Nigeria’s Environmental Protection Agency which was a new government department created after some Italians dumped toxic and hazardous wastes on our coast, especially on Koko in the Niger Delta. The supervising ministry of works of the agency was represented by its permanent secretary, and as ambassador, I represented our foreign ministry while the present secretary general of OPEC, Muhammad Barkindo represented the ministry of petroleum.

I had thought we had a blank cheque to follow wherever the scientific community said was the right path. This was also the belief of our environment experts but the people in petroleum were briefed not to yield grounds to any demand to cut hydrocarbons usage. This is understandable for a country whose foreign exchange came mainly from sale of crude petroleum and LNG. The director general and the permanent secretary soon left the conference for London after the formal opening and left me as leader of delegation. Before the meeting, we had gotten a representation from the German government that we should suggest Bonn as headquarters of the proposed UNCCC because of the generous availability of facilities in Bonn after the movement to Berlin of the German government. I had recommended that our government accede to the German request. I had the privilege of nominating Bonn which when the vote was taken beat cities like Geneva among others for the seat of the Convention on Climate Change. Secondly, I was a member of the Nigerian delegation to the COP 15 in Copenhagen Denmark in 2009. I was a member then of a six member Presidential Advisory Council (PAC) on International Relations. It was at this conference that a decision was taken to create a Climate Adaptation Fund of $100 billion to assist developing countries to be contributed by developed countries based on what was usually described as “polluter pays” principle. The conference had been deadlocked on this issue after almost two weeks before President Barack Obama came in and after calling in China and a few key countries, broke the deadlock and the figure of $100 billion was adopted .This sum has become a recurring decimal since that time.

This landmark agreement was followed in 2015 by the meeting in Paris of COP21 in which leaders of the world finally signed the Paris Protocol or Agreement on Climate Change. The essence of the Paris Agreement was that it was an international treaty to seriously tackle the issue of climate change by radically cutting back on generating power from coal and moving gradually to renewable sources of energy like wind, thermal, solar, hydro, tidal, nuclear and new technologies to drive all industrial processes and the automobiles of the world. President Obama was very active in the negotiations resulting in the United States accession to the treaty.

Everything seemed settled until there was a change of government in the United States and President Donald J. Trump became the new president in 2016. The new president decided to withdraw the United States from the Paris Accord. His grounds for doing this were that the United States bore too much economic burden of the agreement. The pledge to abandon fossil fuels, he argued, will weaken the United States.  He said China and India two of the greatest polluters got home scot free.

Read Also: The COP26 climate test 

Any agreement without the tacit agreement and acquiescence of the United States, one of the greatest polluters will be meaningless. In other words, President Trump ruined the global effort to take abatement measures to reverse the degradation of the global environment and reverse climate change. This was part of his effort and apparently supported by members of his Republican Party to weaken multilateralism as a way of dealing with global issues and his preference for bilateralism as a better strategy. President Trump seemed to have had some angst against the United Nations as an institution. He withdrew the US from UNESCO and some other UN Agencies and cut US assessed contributions to the UN and its specialized agencies.

However the unseasonable rainfalls, coastal flooding, bush fires, droughts and general unpredictability of the weather world-wide in recent times seemed to have convinced all those who doubted the scientificity  of climate change  to have a rethink. The coming of the Joseph R. Biden administration in the United States which promptly re-joined the Paris Protocol brought added momentum and impetus to the COP 26 Glasgow meeting.

Initially British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was pessimistic about the success of the Glasgow conference in a world overwhelmingly concerned with surviving the coronavirus pandemic being called upon to shoulder more burdens. But from this initial pessimism, there seems to be coming out signs of the world’s determination to forge on with tentative measures to save our planet. There seems to be a commitment on becoming carbon neutral in 2050 or 2060 as a target date. Nigeria without apparent preparation committed itself to zero carbon emissions by the year 2060. I suppose most of us will not be here then to be held accountable!

The decade between now and 2030 is projected to see the abandonment of petrol-driven automobiles for electric cars and trucks or at worst gas driven vehicles. There is also a commitment to begin innovation towards using liquid hydrogen in some of the transportation systems including aviation now dependent on hydrocarbons. There is also a commitment towards revolutionizing agricultural processes to reduce methane emissions by 30 percent within a decade. Beef eaters including Nigerians and their love for Methane belching cows should be on notice! Perhaps the commitment to re-afforestation and providing global funds for this is also a step in the right direction. The issue of preserving the forests of the world has the support of Brazil, Russia, The Congos, Indonesia and the United States. This is an area in which Nigeria can play its card because we also have rain forest and we can embark of afforestation in our tropical forest which had suffered from uncontrolled tree felling in the past which we can regrow again to prevent the southward drift of desertification in our country and in other African countries.

I hope our representatives at the conference did indicate our readiness to join in the effort at reforestation if we get funds. What is more heartening is the embrace of the struggle for climate salvation by the hundreds of businesses, banks and thousands of cities irrespective of their national governments which have committed themselves to environmental enhancement. We now paradoxically have the situation where big oil producing companies have decided to be part of the transition to clean energy.

There is no dispute about the $100 billion commitment. But the problem is that action is needed and the United States commitment of about $20 billion is grossly inadequate. There is also a need for the European Union to match the Americans dollar for dollar. Even though Russia wants to be seen as a poor country, it must also show its hands. China can no longer pretend to be a developing country; it also has to pay some amount. The Arab oil producers must cough out huge amount to save their countries reverting to deserts which they were once before even in recent past before petrol dollars transformed their countries into what they are today.

We cannot leave the United States to carry the burden alone after all, industrial pollution first started in Europe before spreading all over the world and as a matter of fairness, justice and equity, those countries that have developed using hydrocarbons and methane producing processes and emissions of other greenhouses gasses must help the rest of the world to reverse global warming to not more than 1.5 degrees above pre industrial global temperatures. Our lives literally depend on this global joint effort which COP 26 in Glasgow represents.