Category: Jide Osuntokun

By Jide Osuntokun

The final of the Euro 2020 soccer competition between Great Britain and Italy was marred by racism which has been a growing cancer in sports in recent times mirroring the deep-seated racism in the wider society in the western world. The recent incident in London followed the loss by Britain of the championship match between her and Italy. The match ended in a 1–1 draw after expiry time and had to be decided by penalties. Anyone can lose a penalty and the whole thing is a game of chance. This is why only the strong-hearted players who can keep their nerves under control are chosen to take penalties. It was quite surprising that three blacks in the English team including a 19-year-old Bukayo Saka were chosen by their very experienced coach to represent their team. Alas, all the three misfired at the critical time thus causing England to lose the match.

Before the final, the English public had been worked up to a frenzy about the cup “coming home” after the last time England won a major tournament- the World Cup -at Wembley in a controversial final against West Germany in 1966. Even the restless Boris Johnson, the British prime minister had promised to declare a national holiday the following Monday to celebrate England’s conquest of Europe harking back to Britain’s exit from the European Union. The loss of the match was therefore a blow to Britain’s pride and honor in the football world bearing in mind that the game of football was even invented in England. The loss was too much for the fans to bear and apart from the traditional hooliganism of British soccer crowds which manifested in their beating up the few Italian fans they could get their hands on, they then took to the internet calling for the blood of the “three black monkeys” who brought the loss on England.

If any of the black players had been found, the mob would possibly have killed them. The fans then demanded that non-white players must never be fielded for the England’s team again. The English coach rose to defend his players, so did fellow players but the mob could not be placated and a mural in Manchester honouring footballer Marcus Rashford was vandalized with graffiti following England’s defeat. The seriousness of the situation was so much that both the prime minister and the leader of the opposition and Prince William issued statements condemning the rancorous racism shown by the English soccer fans.

Mr. Boris Johnson’s condemnation of the racist effusions were dismissed by blacks as shameless hypocrisy because of Boris Johnson’s earlier comment that there was no systemic racism in Great Britain whereas, every black person has been a victim of  ”systemic racism “ in the country and the incident of racism has been on the rise in England since Boris Johnson and his patron, Donald J. Trump came to power in the western world riding  on the wave of anti-black  and anti-immigrant sentiments if not total hatred  for foreigners.

Nationalism in the United States and Europe has been fueled by the feeling of nativist sentiments and white supremacist belief of threat against white privilege. Trump spent part of his four years of his presidency abusing black sportsmen taking the knee to protest against systemic racism in the USA and calling the white owners of their organization to fire them. He also used his presidential pulpit to abuse blacks to go back to the “shithole” countries of their ancestors. This pathetic feeling is not restricted to the Anglo-Saxon world but seems to cut across the whole world and it is present in Europe, Asia, in the Middle East, in the Americas, North and South, Australasia and on the African continent. People of darker hue, the so-called “visible minorities” seem to stand out wherever they find themselves and unlike other immigrants are not easily digested by the wider society with lighter skin colour. Even here there is broad spectrum of racism of mutual dislike between oriental people and Western and Eastern Europeans and their American cousins and it is within this context that one can locate antisemitism.

The inferiority of the darker skins dates back to the Trans-Atlantic slave trade when blacks were reduced to chattels and beasts of burden used to build modern capitalism in the Americas both North and South and in Europe particularly Great Britain  as well as France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain and Portugal. Germany is excluded because of its late unification in 1870 and because it was deprived of its colonies in Africa and New Guinea after the First World War.  However, the Germans have done the right thing by paying two billion Euros reparation to Namibia for their massacre of the Hereros in Namibia between 1885 and 1900 when they were the colonial power in German South West Africa.

Africans were not the first people to be enslaved. Western civilization was built on enslaving of conquered people going back to Ancient Greece. The point I am making is that as soon as the slaves were freed and because there was to racial chasm between the slaves and enslavers, the damaging stigma of racism arising from slavery did not endure. But the modern racism against blacks in sports arises principally from the modern history of white domination in Africa through colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade. The second reason arises out of envy of black success in sports and athletics and entertainment generally and the humongous revenue derivable from it. The other targets of white racism like the Asians are not as successful in sports as the blacks. Asians generally are proving themselves equal to the whites in science and technology. The fact of the Chinese, Indian, North Korean and the Pakistani states being nuclear weapons states have made the whites to respect these people.

When I was a young man in Britain in the 1960s, the average Briton looked down on everybody but gradually one saw advertisements about vacant flats reading “Blacks, Chinese, Indians, Irish need not apply. Japs ok”. The British now accept the Chinese and Indians who are now major investors in Britain; they tolerate the Irish and still put the blacks at arms’ length. Until black people realise that power, both economic and military is what determines the status of people in the world, they will continue to be humiliated both at home and in the rest of the world.

The residue of colonial domination of the Irish by the British is what is responsible for the British dislike of the Irish. This mutual antipathy still dominates British policy towards the Irish Republic and the Irish Catholics stranded in Northern Ireland are presumably anxiously waiting for unification with their kith and kin in the Republic of Ireland to put an end to British humiliation of their people.

It is ironic that racists sometimes ignore common racial sameness but would emphasize cultural differences to build a wall against even people living in contiguous territory. This can be seen from the British treatment of the Irish as a wider definition of racism. The Anglo-Saxons generally looked down on the Slavic people who constitute the vast majority in Eastern Europe and on the Latin people in Southern Europe stretching from the French to the Italians, Spanish and Portuguese. In fact, northern Europeans sometimes look down on the Europeans in the south generally. The First and the Second World Wars were tangentially caused by racism of the Germans against the Slavic people. Today the rivalry between the United States and China are rooted in big power strategic competition and racism. For centuries the west feared the so-called “yellow peril” but nowadays the Western fear is not usually expressed in brutally frank racist slogan but it is understood by those deciding which country should be number one in the world. Even the United States which tend to see itself as upholder of liberalism does not totally accept its citizens of Asian origin whether Indian, Chinese, and Japanese.

In Africa whether North or South of the Sahara, the evil of racism is well and alive. In the North, we have discrimination of Arabs against Berbers and blacks and South of the Sahara, racism and ethnic hatred are not distinguishable. The Hutu slaughtering of Tutsis in the inter lacustrine region around the Great Lakes in East Africa was rooted in racist sentiments in which one group calls for the wiping out of another. Even in other parts of Africa including Nigeria, our so-called problems of tribalism are forms of sickening racism which need to be cured and dissipated by education that emphasizes the common humanity of all people despite height, language, texture of hair and what food one eats.

Racism is almost innate in man and no race can claim absolute freedom from it. It is only a matter of degree. Racism is a cancer to which no one or government has found a cure. Legislation may hide the evil but it will not end it unless there is an equilibrium in economic accessibility and power as well as physical  power that is diffused and not concentrated in the hands of a particular race.

By Jide Osuntokun

Our children are our future and it seems to me that our future is being gradually threatened by what is happening to our children, particularly our female children who are regularly abducted from their schools particularly in the northern part of our country with our governments and everyone who should do something totally prostrate before the agents of evil who are doing this to our country. Recently, these evil people, call them what you will – terrorists,  bandits, kidnappers, herders, cattle rustlers, ethnic supremacists – I refuse to call them jihadists, because that is what they are not. Islam does not hold these kinds of people as worthy in the presence of Almighty God.  It seems these people doing this nefarious business of kidnapping school children have embraced the doctrine of Boko Haram that sees western education as haram (forbidden). It seems for convenience sake that these bandits are just using the Boko Haram credo as a way of camouflaging their thievery and paedophilia.

Or is it that the criminals in the Northeast and the north-central and northwest and all over the country are simply one and the same and should be treated as such? These are simply criminals and paedophiles that should be visited with the full weight of the law when they are caught. In a serious country, these types of criminals would be hanged by the neck until they are dead. But alas since this madness began in Nigeria, no one has been taken to court and speedily dealt with. Sometimes I wonder what our overpaid and over pampered legislators are doing at state and federal levels of government that they cannot legislate for special courts to  be set up to treat the cases of these criminals.

We are witnessing a whole generation of our youth particularly in the north being wasted. Can anyone imagine a worse humiliation than terrorists telling governments at state and federal levels of administrations not to worry about kidnapped underage girls of 12 to 15 years that they have been married off? This was the cold message these people sent to the government of Kebbi over the kidnapping of school children some two weeks ago. The international media is giving prominence to this horrible news in order to present us as savages just to underscore the western racist impression that blacks are not truly human like the rest of humanity. In this kind of environment, one wonders who will want to associate with us or invest in our country unless the rate of return on investment is so huge as to justify dealing with people who are still evolving in the last stage before becoming Homo sapiens.  This humiliation is what is at stake at this moment of our lives.

In his recent interview on ARISE Television, President Muhammadu Buhari wondered what the local governments, state governments and traditional institutions are doing while children in their areas are being kidnapped while they are all shouting about the failure of his government to protect the people of Nigeria. Earlier in the year while commiserating with the people of Niger State where hundreds of school children were simply marched into the forests, General Bashir Magashi, the defence minister said the people should protect themselves and not wait for soldiers and police alone to do the job. One may dismiss the plea of the minister and the president as coming from desperation. But their thinking probably has merit if we the ordinary people and our local, state and traditional governments draw the right conclusion from what the president and his minister said. The president has thrown down the gauntlet; it is ours to pick. The traditional institutions draw five per cent to 10% of the federal vote going to the LGA (local government administrations). Certainly, they should be able to fortify their immediate neighbourhood and protect their institutions. Obas and emirs are being kidnapped right from their palaces with little or no resistance. What chance has the ordinary citizen got if their homes are invaded and members are taken for ransom?

The president’s challenge is worth taking with some seriousness before it is too late. If the traditional rulers become easy targets, then perhaps they should not exist! God forbid! I hold the traditional institutions in high esteem. I am a chief of the Alaafin of Oyo and I certainly will want the traditional institutions to survive like in other advanced countries in Europe and Asia as links between the past, the present, and the future. The challenge has been thrown to them and these traditional institutions should raise defensive and well-armed forces as existed in the past to take care of themselves and their kingdoms.

Responding to the defence minister’s challenge that we should all defend ourselves reminds me about the stories of valour of my grandfather and great grandfather my father used to tell us his children. My father himself was no pushover when it came to valour and courage.  In Yoruba culture, a strong man cannot  be easily overcome by just anybody! We should all take the minister’s challenge seriously by each adult of means, applying for permit to carry firearms for hunting and protection. We have this right as citizens as long as we get police licence. If herders can carry openly AK-47, so should we. We are also armed by the minister’s call for citizens to defend themselves, a call like a levee en masse, some sort of a citizen army.

Will it not make sense to any man to defend himself rather than watch ones’ girls and wives raped by some stinking herder? There was the story of a man who was kidnapped along Akure -Ilesha road with his wife and nine-year old daughter who were both raped and when he pleaded for his young daughter, one of the herders threatened to rape him also!  What an abomination? The situation has gotten so bad that I think what my friend Honourable Eddie Mbadiwe said some years ago about licensing people to carry concealed weapons need further consideration and elaboration.

As for the LGAs and states, the president has thrown down a challenge to them and it is left to them to react. There is nothing strange in state and LGA police. This is what happens everywhere in the world even in smaller countries like Switzerland and Belgium which are federal states like Nigeria. In the USA, there are not only state, county and city police, there are also state police. Even universities have police in the United States. It is simply inconceivable for anyone to imagine only federal police say in Canada and the USA. Even in relatively small United Kingdom, there are layers of police from city to county to the four nations of England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland apart from Scotland Yard. I mention all these places not to give the impression of suggesting over militarization of our country. The point is that without peace, there can be no development and without development, there can be no peace.

Serious countries invest in their security unlike what is happening here in Nigeria. We have to face the issue of our security squarely. Our state governments that can afford state police should go ahead and establish their well-armed police forces and present the federal government with a fait accompli of their police forces and ask the federal government to go to court to challenge them using the president’s challenge as a call to action. There is no point all states waiting for united action. This is a waste of time; after all, we are still a federation, if in words only, and not a unitary state where all actions must conform to some order of uniformity.

Some critics of my formula which is actually Buhari’s formula may pose the question: where will the state get the money to pay their police? The answer is police tax and through fiscal restructuring eventually. The other question is – what will the federal police and the military be doing if LGAs, state and traditional institutions are involved in security? The answer is that the federal police will take care of interstate crimes while the military will secure the state from external enemies as is done elsewhere. Of course they will also be available to help secure peace internally when law and order break down as they have in Nigeria.

There can be no complaints about too much security especially now that we are being told that our security institutions are under manned. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. If we want to be safe, we must secure our country and our homes by every and all means possible. It is as simple as that.

By Jide Osuntokun

Who were our founding fathers? We do not need to go beyond Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, Chief Obafemi Awolowo and the Sardauna of Sokoto, Sir Ahmadu Bello even though our first and last prime minister, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa could be included in the list but he was inconsequential in the power play in the politics of Nigeria. He was his master’s voice and that master was Ahmadu Bello. The family backgrounds of these three people determined to a certain extent their attitude to life and to the Nigerian state that was their destiny to create and nurture. Nnamdi Azikiwe was born in Zungeru in what is present Niger State in 1904 where his father, Chukwuemeka Azikiwe worked as a clerk in the Railways Department. The elder Azikiwe had some smattering of mission education and he could read and write. It was because of absence of a fulfilling life and means of profitable existence that he went in search of some meaning to his life in what would have been terra incognita to most of his people. Nnamdi’s father sent the young lad first to his relatives in Onitsha apparently to be well grounded in Igbo culture before he was again sent to Hope Waddell Institute, Calabar, the only school of a grammar school type in the eastern part of the country. He eventually landed at the Methodist Boys High School in Lagos where he benefited from the basic western education that prepared him to seek the golden fleece in the USA as he himself described in his autobiography “My Odyssey “.

While in Lagos, he imbibed Yoruba culture and mastered the Yoruba language on top of the rudimentary Hausa he picked up in the north. In essence he was a true Nigerian by birth and experience. While in America where he spent more than a decade, he went from one black college to another raising funds to educate himself and even engaging in professional boxing for money that saw him through Storer College, Lincoln University until he graduated with a Master’s degree in political science in the Ivy League university of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia in 1933, the first African to achieve that feat.

Awolowo’s family background was not as dramatic as that of Azikiwe’s. He was born in Ikenne in 1909 by an Abeokuta Muslim woman married to David Sopolu Awolowo, an Ijebu -Remo father who was a devotee of African religion before becoming a Christian. His son, Obafemi started schooling in a Christian mission school and that changed the young man’s educational and religious trajectory because he could have been raised a Muslim like his sister. If that had happened, the course of Nigerian history may have been changed. If Awolowo had grown up a Muslim, would he and Ahmadu Bello have been so antagonistic to one another as they grew up to be or perhaps their common religion would not have influenced their politics? That is one of the ifs of History. Obafemi Awolowo after primary education in Ikenne and Abeokuta found his way to Methodist Teachers College Ibadan where he trained as a pupil teacher. The basic education he had there prepared him for self-education until he graduated with a Bachelor’s of Science degree in commerce by private tuition. Not satisfied with this, he borrowed money to send himself to London to study law during the Second World War. He strongly believed he was destined for leadership position in Nigeria without any proof but absolutely trusting in his faith and some kind of mystical belief in his destiny of greatness.

Ahmadu Bello was born into the Usman Ibn Fudih family in Rabeh near Sokoto. As Shakespeare famously said, some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them. In the case of Ahmadu Bello, and within the context of Nigerian politics, he had greatness thrust upon him. He had his primary and Islamic education at home in Sokoto. He had no ambition outside serving as a district head in one of the districts of the Sokoto emirate. But he and sons of prominent traditional elite in northern Nigeria were drafted to the Katsina Teachers College  by the British colonial administration to be trained as teachers to introduce western type of education to northern Nigeria in order  to disallow what the British colonial authorities thought was the unwieldy and inappropriate Christian  mission education in southern Nigeria. These products of Katsina College included people like Kashim Ibrahim, Isa Keita, Ahmadu Bello and Abubakar Tafawa Balewa who were to play significant roles in the evolution of modern Nigeria.

After graduation as teachers, these people were buried in the administration of educational institutions in their districts with occasional forays abroad for short courses to advance their knowledge and careers. Only Abubakar Balewa spent a year in London for Higher Teachers Certificate in Education. Ahmadu Bello did not bother to go beyond teachers college not because he did not have the brain but because he found acquisition of western education and certificates unnecessary in a Nigerian environment where his leadership position was guaranteed and preserved by the accident of his birth. He used to ridicule his southern colleagues who in their speeches quoted foreign authors to demonstrate their educational versatility and wondered why they couldn’t just say what they wanted to say without boring people with what someone in a distant country had said some centuries before!

From this skeletal picture of the formative years of our leaders were laid some of the problems of today. Azikiwe’s sojourn in the United States despite that country’s rampant racism left positive influence on him and imbued him with his republican beliefs in how education can bring out the best in men and women. This was further accentuated by the traditional Igbo belief that every man is king in his own house, a belief which made no room for a hierarchical society of kings and citizen and serfs. Awolowo also believed in the power of education and through deprivations and hardship, he acquired western education as a preparation for the arduous task of future leadership. His embrace of western education was to influence his bull dog tenacity in seeing his people in Western Nigeria go to free primary and compulsory education as from 1955. But Awolowo was unlike Azikiwe or perhaps more like him in bending his educational attainment to upholding the hierarchy and chiefly traditions of his Yoruba people.

Ahmadu Bello right from the word go even though seeing the British “always as friends” nevertheless saw them as religious foes. He rather looked towards the Islamic world for solidarity and inspiration. The English were useful up to a point because they held the keys to future power in Nigeria but Ahmadu Bello either feeling they were too far behind their contemporaries in Southern Nigeria or that he genuinely believed that the future lay in the world of traditions and Islam tried to hold the North together with its minorities which he hoped to convert or force into Islam if and when the British left Nigeria. He was not totally committed to national unity and he agreed with Awolowo that “Nigeria was a geographical expression “ and there were no Nigerians as there are French, Germans  and Russians. How prophetic in view of what is happening today. Ahmadu Bello at every critical time of crisis as in 1953 and in 1959 constitutional conference threatened to withdraw the north from the federation. All the major ethnic groups, the Hausa Ibo, and Yoruba threatened to dissolve the federation in the crisis between 1966 and 1967. So what is new today? Our founding fathers would not have been surprised by our present political division. They would have said since we deviated from the specially crafted political architecture they gave us in 1960, we deserve what we get now.

Am I accusing these leaders for the problems of today? Certainly not. But as political leadership was very critical to the evolution of modern states especially in Africa, we could not have had founding fathers of our country so different from one another and expect a happy ending. Our problems date back to 1900 the amalgamation of the southern provinces and 1914 the second amalgamation done by the British for the British without considering the conflicting interests of the various peoples of Nigeria. The absence of consensual leadership merely cemented the natural bifurcation of Nigeria and whether we can bridge this divide lies in the  kind of enlightened and committed leadership ready to reorganize this country based on fairness, justice, equity and equality. It cannot be done by force. This is the judgment of history. Without that it is walk in the dark for our country.

By Jide Osuntokun

We are overwhelmed by bad news about Nigeria all the time so occasional good news which are not eye-catching should be given vent to and celebrated. This is why I was so delighted about the “rice pyramid” that Governor Kayode Fayemi and some of his colleagues showed to the people of Nigeria some days ago. It just shows what determination and fiscal support from the Central Bank of Nigeria can do to hasten agricultural production in Nigeria.

It is heartening to note that the federal government has decided to aid all states of the country to produce rice for home consumption and for export. This initiative, we are told, is not going to be limited to rice only but to other agricultural produce like cocoa, maize and cassava in the case of Ekiti. We hope the CBN will extend loans to yam and potatoes farmers as well and to those growing onions, peppers and tomatoes. There is nothing unique about rice production, it is just that our people prefer the easier way of satisfying their taste by depending on polished rice from Asia and Latin America especially when we were awash with petrodollars. Now that there are clear signs that the inflow of dollars with which we indulged ourselves with imports of all sorts of consumables is not going to last forever, we are gradually going back to our senses of sustainable economic development.

It is not Ekiti alone that is witnessing this rice revolution. Several states in the north, some of which in the past grew rice are going back to the past to determine their present and future. This is because states in the nearest future would have to depend on what they can produce to survive because in the case of Ekiti, for example, we are not going to allow anybody to take the money generated from our sweat to support another state under the rubric of federalism. It is going to be who ever does not work shall not eat! This crude way of putting it is what economists have been calling “fiscal federalism” which apostles of “non-negotiable unity” have been saying is not going to happen. This unity may be “not negotiable” now because of the easy money we are getting from oil commissions and because of our dependence on oil which God put under our soil.

The people in the Niger Delta are right to agitate for “resource control” even though it is by geographical accident that the oil is under their soil. In the same way and by the same logic of “resource control”, the people of Sokoto, Zamfara and Osun can claim their gold and the people of Ogun, Bauchi, Benue and Enugu should be able to claim their limestone used for cement. No state is totally lacking in economic resources whether mineral or agricultural resources, it is the oil dependency of these past 60 years that has dulled our brains and initiative. The time has finally arrived to go back to the past to arrive at a sustainable present and future.

I grew up in colonial Nigeria where we were totally self-sufficient in food. We did not import food for all I know. Rice was not our favorite food in this country. In my part of the world, we ate rice sparingly at Christmas, Sallah, New year and Easter. We did not crave for rice with our mouth watering in expectation of eating rice on days of celebrations. Whenever we ate rice, it was the local ones from Nupeland, Abakaliki, and Igbemo in Ekiti. Preparing it was so laborious because of the presence of stones in the rice that housewives would rather cook something less time-consuming. To us in Ekiti and Ijeshaland, nothing went down our throats better than pounded yams and okra or efo riro. In the East and Benue area, pounded yam was also king. In the North where people ate tuwo, it was not tuwo shinkafa that people ate but tuwo made from corn and if they wanted to eat tuwo shinkafa, they bought the Nupe rice or rice from the southern states.

I remember that those of us who grew up in Ekiti in the 1950s were forced to eat eba apparently because there was famine or shortage of yams. I remember one of my brothers whose mother had to flog him to eat because he said he could not swallow eba because it was not smooth like pounded yams! Of course, we later got used to eating eba with much grumbling and grumpiness. I am writing all these to let the younger generation who want to bankrupt our country with imports of food stuffs and especially rice to know that this rice eating is a recent fad. People are killing themselves smuggling rice through all our porous borders making indigenous efforts at growing rice futile and unprofitable. Let us hope the new efforts by states like Ekiti to increase local harvests to 1.5 million metric tons a year are realizable. To get to this utopia of food security all over the country, the old extension services unit of our ministries of agriculture would have to be revamped where they exist or brought back where they have fizzled out in our days of oil folly and squandermania. This is important if loans are to be given to local peasant farmers as stakeholders.

I remember some years ago during Obasanjo days as military head of state when he launched the Operation Feed the Nation (OFN), a component of the scheme was granting loans to farmers to increase their acreage and farm yield. An uncle of mine in Okemesi asked me if it was true government was going to give him and other farmers money to increase production. I answered in the affirmative. He stunned me by saying as soon as he got his loan, he would buy a truck and go into trucking business and leave the back-breaking farming to Obasanjo and his government. My uncle completely misunderstood government’s intentions and plans. All my explanations fell on deaf ear. I was very happy to hear Governor Fayemi explain that his government would buy ploughs and tractors to help farmers till the ground. The back-breaking hoe and cutlass kind of farming is what has driven young boys from the farms to riding okada and to the kidnapping businesses of today.

When I was a professor in London Ontario in Canada, some of my students on graduation went back to join their fathers on the farms because farming was profitable and more rewarding than white collar jobs in the cities. I pray there will come a time in this country when agriculture will be more attractive to young people than banking and civil service. But the security situation has implications on the agricultural sector.

I want to illustrate this point by two personal experiences that are close to me. A classmate of mine after reaching the grade of director in the Federal Ministry of Trade took a premature retirement sometimes in the 1980s and went into farming somewhere in Akure apparently on a grand scale using borrowed money and his gratuity. He was very pleased with himself and the labour of his hands and those of his husbandmen. Some days before harvest, huge trucks followed by armed men drove in from the then Bendel State and harvested all his crops and drove away his security men. He was shattered!  He did not know what hit him but he was encouraged not to give up. He repeated his plantation and tightened his security but the same invasion and looting of his crop happened. In order to keep his sanity, he took his family and left for New York where he has remained ever since and I sincerely hope he has had a happier life there.

The second example was my brother. After retirement from Leventis Motors as a sales executive sometimes in 2000 or so, he acquired a large land area along the Osun River near Ikire and went into agricultural production. He planted yams, plantains, cassava, palm trees et cetera. He usually had huge yields because his farm was well watered by the river. The local people watched him for about a year or two before they started harvesting his crops which they did not sow at night and soon bankrupted him. He subsequently died of depression and heartbreak.

Need I say that no agribusiness can survive without security. This is where the issue of cow herders come in. Will any rice field or cassava plantation be allowed to yield profits when federally protected herders invade the farms to eat up crops before they are harvested by their owners? All reasonable people have suggested that the primitive open grazing has to end but our president says there were grazing routes in gazettes of the 1960s and his attorney-general should find them for him so that the grazing routes can be reopened to facilitate the private enterprise of cattle owners. While the UAE, where cattle was kept in the past is sending rockets to Mars, we spend all our time on debates about cows and where they should forage.

Fayemi without much ado and fanfare is setting up example about ranching in Ikun Ekiti by resuscitating a previously existing ranch which provided milk and meat in the old Western Region. There were also such ranches in Fashola/Oyo and Iwo and other areas. We used to drink fresh milk in the GRA in Ibadan in the 1950s and 1960s. We can repeat that phenomenon in Ekiti. Afe Babalola University should be interested in its students drinking fresh milk so also should the authorities of EKSU and other secondary and tertiary institutions in the state and elsewhere. The Germans have a saying “Alles ist moglisch” meaning all things are possible. With Ekiti being the centre of knowledge and with a knowledgeable governor like Fayemi, it’s about time we started applying our knowledge to production.

By Jide Osuntokun

Erin wo Ajanaku sun bi Oke (the elephant has fallen and is lying down like a hill) is the way we herald the death of a great man in Yorubaland.  At the age of 87, Chief Fola Alade lived a long and professionally satisfying life, achieving incredible feats, designing hundreds of houses, institutions and monuments on local, state, national and international levels. In the process, he left legacies and memorials for which he will be eternally remembered. These monuments say a lot about him but what would be most remembered by those who knew him are his joie de vivre and his persona which manifested whenever he arrived anywhere where one or two people were assembled. His attitude and happy go lucky carefree character were always on display effortlessly wherever he was. The man simply had presence. Whether one loved him or not, one could never ignore him. He seemed to dominate his environment positively.

He started his earthly journey in his native Aramoko in Ekiti. Aramoko may be a small town but it is regarded as a very important town in Yoruba History and cosmology. To be regarded as “Omo Alara” (child of king of Aramoko) connotes royalty of the highest order in Yorubaland. From Aramoko, he went to the famous Christ’s School Ado Ekiti, a school which in colonial Nigeria was built on the ethics of hard work, and integrity which were native practically to Ekiti people with their peasant culture of sharing the little they had and totally untouched by the greed of commercial communities of coastal towns. On top of this, was built Christian fortitude, forbearance, love of God and fellow human beings. These were not abstract concepts to Fola Alade and his cohorts. They could see them in the lives of their teachers both local and foreign who were totally devoted to their duties and the transformation of the lives of the wards put in their care. In those days, the students were incredibly young and they seemed to have been rushed through primary schools in their villages and then billeted on the salubrious Agidimo hills under the watchful and kind eyes of white missionaries from the United Kingdom one of whom was Cannon Leslie Donald Mason who was principal most of the time Fola Alade was in Christ’s School. It was in this school that the ebullient, artistic and extroverted character of Fola Alade developed. He was a sportsman playing soccer which was one of the few sports the school could afford. His lifelong friendship with some of his mates was forged in the classroom and on the soccer field. He had a flair for outdoor activities which the narrow academic and restricted curriculum in the school did not encourage. He left school in 1951 as a tall almost skinny teenager and he and his school colleagues drifted to Ibadan where they picked up jobs that were available in government and in the few commercial institutions available in the city. Some of his friends drifted to Lagos but Ibadan with the presence of the University College and the Nigerian College of Arts and Science, some kind of a preparatory Advanced level college before university admission, offered more attraction for ambitious young men in the early 1950s. It was from Ibadan that he entered the Nigerian College of Arts and Science from where he decided to study architecture, a field for which he had no prior knowledge. Apart from the study of ordinary level and not the additional Mathematics which by his self-confession he was not too fond of, he was very far removed from the study of architecture. After his stay in Ibadan, he had to proceed to the Zaria branch of the Nigerian College of Arts and Science where professional courses in architecture and engineering were offered. He graduated as one of the four pioneer architecture graduates in West Africa in 1961. He joined the services of the Western Region and practiced architecture in Ibadan and was sometimes moved around to provincial headquarters in Western Region of Nigeria. He completed his postgraduate training at the Architectural Association School in London in 1965 as a Commonwealth scholar. He returned home and for the next 40 years worked as an architect in the Western Region before joining the federal service as a Resident Architect in the Ministry of Works and Housing after a brief stint as a Resident Architect at the Lagos city Council in 1967. He was the first registrar of the Architects Registration Council (ARCON) in 1969. He became the Chief Project Architect in 1972 and Director of Public Buildings in 1975. In 1976 he became the first architect in Nigeria to be appointed a permanent secretary (projects). The story of this appointment is worth telling as contained in his memoirs – Remember Whose Son Thou Art (2005).

General Olusegun Obasanjo, the then head of state who had just taken over the headship of state after the brutal assassination of General Murtala Muhammad was confronted with the problems of housing the much ballooned Nigerian military after the civil war. He therefore sought out Alade for help. In his characteristic sometimes funny way of approaching a deadly serious issue, Obasanjo asked Fola Alade if he knew “… a mad man who could help him build barracks rapidly to house poorly accommodated soldiers”. “This mad man must operate out of civil service rules not shackled by memos,  bureaucratic rules and carrying files around for approval thus delaying matters of national urgency”. Fola Alade told the head of state: “I know no such mad man” to which Obasanjo then responded “you are the mad man!”

This was how his appointment as permanent secretary projects was announced. As expected, Fola Alade delivered his assignment with panache, grace, efficiency, flair and integrity, building army barracks all over the country before Obasanjo handed over government to the civilian government of Shehu Shagari who did not have to worry of disquiet about accommodations from the army. Fola Alade retired from the Civil Service in 1979 and went into private practice establishing the firm of ALADE ASSOCIATES in 1980. Throughput his public career, he designed several educational institutions, the federal secretariats in Lagos and Abuja, the National Arcade in Onikan,  some Nigerian embassies abroad,  the Institute of Policy and Strategic Studies in Kuru among several monumental and legacy projects. He had also served as chairman of the West African Portland Cement Company. He later served as chairman  of the Governing Council and Pro chancellor of the University of Port Harcourt in 1991 and chairman of Governing Council  and pro chancellor of University of Ado Ekiti ( 1999- 2000).

A grateful country honored him with an OFR (Officer of the Order of the Federal Republic) in 1979. He was a prophet honored at home when he was conferred with the title of Asiwaju of Aramoko, Sobaloju of Ido -Ekiti while his in-laws at Awo Ekiti where his wife Yemi hailed from honored him with the title of Bobagunwa.

As a sportsman he enjoyed swimming, playing golf, lawn tennis, badminton, squash racket. He was a member of Ikoyi Golf Club and whenever he was at home in Ekiti which was often, he played golf at Ekiti Golf Club which he supported financially.

He was very active in the affairs of his Alma mater, Christ’s School Ado Ekiti and Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. He was an artist in truth and indeed and loved dancing and music and sometimes designed his own clothes. Unfortunately, he lost his darling wife Yemi, a princess from Awo who bore him highly successful children, Yinka, Dipo, Kola, Bisi, and Shola two of whom are fellow architects like their father and one a lawyer and another has taken to business while the baby of the family is a cleric who was called to Gods service after studying medicine in the University of Ibadan.

Chief Alade was my brother Kayode’s  classmate in Christ’s School and soul mate until my brother passed on rather prematurely in 1995 .The two were like twins buying the same kind of cars and numbering them in sequence with their Ekiti famous plate numbers. They were each other’s best men and by coincidence having the same number of children two each following their parents’ professions and the others spread out into business and law. I am not sure they planned this but they must have felt short-changed by their government service and hoping their children would do better than them materially. Chief Alade’s generation of Ekiti men by dint of hard work and dedication blazed the trail of western education in which by the 1980s saw them at the commanding height of western educational advancement  in Nigeria as told to me by no less a person than Professor Chike Obi in a discussion I had with him. I knew  Chief Alade as anyone would know his older sibling and I was a beneficiary of his kindness and generosity whenever I visited him at home in Lagos, Aramoko and when he was studying in London in 1965. He was always gracious to me and treated me like an old brother would treat one, advising and admonishing and chastising when necessary. He was a typical Yoruba man who loved his local food, attire, dance and he was also a Renaissance man at home anywhere in the global metropolis of London, Paris , Washington or New York. Even though he had not been well for some time, his death has left a void in the lives of everyone who knew him. Professor Ayo Banjo, former vice chancellor of the University of Ibadan who was his classmate at the Nigerian College of Arts and Science in Ibadan six or so decades ago in private communication with me said of Chief Alade “… He was so highly gifted and endowed with a lot of energy…He and I were pioneer students of the Nigerian College, Ibadan, from where he transferred to the Zaria branch. It was at Ibadan that we struck up a close friendship which was to last for about 70 years.

His passing has been a great blow, and I wish his restless soul well -earned eternal peaceful rest”. I shared this restless bit with Bisi his daughter and she said “What a perfect description of my father I couldn’t have put it better “

Sunre brother Fola . You ran a good race and I believe a crown of glory awaits you in the great beyond.

By Jide Osuntokun

Welcome back to the Club” was how Immanuel Macron the president of France greeted President Joe Biden at the recent G7 summit that held in Cornwall England. This was the first major outing of President Biden since becoming the president of the USA in January following the tumultuous and unpredictable years of President Donald J. Trump. The G7 is an informal group of the most industrially advanced liberal democracies in the world consisting of the USA, Canada, Japan, Germany, France, Great Britain, and Italy. After the collapse of communist Soviet Union, the Russian Federation was brought in to make it the G8 but rapprochement with Russia did not last long before it was kicked out because of Russia’s aggressive behavior in Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova and in the Baltic and generally its involvement in meddling in democratic elections in the West.

This particular meeting is the first meeting when the leaders of the G7 met in person since the last meeting in Quebec Canada in 2019 when President Trump had a public spat with the Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the host of the G7 leaders and called the leader of an important neighbor a liar. Trump also refused to sign the joint communiqué after the summit. The Cornwall summit lacked the anxieties and drama of the Trumpian era in American foreign policy. Biden’s inaugural speech in January promised to return the United States to the driving seat of global diplomacy. He seems to have achieved this already. First he joined the Paris Protocol to protect the global climate. He then raised the issue of returning to the nuclear agreement with Iran, the so called P5 + 1 in which the  permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany entered into a complex agreement with Iran  to prevent the Islamic Republic from  refining uranium to nuclear  bomb grade level. Negotiations about this are ongoing in Vienna. The virtual adoption of Biden’s “build back better” which was his mantra during his election campaign showed how dominant the American influence in the G7 is.

The members also embraced the idea of rapidly moving to a green future of possibly zero green gas emissions to meet the target of not more than 1.5 degrees rise in global temperature. In the final communiqué of the Cornwall summit, the criticism of China and Russia is from the Biden’s policy book so to say. There was a promise of $650 billion loan to the IMF for lending to poor countries to combat the Covid-19 pandemic. President Biden promised to donate to the WHO for onward distribution to the poor countries 500 million shots of the coronavirus vaccines. The British added 100 million of their own while Japan promised to donate 30 million shots and the European Union promised to round it up to one billion. The WHO however said it needs 11 billion rather than one billion shots. This Is presumably why the G7 promised to loan $650 billion to the IMF to assist poor countries to buy Covid vaccines.

Whatever may be the shortcomings of the G7, one cannot blame it for inaction provided it carries out its promises and commitment. The other vaccines producing countries like China, India and Russia can pitch in and add their own donations. The solution really is to share the technical and scientific know-how of vaccines production with countries that can produce them. This is the position of South Africa, South Korea, India and presumably Australia. But it appears the British, the Germans and the Americans do not want to breach copyright laws and traditions of their countries. Such a breach, it was argued, can discourage innovation and pharmaceutical research. There was also an agreement on corporate taxes among the G7 so as to have a level playing field to eliminate some countries being disadvantaged by very low taxes by their competitors to attract investors.

One item on the communiqué that attracted my attention is the commitment of the G7 to match China’s spending on the  so-called “new Silk Road “and transportation grid all over the world that is allegedly giving the Chinese an advantage over their western competitors. Certainly, Nigeria can benefit from the oncoming competition between China and the West to assist us in improving our transportation grid. If the G7 manages to carry out their green commitment, countries like Nigeria had better be prepared for a hard time of not finding market for their hydrocarbons. The G7 invited South Africa, South Korea, India and Australia to observe the summit negotiations. For us in Nigeria, the irrelevance of our country fighting over cows route is made very clear. We have never had it so bad.

The point needs to be made that the G7 is an informal club whose secretariat is ad hoc moving from one summit to the next hosting country. There is no certainty that these commitments will be met and there are no sanctions to enforce the commitments entered into by the members. One issue that has attracted me is the strident name-calling of China and Russia by Biden who is also trying to dragoon their western allies to their Chinese confrontation. The American president has also carried his strident campaign to the NATO summit which met immediately after the G7 meeting.

I wonder what Joe Biden is about in his country’s relations with China and Russia. It is clear that America sees China as a competitor for global influence. America is right to feel the challenge of China especially with the phenomenal growth of Chinese economy even during this coronavirus pandemic that was unleashed on the world from Wuhan, China. It is amazing that China somehow seemed to have overcome the effect of the plague with few mortality compared with over 600,000 souls in America alone and millions in the West. The problem Biden is going to have to contend with is that some countries in Europe are somehow dependent on the Chinese market and Chinese investment. Germany for example has China as its biggest market overseas. It follows therefore that the Europeans will hedge their bet on anti-Chinese criticism. As for Russia, the Europeans share same continent with the Russians. America is far away and the Europeans in spite of the NATO shield feel they need to have an independent power of their own to serve as a deterrent against Russian conventional and Strategic forces.  They are also concerned about American unreliability which manifested itself during the Trump administration when Trump said he did not believe in Article 5 which says an attack on any NATO member is an attack on all. This sentiment is very strong in France and has always been there since the time of General Charles de Gaulle and France’s development of its force de frappe as its own nuclear deterrence separate from that of the United States. Biden will do whatever is necessary to convince American allies that no matter who is president in the USA, NATO is a critical component of American Defence and foreign policies. This he feels is critical at a time when Vladimir Putin is determined to put Russia back as co-equal of America in global power.

Biden seems to play open diplomacy. He has made everyone to know what he was going to demand of Russia and China even before meeting their leaders. This is not the tradition of European diplomacy which is not always open. After the First World War which was blamed on secret diplomacy, America under President Woodrow Wilson championed the idea of “open covenants” and was supported by the Left particularly in Britain which favored “democratic control” of foreign policy. This idea of “open covenants” was included in one of the Articles of the League of Nations, the precursor of the United Nations. But since then the world has reverted to secret diplomacy but it seems Biden represents the extreme example of open diplomacy.

One wonders whether it makes sense for America to challenge China and Russia at the same time. This has succeeded in driving Russia into the warm embrace of China. Although China and Russia share a common sometimes disputed borders, where there had been fighting in the past, they are being forced to come together because of their common challenge of American belligerent posture against them. Apart from Russian opposition to NATO extending to its borders and the competition in the Arctic Circle, there are no fundamental reasons why Russia and the USA cannot establish a modus vivendi between these two nuclear weapons states. Russia is no longer an ideological opponent of the USA as it used to be when Soviet Union was a communist state involved in global struggle for ideological domination between Washington DC and Moscow. At least superficially Russia is a democracy of the autocratic type. The West will also have to understand Putin’s obsession with his idea of Russia taking care of “Russia abroad”. He must be encouraged to bring his country into the wider world rather than keeping him at arm’s length while the ordinary Russians suffer the consequences of western hostility to their country. This was why I saw some reason in Trump’s warmth to Russia. I honestly don’t see how Russia will kowtow to America unless America was prepared to engage it in physical combat. Instead of the stridency of Biden, it will be wise for America to engage Russia so that the mutual confrontation manifesting in cyber warfare can end.

As for China and America, the competition between them is inevitable. It is one between an economically dominant country now in decline and a rising Eastern power with all the underlying racist undertones. China is also not particularly popular in Asia despite the showering of billions on loans and grants to countries in South Asia and countries on the Pacific Rim. Recently, America was able to put together a five -country liberal democratic alliance of Australia, India, South Korea, Japan and the USA to try and rein in Chinese aggression in Asia. And most of the ASEAN counties are also suspicious of Chinese intentions. This gives America the chance for diplomacy to contain China. The good thing is that the Chinese and American economies are intertwined with the Chinese holding trillions of United States dollar bonds while the Chinese economy depends on accessibility to American and western markets. In this struggle, both China and America are likely to try to enlist the support of other countries especially African countries. The world seems to be going back to the old days of diplomatic struggle to seek for support in the rest of the world. We seem to be back to the past when non-alignment became the wisest policy for the so-called third world. It is a case of plus ca change plus c’est la meme chose?

By Jide Osuntokun

There is no point denying the fact that the situation of Africa as a whole is dire. We can also say the global condition of the whole world itself is not too good but there is no place on earth as distressed as Africa. There is nothing to cheer us up in Africa. There is no island of tranquility in the chaos that characterizes this continent where man became man if we are to believe the evidence of physical anthropology. It is here that homo erectus became Homo sapiens. But since the beginning of time and the migration of man from Africa to settle in other continents in the world, there has been retrogression rather than progress. God has departed from the House of Israel, so to say, to put it in Biblical parlance.

The title of this piece derives from the 1979 BBC Reith lecture given then by Professor Ali Mazrui, the Kenyan political scientist who in later years became a towering intellectual. He was quite optimistic about the place of Africa in the world then but I am not that optimistic now seeing the terrible political and economic topography of the continent today.

Starting from the Maghreb, only Morocco has some semblance of stability and marginal economic development and growth. It’s neighbor, Algeria is being eroded from within by the forces of FIS (Front Islamique de Salut). What you have there is a resuscitation of the FLN (Front de la liberation nationale), the armed Algerian national liberation front that fought French colonialism and the settler French pied noirs who had to leave the country in their millions when General de Gaulle in 1962 felt there was no point fighting against the hurricane of African nationalism and withdrew French forces from that country, ending 130 years of French settler colonialism. Since then, Algeria has not managed to transform itself into a modern state and the president who took over from Ben Bella and Houari Boumedienne, Ahmed Bouteflika overstayed in power until he was rendered useless by the coterie of palace cabal ruling in the name of a sick man suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and who could hardly recognize members of his government. The country has not recovered from the immobilism arising from absence of a dynamic leader. Libya, its neighbor to the east is now afflicted by war lordism and foreign intervention from Egypt, Turkey and Russia. The remnants of Ghaddafi’s army and the African mercenaries he recruited to beef up his security have now become a scourge on the whole of the Sahel from Mali across Burkina Faso, Niger, Northern Nigeria and Chad. The entire West Africa is besieged by this Ghaddafi renegades. Egypt itself has replaced the ineffective government of the Islamic brotherhood with a brutal military dictatorship of General Mohammed Abdel Fattah Al Sisi which means Egypt is back to square one and one-man rule until there is another general uprising and another man on horseback comes to salvage the situation.

The proliferation of light weapons and small arms in the hands of jihadists and ethnic armies and dissidents in the Sahel and the whole of West Africa has led to mass movement of poor people into the few pockets of safety which in turn creates suspicion and irritation among host communities branding them as fifth columnists of jihadist forces lurking in the recesses of ungoverned spaces and forests in the region.  With the exception of Senegal, Benin, and Ghana, the whole of West Africa is a tinderbox waiting to ignite. Guinea is internally divided and enemies of the geriatric Alpha Conde are just waiting for him to expire before the place explodes. Mali is bifurcated between the jihadists in its northern part and the government in Bamako. The chaos in Mali has affected Burkina Faso where hundreds of people were slaughtered recently by jihadists driven by blind fury.

Niger’s government’s writ is only in the Southern part of the country while its Sahel North is a no man’s land in the hands of roving desert Berbers determined to create some kind of caliphate from northern Mali to Chad and Darfur.  Nigeria the so-called giant of Africa, has been politically reduced to a drunken giant with marauding herders slaughtering farmers while its government looks on unconcerned. Crime is being daily committed without the certainty of punishment thus leaving victims to resort to self-help and retribution. The north-eastern part of the country is beset by the ravage of Boko Haram and ISIS in West African province (ISWAP). Their declared aim is creating an Islamic caliphate apparently adopting the brutal methods of ISIS and Al Qaeda of Osama bin Laden. The result of this in a religiously and ethnically plural country is the chaos unleashed on Nigeria while its government seems incapable of putting an end to what is an existential threat, giving rise to secessionist and centrifugal tendencies in the country which may yet succeed unless the federal government reverses its highly divisive sectional and religiously discriminatory policies and actions which are obvious and apparent to all observers except the government. The massacres of people in Darfur by the Arab Janjaweed from the Sudan continues without let or hindrance. The Sudan, both North and so-called independent Southern Sudan remain hell on earth and havens of ethnic militias and undisciplined army that seems to rejoice at killing its own people. Somalia is a sad commentary on how not to be a country. There is no government in the country that is now divided into three separate entities each vegetating in uncontrolled violence and mutual slaughter by their people. There was the recent spectacle of the president of Somali Republic taking on his prime minister in a boxing challenge at a cabinet meeting with bare knuckles in which the expertise of a dental surgeon was needed to put some of the teeth of the prime minister back in the poor man’s mouth. The situation in Ethiopia calls for caution and concern. Tigray, the site of the Holy city of Axum was invaded by Ethiopian federal forces ironically joined by the former secessionist Eritrea to put down rebellion in Tigray occasioning destruction of historic sites, raping and murders on an industrial scale in the name of national unity. No African government has raised its voice against genocide going on in our continent apparently because the same phenomenon is going on in their own countries. It is sad for this to be going on in Ethiopia which faces an existential threat from Egypt and The Sudan over the Ethiopian dam on the Blue Nile in their territory which the two Arab governments have threatened to destroy. One would have thought this is a time for unity in the face of external threat; rather than this, the Addis Ababa government is bent on self-destruction over an illusory national unity and is resorting to force where diplomacy would have sufficed.

Rwanda of Paul Kagame is perhaps the only going proposition while Burundi and the vast area of the Democratic Republic of the Congo remain largely ungoverned and in the case of the Congo, governed by war lords. The DRC appears too large for the governmental ingenuity of the African in a territory larger than Western Europe and potentially a great and rich country blessed with minerals, which, if properly exploited and accounted for, will give its people decent lives far better than their present miserable lives. The less said about the Central African Republic which has been reduced to a place of contending ethnicities perpetually at war with each other, the better. The other Congo, Gabon and Equatorial Guinea have remained each ruled by one family for almost half a century while foreigners cart away their wealth while dropping some for the rapacious rulers who collude with them to rob their countries.

The former settler countries in East and Southern Africa seem to do better than the rest of Africa. If we excuse the non-democratic practices of the governments of Uganda, Kenya and Zimbabwe, we can at least see stability in South Africa, Namibia, Zambia, Tanzania while the situation in Mozambique is very concerning particularly the recent jihadist attack of its northern part, a situation which caught everybody by surprise. It is hoped that SADC would be able to take a leaf from what ECOWAS states did in the 1980s by forming a military component of their economic organization to assist Liberia and Sierra Leone. SADC should help Mozambique to resist external and internal forces of destabilization.

The question to ask is what is responsible for all these problems. The answers lie in the artificiality of the African states where unrelated people are lumped together to create states on the paradigm of 19th century European states. The borders of these African states have been declared inviolable by the African Union and Africans are therefore stuck with these rather unnatural states. Secondly, many of the African states are economically unviable. Where they are viable, their internal structure lends support to internal colonialism and ethnic arrogance with one group lording it over others. Sometimes those who generate the wealth are shunted aside while those who contribute little appropriate larger share of the national resources. A country like the DRC is just too big and has little interconnecting transportation grid with the result that people from one part are foreigners to one another. Bad governance manifesting in rampant corruption, autocratic dictatorship and looting of national resources and carting them abroad and living the poor masses to indulge in violence to satisfy their needs is another problem. From this survey, the smaller the country, the better the chances of good governance. Perhaps we need to look at the situation in Africa and allow culturally distinct people lumped with others to separate even though cultural homogeneity in Somalia has not led to stability. What seems most important to me is economic development. With a developed economy, with people employed and with high standard of living and with enough for everyone to satisfy their need not their want, Africa may yet stretch its hand to God and realize its potentiality and destiny.

By Jide Osuntokun

I wonder how it is for Nigerians who don’t read and are not aware of the woes and tragedies in different parts of the country overrun by kidnappers, murderers, bandits and terrorists and who are deaf and cannot hear the news and cannot be told about what’s going on but who can see with their eyes people running in different directions. Will such handicapped persons not know war has broken out?

I am told that there is an Igbo proverb that says you don’t have to tell a dumb and deaf man that war has broken out because he will see it with his own eyes when people start running helter-skelter. No day passes in Nigeria without news of some gruesome murders committed by either so called bandits, kidnappers, terrorists and herders. Some government’s spokesmen have even tried to define these groups and Sheikh Abubakar Gumi who seems to know more about these people have told us the differences between them. We are told the bandits are just unemployed, hungry and angry young men who can be redeemed if government can find something for them to do or to eat. Some even unfairly compare them with militants in the Niger Delta protesting about poverty in the midst of wealth. Some even suggest sending them abroad to be trained as artisans!

I think the same Sheikh said the terrorists like Boko Haram and their affiliates are irredeemable and have to be confronted and in Nigerian army parlance “neutralized”. The herders are of two types. There are the local ones and the foreign ones from Mali, Niger and Chad. We are told the foreign ones are very dangerous and cannot be easily placated. The local ones are our own Fulani who in medical terms are benign but how to separate the wheat from the chaff is a problem. In Nigeria, the term Fulani is carelessly used to depict anyone carrying a stick and now an AK-47 and following herds of cattle. The real Fulani must either be laughing or furious about how their ethnic group is being used to describe just any cowhand in Nigeria. The herders have also become the kidnappers either when they have sold their cattle or rustlers have stolen their cattle they then try to recoup their losses by kidnapping people and asking for ransom. These local herders are not the owners of the cattle they follow from Maiduguri, Yola, Sokoto or Kano to the south. They are hired by the owners of the cattle who have agents to sell the cattle and repatriate the money to the maigida up north.  These herders are from the underclass who merely survives on the measly and poor remuneration they make after their arduous journeys of over a thousand kilometres. When they see how much money they can make from successful kidnapping, they become addicted to the business and overtime their masters may find it difficult to find herders unless they go outside the country which of course they can easily do and recruit new herders from the millions of jobless and aimless young men in our neighbouring countries.

People have always asked why the poor animals are not ferried in trucks to their slaughter. Some are but the ones who need to be fattened along the route from the labour of equally suffering poor farmers are the ones who do the long trek accompanied by the poor herdsmen who may later become kidnappers. These kidnappers, I must say, are then joined by local criminals who want a piece of the action and who also want their share of the blood money. Because of arduous work they do some of these herders are addicted to hallucinogenic drugs. This is why they kill without any sentiment or emotions. Some of the so-called Fulani, especially the bororo are pagans and not Muslims so appealing to them in the name of Allah would fall on deaf ears. This is the only way one can see understand what happened in the case of the Greenfield University episode in Kaduna. The kidnappers demanded for N800 million to release the victims and when they felt they were not being taken seriously they slaughtered five of the young boys and girls and threw their bodies near the university where they were seen by passers-by. Eventually after 40 days of total absence of government, the parents recovered the remaining children after selling their homes and other properties to pay a ransom of N180 million as claimed by the parents. While the drama was going on, Sheikh Abubakar Gumi pleaded with the Kaduna and federal governments to pay the kidnappers N100 million and he suggested they would take the money even though vastly less than N800 million they demanded and that they would have freed the students.

I can understand Governor Nasir El- Rufai saying paying ransom would encourage the spate of kidnapping and because he had burnt his fingers before when he paid some terrorists to leave his state alone, they apparently took the money and continued in their terrorists attack on the farmers.

The Kaduna story can be replicated in several parts of Nigeria. It is even more serious in Zamfara, Benue, Plateau and Taraba states. The full scale war in the Northeast particularly in Borno, Yobe, Gombe and Adamawa are better known because of the deadly onslaught of Boko Haram and the forces of ISIS in the West African Province (ISWAP). People are afraid to travel by road anymore. Even Abuja to Kaduna, one of the most strategic roads in the country is now a no-go area. Even military convoys are shying away from it and officers now either fly or go by train on the relatively short distance which in good times would have been a pleasurable trip to see the countryside.

Initially the incendiary rebellion, because that is what it looked like, was restricted to the North but now it has metastasized to cover the whole country. The Niger Delta which seems to have seen some respite has again joined in the orgy of violence of their own or in resistance to herders’ onslaught on their area.

The Southeast is completely different case rooted in the deep and underlying feelings of marginalization by the Buhari regime with regards to appointments particularly security appointments. The old shadow of the Biafran war of the 1960s seems to hang dangerously in the Southeast. The herders’ invasions and killings in the southwest and rampant kidnappings and the destabilization of the economic activities of the place because of the fear of intercity travel have upset a critical mass of the people.

All these problems have been compounded by the economic effect and the uncertainty caused by the coronavirus pandemic. We are even very lucky for its less than severe mortality and morbidity in our country. I shudder to think of what would have happened to Nigeria if we were to suffer from the kind of the experience of India. With our primitive medical infrastructure, no one would be left standing! As I write not up to one per cent of Nigerians have gotten one or two shots of the coronavirus vaccines. Unless a miracle happens we will be sitting ducks when the serious wave of this terrible pandemic breaks out here

While we are faced with this twilight in our country, it does not seem the powers-that-be understand the existential nature of the problems. We are at the precipice and a little push may plunge the country into chaos if not war of all against all. If this happens, the war front may not be easily identified because while some may want to fight an ethnic war; others may fight a war of spoils and while others may want a war of the poor against the not too poor. In essence, we stand to lose the little we have achieved in the 20th and the two decades of the 21st centuries. Weapons merchants would be too glad to ply their trade here and the racist white world would enjoy blacks slaughtering blacks. One white politician cynically suggested that Africa would have been the best continent if not for the blacks. In other words, remove the blacks and Africa would be perfect for white colonization. Instead of facing the fundamental issues of our existence, we spend all our time on disputes over cows. We fight where they should forage, and where they should drink water. The rest of the world is even moving away from eating beef. Ireland is reducing the population of its cows by 50 per cent because cows emit too much methane which is causing global warming. It  is common knowledge that beef is not good for our health.

Soon we will find out that the world is moving away from hydrocarbon dependency. Then, where will we find money to sustain our deep state of huge bureaucracy and a myriad of ministries, agencies and other paraphernalia of state that add nothing to the welfare of our people? If all this does not constitute the twilight of a country that used to lead Africa but now finds its voice muffled and is hardly consulted in decent international circles, then what does?

But after twilight comes a glorious dawn. If our leaders listen to wise counsel and to the cries of the suffering humanity in Nigeria, we may yet turn from the precipice and walk our way back chastened by the experience of this period, do an analysis of what is wrong with the present structure of our country and try to make amends. If we don’t do this then the answer is blowing in the wind!