By Jide Osuntokun

An English friend  of mine phoned me a couple of weeks ago asking if it was true the governor of Bauchi State, Bala Muhammad said herders should carry AK-47 guns to defend themselves. I said I am not sure if he said so and that I would find out more about it and call him back. Of course I knew he said so; I was just trying to protect my country’s honour and integrity abroad. But the guy phoned back the following day and I had to own up to the fact that one of our governors actually said so. My friend said he was sorry to see that our situation was getting very serious and asked me if I knew that this type of weapon was for combat operations.

Of course I knew being an expert in warfare myself. I asked myself why the governor took that position. He himself said Fulani herders were being killed and their cattle rustled. I don’t know how true this allegation is and if it is true it is a serious allegation and it should be investigated by the police. There is a general information that cattle are being rustled in the north by thieves and brigands and Fulani owners of cattle are losing their means of livelihood and many of the herders are consequently taking to armed robbery and kidnapping to make a living. Commentators have also said kidnapping for ransom which yields tens and even hundreds of millions are now more profitable than cow herding. We must first say the herders are not the owners of the cows. They are mostly cow hands hired by the big cow owners so this loss of cattle cannot justify robbery and kidnapping by cow hands unless we are to believe the rich cow owners are also involved in kidnapping and collection of ransoms to make up for stolen cows.

So how does carrying Kalashnikov battle guns solve the problems? Secondly which security authority licensed the carrying of these lethal weapons which the governor was defending or the herders are law unto themselves and just carried these weapons without license? Some of us licensed to carry hunting rifles have even been asked to give them up because of the general proliferation of small arms which is a serious problem globally. The Nigerian public needs to know if the gun laws have changed and all those who can afford to buy any kind of weapons can now purchase them. This is a policy which we call “grave yard policy” when discussing the unbridled spread of nuclear weapons instead of disarmament. The same logic also applies to a situation where everyone can own battle-grade guns.  Even in America, the gun crazed country, people cannot carry these types of guns our governor is recommending! Imagine if the much abused farmers whose crops are wantonly damaged and eaten by cows took a queue from the governor and embrace this new gun culture.

The Bauchi governor has been making all kinds of unguarded statements these days such as saying Fulani people have universal nationality and are not bound by borders and that Fulani in any country will find home in Nigeria and that he has relations himself in the Cameroons. Perhaps this governor should be told that division of nations and ethnic groups by national borders is not unique to Fulani alone, so are the Hausa, Yoruba, the  Mandinka  are actually divided among  Guinea -Bissau, Guinea, The Gambia, Mali, Senegal and Liberia. Other divided nations are Arabs, French, Germans, Punjabi, Bengali, Koreans, Dutch and even Chinese. If all these people refuse to obey international frontiers, international order will collapse and world order would have to be reconfigured.

So why did the governor take this extremist view of wanting our people to see him as Fulani champion? If other ethnic groups adopt his bellicose position, this will harm Fulani rather than help them. Suppose people take seriously the advice of the minister of defence that we should all fight back the kidnappers and brigands tormenting us instead of crying and pleading with security forces to save us. This call on us to defend ourselves will lead to acquisition of the same AK-47 guns by everyone and since the villagers are more than their invaders, what chance would the Fulani herders have against armed peasantry all over the country. It is obvious to reasonable people that the solution to our security problem is not general arming of our people or a section of it.  What we need is general disarmament and increase in security forces in numbers and improved mobility and disposition. This will include establishment of local and state police as we used to have in colonial times and ensuring that offenders are swiftly punished. One of the causes of insecurity is the fact that swift punishment that should serve as deterrence has not been seriously employed in the past. The order given recently by the president to forcefully disarm or to shoot at sight any gun carrying criminals who resist security forces order is a policy in the right direction. One hopes it is not coming too late like shutting the door of the stable while the horse has bolted away!

I asked myself why the governor of Bauchi took the extreme position as if he was not part of the executive that should be helping Nigeria to find a solution to its security problem not by suggesting a shoot-out solution to an extremely complex problem which if not handled properly could unravel the delicate cement that glues us together.

I read a brilliant analysis of the governor’s motive by one of the editors of the Vanguard newspapers who said the governor is trying to position himself as Fulani defender because of the serious cases of graft and corruption the EFCC has against him. He built houses worth billions of Naira for himself and another for his young son in the exclusive Maitama areas of Abuja which he allocated to himself and family when he was Minister of the Federal Capital Territory. He also acquired hectares of land near the airport worth billions of Naira and to insure himself against presidential question, he allocated same to President Jonathan supposedly for agriculture. When Buhari came in 2015, Bala Muhammad was temporarily locked up for his malfeasance but later released. Needless to remind my readers he got his ministerial appointment from Jonathan for supporting the removal from power of poor sick Umar Yar’Adua. In any serious country, he should not have been allowed to contest election for the post of governor which he had resources to buy and which he promptly bought in the Nigerian fashion despite the fact that Bauchi State is an APC state as reflected by the party’s overwhelming majority in the House of Assembly.

We must be very careful about who we elect into political positions in this country. Arming a group of supporters as was done in Borno during the governorship of Ali Modu Sheriff which eventually led to Boko Haram is not the best way to go. Arming Fulani herders may lead to another incendiary movement which we may not be able to control because action and reaction are equal and oppositely directed. Opponents of the Fulani herders will also arm themselves in a war of all against all, some kind of Hobbesian state of nature in which life is short  nasty and brutish .

We must refuse to be led by time servers and people feathering their own nests while they claim to be fighting for their ethnic groups and if everybody does this in an insane manner, we will have no country to rule and we will all suffer when anarchy breaks out. The governor of Kano State, Abdullahi Ganduje has suggested to all those asking herders to be armed and to follow cows from Bauchi to Lagos to donate their children who are comfortably living in London or New York to come home and join the trek across Nigeria they are so much in love with.

I need to remind the Bauchi governor that the cow herders do not represent the essence of being Fulani, an essence demonstrated by Shaikh Uthman bin Fodio which is piety, holiness, forbearance, order and peace and in my life I know millions of this kind of Fulani, not the killer monsters being encouraged by Bala Muhammad. This country has been too good to many people in my generation that I sometimes feel guilty for how low we have descended. Somebody asked me about the national slight of President Joe Biden not calling our president while he has called the presidents of Ghana and Kenya; I told the fellow to go and ask governor of Bauchi Bala Muhammed. With this kind of situation, who wants to die for Nigeria. In my youth and adult life while I had opportunity to serve Nigeria I would have gladly died for this country.

By Samuel Akinnuga

I present to my readers the views of a 25 year old young man I am very proud of and a former student of ours in Redeemer’s University, Ede and president of the students union in his graduating year. 

No better time exists, to tell the truth than in a moment where silence in the face of glaring injustice is a politically correct choice. This moment is one of such times. If Martin Luther King, Jr. were alive, he would have considered it appropriate to rephrase his statement about dark moments and bright stars, particularly in the context of the realities in our country. It was he who declared, and quite profoundly so, that “only when it’s darkest can we see the stars.” And this statement bears far-reaching significance. Darkness is symbolic, often a metaphor for a period of distress and despondency. On a bright note, it represents the calm after the storm and so there is the urge to keep hope alive with the expectation that a glimmer would be sighted at the end of the tunnel. Would MLK be as bold to make the same declaration in a time as this when every bit of sanity is drained from anyone who is so emotionally attached to the dismal state of affairs in the country?

These times are dark, and with all that has happened recently, one is frustrated enough to think that there is a fault in our stars. From all indications, everything that can go wrong has gone wrong. We are gradually becoming inured to accepting an anomaly as the norm. People can just be whisked away; students from their schools, travellers on their way, and nothing will happen. These days, no one is really shocked that a kidnapping happened. It’s sad news but no one is shocked. What comes as a shock is something different. One, the number of victims involved each time, details we are mostly unsure about. Two, the nature of ‘negotiations’ with the kidnappers, bandits, or whatever we choose to call them, details of which are utterly ridiculous from what we are made to believe.

In between the kidnapping and the ‘releasing’ or the ‘rescuing’, we don’t miss the trail of statements with a huge tact-sensitivity deficit left by those who appear to defend the aberration rather than bolster confidence in the body politic that public safety is being sought as a matter of critical national priority. We have somehow adopted the uncanny habit of justifying madness and stifling patriotic passions. We have become so adept at misdirecting state force, misplacing national priorities, and majoring in minors. We have simply developed the unbridled penchant for missing the mark.

There is no denying that these are not the best times for our country further worsened by rising anxieties and tensions. You’ll be practically frustrated at almost every noble effort to eke out a decent life while some misguided elements who have continuously unleashed terror on vulnerable Nigerians have continued to enjoy government attention, unabatedly. Nobody needs to tell anybody that the crisis playing out before us is a most unhappy culmination of the years we paid lip service to the ideals of fairness, equity, and social justice; a society where some are more equal than others; a society where a criminal is called by a more dignifying name because, in the words of some people who should know better, that criminal is being ‘marginalised’.

Are we now supposed to accept this ‘marginalisation’ as a pardonable justification for the killings of innocent people in a country that has laws and leaders? That would be unfortunate. We now defend criminals and hound those who speak truth to power. We negotiate with criminals and come hard on those with genuine grievances, and who go about expressing such grievances peacefully. This writer has lost count of attempts by the powers that be to shut the mouths of those who have dared to be critical of the government. This is sadly often the case with many others with whom it seems those in government have scores to settle.

With every passing day, we lose the credence to lay claim to being a sane democratic society. What kind of society is ours, where people are suddenly treated as criminals when they speak against the obvious failures to deliver on the most basic expectation of every government? The other day in Lagos, some young Nigerians were practically submitted to suffer indignities for choosing to demonstrate within the constitutionally-guaranteed limits. That show of force was patently misplaced and most unfortunate. If we approached the insecurity crisis and many other failings in the country with the level of determination we deploy to intimidate citizens, we would have recorded outstanding gains.

A society where the vulnerable are victimised and criminal elements justified is not headed for a good place. Worse still, the posture of the leadership, and particularly the president, in the bigger scheme of things, has been largely untidy.  No one seems to know what we’re doing or how we’re going to get things done. There’s really no sense of direction and we honestly can’t keep making excuses for below-par leadership in a most critical time like this. The consequence is that many Nigerians, obviously helpless, have resorted to ‘carrying their cross.’ The ‘cross’, for most Nigerians, is simply not to have any decent expectation from the political leadership while they are routinely exposed to uncertain degrees of harm by criminals as they go about their daily lives.

The sense of duty of most has become so blunted by affiliations to political actors, aspirations, and tendencies rather than a commitment to the cause of the country. And by all indications, this trend would not be reversed in any short time to come. The general state of affairs in the country, with the insecurity crisis being an awry watershed, begs for a renewed, honest reflection on the situation of Nigeria. It is becoming increasingly clear that we have two ‘Nigerias’. The first is a Nigeria created of the political class for the political class; a Nigeria where all is well as long as political interests are protected; a Nigeria where the welfare of the masses of Nigerians doesn’t matter as much as the pockets of the political class; and one in which the body language of the person in power is more pervasive than the patriotic deference to the spirit and letter of the constitution.

And there’s the other Nigeria where the overwhelming majority of Nigerians find themselves. A country where ethnic affiliations are more relevant than credentials of competence; a country in which the lives of most are in the hands of God rather than in social institutions that work; a country where citizens are constantly subjected to economic, ethnic and religious tensions stirred by an unpatriotic bunch to advance a deleterious agenda. The other Nigeria is the one that has made living a nightmare for those with no means, where poverty, illiteracy, and deprivation are the only things many have known all their lives. Not necessarily by these names but by the unmistakable manifestation of these maladies on their lives and livelihoods.  The other Nigeria is the one in which you must know someone to stand a chance of becoming something. It’s been said too many times that who you know is far more important than what you know. That is the other Nigeria. The other Nigeria is sadly the place where the principles of social justice and fairness are alien concepts in reality. And as long as the other Nigeria is the only one majority of Nigerians would continue to know, we should jettison the idea that things will get better. They will not. And this is the sad reality of a Nigeria we have created.

Ours is a nation in dire need of salvaging. Anyone who is anything has said something about the ugly state of affairs. Any attempt to gloss over the issues or look for quick fixes without a deeper look at the big picture would amount to a waste of time and other resources expended. The nation’s best chance of ‘bright stars’ lies in its investment in the younger population. There’s got to be a marked departure from the usual shabby disposition to youth empowerment and the joke we’ve made of constituency project like we are doing the people a favour. We need to activate a public-spirited commitment to a Nigeria where unity and faith, peace and progress are not merely symbolic good-to-haves.

May we find the courage to save this country from the brink. And may God bless this republic.

By Jide Osuntokun

I heard the news of Chief Dele Falegan’s transition just this last weekend even though he passed on a few weeks ago. I was filled with sadness that I could not immediately head straight to his residence in Ado to commiserate with his family. It is not safe traveling these days because our territorial space has been taken over by killer herdsmen and other brigands manning our highways. There are other logistical problems which most people in my age bracket have. But I owe chief Falegan deep respect and God willing one way or the other I will play some role in the celebration of his life.

Chief Falegan’s life epitomizes the Shakespearian dictum that “The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling but in rising every time we fall”. He would never have gone beyond standard six but for the courage of his father and understanding of the white man, the Reverend Leslie Donald Mason, who was principal of Christ School Ado Ekiti in 1948 when he took the examination and passed. Passing the examination was of course not enough; there was the not too little problem of school fees. The old man was a farmer, a hard working one for that matter but apparently did not grow cash crops but had abundance of yams. So he took the young son who wanted to go to college to the office of the white man and told the white man he wanted his son to go to Christ’s school but had no money but loads of yams. He then suggested to the principal that since the school was a boarding school, he could supply yams to feed the school and the principal should cost the yams supplied equal to the school fees. The principal smiled at the honest proposal and said that was a deal!

That was how Dele Falegan went to college and had an excellent education on Agidimo hills. The principal also yearly gave the young man pocket money after paying his fees from the yam supplied. This arrangement lasted 10 years – six years while Dele was a student and four more years to accommodate younger siblings.This episode shaped the life of honesty and courage Falegan lived.

Falegan after leaving Christ’s School in 1954 worked for some years before going in 1958 for a four-year degree programme in economics at Fourah Bay College Sierra Leone, a college of Durham University in England.  He did not have it easy there because of his bad health and poor financial situation. But he never gave up .He later as a staff of the Research Department of the Central Bank of Nigeria earned a Master’s degree in Economics at the University of Oregon, United States.

He had a checkered life marked by ups and downs but had always risen against all odds. He specialized in international finance and banking. He rose to become Director of Research in the Central Bank of Nigeria from 1977 to 1979 and was Managing Director of the Federal Mortgage Bank of Nigeria and he transformed the bank from what was essentially a building society kind of institution jointly owned by the Commonwealth Development Corporation (CDC) and Nigeria to a Mortgage Bank. He was also at a time one of the directors of Standard Bank of Nigeria now First Bank. He was on the Governing Council of Nigerian Institute of Social and Economic Research (NISER). He was director and later chairman of OWENA Bank. When the federal government was concerned with inflation, Falegan served on the Inflation Task force from 1974 until the task force lapsed but it was during this time that he earned the nickname of anti-inflation man. It was with this reputation that he got into some kind of trouble with the then Head of State, General Olusegun Obasanjo while discussing the 1978- 84 Development Plan. While all the experts had concurred or kept quiet on the planned estimated expenditure, Falegan raised his hand to disagree. He told the small committee of experts coming from line ministries of finance, economic development, the Cabinet Office and the Central Bank that the expenditure budgeted for one year of the plan was 50% of the entire plan and that this would cost runaway inflation. Obasanjo then asked the others if this was true. They answered in the affirmative. The Head of State then closed the meeting and asked everybody to go home. The following morning, Falegan was removed as director of research and shunted into the mortgage bank whose British management team had one more year to go and where Falegan’s presence was met with hostility of both expatriate and Nigerian staff. He had hardly settled in at the bank when the Shehu Shagari government took over and meetings of the board of the bank became a struggle for how to loot the bank and any call by Falegan for propriety and restraint was met with accusation of being a card-carrying member of Obafemi Awolowo’s opposition party, the Unity Party of Nigeria( UPN). Being from Ekiti whose people were regarded as Awolowo’s diehard  supporters  did not help .One of the experiences which Falegan wrote unchallenged in his memoirs My Yesterday- years published in 2013 by Bamboo Books Ltd  and which I reviewed in a public presentation in Ado Ekiti was his victimization by Chief Remi Fani- Kayode. Chief Fani-Kayode had a colorful political life moving from the Action Group to the NCNC then teaming up with Chief Ladoke Akintola to form the NNDP and finally ending up with Shehu Shagari in the NPN. Fani-Kayode wrote Falegan as managing director of the Federal Mortgage Bank asking for five million Naira loan for an unspecified purpose. Out of respect, Falegan wrote to ask Fani- Kayode for specifics of the loan and that his approving capacity as managing director was one million and that Fani-Kayode could however write directly to the board of the bank. This displeased Fani Kayode who wrote to Wahab Dosunmu, the supervising minister of works, saying Falegan was hostile to the ruling party. He also accused Falegan of having loaned money to his sister in Ife to fund ‘Ife Stores’. Ife sores indeed belonged to Falegan’s sister who had actually written to the mortgage bank for a loan and had been turned down for which for months she was not on speaking terms with her brother. When Falegan met Dosunmu to state his case against Fani-Kayode, he was pleasantly surprised when the minister turned down his resignation letter and said he had heard a lot about Falegan’s integrity from his time in the CBN and then asked him to ignore Fani-Kayode . But more trouble came from the hierarchy of the NPN including M.K.O Abiola who was determined to remove him by fair or foul means.

For using his good offices to get OWENA Bank owned by his state of origin Ondo established when he was director of research in the Central Bank, the NPN government suspected whatever he did to help the bank. He played into their hands when he got the management of the Federal Mortgage Bank to place funds of the bank in commercial banks to earn interest instead of just leaving them in current accounts. Newspaper like the Concord of Chief Abiola was used to say he gave a loan of N5 million within 72 hours to OWENA Bank. Even people with no banking knowledge know the difference between investing in term deposits and granting a loan. No matter how strong his defence was and that about 13 banks were involved, he was still suspended from office for unauthorized disbursements of the money of the mortgage bank. This led to intervention of Governor Adekunle Ajasin of the then Ondo State with the President Shagari. By this time, Falegan had had more than enough and in spite of Shagari’s exoneration, he was determined to end his unhappy relationship with the bank during which time he developed hypertension.

But life went on with the proverbial ups and downs. He was also involved in the struggle to create Ekiti State and since its creation he has made his expertise available to whoever requested it trying very hard to stand above political differences and Ekiti people’s penchant for politicking sometimes with bitterness. Our people always see issues either as black or white and are not ready to consider any position in between the two extremes. I am not sure this is an advantage in politics which is the art of the possible. Falegan like most people in his generation worked without any consideration of material reward. They in fact seemed to shy away from any opportunity that could bring to them material benefit. I remember another person of his generation, Olufemi Eperokun who became an unfortunate victim of his refusal to use his office for pecuniary reward when he was the registrar of the University of Lagos and the late Kwaku Adadevoh was his vice Chancellor. The same political shenanigans were called into place to get rid of him. This made me to say in private discussion I had with an important Ekiti man that until an Ekiti man became governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, this country will remain shortchanged in the kind of banking leadership and expertise this country needs and deserves. We need people like the late Eperokun and Falegan who would offer service which does not expect rewards. May be no such Ekiti man now exists! This and other exemplary instances of honesty and patriotism are what Falegan will be remembered for. In 2014 without any prompting  from me, he issued a cheque for one million naira to Ekiti State University for which my family contributed one and half million to fund a Professor Kayode Osuntokun prize for best graduating student in the Ekiti State University College of Medicine and he also suggested that the college should be named after Kayode Osuntokun. That is the kind of generosity of spirit that Falegan was known for. He recognized and worshipped excellence wherever it may be found.

Rest in Peace good man, honest and courageous champion of whatever exalts God and man.

By Jide Osuntokun

Unequal relations among the countries of the world and the people within the global community and also within individual states have been the nature of human society from time immemorial. Even the Holy Scripture, the Bible, acknowledges this when it says we will always have the poor among us. Socialist ideology was and is predicated on how to eliminate poverty and inequality among the people of each state and the world at large.

The idea of proletarian brotherhood and solidarity was at the root of global communism for decades after the success of the communist revolution in the Soviet Union in 1917. The hypocrisy of the idea was exposed by the subordination of other national interests in Eastern Europe after the Second World War to the national interest of the Soviet Union. The recent history of Eastern Europe where national interests of each state have asserted themselves has proved that the so-called proletarian solidarity was enforced by Russian tanks and not by natural feeling of brotherhood or the common interests of peasants and workers. No pretense of Russian brotherliness is now mouthed in the open to justify Russian imperialistic tendencies in what is left of the Russian empire from the Urals to Vladivostok.

Even though the idea of equality and sharing of God’s material blessings is common to all universal religions, nowhere has this idea taken totally solid roots in governance. There has however been efforts to ameliorate the suffering of people through social welfare schemes such National Health Insurance, minimum wage and unemployment benefits which the  Labour government of Clement Attlee introduced to Great Britain in 1945 and which has been copied universally though not in detail and  in totality by some governments. Some, like the United States, only picks what is ideologically compatible with its national ideology of free enterprise and survival of the fittest.

For historical accuracy, it must be stated that in the 1880s, Otto Von Bismarck, the imperial chancellor and forward-looking statesman of Germany had tried to cut the ground under the big Socialist Party in Germany by imposing what he called “socialism from above” thus predating the post-Second World War Social Welfare State. While the yawning gap between the rich and the poor still remains in Europe as a whole and in the United States and Canada, people generally are provided for in sickness and during material want even in the United States which frowns at “socialized medicine”. People who are poor and uninsured still die in America, the so-called “God’s Own Country” but not in any other major western capitalist country including Japan and in Australasian countries of New Zealand and Australia.

The prevailing stat ideology in the United States in spite of their Declaration of Independence saying “all men are born equal”, the modern capitalist America would argue that all men are born equal in the sense of being born naked! Americans generally feel equality is unnatural and that everyone should strive to make a life for himself or herself or fall by the way side and that big government is anathema.

The situation in the global South of Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean and South Asia, the pacific islands and Asia in general excluding China is characterized by mass poverty and inequality. Most of the countries in the global South were previously under colonial rule or alien sphere of influence. The nature of imperialism is inequality and under development. Both Frantz Fanon in his book, ‘Wretched of the Earth’ and Walter Rodney’s ‘How Europe Underdeveloped Africa’ clinically examined the deleterious effect of colonialism on the so-called Third World. From the mouth of Joseph Chamberlain the high priest of British imperialism, we learn that colonies were ‘undeveloped estates of the Crown’ kept for future development for the benefit of Great Britain.

It is not only inequality that characterizes the global South but iniquity in the distribution of wealth among those grindingly poor and those stupendously rich as one finds in the Arabian Peninsula and in Brunei and even in India and Africa. In the rest of the world, the coronavirus pandemic has further increased the wealth of the rich while rendering the poor poorer. The poor who cannot work while locked down have watched the rich become richer through the booming Stock Exchanges of New York, London, Frankfurt Paris, Shanghai and Tokyo. Most of the pharmaceutical companies are benefiting from the production of vaccines against the coronavirus and certainly, the shares of these companies are rising astronomically at the stock exchanges. The vaccines are also priced beyond the means and affordability of many of the countries in the global South. Many of the vaccines being produced and those to come have been paid for, months ahead before production by those countries that can afford them.

There is growing vaccines nationalism by countries like Canada and the United States that have paid ahead of production for more vaccines that they would ever need. Thus countries in the global South are looking up to the World Health Organization (WHO) for help. Until the Biden presidency, the WHO itself was handicapped by scarcity of funds when America that pays about one-third of the WHO’s budget was withdrawn from the organization by the former president, Donald Trump who accused it of favoritism to China. Thank God, the new Biden administration has returned the United States to the WHO.

There is no stated time when the global South will benefit from the COVAX vaccines from the WHO. I suppose it will depend on the generosity of member states because the vaccines will have to be paid for. Trump was not going to vaccinate all Americans free of charge but the Biden administration has made the vaccines free whether one has health insurance or not. It is also free for citizens of the European Union and presumably for citizens of the Russian Federation and China and India and the various kingdoms, sultanates and emirates of the Middle East. Most of the governments of Africa do not have money to pay for the vaccines. Nothing would gladden the hearts of those in Europe and America who want to reduce the population of the world than see millions of Africans succumb to the coronavirus pandemic.

We in Nigeria are busy fighting tribal wars over watering places for cows and farm lands for our peasants and threatening ethnic wars between ethnic groups because of conflicts in rural Nigeria among people struggling to preserve their ancestral rights to land against newcomers who claim all lands belong to God, God as defined by their own religion and the Kalashnikov rifles they carry. When the vaccines arrive Africa and the global South, those with the usual right of entitlement will be the ones to get them unless out of fear, they allow the poor to get them first so that they can judge the efficacy and safety of the vaccines. After this is done, the big shots in society will line up or demand the medical staff of our health institutions and the few hospitals to come and vaccinate them and their households at home.

Nigeria and the rest of Africa, if given the option, should opt for the Johnson and Johnson vaccines expected to be certified within the next fortnight simply because it is a one-dose vaccine and it is produced through the traditional way of injecting weak virus into the body to trigger natural defence mechanism rather than the RNA( Ribonucleic Acid) manipulated  Pfizer-BioNtech, Moderna, Astra-Zeneca, the Sputnik Russian vaccines and the two or three types of Chinese vaccines particularly Sinovac .

Whatever vaccines we get, our leaders will struggle to take care of themselves and their families first and if the vaccines are not enough, the rest of society can go to hell. Our people even before vaccines have turned to homemade remedies of garlic, ginger, lemon, turmeric and back of pineapples boiled together for sniffing and drinking. Many are swearing this concoction works. The more discerning and sophisticated are consuming vitamins and Ivermectin and all kinds of malaria drugs. The rich are foolishly flying into the eye of the coronavirus storm in Europe and America as coronavirus tourists to get their vaccination and post vaccination care if necessary. God have mercy!

The western media says four out of the ten richest men in the world have resources to vaccinate the 7.8 billion people of the world today. Even though this coronavirus pandemic has, in my view, made wealth almost useless because what can one do these days with too much money when everyone is locked down to avoid infection? Yet there is no doubt about growing inequality in wealth accumulation largely because of this virus that has opened some avenue of wealth for some and has exacerbated the poverty and want of many. In our various fragile African countries, the rich are not sleeping soundly because the poor on the highways and in their homes and those accompanying their cows to slaughter are planning how to rob, kill and kidnap the rich for ransom.

By Jide Osuntokun

News about the deaths of Nigeria’s academics particularly professors have been rather frightening and depressing in these days. There is no doubt that many of our people are succumbing to the ravages of Covid-19. This is a personal tragedy for me because some of the people dying are personal friends, colleagues or younger brothers in the African sense. It’s not every one of them who passed on that is coronavirus victim. Some are dying of old age because of wear and tear after years of work in environment that is not conducive to mental exertion and with very little material earthly things to show for it. Some are also victims of depression after seeing their life’s work fall apart or into decay because of government policies characterized by lack of consistency and continuity.

I have sometimes looked in bewilderment at the state of collapse in places where I have worked in my youth and adult lives go into disrepair and disrepute in the present dispensation which pays little attention to merit, integrity or excellence. It is very difficult for anybody of my age not to wonder if life has been worth living with all we worked for going to the dogs with those in authority unable or unprepared or incapable of doing something about it.

When I discuss these issues with my friends, we all share the same feelings of despair and disappointment. If you are also a thinking person and who is aware what is in offing for black peoples in the future, the ignorance of people in government who seem to worry more about their bellies and their pockets and about who is in or who is out and what ethnic group, persons holding office belongs to or who are engaged in perpetual permutation about offices they intend to hold in the future, you realize that our people have lost their senses and our future as a country and a race is a lost cause. How many of our people are aware of the whispering discussion about reduction of the population of the world and getting rid of the useless part of it which they suggest are Africans. One tends to dismiss these talks as hoax but there is no smoke without fire. This is why the gradual withering of our country’s intelligentsia is a cause for concern. The total lack of preparedness for all future eventualities is frightening.

Read Also; Five prominent Nigerian professors lost to COVID-19

For example Nigerian newspapers reported that Nigeria is expecting 100,000 Covid-19 vaccines soon. I hope this is not true! Isn’t Nigeria said to have an estimated population of 200 million?. What fraction of our population will the expected vaccines take care of bearing in mind that two doses are expected for a person . What a joke of a country. Is this country not sufficiently endowed in knowledge and wherewithal to have assembled its own scientific community to produce this vaccine even if we had to import the manufacturing equipment from abroad? Iran is doing this, so are India and Pakistan. When are we going to stop being journeymen in the grand journey of human history? The answer is blowing in the wind! Until a Black country is successful others in the secret covens of white supremacists who deny the humanity of black peoples will be planning and targeting Africa as an experimental field of drastically reducing human population through sterilization or scientifically or secretly poisoning them under the guise of controlling diseases which invariably seem to come from Africa as erroneously propagated by the racist Western and Eastern press. The swirling dangers surrounding the black man is unfortunately matched by the woeful ignorance of the black governmental leadership on the African continent. It is not a matter of self-protection only  that eternal vigilance is required always but it is a matter of life and death for a whole people and unless we wake up now it will be too late before we  are all led like sheep into slaughter houses at least metaphorically speaking .

On a personal level, the loss of our intelligentsia is doubly painful because of the threat against us as a people. When I heard the death of Femi Odekunle, I felt it as a personal loss. Femi was a person who will ask why not when everybody was saying why? One does not have to subscribe to Hegelian dialectics to realize that scientific truth can only be attained through conflict of ideas. In positioning himself this way, Femi nearly lost his life to the Abacha terror. I shared this unfortunate experience with him in my incarceration in military detention for six months under Abacha for speaking truth to power. But for the sudden death of Abacha, Femi would have been executed along with General Oladipo Diya for knowledge about a phantom coup! This is why it is so painful seeing him dying in harness while serving his country to the coronavirus pandemic. His father died when he was over 100 years old. Longevity was in his gene. It was at the burial of the old man that I last saw Femi. I feel sorry for his family and his relatively young wife Ruki .

Oye Ibidapo- Obe was my junior brother through his marriage to the sister my departed friend  Segun Ojutalayo. I watched his meteoric rise from lecturer to professor and vice chancellor. He was vice chancellor when I retired from the University of Lagos. He comes from a family in Ilesha whose ancestors fought alongside my great grandfather in the Ekiti parapo war of 1876 to 1893. He had always been close to me. He was always full of life and his services were in high demand everywhere. In spite of this, he was highly principled. I was impressed that he opposed President Jonathan’s decision to rename University of Lagos Moshood Abiola University as political move to curry Yoruba votes. God knows Abiola deserves monuments in his honour but not an old institution with traditions and long history like University of Lagos or University of Ibadan. Oye stood his ground despite the fact he was serving as one of the vice chancellors of Jonathan’s  12 “democratic dividend “ universities hurriedly put together without planning about staff or financial cost.

I knew Professor Ajeyalemi at the University of Lagos. I knew him at a distance so to say but he related to me as a big brother. Academics is a leveller and there is no feeling of senior or junior in the university system. One earned the respect of others if one merited it. Ajeyalemi was one of those who earned the respect of others.

Of course it’s not all the professors who died in recent times that died of Covid-19. Some died as a result of age and ailments associated with aging. Professor Tunji Oloruntimehin , the famous historian of the Western Sudan, I believe died of natural causes. He will be remembered for his erudition and scholarship. For a man who did not go through secondary school but rather a teachers’ college to achieve all he achieved is a mark of perseverance and distinction. He served for several years as editor of the academic journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria. He also edited publications of the Nigerian Academy of Letters before subsequently becoming the president of the academy a position which he held with passion, dedication and dignity.

Prof Olu Longe, former head of computer science department in the University of Ibadan was a quiet and deep man knowledge-wise. He passed on due to old age. He was the first professor of Computer Science in Nigeria. He was also a distinguished old boy of that city on the hill, Christ’s School Ado – Ekiti.

There are many other professors who crossed the line of Divide between this earthly place of weariness and wickedness to the other side beyond the pearly gates of heaven. I know of professors Ekeh and Onwundiwe and others. I know them by their reputation which will remain imperishable.

I remember what Professor Gerald Graham, emeritus professor of Imperial History at the University College London and one of my mentors and supervisors of giants like JF Ade Ajayi and Kenneth Onwuka Dike told me in the University of Western Ontario, Canada in 1971 when we were both on the staff of the Department of History of that university. He said an academic never dies as long as he has published books which will serve as a permanent memorial to his name wherever there are libraries in the world. This is absolutely true of such recently departed professors like Ladipo Akinkugbe and others.

Monuments may be destroyed or wear out; the words on marble will always remain. If this will serve as a consolation to the families of departed academics, I commend this tradition and belief that academics just like ideas don’t die. In any case, we are destined to die one day and as masquerades in my home town of Okemesi, are wont to say on the last day of Egungun festivals when they are on their way back to heaven as people pretend to believe, they would say “Heaven needs not be in a hurry because we are all going there”.

How philosophical!