Category: Jide Osuntokun

By Jide Osuntokun

Great Britain finally exited the European Union after being in the Union for almost half a century since sir Edward Heath, the prime minister, took the country into the European Economic Community (EEC) which it joined along with Denmark and the Irish Republic in 1973. The EU’s population is 447,706,209 with a GDP of $18.377 trillion in 2020 compared with the USA’s 328 million people and GDP of $20.54 trillion, China’s population of 1.4 billion people and a GDP of $13. 61 trillion and Japan’s population of 93 million people and a GDP of $4.971 trillion. On the other hand, the population of Britain is 66 million and a GDP of $2.83 trillion. The UK has the sixth largest economy after the US, China, Japan Germany and India. Germany, the dominant economy in the European Union has a population of 83 .2 million and a GDP of $3.8 trillion. From these comparative figures it is doubtful if Britain made the right choice in leaving the second greatest economic union in the world with what it offers to industrial concerns which care much about economy of scale in terms of viability and profitability of investment. Although the government of Boris Johnson managed to strike a deal that guarantees free trade between Britain and the European Union, but this does not cover financial services and insurance where Britain has always had comparative advantages with the position of London as a major capital of global capitalism. I understand that this aspect of the withdrawal deal may be negotiated in the future. But the uncertainty it creates cannot be in the interest of Great Britain. In the years preceding the eventual withdrawal of Britain on December 31, 2020, many of the international banks and financial institutions and other multinational companies moved their headquarters to such places as Frankfurt, Paris and Dublin with consequences on employment in London in particular. There was also a decline in property values in London and the greater London area. Although Boris Johnson and his Conservative and Unionist party had during the campaign for severance of ties with Europe said it was a question of psychological satisfaction for the British to know they were totally in charge of their own affairs as a sovereign independent country, but when people begin to count the costs, questions are going to be asked on how leaving the EU puts food on the table of the average Briton. In a world of interdependence, as seen in the new economic integration in Asia/ Pacific region and in the economic integration of Mexico the USA and Canada, one doubts the wisdom of Britain leaving the EU on mere psychological satisfaction. Even here in Africa, we are moving towards African free trade area however putative our efforts may be. It however signals the future trajectory of economic relations on the African continent.

There is also the lack of clear majority for brexiteers in the UK. The people of Northern Ireland voted against it just as the people of Scotland remains opposed to leaving the European Union. Only the Welsh and the English in the four nations that make up the UK voted for Brexit. Even there, the majority of the young people were opposed to leaving the EU. Leaving will cost universities in the UK the loss of billions of Euros in research and innovation funds which most of the young academics and students benefit from. Jobs in the Union will no longer be opened to the young people of the UK because their certificates will not automatically be recognized as before in the European Union. They will also not be able to bid for consultancies in the European Union. There is also the inconvenience of having to apply for visas. The government of Scotland has now indicated that it will again call for independence referendum in Scotland to take it out of the UK and for it to seek admission into the European Union on its own. For sectarian religious reasons, Northern Ireland is not likely to secede soon from the UK and join the Irish Republic. But how long Ireland will remain divided remains a moot question. The small island was divided in May 1921 strictly on the sectarian basis of the south belonging to the Catholics while the Protestant unionists maintain their hold on the north which remained and still forms part of the UK. The other aspect is that the majority in the north were mostly descendants of Scottish and English settlers. To complicate the issue, the Catholics in the north have now outbred the Protestants and are probably now in the majority and if there is a referendum they will vote to join the Republic of Ireland.

The point I am making is that the decision to leave the European Union may lead to the unravelling of the United Kingdom itself. Brexit may therefore turn out to be politically costly for Britain. Even though Britain will remain in the North Atlantic Organization (NATO) but it will not have the same voice as it would have had if it were still part of Europe. The result is that Britain will gradually remain at the apron strings of the United States untrusted by the EU and with no influence in the United States and in the world generally. Of course it is too late to start crying after spilt milk. Boris Johnson and his Conservative and Unionist Party will just have to find their way out of the multitude of their self-inflicted problems. No one is of course saying there were no reasons for Brexit. The campaign to leave hinged on the question of immigration. Too many people were flooding into the United Kingdom from Europe especially when the Union was opened to former communist countries in Central Europe. Britain witnessed millions of people coming in from Poland, Bulgaria and Rumania. The fear of millions of Turks flooding in from Muslim Turkey which for political and strategic reasons was being seriously considered for membership of the Union convinced many working class people who had chaffed under the pressure of immigrants from former British colonies in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. Cultural and racial reasons drove the British into voting against remaining in the European Union irrespective of what economists and British intelligentsia might have felt.

This paranoia reminds me of the colourful British Conservative MP, Enoch Powell, a former professor of classics and minister who warned his people against the flood of South Asian immigrants particularly Pakistanis whom he surmised might lead to blood flowing on the streets of Britain. He was dismissed as an alarmist but the spate of terrorists in Britain mouthing Islamic slogans has made the British to remember Enoch Powell.

During the stay or leave campaign, Prime minister David Cameron and President Barack Obama as a friend of Britain advised against it . Boris Johnson branded Obama’s advice as coming from a Kenyan descendant who was unlikely to be a friend of the British after the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya in the 1950s and its brutal suppression by the British army. Nigel Farage, the leader of the “little Englanders” and founder of the nationalist UK Independence Party (UKIP) insulted both British and foreign friends of the British if they merely pointed out the possible economic and political consequences of leaving the European Union. Now chicken has come home to roost and the British people would just have to make do with their choice. The campaign that Britain was sending billions of pounds sterling to help backward areas of Europe with nothing in return is not true. The reason why Northern Ireland and Scotland wanted to remain was because of the huge transfer of resources from Europe to the distressed parts of the UK notably the Celtic nations of Scotland, Wales and Ireland as a whole. The remarkable physical development noticeable in Belfast, the whole of Wales, Edinburgh and Glasgow and the infrastructural modernization of the Irish Republic could not have been done without the European Union.

It is of course true that the rich countries of Europe like Germany, France,  the Netherlands, Austria and Belgium and the Nordic countries like Denmark, Sweden and Finland bore the brunt of providing funds for their less developed member states in southern and Central Europe. But the plan was that this was for some time and that in a future prosperous Europe, everyone would be a winner. The complaint of economic burden was also very loud in Germany which provided about 35% of the European budget. Germany and France because of their history of course know that the cost of peace was nothing when compared with the cost of the ruinous wars that devastated Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries.

It is not surprising that the European Union has been rather very generous to Britain in allowing her to enjoy free trade without free movement of people with the Union. But this cuts both ways because Britain would continue to be a huge market for German automobiles, pharmaceutical and chemical products. Europe cannot really be hostile to Britain because Britain will always remain an important European country whether in or outside the European Union but its exit would probably make bureaucrats in Brussels and hard headed monetarists and advocate of a hard euro in Berlin and Frankfurt be more flexible when considering the economic performance of laggards in Southern Europe and the Balkans where for a considerable  length of time, the European Union’s economic support will continue to be needed and where  it would be prudent not to push  too hard for economic success and prudent management of resources which nearly drove financially challenged Greece and even Italy out of the Union.

By Jide Osuntokun

At last this horrible year is ending at midnight tonight . I can’t wait!. The news of Covid-19 did not break in Nigeria until sometime in February 2020. At that time many of us thought it was going to be a flash in the pan, but alas! We do not now know how the tragedy that is afflicting and affecting the whole world is going to end . Close to over one and a half  million  people have died in the world with most of them coming from Europe, the Americas , India and relatively few have come  from Africa. The reason why the morbidity and mortality in Africa are this low is not clear. We have heard that this may be because the demographic situation  in Africa where 60%of our population is below 25 years old, meaning we have relatively young and strong population, gives us some kind of advantage because the problem affects older people than younger people whose immune system is certainly stronger than those of the elderly. it  can also be that we in Africa are exposed to many viral diseases to the extent that we have developed  some kind of herd immunity to most of them including this new coronavirus. Whatever the explanation may be, it is obvious that we have  not suffered the kind of morbidity and mortality suffered in Europe, the United States, Brazil and India. One just hopes we won’t push our  luck too far and ignore all established preventive measures that are known to work in other parts of the world . Our religious leaders have to be careful in saying God has lifted the death of coronavirus over our heads. This may be true, but we should curtail our assembling in large numbers in cross-over services on the 31st of December so that by so doing, we don’t facilitate the spread of coronavirus. God is omnipresent and he is everywhere, including our private homes . We can pray to Him with our families at home and He who hears our private pleas  in the secret of our homes will reward us openly.

The coronavirus pandemic has had severe and deleterious effect, not just on our health but also on our economy which in the best of times was never strong as a mono-cultural economy depending on hydrocarbons export. Things were so bad that Nigeria had to pay to store its unsold crude petroleum abroad because its market in India and China were virtually shut down . This was also at a time when humongous amount of money was being spent on unending and materially and humanly wasteful war in the northeast of Nigeria . To make matters worse, the insurgency has spread to the north-west of the country manifesting in farmers / herders mutual slaughter . The brigandage that has ensued is also prevalent in the north-central part of the country. Added to all this are the incendiary movements, which are decade-old in the oil producing Niger Delta . One kind of turmoil or the other now affects the entire southern part of the country with the cities in total disconnect with the rural countryside. All these problems have made governance extremely difficult. Road infrastructure remains unmaintained if not totally abandoned. These problems and the criminality in the ungoverned spaces of Nigeria has led to the London Financial Times sometimes in December 2020 branding us as a nation on the brink of total collapse as a “failed state.” What worse indictment can we get when perhaps the most respected medium in western capitalism brands us a near-failed state? This has sealed our fate in terms of foreign direct investment, because no foreign company is likely to venture to our shores unless we can miraculously clean our acts and restore sobriety and security to our land. This near-failed state status in which we find ourselves has had damaging effect on our profile in the international community where before now we had a strong presence, but now our influence internationally  is zero.

To compound all these problems we have had a political leadership totally cut off from the reality of the problems of Nigeria. Many of the leaders are living large  in sumptuous and conspicuous consumption, and some of their children and children of their business associates are getting married and throwing lavish parties and celebrations while the famished many look at them in wonder, hoping to join them by hook or crook no matter what it takes and by all means necessary including banditry and kidnapping. The political structures have proved inadequate and unresponsive in tackling governance issues,  particularly such issues as overpopulation, corruption, bribery, and general malaise in the country. Yet all appeal to common sense to practice the federal constitutional grundnorm negotiated at independence has fallen on the deaf ears of those benefitting from the rotten and wretched current structure imposed on us by the military. It seems the country is bound to failure, violence or collapse unless men of good  conscience will come forth to force the leaders to change course from the edge of the precipice they are willy-nilly leading the country. What is most disappointing about the political leadership is that rather than be seized with the problems of the moment, they are focused on the question of succession to the leadership of the country in 2023. One would have expected many of them would be worried about the future of the country  rather than 2023 when a day is a long time in politics, as it is generally known. In their struggle for 2023, they are  not strategizing based on ideas or ideologies but on sterile ethnic balancing permutations. They are not talking on what they are going to do for the country, but apparently thinking of how they are going to use whatever political positions they are hankering after for their own financial self-aggrandizement.

The intelligentsia of the country is not better. How does one explain shutting down the tertiary educational sector of the country for a whole year following unresolved industrial action and wild  cat strikes by workers. University workers, apparently unimpressed by plea of national hard times when politicians are living it, up refused to work while negotiations about salaries and better working conditions were going on. The problem really is that there are too many wishy-washy universities hurriedly established as “dividends of democracy,” with no planning about staff and funding. Professors who should have been shouting hoarse against it keep quiet when they are appointed, without merit, as vice-chancellors or promoted professors in the new universities. The end result is a watering down of the quality of education and inadequate funding, which now have to be spread to the hundreds of secondary schools masquerading as universities. The universities are also plagued by the presence of four or five trade unions in the universities, while the governments  which should legislate  all of them into one looks  helplessly on.

Universities should also rise to the occasion of providing governments alternative ideas , knowledge for industries, and innovations that will benefit society and expand national wealth. The universities should be at the frontier of knowledge. It is a shame that none of our scientists is involved  in the research and finding solutions to the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic or in the development of the vaccine against it. I know it is not their fault in a nation of misplaced priorities, where budgetary allocation to education and research is grudgingly and miserly given. Research costs money. But if in the past our researchers had demonstrated the link between research and development in a knowledge-based economy, our governments would not be nigardly  in treating researchers in budgetary allocation . If the knowledge community do not demonstrate their relevance to economic development, they will continue to be treated as the Cinderella of relations in sectoral budgetary consideration.

It is now evident that all the things I have been discussing are related. Without knowledge, politics will remain at a pedestrian level of primitive accumulation by those in control of the levers of governmental power, who see their positions as primarily for financial self-aggrandizement. The bad governance emanating from this will redound on all other sectors because money in the country is not inexhaustible, and it is whatever is left that will be shared by the other sectors crying for financial support. Education will be neglected, Defence will have its share based on the necessity to secure those in power in their posts.  Infrastructural development will be neglected. The appurtenances of modern life like potable water, electricity, hospitals and health facilities, aviation and shipping infrastructure will not be provided. All this neglect will lead to massive job losses, which will in turn fuel internal insecurity and aggravated poverty. This has been the story of Nigeria in 2020 and one hopes we will turn the corner for good in 2021.

The year 2020 witnessed a harvest of deaths in the  top hierarchy of our public life, both at federal and state levels. May God rest their souls in peace. On a personal note, 2020 was horrible year. I lost two very close cousins and an uncle. I couldn’t because of the coronavirus pandemic attend their funerals. Quite a few academic brothers and colleagues like Professors Ladipo Akinkugbe, Tunji Oloruntimehin and Olu Longe – distinguished nephrologist, historian and computer scientist respectively – have passed on. Their loss was a great loss to their families, the global Academy and to Nigeria. May God accept their souls and rest them in the bosom of father Abraham .

Happy new year to all my readers .

By Jide Osuntokun

It was widely reported that following the #EndSARS revolt by young people recently, the statue of the first president of our country, Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe in Onitsha, his home town was damaged or destroyed and when interviewed, some of the hooligans who did this dastardly act, said they attacked the statue because “the man was one of those responsible for Nigeria’s problems”. From where did these young people get their story? I felt very bad about this because the people spoke English so they were not completely dumb. I wonder what the reaction would have been if someone had done this to Obafemi Awolowo’s or Ahmadu Bello‘s statue in Ikenne or Sokoto respectively. One cannot be too sure what the reaction would have been because the present generation suffers some kind of historical and mental amnesia about our past. Our school curriculum and the removal of the teaching of history from primary and secondary schools by the military when they ruled and ruined Nigeria may have been responsible for this. Some two or three years ago, a newspaper reported how a teacher in the primary school that Chief Obafemi Awolowo attended in Ikenne was surprised by the ignorance of the people about the past of their school. When he asked the children if they had heard about Obafemi Awolowo before and some of the children put up their hands and one after the other they chorused the name of Obafemi Martins the Nigerian footballer. When the teacher then tried to correct them they told him they had never heard about Obafemi Awolowo before. I don’t blame them. Most parents today in the materialistic jungle Nigeria has become would rather prefer their children follow the football or songs and dance route to fame and wealth than the dangerous route the likes of Awolowo and Azikiwe traversed before becoming famous. Even history graduates from our universities only think “Bode Thomas” is the name of a street in Lagos and cannot identify the name behind the street. My 40-year old engineer son once told me the only Nigerian leaders he knew were “Tunde Idiagbon and Muhammadu Buhari” because those were the leaders he knew growing up. He then innocently asked me if the current Buhari is the son of the Buhari he knew when he was growing up in the 1980s. I laughed and I said it is still the ageless Muhammadu Buhari. You can imagine what he said to me!

Now imagine if the people who damaged Azikiwe’s statue had come from another ethnic group than Igbo; all hell would have broken out or imagine if Ahmadu Bello’s statue had been damaged by say, Yoruba or Igbo, the whole thing would not have been seen as a manifestation of our poor educational backwardness or youthful exuberance but as a manifestation of ethnic and religious bigotry and who knows how many people would have been killed as result of apparent youthful ignorance!

I have always wondered why Azikiwe is not celebrated in Nigeria especially by the Igbo people. Some have said even though he wrote the Biafran national anthem, he deserted Biafra during the civil war. But this is not really true. It was when he saw the fruitlessness of the situation that he advised Emeka Ojukwu to seek for peace. He knew there was a time to fight and a time to seek for peace and as a wise man he knew the Igbo people had proved their mettle and to continue to fight a war in which they were facing overwhelming odds in terms of weapons, ammunitions and manpower was the height of folly. For taking this position, the man’s record has been deliberately distorted and his contribution to Nigeria and Africa as a whole has been diminished. This was a deliberate ploy by Ojukwu to reduce the stature of Azikiwe in order to boost his own. Yet without Azikiwe’s contribution, Nigeria’s independence would not have come at the time it came; it certainly would have been delayed. Many young people today cannot believe that with two Masters Degrees from two Ivy League universities, namely Columbia and Pennsylvania, Azikiwe could not get a job in the civil service of Nigeria because the British colonial administration did not think too highly about the quality of American education. Up to the early 1950s the “Colour bar” prevented Nigerians from getting served in hotels in Lagos reserved for whites only! But for people like Azikiwe, this humiliation would have continued for a while more in our own country. Today in Nigeria, young people without the right dose of historical education take many things for granted. It was not in the plan of the white man to walk away from his conquest of Africa without the push of such men as Azikiwe. Rudyard Kipling, one of the ideologues of imperialism felt black Africans constituted the “Whiteman’s Burden” and Africans were “half children half devils” and his counterparts in Germany regarded Africans as “ Untermenschen that is, sub-humans and it was the lot of people like Azikiwe to remove from Africa what he called “man’s inhumanity to man”. His struggle and those of others like him should never be forgotten by poorly educated compatriots. Who was Nnamdi Azikiwe?

He was essentially a true Nigerian. He was born in 1909 in Zungeru, where his father was a clerk in the military detachment of the West African Frontier Force (WAFF) in the present day Niger State in northern Nigeria. After some years of elementary schooling in Onitsha, he moved to Lagos for his primary and secondary schooling which he completed in Methodist Boys High School in 1924. He worked briefly as a government clerk before going to the United States in 1925. He finished his high school in Storer College, a high school for blacks at Harpers Ferry in Virginia before going to Lincoln University, a predominantly Black college in Pennsylvania.

He later transferred to Howard University in Washington DC. These were black institutions in then segregated America where blacks were put in their place of subservience to whites. He acquired two Masters in Columbia University and University of Pennsylvania, two Ivy League universities in the United States. He was one of the first blacks to cross the “colour bar “in these white institutions. He achieved all this by dint of hard work, determination and exceptional ability to eat the “bread of racial bitterness” as he later put it. To pay his way through college, he served as porter in railway stations where he sometimes slept and even tried professional boxing. He spent a total of nine years in the United States before returning to Africa where he intended to show in his own words the “light of freedom for people to follow”. He did not return to Nigeria but in the spirit of Pan-Africanism, he went to Accra where he lived for a while and established a newspaper as the mouthpiece of fledgling African nationalism in 1934. It was not until following year that he shifted his base to Lagos.

While in the Gold Coast (Ghana) he mentored young people, including Kwame Nkrumah who later led his people to independence in 1957, three years before Nigeria. As a journalist, Azikiwe established newspapers located in Lagos and other parts of Nigeria and brought young people like Anthony Enahoro into journalism barely just out of secondary school. Azikiwe the orator was such an effective mobilizer of people that young men from all parts of the country flocked around him .People like Sule Zukogi, Raji Abdallah, Kolawole Balogun , Osita  Agwuna to name a few formed the Zikist movement as a radical group to forcefully demand for “Freedom or death” from the British. Zikism became an ideology that sometimes left Azikiwe bewildered because he was not a revolutionary but a liberal democrat. He had however planted the seed of nationalism for the younger firebrands to water. Many of these young people suffered for it by being jailed by the colonial government and this made a few of them to be critical of Azikiwe. In the nationalist rally around him, all sorts of associations enlisted and the Ibo State Union became one of the powerful forces in the NCNC (National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons) which  at the prodding of mostly students in Lagos he joined the veteran nationalist and land  surveyor Herbert Macaulay to form  in 1948. This rally  was distinct from all the  previous nationalist parties that existed  in Nigeria  before Azikiwe returned to Nigeria in 1935 and they resented his domineering presence and dismissed him  unfairly, in my view, as an Igbo champion.

It is a long story. It will suffice to say Azikiwe was elected into the Western House of Assembly from Lagos in 1951 and he actually wanted to head the government in Western Nigeria before the Yoruba felt their liberalism was being exploited and forced Azikiwe to abandon his pan-Nigerian mission for a more realistic vision of heading the government of Eastern Nigeria while his nemesis Obafemi Awolowo headed the government of Western Nigeria. This was the genesis of the poisoning of relations between the two titans of Nigerian politics and their followers. While Awolowo and Ahmadu Bello wanted a loose federation, Azikiwe wanted a federation with a strong centre. In 1959, some nationalist forces felt Awolowo and Azikiwe could have teamed up to lead a strong government to independence in 1960 but Azikiwe rightly or wrongly moved to form a coalition with the Northern People’s Congress (NPC) on principle of realism not idealism. He repeated this again in 1979 when his Nigerian Peoples Party (NPP) formed a coalition government with the northern party, the National Party of Nigeria. Whether his political decisions were the product of opportunism or realism remains a moot question but no one can deny Azikiwe his rightful place as primus inter pares among the founders of modern Nigeria. I was privileged to have met him in 1979 and chaperoned him round Philadelphia when the University of Pennsylvania honoured him with a doctorate degree, honoris causa. I was part of the official Nigerian delegation and I will never forget.

By Jide Osuntokun

Recently former president, Goodluck Jonathan celebrated his 63rd birthday and some APC governors went to felicitate with him and to invite him to cross over to their camp so that he can be anointed to contest the 2023 presidential election on their party’s platform. Among those who went to Jonathan with this offer is the interim chairman of the party and governor of Yobe State, Mai Mala Buni. The newspapers reported that the calculation of those rooting for Jonathan in the north is that after a term of four years, he would yield the position to another northerner because Jonathan would not want to seek re-election after he would have been president for a total of 10 years. They were alleged to have argued that Jonathan would not harm the northern interest because in his previous political incarnation, he served with dedication northern interest.

I am not sure Jonathan would like to be perceived as having served northern rather than Nigerian interest for the six years he was president. What this attempt of a few young northern Nigerians trying to determine the future of Nigeria is a sure way of unraveling this delicately balanced country rotating as it were on one leg of a tripod so to say. I know many will disagree about Nigeria resting on a tripod of different nations and several other nationalities. I plead guilty for not having a better analytical tool.

To suggest to thinking Nigerians that the best their political leaders are thinking about the solution to the problems of their country is to bring back the leadership most people organized to remove in 2015 underrates their intelligence. It is also ironically a repudiation of the Buhari regime itself of which these buccaneering APC governors are currently part of. If the only solution to the myriad of problems this country has is to call on a man who could not solve Nigeria’s problems when the country did not have the current financial challenge, then we need to go back to the drawing board and device another method of governance than the current so called democracy that has thrown up the kind of governors who are clandestinely planning to take over a ruling party and toy with the future of the largest Black country in terms of population. If these people are not challenged, they will ruin the only country millions of us have.

I have no problem with President Jonathan. I also feel he will not want his own head to be used to crack a coconut, as we say, in my own part of this country. But as an academic, he himself on self-examination will arrive at a conclusion that he was not an exceptionally successful president. There were many reasons for his failure. He was not strong enough to discipline his own troops because running a government is not a one-man show. But as the president, the buck stopped at his table. The general perception of his regime was that of a financial open sesame or bazaar for all kinds of people to indulge themselves in sharing what Nigerians call national cake. I am not sure if the present regime is better than the Jonathan regime. But in 2015 most of us, and I speak for the national intelligentsia, felt we needed a change and General Buhari in our estimation was seen as the man who could clean the Augean stable. It is a moot point to say if we miscalculated or not. Even if we did, those benefiting from the movement that swept Buhari into power do not have the right while still in government to repudiate his claim to integrity by inviting the man he defeated to come and take over from him in 2023. If they are convinced that he has not done well, they should say so and resign from the APC then Nigerians will take them seriously. They should not from the comfort of their state houses be throwing stones at the party and leader who brought them to power. The surest way to throw the country into political chaos is the way Governor Mala Buni and his northern governors are going. It will destroy the APC and plunge the country into disarray considering the various political, economic and security problems the country faces.

I am personally surprised how politicians are handling the affairs of this benighted country. None of them is seriously tackling the problem of insecurity as it should be. A situation in which traditional rulers are being murdered as was the case with the Olufon of Ifon in Ondo State calls for soul searching. The Sultan of Sokoto, Muhammadu Sa’ad Abubakar recently openly cried out about how terrorists were running over villages in his domain and terrifying people in the markets wielding wildly AK-47 rifles. Just last week, the Boko haram inflicted a massacre on rice growers in the Chad basin. I read a sad piece in which  Alhaji Baba Ahmed  bemoaned the situation in the north where insecurity is so wide spread and killing is almost a daily and universal occurrence that it is no longer news. From Sokoto, Kebbi through Katsina, Kano, Jigawa, Bauchi, Yobe to Borno and from Niger, Plateau, Nassarawa, Benue, Kaduna, Taraba, Adamawa, Kogi and Kwara, the same problem of insecurity pervades the entire northern half of Nigeria and it is rapidly spreading to Oyo, Ondo, Ekiti, Edo, Enugu, Ebonyi and the Niger Delta as a whole. There is nowhere to hide. Lagos State has witnessed the influx of unruly northern motorcycles-riding youths who either out of ignorance or out of deliberate misdemeanor are taking on law enforcement officers who try to apply state laws on road usage. Insecurity has spread to all parts of Nigeria and soon interstate and intercity routes will be no-go areas except for a few intrepid travellers armed to the teeth and ready to die fighting!

These are the problems confronting ordinary people in Nigeria which some of our idle and calculating governors seem oblivious of. I honestly think any honest politician should be helping the federal government to find its way out of this insecurity conundrum rather than speculating about three or so years to come. At the rate this country is being torn apart by marauders of different hue and colour, we may not have a country by 2023 for these governors to play with as in a chess game.  Perhaps they need to look at other parts of the world to learn that you don’t toy with the destiny of 200 million people by meeting within the cool environment of your state houses or in distant places like Abuja and try to determine the course of history of a whole country. How can anybody be planning about putting somebody in the position of a president just to serve sectional interest while ignoring genuine problems of exclusion and sectional monopoly of power and alienation to one section of a country’s wealth generated in another part of the country and expect peace and quiet?

If there is anytime the whole question of restructuring of this country must come to front burner of our national politics, this is the time. The current security architecture has failed. The country cannot be policed from Abuja. There must be local police recruited locally from the indigenes of our states who presumably would know the geography and languages and be in command of intelligence gotten from familiarity with their areas. Federal police can continue to provide additional layer of security and take care of interstate crimes. The country will have to go back to where we were before the military coup d’état of 1966 with modifications. This will mean local and state control of their resources with adequate contribution in taxes to support the federal functions of defence, diplomatic representation, post and telecommunications, currency, aviation and transportation while all other areas of governance shall be the responsibilities of state on principle of subsidiarity.  We had this paradigm of governance before and there is nothing new in this. This will greatly assist in development based on healthy and cooperative federalism as was the case in the First Republic. Any attempt or effort to continue the way we are now at the moment will fail miserably. That is the truth. I love my country and as a former ambassador, I am a beneficiary of the size and importance of the country  and I will like Nigeria to survive as one entity but the only way this country can survive is through restructuring.

To continue to do things the same way and expect a different outcome is the height of insanity.

The problem of Nigeria will be solved through having appropriate policies and right and honest individuals not through revolving doors or musical chairs of going back and forth to bring back failed and failing leaders. Nigeria is too important to the black race to be left in the hands of political neophytes and buccaneers.

Jide Osuntokun

Some years ago, there was a negative advertisement about the difficulty of banking in Nigeria. This advert showed a man with his mat and pillow entering his bank and when asked why he brought a mat to the bank, he retorted that after taking a number he would be able to have a nap before it was his turn. This was before the liberalization of the banking sector by the Babangida’s administration in the 1980s. From what is going on in the banking sector now, we seem to be back to the past when banking was a burden to be avoided. This is what Covid-19 and the inability or unwillingness of banks to respond appropriately has caused Nigerians. The practice in the urban areas now is for people to wake up and go to the banks to queue up in the wee hours of the morning and to take call numbers so that when operations begin one may go in early to transact one’s business and go away to do normal chores. But since most people have other things to do to earn a living, they find people to go to the banks to join the queues so that when the real people come, they will yield their places to them for a fee. In fact, a business has developed around the inconveniences created by the banks on the excuse of following coronavirus protocol to prevent infections. It is now clear by the size of the crowd assembled each working hour of the banks, that Nigeria is seriously underbanked. Only God knows how much money is kept in the informal banking sector under the beds and in people’s farms, gardens and attics by market women and men and petty traders and the petite bourgeoisie generally because there is just too much hassle going to the banks.

There is also this unrealistic expectation by the young people running the banks that people should conduct their banking transactions electronically. Because of this, a popular bank like GTB has relatively fewer branches than its competitors. Instead of GTB opening newer branches, it even closes some of its branches for up to week which it runs alternately with other branches for no clear reasons. It cannot be due to shortage of staff in a country where graduates are roaming the streets in search of jobs. GTB merely publishes on weekly basis which banks it will open and which it will not and tells its ever growing customers to go to its ATMs which most time never work because of pressure on the mechanical devices.  Some banks limit to N10,000 the amount of money one can withdraw from the ATMs. The result of this is disenchantments with a popular bank that if people have the alternative, they will quickly close their accounts and move on. Unfortunately there are few alternative options because very few people will go to the old antediluvian banks that existed in colonial days that have found it extremely difficult to innovate in their old fashioned dilapidated banking halls equally manned by elderly folks in their Victorian frocks and trousers and oversized jackets.

I will be the first to commend any institutions or commercial houses that respond scientifically to the Covid-19 or coronavirus pandemic. But the response must be measured so that the medicine does not kill the patients. There is growing hostility to banks by those who are not able to access their monies in the banks or even to deposit the sales of the day because of the multitudes besieging the banks. It is not every bank that has this problem. For some reasons people prefer to keep their monies in the banks of their choice and I think any bank should be happy to welcome as many accounts as possible and respond to people’s banking behavior and not force even illiterates into electronic banking in which they could be easily defrauded. Certainly, banks can afford to spend from their annual humongous profits on expansion of branches to alleviate the suffering of their customers now and after we would have overcome the coronavirus pandemic.

The banks must through services provided justify the huge profits they make annually. The CBN itself seems to have ganged up with the banks and their shareholders in ripping off the public. Following CBN’s directives, commercial banks suddenly decided not to accept TERM DEPOSITS thus forcing depositors to move into savings accounts and interests on savings were suddenly reduced to one or so percent! I am not an economist, but I also know economics is common sense and everyday science of income and expenditure, production and distribution of goods, investments, loss and profits and so on. The reason why the countries of Southeast Asia have succeeded very well in recent times is because of their thrift, industry and savings built up through the Confucius ethics prevailing in China which then found expression for investment in Southeast Asia and the rest of the world including China itself. Now there seems a deliberate determination and decision by the CBN to discourage savings in Nigeria. How does one explain a policy of paying savers one odd percent while banks lend out as loans at double digits? Is the governor of the CBN who is a commercial banker trying to increase the huge profits of his colleagues who take depositors’ money at little interest and lend it out at huge interest rates?

Is the CBN looking at what operates in America and Europe where interest rate is very low and sometimes even below one percent? There was even a time when serious thought was being given to a policy in England where depositors might have been asked to pay the banks for their fiduciary role of keeping people’s money in trust. Nothing came out of such esoteric consideration of the role of banks. But it must also be asserted that lending rates abroad were always very low and as small as 3 or 4 percent. There were also alternative investment windows and portfolio such as stocks, bonds, commercial papers and so on in which depositors could put their money into. We don’t have such options in Nigeria. I agree that the previous rate of interest on deposits and loans in Nigeria and other developing countries is too high. If there is depreciation of interest paid to depositors, there should be corresponding decline in interest on loans.  This is not so in Nigeria. A situation in which the rate of inflation is 13 or so percent while rate on deposit is one percent does not make economic sense and it is a disincentive to savings. If people are encouraged to save, perhaps our government instead of rushing all over the world to borrow and mortgage the future of our children, would be able to borrow at home depositors’ money sitting idly in the vaults of commercial banks or at the CBN. Pensioners who live on their savings are seriously affected by the vagaries of unstable interest rate regimes. I know also that tertiary institutions are also seriously impacted.

A few years ago, I authored a book on Chief Samuel Festus Okotie-Eboh, Nigeria’s first minister of finance. I advised Dr ‘Dere Awosika, his daughter to endow a prize for  best graduating student with a PhD in economics/finance in the University of Lagos and she graciously agreed and gave the university millions of naira to award a generous prize in perpetuity on the basis that the interest earned would suffice for eternity. My late brother, Professor Oluwakayode Osuntokun left a bequest in his will for a visiting chair in Neurology/Ophthalmology at the University of Ibadan with the hope that the interest on the money will be adequate to support his wish in perpetuity. When I left the Redeemer’s University Ede, I left money for prizes in my name and that of my late wife Abiodun to be funded from interests of the money I left behind. I did the same thing in Ekiti State University where I was  for a while pro-chancellor  and chairman of council for prizes to be given across several faculties  and in the College of Medicine in my name and in the names of  my brothers, Chief Oduola Osuntokun and again  in the name Professor Oluwakayode Osuntokun from money contributed by me, my family and a friend of the family, Chief Dele Falegan. The whole idea was that the money so left will earn interest that would suffice to keep the prizes going in perpetuity. But from this unstable economic policy of the CBN, those of us who plan, seem to plan in vain and it is not right that in the most important part of a country’s life, its economy, there is no stability and predictability. This is just not right and this is one of the reasons why the naira in our pockets is increasingly worthless and not more than just colored paper. The banking sector is probably too important to be left in the hands of bankers alone without the input of serious economists

Jide Osuntokun

As I write this, the outgoing president of the United States, Donald J. Trump, in his characteristic way, has not conceded the election to his opponent Joseph R. Biden of the Democratic Party. On the contrary, he is busy whipping up emotions about Biden stealing the presidency from him and calling on his supporters to embark on fruitless but dangerous demonstrations all over the United States. What a legacy! Trump without any concrete evidence is alleging there were fraudulent practices indulged in by his winning Democratic Party opponent in his defeat at the concluded election. He had actually said before the election that he was not obliged to hand over the administration of the USA to his opponent, unless he felt sure that he had been roundly defeated at the election. This means he was going to be his own umpire rather than the Federal electoral Commission. He had done everything to hinder the electoral process by handing over the administration of the United States Postal Service to a Republican Party supporter when he realized supporters of his opponent were more inclined to vote either before the election date or by postal mail because of the coronavirus pandemic. The Post Master General immediately went to work by boarding several transportation vehicles and equipment of the postal service and also vastly reducing postal drop boxes to limit the availability of postal boxes country wide on the pretext that he was saving money. The post master general, as I write, still has cases in court bordering on constituting himself as an obstacle to the smooth running of the United States electoral process.

On a general note, supporters of the Democratic Party are the more educated whites and suburban white women and minorities who listened to admonition from experts that it was safer to vote by mail in order to protect themselves by limiting physical contact with others because of the coronavirus pandemic. On the other hand, Trump dismissed scientific advice on the coronavirus and advised his supporters to only vote physically on Election Day. When the elections were held on November 3, for the election of the president and also to some gubernatorial positions at state level as well as some seats in state assemblies and to some seats in the House of Representatives and the Senate, the votes cast physically were the first to be counted. The mailed in votes and votes before the election were by law those that were counted last. The result was that the Republican candidates across the board had head start and some of them including the president were overtaken when all the mailed in votes were counted. This is not rocket science. President Trump in a premeditated plan, ran to the press when he saw the first tallies of votes that he had won a reelection. But this was not so and up till now he has refused to see what is obvious to every reasonable person that all votes both cast by mail, and those cast before the election and those cast during the election have to be counted to get the final tally and decide who has won and who has lost.

Trump was clinically defeated when all the votes, or most of the votes were counted. The reasons for Trump’s defeat are clear and obvious. People got tired of his innumerable tweeting every day and running government including foreign policy by tweets and embarrassing his own officials who had to explain or plead with the public and foreign governments for understanding of an unusual and unpredictable president. Yet this is a man carrying the United States nuclear codes capable of burying the whole world five times over. It is one thing to be a non-politician trying to “drain the swamp” in Washington DC but when it comes to serious work of governance, it requires more sobriety than what the wheeling and dealing Trump was used to in the corporate world.

By his actions had isolated the United States from key allies like Germany, France and even the United Kingdom. He was closer to the world of the dictators like Vladimir Putin’s Russian federation, Viktor Urban’s Hungary, Rodrigo Duterte’s Philippines, Kim Jong-Un’s North Korea, and Narendra Modi’s India and until they fell apart, Xi Jinping’s China. He was particularly abusive to Angela Merkel of Germany and Justin Trudeau of Canada.

I am particularly surprised about his behavior to Germany. Many American presidents before him celebrated their ancestral homelands and knowing that the Trumpfs (their original German name) came from Bavaria towards the end of the 19th century. Trump’s grandfather was actually found guilty of some crime and to avoid punishment ran to United States perhaps this is why he associates more with Scotland where his mother came from.

The Trumps have a long and unforgiving memory which President Trump has unfortunately inherited. His relations with Putin was rather suspicious because he apparently owes money to some Russian interests while he is still indebted to the German Deutsche Bank. His enemies have a dance and song issue about how his indebtedness was not too good for America because this may have beclouded his views and consequently his policies towards these foreign countries. As an international businessman, he was too exposed and some countries may have had some dirt on him. But I personally see nothing wrong in his fraternal relations with Russia the other nuclear power that can destroy the whole world several times over. I think Trump was just being realistic in reaching a modus vivendi with Putin over the concession to Russia of influence in the Slavic states of the former Soviet Union like Ukraine, Belarus and the former Soviet States in the Caucasus even though they are all technically independent sovereign states. Even Biden will not be able to change America’s policy towards Ukraine unless he is prepared to risk an all-out nuclear war with Russia.

Trump’s policy towards China, to a certain extent was correct in holding China to international scrutiny in the South China Sea and in China’s sometimes unscrupulous trade and economic policies to foreign countries including the United States whose liberal trade policies the Chinese had been exploiting for several decades. His policy towards North Korea has been exploited by Kim Jong UN to become a nuclear power state. It will be realistic for Biden to follow Trump’s policy by accepting this reality. Whether this makes for world peace is another issue. This may lead to nuclear proliferation in Northeast Asia with Japan and South Korea feeling the need to become nuclear powers too. Perhaps with this eventuality of proliferation, may in the long run, be possible to have a comprehensive nuclear ban or disarmament regionally and globally.

Biden has said he would resuscitate the nuclear deal with Iran – the so-called P5+1 to prevent Iran becoming a nuclear power. The world has become very dangerous in the Middle East partly because of Trump’s pandering to Israel and organizing a coalition of Arab states against Iran. It will take a lot of diplomatic wizardry to persuade Iran to abandon its nuclear quest especially bearing in mind that Israel has the bomb. Biden has said he would rejoin the global effort to save the environment by re-joining the Paris protocol to reverse global warming and environmental degradation which Trump has said unnecessarily burdened the United States economically. It is because of these international issues and Trump’s mercantilist and protectionist economic policies that had made the world breathed a sigh of relief when it learnt that Trump has been defeated.

Why am I even bothered about who wins power in the United States? It is simple, when people sneeze in Washington D.C the world catches cold.! The American dollar for now is the global reserve currency. America is a global hegemon with a military reach to everywhere in the world. Recently a company of American special forces sneaked into northern Nigeria to rescue a kidnapped American hopefully with the knowledge of our people. But they could have done this without our knowledge. The fate of blacks in America is intricately tied with our fate bearing in mind our historical responsibility for selling our own people into slavery and the way their descendants are treated has ramifications for the way all black peoples are treated. So, when Trump sees nothing wrong in white policemen strangling or shooting black people as if they were game animals and calling our continent “shithole”, all black and brown people should have a problem with him. This is why I cannot understand why so-called African Pentecostal Christians are supporting Trump because he is a Christian, which he is not. Some are also saying he has committed himself to “Biafran Independence” and that he is protecting us Christians from being Islamised by Muhammadu Buhari! These fables as far as I am concerned remain conjectures. They also say Biden supports freedom of sexual choice. All these means nothing to high politics of international and inter-state relations.

Trump was evil and a threat to international order as well as a threat to internal peace, law and order based on equity and justice and cohesion in the United States itself. That’s why he was rejected and roundly defeated and the rest of the world understands and applauds this impending change of  the captain of the American ship of state.

By Jide Osuntokun

I was planning to appeal to all Nigerians, young and old, to give peace a chance in the current struggle for the soul of our nation even before I read the pastoral intervention of Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury. I read with much appreciation the appeal to our common sense by the Archbishop of Canterbury. He said this as a friend of Nigeria and the primate of the Anglican global communion.  I was particularly touched when the archbishop mentioned the fact of the potentiality of Nigeria as a global player if only, we run our affairs on the basis of justice, equity and inclusion. He particularly said without justice there can be no peace.

There are about 20 million members of his Anglican communion in Nigeria which is a substantial part of the Anglican Church in the world. These are not just nominal members of this church and unlike in Great Britain, the Anglican Communion in Nigeria is an active one. I should know because I am a baptized and confirmed Anglican communicant in spite of my current membership of the Redeemed Christian Church of God of which the General Overseer Pastor Enoch Adejare Adeboye, has himself been very vociferous and loud about the need for peace in Nigeria. Without peace there can be no development and if there is no development, there would be no jobs and we all know that it  is idle hands that are the devils instruments of destruction and destabilization.

What happened in the last few weeks since the shooting in Lekki of demonstrators and the destruction that preceded and followed the unfortunate situation should convince all Nigerians how fragile our post-colonial state is. If we do not learn the simple lesson of our fragility as a country, then we will never learn and our future will be very dicey.  It is not only our country that is fragile, our society itself is quite close the state of nature which the English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes claimed is nasty brutish and short and in which there can be no civilized way of living. It is because of the awareness of this horrible state of nature that governments are instituted by man. Even a dictatorship, some kind of Leviathan, would be preferable to this state of anarchy that those of us in Lagos and environs saw, experienced and endured some weeks ago.  What began as an apparently well-organized protest by young people who justifiably felt they had to make their anger felt about the way a particular special branch of the police treated any overtly successful young person. In their protest they received overwhelmingly support and understanding of their older folks if not countrywide support, at least support in the southern part of the country where the protest was domiciled. It is also not surprising to anybody that the large proportion of the innovative and upwardly mobile young people in Nigeria who don’t depend on government jobs and patronage appear to be concentrated in the Lagos area which for many years has been a crucible of nationalist and progressive feeling which tended to mirror the future of a progressive Nigeria where scant regard will be paid to ethnicity and religion. So the fact that the #End SARS demonstrators were concentrated in the Lagos area and to a certain extent in the Southwest and the southern part of the country generally does not detract from the fact that this was a Nigerian expression of anger against the way they are being ruled.

It must also be said that when one part of Nigeria hurts a little, the whole country suffers from the pain. The destruction of Lagos in the last rampage is going to have a lasting damage on the Nigerian economy since Lagos is pivotal to the growth and development of the Nigerian economy. The way Lagos goes determines the direction of the Nigerian economy. What New York is to the American economy is what Lagos is to the Nigerian economy. In our warped way of looking at national politics divorced from the political economy of Nigeria, some people feel if they destroy or slow down the economy of Lagos, the more politically privileged and advantageous section of the country will benefit and gain at the expense of Lagos. The economy does not work that way. Americans will say the dollar does not discriminate between black and white so it is in Nigeria where the naira is no respecter of tribe or language! It follows therefore that, it is in our overall interest as a nation, if we all build together rather than planning to destroy the most vibrant and viable part of our economy.

I say all this because after the dust of the destruction in Lagos had settled down some people seriously felt that there was an unseen hand determined to bring the economy of Lagos and perhaps that of southwestern Nigeria down. There may not have been any deliberate desire or attempt to do this but sometimes perception can be more important than facts. I personally felt the destruction we witnessed in this part of our country was self-inflicted arising out of petty political jealousy and struggle for political relevance. The way the noise over succession to the presidency and the loud claim to it by all sorts of people suddenly sprang up just after the madness of these last weeks gives one the impression that there is more than meets the eye over the targeting of certain individuals for destruction so as to render them hors  de combat  even before the contest begins. I personally feel it is totally inappropriate if not immoral to start campaigning for 2023 election when the burial of those killed in the Lagos disturbances had not taken place nor the ashes of the destruction settled down.

With the way things are going will it not be more appropriate for us to bind our wounds first and then seek the face of the Lord for the blood that was shed during the rampage in Lagos and in the Southwest and Edo, Enugu and Rivers states than to begin campaigning for 2023 election?

Weeks after the commotion, policemen have refused to return to their beats. Other security personnel have followed the example of the police. Can anybody blame them? The insensate murder of some policemen in some towns should make us ashamed and should be condemned. The fact that some security people in the past committed extra-judicial murders does not justify meting the same measure to some innocent men in uniform. No one deserves to die by the hands of fellow human beings. Even soldiers who go to war are given orders of restraint unless their lives are in danger. While it is wrong for armed security operatives to kill unarmed individuals, it is equally wrong for any security personnel to be wantonly wasted no matter what cause one is fighting for.

It was apparent to observers that life matters very little to some of us Nigerians and this is why armed robbers or herders and brigands kill almost for fun those not resisting them. Yet many of the perpetrators of these dastardly acts are votaries of one religion or the other. There is no religion from the universal monotheistic ones of Judaism, Christianity, Islam and other non-monotheistic religions including traditional African religions that tolerates taking of human lives. It is against the law of God to kill a human being and this is why in almost all parts of the world, capital punishment has been abolished. It stands to reason therefore to think of killers as people suffering from permanent insanity or temporary madness induced by taking hard drugs.

This brings me to the rampant consumption of hallucinogenic drugs by young people in Nigeria. So apart from serious economic problems of unemployment and social immiseration, we also have the health issue of drugs ingestion by the underclass and even some deluded young people who see its consumption as a temporary relief from their depression.

Our problems are legion. We do not need to add to it by state policy of discrimination in employment and appointments based on ethnic and religious considerations. There can be no peace without justice and equity. There is no point for those in government to be appealing for national unity which they say is not negotiable when they themselves do everything through their action of preferences to work against national unity.

I wonder how some people can sleep at night! This is a time for some kind of national moral rearmament to save this country. This is the only country the black man has that possess a chance, all things being equal, to defend black humanity in an increasingly competitive and wicked world.  Archbishop Justin Welby made this point also. But do our politicians realize that while we are still here on this side of the heavenly divide, we should help build a future where the labour of our heroes’ past will not be in vain? The foundation of that future must be laid on equity, justice, fairness, inclusion and political realism. There is no point burying our heads in the sand and saying all is well. All is not well. God will not come down from heaven to rule us. He has given us human intelligence and what we require is willpower to face our problems of population explosions, laziness, refusal to face the reality that in order to build a thriving future based on political stability, we have to rejig and restructure the governance architecture of this potentially great country which its temporary rulers have rendered largely unhappy. Those who make change impossible, as President John Fitzgerald Kennedy said, make revolution inevitable.

By Jide Osuntokun

My oldest daughter Fola asked me if I have ever gone through the kind of psychological pain and experience that I as a Nigerian have gone through in the last few weeks following the tragedy of the shooting of innocent demonstrators at the Lekki toll gate. My answer was I had never gone through this kind of experience in which we went through this kind of existential challenge to the country. But after a few days, I now remember that I went through this kind of agony in 1968 as a post-graduate student in London when the civil war was raging in my country. The newspapers and the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) were involved in massive covering of the tragedy in Nigeria for the British public. We saw every day, pictures of starving pot-bellied kwashiorkor children crying and dying in the public glare of television cameras. As a sensitive black young man in his mid-twenties living a lonely studious life in a white racist society, the worst thing that could happen to one is for one to see his kind suffering needlessly. Then one day, the 3rd Marine Division of the Nigerian Army commanded by the mercurial Brigadier Benjamin Adekunle, the most successful commander on the Nigerian side of the civil war, made a sea-borne landing in Bonny and then invaded and captured Port Harcourt. The British commentator on the BBC said the “…Federal Nigerian troops have captured the oil rich city of Port Harcourt and all British oil wells are safe in federal hands”! It then occurred to me that my countrymen were fighting each other to preserve British oil wells!  I immediately went into depression as a sensitive person.

In those days we could not call home by telephone as you can do today. Once you left home, you were completely on your own except through the very slow letter writing. Racism in those days hit me like a thunderbolt because before I left home, I felt important and not inferior to anybody but by living in a white man’s country, I was daily humiliated and without my knowing it and almost imperceptibly, I became a radical and militant Blackman as some kind of resistance against racism. It was with difficulty and the help of an Egyptian neurologist that I was able to complete my studies. I felt this same kind of pain as if my country was again needlessly hurting itself.

I was in Lagos and I had wanted to go home to Ibadan but I am now marooned in Lagos because the whole country seems to be embroiled in some kind of leaderless Jacobinism descending into some kind of proletarian fury in which the underclass is bent on taking revenge against the whole society that had confined them to the margins of society for a long time. Even when the youths had gone home, the underclass or what Marxists call the lumpen– proletariat had taken over and are apparently determined to ruin the country through looting of shops and destruction of private property. All other kinds of dark forces including politicians going after their perceived enemies appeared to be driving the poor people into rebellion. Even the lame broadcast and appeal of the president have fallen on deaf ears. The rampaging poor people appear to be occupying the public places abandoned by the police and other security forces, who for fear for their lives, have simply melted away and abandoned their posts. The curfews declared by state governors are obeyed in their breaches. It is as if there is no government at all in Lagos and most of the southwestern states including Edo State. The inter-city roads which brigands had made unsafe in the past are even made more unsafe now by the lumpen proletariat and the rural equally poor peasants who have barricaded the highways and are now collecting tolls from the traveling public. The situation is bad and the earlier we go back to our senses and a semblance of normalcy the better.

This breakdown of law and order appears to be confined particularly to the southwestern states and the southern part of the country in general. The northern states which were previously suffering from the Boko Haram insurgency and other social and criminal dissonances undermining peace and harmony in the polity was not affected by the present uprising and if affected, it is certainly not in the same degree. This raises a fundamental problem of analysis. If there was despair and disappointment with the federal government’s performance, how National was this perception?  If it was not national what was responsible for this? Could this be because of the government’s exploitation of religious, ethnic and regional differences in the country? Or could it be due to educational disparity underscoring the fissiparous tendencies in the country? Whatever it is, the disunity in the country is very apparent. No common front, it appears, can ever be forged to demand for reforms that would make a better Nigeria possible. This is sad and for as long as this exists, whoever controls the levers of power will always be in vantage position to indulge in misrule and bad governance knowing that he or she would be protected by the cultural fault-lines existing in the country.

Now that the dust of the rebellion is settling down, what is the way forward? First of all, let me say I disagree with people trying to identify a dichotomy between the innocent and educated children of the middle class and unemployed graduates and the hoi polloi or the underclass or lumpen proletariat. As far as I am concerned, both groups had legitimate reasons to be angry with society that spawned them. Unemployment affects and afflicts both groups. If our economy was buoyant, even poorly educated people would find work suitable for their level of education or lack of it. They would be able to use their brawn while their more fortunate cousins would be able to use their brains. Secondly, if jobs were given out on merit based on careers open to talents, no one would feel angry. But when young people see open and rampant discrimination in the country on the basis of region, religion and ethnicity, then there builds up a sense of frustration, depression and anger against society and the political order. In other words, the ball is in the court of those in authority to change course and embrace justice, equity, fairness and inclusion. Thirdly, we need to develop some kind of plan to embrace and train the so-called hoodlums. They were not born hoodlums. It is the circumstance of their birth and the unequal opportunity in our society that created the underclass. We must also find a way to create jobs for the young and unemployed graduates from our colleges and universities or make agricultural loans and land available to those who want to go into commercial agriculture. Fourthly, we need a new security architecture which will involve an expanded police force organized on state basis while small federal police will coordinate inter-state policing. All other security forces would have to be subjected to the mean test of ethnic, regional and religious fair representation.

Fifthly, the humongous salaries of elected representatives would have to be drastically reduced to reflect our economic level of development. A situation where our representatives are earning four or five times what their counterparts earn in the United States is simply insane and uncalled for. We need the excess for national and state development. We also must reduce the number of representatives and have a unicameral legislature at the national level. The current unwieldy and unnecessary number of states and local governments must be drastically reduced to what is economically feasible.

Finally, it is obvious to anyone who wishes Nigeria well to realize that the current military diktat of a constitution imposed on us by the military is not working and must be renegotiated. This is necessary to preserve the union. If this is not done, we will be postponing our eventual collapse. No one wants this but history is not on the side of those who want to keep by force an arbitrary and unworkable structure that will not work if frontally challenged. All these suggestions except the question of the structure of government can be effected through an executive order or what students of history call a revolution from above instead of waiting for a revolution from below.