Category: Jide Osuntokun

By Jide Osuntokun

Some years ago some of my friends and I ruefully bemoaned the situation of what we perceived as poor political leadership all over the world. We asked where are the leaders comparable to  Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Mao Zedong and Chou en Lai of China, Ahmed Surkano of Indonesia, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Broz Joseph Tito of Yugoslavia, Nikita Khrushchev of Union of Socialist Soviet Republic, Charles de Gaulle of France, Konrad Adenauer of the Federal Republic of Germany, Harold Macmillan and his Labour counterpart Harold Wilson of Great Britain, John Kennedy and Richard Nixon  of the United States of America, Juan Peron  of Argentina, Fidel Castro  of Cuba, and nearer home, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Ahmed Sekou Toure of  Guinea, Ahmed Ben Bella and Houari Boummediene of Algeria, Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, Nwalimu  Julius Nyerere of Tanzania and our own Nnamdi Azikiwe, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, Obafemi Awolowo and Ahmadu Bello?

Both Azikiwe and Awolowo were intellectuals judging by the profundity of their ideas of politics. Ahmadu Bello made up for whatever his intellectual lacuna in book knowledge by his sheer determination and sense of sacrifice.  Abubakar Tafawa Balewa’s elocution and quiet dignity remains unequaled when compared with the present puny characters we have as leaders in this country. He remains the first and last African statesman to be invited to address the joint session of the United States Congress until 1994 when Nelson Mandela broke the record.

Many of these past leaders were so important in the lives of their people that their countries were almost synonymous with their names.  Most of them were not interested in the monetary perquisites of office which seem to be the obsession of our current rulers. They had this sense which the French call noblesse oblige, meaning the desire of a great man to take care of the less privileged and fortunate in society. Any student of state power knows that political leadership of a country is a very important element of power.

A charismatic leader of a people can make the people exert themselves beyond their ordinary power just to build the state and satisfy the leader. Important are such factors like the size and quality of the population, the geographical location and configuration of the country including water and potential hydropower resources of the country. Other elements of power include possession of natural resources particularly strategic resources such as hydrocarbons i.e. coal and petroleum, uranium, copper, iron as well as other factors such as vast agricultural land because a country that is hungry country like India used to be until it solved its food problem, cannot be adjudged potentially strong. From these elements of power will flow quality of education, industrialized economy, health service, education, the level and sophistication of its finance and commerce, the state of aviation, communication and transportation. This will determine the kinetic energy within the state because a state that is not perpetually in motion in today’s world is a dead state.

Of course the level of military preparedness and the development of what General Dwight David Eisenhower called the military industrial complex is very important in the delivery of power to target objects. To move all these elements into force to reckon requires political leadership. This does not have to be democratic leadership but democratic leadership is more enduring and preferable. But there are instances of strong monarchies or totalitarian and authoritarian leadership, a Caesar, for example providing a state the rallying point necessary for it to make an impact in the world and to strike a blow in the defence of its national interest. It may be that one is being nostalgic and living in the past and that is why one can easily notice the Lilliputian stature of the present day political leadership in the world. But this alone does not account for the stark decline in political and moral civic leadership around the world. There seems an agreement among scholars about the pervasive nature of corruption among political leaders in the world today. How does one account for the rise and performance of a man like Donald Trump in the most powerful and politically dominant country in the world, a country that commands hegemonic power in global trade, finance and military power. This is due to moral decadence and decline in the democratic world where womanizing, sexual perversion, and unusual sexual orientation seem to be the game in town. This decline is everywhere and how does one explain the emergence of a political non-conformist like Boris Johnson heading Her Majesty’s government in Great Britain?

Many of the present political players on global chessboard do not inspire much confidence in the world and even in the countries over whose government they sit. The present crop of political neophytes in power in many countries has shown that standard has definitely fallen all over the world.

It is this global picture and perspective that give us a better understanding of the failure of leadership in Africa and right now in Nigeria where political leadership does not seem to appreciate the awesomeness of the task at hand but rather sees the assignment as one in which to indulge in political jobbery and dishing out appointments to family members and ethnic and religious cohorts unmindful of the harm being done to national harmony and concord. This is very dangerous in post-colonial Africa where states are very fragile. We need in Africa leaders who can rally and mobilize the people for states defence and development.  Where those temporarily  in position of power through acts of omission or commission so undermines the deep state through acts of partiality and inequity in the treatment of citizens in an ethnically and religiously diverse states, such rulers create potential fifth columnists who will not help to defend the state and may even support external aggression. In other words, a wise ruler will create broad support for the state by making all citizens particularly the critical mass of the people to be joint stakeholders with whoever wields political power for the moment.

No matter the resources that inhere in a state, if the political leadership is poor, that state will remain perpetually poor. Government is about people. Even though a leader may not be able to satisfy all the people every time but a leader’s action must be seen in terms of wide acceptability and utility value for the state. It is just sad for a country’s leader not to have a sense of history and what had made predecessors successful. Many of the present leaders have no sense of history. Broz Joseph Tito was able to hold the old disparate Yugoslavia together because of his exemplary leadership and his ability to balance and manage the interests of Croats, Serbs, Montenegrins, Herzegovinians, Slovenians, Macedonians, and Kosovo within an overarching Yugoslavian interest. The moment he died, all hell broke loose. He did not do it by force of arms but force of character and charisma. The situation in the former Soviet Union where Vladimir Putin is trying to use force in so-called Russian satellites has led to a shooting war against Ukraine. No force of arms can hold a people down forever. This is the evidence of history. It is weak leaders who resort to force to knit people together against the spirit of universally accepted self-determination. Even the Almighty Soviet Union had to grudgingly concede and accept independence of its different peoples.

Nearer home in Africa, Ethiopia was compelled by force of arms to let Eritrea go its separate ways and miserable Sudan did the same to Southern Sudan. One however hopes the situation in the Horn of Africa will not be like the  paramecium that keeps breaking apart periodically because the ethnic question there has not been solved in spite of the political divisions of those countries including their sister country of Somalia that has ceased functioning as a state. Experience is a better teacher. Even the less than exemplary and sterling current political leaders in Africa should learn a lesson about the fragile and weak nature of their countries and try to stabilise them through wise, fair and equitable measures and structures that will outlive current leaders in their states. Since they neither have  the political wisdom and charisma of their predecessors, they should leave legacies of enduring structures and governmental systems that they would be remembered  for or else history will be very severe on them for the ramshackle states they leave behind after they would not only have been gone from office but from this world as well.

Jide Osuntokun

The average life span of a Nigerian, we are told, is about 50 to 55 years. This means since Nigeria is still standing at 60, it has at least lived longer than the life span of the average Nigerian. But still standing is not enough. Countries like South Korea, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia that were at par with us in our journey of development have since left us behind while we remain hewers of wood and drawers of water. Nigeria has of course been in existence since 1914 when the British protectorates of Northern and Southern Nigeria were forced together to save the British Exchequer the headache of funding the economically-challenged northern Nigeria. Northern Nigeria was then subsidized by her southern neighbor which had surpluses from her customs duties on “trade gin” and exports of vegetable oils of palm oil and palm kernels. These vegetable oils were in huge demand for making margarine as a replacement for butter for the masses and soap in the dirty homes and environment of industrialized Europe. The interesting thing is that the source of this economic strength of Southern Nigeria was concentrated in  the palm oil belt of the Niger Delta just as the hydrocarbons that sustain the economy of Nigeria  today is concentrated in the same Niger Delta. Not much has changed in over a century economy wise.

Nigeria since independence has had ups and downs as can be expected of 60-year old country but none has been so devastating as to destroy it. I am old enough to say how exciting the future of our country looked like in 1960. We had three thriving regions that depended on cocoa in the West; palm produce in the East, crude oil was only discovered in Oloibiri in 1956 and groundnuts in the North although some mining of tin and columbite was done on the Jos plateau. Each region enjoyed large political and economic autonomy until 1962 when the federal government declared a state of emergency in the Western Region following an intra-party crisis in the governing party, the Action Group. At independence, each of the regions had its own constitution and flags and became self-governing at different times; the West and the East in 1957 while the North came in, in 1959 a year before the federation. Each of the regions had its development plans separate from that of the federation. Ultimate power resided in the regions while enumerated powers on aviation, currency, defence, immigration and customs, foreign affairs, railways, interstate highways, sea ports and airports, electric power generation and distribution, communications and telegraphs lay with the federal government. The federal government also shared concurrent powers on policing, and higher education. All other residual jurisdictions belonged to the regions.  All lands belonged to the regions which meant there was no question of the federal government having ministries of agriculture, water resources and housing. Each region had its own police and control of whatever minerals it had with the exception of hydrocarbons. Each state had control of its local government and higher institutions. In fact the regions used to maintain diplomatic representation in a key trading partner like the United Kingdom. Political power lay in the regions and this was why the premier of northern Nigeria remained in the North after independence and allowed his deputy, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa to be prime minister at the centre. The federal government and the regions operated the parliamentary system of cabinet government with very strong nonpolitical professional civil service. Members of the various legislative bodies were on part-time basis. There were no career politicians as we have now and only ministers and their parliamentary secretaries were on full-time appointments. The regional Houses of Assembly were bi -cameral in the West and the North while it was unicameral in the East. Each region operated its system of government as it deemed fit and as was culturally relevant.  There was a federal senate whose members were chosen by the regional Houses of Assembly. This was the constitutional order and it worked reasonably well until politics drove the federal government to upset this apple cart by its declaration of a state of emergency in the West in 1962. This was followed by a decision of the coalition government in the centre to use its power to destroy the Action Group governing party in western Nigeria which also led the federal opposition. The leaders of the Action Group party were also incarcerated in prison after trial for treasonable felony. What followed was the botched federal elections of 1964 and the flagrantly rigged regional election in Western Region in 1965 and the breakdown of law and order in the West and the Middle Belt area of the North which provided an excuse for the under 10,000 strong Nigerian Army to carry out the first coup d’état in the country on January 15, 1966.

This opened the Pandora box about access to government  and wealth by a few determined  armed group in the country. It also opened up the inadequacy of the federal constitution as a means of governing a vast country like Nigeria. Inability to resolve this constitutional conundrum led to a bitterly fought civil war which led to more deaths on top of the pogroms committed against the Ibos in northern Nigeria after the counter coup d’état of July by northern troops to balance what they felt was the  lopsided killings of northern military and civilian leaders in January 1966.

The disastrous civil war, in retrospect, has not solved the problem of political and economic power distribution in the country; rather it has exacerbated it. The long stay of the military in power, a military that was increasingly dominated by Northern Nigerians after the civil war has created a Nigeria in which one part of the country wields almost untrammeled power over the rest of the country. This is manifested in manipulation of census, creation of states and local governments, revenue allocation based on spurious census figures and abandonment of the principle of fiscal federalism and the undermining of the Professor K. C. Wheare’s principle of federalism as a mode of political organization that unites separate states or other polities within an overarching political system in a way that allows each to maintain its own integrity.

The result of all this is the country now runs a unitary system of government. This is the only federation in the world where the tail wags the dog and where the centre creates states whereas it is the coming together of states that should normally shape the centre. This is the case in all federations all over the world, be it the United States, Canada, Australia, India, Malaysia, South Africa and even small federations like Switzerland and Belgium. There is nowhere in the world where political stability and development can be maintained where a substantial part of a country is dissatisfied with the constitutional grundnorm binding the country together. In other words there has to be fundamental and profound constitutional changes that have to be made to rebalance the country in favor of our federal system based on our lived experience not necessarily copied from the United States with a totally  different culture and history. This has been our undoing in recent times. We must return power and financial resources to the people at the regions and political periphery.

This will require a sense of purpose and determination to save our country threatened by serious fissiparous tendencies which if not responded to with wisdom and sagacity can lead to disintegration and separation as happened in the almighty Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and nearer home in Africa, Sudan, Ethiopia and the various failed attempts at federation in Francophone West Africa. We must identify what ails us in Nigeria. These are structure of government, sharing of political power, creation of wealth and sharing of it, religious and ethnic division, sharing of federal appointments and distribution of federal institutions. We must so design our new federal paradigm to avoid and minimize areas of conflict. This we can do by so whittling the power at the centre that there will be little pork to share and transferring resources to constituent states or regions where our people live. We can also transfer police to the constituent states while the federal police will take care of interstate crimes. The defence forces can be organized as territorials on regional basis. Locating the police and defense forces in territories familiar to them will ensure intelligence collection and enhance security. States will have to keep the revenues generated in their territories while paying agreed percentages to maintain the federal government and to guarantee that all states will be supported so as to maintain an irreducible minimal development in all the regions. Regions or states will create and fund their local governments unlike the ridiculous current practice of so-called three-tier government of local, state and federal government – the first of its type in the world and not an innovation we should be proud of. It is going to be a win-win situation. Nobody likes the present situation where a distant Poohbah lords it over people in distant places in the states and remote towns and villages as was done under colonial rule. We want to be governed and protected by our own kind that we can hold responsible for insecurity and underdevelopment.

As at now, it appears to us no one is responsible for the current underdevelopment and insecurity. Our hope is that the next 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 and 60 years will usher in grand occasions for celebration. Happy birthday Nigeria.

 Jide Osuntokun

The recent announcement by the managing director of Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) that contracts have again been awarded for rehabilitation and comprehensive repairs of the existing four refineries, two in Port Harcourt, one in Warri and the fourth in Kaduna surprised me and perhaps most observant Nigerians who have over the years followed the shenanigans going on the NNPC with regards to these moribund refineries.

Albert Einstein said: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”. Since the Babangida era and up to the end of the second term of the Obasanjo presidency, it was  an annual ritual for so-called Turn Around Maintenance (TAM ) of the refineries to be announced and given at huge amounts to shady contractors  usually party hacks on the premises that their combined capacity of refined petroleum of 440,000 barrels were more than our total consumption and that making these refineries work would spare the  country the odium of importing refined petroleum in a country that was the sixth largest producer of the so-called black gold. The argument was unimpeachable so we all fell for it. But some of us began to smell a rat when during the Abacha roguish regime, the Kaduna TAM was given to TOTAL oil company for $100 million! One wondered what the initial cost of the construction of the refinery was. This rigmarole continued until the eve of the end of the Obasanjo’s second term when the departing president decided to cut the Gordian knot by actually selling the refineries to Nigerian businessmen with capital and capacity to own and run oil refineries thus saving Nigeria the annual financial hemorrhage. But as soon as late President Umar Yar’Adua took over, one of the legacies of Obasanjo he cancelled was the privatization of the refineries along with stopping ongoing work on electricity generating plants. Up till today, what informed his decision has not been properly interrogated. Some uncharitable friends of mine said Yar’Adua’s socialist friends from his days in Ahmadu Bello University influenced him  Whatever the reasons for his decision, the country has paid dearly for it by the corruption that has attended the regime of fuel importation and the continuation of the TAM dispensation through the  Goodluck Jonathan years and the trillions of Naira that went down into the pockets of PDP party bigwigs and their children from oil subsidies and TAM.

Some of us who campaigned for a change of leadership in the country in 2015 wanted to put an end to the humongous amount of money looted from the treasury through the laissez faire oil importation and subsidies payment. This current regime came in with its anti-corruption mantra and planned stoppage of the oil subsidies by rapidly rehabilitating the oil refineries so as to provide domestically refined petroleum products for the home market. Alas this promise has been breached perhaps like every other promise by this government. For the past five years refined petroleum has continued to be imported while TAM contracts have continued to be awarded. The minister of state for petroleum and apparent supervisor of the NNPC, Timipre Sylva in an interview recently cried out loud about the deplorable state of the refineries and pointedly said the Kaduna Refineries and Petrochemical Company had a deficit of about N54 billion last year producing no single drop of refined petroleum. He added that there were also promotions of staff for doing nothing. When he was asked why the place was not shut down or sold, he said government could not even rationalize its staff for fear of industrial action and strike by NNPC staff all over the country. He said of course if the place had belonged to a private company, the owners would have known what to do. When told about privatization, he said that was high policy which could not be discussed on the air.

I agree with the minister, but if he was convinced that privatization was the way out for these refineries, he should have taken a memorandum to the president and pushed very hard for its adoption and if it was turned down he should have resigned unless superior reasons were given for government’s decision to continue with the wasteful TAM whatever name it may be called under the new rubric of comprehensive repairs and rehabilitation. He should also have reminded the president that his predecessor in office, the knowledgeable Professor Tam. David-West before he died joined the chorus of those of us asking for the sale of the refineries. We can of course not be branded as capitalists and their running dogs because we have no capital! These expensive leap in the dark will not be completed until 2023 conveniently on the eve of the departure of this incumbent regime when no one will be around to  be held responsible for this waste of scarce resources in a country where the physical infrastructure is begging for attention, where the health and education sector leaves much to be desired, where all the appurtenances of civilized existence are abysmally lacking. These contracts for the refineries are bound to be like the railways, roads, electric power and bridges being undertaken by this government to be pushed forward for completion into the future under the pretext of either inadequate resources or inability of foreign companies and government itself to access foreign loans for the projects.

I don’t know how many times Transportation Minister Rotimi Amaechi has announced the completion of Lagos-Ibadan standard gauge railway! He said it would be ready by December 2019 now we are in September 2020! Perhaps it too will be commissioned before the magic year 2023! The same scenario is painted for the Lagos-Ibadan road by Babatunde Fashola, the works minister.

If there was anytime government should husband its resources, the time is now. This is a time of dwindling foreign reserves due partly to the impact of the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic on the global economy and consequent reduced demand for hydrocarbons the export of which constitutes Nigeria’s economic lifeblood. The ongoing security challenges posed by Boko Haram and ISWAP and incendiary movements all over Nigeria but particularly in the Northwest and the North-central and the South-south with the security situations in the Southeast and Southwest also precarious and dicey. Most of the 36 unviable states and 774 LGAs inflicted on the country by unthinking military regimes cannot pay salaries. The few industries we have are underperforming because of inadequate energy and infrastructural challenges. All these problems have created negative social welfare problems for the government that it needs all the money it can get from internal and foreign sources that going on a wild goose chase should be avoided.

If it is not too late, the president should cancel these refineries contracts and call on foreign and local investors to bid for the sale of the refineries. In fact, government should call on the original builders of these refineries to come and take them for free on the condition they would make them work. This may sound as a loss but it is in actual fact a saving for the country from the free for all TAM millions which would have been wasted on these refineries. While on this issue of refineries, may one ask of what has happened to the Dangote Refinery which if I am right, is scheduled for commissioning this last quarter of the year all things being equal. If and when Malam Aliko Dangote completes and commissions his refinery, we will witness what would have been since 2007 when a decisive step was taken to rescue the country from wanton waste and reckless looting of the country’s treasury by privatizing the extant refineries which are now avenues for waste and corruption.

By Jide Osuntokun

I have many times in my quiet moments and when I meet junior colleagues still teaching in Nigerian universities wondered about the future of our youth and the existential challenge posed by current leaders of industrial unions in the universities to the future of universities and even of Nigeria itself. When I joined the University of Ibadan in 1972 as a young lecturer, I felt called to serve almost as people feel called to serve God as pastors these days. Before coming back to Nigeria, I had taught at the universities of Western Ontario, London, Canada  (1970-1971) and the West Indies, Cavehill Barbados (1971-1972). If what I was looking for in life was money, I would have stayed on in Canada or the West Indies. As a Christian, I saw the divine hand of God directing my movement but I was a willing instrument in the hand of God. I could have refused to come home to contribute my own quota to the educational advancement of my country. In my labour of love, I taught not only in the universities of Ibadan and Lagos but also in the universities of Jos and Maiduguri. I had in spite of health challenges to my wife, the best of times in Jos and a very happy time, good memories and productive achievements in Maiduguri. I have always liked teaching and the freedom one had and still have in academia compensated for whatever dissatisfaction one may have had in terms of inadequate monetary compensation and rewards. The first time I felt jolted from my revelry of being called to teach rather than to earn a living  was when in 1975 following  a  general strike by university staff ,the government of General Yakubu Gowon asked workers who were not prepared to work to vacate their houses on university campuses as well as houses rented for them outside the university campuses. Many of my senior colleagues began seriously to think about owning their own houses outside the campuses. Those of us following them also felt the need to interrogate our material conditions in the capitalist environment of Nigeria where even if one had taken a vow of poverty, one still had to think of the future of our innocent children. We thought we could do this without bringing down the academic edifice on our heads as seems to be the strategy of the current leaders of the several industrial unions in the universities. If my memory serves me right, there was only one union in the universities then which served the interests of all workers be they academic, administrative, technical or clerical or junior staff. Everybody fitted in at a salary level. If there were salary awards, the salary level of the academic staff had comparable levels at the technical and administrative cadres. It was a case of water finding its own level. We did not have a welter of unions working at cross purposes and sometimes against each other as it is today. Nowadays in the universities, we have academic unions, senior administrative staff union, technical and laboratory unions and junior staff unions. All these unions want government to negotiate with them separately while sometimes forgetting the purpose for which the institutions where they work were set up as the training and educating of young people for the future of the country. It seems nowadays normal to close down universities for half of the year and to cancel sessions because of disputes over so called “earned allowances”. When outsiders ask what the earned allowances are, they are surprised that they are for marking of students’ scripts after examinations or supervising of students in their laboratories or supervising students’ projects and theses and dissertations. Give me a break! I would have thought these are normal chores in the life of a university teacher. As soon as the academics raise these types of issues, the administrative and technical staff and their junior counterparts will find their own “earned allowances “ which must also be paid or they will down tools. There are times when academic staff wants to teach and junior staff would lock up the gates, classrooms, laboratories and libraries in order to drive home the point of their important role in the running of academic institutions.

What then should be the position of government in all these problems? I believe it will be useful to bring up a legislation in parliament declaring the work in tertiary institutions as “essential work” not subject to strikes as those in the military and paramilitary organizations like customs, immigration and civilian aviation control. Government must also be ready to offer matching salaries commensurate with the level of importance it considers the services of people in tertiary institutions. Government must also stress the fact that it considers all staff irrespective of their roles to be essential to the smooth running and functioning of the institutions. The whole idea would be to bring to an end, rivalry among industrial unions and to usher in a period of peace unity and innovation and intellectual academic breakthrough in the universities which are at moment lacking. This will also bring peace to parents, students and their sponsors and predictability to academic lives of students and staffs. Students will be able to graduate on time and academic staff will be able to plan their research trips around the long vacations which unfortunately have now been wiped out by incessant strikes and disruptions.

Universities too must begin to do away with overloading the system with non-essential staff. I remember a time when every professor insisted he must have a secretary like their counterparts in university administration and civil service. Thank God this luxury is gone and every professor is now armed with his I-Pad or laptop to do whatever writing that was done through secretaries in the past. Only heads of department and deans of faculty who need to file documents and keep students records need this kind of staff nowadays. I believe the same is happening in the other areas of university administration. On no account must we have situations where supporting staff outnumber core academic staff in the universities. The universities must remain communities of scholars in the true sense of it. They cease to be universities when they become communities weighed down by municipal services. In this respect, government must do its duty by ensuring that universities are not charged with the duties of generating and distributing power as well as supplying potable water for university campuses. Ordinarily the state should take care of campus security and other ancillary chores that swell the number of non-academic staff on the payroll of universities and other tertiary institutions.

A nation that cannot take care of its youth has no future. The present young people in our universities do not have reasons to be proud of their country. A course of four years through no fault of the students are made to last sometimes for eight years because of incessant strikes and disruptions thus leading to frustrations on the part of the students who cannot plan for their future. This is particularly onerous for female students who may want to graduate and settle down. Parents who do not want to be paying school fees after retirement are faced with the problem of what to do with their children whose education is going on without end. This creates bad blood and tension between parents and children. This is why university staff are perhaps very unpopular with the Nigerian parents if not the wider Nigerian society.

I sometimes wonder if university staff knows the damage they do to themselves and their profession and the country at large. They no longer hold the high moral ground they used to hold before this regime of samsonian tendencies of bringing the whole academic houses on themselves. It seems they cannot help themselves and we as a society, must help them by presenting options which may not go down well with their radical elements but will be palatable to those who want to impart knowledge to the young and not those of them interested in trade unionism. Already rich Nigerians are boycotting the public universities and sending their children and wards abroad, and to private universities springing up all over Nigeria and the mushrooming universities among our neighbours specifically targeting frustrated Nigerian youths. There is no doubt in my mind that some of the private universities are the future of education in Nigeria because of the predictability of their calendars and the quality of their staff. But unfortunately some of them are not up to the mark and are below standards of academic requirements. Those set up in our neighbourhood leave much to be desired but our young people are migrating there in droves thus compromising our future.

It therefore behoves our government and our academic community to find solution to their constant confrontation which leaves the students at the margin of societies. The recent announcement by the academic union of certain universities that they would not go back to work after the opening of the universities shut down by the Covid-19 pandemic is a manifestation of total insensitivity.

Jide Osuntokun

Nigeria has always had complex relations with Ghana stretching back to colonial times under the British empire. The Gold Coast (Ghana) in terms of development was always far ahead of Nigeria. It was no wonder it got its Independence in 1957 way ahead of Nigeria taking on the historic name Ghana instead of the colonial name of Gold Coast  .It was richer than Nigeria because of its gold mines in Asante and Manganese mines in Nsutta and its vast cocoa production . Nigeria only had few minerals such as the Tin and Columbite mines on the Jos plateau and the lignite brown coal in Udi area that was only suitable for home use on the railways when imports could not be secured especially during the First and Second World Wars. Nigeria produced some cocoa but not on the industrial level as the then Gold Coast. We produced large amount of vegetable oils particularly Palm products and peanuts but in terms of wealth the Gold Coast was well ahead of us. Nigeria unlike the Gold Coast which for years until Sir Hugh Clifford became our Governor-General in 1919, had always been under the jackboots of military men as administrators. Ghana was usually run along civilized lines by its civilian governors. Northern Nigeria was run on the so called “Orders in Council” permitting the Governor- General to issue edicts until 1946 when it was run along the same lines with the Southern provinces. Christian missionaries were allowed unfettered ingress into the Gold Coast unlike in Nigeria where they were largely kept out of the North because of Islamic sentiments. The colonial government in the Gold Coast encouraged western education and established schools such Achimota College in Accra and Prempeh College in Kumasi and others all over The Gold Coast. But for the action of the Christian missionaries who established schools in the southern part of Nigeria, western education would have come very late to the country. Because of the Gold Coast’s relatively small size and small population, colonial administration was largely direct rather than the Lugardian indirect rule system which froze the level of administrative genius of the local people in Nigeria.

This preamble is necessary to put in context the complex relations between Nigeria and Ghana. The Gold Coast attracted hordes of Nigerians to the mines in particular as well as the general trade in the country without any resentment or animosity. The people who went to work in the Gold Coast were mostly Yoruba people from Ogbomoso, and Ijesha/Ekiti areas. Several people from my home town including my father and some of my uncles formed the vanguard of Imesi workers in the Gold Coast to the extent that when I was growing up several homes had Nigerians who spoke Fante or Twi in Okemesi. Many of my people cultivated western ways of tea drinking with bread and paid for it when many were asked to leave Ghana in series of expulsion orders in 1954, and in 1958 and the 1969 order by the reactionary Asante nationalist Kofi Busia who was prime minister after the overthrow of President Kwame Nkrumah. Many of our people died shortly after reaching home because they could no longer fit into the rigour of surviving in Nigeria. In reciprocity as it seems, President Shehu Shagari in 1983 following allegations of Ghanaian involvement in crimes expelled all foreign nationals from Nigeria and 75% of the almost three million hapless Africans were from Ghana. The scale had turned against Ghana. In the 1970s due to vast oil revenues Nigeria had attracted a lot of foreigners who came as teachers and skilled artisans and when there was recession in the 1980s the aliens became easily identified culprits of sharp practices and illegal behavior.

But over the years blood bond had developed between ordinary Nigerians and Ghanaians. My late brother, Professor Kayode Osuntokun told me an interesting human story during a visit for a conference In Accra. After his paper presentation, a Ghanaian colleague asked him if he knew a certain elderly man in Nigeria and he gave the name and my brother said “yes that’s my uncle”. The Ghanaian colleague said “your uncle is my father”. On second look my brother then realized how much his Ghanaian colleague looked like this our uncle. My father too may have left some love children in Nsutta where he was not only a miner but also a Catechist as a young man. This was of course before he returned home with some money to build a house and settled down with my mother. Now, I also have in-laws in Accra. My daughter, Yewande is married to Ralph Kofi Kodjo-Wayo  after they met in London. This makes it difficult for some of us to be too bellicose in our attitude to Ghana no matter the provocation.

Having said this the government of Nana Akufo- Addo unlike the previous governments of John Dramani Mahama (2012-2017) and John Kufuor (2001-2009) has not been friendly to Nigeria. As soon as he got to office, he went to Oxford to give a lecture and implied that Ghanaians would develop their country by hard work and the ingenuity of its people unlike Nigeria which used to throw money around in the past. He forgot that until recently when Ghana found oil, it used to be given oil by Nigeria on concessional basis with three months grace to pay. Although he denied that meant harm by his comment but nobody in Nigeria trusts him. He brought back the hostility between the two countries which used to stretch to the field of sports particularly football in the 1960s. In those days our footballers played second fiddle to their Ghanaian counterparts. People of my generation recall the famous radio commentator Ishola Folorunso shouting himself hoarse when upbraiding our footballers who could not score against their Ghanaian opponents. I can still hear Ishola Folorunso shouting the name of our centre forward in one of the matches in the 1960s “… Cyril Uwalaka, useless Uwalaka…” in desperation as if the man on the field could hear his broadcast. Many of us young people secretly wished we were Ghanaians! Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah had built a sense of nationalism in every Ghanaian that they could die for their country. Ghanaians woke up every morning to say “Osagyefo katamanto!” I saw this myself in Kumasi in 1963. Ghana today is not the Ghana of Nkrumah but it still attracts hordes of Nigerian big spenders and many unscrupulous petty traders who pursue their trade aggressively as if Ghana is a state in Nigeria. Some of our bigwigs also throw their weight around trying to pick who will be leaders in Ghana. The result of this is the growing xenophobia against Nigerians. This has manifested in the undiplomatic attacks against our diplomatic premises on the grounds of imperfection of title documents. The Ghanaian government has apologized for this and covenanted to rebuild damaged properties. We should hold them to their immediate fulfillment of their covenant. Perhaps they should be reminded how we gifted their country a huge embassy building in Abuja at our expense during the corrupt Abacha regime when as payment for President Rawlings’ support he built them an embassy in Abuja when Ghana did not have money to do so.

Now to the question of closing shops of Nigerian traders in Ghana, we can only appeal to our people to moderate their behaviour when they go abroad and not attract envy to themselves by their loud and unreasonable celebrations of their successes. Fixing a minimum of solely owned small business enterprise at $1 million and joint enterprises at $200,00 with proviso of plans to train Ghanaians is a subtle way of asking non -Ghanaians and foreigners to go home.  The statement by the Nigerian minister of information that there are one million Ghanaians in Nigeria doing business cannot be verified. I have serious doubts about its veracity and if true, we don’t have to descend to the level of again hurting innocent people for the foolish actions of their government. We can retaliate by stopping our people from attending rubbishy Ghanaian private universities specifically set up to absorb young Nigerians wanting to go outside our shores to acquire worthless certificates by all means. There are other areas we can hit them to send the right message of reciprocity. But thank goodness, the Ghanaians are now talking of a Bi-National Commission to regulate our economic relations with their country. This is perhaps the way out of a complex situation in which the government of Ghana has found itself because while protecting its people, it must remain a good neighbour especially to big brother Nigeria.

By Jide Osuntokun

I remember first meeting the then dashing young Army Captain Ike Nwachukwu sometimes in Lagos in the 1960s. He would have been in his 20s then and I was in the University of Ibadan. He was introduced to me by my friend Goke Adeniji. I then got to know later that he was dating my friend’s cousin, Gwendolyn Ejiwunmi who later became his wife years later. Those of us young boys in Ibadan used to come to Lagos virtually every weekend to attend parties. I had come in contact with young army officers before because my brother Captain Edward Abiodun Osuntokun who unfortunately died in 1964 was in the Nigerian Army Electrical Mechanical Engineers (NAEME) corps. Ike Nwachukwu was the first army officer that I could relate to as a friend. I left Nigeria in 1967 for my Ph.D program in Canada. After hanging around the western world for two years after the completion of my program in 1970, I returned to Nigeria in 1972 and joined the staff of the University of Ibadan and I was shunted to the University of Ibadan campus in Jos. Whenever I drove to Jos from Ibadan, I made a stopover in Kaduna at General Adeyinka Adebayo’s house in Kaduna where he was the Commandant of the Defence Academy and Ike Nwachukwu was one of his officers as a Major. Whenever Ike brought young officers to Jos for field exercises, he would get in touch with me and I  would visit him in the bush to have a feel of what it was to be a soldier. As young people we used to bring him from the bush to felicitate with us in town.

Right from my first meeting with him, he left a great and permanent impression on me and our other friends. He was usually very reticent perhaps because he stammers a lot. If there was anyone who could be described as an officer and a gentleman, Ike fitted that description. While I was away in Canada, Ike who had himself graduated from the Royal Military Academy in Kingston, Ontario Canada, fought with the 2nd Infantry Division of the Nigerian Army in the then Mid-West. I can only imagine what mental debate if not torture he must have gone through during those difficult years of the Nigerian civil war. He was a “Lagos boy “of Ibo and Hausa- Fulani parentage having to decide which side to fight on when he had himself narrowly escaped being killed as a young Captain serving in his post in Kano for being Ibo. He has an autobiography coming out soon in which he detailed graphically his narrow escape. All I can say as someone who has read the manuscript is that the Almighty God preserved him for the great heights he reached in Nigerian military and political life in later years. God who is the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending preserved him for what he later became in spite of several obstacles and narrow escapes he went through before his glorious retirement from the army. He rose to the rank of Major-General and commanded the 1st Division of the army, the very teeth of the military machine in Nigeria. He was military governor of the old Imo State during which time he founded the beautiful Abia State University at Uturu. He was also Federal Minister of Labour and Employment during which time he established the National Directorate of Employment (NDE) and he followed this by being foreign minister.

He came after the erudite Professor Bolaji Akinyemi as foreign minister. Bolaji like Ike is my friend since high school. Bolaji will be remembered for his idealism in foreign policy formulation. He was the architect of the Nigeria’s Technical Aid Corps, Concert of Medium Powers and aggressive forward policy in Southern Africa. Ike Nwachukwu brought more realism from the idealism of his predecessor.

Ike Nwachukwu was foreign minister of Nigeria (1988-1990) and for a second time in 1991 to 1993. Wherever he served, he left a lasting memory and legacy. He was the father of policy of “Economic Diplomacy” as the guiding light of Nigeria’s diplomacy after the boisterous years of successfully confronting settlers and colonizers in Southern Africa. He was also responsible for restoring ties with Israel broken in 1973 after Israel’s Yom Kippur war with the Arabs. He was actively involved in the final stages of the extirpation of settler rule in Namibia and apartheid in South Africa leading to the freedom of Nelson Mandela. He also left for posterity the building of NIGERIA HOUSE, an imposing 20-floor skyscraper in New York. He of course did not achieve all this solely by himself but he provided the leadership around which people rallied. The thing about General Ike Nwachukwu is his amiability and personality which drew people to him. Because of this, he was able to attract friendship to his country even when leaders in the wider world kept military regimes at a distance and did not want to associate with Nigeria for its democratic deficit. Many changed their minds because of Ike and his imposing figure and suave manners.  He ingratiated himself into the warm embrace of his colleagues not only in Africa but in such countries like Britain, Canada and Australia. This was to lead to dividends and support for Nigerian candidates bidding to become secretary-general of the Commonwealth, president of OPEC, the World Court, presidency of the United Nations General Assembly ( UNGA) and other multilaterals.

Ike Nwachukwu without advertising it is a devout Christian and regularly worships at the Anglican denomination even though his father’s church at Ovim in Abia state is a Methodist Church which he spent considerable amount of money to renovate after his father’s death in 1989. Throughout his military service, he regularly resorted to prayers when faced with life and death threat on quite a few occasions. He has remained a Christian at heart ,even though like many of us thinking men, he has had to say like the character who was challenged in the Bible for not having enough faith –”Lord I believe, help thou my unbelief “. Like a good Christian in truth and in deed, Ike Nwachukwu tries not to keep a grudge or malice which consumes people in life more so in public life.

Finally I must add that Ike knows how to keep and sustain friendship. He has maintained friendship with all those who impacted his life when he was a cub reporter in one of Nigeria’s newspapers after leaving school. He has remained in touch with all those he grew up with in Lagos and his military buddies and those he met while he served as minister in two ministries and finally when he entered politics and became a senator. One of his greatest attributes is that he sees people not from the prisms of tribe and ethnicity but from good old humanity. His command of the three main Nigerian languages, Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba has further added flair and flavour to his life. His admirable wife has also provided a pillar of support.  Gwen his wife is partly from Abonema in Rivers State and Abeokuta in Ogun State. Ike’s home environment is a microcosm of Nigeria with the North, South-south, East and West represented, thus anybody with an ethnic prejudice is not likely to find the place welcoming.

How time flies! It is simply unbelievable that we are all now very old and Ike is 80. All I need to add is that it is not over until it is over and the show is not over until the fat lady sings! Congratulations dear friend and buddy!

By Jide Osuntokun

It is common knowledge that the republic of Lebanon is abysmally broke due to corruption, institutional political instability, politics of ethnic and religious preferences and alienation, foreign meddling and the fact that it is located in a dangerous part of the world sharing borders with Syria to the north and east and Israel to the south while Cyprus lies west across the Mediterranean Sea.

The current population of this unfortunate country is only 6.8 million just about a third of the estimated population of Lagos State of Nigeria. At different times in history before the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ, Lebanon was ruled or inhabited by different peoples namely by Canaanites whom the Greeks called Phoenicians, then the Hittites who are now in  parts of Turkish Anatolia, Syria, Lebanon and Cyprus, later by Assyrians now largely found in Syria and Iraq then the Babylonians of modern day Iraq and Persian rule before  the Ottoman Turks conquered the place in 1516 and ruled it till the defeat of the Ottoman Empire by the western Allies in 1918.

In short, Lebanon has been at the crossroads of peoples, cultures and religions. While under the Ottomans, Lebanon was administered as part of greater Syria until 1908 when it gained its autonomy under the Turks. It was jointly administered as part of Syria by France under the League of Nations mandate granted France in 1923 but was separated from Syria in 1943 by France and constituted into an independent Republic of Lebanon. The people of modern Lebanon are mixed but the Lebanese Arabs form the majority while Armenians are an important minority forming about four per cent of the population. Some of the Lebanese actually dispute whether they are Arabs at all. They say 50-70% are descendants of  the Canaanites/ Phoenicians and/ or West Aramaic, while the Arabs constitute only 20-30% and  the Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians, Hebrews, Kurds, Persians and others form about 10-20% of the population. To add to this mix is the complex religious configuration of the country. The two main religions are Islam with 61.1% of the citizens (Sunni and Shia) and Christianity with 33.7% of the citizens (the Maronite church,  the Orthodox Church, the Melkite Greek Catholic Church, Protestant churches and the Armenian Apostolic Church).

Power is also distributed among all these groups making what the French call l’unite de direction almost impossible. The president of Lebanon by tradition is always a Maronite Christian elected by parliament for a term of six years. The current president is Michel Aoun. By tradition, the prime minister is usually a Sunni Muslim and Speaker of Parliament a Druze (small Muslim sect) or someone from the Shia group. Until 2019, the prime minister was Saad Hariri, the son of the brutally assassinated prime minister  Rafic Baha El Deen Al Hariri who was prime minister from 1992 to 1998 and again 2000 to 2004 and was eliminated by the bombing of his motorcade in 2005 after he had left office by members of the Hezbollah (Party of God )  that along with the Amal movement represents the Shia Muslims in Lebanon. Until Hezbollah became a militant party and armed group, the Amal movement founded in 1974 by Musa al- Sadr  as Harakat Amal (the movement of the dispossessed), represented the Shia Muslim in Lebanon. Hezbollah was founded by Imad Mughniyeh, Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah and Ali Akbar Mohtashamipur under  the inspiration and support of the Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini in 1980. The current leader of Hezbollah is Hassan Nasrallah. Hezbollah has proved its mettle in confrontation with Israel in the 1980s until its forces withdrew from the Bekaa valley. Hezbollah cadres are currently fighting along the Syrian forces in suppressing a largely Sunni majority rebellion against the minority Alawite Shia in Syria.  The Alawite domination of Syria has lasted for almost 50 Years since 1971 ruled first by President Hafiz al -Assad and currently by his son, Bashar al -Assad and the resistance against it has spilled over to Lebanon by the influx of about one and a half million Syrians to Lebanon thus complicating an already hopeless political and economic situation of the country.  The government of Syria occupied Lebanon from 1976 to 2005 presumably guaranteeing internal peace among the warring Muslim and Christian militias that had fought over Lebanon in the 1970s to 1980s and ending in 1990. Syria only recognized Lebanon’s sovereignty in 2008.

The Lebanese economy is based on free market and laissez- faire market economic commercial tradition. The economy is service oriented with banking and tourism playing commanding role. There was free movement of money in and out of Lebanon. This allowed the considerable number of Lebanese Diaspora  in  France, West Africa particularly Sierra Leone  and Nigeria and also in the Americas both north  and south and the Caribbean to move in and out money from the country. The freedom in Lebanon also extended to the relaxed way of life in the rather suffocating religious environment of the Middle East earning the city of Beirut its capital the nickname of “Paris of the Middle East”. Rich Muslims including Nigerians went there to let down their hairs and to indulge themselves with wine, women and song far from the preening eyes of their people at home. The involvement of the Lebanese in diamond mining in Sierra Leone and the various businesses in Nigeria including gold mining in Ilesha is well known. Some of them and their Nigerian patrons involved in the oil and gas sector have become billionaires.  Actually, the Lebanese have been in Nigeria even before the amalgamation of Southern and Northern Nigeria in 1914. They were trading in Lagos and Ibadan and presumably in Kano until the 1960s before they moved into soft drinks and light manufacturing and some into estate development and hotel industry.

Chicken has now come home to roost in Lebanon after the free for all corruption in the country. The foreign exchange of the country has been wiped out with no money to import essential commodities or service existing foreign loans and conduct necessary commercial deals. The World Bank/ IMF have refused to lend the country money saying it is a basket case and the rich Arab states have their own problems with the drastic reduction in oil and gas income and the burden of the Covid-19 pandemic. The Lebanese in West Africa and the Americas particularly in Argentina and Venezuela have their serious economic problems. It was at this inauspicious time that due to negligence and bureaucratic inefficiency an explosive material ammonium nitrate used in making fertilizer which had been in the port of Beirut for years caught fire leading to an explosion killing instantly 200 people and wounding thousands of people and rendering about 300,000 people homeless. It does not only rain in Lebanon, it pours! President Emmanuel Macron of France in solidarity with the former colony of France rushed to the country and got pledges of $300 million from Europe, the USA and Canada and presumably some Arab Gulf countries. But the estimated need of the country is put at $15 billion so what has been pledged is merely scratching the face of what Lebanon‘s needs. The days ahead are going to be very tough for the Lebanese but many of them will leave their country for their second homes in France, the USA, Argentina, Chile, Canada and Nigeria among other countries.

What can Nigeria learn from the situation of Lebanon? This is that rampant corruption, injustice, inequitable distribution, and monopoly of power can not only kill, they can also destroy a country. The Lebanese are now calling for the scrapping of their old constitution and political arrangement where power was shared along ethnic/religious lines thus perpetuating power among certain families and religious groups.  They now want a system of careers open to talents instead of present system of political and ethnic and religious balancing leading to mediocrity instead of meritocracy. Unless the leaders of Lebanon listen to their people, the country will split into little statelets while their more powerful neighbours will grab what can be easily digested or agree to maintain some kind of condominium over the ancient people of Lebanon with their glorious historical heritage. There is a lesson for Nigeria to learn from the Lebanese tragedy.

Jide Osuntokun

There has been a lot of brouhaha over some recent loans from China for projects in Nigeria and the inclusion of a clause in the loan agreement saying in case of default on payment, Nigeria will not be able to assert sovereign protection against whatever assets China may decide to seize in lieu of payment. The confusion over the issue arose from the rather flippant way Rotimi Amaechi, the minister in charge of transportation tried to explain the issue. If he was at sea about the implication of the controversial clause, he should have told the House Committee that he would bring to the committee somebody either from the Ministry of Finance or Debt Management Office or the office of the attorney general to throw more light on the issue before it became a free for all comments thus portraying the government as being totally unsure of its foreign obligations.

Those worried about Chinese intentions in Africa point glibly to China taking over Zambian Department of Customs and the Zambian Police Force because of that country’s defaults over some debt owed to China. There is also some allusion to China taking over port operations in Sri Lanka after huge investment in expanding port facilities in that country. If true, this is a cause for concern.  However, Nigeria is neither Zambia nor Sri-Lanka without trying to be-little those countries. Nigeria does not have a history of defaulting rather we have always paid our so-called debts in spite of controversies surrounding some of the debts incurred by the civilian government of Shehu Shagari between 1979 and 1983. But I suspect some of the press and politicians may be falling for western campaign and propaganda against Chinese so-called infiltration into Africa as if Africa belonged to the West.

Of course we have to be concerned about China’s ambition in Africa. I have written criticizing the humiliation of African leaders going cap in hand to China and other capitals of major powers and lining up as school children and being called one by one to shake hands with the imperial poobah from whom they have gone to borrow money. There is nothing wrong with borrowing money for development as against borrowing money for consumption and payment of salaries. If money is borrowed to construct revenue generating facilities whose income would be sufficient for amortization of the debt, this should be welcomed. The problem with most underdeveloped countries is management and maintenance of facilities after completion of projects. The railways being constructed with these loans and the roads and bridges being built are needed but are there post completion maintenance clauses in the agreement and possibly joint management clauses so that as usual, our people do not eat the seed and the fruit if I may use an agricultural terminology?

I do not blame Nigerians for being concerned about goings on in this government where there is almost total blackout of what the government is doing. The exposure of rampant corruption in some of government parastatals and the ongoing investigation of the EFCC, a corruption bursting organization being accused of looting recovered loot! It cannot get worse than that! I know we hear from the minister of information sometimes about what is going in government but even that is mostly reactive and defensive rather than expository and explaining government policy but when last did we hear anything from the president or the vice president about the economic plan for the country?

On these Chinese loans, the situation is fairly straight forward. The total loans borrowed from China is  USD 3.121 billion out  of total external loans of USD 27.67 billion  representing  11.28 percent of external loans . This shows China is not the main source of Nigeria’s external finance. The Chinese loan of USD 3.121 billion represents  3.94 percent of the public debt (local and foreign) of USD79.303 billion. So why the unusual noise? Why are we not calling for an investigation of the entire loan stock of Nigeria and what the loans were used for? This will be a legitimate enquiry. The Chinese loans are at concessional interest of 2.5 percent per year. The tenor is 20 years with a seven-year moratorium period. It will be interesting to find out what interest is attached to the non-Chinese loans. I personally would prefer we build our country without external loans. A small country like North Korea is now a nuclear power without borrowing a dime from any country. We can do this if we husband our resources instead of the usual looting. A country that has earned $5 trillion dollars over the years from hydrocarbons and other exports without much to show for it cannot turn back and blame the cynicism of its people over external borrowing. Our country citizens are concerned knowing what such extravaganza did to Egypt over its huge debt on the construction of the Suez Canal. When it defaulted in payment and nationalized it in 1956, an Anglo- French Force invaded the country to demand its pound of flesh.

When it comes to the issue of the economy, it seems government’s preoccupation is preparing the annual budgets and taking care of recurrent expenditure with little or nothing said about capital expenditure. What capital expenditures can one really talk about when government is borrowing money externally and domestically to balance the budget?

I honestly do not believe in the capacity of those running the Ministry of Finance to handle the economic future of the biggest economy in Africa. Economic philosophy is not the same as routine management of income and expenditure.  It is also not the same as fixing the exchange rate of the Naira and rationing of foreign exchange – important as this may be for a developing economy.

It is also not the same as episodic intervention in roads, bridges and railways construction unless situated within a national plan and planned period. There ought to be a philosophy behind the whole thing such as we find in the management of the economies of the rapidly developing economies of South Asia and South East Asia. A background in economics and particularly econometrics not accountancy and business management is what is needed to project for the future of a country like Nigeria away from over dependence on income from hydrocarbons of crude oil and gas. There ought to be a measurable standard or yardstick by which we can say whether we are on any trajectory and in what direction and to tell us where we are on our journey of economic development. One needs to know what plans we have to make us self-sufficient in consumer  and capital goods and how we can get maximum returns from our agricultural products if we add values to them and what we need to do in concrete terms to diversify our economy from our present primitive dependence on raw materials of mineral and agricultural products.

A few years ago such economic philosophy was well articulated by the Yakubu Gowon and the Obasanjo governments when we had vehicle assembly plants in Kaduna, Kano, Enugu, Ibadan and Lagos. When I was ambassador in Germany in the 1990s, I used to have meetings with the Daimler Benz and Volkswagen people over their operations in Enugu and Lagos respectively. Both companies and Peugeot in Kaduna were concerned about the Babangida government lifting its commitment to their protection perhaps under the pressure from the Bretton Woods institutions and their commitment to open market and free trade without thinking of protecting infant  businesses. There used to be companies producing batteries, windshields and of course tyres from our raw rubber. Fiat and Leyland and Toyota were also assembling vehicles and sourcing some of their parts from local manufacturers. We were also self-sufficient in fertilizers. We also had the giant Ajaokuia Steel mill and other steel companies in Oshogbo, Jos and Onitsha in what were supposed to be the nucleus of our integrated steel industrial take off.  But we lost all this. Are we still interested in foreign investment and the protection of foreign investment?

Are we going to have direct government investment through corporations which we tried in the past which got us nowhere before we decided to privatize government corporations? What exactly is our economic philosophy? Or we are going to continue to muddle through? These are the real issues. But I want to say finally that we need to manage our resources better than we have been doing over the years and if we must borrow from outside it must be under the most favorable  and stringent terms which must be scrutinized by parliament openly with nothing  done in secret.

Jide Osuntokun

Anybody who says things are alright in Nigeria today is being dishonest. If the truth must be told, we are going through a difficult period of our national life now compounded by the coronavirus pandemic. The level of disenchantment and disillusionment is very high. This is caused by the general insecurity in the land of which the campaign against the Boko Haram insurgency is just but one. No area of Nigeria is secure, from the Northwest to the North-central, the Southwest to the South- south and the Southeast to the Northeast. Only intrepid travellers dare moves anywhere in Nigeria without armed escort. Having an armed escort is no guarantee against attacks by one type of marauders or the other. They range from bandits, cattle rustlers, ethnic militants bent on seizing other people’s lands after slaughtering the men and raping their women and children. There are even instances of men and women being raped which for us Africans is an abomination.

Complaints from governors about paucity of policemen and other security men in their states fill the press every day. As citizens, we are stuck and marooned wherever we are and we can no longer perform family responsibilities such as burying our dead ones in our towns and villages or visiting the graves of departed souls. This is because we are usually advised not to take the risk of coming home and to avoid compounding the losses when one is killed or kidnapped by bandits on the roads.

What is most agonizing is that if one is killed, there is just no one to run to for justice. The police appear incapable or incapacitated because they lack the elementary and rudimentary tools of investigation and even when investigations are completed, the ethnic origin of the killers may prevent police from following through the prosecution of the offenders.  It seems some people have become sacred cows in Nigeria. With justice and punishment not sure and immediate, the offenses are repeated ad nauseam. Many people are taking laws into their own hands in reprisal and self-help attacks and retribution thus compounding our security problems. With this kind of situation foreign and domestic investments are drying up. Some of the retail sector dominated by South African businesses are gradually winding down and folding up with thousands of Nigerians thrown out of employment.

Many Nigerians are hunkering down in the apparently secure few towns and administrative capitals of states thus abandoning the rural countryside, farms and villages to their own devices. There is a looming famine if farmers cannot safely till the land, plant their seeds and harvest their crops. We are gradually losing the joy of having a big country and the pride that goes with it. We are now looking forlornly at small countries that are well run and where there is security of life and limbs. I watched with horror a Ghanaian politician running for office and telling his audience not to vote the kind of politicians running our country into power in Ghana. He had absolutely no respect for us. He kept saying “Nigeria is dead”. Perhaps this explains the recent humiliation of Nigeria when a part of our embassy in Accra was demolished by an irate Ghanaian!

The unsuccessful campaign by our military against Boko Haram for almost a decade has sapped the power of our armed forces as well as undermined our economy. The amount being spent on the campaign is what would have been available for building some regenerative infrastructure for the country. Yet this war has to be fought to the bitter end until it is won. But one is afraid that there doesn’t seem to be an end in sight. We had the embarrassing situation in which the young governor of Borno was nearly killed in an ambush between Monguno and Baga after security had said the road was clear. In justified anger, the governor accused publicly the military of sabotage. The Shehu of Borno reechoed this by saying nobody in Borno is safe. Yet a whole division of the Nigerian Army and a squadron of the Nigerian Air Force are based in Maiduguri. There are also mobile police force and other support armed groups all trying to secure the state. Then there is the so called civilian armed group made up of hunters. The governor in exasperation asked the army to tell him if it was impossible for them to secure the place so that he will deploy local people to secure at least Baga and environs because he wanted to return displaced civilians back to their homes in Kukawa local government area. This may sound fanciful but it has happened before when Sir Kashim Ibrahim was Waziri of Borno in the 1950s and was faced with an incendiary movement of opposition militants. He dealt with them by calling on his people to rise against banditry.

One can only hope that our situation is not so hopeless that we will not be able to defeat a local insurgency even though aided by Islamic fundamentalists from outside. This campaign against the Boko Haram and the affiliate of the Al Qaeda in West Africa has become a matter of honour which our military must face squarely. This is because it has raised the question of a levee en masse or citizen army which the governor of Borno has posed to the Nigerian military.

The general insecurity has also again brought back the discussion whether Nigerian citizens should be allowed to legally carry concealed weapons. This may sound crazy but why should it? I know that many people will say the freedom will be misused. In the USA where ownership of guns is permitted, there are conditions attached to it. One must of course be of age and must hold a responsible job and of fixed address and possibly own a property.

No matter what conditions are attached to it, gun violence kills many more people in the USA than coronavirus will ever kill. Obviously, no one in his real senses will advocate freedom to carry concealed weapons in Nigeria. But if it can be properly organized, I am in favour of some kind of citizen army which we can start from the level of the National Youth Service Corps. This is not a revolutionary idea. We used to have this in government colleges and secondary schools and at the University of Ibadan in colonial Nigeria. Whatever option that may be deemed possible is worth exploring. In France and the USA, citizen army is regarded as a bulwark for democracy. It is inconceivable for the army in those two countries to stage a coup d’état because it knows it will be met by armed resistance.

I find it galling that some ragtag militants and armed bandits will be running all over our country maiming and raping the people indiscriminate of gender. The picture of an elderly man in Southern Kaduna pouring, in biblical fashion, ashes of his destroyed home on his head leaves an indelible impression on me and should keep men of conscience awake all night. It is time to stop all these tragedies and ethnic shenanigans. What then should we do as a people and as a government?

We should invoke the War Act to declare a state of siege in the country, suspend habeas corpus and give large powers to a war cabinet to put the entire country on war footing with the president and the governors given executive powers to put an end to banditry, brigandage, cattle rustling, ethnic cleansing and armed militancy by all means possible within six months. During the period, all strikes and industrial actions shall be suspended. Parliament shall be suspended while a committee set up to reduce parliamentary representation to one chamber House. The committee shall also reduce by half, local governments in the country and all funds of local governments transferred directly to the states so as to eliminate the idea of three tier government because our federation is that of states and the federation as exists all over the world. Money saved from suspended federal and state parliaments shall be mobilized for expanded police force to take care for adequate policing of the country. During this period, all previous “constitutional” conferences reports shall be studied by a committee of former heads of state,  former chief justices of the Supreme Court, leaders of Trade Union Congress, representatives of Christian and Islamic leadership and six deans of faculty of law from the six zones of the country and presidents of the various academies in Nigeria.

The idea is that the group should not be unwieldy. Whatever they agree upon shall be presented to the president to be presented to a constituent assembly of not more than 100 people. Its resolutions shall become the grundnorm or Basic law of the country. The aim will be to produce a devolved and lean government of the people by the people not a government of politicians for politicians as we currently have.