The Nation Newspaper

Category: Jide Osuntokun

  • Old men are coming: American Presidential election

    Old men are coming: American Presidential election

    By Jide Osuntokun

    The exit of Elizabeth Warren from the Democratic Party primaries has narrowed the competition to two elderly gentlemen, former Vice President, Joe Biden, a professional politician who represented the  small state of Delaware  in the US Senate from 1973 to 2009 and  was vice president from 2009 to 2017  and who has spent 44 years in electoral offices in Congress and the vice presidency of the United States, and, Senator Bernie Sanders an independent, representing the state of Vermont in the House of Representatives for 16 years before being elected into the Senate in 2012 and 2018. He caucuses with the Democrats in the Senate.

    Joe Biden would be 78 and Sanders would be 79 by the time of the election in November. Whoever wins the Democratic nomination would face the incumbent Republican President Donald J. Trump who will be 73. The Democratic Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi is 79. Happily Vice President Mike Pence is a young man of 60 years.  The United States has not paraded this kind of elderly leaders in recent times. From the realignment of forces in the Democratic Party, Joe Biden is likely to emerge the Democratic nominee to face Trump. The age issue will definitely be raised in the debates and in the press and whoever wins the Democratic nomination had better be prepared to face the issue by nominating a healthy young man or lady as running mate. The name of Kamala Harris, black senator from the state of California and erstwhile presidential candidate has been mentioned as possible running mate to Biden.

    Senator Harris has recently endorsed Joe Biden and it is rumoured she is a sure banker for vice president’s slot. In an ideal world this would have been a formidable partnership. The senator is young and very beautiful. But this is not an ideal world and some may be afraid that she may become president, were Biden to die in office of old age and this would amount to two black presidents within 12 years. Biden would do his electability a favour if he chooses a white man or perhaps Senator Elizabeth Warren but she is going to be 71.

    If I was a betting man, I would put my wager on Joe Biden to emerge the Democratic nominee. This is not because he is a better man than Bernie Sanders. In fact Sanders has a better progressive pedigree and programs than Joe Biden. He did not vote for any of the ruinous foreign wars which the United States for almost one and a half decades has not been able to extricate itself from. He also did not vote for the continental free trade that yoked together the United States, Canada and Mexico which was the signature policy of President Bill Clinton which has resulted in loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs in the American rust belt of Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania which were traditional Democratic states but which have changed allegiance from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party.

    Joe Biden’s commitment to universal health coverage for all Americans is doubtful whereas Sanders commitment is unequivocal on the grounds that the US is the only major industrial state in the West where there is no national health service that is universal. Sanders is not ashamed to call himself a socialist which to me is a kiss of death for his chance of winning the nomination. In America, communism and socialism are almost perceived as original sin . If Sanders had declared he was a socialist in the 1950’s America, he might have been arrested for “Un- American “activities. During the time of Senator Joseph McCarthy, Republican of Wisconsin, no one in public office could have called himself a socialist without consequences. The McCarthy era of hounding communists in the US was a period that has gone down into history as McCarthyism, a period of intense anti-communist suspicion in the US that lasted roughly from the late 1940s to the middle 1950s otherwise known as the “Red Scare”. Not only did Bernie Sanders call himself a socialist, he went further to celebrate the life of Fidel Castro of Cuba as having revolutionized the health of his people by bringing health care and health facilities to all Cubans. This statement could have been made by any professor in any university in the US and gotten away with it but this is not expected of a politician who wants to win the votes of millions of Cuban émigrés who tended, like all Latinos and blacks, to vote for Democrats. But with eulogy on Fidel Castro, Bernie Sanders would lose Florida and perhaps Texas where there are large Cuban concentrations. America by and large is an immigrant and tolerant country but there are hard pockets of hard core racists and intolerant people.

    I remember a long-serving Senator Strom Thurmond, Republican of South Carolina, who while speaking publicly in the Senate said something was against “Christian tradition” and somebody cut in and said  you mean “Judeo- Christian tradition “ and the senator said he meant Christian tradition and did not want it linked with anything “ judeo”.  Among some fundamental Christians, Jews are blamed for killing Jesus and they cannot reconcile themselves to the continuity of Judaic tradition with that of followers of Jesus.

    I am saying this because there are people in all of Europe and the Americas – north and south -who would find it difficult to trust the presidency of their country to a Jew. Since Britain’s Benjamin Disraeli in 1875, I don’t know of a European country where a Jew has headed the state or the government. In the case of Disraeli, he was a baptized Jew anyway. In one of the rallies of Senator Bernie Sanders, somebody waived a large Nazi swastika flag thus bringing up his Jewish race and religion as an issue. Yet this is still at the Democratic nomination campaign. Only God knows what will happen when he faces Trump who even though his daughter is married to a Jew has said a few things as president that were regarded is anti-Semitic and improper.

    The question facing Democrats is who can beat Trump? Bernie Sanders or Biden? I think each of them can in issues-based contest defeat Trump. I even think on issues Sanders will be a more formidable foe than the clumsy Biden. But to be on the safe side, the Democrats will probably opt for Biden.

    The election proper will be dirty. Trump will label Biden’s family as having benefited from the corruption in Ukraine and China where Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, has unscrupulously benefited from business deals, riding on the name of his father as vice president during the eight years of Obama-Biden presidency. Biden of course would dig out the sharp practices of Trump in developing properties in New York and New Jersey without paying taxes and his casino business in Atlantic City in New Jersey and in Las Vegas and his so-called Trump University where he sold degrees and the various sexual peccadilloes in which Trump paid off ladies with whom he had had romantic escapades in the past.  However, it will be very difficult to beat an incumbent president during a period of a strong economy that is if, the Coronavirus or Covid-19 does not plunge the US into recession as may happen in many countries including Nigeria. It used to be said that “when one sneezes in Washington, the world catches cold; now it is when one sneezes in Wuhan, China that the whole world catches coronavirus.

    We in Nigeria are going to be in serious trouble because of this Covid-19 pandemic. The price of crude oil has collapsed by almost 35%. This means we cannot implement the current budget. The collapse of the price of hydrocarbons, unless it is urgently reversed, will have effect on the value of the Naira. There is no way the CBN will be able to maintain the current rate of exchange. This will affect the price of all inputs into the local industries as well as the price of all imported goods. This will bring unheard of hardship and unemployment to Nigerians. Even the current loans being expected and most of the current projects under construction with Chinese loans will become unrealistic. This is because there is currently little production going on in China. This is not only affecting China but the whole world.

    Adding to this is the uncertainty of the American election which is only eight months away in November. It is not without exaggeration to say as the Chinese would say that we are entering “interesting times”. What is most important is sustainability of life in the face of this viral attack whose trajectory is unknown and whose cure is in the hands of God and those to whom He reveals the way forward, medically speaking.

  • Coronavirus or Covid-19: Silence, not golden

    Coronavirus or Covid-19: Silence, not golden

    By Jide Osuntokun

     

    It was predictable that the pandemic coronavirus or Covid-19 will eventually spread to Africa. When for weeks South America and Africa appeared not to have been touched by the virus, I suspected that the global media was lulling us to sleep and was deliberately underreporting it.

    I also felt that we were not reporting it ourselves because we did not have the technical capability of detecting it not to talk of managing it.

    Then BBC came up with the news that only the Pasteur Institute in Dakar and another diseases control centre in South Africa had the technical capacity to detect the virus.

    As we now know, there are about four centres in Nigeria that can detect the incidence of the virus. There is of course no known cure.

    MIGAL Galilee Research Institute in Israel has claimed that it has developed a vaccine against the avian type of coronavirus which can be modified to tackle the human Covid-19 and within the next few months it would begin testing this before it comes to the global market.

    We can only pray that this is true. What is now known is that this virus would probably not kill a young healthy person if he or she did not have pre-existing medical problems. But the high mortality among the elderly would be high. This I suppose is understandable because something must kill an old person!

    There are no definitive pronouncements about the death rate among children. This is not likely to be high but a highly developed and efficient country like Japan has already shut its schools and sent its children home for one month.

    One of my children abroad asked me to stock my house with foodstuff so that I won’t have to go to the market! We don’t have malls which sell everything that one needs here in Nigeria so stocking your pantry with all you may need is out of the question.

    How for example does one protect food sellers and food buyers from spreading the virus to one another in our open markets where people are sneezing and coughing on each other?

    Last week when 30 people died in Iran including a cabinet minister the country cancelled Jumaat prayers in the entire Islamic Republic the first time since1979 to stop the spread of the virus.

    I was most delighted when during our service in my parish at the Redeemed Christian Church of God in Bodija Ibadan, an epidemiologist who is a member of the church educated us on what the World Health Organization said we should do to prevent succumbing to this pandemic.

    Happily, this is now public knowledge. This is the time our government must demonstrate leadership in telling Nigerians what we all should do to avoid catching the disease and infecting one another.

    We must apply wisdom and suspend gathering in large numbers until we are sure of the trajectory of this plague.

    Government also need to direct shop keepers and owners of existing malls in some cities what to do at this time of the onset of the viral spread of the coronavirus in our country.

    Government should also warn charlatans including some so-called professors of virology who claim they have a cure for the viral infection to desist from raising hopes unnecessarily. Any scientist worth his or her status knows what to do if he or she has made a breakthrough.

    There is no need to go to the market place and begin to say stupid things .This is what responsible governments do all over the world. Yes our people can continue to pray but we are not yet a theocracy! I know people say Nigerians are the most religious people on earth.

    It is obvious why this is so. It is because our problems are just too many for the human mind to understand .We are still battling with urban and living conditions that have become history in other climes.

    Our transportation and communication grid and infrastructure are antediluvian. Our hospitals lack the basic medical equipment and gadgets. Patients have to be carried on the backs of their relations upstairs to wards above ground floors in so-called teaching hospitals because the lifts don’t work.

    Water which is basic in medical practice, is a rare commodity in many teaching hospitals. Our educational system collapsed a long time ago. In fact nothing works in Nigeria.

    To compound all these evil, the security situation leaves much to be desired and the powers that be seem not to know where to begin to solve our problems. Silence on all these issues seems to be the reaction of government.

    When the coronavirus finally reached our shores through Italy, we were caught napping. A serious country should have alerted all its diplomatic missions about visa issuance in countries where the virus pandemic was raging. This Italian came from Milan area which even the Italian government has isolated from the rest of Italy.

    Read Also: Chinese researchers discover two subtypes of coronavirus

     

    The USA has barred people from that area from traveling to America and it is seriously considering barring Alitalia from flying to the USA. It has banned all travels to China and aircrafts from China and Korea flying into the USA.

    We should not be surprised when the USA adds our country to the list of coronavirus infested countries whose citizens should no longer come to the USA until the whole situation becomes clearer.

    The USA is even considering a lockdown of the three western states of Oregon, Washington and California if the virus in those western states continues to spread.

    The template of the United States approach should guide us if the virus assumes epidemic proportion in our country or else we would all die like flies.

    Some people are already saying Ebola did not kill us therefore we have nothing to fear. People who say this should go and ask Liberians and Sierra Leoneans about the terrible plague that befell them.

    There are even some cynics in the western world who say since 1945 the global population has grown exponentially and that there is a need to cut it back or slow it down.

    Historically this has either been through wars or global epidemics like the Black Plague of the 14th century, the Spanish influenza that came after the First World War as well as the loss of several millions of people during the First and the Second World Wars.

    These cynics think this outbreak of the Convid-19 may just be God-sent to curb the overwhelming growth in global population.

    Some have even suggested that it may be a biological attack on China or scientific biological warfare that by mistake escaped into the atmosphere in China.

    All these fanciful theories remain what they are – fake news. But Africa must be watchful so that as a result of our carelessness and unpreparedness we fall victim to this and any pandemic that is bound to come.

    The national reaction to this outbreak is not good enough. If we don’t know what to do, other world leaders like  Xi  Jiping of China, Donald Trump of the USA and other leaders in Asia and Europe addressed press conferences with their technical leaders telling their people what to do and what resources were being put in place to prepare their countries for the viral attack.

    The USA set up a tactical committee headed by its vice president; this is some kind of “war cabinet” to coordinate attack on the virus and to tell Americans what to do.

    There is no reason on earth why our president could not have called a press conference with all the people charged with confronting the problem.

    We need this kind of national sense of urgency in the Covid19 situation and other security emergencies. This absence of a “war cabinet” to tackle the Boko haram and insecurity problem is probably why the problem has metastasized.

    We need in this country, to hear more from our president so that we know somebody is carrying our burden and trying to find solutions to them. But in a situation of mum’s the word leaves one to wild conjectures and imagination which are not good for the image of the government and the country.

     

  • Judgment and justice in Nigeria

    Judgment and justice in Nigeria

    By Jide Osuntokun

    The proverb “the law is an ass” means the law as created by legislators or administered by the justice system cannot be relied upon to be sensible or fair. The philosopher Plato grudgingly wrote his book “The Laws” because he felt that an ideal state should be run on a perfect system of a philosopher king as contained in his book “The Republic”. Laws according to him, are unnecessary in an ideal republic. The existence of laws is a manifestation of failure of the republic. Of course he was writing about a Utopia where everything will be perfect.

    Karl Marx, the 19th century German revolutionary philosopher even though a Jew did not believe in God but was influenced by Judeo-Christian belief about a heavenly paradise or utopia, built his philosophy on a material utopia. This was to be a utopia of a classless society on earth in which we would all work according to our ability and would take from the state according to our needs. In his utopia we would not need police, army, the judiciary and state bureaucracy which in the past was the instrument of control in the hands of the bourgeoisie. Religion which he described as the “opium of the people” would not be needed to deaden the nerves of the oppressed proletariat.

    The point I am making is that right from the beginning of modern times, man has always suspected that there was something wrong with law and its administration. Modern states can only be run on the rule of law and the greatest body of laws in any state is the constitution which is the grundnorm on which modern states exist. Most constitutions are written with the exception of the British constitution which is unwritten but even there, there has accumulated over the years a body of constitutional traditions and acts of parliament which can now be referred broadly as British constitution.

    Most constitutions are carefully negotiated by delegates chosen by the people and when the constitution has been agreed upon, they are sometimes subjected to national referenda. In our own case in Nigeria, the independence constitution of 1960 was carefully negotiated by our elected political leaders and was based on a compromise between those who wanted a unitary state and those who wanted a confederation like Canada. Eventually a midway of federation was agreed upon but it was not subjected to a referendum. There is no doubt, that if it were subjected to a referendum, the leaders would have ensured its passage.

    Of course since the coup d’état of 1966 January and the counter coup of July the same year, our constitution has been bastardized beyond recognition. Now we run a unitary dictatorship and the puny administrative states run by prefects masquerading as governors have to toe the line of the Pooh-Bah at the centre .Even the administration of justice has suffered because it is the executive that chooses its members and funds it through budget presented to the legislatures. The question then arises if the courts are free and if its personnel have the cerebral wherewithal to administer the laws before them and if the right people are sitting on the judicial benches?

    Several judicial decisions in recent times have created doubts in the minds of the Nigerian citizenry. Some of the faults may be due to the immaturity of our political system. It is only in Nigeria that the kind of judicial decisions that came out of the Supreme Court in relations to the gubernatorial positions in Zamfara, Imo and Bayelsa states could have come out. In the case of Zamfara, the dominant political party that won the gubernatorial position, the three senate positions and the House of Representatives and state assembly seats were by judicial fiat removed and replaced at all levels by the opposition thus imposing a one party state on the distressed state of Zamfara. Governor Yari, the departed APC governor does not deserve being defended but certainly the people of Zamfara have rights guaranteed by our poorly put together constitution. If the Supreme Court felt there was no democracy at the party level, it should have sent the whole thing back to the electorate for a new election so that the people can have the right to make a choice. This kind of judicial diktat is not only undemocratic but injurious to the fledgling democracy we are trying to embrace.

    The situation in Imo is even laughable to say the least. The Supreme Court was reduced to counting the votes which INEC apparently missed out in deciding who won the Imo election. Opinions are divided over the propriety of the Supreme Court taking over the job of INEC. What the court should have done is to ask for a new election.

    Finally, the Bayelsa case remains most amazing and beyond reason. Bearing in mind that the Supreme Court four years ago ruled in favour of Governor Yahaya Bello whose running mate Abiodun Faleke withdrew from the race and the man ran alone without a deputy. It is therefore beyond belief that the same court will not only nullify the election of a legally elected governor on the basis that his deputy was a liar. Could the court not have ruled removing the deputy while allowing the governor to find a new deputy or at worst could the court not have asked for a new election instead of foisting somebody who was rejected on the same electorate. The accusation of influence-peddling levelled against the lead judge in this case raises fundamental question of fairness in the whole scenario .The finality of judgements in the Supreme Court while  well recognized  in Nigeria as in other climes does not invalidate the argument of the accusation of what we are getting from our courts is judgement and not justice.

    If this is happening at the Supreme Court, one can imagine the level of unfairness in lower courts at both federal courts of appeal, high courts and state high courts not to talk of magistrate courts, customary and Sharia courts. There have been instances of emotional outbursts and judgement based on open vendetta. There was the case of the disgraced University of Obafemi Awolowo University professor accused of improper conduct with a post-graduate student. The professor was accused of propositioning a lady and dangling marks before her if she would sleep with him. The student was mature enough to entrap the professor by recording their conversation on her phone. She lodged a complaint and the university council took up the case and dismissed the professor outright with no possibility of pension, gratuity or of ever getting any job again in the university system. That’s the law of the university. The professor was subjected to double jeopardy by being hurled before a bellicose female judge who in open court told the professor she would deal with him because she had a daughter in a university. She promptly sentenced him to five or so years without right of appeal for an offense the poor man had not yet committed!

    Please my readers don’t get me wrong; my God does not want the death of a sinner but that he should repent. The professor deserves what he received but did he get justice? Did the emotion of the lady judge not override her sense of justice?

    Two or so weeks ago another part-time lecturer from the University of Lagos was sentenced this time for raping an 18-year old girl looking for admission in the University of Lagos. The 47-year old man was not in a position to grant the poor girl admission. So this was a case of deception. Secondly, the two people knew themselves very well because the so-called lecturer was a friend of the girl’s father. So it was also a betrayal of trust. The judge was right to find the stupid man guilty and to deal with him appropriately. I don’t know whether the punishment for rape is seven years or 21 as pronounced by the judge. Should punishment be excessive before it reforms? This is a question jurists should answer? Perhaps we should begin to think of trial by jury so that the fate of offenders is not left to the decision of a single person no matter how learned he or she may be.

  • Turnaround in the Sudan

    Jide Osuntokun

     

    Umar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir, the 76-year old, long-serving president of the Sudan was overthrown last year after he had been in power from 1989 to 2019 a period of thirty years.

    During this period he wielded untrammelled power restrained only by the army and a sham of a political party called the National Congress. Before him was the interim prime minister-ship of Sadiq al Mahdi, the grandson of Sheikh Muhammad Ahmad ibn Abd Allah al Mahdi (1881-1898).

    Sheikh Muhammad Ahmad founded a Mahdist state in the Sudan in 1885 after murdering the British General Charles George Gordon.

    The British fought back, finally killing him in 1898 and then the Sudan came under an Anglo-Egyptian condominium from 1898 to 1956.

    Omar Al Bashir shunted aside Sadiq al Mahdi in 1989. Before him was another long-serving military ruler Jafar Muhammad el Numeiry who ruled from 1969 to 1985 as part of so called “free officers movement”.

    Numeiry survived more than 20 attempted coups and was once restored to power by troops of Muamar Gadhafi. The point to make is that since the Sudanese independence in 1956, the military has remained a permanent feature  in the government of the country with occasional civilian rule provided by rival Sudanese politicians of either the Umma party of the Mahdist movement and other Muslims opposed to them.

    Out of the 64 years of sovereign nationhood, the military has been in power for more than 50 years. During this period, the country has been wracked by racial/religious wars between the Muslim north and the largely Christian / animist South in which more than two million people were killed and five million displaced as well as fissiparous political tendencies between the northern Arabized Muslims and the black Muslims in Darfur.

    Southern Sudan became independent on July 11, 2011 thus ending the longest civil war in Africa. In the meantime, the Khartoum regime launched a paramilitary force, many on horsebacks, the so-called Janjaweed against their compatriots in Darfur murdering more than 400,000 people mostly of Zaghawa, Masalit and Fur tribes and raping hundreds of thousands of women and female children and seizing their lands.

    The USA in 2004 declared the massacres in Darfur genocide and crime against humanity. This Sudanese campaign was in retaliation against a secessionist liberation force which wanted people of Darfur to be recognized as a distinct people.

    The rebellion in Darfur remains active with no end in sight. Sudan is a basket case whose economy has been further damaged by the secession of the oil rich Southern Sudan since 2011.

    The Sudanese regimes, whether civilian or military, have oscillated between ideological socialists and Islamic fundamentalists depending on whichever could guarantee them hold on power.

    Omar al Bashir has however held power until 2019 when there was a general rebellion of workers, students, professionals, particularly doctors and civil servants.

    On the orders of General Omar al Bashir, the army unleashed murderous force on the civilian population, especially college students killing thousands of them. When it became clear that the young people could not be cowed, the higher command of the military moved against Omar al Bashir.

    A transitional Military Council (TMC) took over power. In August 2019, the TMC and “Forces of Freedom and Change alliance” (FFC) signed a political agreement and a constitutional declaration legally defining a 39-month phase of transitional state institutions and procedures to return Sudan to civilian democracy.

    In September the TMC formally transferred executive power to a mixed civilian-military collective head of state the so-called “Sovereignty Council of Sudan”, and to a civilian Prime Minister Abbdalla Hamdok and a mostly civilian cabinet and a female jurist, Nemat Abdulla Khair became Sudan’s first female Chief Justice.

    There has been tremendous pressure on the Sudan by the West particularly the USA and by Saudi Arabia, its main financier in the past which has withheld financial assistance to the country until it met western demands.

    The economy of the country relies mainly on agriculture particularly the production of cotton from the vast irrigated plains of Gezira plains, the largest irrigated agricultural scheme in the world, lying between the white and Blue Nile river .

    The country also produces 80% of the world’s gum Arabic. It is trying to invest in the mining sector especially the mining of gold  and it still has some oil but not enough to make serious economic impact.

    The entire country is in the Sahara desert with consequent harsh climatic conditions making the country one of the poorest countries in the world.

    Read Also: Sudan agrees to send ex-president al-Bashir to face ICC

     

    It has also been subjected to economic sanctions from the 1970s because of harbouring  Al Qaeda terrorists including Osama bin Laden and others who attacked  in 2000, the American ship, USS Cole in the Port of Aden  in Yemen killing 17 American servicemen.

    The Clinton administration was forced to bomb the country using long range Exocet missiles from ships on the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. The Sudan was declared a terrorist state with all the negative implications deriving from it.

    The new regime in the Sudan after negotiations with the Trump administration has now decided to compensate for the damage to American property and loss of lives of his servicemen to the tune of $30 million. This is a huge amount for an impoverished country to cough out.

    It is also now ready to surrender Omar Al Bashir, its long term former president, for trial in The Hague for genocide and crime against humanity committed, in Darfur and other places on his order.

    A United Nations Commission in 2005 had reported that crimes were committed in Darfur by the Sudanese forces and had referred the case to the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

    It now seems that chicken has come home to roost and that Omar al Bashir and his henchmen are going to answer for their crimes.

    We do not know what the USA has promised the current government in Khartoum in exchange for their bending over backward to accommodate the American demands including ties with Israel.

    Sudan is on the list of countries whose citizens are banned from coming to the United States. It may be this ban will be lifted as well as the designation of the country as a terrorist state.

    There may also be promise of American investment and encouragement for the Gulf Arab states and Saudi Arabia to increase their aid to the country. The apparent rapprochement between the USA and the Sudan has wide-ranging ramifications.

    It is a call to dictators particularly in Africa that oppressing their citizens and killing opposition members is not the internal affairs of their countries.

    Brutal dictators will, no matter how long, be held accountable for their misdeeds. It began in the successor states of the old Yugoslavia, in Serbia and Croatia; then the Serb leaders in the ramshackle Bosnia and Herzegovina, then in Liberia, Chad, Cambodia and The Ivory Coast.

    There is of course disquiet that only countries in the poorer parts of the world are subjected to criminal prosecution while in office or after leaving office.

    While on the other hand powerful leaders of major powers are getting away with murder.

    This is of course the kernel of international politics which is largely based on power relations. History is written from the perspectives of the victorious!

  • American presidential election 2020

    By Jide Osuntokun

    I have been a keen watcher of American politics since I was in secondary school in Christ School Ado Ekiti, 60 years ago, when Vice President Richard Milhous Nixon from California and Senator John Fitzgerald Kennedy from Massachusetts were running for the White House.  I grew up in an intensely political family, so I was naturally drawn to politics of Nigeria and other countries.

    America had been a global power from 1918 onwards following the armistice signed by imperial Germany’s High Command with the Allies at the end of the First World War. The United States by the end of the Second World War in 1945 became a super power and the only nuclear power until 1949 when Soviet Russia was able to split the atom and became a nuclear power also, thus beginning the super power rivalry until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1994. So, any intelligent person concerned with survival and security of mankind had to show interest in what was going on in the USA and the USSR. World peace and human survival was maintained on the thread thin balance of power between the two super powers and on the fear of mutual nuclear annihilation or what was later described as “balance of mutual terror”.

    The excitement of American politics is however no longer there for many observers. This is not because world peace is guaranteed, and it is not, particularly with the proliferation of nuclear weapons among several nuclear weapons states like the USA, the Russian federation, China, France, Great Britain, North Korea, India, Pakistan and Israel in what a writer described as “peace of the graveyard”.  In spite of an international protocol against nuclear proliferation, quite a few countries like Iran and possibly Germany, Japan, South Korea if compelled by security considerations and threats by their neighbors have the capacity within a short time to make the bomb.  Interest in American politics has waned because of the advent of the tempestuous and unguarded Donald J. Trump who can say anything without caring of its diplomatic consequences any time any day. In spite of the enormous punch the country still packs, America is just merely tolerated and endured like a bully but hardly respected any more.  Trump has no respect for any leader of any country except those dictators like Vladimir Putin of Russia, Victor Orban of Hungary, Xi Jinping of China, Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, and the new man at the helm of affairs in Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro. He insults on regular basis Angela Merkel of Germany, Trudeau of Canada and Emmanuel Macron, President of France and the previous prime minister of Britain, Theresa May, the very people who made NATO a truly Atlantic alliance.

    It is the hope that nothing lasts forever and that the Trump nightmare would also end possibly by January 2021 that makes us pay unusual attention to the process of who the Democratic Party flagbearer will be in the election against Trump in November this year . The signs are not good. The Iowa debacle in which it took almost a whole week to determine who won the vote of the Iowa caucus of just over 200,000 shows how unprepared the Democrats are in an election year. The man who was eventually announced as winner is Peter Paul Montgomery Buttigieg, an American combat veteran and a mayor of a small town in the state of Indiana and a graduate of Harvard College who was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford university. He is 38 years old. Coming second is Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont who is technically an independent who however sits with the Democrats in the Senate of the United States. He is Jewish, a socialist and he is 79 years old. The next two are Senator Elizabeth Warren, a law professor from Massachusetts who has been a senator since 2013.  She is 70 years old. Former Vice President Joseph Robinette Biden jr. is from Delaware. He served as Obama’s vice president for eight years and was in the US Senate from 1973 to 2009 making him a veteran politician who should go into retirement if he was a wise man. He is 77 years old. A dark horse who has just thrown his hat into the ring is the former mayor of New York, Mike Bloomberg, who comes in with a huge war chest from his $55 billion wealth. He is 77 years old. This is the group from which the Democratic Party has to choose a candidate unless some popular governor or senator were to come in from the blues.

    The question then is which of this lot would emerge the Democratic nominee? And will he be able to beat Trump. Four years ago, no one believed that Trump would be president and when he decided to run, many people dismissed him as loudmouth inexperienced television showman with a history of failed businesses and philandering. He did not only win the Republican nomination, a party that he was not even a member and also defeated the much fancied cerebral and celebrated Hilary Clinton, wife of a former president, senator from the great state of New York and Secretary of State. Although Hilary Clinton beat him by almost five million of popular votes but in the Electoral College where it mattered, Trump triumphed over Clinton. The import of this is that anything can happen in American presidential elections. Who could have believed that a skinny young black man from Chicago, born in Hawaii to a white young woman driven by more enthusiasm than wisdom, and a philandering married man from Kenya, would become the president of the United States? Anything is possible (Alles ist moglich”) as the Germans would say.

    From the Democratic wannabes none stands above the others. The oldest of them Bernie Sanders is a Jew and a socialist, who has had a previous heart attack seems to attract a large following among college students and educated young people. This may be due to his policy of universal health insurance coverage and free college education and writing off of all college debts. He also wants to scale down the influence of the military industrial complex in American politics and reduce military spending while increasing spending on social security and welfare. The question is whether Old Bernie Sanders is electable. I have my doubts. The shrill professor from Massachusetts, Elizabeth Warren, is also perhaps too extreme for America which is by and large still afflicted by misogyny and may not yet be ready for a female president. Joe Biden on account of his son’s shenanigan in Ukraine and China, earning  millions  of dollars for doing nothing, has probably irredeemably damaged the candidacy of his father. Michael Bloomberg, the Jewish billionaire may be resented for his money and his religion in the heartland of America where Jews are still not favorably looked at. Peter Buttigieg who now sees himself as the “gay Obama” is regarded by some as a patsy of the Wall Street crowd and who may be acceptable to liberal America of New York and California, but is not likely to be acceptable to rural America, the blacks and the Bible Belt where homophobia is rife.

    So where is the candidate to beat Trump in a campaign which will be bitterly fought in which Trump will not take prisoners? The world in my own estimation, is doomed to endure Donald J Trump’s second term as president of the United States. Trump during his second term, when he has nothing to lose, may be tempted to fight Iran and possibly North Korea and that is the danger the world would face because of the Democratic party’s failure to come up with a credible and electable candidate in November 2020. The election is nine months away; this is a long time in politics. My prediction is a long shot but any intelligent reader of politics can predict the end from the beginning.

  • Ban on Nigerians traveling to the USA

    Jide Osuntokun

     

    Many Nigerians are still in shock over the inclusion of their country in President Donald Trump’s ban on certain countries from coming to the United States of America. The new list includes immigrants from Myanmar (Burma), Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Libya and Nigeria.

    On the other hand Sudan, Tanzania and Belarus citizens will no longer be permitted to apply for the diversity visas generally known as the green card lottery. Banning of some countries ‘citizens from coming to America is the signature policy of President Trump.

    He considers these countries as “shit holes” and their citizens as being undeserving of living in civilized countries including the United States.

    We are told Nigerians may still be allowed to visit the country as tourists for short time stay and perhaps young Nigerian students may also be allowed to come to the United States to study after which time they must return to their country.

    As far as I am concerned, this seems an afterthought and a palliative to soften the blow and humiliation of the wound inflicted on the biggest economy in Africa. At a time in the past, no American government dared do this to us when we were supplying almost 10% of American crude petroleum imports.

    Things have changed and America is not only self-sufficient in hydrocarbons but it is even exporting gas and oil thanks to additional oil production through fracking. But trade alone is not the only vital link Nigeria has with the USA.

    Nigeria is the third largest troops’ contributor to UN peacekeeping and peace enforcement operations in the world. As a global hegemonic power, the USA needs Nigeria in its effort to maintain global peace.

    Nigeria is useful in pulling out USA’s chestnut from fire where America may not want to be directly physically engaged in such places like Liberia, Lebanon/ Israel and Kuwait/ Iraq borders. Nigeria is also important in the security of West Africa and the middle Atlantic generally which are of strategic importance to United States.

    In any case, a major power like the United States cannot afford to be an island sufficient unto itself. Nigeria remains the largest African market for western industrial goods and all things being equal, Nigeria will remain a major global market in the future when the USA will be locked in horns with China in global economic struggle for supremacy. As an elephant never forgets, we and our children will remember this American humiliation.

    What did we do wrong to qualify for this disgrace? It is possible that our government shirked its responsibility in not providing immigration information as allegedly claimed by some sources? There is information to suggest that for over two years, the USA government demanded some immigration details from us which we were unwilling or unable to provide.

    Perhaps there were issues of sovereignty and security on our part which American Homeland Security Department did not appreciate. Whatever the case might have been, somebody was derelict in the assignment and duties of his/ her office.

    This is not far-fetched because the Nigerian bureaucracy usually responds very slowly if at all. It is not every country that will buy the way we do things in our country. There is also the issue of insecurity and terrorism in our country.

    Reports about these must be in the diplomatic dispatches sent home by the American embassy in Nigeria to the State Department in Washington D.C.

    The recent surprising sudden opening of our borders to all Africans who fly into our country where visa will be issued on demand may also have jolted American government into action over the unpredictability of our immigration processes.

    Some of our nationals who are our honorary envoys in the USA have not served our country well. A significant number has been involved in fraud, identity crimes and credit card crimes generally.

    This lot has ruined the excellent representation of distinguished and scholarly Nigerians making contribution to American medicine and scientific and liberal academy. Eighty percent of Nigerians resident in the USA have second degrees or masters and doctorate degrees.

    I remember former President Bill Clinton saying Nigerian immigrants in the USA are the most educated people as a group in the USA. Certainly all these should count for something. Nigerian-Americans should do what all immigrants do, let their votes count in November.

    The leadership of the US Congress seems aware of their demographic strength and has accused President Trump of racism. Nigerian-Americans should get engaged in American electoral politics and make their presence felt.

    What is driving President Trump’s policy is his desire not only to make America great again but to make it white. There is statistical evidence that suggests that by the year 2050, white peoples will become a minority in the United States.

    This is a frightening scenario to most white Americans. Americans like to say they are a nation of immigrants. When they say this they mean white immigrants not black and brown.

    But with the influx of immigrants from Latin American countries as well as from Asia, the Middle East and Africa, the colour of Americans is beginning to change.

    This is why President Trump and other racists like him will continue to win in presidential elections not out of merit but out of fear. Nigeria just happens to have fallen on evil times at home and abroad.

    Read Also: Travel ban: Nigeria won’t react to speculations, says Presidency

     

    I hope our government people will realize that stopping Nigerians from going to America has some economic dimension. The $28 billion sent home by the Nigerian diaspora in the west will ultimately be affected.

    It is hoped that Boris Johnson, the Trump mimic in 10 Downing Street will not follow suit by banning our people from visiting Great Britain.

    Quite a few Nigerians have children and family members in the USA, and one can only imagine the psychological damage the effect of visa ban will have on those of us who will be victims.

    One may say it hasn’t reached that point yet, but if one can read between the lines, the end game of this policy is to ban us and some “shit hole “and problematic countries from normal ties with the USA.

    The current situation calls for soul searching by our leaders. Setting up a committee to enquire into our predicament is like bolting the door when the horse has escaped.

    What our government should do as a matter of urgency is mobilizing all Nigerians against insecurity in our country and for development. The insecurity situation is just simply unacceptable. Nowhere is safe or secure; not Katsina the president’s home state nor are other states including the entire north east zone safe.

    When a Christian leader in Adamawa can be beheaded by a terrorist without anyone being arrested, it shows a sign of collapse of not only government but civilization.

    Young girls are still being abducted to be impregnated by terrorists in the northern part of our country with impunity.

    These calamities are too numerous to count. We need a declaration of state of emergency in the whole country to put us back to the secure environment which we were used to.

    Governance is more than musical chairs of appointments of religiously and ethnically preferred people to those in power.

    We cannot continue like this. There is just too much suffering in the land. For example the Lagos-Ibadan road whose reconstruction began under General Obasanjo in 2007 is just reaching 45% completion.

    If it takes this length of time to reconstruct 100 kilometres road, how long will it take to rehabilitate most of the collapsed roads in the country?

    I give credit to the Buhari government, before him virtually nothing was done on our roads by presidents Obasanjo, Yar’Adua and Jonathan.

    But having said this, must we wait forever for these roads to be made fit for purpose? Our development deficit de-markets us as a serious country.

    Malaysians and Singaporeans on account of their development do not need visas to enter any western country including the USA.

    What I am saying is that the safety valve of legal immigration by our youth is being closed and I shudder to think of what the consequences will be on our security and our national development.

  • Nigeria: Time to laugh and cry at an old person in pampers

    By  Jide Osuntokun

     

    Nigeria became a sovereign country 60 years ago and by normal expectations this our dear country should have settled down by now properly providing a healthy environment for all its people to grow and thrive.

    There is of course no doubt that at independence the British cleverly booby trapped our trajectory of  growth and development as they did on the Indian sub-continent, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Pakistan ,The Central African federation, South Africa and in the oldest dominion in the Commonwealth, Canada.

    All these countries have somehow attempted finding solutions to their loaded and some would say, predictable and planned obstacles put in their ways by the departing “perfidious Albion”.

    In the case of India and Pakistan, the two countries have fought four wars over the control of Jammu and Kashmir between 1947 and 2017. East Pakistan declared itself Bangladesh in a brutal liberation war from Pakistan in 1971.

    On August 9, 1965, Singapore broke away from the Malaysian federation because of racial riots of September 1964. The two countries have prospered since then.

    Sri Lanka saw a bitterly fought civil war between majority Sinhalese and minority Tamils from 1983 to 2009 before an uneasy peace was imposed on the country by force of arms.

    The Central African Federation created by the British  in 1953 to include British colonies of northern and Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland (now Malawi ) dissolved in 1963 when northern Rhodesia ( Zambia ) and Malawi became independent  countries leaving Southern Rhodesia to fight a bitter racial war until it became independent Zimbabwe in 1980.

    South Africa fought a low intensity racial war from the 1960s until 1994 when a nonracial majoritarian democratic government emerged to maintain the present precarious peace in the country.

    Canada after series of French ethnic insurrections in Quebec resolved its identity crisis under the rubric of bilingualism and biculturalism in which the two founding nations are equal in spite of the demographic preponderance of Anglophone Canada.

    Nigeria too went through the baptism of fire in the civil war between 1967 and 1970 before a forced peace prevailed.

    This peace is not without challenge by those who feel the unitary government imposed on the country by the military since 1970 is not what our founding fathers negotiated as a basis of our political and economic association.

    Unless we learn from the fortunes and misfortunes of countries with which we share common historical ties and tradition, we will experience the same problem.

    If we had been more careful and had learned from the experience of countries similar to us as detailed above, we would not have fought the civil war in which a million or more poor people died. My emphasis is on suffering humanity who die in these unnecessary conflicts.

    The unfinished task of balancing the need for individual and group freedom and security with the interest of the wider political union of a proper federation is what is at the root of the present brouhaha over the Southwest desire to protect its people from internal and external terrorism in the face of the inability of the federal police to properly secure the whole country.

    The  southwest security outfit known as “Amotekun” should be welcome by the federation in other to prevent self-help by people pushed to the wall by those bent on killing and injuring them and laying their farms to waste.

    No people would fold their arms and allow other people whom they have in no way offended to descend on them killing their men and raping their wives and their male and female children, yes both boys and girls, and just remain quiescent.

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    It is the cries of these hapless people that the governors have responded to. The federal authorities must understand the level of political education of people in this part of the country and that if their governments fail to respond to matters of life or death, the people will react violently. It is to forestall this that Amotekun has come up.

    Governments everywhere exist for the common good. There should be no conflict between our demand for patriotism and the call to support our nation.

    One has to be alive first in our towns and villages before one can think of belonging to a wider political community like the federation. I personally have suffered because of lack of peace in my part of the world.

    I cannot visit my parents and my siblings’ resting places in the cemetery in my town because of the insecurity in my home state. Like many people living away from home, I am marooned in Lagos.

    What I believe the federal government should do is to ask the other five zones of the country to organize along the same line as the southwest. If we have six regional police services along with the federal police, some level of sanity is bound to prevail.

    We should reject the suggestion that Amotekun should not be armed. This is nonsensical and a non-starter. Even mai-guards are armed.

    My neighborhood night watchmen made up of ex-service men are armed and without arms they will be like women! Are we going to deploy unarmed men against Kalashnikov-carrying terrorists and brigands? That will be a recipe for disaster. .What is necessary is to license members to carry arms that are properly registered so that their use can be tracked.

    This is what is done in civilized countries of the world. Security goes beyond armed braggadocio; we must now use our common sense and intelligence. We should lay our cards on the table.

    Amotekun must be properly kitted to make the kind of impact required. The time has come when we must put in place a proper structural architecture for a modern state good enough to attract international development partners to help with the development of this country.

    If we do not do this, our country will die under its weight of inefficient and ineffective political and governance structures. The impression one gets nowadays is that our country is being run incompetently. The deep state is poorly served by people recruited without merit.

    Recently, I got a text that I should come to Abuja to collect my National ID card which I applied for in 2015. I was pleasantly surprised because I had forgotten about it since the card really does nothing for anybody that I know. Of course I couldn’t go to Abuja.

    I sent my nephew who is a lawyer to collect the card. The card finally got to me in the year of our Lord 2020. I looked at it and it says it will expire next month. The question I want to ask is – if the people in charge are brain dead or are insane? Why should a national ID expire? Common sense should have dictated that like birth certificate, the ID card should be forever at least for all adults.

    I asked people who had the cards before and they said it had no expiry date. My university ID card as a professor does not expire. It has the date it was issued but no expiry date. I checked my ID card when I was a member of the Presidential Advisory Council on International Affairs in the presidency; It has date issued and no expiry date.

    The issue of this card is a manifestation of how far we have sunk in public administration that we don’t seem to think about national affairs.

    This is simply because there is no merit in appointments and recruitment of staff particularly at the federal level where nepotism, religious and regional bias have replaced sense of nationalism and excellence and yet we shout daily about national unity being nonnegotiable and irrevocable.

    How many countries in the world do we know where if you want to buy a product or even medicine you are asked if you want “fake or original?” It happens in this country with un-policed or under-policed state where we all enjoy inflicting sorrow and pain on each other once one has some political leverage or advantage.

    It is not the issue of Amotekun that we should be talking about; rather we should be talking generally about  the federal government’s alienation from the majority of the people not just in the Southwest or Southeast but also in the North unless you belong to the favored few in the inner circle of those in power .

  • Suffering humanity in the Middle East

    By  Jide Osuntokun

     

    The shooting down of Ukraine air plane in Iran in which 176 innocent souls perished has brought to the fore the unacceptable tinderbox situation in the Middle East.

    This followed the assassination of General Qaseem Suleimani, the commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Force through a drone attack by the American government. Suleimani was killed in Iraq which had been virtually destroyed by American and western bombs following the war against Saddam Hussein and later against Abubakar Al- Baghdadi’s caliphate.

    Important legacies of ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, Babylon and Chaldea were obliterated. Suleimani was allegedly plotting against American forces in Iraq and American interests generally.

    America had previously tolerated Iranian attacks on shipping in the Persian Gulf, shooting down  of American drone and launching an attack on Saudi Arabian American-built, world’s largest  oil refinery.

    The assassination of Suleimani was the climax of seething antagonism between the Western hegemonic power of the United States of America and Iran, a putative power in the Middle East with determined influence and leadership of the Shia sect of Islam particularly in the Middle East and South and South East Asia and some toehold even in Nigeria.

    Iran was fuelling the conflict in Yemen, Syria, and Lebanon and had considerable influence on the Taliban in Afghanistan its neighbour to the East.

    In recent times and at considerable cost in American lives and money, the USA has had to contend with Saddam Hussein, Al Qaeda, Abubakar Al – Baghdadi’s ISIS and virtual Iranian take-over of Iraq. One of course can legitimately ask who made America the global gendarmes.

    As long as there is no other way of maintaining global peace outside some delicate balance of power among the super powers or under some informal directorate of global powers, the question of what is the USA doing in the Middle East or why it is there, will remain a moot question.

    The strategic importance of the Middle East in a world still dependent on hydrocarbons as sources of energy draws the big powers to the area. What will happen when the world abandons oil and gas remains in the belly of time.

    Even apart from the search for secure energy source, the Middle East is located along the most important shipping route in the world, and it is also a major meeting point for global culture.

    The Middle East is the place of origin of the three monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam and the holy sites in sometimes overlapping locations are found there occasioning conflict over primacy of ownership.

    The place has witnessed the rise and fall of the Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Persian and later the Phoenician empires before the place fell under the Greeks and later the Romans which brought the place into unequal relations with the western world.

    By the time Islam knitted together the various contending forces in the region by the 7th century, some semblance of order at considerable slaughter of people had been imposed under the largely Arab Umayyad  caliphate with headquarters in Damascus in Syria in 661.

    The Abbasid under Persian leadership took over control in 762 and moved the capital to Baghdad. The Caliphate was destroyed by Mongols in 1258.

    Later the Ottoman from 1301 to 1922 were to be the supreme force in the world of Islam until in 1918 when they were defeated along with Germany in the First World War and their Arab territories were “liberated” and Syria, and Lebanon came under France’s League of Nations mandate while Palestine, Transjordan, and Iraq came under British administration as mandated territories of the League of Nations.

    Even the kingdom of Saudi Arabia was largely a British creation. From then on, all attempts to drive out western influence in the Middle East have failed. Regimes have been changed at the whim of their western overlords.

    Earlier on from 1095 to 1291, in nine brutal  campaigns against Muslim control of Jerusalem, Christian knights in what has gone down in history as crusades fought to liberate Jerusalem from Islamic control and to set up colonies in the near East.

    This of course elicited equal massacres by Muslim forces against Christian knights from Europe. The point I am making is that western and Middle Eastern conflict has a long history. Unfortunately, this conflict is rooted in religious antipathy. But religion does not explain why the leadership of the Arab world are largely pro West.

    From Morocco, to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the gulf states and Oman, the leadership there and possibly their people follow a live-and-let-live policy with the west.

    Algeria in spite of its war of liberation against France in the 1950s and 1960s, has remained pro-west; so also has Tunisia. Yemen before the Houthis take-over of the place has been too poor to matter.

    But Persian Iran is a different kettle of fish. American and western attempt to dominate it has been rebuffed. After genuine nationalist government of Muhammad Mossadegh nationalized Iranian oil and took it from the British, western power was called in to reverse a genuine nationalist assertion and thus began the hostility between Iran and the West.

    The British appealed to the USA for help and the USA promptly through the CIA overthrew the democratically-elected Iranian government and restored power to Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran. In this way, the USA became the enemy of Iran.

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    The Shah, even though a modernizer, ruled with iron fist under American military tutelage until overthrown by students and Islamic fundamentalists led by grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini In 1979 thus ending a dynasty that was more than 2000 years old and also drawing a wedge between the USA and Iran.

    From this time onwards, Iran adopted two strategic policies that have continually brought  it into conflict with the USA. Iran realized that its security would always be threatened unless it developed a nuclear deterrence as well as a delivery capability in terms of missiles that could conceivably reach not only Israel and Europe but also the USA itself.

    It was the fear of this that made the Obama administration to sign with the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council and Germany the so-called P 5+1 with Iran the “Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) of 2015 essentially to prevent Iran refining Uranium up to nuclear weapons grade.

    This was to be verified by the International Atomic Agency of the UN in which all the signatory powers have representatives. This plan was to last initially for 10 years and renewable thereafter. Iran was to get its money seized by the USA after the Iranian revolution of 1979.

    Iran‘s missile programmes were also to be monitored. President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel feel that the treaty with Iran was too loose and that it will permit Iran to develop nuclear weapons.

    For this reason President Trump withdrew from the treaty and slammed comprehensive economic sanctions on Iran. These sanctions have virtually brought Iran’s economy down.

    A proud country like Iran, inheritor of an ancient civilization, finds itself humiliated and almost brought to its knees. In reaction, it has gone on adventurist policies of destabilization of the whole of the Middle East.

    This is the kernel of the problem in the Middle East and the USA’s relation with Iran. Unfortunately when two elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers. This has been the lot of suffering humanity which for the past 40 years has witnessed one war after the other with countries like Yemen, Libya, Syria, Palestine and Iraq in ruins.

    Iran has publicly said it will attack Saudi Arabia and the Emirates states if the USA attacks it. Iran also can expect to be supplied with Russian weapons. It was a Russian made missile that brought down the Ukrainian plane which killed 176 people about 100 of them young Iranians living or studying in Canada.

    The bogey of Godless Russia has been removed since the collapse of the Soviet Union so Iran can feel comfortable dealing with its Russian ally just as Turkey, a member of NATO, is awkwardly dealing with Russia in the purchase of advanced weapons in the face of western and USA‘s refusal to oblige it.

    The role of Turkey may be crucial in finding solution at least as Sunni counterbalance to Iran’s Shia influence. This may persuade the USA to treat Iran with less hostility. One hopes Iran will not gamble going to war with the USA and thus bringing total destruction to its ancient civilization and its people and precipitating a possible global Armageddon.

  • Psychology of greed and the principles of conflict – 2

    By Akintunde Akinkunmi

     

    We have already looked at some possible causative factors for the existence of greed and corruption, and we now turn to the nature and consequences of this veritable pestilence in the Nigeria of today.

    The simplest and best definition of corruption I have ever come across is that it is “the misuse of entrusted power and resources (by heritage, education, marriage, election, appointment or usurpation) for private gain”. The great virtue of this definition is that it encompasses the public and private sectors, and that it encompasses the entire hierarchy of society, from the top echelons to the humblest levels of society. The examples which follow are not strictly limited to Nigeria, but I am sure they will strike a chord for all of us:

    • In politics, it undermines good governance by flouting or subverting formal processes and procedures
    • In elections and in legislatures, it distorts representation in policy and law making
    • In the judiciary and in law enforcement agencies, it undermines the rule of law
    • In public administration it undermines the efficient provision of services
    • In government, it reduces the strength of the institutions of the state through the siphoning off of resources and the buying and selling of public office; it also undermines the legitimacy of government, and the levels of the populace’s trust in their government
    • In the private sector, it increases the costs of doing business, costs which are passed on to the consumer

    In 2004, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimated that between 1960 and 1999, $400 billion dollars was lost to corruption in Nigeria – at today’s exchange rate, that equates to N144 trillion; by comparison, the federal budget for 2020 is N10.33 trillion.

    Put another way, if you laid 400 billion one- dollar bills end to end, you would have enough to make 75 round trips to the moon. These are funds that could have provided hundreds of thousands of kilometres of good roads, hundreds of thousands of equipped and functioning schools and hospitals, and millions of public servants and pensioners who receive their salaries and pensions in a timely manner.

    This is therefore not an inconsequential problem, either in scope and in consequences, and I submit that a problem of this magnitude requires a systemic approach that involves a concise, coherent and focused application of overwhelming force in order to disrupt and ultimately defeat it.

    Principles of conflict

    NATO defines military doctrine as “the fundamental principles by which military forces guide their actions in support of objectives”. Since the central reason for the existence of any military force is to fight and defeat its enemy, the creation of effective fighting power is therefore key to this. There are three components of fighting power, namely:

    • Physical component – the weaponry and other hardware required to do the job
    • Moral component – the rules that govern what we do, and include concrete things like the laws of armed conflict, and less tangible things like motivation and morale. (According to Napoleon Bonaparte, in conflict, “the moral is to the physical as three is to one”)
    • Conceptual component – doctrine.

    It is on the last of these I intend to focus.

    Having, for the purposes of this discussion identified greed and corruption as our adversaries, it would be as well at this point, to quote from the British Army’s Doctrine Publication: “whether the belligerents are states or other entities, all conflict is essentially adversarial, human (involving friction, uncertainty, violence and stress) and political. Conflict is a reciprocal contest of will, in which multiple adversaries and actors act and react to each other, often unpredictably, in a struggle to succeed.

    Adversaries seek constantly to mitigate their own weaknesses, avoid opponents’ strengths, and focus instead on aligning their own strengths against weaknesses. As human dynamics lie at the heart of all conflict, it follows that the nature of conflict will continue to be influenced by and represent the entire spectrum of human behaviour, emotion and capability….our physiology limits what we can do physically…our psychology means that our decisions and behaviour are informed by our perceptions of what is happening”

    It will be apparent to you all by now that there are some parallels between some of the highlighted words in this doctrine publication, and our previous discussions on the subject of greed.

    Let us now acquaint ourselves with the Principles of Conflict.

    Our starting point must be the careful selection of our aim – what are we trying to achieve? It would be a mistake, in my opinion, to try and achieve the total elimination of greed/corruption, for the simple reason that it is simply not possible; as long as human beings are involved, there will always be corruption.

    That said, is it possible to mitigate it, and if so, how? I am reminded here of the words of General Colin Powell, at the time the Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, (and later Secretary of State), talking about the plan to expel invading the Iraqi Army from Kuwait in the first Gulf War: “First we’re going to cut it off, and then we’re going to kill it”.

    Elegantly simple and easily understood by everyone from General down to Private. For our purposes, we can rephrase our aim thus: “First we’re going to cut off as far as possible the avenues by which greed can mutate into corruption, and then we’re going to kill it by making the consequences of being caught as unbearable as we possibly can”.

    Talk, however, is cheap, and has to be followed up by action – the Iraqi Army was not expelled from Kuwait simply by General Powell’s elegant prose, it was expelled by the focused and relentless application of overwhelming force to back up his words.

    And we must maintain our aim by being relentless, as to fail to do this gives the adversary the breathing space to regroup. In our case, we must ensure the vigorous application of existing laws and processes, and I would suggest that the first step is to overhaul, radically, if necessary, the instruments of law and order, especially the police and the judiciary.

    Read Also: Court throws out EFCC’s plea to screen witness in Maina’s trial

     

    None of this is likely to happen in the absence of determined and visionary leadership, because changing the culture that engenders and sustains greed is likely to be much more difficult in the absence of this key factor.

    The maintenance of our selected aim implies the need for offensive action, as set out above, for our chances of victory will be increased by knocking and keeping our adversary off balance, overwhelming his capability to decide and act, and eroding his will to continue the fight.

    In so doing, we impair his ability to maintain his morale, whilst increasing our ability to do that as our own forces begin to see progress in overwhelming the adversary.

    Catching our adversary by surprise means he is likely to be unprepared for our offensive action, and this in turn further impairs his ability to fight back; but in order to surprise him, we must make plans within a bubble of security that gives us the freedom of action to strike at a time and in the manner of our own choice.

    There is, however, little point in spreading ourselves so thinly that in trying to attack everywhere, we are effective nowhere; we must therefore concentrate our forces and fighting power, preferably pitting our strength against the adversary’s weaknesses, in order to further degrade his ability to effectively respond to our onslaught.

    Given that our resources are unlikely to be limitless, we must shepherd what we have, applying it where we get, as it were, and the biggest bang for our buck, thereby applying the principle of economy of effort.

    Our adversary, however, is unlikely to simply roll over and let us walk right through him – he is much more likely to fight back with every weapon in his armoury. We must therefore be prepared to be flexible in our responses to his inevitable counterattacks.

    Both our attack on our adversary, and our response to his inevitable counterattacks, are more likely to be successful if we identify, seek out and cooperate with allies with whom we can share the dangers, burdens, risks and opportunities.

    And finally, we must ensure that our efforts to combat this adversary are sustainable, and not a one-day wonder, by laying the foundations for, and building enduring institutions that will ensure that our fighting power, and our freedom of manoeuvre in deploying that fighting power is maintained.

     

    • Maj-Gen (rtd) Akinkunmi, MBBS LLM FRCPsych FRCP (Glasg) psc VRSM(+) formerly of the British Royal Army Medical Corps delivered this paper at the 21stAnnual Benjamin O Osuntokun Memorial Lecture on January 6.

  • Psychology of greed and the principles of conflict

    By  Jide Osuntokun

     

    The Oxford English Dictionary defines greed as “a strong desire for more wealth, possessions, powers, etc. than a person needs”. Its counterpart, the Cambridge English Dictionary puts it thus: “a strong desire to continually get more of something, especially money”.

    Another definition of greed is that it is “the excessive desire to acquire or possess more than one needs or deserves, especially material wealth”.

    All these definitions of greed could be reasonably described as involving a diminution, if not the complete absence of of satiety, and this might be an opportune moment to look into our brains in search of a possible causative explanation of greed.

    Neuroscientific theories of greed

    The hypothalamus, a structure about the size of an almond, is located at the base of the brain, and, for something so small, it exerts a significant effect on several of the functions of a living human being.

    These include, for example, regulating a number of metabolic processes, linking the nervous system to the endocrine system via it’s near neighbour the pituitary gland, and, crucially for the purposes of this lecture, forming a major part of the limbic system, which is involved in the key functions of emotions, motivation, learning and memory.

    The ventromedial nuclei of the hypothalamus house the satiety centre, which, simply put, tells us when we have eaten enough, whilst the lateral nuclei prompt us to eat.

    Now, it is obvious that these hypothalamic functions relate to the intake of food, but the critical factor here is that the same hypothalamus, as mentioned above, is also part of the limbic system, which is the link between subcortical structures and the cerebral cortex; in other words, between the satiety centre, emotions and behaviours/actions.

    The obvious (to my mind, at least) question that needs to be asked here is this: is it possible that the phenomenon of greed, as defined above, may be partially have its origins in malfunctioning neuroanatomy or physiology?

    In order to address this question, it is necessary to consider other potential causative factors, and to do this I move from the brain to the mind.

    Psychological and philosophical theories of greed

    The Chinese philosopher, Lao Tsu, writing in 500BC, wrote that “There is no calamity greater than lavish desires, no greater guilt than discontentment, and no greater disaster than greed”

    The Ancient Greeks describe the concept of pleonexia, defined as the insatiable (that word satiety again!) desire to have what rightfully belongs to others, modified by John Ritenbaugh in 1988 as “ruthless self-seeking and an arrogant assumption that others and things exist for one’s own benefit”.

    According to the Ancient Greeks, pleonexia was both immature and immoral, and thus to be signs of “an atrophic superego leading to perdition”.

    The 17th century English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, in his 1651 book Leviathan, had this to say: “If in this case, at the making of Peace, men require for themselves, that which they would not have to be granted to others, they do contrary to the precedent law, that commandeth the acknowledgment of natural equalitie, and therefore also against the law of Nature. The observers of this, are those we call Modest, and the breakers Arrogant Men”

    It will come as no surprise to anyone that there are divergent views on the subject of greed. At around the same time that Hobbes wrote Leviathan, the English physician and philosopher, John Locke took exception to the idea that there was such a thing as greed, preferring to regard it as “enlightened self-interest”.

    Writing in Capitalism Magazine 19 years ago almost to the day, Walter Williams, Professor of Economics at George Mason University in the United States, opined that, “without greed, our current economic and social structures would implode….greed produces profitable economic outcomes most times and under most conditions”.

    So…is greed innate, or do we learn it?

    One theory holds that, in addition to the obvious nutritional benefit of an infant suckling at its mother’s breast, there is also an additional element of pleasure involved – and that this pleasure is replicated in acquisitiveness, where possessions are acquired not just for need, but for the pleasure involved in taking, holding and hoarding.

    This theory, however, has the obvious flaw that, whilst the vast majority of us have at one time suckled on our mothers’ breasts, not all of us (hopefully!) “have an excessive desire for more than is needed or deserved, not for the greater good, but for one’s own selfish interest, and at the detriment of others and society at large” (Burton, 2014).

    So, what sets the greedy folks amongst us apart? We have already referred to the possibility of flawed neuroanatomical structure or neurophysiological function. Neel Burton suggests that greed may also arise from “early negative experiences such as parental inconsistency, neglect or abuse.

    In later life, feelings of anxiety and vulnerability, often combined with low self-esteem, lead the person to fixate on a particular substitute for what he or she once needed but could not find” He goes on to point out that, as human beings, we have a unique capacity to project ourselves into the future, up to and beyond our death, and that we are all, to varying degrees, haunted by our own mortality.

    This, when taken in combination with our strong survival instincts, generates anxiety “about our purpose, meaning and value”.

    This existential anxiety, although mostly subconscious, occasional intrudes into our consciousness, prompting us to seek comfort through compensatory behaviours – of which greed is but one.

    And then there is the factor of our culture. Where, as I would argue is the case in Nigeria, our culture places a premium on materialism, is it possible that we could become immune to satisfaction? If so, is that aided and abetted by the complex interplay between possible structural abnormalities and impaired physiological functioning in our brains, as well as early and on-going negative life experiences? Or is Nikelly right when, in 2006, he averred that greed is nothing more than “cultivated behaviour fueled by economic or cultural values, and is neither inherited nor universal”?

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    Whatever its parentage, greed often spawns other problems: deception, spite, envy and theft, to name but four. Abraham Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs is often presented as a five-level pyramid, with needs at the higher levels of the pyramid coming into focus only when the needs at the lower, more basic levels of the pyramid have been met.

    Maslow described the top level of the pyramid as a growth need, because it enables him or her to reach their fullest potential as a human being; the problem with greed in this context is that it gets the individual stuck on one of the four lower levels, and thus unable to “self-actualise”, as Maslow puts it.

    Again, I strongly doubt that anybody would dissent from the suggestion that we live in an increasingly religious and religiously polarized society in Nigeria (and, in my humble opinion, also an increasingly godless one).

    And yet, I know not of a single major religious faith that does not explicitly and strongly disapprove of greed, for the obvious reason that it not only exalts self above whichever deity one happens to believe in, but also because, as mentioned earlier, one result of greed is to deprive one’s fellow man of what belongs to them.

    In summary, therefore, greed may be the result of a multitude of factors (neuroanatomical and neurophysiological defects, attachment theories, adverse life experiences, existential anxieties, learned behaviour fueled by cultural or economic values), and its harvest (bitter or sweet, depending on one’s particular perspective), include innovation and economic growth on the one hand, and deception, envy, theft and spite on the other.

    I invite you all now, at this point, to consider substituting the word “GREED” for the word “CORRUPTION” in the context of the Federal Republic of Nigeria in 2020.

    You might well question the validity of what appears on the face of it to be a bold suggestion that greed and corruption are synonymous….and you would have a point.

    Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that corruption would neither exist nor thrive without greed, and that not all greedy people are necessarily corrupt. So, whilst it may not be strictly true to portray them both as being synonymous, there is nevertheless a strong association between both.

    • Maj-Gen (rtd) Akinkunmi, MBBS LLM FRCPsych FRCP (Glasg) psc VRSM(+) formerly of the British Royal Army Medical Corps delivered this paper at the 21stAnnual Benjamin O Osuntokun Memorial Lecture on January 6.