Category: Jide Osuntokun

By Jide Osuntokun

As we celebrate the birthday of our Lord Jesus Christ may the peace and goodwill associated with the day radiate to all our people in this country and to mankind worldwide.

May rivers of peace and prosperity flow into our individual lives so that we can again have a country that we used to know in our youth.

In those days we used to travel to our towns and villages to be with our loved ones and the extended families. Alas ! those days are gone because of fear of kidnappers, killers ,herders and highway robbers.

Christmas was first celebrated in Rome about 336 AD but did not become a major Christian festival until the 9th century.Christmas has evolved overtime from an embrace and incorporation of two pagan traditions of the Germanic and Nordic Yule and the Roman Saturnalia which were celebrations of  the winter Solstice of revelry involving eating ,drinking and giving of gifts in midwinter in both Northern Europe and the Roman Empire .

The introduction of Christmas trees was  a unique German tradition which has now spread to the whole world . There is evidence to suggest that our Lord Jesus Christ was born in early spring and not winter but that the early missionaries in Europe took over the pagan celebrations  of Yule and Saturnalia and imposed the birth of Jesus on them for the purpose of conversion of European pagans to Christianity.

Whether Jesus Christ was born in early Spring or midwinter is immaterial and insignificant. What is important is the arrival of God in human body which is central to Christianity not the date of the birth of Christ. December 25 is the symbolic date of the birth of Christ and indeed christians celebrate the  birth  of Jesus everyday.

To Christians worldwide ,it is the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ that gives us the hope of a life hereafter for those who believe  that Jesus is the son of God and part of the indivisible Trinity of God the father , the son and the Holy Spirit  , three in one , a concept which cannot be easily grasped by ordinary mortals .

Today  Christmas is celebrated everywhere in the world even among non Christians .This is the danger that this religious mass ( Mass of Christ) faces because of its commercialization. It is now more Associated with shopping, parties and exchange of gifts than the solemnity the birth of our Lord deserves .

Thank God Easter has not been as commercialized as Christmas because that would have been a tragedy. The United States of America  ,the heartland of capitalism ,has even gone further in its political correctness to celebrate at the same time of Christmas an eight day  Jewish celebrations of Hanukkah, from December 22nd to 30th December commemorating the rededication during the second century B.C of the second Temple in Jerusalem where according to legend ,Jews had risen up against their Greek- Syrian oppressors in  the Maccabean Revolt .

African – Americans will not be left behind they also celebrate KWANZAA from December 26 to January 1 to honour African heritage. It is obvious that Christmas has not only been commercialized in the United States,it has also been politicized .

Since American culture is globally dominant , I can foresee their idiosyncratic celebrations  of these three distinct festivals spreading to many parts of the world particularly to Europe and Africa.

The idea of Santa Klaus riding on a convoy of  Reindeers and coming down through the chimneys bearing presents to children is a western innovation to the Christmas feast .

One of my grand children was worried about her grandpa not receiving his gifts because there is no snow in Nigeria for reindeers to travel on ! I wonder which part of the Christmas story resonates with my grandchildren ,whether the birth of Jesus Christ or the Santa Klaus bringing gifts .

I remember contributing to this myth when my children were young and when I was living in Canada and America. The tradition of  Christmas tree in my house continued while home in Nigeria and did not cease until the passing into glory of  Abiodun my wife .

Today Christmas to me is just another day to remember how God in his infinite wisdom and mystery came down enveloped in a human body to reconnect with fallen humanity through the eventual sacrifice of Jesus Christ as a  propitiation  for mankind’s manifold sins .

In other words we should celebrate Christmas and Easter everyday at least in our minds and in our character of showing humility characteristic of Jesus’ birth and sacrifice symbolized by his death and the triumph of his resurrection.

When I was young Christmas was a Major feast  in Nigeria. In Ekiti in those days ,we abandoned our perennial dish of pounded yam and bush meat for rice and chicken .

Read Also: Christmas: Pope defends migrants, seeks peace

Like Indians we ate the rice with our hands not with forks and knives , of course later we started using table spoons . When the chicken was served , we children ate the heads , wings ,feet and toes .

The parents who actually did not need to eat too much meat since they had stopped growing told the children that the better parts of the chicken belonged to the older members of the families and if young people ate too much meat they will become thieves as adults especially if and when they could not afford to buy chicken.

There is probably some logic in their reasoning ! We ate rice on such big occasions  like Christmas not like now when our country is addicted to imported rice from the Americas and Asia . In those halcyon days we ate what we grew . When we ate rice it came from Nupeland , Abakaliki and from Igbemo in Ekiti.

Later upland rice was grown in what is now Effon and Ekiti West . Rice is still grown in these places today and if there were  correct and sufficient inputs the productivity of the farmers can be increased to satisfy local needs .

In those days it was obligatory for our parents to buy shoes and clothes for us  and if not many children took ill .I remember our clothes were sewn by local tailors. Sometimes we deployed ourselves like troops around tailors to ensure they did not disappoint us .

No children would follow their parents to church in old clothes no matter how new and fashionable they were . It was a psychological thing .

Christmas also marked the end of the academic year and kids who did well and were promoted to the next class had double reasons to celebrate. During the festive  season children also visited their parents’ friends to collect gifts and to join in the merrymaking.

Our Muslim friends and relations were not left out in the joy of Christmas just as they did  not leave us out of their celebrations of Id -el  Adha ( Ileya) .In some places children put on masques to dance around like in Brazilian carnival.

This may be the impact of Afro – Brazilian returnees to places like Lagos and Abeokuta which then eventually diffused culturally to other parts of yorubaland .Carols were and are still sung in Orthodox Churches and even the Pentecostal churches that did not celebrate Christmas have now begun to have Christmas carols just to join the merry making .

But they do not have special masses as in the Orthodox Churches . The Redeemed Christian Church of God , one of the largest Pentecostal churches in Nigeria use the time of Christmas festivities to embark on “ fishing for men” that is embarking on evangelization among non Christians .

Just as in the western world Christmas is seen as time for family reunion. In Nigeria people travel long  and dangerous journeys  because of bad roads to be with their families.

Some whose families are spread all over the world travel out to meet their children and grand children. For the old and elderly and particularly widows and widowers ,Christmas can  be really lonely ,and it si incumbent on Christians to remember such people and extend the hands of Christian fellowship in remembrance of the humble beginning of the baby Jesus. I say again to all who follow me on this column.

Merry Christmas and happy new year in advance .

I got a distress call from one of my former students in the United States about Sowore and the DSS invasion of a high court in Abuja to re-arrest and seize their quarry. She said a video was trending on the internet and showed Nigeria in a bad light.

This young Ph.D. student in one of the universities in Illinois, United States was actually crying about the situation in our country. She said she saw the lady judge handling the case take to her heels with her files and gown flying in different directions while her police orderly was trying to help her.

I tried to calm her down by telling her all will be well and that she should face her studies and not become an emotional wreck. I have not seen the video she alluded to but I have read the account in the papers. I then told the young lady about my own experience as a Ph.D. student during the Nigerian civil war and how I was emotionally traumatized.

The International media particularly the BBC was suffused with starving children of Biafra dying of Kwashiorkor. Then when the then Colonel Benjamin Adekunle and his 3rd marine commando division captured Port Harcourt in 1968, the BBC announced the event and the newscaster said “British oil wells are safe in Nigerian hands”.

As a young radical, I broke down in tears telling myself that the two black armies were fighting to secure “British oil wells” in Nigeria. From that time on, I could not continue with my research.

My General Practitioner (GP) in London could not help. I went and saw an Egyptian neurologist who put me on Valium three times a day. This did the trick and I was able to complete my programme.

When I finally submitted my thesis and I wrote in the introduction that I suffered a psychological breakdown, my thesis supervisor, Professor John Edgar Flint, who is still very much alive, advised me to remove it because people in future might think I went mad.

I removed it but I know what I went through. I knew I was knocked down but not knocked out!  I told this story to calm my former student who is emotionally tied to the wellbeing of her country that it is not a strange phenomenon.

When some of us worry about our country, it is because of our experience. The young lady said to me “if Nigeria was ok what would I be doing in the USA where for the first time in my life I became aware of my colour being my defining factor?” I told her I went through the same experience. This is why we all must do something to build this country together.

I saw the video of Jerry Rawlings, former president of Ghana recently saying that if Nigeria gets its act together by restructuring its polity along regional lines, our country has the potential of being the greatest country not only in Africa but in the world.

All things are possible, but it will require a lot of discipline and unity and perhaps tears, blood and iron, to parody what Otto von Bismarck said about German unification in 1870. What do I mean by this?

I will give four examples of unacceptable criminal behavior of our people which should elicit tough and strong reactions. There was a news item of bolts being removed by thieves on the new rail line under construction from Lagos to Ibadan.

When I heard about this, the first thing that happened to me was that I lost my appetite the whole day. I wish the Air Force will deploy one or two helicopter gunships to shoot at sight anyone found tampering with such strategic assets.

The same treatment should be meted to those tampering with oil pipelines anywhere in the country. Sometimes last week, a so-called pastor in Isheri-Olofin  while baptizing a member of his church was said to have mistakenly poured petrol instead of “holy water” on one of his parishioners.

The burning candle in front of them set the pastor and parishioner alight. The fire then spread to vandalized oil pipelines nearby setting the entire area on fire.

Now where else in the world could this have happened but in Nigeria? We just lack discipline in every facet of our life and draconian steps must be taken to put out the fire of indiscipline before we are consumed by deliberate acts of criminality.

Recently it was reported that the governor of Kaduna State, Nasir El-Rufai installed in the Rigasa area of Kaduna, solar street lights. He did this with the usual publicity characteristic of politicians. Within a week, all the street lights went dead.

On investigation, it was discovered that all the batteries had been removed and stolen. He called all the police DPO and councilors in the area giving them a week to find the batteries or lose their jobs. The batteries were immediately found and the solar lights restored.

Now what kind of country is this where citizens will deliberately vandalize facilities put in place to make their lives better? The governor should have continued with his investigation to find out the culprits and hand them over not to the police but to the EFCC.

Some years ago my church parish in Ibadan on finding out that the police office in our area was always plunged into darkness when there was power cut, which occurred frequently, bought a generator and donated it to the police. A few weeks later the DPO was transferred.

Read Also: Sowore planned court drama to embarrass Nigeria, says coalition

He simply took the generator with him and returned the office to the dark nights which we tried to end by our generosity.

Whenever I travel on the Lagos-Ibadan expressway under construction, I notice that the flyovers across the expressway are being repaired because the steel barriers on both sides of the flyovers have been removed and fabricated into long spoons sold to caterers.

Government at extra cost has to replace these steel barriers with concrete slabs. They will have to do this at about ten overhead bridges crossing the expressway.

What a country! Recently, Raila Oginga Odinga, former prime minister of Kenya was comparing corruption in Nigeria and Malaysia.

He said ministers in Malaysia take ten percent of the cost of projects as bribes while in Nigeria they take one hundred percent.

Does anybody blame him for ridiculing a fallen elephant being ridden by ants? Our High Commissioner in that country should write him a stiff protest and make a video telling the ingrate how he irresponsibly brought his country to the brink of civil war twice over election and what role Nigeria played when he came crying to Nigeria for intervention and that his country calling Nigeria corrupt is that of a kettle calling the pot black!

The time has come when we really have to shape up. For how long will our potentialities as a country remain latent? This question was asked us by Condoleezza Rice, former United States Secretary of State at a breakfast meeting sometimes in 2013 in Abuja.

In the past we used to have five year development plans before Babangida came and dispensed with it and replaced it with “rolling plan” which apparently gathers no moss.

Now we do not have any plan at all and we seem to live from day to day depending solely on the vagaries of rise and fall of crude oil and gas. In the meantime our population is growing at galloping rate and the inevitable crisis of youth rebellion stares us in the face in the various manifestations of violent youth resentment.

We need to summon up the courage of looking at the political configuration of our country to cut down costs through restructuring into six or eight states and allowing each to develop at its own pace while contributing to fund the centre and maintaining an irreducible minimal national development.

The present over concentrated political and economic power at the centre is not working and it is in everybody’s interest to replace it with what works in other federations of the world.

The planned revival of the textile industry in Nigeria is a strategy in the right direction of improving the economy, creating jobs and funding the industries necessary for appropriate industrialization of our country. Most of the textile industries in Nigeria fulfill the spatial criteria for inclusive national development because they are located mainly in Kano, Kaduna, Aba and Ikeja. One only prays that unlike previous plans to revive the textile industry, the money this time will not be stolen  , mismanaged and in the word of a former Vice President “misapplied” whatever that was supposed to mean. The textile industry in Nigeria presents us great opportunities for backward integration to the raw materials being sourced locally. Before oil, the economy of northern Nigeria was based on production of groundnuts and cotton. The two produce were largely exported but by the 1960s, textile mills sprang up in Kano and Kaduna providing jobs for thousands of people. Also oil mills for crushing cotton seeds and groundnuts also became common feature of the economy. Alas all these disappeared gradually when government’s foreign reserves no longer depended on agricultural produce but on commission paid to our government by foreign oil companies.

In the southern part of our country, there were textile industries in places like Aba, Ado Ekiti and Ikeja which relied on imported cotton yarn from Egypt and the Sudan. Instead of depending on increased local cotton production, the southern textile mills did not enjoy the advantage of backward integration even though cotton could also be grown in transitional zones in the south before reaching the rain forest. Historically, there existed thriving textile native industries owned usually by women. These women provided school uniforms for their children in their ancient looms behind their homes. Cotton harvested from their farms were manually turned into yarns using their own fabricated tools. These women also had dyes gotten from plants and in Yoruba land for instance, Osogbo was famous for its dyes even though most women were historically involved in the textile and dye industries. Thank God the importation of British textiles did not completely kill the local industry which still survives in Ilorin, Oyo, Iseyin, and northern Oyo generally. They also survive in Ondo, some parts of Igbo land and in Sokoto, Kano and Borno. On important occasions our people are still decked in these traditional textile apparels. The point I am making is that unlike southern and eastern parts of Africa where before the coming of the white man there, their native attire were mainly animal hides and skins.

When Governor General Sir Reginald Wingate  of Sudan In 1925 decided to irrigate vast area of the Sudan for agricultural development especially the growing of cotton and other produce, Nigerians were sought after for work in the Al Jazirah ( Gezira)  scheme. Most of the workers who built the scheme were Nigerians stranded on their way to or return from the hajj. They have now made the Sudan home and constitute a large portion of the population of the Sudan usually referred to as “Fellata”. The Al jazirah scheme contributes more than 50% to the economy of the Sudan. Imagine what we can do if our surplus and underutilized labour is harnessed for cotton production on irrigated farms to satisfy our domestic textile need and for export.

Read Also: Nigerians hail Senate over proposed five-year ban on textiles

Countries like India, China, the USA and Great Britain itself started their journey of industrialization from the textile industry. At the onset of industrialization in the USA, cotton based on unpaid free black labour was king. Industrial Britain grew from its textile mills in Lancashire before the development of heavy industries in Birmingham. The reason for this is that the machines needed for textile mills were not as complex as those of heavy industries. Imagine if Nigeria can provide all her textile needs for everything from what we wear to furnishings, the number of millions of our people who will be in gainful employment. There are probably more than 150 million people who will need clothes of different types. Millions of school children who will need uniforms. The police, customs, immigration and the military and other uniformed forces would need to be provided for. What about beddings, window blinds, flags and so on. Imagine the millions of tailors who will find jobs working for fashion houses or for themselves. We have this blessing of a huge market. What seems absent and missing is somebody or government to mobilize our people to translate the latent force in our country to economic reality. Imagine if we ban importation of all textiles and force ourselves to rely on and use what we have. Within 10 years, we will be one of the strongest economies in the world and we will not have to beg Donald Trump to extend the AGOA (African Growth and Opportunity Act) put in place by the Clinton administration to encourage African countries to export their products to the USA under most favorable terms.

I am not suggesting a policy of autarky.  Why not? China closed its borders for more than a decade before joining the global economy as a force to be reckoned with. In terms of purchasing power parity China is the biggest economy in the world today. Of course with our known slothfulness and celebration of ethnicity, mediocrity rather than meritocracy, we do not have the discipline needed to leapfrog from the economic doldrums we find our country to a modern economy. But in the advancing world of knowledge economy and moving away from dependence on hydrocarbons as sources of energy, we will soon find out we have no economy unless we mobilize to prepare for a future which will need less of our oil and gas because of their deleterious and abusive impact on the environment causing severe strain on global climate.

Since our avowed aim is to diversify our economy away from oil and gas and to replace it with agriculture and other sustainable industries, textile industries fit appropriately our strategy. Firstly, most of the textile mills are state corporations owned and even where there are substantial foreign participation in ownership there should be no hindrance in local buy in through the stock exchange. There may even be the need to build new mills if the old ones are too decrepit that it will be waste of resources repairing them. By now we ought to have learnt our lessons from the perennial waste of millions of dollars on petroleum refineries that should have been sold or scrapped a long time ago but still continue to guzzle millions of dollars because of deep state corruption. We can also learn from the Al jazirah scheme in the Sudan by government getting directly involved in the production of cotton for home industries and export of its surplus. Where there are individual farmers growing the stuff, government particularly state governments and not the federal government should provide loans to assist them. This may also be the time to bring back the old cotton commodity board to guarantee fixed and profitable prices to producers so that they would not be faced with gyration of prices which may discourage farmers.

What one has suggested for cotton can also apply to cocoa, rubber, palm oil and palm kernel, groundnuts, Shea butter, cashew, maize, sugar cane and soya beans. We ought to have a policy of adding value to our agricultural products. We have the land and water and abundant sunshine; all we need to do is put our thinking caps on and make what potentialities given to us by God come into reality.

As JF Kennedy the former president of the USA famously said “The work of government will not be finished in one administration and not even in our own, but let us begin”.

This is my charge to this current administration at the federal and state levels

As a young man in 1971/72 academic year, I taught at the University of the West Indies Cave Hill Campus, Barbados. I had read that historically Barbados was regarded as one of the gems on the British crown on account of its richness as one of the largest producers of sugar for Great Britain.

The name Barbados comes from the Spanish word “los Barbados” meaning the bearded one. The island had native trees that looked like full grown beards and this feature gave the island the sobriquet of Barbados.

Students of history know that the sugar could not be grown by the British themselves because of tropical diseases like malaria found on the island.

Although poor English and Irish prisoners were shipped down there, the experiment failed because these unfortunate people died quickly like flies.

It was in this situation that the British resorted to using the native Caribs of the island but they too could not bear the hard work and rigour needed to produce sugar. Then the Africans came into the picture.

As far back as the 15th century, the Portuguese who by the papal bull of demarcation ”Inter Caetera” issued by Pope Alexander VI on May 4, 1493 had the eastern part of the world as their preserve for naval enterprises and exploitation and exploration while their Spanish counterpart had the remaining western part had become familiar with West Africa.

The Portuguese had by this law been visiting Africa and the Far East, first as explorers and later as traders. Their first contact with West Africa was with the Upper Guinea coast. According to Professor Walter Rodney, the Portuguese used to buy “blue cloth” from the Nigerian coast and traded it to people in the Upper Guinea Coast.

This blue cloth were indigo dyed native textiles woven in Yoruba and Bini areas of present day Nigeria and the industry even though  now dying still survives until today.

But with demand for African labour in the new American plantations in the 17th century, the Africans themselves became the article of trade. By the time the slave trade was abolished, about 15 million hapless Africans, according to Professor Joseph Inikori, had been shipped to the Americas which included the Caribbean where Barbados is located.

This figure does not include the millions of Africans thrown into the ocean when they fell sick so that they would not contaminate the remaining black cargoes.

Professor Eric Williams in his path-breaking study of the slave trade entitled “Capitalism and slavery” from his Oxford University Ph.D. thesis of 1947 said it is one of the ironies of history that producing such a sweet thing like sugar would have entailed the commission of such act of cruelty and bitter sorrow to fellow human beings like the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

Eric Williams in later years became the prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago arguably the richest of the British West Indian islands on account of its production in recent years of crude petroleum and gas.

When sugar could be gotten from India and Canadian beet tree, the West Indian islands became expendable to the British by the beginning of the 19th century and it was in this circumstance that the so-called abolitionist movement associated with William Wilberforce took root and grew to the extent that by the early 19th century, slave trade and then slavery were officially abolished but the trade continued illegally for decades later. The capitalist interpretation of the abolition of slavery got me into trouble during my days at graduate school in Canada when one of my conservative professors nearly had an heart attack on hearing me say the slave trade and slavery were not abolished because of British humanitarianism but on account of struggle for power and market by the British merchants making money from the Indian trade as opposed to those old oligarchs of the West Indian sugar trade.

It is necessary to put my visit to Barbados within the context of history and my intellectual exposure to the West Indies. When I went there as a lecturer in 1971, I was already armed with all the facts of the place and what to expect. Of course one had met several West Indians in London and Canada during the course of my studies.

African students’ relations with fellow young West Indians were sometimes prickly to put it in diplomatic language. The reason for this was that Africans were ambitious and wanted to finish their studies and return home as soon as was possible. West Indians on the other hand felt at home in England and Canada. Secondly, some Africans foolishly looked down on West Indians and black Americans on account of their servile origin. Thirdly and perhaps most explosive reason was that young West Indian girls seemed to like African boys perhaps out of curiosity and sentiment.

This was the baggage I carried to the West Indies as a young lecturer. Needless to say I was very popular in the university. I was the exact opposite of the bumbling Tarzan the people had felt an African would be. But racism was nevertheless rearing its ugly head in the place.

There was a statement which captured and perhaps still expresses the predicament of the black person in the West Indies today in terms of employment in the predominant services industries of banking, finance, tourism, and insurance.

The saying was “if you are white, you are alright; if brown, stick around and if black, get lost”. Looking around Barbados like an intelligence officer spying on the people, I noticed that the blacks constitute a preponderant proportion of the unemployed or underemployed.

They are more likely to be found as waiters in the hotels and workers cutting cane in the rum industry. They are also the rank and file of the police and lifeguards on the beaches where mostly white tourists and the Barbadian middle class go to relax.

They are also the musicians who make the calypso that the Eastern Caribbean is famous for. They also peddle drugs such as marijuana and stronger ones like cocaine. Any tourist is more likely to be propositioned to buy drugs!

What blew my mind is the phenomenal development that had taken place on the island in the last 40 seven years since I lived there. The aviation industry has prospered and the airport is welcoming and of international standards.

The major roads are dualised and the smaller parish roads are well maintained. The island also has well maintained drainage system. The educational sector is well provided for. When I was in their university campus at Cave Hill, the University of the West Indies had campuses in Mona Jamaica, St. Augustine Trinidad and Tobago and Georgetown on the mainland of South America in Guyana.

All the campuses had the humanities and social sciences but the professional courses in engineering and medicine were in Trinidad, Basic sciences and pre-medical sciences were in Jamaica and Barbados had law. The campus in Barbados was the smallest and served the eastern Caribbean islands of Grenada, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Anguilla, Saint Lucia, Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Saint Kitts and Nevis and it offered courses in law, social sciences and humanities.

It was a small campus when I was there but it has now blossomed into many faculties including medicine. Seeing the place brought back memories of my youth of traveling round the world.

Two of my colleagues, Woodvile Marshall and Keith Hunte have been knighted by the British Queen and also have colleges named after them. If I had not hurriedly returned home in 1972, perhaps a building like the library may have been named after me.

Who knows?  Barbados is very British with members of the British royal family having estates where they spend their winters.

The late princess Margret, the sister of Queen Elizabeth was a frequent resident and visitor there. The people are also very British with cricket being a national past time and the island in the past produced one of the greatest cricketers in the world, the legendary Sir Garfield Sobers. In 47 years, the island has been so completely transformed that I could hardly recognize the place. This is the way Nigeria should go!

By Jide Osuntokun

Driving on Nigerian roads in the best of times is a great challenge. Drivers are not properly trained on road usage, driving regulations and laws and what side of the road to take while driving. It sometimes seems to me that drivers are totally oblivious of the rights or presence of other road users while driving on the roads. It is almost normal to see trailers and long articulated lorries driving in the inner curbs of the roads rather than on the outside leaving other drivers to overtake them wrongly on their right rather than on their left side of the roads. When a long lorry or slow drivers stay in the fast lane, others overtake them wrongly causing unnecessary accidents and deaths. Furthermore drivers avoid potholes and other portions of the roads that are bad and drive and weave here and there possibly colliding with other road users. The saddest part of this whole tragedy on our roads is that drivers are not aware that they are doing anything wrong. Obviously there is a need to overhaul the licensing regulations and the role of vehicle inspection organizations to remove crazy drivers from our roads. To make matters worse, many of these drivers are intoxicated on alcohol, drugs and all kinds of mind-changing substances.

Sometimes in the 1970s, a famous economics professor in the University of Lagos was run over by a trailer on Lagos-Ibadan expressway. When the killer truck driver was arrested, he was found to be high on drugs and marijuana. When he was interrogated, he confessed that the big and long Chevrolet car of the professor looked like a small loaf of bread that he simply ran over! He said this with little human emotion. He had killed a Harvard university trained professor whose contribution to the country’s development was cut short by an illiterate driver. In 1982 I arrived from Washington D.C and was on my way to the University of Maiduguri where I had been appointed a professor of History. I hired a trailer to drive my containerized luggage to Maiduguri while I drove my car from Lagos all the way to Maiduguri a distance of over a thousand kilometres. The trailer driver and I took off around the same time and I drove straight to Maiduguri stopping only to ease myself or refuel my car. This looks like an impossible dream in today’s Nigeria where people dare not drive over a few kilometres without the fear of being kidnapped! I finally arrived at my destination about 4am the following day with a stiff neck. I was telling my wife about my adventure when the trailer driver showed up. I could not believe my eyes. The question I asked was how it was possible for him to nearly catch up with me driving a heavy Volvo 264 compared with his long truck. When I asked him he laughed and went to his truck, brought out a large stone and an empty bottle of local gin. He said in the night, trailer drivers usually put a large stone on the accelerator after having taken the alcohol and God save anybody who tried to stop them on the road!  I will never forget this story and whenever I see a trailer, the terrible thought of the story always came to my mind. There was another day when there was a long traffic snarl on Western Avenue now renamed Funso Williams Avenue in Surulere Lagos. A motor assistant to a petrol tanker came down and started smoking under a fully loaded petrol tanker in front of me. I came down and shouted on him to stop smoking and forcefully took the cigarette from him. Thankfully he didn’t beat me up! There are many more stories of this craziness on our roads. Even if one reported to the police, nothing will be done. The police, who rather than anticipate crime and prevent its commission, are more interested in arresting after the crime has been committed.

In the 1950s as a manifestation of poverty there were bicycle taxis in what is now South-south and South-eastern part of Nigeria. But these were nonviolent people eking out miserable existence in pre petroleum rich Nigeria. Now a new road rage has arrived in Nigeria in the form of motorcyclist gangs. Thousands of young men who after school cannot find jobs and are not ready to learn a trade or take to farming have become commercial motorcyclists. The problem is that these ones are totally out of control. There is no test conducted before they are issued permit to operate. In most instances they don’t even wait to be issued permits before they jump on their motorcycles and head for the roads including the highways. They are totally out of control. Politicians buy and distribute these machines to their supporters as part of “democracy dividends” and the young people then take liberty for license when they hit the roads. At a time they were told in their own interest to wear protective headgears and provide for their passengers. They were told they could only carry one passenger at a time. Now we have a situation where neither they nor their passengers wear head gears. The number of passengers they carry depends on their ingenuity. It is not uncommon or strange to find a family of five dangerously clinging to one motorcycle. The number of motorcyclists in Ibadan where I live has been dangerously increased by young people from the northern part of the country fleeing from Boko haram and insecurity of one type or the other. These ones who are not familiar with the maps of the cities where they operate can stop right in the middle of the road or make wrong turns or speed at breakneck speed fatalistically believing “God is in control”. With this lawless situation, accidents are bound to occur and they do occur rather frequently. Sometimes the motorcyclists collide with one another. When this happens, there does not seem to be much of a problem, but when they collide with other road users particularly cars, all hell will break out. All other motorcyclists will gang up against the car owners. They will smash their wind screens, beat up the drivers and owners and sometimes burn and kill the drivers while their motorcyclists’ colleagues cheer them on or ask for bloody revenge.

Read Also: 5,181 died in road accidents in 2018, says FRSC

I have witnessed this scenario in Lagos and Ibadan and it seems to be happening all over the country as a manifestation of some crude class war of motorcyclists against car owners and even innocent pedestrians.  A friend and former roommate of mine in Ibadan Grammar School and an Oxford University educated lawyer, High Court Justice Supo Okunrinboye was simply run over by one of these wild motorcyclists and killed while trying to buy newspapers in Lagos. The culprit ran away and was never caught till today. One fellow church man of mine, John was killed in Ibadan when he was knocked down while strolling in Oluyole area. The hostility and hatred of motorcyclists for car drivers and others including pedestrians is palpable. You would think that whatever problems they have were caused by pedestrians, car and motor drivers. I sometimes cynically feel how nice it would have been if responsible people had the right to carry concealed weapons. At least the poor drivers would have had a fighting chance to defend themselves. This is not the solution. It would probably add to the problem and quickly bring up a class war much faster than anticipated.

What is to be done? If the police were up to it, one would have suggested that street patrol like they have in civilized countries should be intensified and increased by the police.  We can borrow a leaf from The Beninois book where punishment is meted to erring motorcyclists and drivers on the spot when they commit traffic offenses. This usually came in form of heavy fines on the spot which must be paid before the cycles and cars are released.

By Jide Osuntokun

Until the biggest masquerade dances the festival is not over. This is how the Yoruba people defer to people on account of age and experience. Americans say the show is not over until the fat lady sings. Anybody familiar with American night clubs will be familiar with fat ladies singing jazz in dimly lit club houses. Apparently when the show is about to end is when the best act is put on in the person of the best singer who is invariably a fat lady as a result of too much booze. I have been reading the many eulogies paid to General Alani Akinrinade, most of them by younger colleagues in the press and some by his military and political associates. Most of them have been excellent and well deserved.

I want to join others in singing the praise of this deep and profoundly thoughtful General by mentioning a few instances of my observation of him.

I first met him when he was a captain in the army in the house of a mutual friend Kehinde Alade. Kehinde joined the saints triumphant rather early in life. I met the then Captain Akinrinade, I believe in 1963 or 1964. I was in my first year in the University of Ibadan. In those days young students of the University of Ibadan always drifted to Lagos on weekends. Kehinde Alade lived in a house in Oyewunmi Close in Surulere. The place was full of mosquitoes. Right from about 6 p.m. Kehinde and I will sit on his bed with the mosquito net drawn down and gist for as long as possible before dozing off to sleep. Even with the mosquito net down, the crazy mosquitoes would still try to inject their poison into one’s body if it was near the net. It was in these circumstances that Captain Akinrinade would pop in and ask Kehinde to follow him to one party or the other. I never for once went out with them probably because I was too much of an Ibadan man and not a “Lagos lizard” as the Yoruba will say. Kehinde Alade was a younger brother to the famous architect Fola Alade who designed most of the famous architectural landmarks in Nigeria including the federal secretariat, National Institute of Policy and Strategic Studies, Kuru, military barracks to house the multitudes of soldiers after the Nigerian civil war. Chief Fola Alade, now very old, was my brother Kayode Osuntokun’s friend and our two families, that is, the Alades and the Osuntokuns became one. Around the time I am writing about, I had a brother, Captain Edward Abiodun Osuntokun of the NAEME (Nigerian Army Electrical and Mechanical Engineers) living in Ann Barack’s but I preferred to stay with Kehinde to enjoy absolute freedom. Unfortunately my army officer brother died prematurely due to botched appendix operation by apparently unqualified Pakistani army doctors on secondment to the Nigerian Army. This was a painful period for our family. This brought me closer to the Nigerian Army particularly to the then Colonel Adeyinka Adebayo, who though senior to my brother, was his close friend.

We did not know that the army would ever take over the government of the country. The army however struck in January 1966 when Alani Akinrinade was a Major. The killings of political leaders also decimated the higher echelons of the army in the persons of Brigadier Adesujo Ademulegun, Brigadier Zakiriyau Maimalari, Colonel Ralph Shodehinde, Lt-colonel Abogo  Largema, Col. Kur Muhammad, Lt-colonel  James Pam, Lt-colonel  Arthur Unegbe and  in the counter coup of July 1966, Major-General Johnson Aguiyi Ironsi and Lieutenant-colonel Adekunle Fajuyi were killed; several Igbo officers who could not escape to the East fell to rebellious troops. Colonel Adebayo was out of the country on a course in England and Brigadier Olufemi Ogundipe the next man to Ironsi was rendered hors de combat after northern troops refused to obey his command.

At the time the civil war broke out, the number of Yoruba officers in the army could be counted in tens. The situation was worse in the number of troops or fighting men. The officer class was dominated by Igbo and Hausa/ Fulani and Kanuris.  This was because the civilian government formed in 1954 in which the mainly Igbo NCNC and the NPC formed a coalition government deliberately pressed many young Igbo and Hausa boys from secondary schools in their region into the officer corps of the Nigerian army. I have a feeling that Akinrinade would not have joined the army if he had not gone to Offa Grammar School in the North. When the war broke out, the three divisions facing the rebellion in Biafra were commanded by Colonel Muhammad Shuwa in the northern operational area, Colonel Murtala Muhammad in the western sector and Colonel Benjamin Adekunle in the south. Major Akinrinade was one of the battalion commanders that swept the Biafran troops out of the Midwest. His opposition to repeated disastrous attempts to make a frontal attack on the concentrated Biafran troops in Onitsha from Asaba got him into trouble with Colonel Murtala Muhammad and he had to be deployed to Benjamin Adekunle’s Marine command division. This was the division hurriedly recruited and largely trained in action but bore the brunt of the fight against the Biafrans. Akinrinade and colleagues fought bravely under the mercurial but absolutely brilliant and fearless Adekunle until exhaustion set in and Adekunle had to be replaced by Col. Olusegun Obasanjo who finally received the surrender of the Biafran forces. From all indications by his colleagues, Akinrinade was an extraordinarily brilliant soldier.

After the civil war, he rose rapidly and never participated in any putsch until he left the army as a Lieutenant General at the age of 42. He had served as G.O.C 1st division of the army which in conventionally regarded as the teeth of the army. He rose to the position of Chief of Army Staff and became the first Chief of Defence Staff under the civilian government of Alhaji Shehu Shagari. He left prematurely because he felt he was not trusted and he apparently did not like being kicked upwards from his position as Chief of Army Staff to Chief of Defence Staff apparently because of ethnic and religious reasons. From all colleagues of Akinrinade spoken to by this writer, they all said he is the best army officer the country has ever produced. It will be interesting to find out what his teachers at the Royal Military Academy in Sandhurst England thought of young Akinrinade.

Since leaving the military, Akinrinade served as minister of agriculture in the Babangida regime leaving when the ovation was loudest and when he felt he couldn’t remain in the government because of the way events were unfolding. I remember the late Navy Captain Michael Akhigbe dragging me and Brigadier Ola Oni to Akinrinade’s house in Ikoyi to prevail on him to support deregulation of the cocoa trade and abolishing the cocoa board. The cocoa board had been set up by the colonial government to guarantee cocoa price for the farmer. When there was a boom in price the excess was saved against a future when there was a collapse in cocoa price. Because of the money held by the board, the cocoa price to the farmer continued to be maintained without the farmers suffering sudden reduction in income. Michael Akhigbe as governor of the then cocoa-producing Ondo State felt the board had no place in a deregulated economy. Apparently Akinrinade felt otherwise. We followed Akhigbe, our well-meaning governor and a personal friend of mine to remonstrate with Akinrinade knowing if he was persuaded, he will influence Babangida who held him in great respect.

The upshot of the story was that the cocoa board was dissolved.

I also remembered a much larger delegation Akhigbe arranged for us to tell Babangida that Ondo State was not happy for having nobody in his government. Babangida had apparently told Akhigbe he was going to appoint an elderly retired civil servant from the west as Secretary to his government. Akhigbe said that was not what Ondo deserved. Eventually Babangida appointed Olu Falae to the satisfaction of everyone involved. May God bless Michael Akhigbe’s soul. Whatever he did, he committed all his energy and courage.

General Akinrinade‘s courage came to the fore when Babangida left the stage and his Khalifa Sani Abacha took over. In spite of the danger of being in opposition to Abacha, Akinrinade became a rallying point of the opposition particularly of the Yoruba to Abacha after Moshood Abiola was denied the presidency which he had clearly won. Akinrinade supported Abiola not because of ethnic solidarity but out of principle that the vote of the people should decide who to rule them. He suffered for his belief and narrowly escaped being killed by assassins sent after him by Abacha. His house in Ikeja was fire-bombed and his farm in his home town of Yakoyo where he had invested his life savings and borrowed funds was destroyed. He escaped into exile in the United States and only returned after the military left the scene. Since 1999, he has not been satisfied with the quality of governance in the country. Even with Obasanjo in power, he felt the structure of government would militate against performance by anybody in government. He committed his resources, intellect and organizational ability along with Bolaji Akinyemi and others like myself in forming an all embracing “Agbajo Yoruba Agbaye” a world-wide non political group to protect the interest of the Yoruba in Nigeria. He got all the governors in Yoruba land to support it with funding. The whole thing was planned in detail. Anthem, flag, constitution etc were made but perhaps because of personality clash, we didn’t get very far after the first outing in Ibadan in which Justice Kayode Esho took the chair and gave words of encouragement. We got moral and financial encouragement from the late Ooni of Ife, Oba Sijuade Olubushe 11. Perhaps it is the curse of the Yoruba to always split like paramecium. Alani Akinrinade is as beautiful inside as outside; one sometimes wonders what led this man who would have done well in a university setting into the Nigerian Army.