The Nation Newspaper

Category: Jide Osuntokun

  • Independence from the eyes of a provincial lad

    Nigeria got its independence 59 years ago and I was in my final year in the fifth form in Christ’s School Ado Ekiti. A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then, to put it in local Nigerian lingo.

    I was a fragile but athletic teenager who played soccer, basketball and represented my house in short sprints, long and steeple jumps as well as rounders. If there was a school team in rounders, I would have been on it. Rounders was almost unique to Christ School because hardly any other school played it. On the eve of independence, I remember our class being asked to write about Nigeria‘s independence. I wrote that we would soon be free from “rancorous negrophobism” of white colonialists.

    I think I must have seen this phrase in the Daily Times, the most widely read newspaper of the time. It sounded very nice but our English teacher, Allan Reed angrily cancelled it. I felt bad many years later when I realized how insensitive I must have been. Here was a young Englishman and his wife doing yeoman job in the backwoods of the British Empire being lumped with other white people from his country as haters of blacks. Of course I was not totally off the mark. There were Britons who hated us while making a living in our country. After all Rudyard Kipling in his book “The White Man’s Burden” had described us as “half children half devils”. Our white teachers in Christ’s School, were however really devoted to their jobs and they apparently loved us as Christians were supposed to love one another. This was particularly the case with our principal Donald Leslie Mason. We students also loved him in return. Mason celebrated brilliant students but paid little attention to sports, the result of which was the annual humiliation of our school by Government College Ibadan’s soccer team. To make up for this, we usually displayed our school certificate results for the visiting soccer team to see and to know there was life after soccer victory.

    Even though we were not aware of nationalist rumblings among our Nigerian teachers, we suspected something was wrong when our beloved principal Canon L.D Mason went on an extended leave for six months. The chemistry teacher Papa Adeyemi, a much loved man and an old hand in the school, acted in the absence of Mason. What we noticed was the improvement in our food. It certainly tasted better. We started having bread and tea for breakfast.

    Crayfishes found their ways into our previously tasteless stews. We later learned that by currying the favour of the students, the school’s finances were run down. Baba Adeyemi took keen interest in our preparation for our final University of Cambridge West African School Certificate examination. That was the name of the final examination then. It was the first serious examination many of us had ever taken. And for most of us it was a “do or die affair”. In Christ School of those days,  nobody cared whether you came from a rich or poor home, all that mattered was one’s  performance in examinations and the crowning glory was your coming out with flying colours in the final  school certificate examination. When I was a junior boy, one of our senior boys was known to keep his legs in a bucket full of cold water all night so that he would not fall asleep while swotting. Unfortunately this particular boy was the butt of students’ jokes because he flunked his examination. Boys in my set read all round the clock weeks before the commencement of the examination. We ate kolanuts and drank strong coffee to stay awake. There were all kinds of tablets that were hawked around to keep students awake. Thank God our “do or die” efforts did not result into any deaths. On the eve of the examination, the acting principal, Papa Adeyemi called all of us to his office and gave us what he said were tablets to prevent us from having head ache. But we noticed that as soon as we took the tablets we became sleepy a few minutes later and we had to rush to our dormitories before falling asleep on our legs. This routine of cleverly sedating us was followed daily until we finished our examination. I remember our distinguished biology teacher, R. A Ogunlade emphasising deliberately what he knew would not be asked the students in the practical biology paper. What an honest man!

    That was the Nigeria in which I grew up and the Nigeria of our independence dreams .We worked very hard not because of independence but because that was the tradition of our school.

    One thing I remember vividly was that at the eve of Independence Day, we had a party in our big dining hall to which girls from our sister Anglican Girls Secondary School in Ado -Ekiti were invited. This was before the two schools were merged. Many of us were not too comfortable dancing with people of the opposite sex. We just did not do such things as Christ School boys. We actually thought any boy who had a girlfriend was doomed to a life of failure. Indeed many of such wayward boys did not make it in life! Many of us danced alone and the girls did the same. The rave then in the world of music was Victor Olaiya’s “Omo pupa”. The song was about marrying a fair skinned woman and leaving her at home while the spouse went in search of the “golden fleece” in London. While in London the man sends money home so that his wife could join him and so that they could live happily thereafter. That captured a trend in those days when men sort of funded their education through “work study” without parental or government support. Many of our people took this route to success. Most of my classmates were far removed from this trajectory. All we wanted to do was pass our examinations and go to the University of Ibadan and become graduate teachers like our teachers. We had no professional guidance in school. The few of my classmates who became medical doctors did so by mere chance of emulating older students from our school who were studying medicine at the University of Ibadan. We knew nothing about engineering, law, accountancy, journalism, insurance, banking, finance etc. No one thought about police or armed forces yet our contemporaries in the East and the North were being encouraged to join these critical organs that, for better or for worse, played decisive roles in the history of our country. My class did not enjoy the privilege of being the most senior class in the school because the sixth form in science started in our last year. This created unnecessary conflict between us and the sixth formers who were very few but were veritable irritants for us who felt robbed of the ultimate prize of being the senior boys and ultimate bullies in the school old tradition!

    A year earlier in December 1959, the elections into the federal House of Representatives had held. This was a bitterly fought election. In our part of Nigeria, we had thought the Action Group (A.G) led by the indomitable Obafemi Awolowo would win. We saw the party flying helicopters here and there and engaging in aerobatic displays and writing of party slogans and symbols in the sky. The two other major parties of the Northern People’s Congress (NPC) led by Ahmadu Bello, the scion of the Usman Dan Fodio northern aristocracy and the NCNC (National Council of Nigerian Citizens) led by the flamboyant wordsmith, Nnamdi Azikiwe, we were told, stood no chance against the A.G. The NPC did not bother to campaign in the South while the NCNC gave the A.G in the Southwest a fight for its money. This was because the NCNC was previously led by Herbert Macaulay a Lagosian Yoruba descendant of the first African bishop, Ajayi Crowther.

    For daring to challenge the NPC in the North, it was predictable that it would form an alliance with the NCNC. This was what happened. The government formed by the two parties led Nigeria to independence. We had an uneasy political peace in the country and certainly in the west with the NCNC threatening to use its presence in the federal government to challenge the AG government in the west. As school boys we grew up seeing other Nigerians as inferior to Yoruba people.

    We did not have much contact with other ethnic groups in Nigeria. There were neither Igbo nor Hausa in Christ School. We had a few people from Edo speaking part of the West. The Urhobo we knew lived in the bush tapping palm wine and making palm oil from the palm trees on our farms. We dismissed Ijaws (Izon) and the Ibos as “ Kobokobo” which was the way their languages sounded in our ears. We even called them worse names! We called the Hausas “gambari” apparently thinking all northerners belonged to the small Kamberi ethnic group. Our people sold kolanuts to them but we still did not feel they were our equals.  We had derogatory names for other Nigerians and of course they had derogatory names for us too. We were supposed to be the future of the country, yet we held each other in mutual contempt. It should not have surprised anybody that our country was building on shaky foundation because of ignorance. As students we sometimes went to non-Yoruba areas of the west and also to the Igbo speaking areas of the Eastern region either to play soccer or on geographical excursions.  This did not remove our negative notions about them; rather we looked for things that validated our preconceived ideas about other people. We never went to the North not even to the Yoruba areas of Offa, Ilorin and Kabba. This isolated us from the youths of other parts of Nigeria. We of course were not sensitive to these negative trends in our lives. We did not study Nigerian history; rather we studied the history of the British Empire and even got distinctions in the subject. In retrospect, we were not well prepared for the future. We passed our examinations quite alright. We were very well behaved. We obeyed the school regulations. We knew it was wrong to be dishonest or to steal. In short we grew up to be decent Christian boys and there was nothing wrong with that. But we were not going to live in a Christian country or perfect society where everybody was of the same ethnic group. In fact we were going to live in a complex mixed up society where not much attention would be paid to academic excellence, morality or integrity. This is why in my view my school did not produce a single rich Nigerian. Do I regret this? The answer is blowing in the wind.

     

  • Independence from the eyes of a provincial lad

    By Jide Osuntokun

    Nigeria got its independence 59 years ago and I was in my final year in the fifth form in Christ’s School Ado Ekiti. A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then, to put it in local Nigerian lingo. I was a fragile but athletic teenager who played soccer, basketball and represented my house in short sprints, long and steeple jumps as well as rounders. If there was a school team in rounders, I would have been on it. Rounders was almost unique to Christ School because hardly any other school played it. On the eve of independence, I remember our class being asked to write about Nigeria‘s independence. I wrote that we would soon be free from “rancorous negrophobism” of white colonialists. I think I must have seen this phrase in the Daily Times, the most widely read newspaper of the time. It sounded very nice but our English teacher, Allan Reed angrily cancelled it. I felt bad many years later when I realized how insensitive I must have been. Here was a young Englishman and his wife doing yeoman job in the backwoods of the British Empire being lumped with other white people from his country as haters of blacks. Of course I was not totally off the mark. There were Britons who hated us while making a living in our country. After all Rudyard Kipling in his book “The White Man’s Burden” had described us as “half children half devils”. Our white teachers in Christ’s School, were however really devoted to their jobs and they apparently loved us as Christians were supposed to love one another. This was particularly the case with our principal Donald Leslie Mason. We students also loved him in return. Mason celebrated brilliant students but paid little attention to sports, the result of which was the annual humiliation of our school by Government College Ibadan’s soccer team. To make up for this, we usually displayed our school certificate results for the visiting soccer team to see and to know there was life after soccer victory.

    Even though we were not aware of nationalist rumblings among our Nigerian teachers, we suspected something was wrong when our beloved principal Canon L.D Mason went on an extended leave for six months. The chemistry teacher Papa Adeyemi, a much loved man and an old hand in the school, acted in the absence of Mason. What we noticed was the improvement in our food. It certainly tasted better. We started having bread and tea for breakfast. Crayfishes found their ways into our previously tasteless stews. We later learned that by currying the favour of the students, the school’s finances were run down. Baba Adeyemi took keen interest in our preparation for our final University of Cambridge West African School Certificate examination. That was the name of the final examination then. It was the first serious examination many of us had ever taken. And for most of us it was a “do or die affair”. In Christ School of those days,  nobody cared whether you came from a rich or poor home, all that mattered was one’s  performance in examinations and the crowning glory was your coming out with flying colours in the final  school certificate examination. When I was a junior boy, one of our senior boys was known to keep his legs in a bucket full of cold water all night so that he would not fall asleep while swotting. Unfortunately this particular boy was the butt of students’ jokes because he flunked his examination. Boys in my set read all round the clock weeks before the commencement of the examination. We ate kolanuts and drank strong coffee to stay awake. There were all kinds of tablets that were hawked around to keep students awake. Thank God our “do or die” efforts did not result into any deaths. On the eve of the examination, the acting principal, Papa Adeyemi called all of us to his office and gave us what he said were tablets to prevent us from having head ache. But we noticed that as soon as we took the tablets we became sleepy a few minutes later and we had to rush to our dormitories before falling asleep on our legs. This routine of cleverly sedating us was followed daily until we finished our examination. I remember our distinguished biology teacher, R. A Ogunlade emphasising deliberately what he knew would not be asked the students in the practical biology paper. What an honest man!

    That was the Nigeria in which I grew up and the Nigeria of our independence dreams .We worked very hard not because of independence but because that was the tradition of our school.

    One thing I remember vividly was that at the eve of Independence Day, we had a party in our big dining hall to which girls from our sister Anglican Girls Secondary School in Ado -Ekiti were invited. This was before the two schools were merged. Many of us were not too comfortable dancing with people of the opposite sex. We just did not do such things as Christ School boys. We actually thought any boy who had a girlfriend was doomed to a life of failure. Indeed many of such wayward boys did not make it in life! Many of us danced alone and the girls did the same. The rave then in the world of music was Victor Olaiya’s “Omo pupa”. The song was about marrying a fair skinned woman and leaving her at home while the spouse went in search of the “golden fleece” in London. While in London the man sends money home so that his wife could join him and so that they could live happily thereafter. That captured a trend in those days when men sort of funded their education through “work study” without parental or government support. Many of our people took this route to success. Most of my classmates were far removed from this trajectory. All we wanted to do was pass our examinations and go to the University of Ibadan and become graduate teachers like our teachers. We had no professional guidance in school. The few of my classmates who became medical doctors did so by mere chance of emulating older students from our school who were studying medicine at the University of Ibadan. We knew nothing about engineering, law, accountancy, journalism, insurance, banking, finance etc. No one thought about police or armed forces yet our contemporaries in the East and the North were being encouraged to join these critical organs that, for better or for worse, played decisive roles in the history of our country. My class did not enjoy the privilege of being the most senior class in the school because the sixth form in science started in our last year. This created unnecessary conflict between us and the sixth formers who were very few but were veritable irritants for us who felt robbed of the ultimate prize of being the senior boys and ultimate bullies in the school old tradition!

    A year earlier in December 1959, the elections into the federal House of Representatives had held. This was a bitterly fought election. In our part of Nigeria, we had thought the Action Group (A.G) led by the indomitable Obafemi Awolowo would win. We saw the party flying helicopters here and there and engaging in aerobatic displays and writing of party slogans and symbols in the sky. The two other major parties of the Northern People’s Congress (NPC) led by Ahmadu Bello, the scion of the Usman Dan Fodio northern aristocracy and the NCNC (National Council of Nigerian Citizens) led by the flamboyant wordsmith, Nnamdi Azikiwe, we were told, stood no chance against the A.G. The NPC did not bother to campaign in the South while the NCNC gave the A.G in the Southwest a fight for its money. This was because the NCNC was previously led by Herbert Macaulay a Lagosian Yoruba descendant of the first African bishop, Ajayi Crowther.

    For daring to challenge the NPC in the North, it was predictable that it would form an alliance with the NCNC. This was what happened. The government formed by the two parties led Nigeria to independence. We had an uneasy political peace in the country and certainly in the west with the NCNC threatening to use its presence in the federal government to challenge the AG government in the west. As school boys we grew up seeing other Nigerians as inferior to Yoruba people.

  • Killing Lagos through infrastructural deficits

    The place of Lagos in the economy of Nigeria needs no debate. Whatever affects Lagos negatively would have ramifications on the economic health of the country. Lagos is the economic and commercial centre of the country. It follows that any neglect of Lagos for whatever reasons would be like cutting off our nose to spite the Nigerian face. Sixty percent of the VAT collected in Nigeria and distributed to all states of the federation is collected in Lagos. The same is true of income taxes collected In Lagos. In other words, killing Lagos with dilapidated infrastructure is a self-inflicted wound on Nigeria.

    One has watched with sadness the absolute neglect and deterioration of the ports of Lagos and the roads leading to them in the last four years of the Buhari administration with little or nothing done to ameliorate the situation. It cannot be that we are short of ideas on how to fix ordinary roads leading to the sea and airports of the most important economic entrepôt of this country.

    Some four years ago, it was announced with fanfare that Dangote and Honeywell and some other companies were going to fix the roads leading to Apapa to accelerate ingress and egress of vehicles to the place. After four years, the status quo is still what is being maintained. The effect of the paralysis of the ports of Lagos on the economy of Lagos and Nigeria can only be imagined. Perishable goods being exported are rotting in the vehicles conveying them to the ports while imports cannot be easily evacuated. Trucks and their drivers are marooned at the ports for weeks and a journey that should last a day is turned into a journey of no return. Brazil a country like our own producing three million barrels of oil per day does not depend on hydrocarbons production like we do, to fuel its economy but rather depends on its agricultural exports totalling $53 billion a year. Imagine if they have totally impassable ports like our own; their economy will be in the same parlours situation as ours.

    Nigerian government pays billions of Naira demurrage charges to shipping companies because of our inability to facilitate discharge of imported goods. The situation in Tin -Can island port is a mimic of the Apapa situation. In the meantime, the environment of the entire Apapa area of the city of Lagos is degraded. Properties worth billions of Naira have become useless and worthless. Yet, Apapa in the not too distant past compared favourably as Government Reserved Area as Ikoyi. I am sure if the ports complex were given to a competent foreign company to reconstruct and charge fees over some years, Nigeria would be better for it because a smooth ports operation would redound on the national economy. The entire Apapa would come alive and the Lagos State government would be able to collect land use charges for the benefit of the local economy and with increase in IGR, the state will be able to create jobs for the teeming population of people in Lagos.

    A long term planned ports development in Nigeria should factor in the development of the eastern ports of Calabar, Oron, Eket, Port Harcourt, and the western ports of  Onne,  Forcados Warri  and Olokoda. The private sector led development of Lekki deep port should help in reducing the pressure on Apapa and Tin-Can sland ports. I know of course that both Calabar and Port Harcourt cannot take large ships because they are not deep enough and they require constant dredging but this should not be a permanent obstacle to naval engineering. If we are a serious country, we should not be depending on just one city for our shipping and ocean trade. But in the meantime, we must decongest the Lagos ports and ensure that roads leading to them are constructed with permanent building materials that would not be easily washed away by floods and rains.

    It seems not only to rain but pour when considering the inadequacy of infrastructure in Lagos. The Lagos – Ibadan so-called express road has been under reconstruction since the Obasanjo years. Yar’Adua and Jonathan did nothing in eight years and Buhari is in his fifth year on the road. In the meantime, going to Lagos from Ibadan or Benin lasts longer than flying to London. Many of us have suspended trips to Lagos until a 600 metres section of the road under reconstruction and lasting three months is finished. Yes 600 metres lasting three months to reconstruct! This must be the slowest pace in road reconstruction anywhere in the world. We were asked to enter Lagos through Sagamu – Ikorodu road. Yet whoever said that knows that the Sagamu – Ikorodu road has been impassable for almost a decade.

    Thank God I heard recently that Lagos and Ogun states have decided to jointly take over that road and Lagos – Abeokuta road since the federal government is unwilling and unable to maintain interstate roads. I hope Ondo and Ekiti states will take over Akure- Ado Ekiti and Oyo and Osun states will take over Ibadan – Osogbo roads to the benefit of the suffering masses who live there and who are in Yoruba parlance cows without tails afflicted by a swarm of flies.

    States with similar cultural and physical contiguity in other parts of Nigeria can embrace the same paradigm thus imperceptibly restructuring this lumbering federation of Nigeria.

    The clincher in the killing of Lagos is the Lagos Murtala Muhammad Airport. Akinwumi Ambode, the former Lagos governor took it upon his state the construction of a befitting set of roads to the airport. He did not finish the task before he ran out of luck with his party which refused to nominate him for a second term in office. It seems the road construction to the airport has been abandoned. When travellers arrive from overseas trip they are confronted by a ramshackle airport and total confusion about where to go until one is taken behind a high fence obscuring the airport and where one is likely to be robbed by touts. Most of the time there are no lights and planes sometimes hover around waiting for sleeping airport staff to crank up their generators when the national grid fails to supply electricity to the airport. The internal configuration of the airport leaves much to be desired. The immigration and security desks could be better located. The luggage hall is mad house. Trolleys are hoarded and money changers are likely to dupe tired and bedraggled travellers. The toilets don’t flush and the air conditioning in the airport has apparently packed up.

    One wonders what the authorities do with the landing fees collected from foreign and domestic air lines. Whoever are the people running this airport must have travelled abroad or to Accra Ghana to see how airports are run. We say we are looking for foreign investors and we leave the point of entry into our country in this filthy dilapidated way. We should put our best face forward. Even if we say we have moved our capital to Abuja and we can no longer be bothered by Lagos, Port Harcourt and other places, we should ask how much revenue to the national exchequer is derived from Abuja. No matter how much power resides in Abuja, we cannot transfer the Atlantic coastline to Abuja by decree or executive fiat. A situation in which there is a collapse of the infrastructure of the most economically important town in the country, a town which services the economy of the whole country shows lack of seriousness and planning by those who are at the helm of the country’s affairs.

    From what has happened to the airport in Ikeja and the seaports in Apapa, one would have thought we would have learnt our lesson. Now the Dangote petrochemical industry is nearing completion in Lekki. The exclusive economic zone development in the same area being privately developed and industrial layout for export industries and development of a new port in the area are at an advanced stage. A new airport is envisaged for the area. Yet there is yet no comprehensive plan of evacuation of goods in the area. Trains that are planned for the area are yet to be constructed and perhaps a fourth bridge for the area has been discussed and the plans abandoned. History will probably repeat itself because of our lack of planning and our penchant for haphazard development and muddling through where serious planning would have put us among developed countries of the world. No one enjoys pointing out these inadequacies in our national life. But we write hoping that somebody who is failing in his or her duty about these things will be prevailed upon to wake up from his or her slumber. Things that are taken for granted elsewhere is treated in our country as if these were new discoveries. Our citizens do not demand their rights and our government needs not take them for a ride as they seem to do anywhere you turn.

  • Philosophy behind Nigeria’s foreign policy on decolonization

    I am writing this to elucidate some of the principles that has guided Nigeria’s foreign policy since independence. This is necessary in view of the casual and glib talk among Nigerians who while deprecating the violence directed against Nigerians in South Africa always say “we after all, liberated the ungrateful country”. This is wrong history. We as a country contributed to the liberation of South Africa, we did not liberate the country. As far as I know, no Nigerian died any where in the liberation of Zambia, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Mozambique, Angola and South Africa. South Africans liberated their own country with the support of fraternal countries including our own.

    When Nigeria became an independent and sovereign country, the principle guiding our foreign policy was clearly articulated by our prime minister, Alhaji Abubakar Tafawa Balewa who for some time doubled as our foreign minister before Jaja Wachukwu was appointed foreign minister. Sir Abubakar, while addressing the General Assembly of the United Nations in October 1960, said Nigeria will support and protect the interests of all black peoples in the world wherever they may be. This presumably extended even beyond Africa to the Americas, South and North and the Pacific islands where blacks live. This was an ambitious declaration and many doubted the capacity of Nigeria to carry out this policy.  It is the hope and not its practical application of the policy that mattered. It gave hope to black Americans and other blacks under one kind of oppression or the other. Sir Abubakar was a cautious and conservative politician. He must have read the speech over and over and digested it. He must have asked his principal officials the import of his declaration. He also wanted to undercut his critics at home and the radical elements within his cabinet who must have convinced him he had to snatch leadership of the black world from Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana who since the independence of his country in 1957, three years before Nigeria attained independence, had become the acknowledged leader of the black world. This policy was unanimously supported by the critical mass of our people. It is remarkable that since 1960 till now, this policy has endured in spite of the several changes of regimes and personalities at the helm of our country’s national affairs.

    This policy was grounded on the principle of when  a man, any man, suffers any where in the world, humanity as a whole suffers a little but when a black man suffers any where  in the world, because of the pigmentation of his skin colour and not because of his character, all black people every where suffer a lot. From this reasoning, it was clear to foreign policy makers and executors that in defending black people everywhere, Nigeria was vicariously defending its own honour and humanity. In other words, whether in the case of Sir Abubakar’s government breaking diplomatic relations with France in 1961 over the third nuclear test of that country in the Sahara thus protecting the entire African continent from radioactive fallouts, or Yakubu Gowon assisting to pay the salaries of police and civil servants in Grenada in  the Caribbean 1973, or Muhammed/ Obasanjo buying weapons for the MPLA government in Angola in 1976 and assisting the FRELIMO government in Mozambique and the various liberation movements in Namibia, Zimbabwe and South Africa, or, Shagari government’s intervention in Chad in the 1980s, Babangida’s assistance to Jamaica after the devastation of the Island  by hurricanes in  the 1990s, sending Technical Aid Corps to Fiji and his continued support for the liquidation of the apartheid regime in the 1990s and final emergence of  Nelson Mandela as president of South Africa and recently Buhari’s commitment of Nigerian troops to secure a peaceful transfer of power from  Yahya Jammeh to Adama Barrow in The Gambia; all fall within the rubric of protecting the interest of the black man and in so doing protecting our own interest.

    If blacks all over the world are doing well, we as a black people will not suffer the indignity of being looked down upon because of our black colour. In other words, the fate of Nigeria is intricately linked with that of all black people in a world where racism thrives. Even though everybody denies the place of race in foreign affairs, it is however without doubt central to politics among nations.

    This was the political phase of our foreign policy. Nigeria has succeeded to a certain extent in our foreign policy of decolonization. The continent has been rid of colonialism and imperialist domination but neo-colonialism still thrives in the sense that African economy is still largely dominated by former colonial powers of Britain, France and to a certain extent the West generally. In what was called economic diplomacy, Nigeria wanted to engage with other African countries including those it had assisted in joint partnership for mutual economic development to free the continent from neo-colonial domination. This was why Nigeria in the  1990s encouraged Nigerians to participate in fishing off the coast of Angola for example and in the development of Bauxite mines of Guinea in the 1970s and investment in cement and sugar industries in Benin in partnership with the governments of those countries.

    It must be admitted  that these economic ventures did not always succeed as expected but there was no attempt by Nigeria to exploit for its national benefit, inappropriate crude exploitative way western  countries exploit the countries they give aid and a technical assistance to. To do this would have destroyed the high moral grounds on which our foreign policy was founded. This policy of assistance with no strings attached informed the Technical Aid Corps put in place to assist other African countries and black countries in the Caribbean and the pacific countries during the Babangida’s regime. We could not have been criticizing the West and be following a post-assistance policy of exploitation. This however does not preclude individual business people doing businesses in countries where as a result of Nigeria’s goodwill, the environment is favourable for Nigerian private investment. In pursuit of this, we need not rub in the fact that the country so involved benefited from our largesse in the past. That would be immoral and unChristianly and unIslamic. Of course, there is no morality in politics but in the case in which we based our policy of decolonization on the wrongness and immorality of colonialism, standing on a high moral principle was appropriate.

    In the case of recent  xenophobic attacks against our nationals in South Africa, we can make a case for African solidarity without harping on whatever assistance we rendered in the past. Our assistance in the past based on our enlightened national self-interest which happened to have been in the interest of blacks in South Africa was out of our free will and judgement of what was good for our country. It  is quite different from asking for compensation for  current economic damage and injury inflicted on our people. This should stand alone from the sentimental issue of past assistance. Secondly, the nature of our people’s business in South Africa in particular and in other parts of Africa where our people are coming under serious pressure and sometimes murderous attack, needs to be considered and if necessary changed. Any business bordering on criminal and illegal nature must be deprecated and wound up. It is disgraceful for our people to be involved in  human trafficking, prostitution, drugs peddling, and  advance fees fraud and swindling of innocent people of their hard earned money. It is sad that the few of our people involved in these nefarious activities have damaged the many genuine business men and women. We must some how find a way by which our people would be told that each and every Nigerian is an ambassador of this country and that their behaviour abroad will either enhance or damage the image of the country which previous generations have built. Unemployment at home should not be an excuse for criminality abroad. Our government also must take more seriously the issue of job creation at home and control and reduction of our geometrically growing and ballooning population. It is a pity that the issue of the population bomb has not received the attention it deserves. No matter what we do to build a thriving economy, if the population continues to outstrip the economy, we shall continue to create an underclass of criminals at home some of who will find their ways to other parts of the continent as is already happening in our neighbouring countries where the image of the “ugly Nigerian” looms very large.

  • Robert Mugabe remembered

    The death of Robert Mugabe at the age of 95 brings to an end the end of a tumultuous era in Zimbabwean history. What is now Zimbabwe was created by that English speaking South African imperialist Cecil Rhodes in the 19th century’s struggle between the Boers, the descendants of the Dutch-speaking adventurers who had emigrated to the Cape of Good Hope in the 16th century as part of a coaling station on the way to their colony in what is now Indonesia. Over the years, South Africa itself became a prized possession of the Dutch settlers who increasingly came into conflict with native South Africans particularly the Sothos and the much more formidable Zulus.

    Towards the end of the 19th century, the British had replaced the native South Africans in the contestation for power with the Boers leading to a bitter war with them and even drawing in Germany’s support for the Boers in what was a struggle for global power between the two Anglo-Saxon nations of Britain and Germany. Before the Anglo-Boer war (1899-1902), the British had tried to outflank the two Boer republics of Orange Free State and Transvaal by planting a British colony north of them in a private enterprise by Cecil Rhodes, a millionaire who had made his fortune in mining gold in South Africa. This enterprise resulted in the territories of northern and southern Rhodesia named after him thus becoming the private property of Cecil Rhodes who provided the funds for establishing them.

    Africans were not totally docile in the politics of Southern Africa. The same territory claimed by Rhodes was ruled by an African potentate named Lobengula, the king of the Ndebele nation. The  Ndebele were an offshoot of the  Zulus who had precipitated an Mfecane (dispersal) northwards following pressure from European invasion of their territory and a revolution in their military tactics leading to their victory over the British in Isandlwana in 1879 but this was to be a Pyrrhic victory because they were eventually conquered.

    The point to note is that the history of Southern Africa is intricately interwoven. The modern states that have emerged in Southern Africa are the creations of European nation state ideology and map making. The people of Southern Africa are the same Bantu-speaking peoples albeit of different dialects of the same language.

    When the emissary of Cecil Rhodes met Lobengula and promised him protection of the queen of Britain, he laughed and said he was in a better position to protect the Britons who may come visiting. The visitors came first as missionaries and later as settlers. Lobengula later told the story of how the British came to his territory and asked him and his people to close their eyes to pray and that after praying they opened their eyes and lo and behold the British flag had been unfurled and was flying over their territory! The British soon found out that the Ndebele were a minority ruling over the vast majority of the Shona.

    This was soon exploited in the classical “divide et imperia” practice wherever the British ruled in their far flung empire. When the Africans woke up and began to fight for their rights, their movement was divided along tribal lines of ZAPU (Zimbabwe African people’s Union) led by the Ndebele leader, Joshua Nkomo while the ZANU (Zimbabwe African National Union) was led by the Reverend Ndabaningi Sithole who was later edged out by the much more radical and ruthless Robert Mugabe, a Shona, who had previously trained as a catholic friar.

    The British tried unsuccessfully to bring their territories of northern and southern Rhodesia into a federation with Nyasaland (now Malawi) in what was called Central African federation under white settlers’ rule which was unacceptable to African nationalism. Nyasaland withdrew from the federation and became the independent country of Malawi under Dr. Kamuzu Banda in July 1964 and was followed by northern Rhodesia as Zambia under the leadership of Kenneth Kaunda in October 1964. Rhodesia remained firmly under white settlers control with Ian Smith as prime minister boasting that black Africans will not in a thousand years rule Rhodesia and unilaterally declared the territory independent in 1965.

    The Africans became more and more desperate to free themselves. They took to the bush and launched guerrilla war to overthrow the white settler ruled Rhodesia. The struggle was very brutal and the settlers regimes in Southern African territories of South Africa, South West Africa (later Namibia), Portuguese-ruled Angola and Mozambique supported in their own interest Ian Smith in Rhodesia. African countries through the liberation committee of the OAU with Nigeria paying substantially the lion share of the budget for the effort of the liberation movements in Southern Africa confronted the regime.

    Nigeria stepped into the effort of liberation of Southern Africa in a big way in the middle of the 1970s especially after the collapse of the Portuguese empire in Africa in 1975. This period coincided with the coming into power of Generals Murtala Muhammad and Olusegun Obasanjo. Even after General Muhammed was assassinated in 1976, the Obasanjo government continued to provide material and financial support for the liberation of Southern Africa especially when South Africa tried to support reactionary movements of UNITA and RENAMO in Angola and Mozambique respectively against the MPLA and FRELIMO governments in the two countries. Nigeria was designated a frontline state along with Angola, Mozambique, Zambia and Tanzania. The Commonwealth of Nations also put pressure on Rhodesia and South Africa to change their oppressive regimes and bend in the way African nationalism.

    In order to forge a unified front in Southern Rhodesia, General Obasanjo invited Mugabe and Nkomo to Dodan Barracks in Lagos and tried to appeal to the nationalist leaders for unity. When they refused, Obasanjo dramatically locked up the two of them and gave them revolvers to shoot it out. Both later came out laughing and dramatically later merged their forces in a new movement called ZANU/ ZAPU Patriotic Front. Obasanjo’ government nationalized British financial assets in Nigeria by taking over Barclays Bank and British Petroleum (BP) with threat that others will follow.

    This and the intensification of guerrilla war forced the British  in 1980 to concede independence and majority rule to southern Rhodesia renamed Zimbabwe after an African civilization that flourished in the place in medieval times. The country was under the leadership of Robert Mugabe from independence in 1980 to 2017 when in a military putsch, Robert  Mugabe’s authoritarian rule was terminated .The independence of Zimbabwe changed the strategic position of South Africa for the worst for the apartheid regime by strengthening the frontier of freedom confronting South Africa.

    I personally experienced this when in 1989, I stood on the Beit Bridge separating Zimbabwe from South Africa and looked into a future when South Africa would join the community of free African states; a hope which was realized in 1994 when Nelson Mandela became president of South Africa under a non-racial majoritarian democracy.

    With the death of Mugabe, the question is being asked about his legacy. There is no doubt that Mugabe gave his people confidence. The story is often told about a British economic mission visiting Zimbabwe after independence and their leader a British peer getting impatient with young, barely trained immigration officers and arrogantly loudly telling the immigration officers, “We have come to invest in your country”. Deflating the British peer, one immigration officer said “what is wrong in you investing in your own country?” That’s the kind of self-assuredness young Zimbabweans had.

    The unity in Zimbabwe did not last and soon after independence, Mugabe unleashed his North Korean trained special forces on the Ndebele in the south of the country killing thousands of them. He also soon took over by force, white farms and nationalized the diamond and other mineral mines. These acts led the British to mobilize their allies in Europe and North Africa to impose economic sanctions on Zimbabwe. These sanctions ruined the economy of the country and led to more extreme measures and authoritarianism on the part of the Mugabe regime.

    Many young educated Zimbabweans fled to South Africa and Europe to eke out some kind of miserable existence. The country was totally ruined financially and reduced to a laughing stock in the comity of nations while Mugabe remained ever witty in his criticism of the west and Britain in particular. The Mugabe story is a mixed bag of heroism and tragedy of an African ruler who fought valiantly for his country and also let down his own people in a fit of megalomania and inability to vacate the seat of power while the ovation was loudest.

  • Nigeria: Cry my beloved country!

    These are the worst of times for Nigeria.  Nigerians are being arrested in Los Angeles and New Jersey, United States for advanced fees fraud, impersonation and credit card fraud and for what is now generally called “Nigerian scams”.  When other people commit these crimes, they are charged for committing “Nigerian scam”. We have now gone into legal history as giving name to a particular kind of crime. Tens of our people are being beheaded in Saudi Arabia for drugs peddling.  The American FBI is looking for almost a hundred Nigerians for fraud. One of our country men even appeared on an ABC television network confessing his crimes and tearfully telling Americans how to identify “Nigerian scams”. Tens of our nationals are awaiting executions in Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore and Vietnam. Some are in Laos and Cambodia for one crime or the other deserving capital punishment. What the hell for goodness sake are Nigerians doing in Laos and Cambodia? I mean it’s a long way to Tipperary! Other Nigerians are being killed in South Africa for drugs peddling. Chinese and Russian jails are also full of them for one infraction or the other of their laws. Some years ago, they were brawling on the streets of a Chinese town until they were beaten to surrender by some burley Chinese constabulary.

    It seems wherever they go, they are followed by their criminal reputation. Genuine business people cannot transact business without being suspected of fraud. When our people particularly the young people have successfully conned an unsuspecting victim, they spend the money on frivolities like huge marriage celebrations, cars, hotels and on hedonistic life styles and prostitution.  They even not only spray our national currency which they march under their feet, they also spray dollars, euros and pounds sterling. And for these they are prepared to ruin themselves and ruin the image of our country and even to commit hara kiri because anybody caught with hard drugs in most parts of Asia and the Middle East is likely to be sentenced to death. Yet with wide opened eyes our people go to these places hoping they will not be caught. Our greed is what is killing our young people. There is of course unemployment at home but the fact is that many of our young people are not ready to do the work that is available.  They go to universities to avoid hard work or not to work at all. Even those who have jobs want to make it big by illegal and criminal ways. Why will a bank manager for example, resign his job to emigrate abroad where there is no certainty of a job but to join criminal gangs to defraud the system of the country he or she is going to? There is no Eldorado anywhere. There is no crown without thorns! This is the truth. A man who is a bank manager resigns and goes abroad only to wash dead bodies in the mortuary! Our young people must be realistic. I once participated in an interview panel for young recruits into an industry. When a young girl was asked what her goal in life was, she retorted that she wanted to “live large”. I had never heard the expression before. She was thanked for coming and asked to go and live large. I hope she has learned a lesson and would moderate her life expectations.

    Young people tend to blame us the older generation for having spoiled the country for them by our criminal indulgence in corruption, squander mania, mismanagement, lack of focus  general insecurity and planlessness. I plead guilty to all these charges of generational crimes. But I must say that this country has produced in the past world class scholars, international civil servants and administrators, jurists and distinguished medical scientists. Where we have failed is getting the right kind of political leadership and right helmsman at the critical juncture of national development. We were never able to find a leader who could cut through the miasma of tribal divisions and antagonism and chart a brilliant course of national integration for all round development. Poverty knows no tribe and prosperity also knows no tribe. Americans always say their favourite colour is green that’s the colour of the dollar. If Nigeria was prosperous, who will care what tribe the man at the top of government belongs to? I feel really ashamed that I am a citizen of a country that earned almost a trillion dollars from oil and gas over the years and we have nothing to show for it. No light. No potable water.  No motor-able roads. Hospitals are “mere consulting clinics “No schools and 30 percent of school aged children are roaming about the streets as almajiris and hawkers of all kinds of goods. We do not have comfortable means of transportation or communication. All the appurtenances of modern civilization are missing. Some of our leaders troop to England, Dubai and Abu Dhabi to invest stolen money .We build mansions that become useless even while we are alive and in any case our children will not be able to maintain them when we are gone and if they want to sell them there will be no buyers because they will be old fashioned by then. What we have built will become useless at the end and all we have accumulated primitively will become a manifestation of vanity.

    Vanity upon vanity is all vanity, said king Solomon in his Ecclesiastical discourses.

    If my generation has failed the country and our greedy youth has ruined the image of the country that the older generation built, shouldn’t we all start all over again and make hay while the sun still shines? Or are we going to throw up our hands and wait for Armageddon or the inevitable revolution?

    The signs of revolution are all over the place, we can no longer move from one city to another without the fear of being kidnapped. We can’t sleep with our two eyes closed. I arrived last week from London and my luggage was instantly stolen. Foreign investors except for intrepid Chinese and Indians, who are ripping us off, have stopped coming to our country. We must do something to rescue this land of our forefathers. It seems to me that we must prepare the next generation by teaching them how to behave right from home to primary and secondary schools. Cheating at entrance examinations must be severely punished.  Parents indulging in it must be publicly disgraced. We also must try and begin a campaign of moral rearmament and ethical revolution in our regular civic and religious lives. The church and the mosque must be engaged and charlatans masquerading as men of God must be forced out of their disguise. The government must mobilize the country for development.  All young people roaming about the cities must be taken away to state farms and agricultural settlements to be built by all state governments. Annual budgets without any appreciable change in our lives must give way to physical changes. This country needs to be transformed like China was after 1949 and even Vietnam in recent times. Within living memory, we have seen the transformation of Malaysia and Singapore with which we shared common colonial history. There is presumably nothing wrong with us as a race. We just must get out of this rot. We cannot continue like this.

    The reason why our young people have taken to crime both at home and abroad is that they think crimes pay. This is why we must approach punishment after crimes with full speed of the law. Punishment must be sure and swift whether crimes committed by herders, kidnappers, armed robbers, economic criminals and economic saboteurs damaging gas and petroleum pipelines. The spate of crimes committed at home and abroad indicates that our chickens have come home to roost and our cup is full. We must face our responsibility and take whatever measure that is necessary to stamp out all these criminal tendencies of our people. No one is born a criminal it is our degraded society that has made us criminals. We must therefore purify this evil society. Our legal system that allows criminals to exploit legal technicalities to avoid judgement and justice is not a worthy and worthwhile legal system. It must be thrown away. Recently a  British court fined us $9.6 billion to be paid  to so-called Irish investors who never dug the foundation of their so-called gas liquefaction complex in Calabar and then turns up to say because Nigeria failed to deliver gas to a non-existent gas factory, it lost  imaginary profits for 20 years. The deal ab initio was a product of Nigerian corruption and lack of patriotism and coordination.

    But what is most galling is that a Nigerian lawyer sat on the panel of arbitrators. What kind of legal system would condone this kind of fraud? We need whole sale judicial review in this country and Nigerian lawyers need to be more patriotic and less corrupt. Money is not everything. We brought nothing to this world and we shall not take anything with us when we depart it.

    Our cup is indeed full and we must change the course of our journey as a nation so that we don’t hit the rocks of the inevitable cascade into an abyss of no return.

    The recent situation of our much abused and despised people in South Africa, even though the involvement of many of them in drug dealing , prostitution and gang violence in which Nigerians are killing Nigerians in a foreign country, calls for close scrutiny of the kind of Nigerian migrants invading other people’s homelands. We must be frank with ourselves. I don’t like hearing we helped to end apartheid in South Africa. So what? Does that give us the right to invade another country with drugs? Our support for liberation of Southern Africa was based on enlightened self-interest of wanting to wipe out the blemish on and the humiliation of all black people on account of their colour which was what apartheid represented. Helping people in Southern Africa, in which I was personally involved, amounted to a second liberation of Nigeria from racism. There are Nigerian doctors, lawyers, professors, engineers and others making useful contributions in South Africa and they are not being molested. We must bring home our flotsam and jetsam and other deplorables ruining our image in South Africa. Must everybody be a trader? Enough is enough. Our humiliation in South Africa is part of the failure of our governments over the years that earned money and failed to industrialize the country and provide jobs for its teeming population. Enough of this voluntary second slave trade. We need introspection and soul searching to find solutions to what is wrong with Nigeria.

  • Donald J. Trump and the decline of the United States

    I have been a close observer of American politics since my secondary school days when General Dwight David Eisenhower (1953-1961) was president succeeding the immediate post Second World War President  Harry S. Truman (1945-1953) who himself towards the end of the war took over from Franklin Delano Roosevelt ( 1933-1945), the longest serving president of the USA. I was in the University of Ibadan when President John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1961-1963) was assassinated on November 22 1963. The assassination of President Kennedy nearly destroyed the image and reputation of the United States in the world. For us in Nigeria it was a tragedy. Kennedy had so much interest in Africa and the developing world that he invited Nigeria’s prime minister, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa not only to pay a state visit, but also to address the joint sitting of the USA Congress, perhaps the only African that has ever been granted that honour up till today. I still remember how our President, Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe made a broadcast to the nation ordering our national flag to be flown at half-mast for three days in memory of a great man and a global citizen. Many of us in the University of Ibadan wept openly for a man who was regarded as an icon by young people. The way he spoke, the words that came out of his mouth, his mid-Atlantic accent and diction, his lanky stature, his haircut and his beautiful wife and young children were objects of admiration by all of us. I personally made a painful visit to the spot where he was shot when I visited Dallas sometimes ago. When the tears had dried up and the then Vice President Lyndon Blaines Johnson (1963-1969) took over the American presidency, most of my contemporaries lost interest in the USA. Ironically President Johnson did many revolutionary things like getting the Civil Act of 1965 through the Congress and passing a few other socially relevant acts of what he dubbed the beginning of a “great society” into law thus bringing millions of black Americans into the mainstream of American political life through having the right to vote and be voted for. These were rights that were latent and had been inactive because of deliberate acts by the white deep state to deny the right to black people by violence and subterfuge. The bitterness the murder of Kennedy introduced into American politics and the whole conspiracy surrounding the assassination in Dallas Texas, the home state of Vice President Lyndon Johnson, made it difficult for many to view President Johnson’s achievement dispassionately. The war in Vietnam also complicated matters to the extent that many within the Democratic Party of the president rose against him and the younger brother of President John Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy and Senator Eugene McCarthy challenged Lyndon Johnson in the Democratic primaries for the party’s nomination which was an unusual scenario that forced a sitting president to refuse to contest for a second term in office. The challenge was to end in tragedy for the Kennedy family when Robert Kennedy was gunned down on June 5, 1968 by a Palestinian refugee Sirhan Sirhan in Los Angeles while Kennedy was celebrating his victory in the Californian primary. The disarray in the Democratic Party paved the way for the coming into power of a shady and calculating character like Richard Milhous Nixon who ended in disgrace when he resigned in 1974 for his anti-democratic and illegal shenanigans of bugging the office of the rival party in the Watergate office complex in Washington DC and for refusing to release his secret taping of discussions in the White House including his attempt to cover up the burglary of the Democratic Party’s office. Since this low point in the history of the American presidency, there have been people like Jimmy Carter, William Clinton and Barack Obama on the Democratic side and  Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H. Bush, his son George W. Bush from the Republican Party. Some of them distinguished themselves in office and some out of office but all maintained their positions as models and examples for the American people to follow. Some of them were closet racists like Nixon and Reagan and at least presented a facade of upholding the American myth of equality of equality of all races.

    Now we have an unusual and incredible president like the current occupant of the White House, President Donald J. Trump. Trump virtually exploited the anger of the white American working class and rural folks who felt left behind by the globalized economy of the world which transferred manufacturing to China and countries in Asia while many manufacturing jobs in America were lost thus creating boarding of factories in the so-called rust belt of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Illinois and to some extent Wisconsin. Trump bullied his way into the presidency calling his Republican and Democratic contenders unflattering nicknames and being totally uncivil and rude while his opponents who did not want to get into the gutter with him not knowing what to do bore his insults with equanimity. In the bitterly contested election of 2016 against Hillary Clinton, Trump got more electoral college votes than Clinton who beat him by close to three million plurality votes. Trump was able to paint Hillary as a corrupt person who exploited her position for financial gain in what he called “pay for play”. He was also able to tar Clinton with the brush of the so-called liberals who want to flood the country with immigrants from Mexico and other countries from Latin America and Africa. In other words, he told white Americans that they were being marginalized and were doomed to become a minority in their country if they did not vote for him. This racist language worked and fired up about 40percent of Americans who no matter what Trump did were ready to support him. Trump himself boasted that if he shot a person in the heart of New York City his supporters will continue to support him. When he got elected people thought the awesome weight of the office will sober him up and he will be the president of all Americans and the so called leader of the “free world”. In office President Trump has not only contributed to the bitter division of his country and mostly along racial lines with White supremacists on his side and those white and black opposed to them that call themselves anti-fascists or “ANTIFA” for short, President Trump sees both as evil in his warped morality. Not only is he dividing the USA, he is also angering the western allies of the USA and undermining the western institutions that had secured world peace since 1945. Nothing is sacrosanct, not NATO, IMF, World Bank, the UN and its specialized agencies. The president says he is not interested in multi-lateral institutions and that he would rather deal on bi-lateral basis with countries that America would want to relate to. His credo is “Make America Great Again “which is a policy in which America’s interest is paramount. But America is not an island sufficient unto itself because if the USA is in good shape and the rest of the world goes to the dogs, the USA would not benefit from such a self-defeating selfish policy.

    It is strange that in his politics, he seems to love autocrats like Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Rodrigo   Duterte of Philippines and nationalists and populists in Britain, Hungary, Poland and recently Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil while he regularly insulted Justin Trudeau of Canada, Immanuel Macron of France, Theresa May, former prime minister of Great Britain and Angela Merkel, the chancellor of Germany. His regular tantrums and unorthodox way of doing things and his going against all norms of diplomatic behaviour have now come to be accepted as the new American normal.

    Recently on the eve of the G7 meeting in Biarritz France and during and after the post conference press conference, the president said so many things that made people feel he is not fit for the post he is holding. Before leaving for the G7 he peremptorily cancelled a state visit to Denmark because the prime minister of the country, Mette Frederiksen said it was absurd that Trump would offer to buy an island constituting 98 percent of her country. In return Trump called her a “nasty woman”.  At another time he accused Jews in a rather patronizing racist view, that American Jews who vote Democratic in USA elections are either ignorant or disloyal. This is rather a strange thing to say in a country where support for Israel is bi- partisan. He then added the same week that he was the “chosen one “to solve American problems especially his tariff war with China which seems to be about to plunge the whole world into recession. Then he says someone from the highest level of the Chinese government phoned the USA to plead for negotiations on the tariffs war only for the phone call to be denied. While at the G7, he left America’s chair vacant while leaders from the rest of the world deliberated on global climate change obviously because he does not believe in the evidence of climate change. This was explained away by his staff who said he was having meetings with India and Egypt which was a lie because the presidents of those two countries attended the meeting on the invitation of the G7.

    Then it was alleged that he considered nuking the eye of any hurricane approaching the USA. It was allegedly explained to him that he will turn a hurricane into radioactive holocaust if he nuked them! Then he claimed his wife Melania had met Kim Jon Un; this was quickly explained away by saying he meant to say he had spoken so much about the North Korean dictator that his wife seem to know him.  He also offered his money-losing golf club and resorts in Miami Florida as venue for the G7 meeting next year which will go against the Emolument clause in the American constitution preventing a president from benefiting financially by holding the post of president. He has so much embarrassed many people in the USA that two people within the Republican Party including Joe Walsh one of the right wing radio journalists that facilitated his election in 2016 to decide to challenge him in the Republican primaries. It is of course unlikely yet that the Republican Party will abandon him next year. The onus is on the Democratic Party to present an alternative to Donald Trump out of the huge company of 21 candidates running for president. Some of them are simply too extreme in their policies that Americans will not pay attention to them except for entertainment. Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden, two of the three leading contenders are just too old in their late seventies that not many Americans will waste their votes on them. Elizabeth Warren, the articulate and sincere senator from Massachusetts is in her 70s also. Kamilla Harris who is 54 is not likely to be successful in election shortly after another African American. The same goes for Senator Cory Booker another African American and Julian Castro a Cuban-American. Pete Buttigieg, a mayor of a small city looks impressive but he is gay and I doubt if America is ready for gay president. Beto O’Rourke from El Passo, Texas ought to gain more traction than he is gaining right now. Perhaps at the nick of time a shining redeemer would seize the leadership of the Democratic Party to save America and the world from the re-election of Donald J Trump. In other words, the election is for the Democratic Party to lose and not Trump to win.

  • Climate change: Living in ignorant bliss

    Most Nigerians probably say “what concerns us about climate change?” I can understand this especially when we have many existential problems that are of immediate concern to us while the problem of climate change appears to be something not in the imminent physical horizon. Our problems are legion as the mad man of Gadara said. But this does not excuse our non-participation in saving the only planet where we and others call home. We are also victims of climate abuse and degradation and unfortunately we Africans and poor Asians and Latin Americans are the least technologically prepared to bear the burden and consequences of environmental degradation and climate change. In other parts of the world, individuals are being called upon to reduce their carbon footprints through responsible minimization of individual emissions. One of the constituent colleges of the University of London is presently considering abandonment of beef in order to reduce their individual and collective contribution to greenhouse gas emissions arising from the methane cows belch into the air! Some are taking to vegan lifestyle and eating more grains than animal products. We can join the rest of the world not necessarily through our cuisine and change of diet. We can of course ride bicycles than drive cars for short distances. If we have to use our automobiles we can attach catalytic converters to filter the carbon from our vehicle emissions. When I drive in Nigeria and I see rickety vehicles belching huge smoke into the atmosphere, my heart beats skip some beat wondering why such irresponsible behaviour does not attract sanctions or correction of the apparently ignorant offenders. I hope one of our overpaid and over indulged legislators would bring a comprehensive bill to save our environment and to show the world that as a responsible member of the international community, we want to join in the struggle to reverse environmental degradation and save the planet. The first thing we can do is to have a population policy that says no man should have more than two children. Emphasis and the onus on population reduction and control must be on the man not the women. This will not go down well with the religionists but we must force it down their throats.

    We can do more. We need to stop the slash and burn agricultural practice by which we clear virgin forest whenever we farm. This leads to deforestation and reduction of the very forest that acts as carbon sinks and source of the oxygen we breathe. We need to teach this subject in our schools so that children can be made aware of the global problem. We do not have the time to waste and prevaricate about what to do. Scientists say we only have 11 more years to reverse global warming or else it will be too late. Burning bushes every year and burning refuse contributes to the problem. Instead of burning refuse we should make them into composts since most of our refuse are bio-degradable. The plastics that are not should be collected and recycled. We should use less plastics and try to replace plastic packaging with papers that do not litter our streets and find ways into our oceans and rivers to destroy aquatic ecology and kill and poison fishes on which we are increasingly dependent for our protein intake. Anyone who lives in Lagos like me and those people who live in our urban  areas like Kano and Ibadan  would have noticed the constant smog that tends to hang over our cities particularly during harmattan arising from smoke mixing with dusts and blanketing most our cities. It is not neuro surgery or rocket science to see the linkage between this and the increase in respiratory diseases such as asthma among our children and adults. People are being choked and are not able to breathe because of the unnecessary burning of forests, refuse, tyres and plastics, yes plastics thus poisoning our urban and even village environment!

    Some years ago, the European Union banned the export of tropical wood from countries such as ours. Unfortunately this law has been obeyed in its breach. Trees are still being felled and exported abroad as raw timber or timber products in the mad struggle for foreign exchange. Sometimes trees are felled for firewood for cooking. This is very sad for a country that is the largest burner and emission of natural gas that could have been piped into homes to replace wood and kerosene as sources of energy for cooking. Here we are wasting irreplaceable natural asset while polluting the atmosphere. Yet some of the technologies involved in converting natural gas to power urban transportation and domestic cooking have been around for a long time but because of the availability of petroleum products and hard wood we have taken the least line of resistance in our energy source and use. We need to clean our act. This is not only in our energy use but in the way we live. We are just too dirty the way we manage our wastes. We do not know we can separate our wastes into separate garbage bags, one for biodegradable wastes and the other for recyclable wastes; we simply lump everything together or even in extreme cases throw our wastes including human wastes unto the streets or into the gutters. This eventually contributes to flooding when the unseasonably heavy rains caused by global warming come. It can thus be seen that all our problems are bound together and if we think the problem of the environment does not concern us we shall learn our lessons in a very hard way.

    These enumerated problems are just a few that we can tackle at the local or national level and find beneficial solutions to. If we are unable to find solutions to them on our own, we can link up with international organizations such as the following UN bodies: The Earth System Governance Project (ESGP); Global Environment Facility (GEF); Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC); International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN); United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP); World Nature  Organisation (WNO) and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) from which  assistance and funds can be sourced for all kinds of amelioration strategies to add our own quota to the struggle for environmental enhancement. Recently, Ethiopia planted one million trees in one day to reverse deforestation in their country. We used to have a program of tree planting particularly in the north of our country. One wonders what has become of it. This is an area in which we can deploy our millions of rural folk to participate in the greening of our country. In this way the rural population will go through a learning curve in environmental education and they would not likely cut trees again. In Germany it is illegal to cut trees. Trees are living things and their lives should not be summarily ended just because one has a saw or a cutlass. If one wants to build a house one can design it to avoid unnecessarily cutting down all the trees in the neighbourhood.

    The same mistake took place a decade or so ago during the military regime in our country when some young misguided military governors decided to cut down the neem trees in our cities. This happened in Kano, Ibadan and Maiduguri. The trees lining the avenues were felled and replaced with street lights many of which were so fragile that they were blown off by the first rain that fell after their installations. How on earth should anyone cut down trees in the desert of Kano and Maiduguri? Even in lush Ibadan this should not have happened.  No attempt has been made in Ibadan to lighten the arid and harsh urban environment by greening the city. Thanks to Raji Fashola, former governor of Lagos who during this civilian regime tried to green the environment of Lagos. Only the knowledgeable people gave kudos to him for his efforts. The hoi polloi Of Lagos were heard to deride him by saying “Na only tree we go chop?” I am sure history will be kind to him on the account of his environmental concern. I hope his effort can be copied by other state governors and even by the federal government. If there is need for urban expansion into the adjoining forest it must be supervised by a resuscitated forest rangers. We used to have them as forest guards in the old Western Region. Imagine if we had them, he criminal herders and other criminals inhabiting our forest would not have had an easy chance. We also need to watch the kind of fertilizers we use in order to prevent poisoning our soil. We must bring back sanitary inspectors and urban health people to radically supervise our uncontrolled public nuisance and wastes disposal. All these measures will not be easy and it will need considerable investment on public education for our people to buy into a program which at the end of the day will be in everybody’s interest and all these will need people to run and as the cliché goes, there are jobs in green policies and there is money to be made.

     

  • Great Britain and the decline of a global power

    The defeat of the so called Spanish Armada in 1588 by the English navy during the reign of Queen Elizabeth 1 marked the beginning of the dominance of the British Navy which later provided the means by which the British Empire was built.  Admiral Alfred Thayer Mayan in his seminal book on sea power has demonstrated admirably the influence of sea power on history and how this is a key to understanding the rise and fall of the British empire. At the height of the empire it was usually stated that the sun never set on the empire that stretched from Canada in the North American continent in the west to India and Australasian countries of Australia and New Zealand and islands in the pacific. As the sun is about to set in North America, it will be rising in the eastern possessions of the empire. The British were justifiably proud of the awesome achievement of a small island nation dominating the world. It achieved this feat not through territorial expansion in Europe as the other European powers like Spain, France, the Netherlands, Austria, Germany and Russia tried to do. In fact, Britain’s power was based on staying away from European diplomatic and military entanglement.  Whenever Britain intervened in Europe, it was to maintain a balance of power. This policy of “little Englanders” sufficed for a long time and saw Britain come out victorious in two world wars. Of course it was the power of the new world redressing the balance of the old world of Europe that secured victory for Britain in the two world wars. If not for Americans, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders and less celebrated efforts of people in the sub-continent of India and our own people in the Anglophone countries in Africa south of the Sahara, Great Britain would not have remained great for this length of time.

    It was therefore understandable for Winston Churchill after the Second World War In 1945 to declare that he would not be “the  First Lord of the Treasury (prime minister) to preside over the liquidation of the British empire. “Unfortunately for Churchill, there were potent forces at work undermining the empire and in hindsight, it seems no one could have stood against the force of history. Beginning with India and Pakistan in 1947, Ceylon in 1948 to be followed by Sudan in 1955 and the Gold Coast (Ghana) in 1957 and a host of others including Nigeria in the  1960s the British Empire dissolved into its various national entities.

    While this was going on, France and Germany after the Second World War decided to  co-operate  by pooling their resources together shepherded by their two illustrious sons of General Charles de Gaulle of France and Konrad Adenauer  of Germany by forming what later evolved into the European Economic Community ( EEC) and now the European Union(EU). Britain following its well laid down tradition of distancing itself from European entanglement, kept away and continued to manage its empire whose size after the war was still considerable. By the 1970s it occurred to the leaders of Britain that it could no longer afford to cut itself  off from the economic development  and regional integration in Europe, particularly as its trade was beginning to be closely tied up with Europe. On January 1, 1973 Great Britain became a member of the European Economic Community. Even at that time not every one of its leaders were persuaded that membership in the economic community was absolutely desirable. Thus developed two groups of Euro- sceptics and pro-Europeans within the British political spectrum. As European politicians began to dream big of a federal Europe, the British became worried about losing their peculiar British tradition in a Europe economically dominated by Germany – the biggest economy in Europe, and politically dominated by the French who always had the support and understanding of Germany as founding nations. European integration gathered more speed with most of the countries with the exception of a few refuseniks like Britain  adopting a common currency the Euro on January 1, 1999. Then followed the Schengen Agreement by which most of the countries in the European Union adopted more or less a common immigration policy that permitted freedom of movement of one country’s visa holders entering  all countries of the Schengen group. The admission into  the European Union of countries in Central Europe just coming out of communist domination and granting them right of movement in the union and many of them flooding British cities upset many Britons who felt they should have control on those who come to live in their country . What seemed to have finally made some Britons to agitate against remaining in the European Union was the possibility of the admission of  Muslim Turkey. Euro-sceptics whipped up emotions of  Britain being swamped by uncontrollable foreign immigration and possibly of Muslim Turks  when Turkey becomes a member of the European Union.  The rising British opposition to Europe forced the government of David Cameron to negotiate for Britain’s control of its immigration. The EU was not going to have the British benefit from the European market while having power to keep Europeans from living in Britain. This was what forced David Cameron, the prime minister  in 2016 to gamble on a referendum of whether to leave the European Union or stay. He had hoped and campaigned that Britain should stay but the rise of nationalism  and nativism triumphed over economic common sense and the British people voted to leave in a vote that sharply divided the country into 52 percent leavers and 48 percent remainers. Analysing the vote shows people in Northern Ireland and Scotland voted to remain while people in wales and England voted to leave. The youth to which the future belongs voted to stay while the older generation who are less educated and more inclined to be xenophobic voted to leave. As an  honourable man, David Cameron resigned as prime minister and was succeeded by Theresa May who after  three years of negotiations with the European Union got a deal which the British parliament rejected three times thus forcing her to resign. The new prime minister, Boris Johnson who is regarded as  an unprincipled and ambitious man is now saddled with getting a deal with Europe which the British parliament would approve. Boris Johnson has made it clear that with or without  a deal, Britain will leave the European Union on October 31. He has asked for radical changes in the deal negotiated by Theresa May. He is particularly piqued by the so-called Irish backstop, an agreement to prevent a hard border between Northern Ireland which is part of Britain and the Republic of Ireland. Removal of this Irish back stop could conceivably undermine carefully negotiated peace deal between the nationalist forces of Sin Fein and  its armed wing the Irish Republican Army ( IRA) and the British. Undeclared war has been raging between the British and the Irish  Catholics in Ulster since the division of their Island between the Catholic south and the largely Protestant Northern Ireland which has substantial catholic minority who feel discriminated against.

    American meddling in this crisis is changing what is an internal affair of Great Britain. Barack Obama as president of the USA had advised against Britain leaving the European Union. Trump has  now promised post-BREXIT United Kingdom a rapidly negotiated trade deal to replace whatever the United Kingdom may be losing by withdrawing from Europe. The United States House of Representatives has said through its speaker Nancy Pelosi that no matter what President Trump may promise his British mimic, Boris Johnson, the U S Congress will not pass a USA- UK trade deal if there is a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. People of Irish descent are well mobilized against any British – European Union agreement that will jeopardize peace on the island of Ireland. Furthermore the Scottish  National Party( SNP ) which is the ruling party in Scotland has said since the people of Scotland did not vote to leave the European Union, any precipitous British withdrawal from the European Union will trigger another referendum in Scotland about whether Scotland should remain as part of the United Kingdom or not. If Scotland were to withdraw  from the United Kingdom, the status of Northern Ireland in the United Kingdom will now have to be determined either by a referendum or continued Irish Republican Army (IRA) campaign. If Britain were to withdraw without a deal with the European Union,  there will be serious consequences. In spite of continued security alliance with Britain, the European Union will not be economically open to Britain as a partner. A  new agreement would have to be fashioned out which will not be as favourable to Britain as when it was in the European Union. The upshot of all this will be rapid decline of the country because its products will not continue to receive most favourable conditions in Europe and London which for many years has been perhaps the most important financial centre in the world will lose its pre-eminent position to cities like Paris, Frankfurt,  and Dublin with devastating effects on the British economy. This could lead to the unravelling of United Kingdom with Scotland voting to leave the country.

  • Climate change: The fire next time

    In the 1960s, the American black author James Baldwin wrote a book about the future of American race relations and entitled it “The Fire Next Time” which was an attempt to re-echo what God allegedly told Noah that He would not destroy the world by water as he did in Noah’s time but that He will destroy it by fire when man’s cup is full, to put it Biblically. Some people when they think about the possibility of nuclear war always feel that it is the way the old prophecy of destroying the world by fire would be fulfilled. It is of course clear to everybody that in the event of a nuclear war, nothing will be spared. The late President J.F. Kennedy said that in the event of nuclear war, “the living will envy the dead”, meaning those who survive the immediate incineration will die painfully of radioactive fallout. Perhaps man may avoid this if we play our politics right. That is , if the nuclear arms states can somehow manage universal nuclear disarmament. This is provided for by appropriate United Nations protocol. Whether this will happen remains a moot question.

    But there is the possibility of the world burning out through anthropomorphic activities by which human beings have sought to dominate the environment since time immemorial through agriculture and animal husbandry and the modern life styles of man such as industrialization and other appurtenances of modern existence. It is obvious that human activities of production and existence have led to unprecedented and unparalleled emission of greenhouse gasses into the environment causing global warming. Experts have now warned that the world must not only reverse global warming but that it cannot afford an increase of more than 1.5 Celsius in temperature.

    Read Also: Anambra students, others protest global warming

    I remember attending the climate change conference in Copenhagen some years ago and it was then decided that the world must not only reverse greenhouse emissions but should even go back to the level of 1970 or there about. The argument common among those of us from developing countries was that the polluters must pay for all abatement measures that needed to be taken to clean the global environment. Since most of the polluters were countries in the industrialized North of the world namely Europe, America and Japan, they should bear the brunt of the measures needed to be taken to reverse environmental abuse of the world. The developing world reasonably argued that they needed to be developed before joining those concerned with global warming. This meant huge polluters like China and India would continue to use dirty fuels like coal in their industries. Countries in OPEC like Nigeria are always very defensive when the consumption of hydrocarbons like oil and gas are flagged as polluters. This struck at national economies of many countries in Africa, the Middle East, Latin American countries like Mexico and Venezuela and even Russia that depends on its export of gas and oil to Europe. The campaign designed to save the environment has not been easy because there are many complex issues and interests involved, yet this is a task that must be done if man and his environment must survive.

    The vagaries of national and international politics have also not helped the campaign. The work of a UN experts group that toiled for years to establish the scientificity of global warming leading to the Paris protocol on global warming is being undermined by politicians like Donald Trump, the current American president joined by his Australian counterparts who have refused to accept the unarguable facts of global warming. The manifestations of global warming can be seen in the unseasonably high temperatures and other extremes of weather all over the world. This current year is regarded everywhere as the hottest in recorded history. Many people especially the aged, infirm and children have died as a result of extreme heat not only in Europe and America as the world press tend to publicize, but in Asia and Africa as well. Perhaps the most alarming effect of global warming is the regular forest fires in America in particular and now in the Arctic, Alaska, Canada’s northern territories, Norwegian and Swedish northern territories and Russian Siberia and the Arctic. The fires in the arctic circle has been burning since June and because of the inaccessible nature of the areas to mechanical fire fighters, they are being left to burn themselves out thus causing damage in terms of the spewing of carbon dioxide into the environment leading further to global warming. Added to this is the burning of the peat and bog in the Arctic and releasing even greater carbon dioxide into the air. On top of this is the melting of the icecaps thus leading to eventual rise in sea rise and coastal flooding. The reduction of the trees which act as carbon sinks further reduces the ability of the global environment to recover. The huge emissions of carbon is also damaging global oceans whose ability to absorb more carbon has been reduced because there is only a limit to how much carbon the seas which are getting saturated can absorb. The emissions of automobiles and the entire industrial processes had primarily been responsible for greenhouse gasses but the problem has been compounded by our agricultural processes. For example, the rearing of millions of cows all over the world and their emission of green house gasses like the methane they belch into the air has led to calls for a change of diet away from consumption of beef and eating more grains. In this regard, Nigeria must begin to think about what we are going to do to the millions of cows whose methane emissions is adding to global warming. The world may be moving to a point where there might be international protocol about the number of cattle people and countries can hold.

    What is to be done? The automobile industry is at least doing something about automobiles’ emission by planning to replace cars and autos powered by hydrocarbons with those powered by electric batteries and liquefied hydrogen with zero emissions to the environment. Industrial processes are also receiving same attention of moving away from hydrocarbons as sources of fuel. The problem in some countries like China, India and some parts of the USA like West Virginia is that electricity is still being produced from coal instead of from renewables like tide, wind, thermal and at worst nuclear energy sources. Even though Trump and his co -travellers in some countries may not be environment friendly, sub national authorities like California, Colorado and several cities in the USA are taking measures to ensure that they are environment compliant. The same thing is being done in most of Western Europe and Japan where as in the case of Great Britain, the government hopes to have zero emission by 2050. Most of the European Union countries are even targeting earlier years for environment compliance. The rise of Green parties in these countries has put pressure on their governments to do the right thing. In order to make whatever measures being taken in all these countries to be effective, same measures have to be taken globally because the global environment is one. You cannot pollute somewhere and clean in another place and expect positive global results.

    The fight for saving the common global environment has become an imperative recently because of the Arctic circle fires and the gradual denudation of the Amazon forest in Brazil , the Guyanas ( Dutch and French) and the former British Guyana now an independent country. But the global eye is on Brazil where the new president, Jair Bolsonaro, the so-called Trump of Brazil who does not believe in the evidence of global warming, has opened the Amazon forest of Brazil to capitalists who are interested in logging, agricultural and animal husbandry to cut trees in the basin thus removing the forest providing carbon sink for substantial global carbon emissions. Not only that, the Amazon basin is responsible for substantial amount of the oxygen in our air and if the basin were to disappear, the world will be in trouble. The slash and burn agriculture in the Amazon basin and in places like the Congo basin and the tropical forests of Indonesia  as well as our own rain forest are inimical to global environmental wellbeing.

    What then must be done to avoid global calamity. This will require radical changes in the way we live and even what we eat. But to begin with, countries with vast rain forest like Brazil must be assisted to preserve the rain forest for the world and the indigenous people who live there. These countries would have to be compensated through the GEF (Global Environmental Fund) which will have to be substantially increased to take into account what the countries owning the tropical forests would be losing by not allowing whole sale exploitation of their forests. Where the forests have been already cut as in West Africa, efforts at afforestation must be assisted through financial transfers from the OECD counties that were responsible for global warming. All oil exploration in the Arctic would have to stop and what is causing fires to flare up there must be examined and an end must be put to it. The world cannot continue to dilly dally on the issue of climate change caused by global warming.