The Nation Newspaper

Category: Jide Osuntokun

  • General insecurity: What to do about it

    Since the handover of power by the military to civilians in Nigeria in 1999, Nigeria has not has a respite from insecurity. It started on a small scale in the Niger Delta and Saki Biam in Benue State and the Nigerian Army was called in to put out the fire of rebellion. But like bush fire not completely put out, the Niger Delta got out of hands in spite of President Umaru Yar’Adua’s ingenious scheme of buying peace by giving out money to the youths of the Niger Delta and sending many to schools at home and abroad. The policy was continued by President Goodluck Jonathan. Jonathan expanded the scope of the policy by awarding security contracts in the Niger Delta creeks to known leaders of militant groups. Some of these leaders became stupendously rich. This policy of buying off the leaders of the militant groups and educating the youths seems to have succeeded at least for now because the Niger Delta is reasonably quiet now. Thanks also must go to the security forces in the Niger Delta for their robust work of pacification. Recently the youths in the area were pleading with the security forces to extend its security umbrella to the East -West road which they complained had been taken over by kidnappers, bandits and brigands. It is interesting that the former militants have developed a love for the military to the extent that they are now pleading with their former enemy, the Nigerian military, to come and save them. This shows what a policy of cane and carrots can do if applied nationally.

    It appears the federal government is thinking about applying the paradigm already established in the Niger Delta to other distressed and rebellious communities in Nigeria. A new Northeast Commission has just been established with a take-off financial allocation of N10 billion out of its budget of N100 billion a year already captured in the 2019 budget. The government appears to have concluded that poverty is at the root of a rebellion that is masquerading as a religious uprising. The development of the area is one side of a two-pronged strategy. The military and police pacification will of course continue. Government must avoid wasting all the money on paying bureaucrats instead of spending it on the people directly. If this is not avoided the whole exercise will fail. The question to be asked really is what has happened to all the financial allocation to states in the northeast in the last decades. Why has it not made any impact on the lives of the people?

    Unless there is a new direct approach to the problem, the issue of poverty will continue as an affliction in the region. It is heartening to know that some our leaders have realized that education is the key to finding a solution to the problem. By this I am not suggesting and supporting the spate of the establishment of state universities when the fundamental and solid foundations of primary and secondary education are not there. The recent kidnapping of people across the whole country has raised the problem of how to alleviate poverty to a national level.

    The time has come to have a national policy on human welfare in this country. This is not a new and untried strategy. Since 1945, the Labour government of Clement Attlee in the United Kingdom put in place a policy by which all unemployed citizens received the dole so that no one would starve to death when they fall on evil times such as sickness and unemployment. Many countries including the United States and other OECD countries have followed suit. The system is most developed in the Scandinavian countries. I don’t know of any country in Africa that has developed a social welfare package for its unemployed. Nigeria may have to lead because of necessity. The country is overrun by kidnappers and all kinds of young unemployed terrorists. We have to find something for them to live on. In some countries, the issue of “basic income”, meaning the amount for an average person to live in dignified poverty has become the current experimental practice. In a wonderful book with the long title of Utopia For Realists: And How We Can Get There,  Rutger Bregman, a Dutch historian and philosopher has argued powerfully that the world can afford this if there is a rational redistribution of wealth without killing the profit motive. This has been tried in a few countries including some states in the USA. This idea of basic income is different from welfare pay which only goes just far enough to avoid starvation.  I am suggesting the trial of a modified form of it in our war against terrorism, kidnapping and banditry in Nigeria. Whatever name we may call it, somebody would have to pay for it. If we are to do this, we have to increase taxes and widen the base and scope of taxation so that all those who should pay taxes are made to pay. It will also mean reducing radically, the yawning gap between the highest and least paid workers in Nigeria without destroying incentive for performance. We as a country will also have to work harder, increase production and grow the economy substantially. We have no alternative to making everybody a stakeholder in the national enterprise. A situation in which we can no longer travel between cities is not sustainable and we might as well be all dead than continue to live like this.

    We are at war and the president should send a proclamation to the National Assembly declaring an emergency and a state of siege on the nation. There is need to change the pussyfooting leadership of the armed forces. The security forces also need to do more to capture all these kidnappers, herders, and cattle rustlers terrorizing Nigerians. Examples of arrested terrorists need to be made through swift and sure punishment. The impression people have is that it takes years to jail arrested offenders in Nigeria. The government must demonstrate that it has capacity to govern and to secure the lives and properties of the people. This security is the raison d’être of government. Once it becomes obvious to people that government has abandoned them, they will adopt self-help measures.

    In the past one could apply to the police for gun license. I used to have one myself and my father and four of my brothers had double-barrelled guns almost as a family tradition the way we all had dogs in the past. I gave my rifle to our community guards in our area just as other licensed gun owners did the same. There were criteria which one had to meet to qualify for gun license. They include solid and sane backgrounds, middle class type of employment such as those in senior positions in the public service, university and other such people and people in management positions in private employment. In short, the class the British would call property-owning class could apply to the police for gun licence. The licensing regime was patterned after the British practice. From what I know and my research, not many people abused the right to own these weapons. Of course those were the days when Nigeria was safe. To repeat Chinua Achebe, when “There was a country”.  Only God knows what we have now when major roads connecting our most important cities such as Abuja-Kaduna, Lagos-Ibadan, Ibadan-Ife, Enugu-Port Harcourt and so on are under siege of kidnappers and terrorists and the northeast and northwest of our country are besieged by bandits.

    The situation has become so desperate that people are suggesting what at first sounds irrational but on second thought not as crazy as I first thought. A colleague told me that since those who are targeted by kidnappers are the middle class who are waylaid on the roads or captured in their homes, those of them who have the nerve and stomach to carry revolvers should be asked to apply for license for these concealed weapons which are not as cumbersome as the long rifles of those days of yore. At least people will stand some chance of defending themselves and if they die while doing this they will die fighting and as men and not like lamb led sheepishly to slaughter .The desperate situation in our country has made some people to begin to talk and think like members of the American National Rifle Association (NRA), a rabidly racist right wing organisation. They usually argue that a gun in the hand of a good man may deter or even kill an evil person. While that may be true, but what happens when an apparently normal person goes berserk? Or what happens when a man or woman during domestic quarrel shoots his or her spouse?  What about road rage when a reckless driver collides with the car of a gun carrying person? Of course, there may be all kinds of accidental discharges at home through careless handling of guns. Our people are also not the most careful people on earth! There are a million reasons against proliferation of weapons, a phenomenon which got Nigeria where we are today. If we regard carrying individual concealed weapons as not the way to go, our government must show us that it cares. First of all, it is not rocket science to have highway patrol vehicles patrol the major highways in the country 24/7. In countries where they don’t have the country-wide breakdown of law and order, this is what they do. If the personnel is not available, they should be recruited rapidly and demobilized soldiers could be deployed into the highway patrol corps of policemen.  The time for community, city, state and zonal police has come whether the government likes it or not. From experience, kidnappers waylay their victims at bad spots on the highways. If these bad spots cannot be immediately fixed, then they should be appropriately policed. A mixture of all these suggestions should be tried, namely, military and police pacification; secondly payment of welfare to all unemployed youths, expanding the productive capacity of the economy to absorb the unemployed; thirdly, arming those who apply for concealed weapons after proper background and psychological checks, introduction of community/city, state/zonal police and finally increased patrol on major highways on a twenty four hours basis.

  • Royal change of batons in Japan and Thailand

    Two interesting history-making events took place in the kingdoms of Thailand and Japan last week. Thailand got a new king Vajiralongkorn with his coronation after the death of his father, King Bhumibol at the age of 88 two and a half years ago. The old king reigned for nearly 70 years as a divine king. The new 66-year-old king was a pilot and his new queen, who is his fourth wife, was courted and married from among the hostesses in his plane. The new king has travelled widely maintaining residence in Germany and by all standards he is a thoroughly modern king ruling over a medium power in Southeast Asia. Thailand is a country famous for its rice production and its tourism and hospitality business.  The world will be watching how this new king who is the most powerful king in the world almost wielding absolute power fares in a modern world of democracy and constitutionalism.

    As an aside, Thailand used to be called “Siam”. When I entered Christ School, Ado Ekiti in 1956, one of the rites of passage was that we were told that the king of Siam was called “Whatanass” and we were taught to sing its “national anthem” with the music of British ”God Save the Queen “in the presence of the whole school.  We then as greenhorns sang “Oh Whatanass Siam” three times, repeating it many times while our seniors laughed at us before we were told what we were singing was “Oh what an ass I am”! This was a secret initiation we all kept to ourselves and not even revealing to our junior brothers since none of our own brothers told us about this prankish rite of passage. Nobody can joke about Thailand today because it is a reasonably prosperous and contented country whose divine king provides a rallying point in its fractious political environment.

    On  a  more serious note, historically, the more important change of royal baton took place in Japan when Emperor Akihito after  being on the formidable Chrysanthemum imperial throne for 30 years abdicated and handed over to his son, Crown Prince Naruhito. Akihito saw the economic miracle of growth in Japan but his reign also witnessed several disasters, tsunamis, earthquakes and even an explosion of a nuclear reactor. He abdicated because of poor health and handed over to his well prepared and educated son, Naruhito whose highly educated wife and former diplomat, Masako had suffered some depression because of too much pressure as a result of being caged more or less in the palace because of imperial traditions. The abdication is significant because no Japanese emperor has abdicated in more than two centuries; certainly none after the Meiji restoration in the 19th century.

    After the surrender of Japan to Allied forces in 1945 following the dropping of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by Americans on the order of President Harry Truman which promptly incinerated close to half a million people and perhaps more by collateral damage, Emperor Hirohito, the 124th emperor of Japan  was to be tried for war crimes and deposed. The reason for possible trial of the emperor was that the armed forces of Japan fought and died for the emperor and it was considered a sacrilege for any Japanese soldier to surrender and rather than surrendering, it was considered honourable to commit hara-kiri. Wise counsel prevailed and the emperor was allowed to stay on the throne as a constitutional monarch. He had ascended the throne in 1926 and remained on the throne until 1989 when he died and was succeeded by his son, Akihito who has now abdicated.

    The Japanese had fought with fury during the Second World War under their war time Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, who, along his military generals were accused of holding the emperor hostage. The important thing is that Japanese people and soldiers were ready to pay any price and endure any hardship in the defence of their country and the Japanese throne. The Japanese before the outbreak of the war had carved out an area of China (Manchuria) and imposed colonial rule on the Korean Peninsula and during the war had occupied Taiwan and the Philippines and many other pacific islands. Even British rule in India was threatened by the militaristic state of Japan. Many war crimes and crimes against humanity were committed by the Japanese including forcing women in occupied territories in China and Korea to provide sexual service for Japanese soldiers as “comfort women” for which Japan has had to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to surviving comfort women and their families. So strong was the animus against Japan in 1945 that the imperial throne was earmarked for abolition just as was done to the Emperor of Germany in 1919 after the First World War. Japan as a result of its defeat lost its prestige and Russia has refused up till today to hand over Japanese northern territories it occupied in 1945.  Russia against all pleas by Japan has refused to return Japanese northern territory to Japan perhaps because of the humiliation of defeat Russia suffered in the hands of Japan by Czarist Russia in 1905.

    From the ashes and humiliation of defeat and without substantial natural resources but with the ingenuity of its people and commitment of the political leadership of the country, Japan for years became the second most powerful economic power in the world before being recently overtaken by the People’s Republic of China. If Japan wants to be a nuclear power, it has the resources and the knowhow. In fact, in recent times as a result of thereat from nuclear armed North Korea, its former colony, there is a strong movement within Japan and encouraged by President Trump that Japan should be able to defend itself against nuclear threats from North Korea and China. This is a departure from the pacific constitution imposed on Japan by America in 1945 limiting it to small armed forces with only defensive capabilities. This was before North Korea became a threatening nuclear power.

    What happens in Japan has global significance because of the economic power of the country and its potential military power. Japan for now does not need to worry too much about nuclear attacks from potential enemies in Beijing and Pyongyang. This is because it enjoys protective nuclear umbrella of the United States which stations troops on Japanese mainland but particularly on the island of Okinawa where it maintains hundreds of thousands of American troops and on nearby American territory in Guam. But questions are being asked in Japan whether America would sacrifice the interest of Japan in trying to accommodate China and North Korea in the age of Trump where politics has become transactional. In this kind of scenario, the influence of the new emperor may become decisive. He is the 126th in a dynasty that has existed for more than 2000 years, certainly before the birth of Jesus Christ and it is the oldest dynasty in the world today. The mystical love and respect for this dynasty is deeply embedded in the Japanese psyche. There are millions of modern Japanese to whom the emperor remains a god that they are willing to fight and to die for. Below the superficial modernity of Japan is a deep conservative culture which gives the country its solidity which many marvel at because they cannot understand its culture. The new emperor is 59 and a very modern man and unlike his predecessors, he is widely travelled. After a first degree in History from a prestigious university in Japan, he spent three years for a post graduate degree in Oxford University in England. He speaks English and has a smattering knowledge of other languages while his wife, a former diplomat is said to speak English and French fluently. This modernity did not save the new queen Masako from the vitriol of criticism for not having a male child because the throne is reserved for only males. This has led to the nephew of the new emperor being declared the heir apparent to the throne. It seems some kind of Sallic law of royal succession which had been abolished in Europe for quite a while remains in Japan.

    But it must be noted that until recently even in England, the male child takes precedence in order of succession to the throne. Recent attempt to change the law of succession in Japan was rebuffed by the aristocracy and the government. Kingship has its mystic and mystery and to remove these may seal the fate of the institution. This does not only apply to Japan but to all countries where the royal institutions continue to be revered, embraced, venerated and respected. When kings lose their aura and become ordinary people, the justification of the institution becomes tenuous and unsustainable.

  • State vs. private enterprises: A personal odyssey

    It independence, many developing countries including those in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean were forced as a result of paucity of private capital to directly take on the role of private investors through state companies and corporations.It is now fashionable to deprecate state intervention in state economies everywhere because many of the companies and corporations set up became conduit pipes for stealing and embezzling state funds. But it is doubtful if the post-colonial states would have developed at all without direct state investment. Even in The United Kingdom, the USA, Canada, the Asian countries and most of Europe, state intervention was necessary in the development of their physical infrastructure of railways, roads, waterways and airports. Even up till today the debate is still on whether in critical areas and for security reasons the state should not still hold on to some important sectors of the economy. The debate has become ideological with socialists committed to state intervention in the economy while conservatives, liberals and capitalists are committed to free market and free enterprise and deregulated economies. But what seems to be gaining economic favour nowadays is mixed economy in which private and public enterprises compete with each other. This makes more sense than blind ideological embrace of either the socialist or capitalist mode of economic development.

    I have a personal theory that government must never be involved in hospitality business either directly or through a government company. Governments, if they are interested in any hospitality business, should only have minority interest. If not, the company would always be inefficient and unprofitable. I have the privilege to have travelled everywhere in Nigeria and I have seen the miserable management of such government-sponsored hotels like Owena in  Ado -Ekiti, Zaranda in Bauchi, Hamdala in Kaduna, Central Hotel in Kano, Hotel Presidential in Enugu and Port Harcourt, Concord  Hotel in Owerri, Metropolitan Hotel, Calabar, Hill Station, Jos, Lake Chad Hotel in Maiduguri, Sokoto Hotel in Sokoto, Old Owena Hotel in Akure, LafiaCatering  Hotel in Ibadan, Airport Hotel in Ikeja and Premier Hotel  in Ibadan to mention those hotels that I have stayed  in, usually with unpleasant memories.  If any of these hotels is still being run by government or government parastatals or companies, they better be sold immediately.   My friend, Prince Julius Adelusi-Adeluyi, former chairman of the Oodua Group that owns the Premier Hotel wanted to lease out the hotel but was stopped. The time is now ripe to sell all the hotels in the Oodua Group. In most cases, these hotels are located in strategic and central parts of the state capitals or cities so they should naturally attract clientele and customers.  But alas, many of them are notorious for their inefficient operations. They are also notorious for the swarms of prostitutes roaming around them at dusk.

    Last Easter Monday, April 22, some of my grandchildren wanted to go out for Easter picnic and I felt since they came from Lagos, I should show them what we have in Ibadan. I remembered that Premier Hotel was a delight when I was in the University of Ibadan in the 1960s and that we used to go there to have drinks and usually piping hot meat pies.  With that in mind, I and my assistant took these two little children to Premier Hotel. What we found was most discouraging. The lobby was completely empty. We sat down in one of the few easy chairs in the vast lobby. The security man asked me what we wanted. I was surprised by the question and I told him we wanted some soft drinks and “small chops”.  He then told me to move to an area where there were some school type chairs and tables. Eventually I was told we could go to the poolside. When we wanted to go there we were told we had to pay N1,000 each as entry fees. I quickly paid this at the so-called poolside. The swimming pool water was green instead of being blue. We saw quite a crowd of excited children and their moms. After going round looking for where to sit, we found a pile of chairs and tables. We grabbed some and sat down hoping that someone would come and ask what we wanted. After a while, I asked my assistant to go and buy drinks and meat pies. He bought the drinks and there were no glasses to drink the soft drinks. After calming down the toddlers with me, we left quietly and then we drove to the staff club at the University of Ibadan where at least we were served.

    Before leaving, I left my card with the hotel asking their manager to call me because I was told he was not around.  These people are never around when they are running public companies! He did not call me of course. If he had called me, I would have told him my experience and asked him to do something to change the situation. I kept asking myself why everything is being run down in our country.

    I observe that our people want to have money without sweating as Americans will say. People are looking for so called “breakthrough “without serious work. Our people go to churches and mosques, pray and fast without realizing that the holy books ask us to work hard and that God will only bless the work of our hands. I don’t know where we missed the road to doing the right things in this country. I suspect the time we abolished secondary boarding schools was when our problems started. In my old school of Christ School Ado Ekiti, we were at young age responsible for cleaning the dormitories and class rooms, toilets and bathrooms. We also cut the grass and once a week on rotational bases, in the lower classes, we were exposed to either carpentry, brick-laying and farming. We manned the dispensary and power house where electricity for our campus was generated in the absence of national power grid which did not extend to our town or campus in those days. Yet we combined these with serious academic work that by the 1980s, old boys of my school constituted more than 25% of the teaching staff in all Nigerian universities.

    I used to boast that until a Christ School boy was made governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, stealing and looting in the banking sector will continue. Our people had the kind of integrity known and appreciated by peasants whose wealth was calculated in their honesty and hard work. We now have a country of fraudsters and people wanting to have money by all means. This is why government companies and institutions are run down with no qualms. People working in private and public companies do not know it is in their interest to contribute to growing the companies so that they can keep their jobs for life. It seems people work while they keep looking for greener pastures at home and abroad. The effect is lack of commitment to their places of current employment .There is also no commitment to the country and most young people are praying and fasting to go abroad. If they do go abroad, they will be shocked that for every penny they get abroad, they would have to earn it. There is no free lunch anywhere and once you lose your job as a result of laziness, you are on your own. Within a month of losing your job your landlords will throw you out if you miss payment of your rent. It is not like here where you will now start begging the landlord “in the name of God”.

    If you are not used to working hard in your country don’t begin to dream of making it in a strange land with different culture and cuisine. It is the inability of some of our people who think the roads of countries abroad are paved with gold and that they would not have to work that has led to many of them committing crimes wherever they are in the world, be it in Saudi Arabia, the USA and Canada and Europe as well as China. These people have unfortunately given us terrible names and reputation. A young former student of mine working for Masters’ degree in Pennsylvania in the USA phoned me crying that other African students jokingly tell each other to be careful when Nigerians are around because they might steal their phones or wallets.

    We have problems and these are translating to insecurity, unemployment and moral collapse which our political and religious leaders seem unable to tackle. We need a campaign of moral rearmament. If we don’t do serious thinking on how to change the trajectory of this country, those who are already fighting for who will hold different offices in 2023 will discover to their chagrin that there will be no country to govern.

  • Nigeria on my mind

    There are many things that I worry about in Nigeria and that makes me pessimistic about our future.I am naturally interested in the foreign policy of our country because this is an area in which I have experience, expertise and practice. I am equally interested in the area of higher education because I have spent all my life in academia. The two areas are actually related and intertwined and my academic training and teaching nurture my understanding and involvement in foreign policy formulation and execution and operation in Nigeria. Unfortunately in recent times, the two have witnessed increasing decline.

    The profile of Nigeria internationally has suffered for many reasons. First the domestic situation in Nigeria has been undermined by political instability and insecurity caused by ethnic tensions and violence. The rebellion and insurgency in the northeast has become a blight and an open sore on Nigeria which has refused to heal after more than a decade of military pacification. Insecurity is becoming a new normal in Borno, Yobe and Adamawa states. Although things are quieting down, thanks to the gallantry of our armed forces and the police and the cooperation of our neighbours in the Chad Basin. But there is a growing feeling that the springing up of several NGOs supposedly taking care of displaced people has become an industry with vested interest in perpetuating the status quo. Some people are profiting and are interested in unending counter-insurgency operations. The armed forces are trained for war but not war at home but the northeast situation has come in handy for our armed forces to demonstrate their skill and professionalism and some cynics would say to earn a few more bucks for their labour and exertion. Unfortunately people, whether armed or unarmed, are dyingfrom this protracted and perhaps unwinnable war unless political and economic measures are adopted to tackle the issues of unemployment, underdevelopment,poverty,marginalization and oppression by local political hierarchy.

    Unfortunately like cancer, this banditry and insurgency in the northeast have metastasized into widespread insecurity and rebellion in many parts of the north particularly in Benue, Kaduna, Taraba and Zamfara. The situation in Zamfara has the potentiality of spreading to Sokoto and Katsina.When one adds the insecurity in oil-producing states in the Niger Delta, it is no exaggeration to say Nigeria is under siege or is at war. At this rate, the insecurity will envelop the whole country and whether we like it or not, we would be perceived as a failed state by the international community. Already many of us are even now afraid of traveling within the country. Kaduna-Abuja highway was recently infested by armed robbers that even army generals were seen scrambling to get on the Abuja- Kaduna trains. We better pray these same bandits will not begin to stop and rob trains. We are in serious trouble.

    Reports are daily filed by embassies in Abuja to their home governments about Nigeria being a “No go” country. This has serious repercussions on foreign direct investment ( FDI)without which our economy will not grow and expand to absorb into employment our ballooning population growing at geometrical proportion in the absence of a serious and enforceable population policy. The upshot of all this is that Nigeria has been hollowed out because of these domestic problems. We are a country with strong potentialities but weak actuality. The sad thing is that the whole world knows this and are beginning to treat us as a pariah nation. Just try to get an ordinary visa these days and see how long it takes. Most countries in the world in Europe and the Americas as well as Asia and even African countries don’t want our people to visit, study or reside in them. Our people are dying in droves in the Sahara desert and the Mediterranean Sea. Those who managed to get to Europe are fighting on the streets of Italy as prostitutes. Others who are caught smuggling drugs during the solemn hajj to Saudi Arabia are being beheaded in Jeddah and other cities in Saudi Arabia. Recently 20 people were sentenced to death in the UAE for robbing forex banks and operations. In Indonesia alone, many Nigerians are on death row. Some of those who went to Russia for the World Cup are in jail for refusing to return to their country.

    A country’s image is not nurtured by the foreign affairs ministry and its embassies abroad but by the ordinary citizens of the country. If Nigerian citizens are perceived as potential fraudsters, armed robbers, drug and human smugglers, pimps and prostitutes, no amount of propaganda would remove the odium and opprobrium attached to that country. I know there are many fine Nigerians making waves all over the world in all fields of human endeavours. My children and nephews and nieces are part of this vibrant Nigerian diaspora. Just last year, Nigerians in diaspora contributed $24 billion to our country’s foreign exchange in terms forex they send into our domestic economy. This great contribution is unfortunately marred by the black legs and dregs among our people abroad.

    Recently I was in Ghana and my hosts after being very nice to me quietly mentioned the invasion of their country by Nigerian armed robbers to my total embarrassment. When I was ambassador in Germany, the German Foreign Office (AuswartigesAmt) once sent me several letters addressed to the German chancellor, Dr Helmut Kohl purportedly asking him if advance fee fraudsters could use his bank account to move out money from Nigeria to him and to be later shared between the German chancellor and the Nigerian fraudsters! Imagine how embarrassed I was. So when one criticizes the country for punching below its weight internationally, it is because one does not know that foreign policy reflects the strength or weakness of a country at home. A strong domestic polity translates into a strong voice abroad.

    One of the strong points of our country in the international community was our peace-keeping and peace-enforcement roles under the UN. We were in fact with India and Bangladesh the main suppliers of troops and policemen for UN operations all over the world. With disintegration at home, who will call on us for peace-keeping operations outside our borders? So if we want to be regarded as a hegemon in the ECOWAS subregion, we have to secure the home front and be a strong and prosperous country at home.  We don’t have to be loved in our region but we have to be feared and respected so that any country in our region and on the continent of Africa and in the rest of the world would think twice before maltreating Nigerians.

    Our good image in the past was predicated on our excellent educational performance at home and abroad. Our University of Ibadan was rated among the best in the world and doctors trained there could practice medicine anywhere in the world but not anymore. They have to spend, in some cases, as many as six years before being certified to practice abroad. Instead of our government realizing that we can educate our children for the global market in the face of shrinking employment at home, the same government is deliberately undermining the quality of our education by establishing and permitting to be established “universities “at the drop of the hat by unscrupulous politicians.

    How does one explain Governor RochasOkorocha of Imo State establishing six universities on the eve of his departure as governor? The NUC Executive Secretary recently said more than 300 applications to establish private universities are being processed. Should government not impose a moratorium on the establishment of private universities? Who are going to teach in these useless universities? What foreigners except the ones with fake certificates will come to Nigeria to earn $1500 as professors and $850 per month as lecturers? But ambitious and unqualified people would accept to be called vice chancellors of glorified secondary schools masquerading as universities. The situation has become so intolerable that all Nigerian graduates are being tarred with the same polish of having wishy-washy degrees. Politicians are not only bringing down the nobility of their trade, they are also determined to wreck every other sector and to bring down the whole national edifice on all our heads. Academics must stand up to people like Okorocha and refuse his poisoned chalice of vice chancellorship. Until people do this, vice chancellors will be treated like principals of secondary schools while professors that are already two for a penny will become like teachers which is what the French call “professeurs” from kindergarten to universities. With the collapse of our tertiary education, the circle of total decline at home and irrelevance abroad would be complete.

  • Sudan: End of El Bashir regime

    After days of street protest led by professionals particularly doctors and after close to 200 people had been shot, the army moved against President Omar Hassan el Bashir who has been in power for more than 30 years. Military rule in the Sudan is almost a permanent feature of the political life of the country.In 1953, an Anglo- Egyptian Agreement was signed to allow the Sudanese people through a Constituent Assembly determine their future. Until that time, Britain and Egypt maintained a condominium over the Sudan. As a result of the decision of the 1953 Constituent Assembly, a British type parliamentary democracy presided over the country until 1958 when a group of army officers headed by Lt. General Ibrahim Abdud established a military regime and dissolved all political parties. The regime remained in power until it was overthrown in 1964. There was then a short transitional period leading to the formation of a democratically elected government which lasted till 1969 when once again, a group of military officers led by Colonel Ja’farMuhammad al Numayri proclaimed a new revolution and outlawed all other political activities. He ruled the country with-iron hands until 1985 when, following days of street protests by students, Numayri who was on a visit to Washington was overthrown by his defence minister, General Abdel Rahman Swar al Dahab.Within a year, an elected government was installed and headed by Sadiq al Mahdi, Oxford-educated grandson of the 19th century Islamic revolutionary, Shaikh Muhammad Ahmed al Mahdi, who between 1881and 1898 established an Islamic state in the Sudan. Sadiq was head of the Umma party but there were other stakeholders in his coalition government. But having a feeling of ownership of the country because of his ancestry, he ran a corrupt faction-ridden and nepotistic administration until he was overthrown by Omar Hassan al Bashir in 1989 because among other reasons, his enforcement of sharia law put in place by Numayri and the debilitating war in South Sudan led by General Garang.  The war did not end until 2011 when the south seceded from the north after much suffering and international pressure on Omar Bashir. Omar Hassan al Bashir has been in power since 1989 until he was overthrown a few weeks ago.

    His regime has been marked by much wickedness and state terrorism which saw to his unleashing of armed Arab horsemen known as Janjaweed on the hapless and helpless people of Darfur in the west of the Sudan murdering about 400,000 people as estimated by the UN. This has led to his being accused of war crimes of crimes against humanity and genocide for which an international arrest warrant hangs over his head from the International Criminal Court in The Hague. The ferocity of the Sudanese campaign in Darfur brought the charge of racism against Omar Bashir because Darfur is largely inhabited by black people. However Sudan is inhabited by blacks as well but majority of them are Arabized blacks.

    Sudan has strong historical ties with Nigeria. Islam entered the northeast of Nigeria through the Sudan even though Malian Muslims were largely responsible for spreading Islam into Hausa land and Yorubaland but this was much later. The Seifawa Empire of Borno as far back as the 8th century had madrasas (students’ hostels) in the Sudan and Egypt for its students. These educational ties have remained throughout the colonial and post-colonial period not only for recruitment of teachers and medical personnel but also for Islamic and Arabic instructors.During the colonial period, many Nigerians went to Mecca as they had done before the advent of British imperialism on foot,donkeys and horses. Many settled in the Sudan either on their way or on return from the hajj.Many worked in the vast cotton plantations on irrigated Gezira plains. Today, Nigerians and their descendants variously known as “ fellatta” constitute substantial portion of the Sudanese population.In other words we share a similar worldview (Weltanschauugen) and similar problems of political instability, underdevelopment, insecurity and struggle between Islamic theocracy and commitment to secularity. It is therefore appropriate to watch development in the Sudan with special interest because of common ties of history, culture and consanguinity.

    Initially after the overthrow of Omar Bashir, General Awad Ibn Auf, the minister of defence stepped in and promised a transitional government of two years and vast consultations with stakeholders before installing a democratically elected government. He also declared curfew from dusk to dawn. The demonstrators simply ignored him saying what they wanted was not an interim military government but a government of civilians in which any previous office holders would be barred. He threatened to enforce the curfew and when he realized soldiers were no longer ready to fire on civilians, he gave up and left the headship of the military transition council to a new man Lt. General Abdel Fattah Abdelrahman Burhan. To placate the street demonstrators, he quickly removed the much hated chief of internal security who allegedly detained thousands of people torturing them in the process. Provincial administrators were removed and the jails were thrown open so that all political prisoners can come out. General Burhan however has stuck to the two year transitional military council imposed by his predecessor. But how long he will last without resort to terror and strong-armed tactics remains to be seen. In the meantime, the demonstrators have said they have seen the kind of tactics of army coming to power and stating they would stay in power for a short while but after consolidation they stay for ever as shown by Numayri and Omar Bashir. While this is true, the fear in many circles including the international community is that the world cannot afford the disintegration of another Arab country with the possibility of it being taken over by terrorists.

    The situation all around in the geopolitical area creates fear in the mind of those who care for stability. Southern Sudan which seceded in 2011 is still involved in fratricidal ethnic conflict. Ethiopia is still not stable and is still involved in campaign of military pacification particularly in Oromia among its largest ethnic group. Egypt to the north under General Muhammad al Sisi is not the model of stability and the country’s hold on Sinai to the north is tenuous and is infested by ISIS terrorists. Libya since the NATO-assisted murder of Muammar el Khadafihas ceased being a state of one government. There is an going campaign against the UN-recognized government by GeneralKhalifaHaftar based in Benghazi who is backed apparently by Egypt, France and Russia hoping that he may impose his will on the whole state as General Abdel Fattah Saeed Hussein Khalil El Sisi has successfully done in Egypt by putting the Islamic revolutionaries and brotherhoods to the sword. The situation in Algeria is not yet clear after AbdelazizBouteflika resigned as president and was succeeded by an army council that has set a date for election in July with the well-organized FIS (la FronteIslamiqueSalut) possibly winning and declaring Algeria a caliphate. In the meantime, the vast majority of Arab countries of Syria, Yemen and Iraq are in disarray and in disaster and the world cannot afford the suffering of the Arabs to continue and to spread to the Sudan. This is why the international community, including Saudi Arabia, the United States and Britain are engaged in helping Sudan to transfer power peacefully without making the mistakes of the so-called Arab Spring during which time, Islamic idealists were allowed to hijack genuine cry for freedom. Sudan once hosted Osama bin Laden and this still rankles in the minds of American leaders who inspite of the basket case of Sudan must, for geopolitical reasons, have interest in what becomes of the country.

    Unfortunately the political prognosis for the future of the country is not very good. It lost most of its oil wells to South Sudan after partition. There are still regional and ethnic fissiparous movements in the country. There is massive unemployment and salaries are just too poor to satisfy the well-organized professional and labour unions. It used to get substantial financial support from Saudi Arabia which is now no longer as generous as it used to be. The industrial sector is not well developed and the country is surrounded by predatory neighbours of Egypt and Ethiopia. Sudan’s options are not many outside the River Nile floods-dependent cotton-growing agriculture and textile manufacture. Without political stability, it is doubtful if the problems of the country will be solved and this political stability rests on sandy and fragile agricultural economy.

  • The tragedy of the Lagos-Ibadan expressway

    For four days within a week the Lagos-Ibadan expressway was for want of better description under a virtual lockdown or a siege thus paralyzing movement and causing unimaginable hardship and pain to the traveling public. People spent over ten hours on the road till midnight of April 2 and early morning of April 3.  A reoccurrence was witnessed the night of April 6 till the morning of April 7.Repeating the same thing and expecting different results is the hallmark of madness. If innocent people were not the victims of government’s indifference, it would probably just pass as the proverbial example of Nigerians being inured to suffering, humiliation and poor governance but in this case many ordinary Nigerians just wanting to be allowed to live were involved. A 70-year old year professor friend of mine on her way to the United Kingdom was caught in this horror and she spent 10 hours in the heat of the traffic snarl not knowing if she would come out of it alive. After 10 hours anybody, not to talk about a 70-year old lady, would be pressed to go to the toilet. This is just the case that I know but there must have been thousands of unreported cases. Of course the poor lady missed her flight and had to stay in Lagos for extra two days to find a seat on another scheduled flight after paying huge financial penalties for missing her flight. It is only in Nigeria where citizens are subjected to this kind of double jeopardy without anybody or institutions being held accountable.

    There are two construction companies working on this 127.6 kilometre road which has been on the drawing board since 1993. From the Lagos end we have Julius Berger a Nigerian – German company and a subsidiary of Bilfinger und Berger based in Wiesbaden. This is a company with tremendous reputation of efficiency and reliability. This company was largely responsible for building Abuja as well as the modernization of Lagos involving the construction of all the flyovers among many major engineering landmarks in Nigeria. From the Ibadan end is a Nigerian-Israeli company, Reynolds Construction Company Limited (RCC) which has also been handling many construction businesses in Nigeria. The two companies were brought in after the failure of the Wale Babalakin-sponsored company Bi-Courtney limited which was given the go ahead to build the road as a private enterprise by the Obasanjo regime.  Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the minister of finance under Obasanjo had promised that since we exited from the debt overhang of the Paris and London clubs of external creditors after paying in the year 2000, a whopping $12 billion, the money being previously used to service the debts will be devoted to infrastructural renewal. Nothing like that happened; rather we saw the Lagos-Ibadan expressway privatized into the hands of Bi- Courtney. The award was further confirmed by the Goodluck Jonathan regime.

    The question many of us asked then was why the major road artery in Nigeria connecting the main ports with the hinterland became the object of the experiment of the western capitalist inspired privatization mania of the PDP governments from 1999 to 2015. Even in the latter years of the Babangida government particularly under Major General Abdulkarim Adisa as minister of works, plans were afoot to reconstruct the road but all came to naught because of the political and economic instability which marked the last seven years of the military regime from 1992 to 1999.

    Until President Muhammadu Buhari came in 2015, the expressway seemed jinxed with the spirit of abandonment.  It was with great expectations that most people welcomed the appointment of Babatunde Raji Fashola as minister in charge of works, housing and power. His reputation as a modernizing governor predated him to the ministry. He did not initially disappoint his admirers. He took on the Lagos-Ibadan expressway with his usual aplomb. But his enthusiasm and drive were halted when Bukola Saraki as president of the senate stood in his way.

    To curry favour of some powerful interests, Bukola Saraki began to suggest that the Southwest was not the only zone in the country and that whatever resources that were available for the Lagos-Ibadan expressway would have to be spread to all the six zones of the country. Thus the budgets for this road for the four years of the Buhari government were slashed and shared to other zones sometimes for frivolous projects such as boreholes and senators’ corrupt constituency projects .What Saraki forgot to remember was that the Lagos-Ibadan road extended to his fiefdom in his much-abused and humiliated Ilorin.  The reality of the Lagos-Ibadan expressway is that it connects the North to the coast and also the ports of Lagos with the oil producing zones of the South-south and the Southeast. Not only that, the zone where the road traverses contributes 70% of the  customs and excise revenues of the country as well as 60% of the Value Added Tax (VAT). Building the road therefore was of great and significant economic importance to the entire country. This simple logic could not be assimilated by those in the senate whose understanding of government did not go beyond buccaneering self-aggrandizement. Now chicken has come home to roost and innocent people are dying and suffering at the hands of the construction companies particularly Julius Berger.

    For some strange reasons, Julius Berger is performing below expectations in its Lagos half of the road. The story in the past was usually about being owed money for job done. Yet, we were told that money had been secured for this project. Is someone deceiving the public and is Julius Berger still being owed money for previous work on this road? I travel on this road weekly and I compare the work being done by Julius Berger with that of RCC and Julius Berger is surprisingly lagging behind. The equipment and men deployed shows the unserious approach of Julius Berger. There are fewer men and equipment deployed by Julius Berger on the vital Lagos section thus slowing the pace of work and prolonging the suffering of the unfortunate Nigerian people.  Our people in the best of times are also unruly and impatient thus compounding and contributing to the chaos on the road. When sections are blocked there is no intelligent provision for alternative routes. This does not happen on the RCC section. The inference one can draw is that Julius Berger is not interested in the job at hand and is waiting for the riot act to be read to it before being fired. It could also be due to a sense of ennui and tiredness of the corrupt Nigerian bureaucracy and government.

    Whatever the case may be, President Muhammadu Buhari had better send Fashola or his minister of state to visit the expressway and other vital projects of his ministry. As I have said in this column several times, Buhari does not have the luxury of time to waste talking when what is needed is action. He is not going to run again but he is running against his place in the history of this country. He must remove all impediments and obstacles for his earning an enviable place in the history of this much abused and misgoverned country. All governments at the state and federal levels must realise that they are not just in government and authority they are there to ameliorate the suffering of our helpless and hapless people who have no recourse to anybody but God even though divine justice grinds very slowly. Our people don’t demand much than to be left alone to eke out their miserable existence. In this regard, free and passable highways are not asking for the moon but they are the rights of the citizens of this country. In short government is not just about those in government and state houses but about ordinary people too.

  • “Boycotting all boycottables”

    There was a certain Captain Charles Cunningham Boycott (1832-1897) an English land agent in Ireland then ruled by the English who treated the Irish people in general cruelly. But the situation in county Mayo was generally unbearable because of the bad manners of Captain Boycott who worked as an enforcer for Lord Erne, a major landowner who lived off the exorbitant rents charged the tenants. Boycott regularly expelled poor farmers from their land which led to many dying of hunger. The Irish land league organized against the landlord’s cruelty and ostracized Captain Boycott and his family with the whole community withdrawing all services to him. Their action gave the English language the verb to boycott meaning avoid or do away with something.

    In the 1950s during the British colonial rule over Nigeria, a certain Mbonu Ojike, the deputy of Ibikunle Olorunimbe, the mayor of Lagos and one of the Nigerian nationalists, led a campaign that Nigerians should boycott all things British. Mbonu Ojike threw away his western suits and began to wear agbada. He dropped the prefix “Mr” and replaced it with “Mazi”. Other nationalists like Raji Abdallah, Ibrahim Zukogi, Ibrahim Imam and Aminu Kano began to prefix their names with “Malam” and Ogedengbe Macaulay, the son of Herbert Macaulay and Kolawole Balogun, a firebrand member of the Zikist movement, also prefixed their names with “Ogbeni” in solidarity with Mbonu Ojike’s campaign and call to “boycott all boycottables”. Nnamdi Azikiwe, their leader, a six footer who looked very regal and handsome in his suits reluctantly followed his radical lieutenants. Obafemi Awolowo and his Action Group were more practical and natural in their Yoruba outfits without calling attention to it. Being conservative in their politics of the time and using the traditional rulers as pillars of their political movement, they preferred becoming honorific chiefs and being referred to as “Oloye” than the plebeian “ogbeni”.The two groups were however united in rejecting the western standards of civilized dressing. This cultural rejection of the appearances of western imperialism was a necessary precursor to political liberation.

    In recent times, I watched a presentation by Audu Ogbeh, the minister of agriculture in which he brilliantly appealed to Nigerians to only eat what they produce and boycott all food imports through which our national wealth is transferred abroad to other farmers. He said importers of rice for example, would do anything to sabotage the country’s plan to grow enough rice for home consumption. He said those importers are not only desperate but dangerous in strangulating the local economy. He argued that importers contribute nothing to the economy but use the country’s foreign reserves to bring all sorts of junks including toothpicks and all sorts of furniture we can make from our hardwood timber. Just at the time Audu Ogbeh was making his submission, the CBN Governor, Godwin Emefiele said all textile imports would be banned from Nigeria in order to stimulate the moribund textile industry. Any student of economic history knows that textile industry is the beginning of industrial revolution in a country because in most cases, at least in the tropics, it is easily adaptable to backward integration. The cotton needed as raw materials can be grown locally, ginned locally and fed to the textile mills. From the mills, the textile materials can be sold to tailors who will then produce apparels of different types for wear and cloth for home and office furnishing and the fashion trade.Apart from producing for home consumption, they can also produce cotton wears for export.

    When I was in primary school in Ekiti in the 1950s, our school uniforms were woven by women each of who had local looms somewhere in their homes. I watched these women bring cotton from their husbands’farms, carefully ginned them and removed the seed from the cotton lint. They then turned the cotton lint into thread through the use of manual threaders before rolling them into yarns which were then fed into the looms. All this was done by the women manually as secondary occupation in their spare times since farming was their primary occupation as helpmates to their husbands. They of course were also good cooks. After the weaving of these white clothes, they will then be sent to dyers who produced usually black or blue stripes which tailors then sewed interspersing black and white to make knickers and jumpers for primary schoolchildren.  The entire processes from weaving to dying were products of native ingenuity and local vegetable sourcing. This was the textile industry which the white man found here when they came but destroyed when they introduced their khakis as school uniforms. Happily the textile industry still survives as “aso oke” in parts of Oyo. Kwara, Ondo, Kano,Katsina,Zaria, Sokoto, Akwete and Ijebuland. But it seems to have disappeared in most places in Nigeria. Interestingly they can be found in western museums showing African textiles going back to the 15th century.

    I remember wearing my agbada made from hand woven “aso etu” when I presented my letters of credence as Nigeria’s ambassador to the German President Baron Von Weisacker in 1991. My southern African colleagues could not believe we had our own textile industry going back to the 15th century. I had to proudly give a lecture on how everything I wore that day was home-grown unlike my other southern colleagues dressed in Saville Row suits.

    What Godwin Emefiele and Audu Ogbeh are saying is that we must go back to our past to find our trajectory to a viable and productive and prosperous future! Imagine what we can do with a thriving textile industry. We can wipe out unemployment almost immediately. More than three million tailors would be needed to sew what our teeming population will be wearing. We even look more dignified in our environment and climate-friendly Babanriga, Agbada, Dansiki, Jallabia, and kaftans. I remember having to beg my tailors in Maiduguri between 1982 and 1984 to sew my Babanriga on time. The cost of sewing was not cheap either but the skill and dexterity of the master tailors was what we paid for. I would like to see a cultural renaissance in which we all wear what is most appropriate with our hot climate.

    What will be saved in foreign exchange can then be used for industrialization in other areas of heavy industries and in chemical and petroleum industries in which we are well blessed because of our comparative advantage. In this way we will raise the value of our much abused Naira and thus make Nigeria great again.

    The government must be determined and strong to achieve this. It is Jean Jacques Rousseau in his theory of the “General will”who said it is possible to force a people to be free which sounds contradictory but in real fact sometimes this may be necessary because people don’t usually know what is good for them. A strong government can put in place an agricultural programme to encourage the young people roaming the streets selling junks to go back to the farms by mechanizing farm production and supporting young farmers with monthly stipends until they can fend for themselves. This was how the kibbutz in Israel led to the greening of a desert now producing different types of fruits for the world market. This will require a policy of social and political mobilization involving the universities, community and traditional leaders as well as political leaders. It will only work if leaders are ready to make sacrifices.There is money to be made in agriculture but first it must be divorced from the hoe and cutlass hewers of wood and drawers of water type. If we make our agriculture attractive, money will go into the rural areas. Life there will become liveable with very little attraction and incentive to embark on rural urban migration. If the cities are not overwhelmed by unplanned growth, the rate of crimes and criminality would go down and money being spent on policing and pacification would be spent for social welfare. It is a “win-win” situation and I therefore call on the government to build its programme of taking us to the next level around the well-articulated ideas contained in Audu Ogbeh’s agricultural revolution and Emefiele’s foreign exchange management to force us to produce cotton for our daily wears or go naked .These are solid prescriptions for economic revival. I join the chorus of “boycotting all boycottables “

  • The future of the two dominant parties

    With the exception of Adamawa and Rivers States, the 2019 elections are  practically over. What is left in the electoral war are the legal moping up operations. The judiciary has to be very careful about a rash of decisions that seem tilted in favour of the opposition. For keen observers, it seems that quite a few unreasonable judgements are coming out of the courts giving the impression that the courts are fighting back the Buhari government that is perhaps perceived as being anti-judiciary. I believe it is a dangerous combat for an unelected body to  appear to take on an elected government. Even in a settled democracy like the United States of America where an autocrat is in the White House, the American judiciary moves gingerly not to go  head-butting the presidency of Donald Trump. Recent judgements on Osun, Zamfara, Bauchi and

    Adamawa seem rather one sided.

    Having said this, the outcome of the elections and the distribution of political control at the gubernatorial levels gives the impression of a balanced equation of power. The APC, unless the courts decide otherwise, is in control of the following 20 states of  Borno, Yobe,  Gombe, Plateau, Jigawa, Kano, Katsina, Kebbi, Zamfara, Kaduna, Nassarawa,  Niger, Kwara, Kogi, Edo, Ondo, Ogun, Ekiti,  Ogun and Lagos. Osun’s  Electoral tribunal’s decision to switch the state from APC to PDP is being appealed. On the other hand, unless the courts decide otherwise, the PDP is in control of the following 13 states and the Federal Capital Territory namely, Oyo, Sokoto, Bauchi, Taraba, Benue, Enugu, Ebonyi, Imo, Delta, Akwa Ibom, Abia, Cross Rivers, Bayelsa and possibly Adamawa, and Rivers while APGA is in control of Anambra. The balance of political power is not lopsided at all and courts decision may still flip one or two states in either direction. My advice to the courts is to beware or legalistic activism which in the long run always runs the danger of  political illegitimacy and political confrontation as had happened in the much copied USA.

    From current disposition of the two political parties, the future of two strong political parties appears settled. The PDP as some of its members have argued, appear to have better national spread than the APC. The APC appears to be entrenched in the distressed Northeast excluding the important states of  Adamawa and Bauchi where the APC lost by a slim margin because of the unpopularity of Governor Abubakar to a legally-besieged Bala Muhammad, former minister of Federal capital Territory who has several cases of fraud and corruption arising from his allegedly selling plots of land and collecting bribes from allottees of land and alienating hectares of land to himself, his companies and family members. It will be a pity if by being elected governor, he gets to keep his loot of part of the national patrimony. Unfortunately, it is being reported that the current administration of the FCT is involved in the same land alienation and appropriation to current members of the executive and legislature.

    PDP will probably take Adamawa which is the home of Abubakar Atiku and unless for serious reasons of envy, it should support their own son. But from the gravevine we understand Atiku is not too popular in his state because of his wealth in the midst of general poverty and complaints by the people that they don’t benefit from his stupendous wealth and have no money to send their children to his expensive “American” university in Yola. The APC is not too popular in Taraba because it is perceived as a Fulani and Islamic party. It is a victim of the multitudinal ethnic complexity of both Taraba and neighbouring Adamawa states.

    The APC is supreme in the Northwest in spite of Sokoto where it lost the gubernatorial seat by a few tens of votes which may call for recount. The APC is also quite strong in the North-central winning in Niger, Kwara, Nassarawa, Plateau and  Kogi. It lost in  Benue because of the issue of Fulani herders killing local farmers and alienating their land without serious repercussions from the federal government.  The APC remains formidable in the Southwest but here the lack of performance of the Muhammadu Buhari government in its first term drew negative vibes to the government in voters perceptions. The campaign of associating the party with a plan of Islamization pushed the large population of Christians there to the PDP which aggressively marketed the campaign of clandestine plans of Islamization. This was so strong that even apparently nominal Christians fell for the ploy. The apparent nepotism and Islamic and regional bias in Buhari’s appointment did not go down well in Yorubaland in spite of its  almost equal division of the place between the two monotheistic religions. The issue of restructuring/ devolution was also a selling point for the PDP.

    The APC is, with the exception of Edo, virtually non existent in the South-south and the Southeast. This makes the PDP to boast of being more national than the APC.

    What is the prognosis for the future for these two parties?

    The performance of the Buhari government during its second term will determine the future of the APC. Since the president will not be running again, he must help the party to survive after him. The only way for this is performance. The party must also be known as the party of the  common man as well as the struggling lower middle class (petite bourgeoisie); it must also be identified with the party of modernization and innovation in the areas of infrastructure, electricity generation and distribution and  affordable quality education.  All the electricity generation plans under construction must be finished within the next four years.

    Above all, it must do something quickly to guarantee security  and if it is needed for this purpose, it should restructure or devolve power and resources to the states and the periphery.  It must also prevail on its governors to key into its platform of development and  must prevail on the National Assembly to support  the implementation of the party’s manifesto so that plans and budgets are not held prisoner by padding and frivolous demands for constituency projects that are always marred by corruption. President Buhari cannot hands off the government and the party as he appeared to have done in the past. He must carry his party members along with him. Decisions must be taken as quickly as they are needed. A bad decision is better than no decision. If he fails this time around, the party will collapse in both the north where his domineering and charismatic presence will no longer be available when he leaves office. The PDP in Oyo will spread to Osun  if the governors there do well especially in resuscitation of tertiary institutions and payment of salaries to their bloated bureaucracy. If poor governance continues in Ondo  under Governor Rotimi Akeredolu, the PDP will take the state. Before you know it, Ogun, Ekiti and Lagos may remain the redoubts of the APC in the Southwest.

    Without Buhari, the APC may peter out in the northeast and northwest whose natural political tendency and inclination is towards conservatism. Kano may remain with the APC because of its old time radical tradition. With the South-south and Southeast remaining in the PDP and with a disintegrating APC without Buhari, the PDP will be the party to beat  in the future. All this will depend on whether Buhari rises to his historical calling and help the party that brought him to power survive his leaving it. He holds the party this debt of gratitude. This is not the time to be saying he will be neutral in the legislature’s choice of its leaders or to be saying he belongs to nobody. One is not saying he should discriminate against any section of the country. What one is saying is that he must help his party to consolidate its hold in the states it controls.

    His government could have helped Aregbesola more in Osun  by reconstruction of federal roads like Osogbo-Ilesha and Osogbo-Offa-Ilorin roads which could have boosted the popularity of his party in the state. This is the kind of what should be done in the second term with the help of a politically sensitive National Assembly. One hopes such political sensitivity will play out in Ado Ekiti – Akure-Ilesha-Akure dualisation long promised during the Obasanjo years. This eye on the future of the party must be kept open so that it does not appear people have just been used  to fulfill personal political ambitions. If the second Buhari administration is able to do well, people will not leave the party in droves over  the abandonment  for example of  Oyo-Ogbomosho road that seems to take eternity to complete while thousands of souls are perishing on the road.

    All these suggestions would require huge amount of money. This money must be found by cutting off fat from government administration, radically whittling down the salaries and allowances of the members of the National Assembly and the executive branch of government. We must diversify the economy or we die economically. It is as serious as that. Buhari must also pay attention  to all the states of the federation to ensure that the states are also working towards the same end of development and job creation and security improvement. This is the only way to prevent a rebellion of the masses in 2023 and a possible rejection of not only the APC and PDP  but the entire political system that seems to have held everybody down since the end of our first attempt at democratic governance in 1966.

  • Lagos, Port Harcourt, Kaduna and Enugu: Tale of four cities

    There has been so much controversy on who owns Lagos in recent times between the indigenes and the non -indigenes, between “omoEko” (indigenes) and “araEko” (residents) that a little knowledge of the history of Lagos May remove the blinkers from our eyes. The indigenes of Lagos have a saying “Awori lo l’Eko” meaning, Lagos belongs to the Awori. The Awori were the original settlers of Lagos and their settlements still exist in various Awori settlements from Iddo, Iganmu, Apapa, Isheri and so on up to Otta. These Awori settlements were founded around the 12th century during the evolution of similar political entities in Yorubaland.It was not until the 15th century that Oba Ewuare the Great sent an expedition to the island now known as Lagos for the purpose of making it a slave port for evacuating war captives to Europe through the Portuguese, the first Europeans to make contact with the Benin Empire. The Bini settlement or camp (Eko) was separate from the Awori villages and settlements and there was no attempt by the Bini camp to lord it over the Aworis. Waves of people from neighboringIjebu, Remo and Egba territories came to Lagos virtually overwhelming the Awori and the Bini camp. But since they were all of the same culture, there was no acrimonious contention about indigenous rights and the rights of newcomers. The Bini group hunkered around their settlement at IghaIdugaran (pepper farm). The prestige of the Benin Empire made the settlement to be respected and the place grew into a kingdom replicating in a small way, the royalty of Benin and its palace chiefs on the island the Portuguese named Lagos but which the Yoruba’s appropriating the Bini word for camp called Eko. The independence of the Awori settlements on the mainland continued to be respected even until today and throughout the colonial period. The sister empire of Oyo also put down a toehold at Ajase, west of Lagos, which the Portuguese called Porto Novo for the same purpose of the slave trade. Benin influence on the island of Lagos is a historical fact, but this does not mean Lagos is not part of Yorubaland. The Benin influence extended to the dynasties of such places in eastern Yorubaland like Ado, Ikere, ItaOgbolu, IgbaraOke and Akure. This does not make the people from these towns Bini. The fact for example, that the ruling monarch in England is German does not make England part of Germany. Also the Bini inspired monarchy in places like Onitsha and the western periphery of Igboland does not remove the fact that Onitsha and kingdoms west of Onitsha are part of Igboland neither does the replacement of the ogisos in Bini by an Oduduwa dynasty make Bini part of Yorubaland. What is important to note is the dynamic relationship of people in the Bight of Guinea in the past and that the whole area shares a common cultural similarity.

    When the British took over Lagos and its mainland in 1861 after naval bombardment of the town, it signed a treaty of cession with the oba who surrendered his suzerainty to the British crown. From that time onwards, the people of the crown colony became British subjects while the rest of what later became Nigeria was “terra incognita “at least for a while until the heydays of European imperialism of the 1880s to 1900s.

    At amalgamation of all British territories in Nigeria with the colony of Lagos in 1914 with Egbaland remaining still independent until its independence was abrogated at the outbreak of the First World War, Lagos became the capital of Nigeria.

    The then Governor General hated Lagos with its “insalubrious climate and seditious press “and its “trousered niggers, dressed in Bond-street attire who send their laundry for dry cleaning in England” and decided to build a new capital in the centre of the country. He found this centre on River Kaduna which gave the new capital its name. Lugard embarked on feverish development of Kaduna using the same tax on “trade gin” banned from the north as well as revenue from custom levies and proceeds from palm kernel and palm oil and cocoa trade. The development of Kaduna continued during the Great War at a less frenetic speed as before. The whole idea of moving the capital to Kaduna was ended by Sir Hugh Clifford, a different kind of governor from Lugard. Sir Clifford, the successor of Sir Fredrick Lugard said he was not prepared to administer Nigeria from “specially fabricated isolated centre in the middle of the country”. Development of Kaduna was however never quite abandoned and its effect is the well planned Kaduna city compared with the chaos of Lagos. Hugh Clifford tried to improve Lagos by developing the so-called” Ikoyi plains” in the 1920s.

    Contemporaneous with the Kaduna project were two other new towns built by Nigeria. Port Harcourt was conceived by Sir Fredrick Lugard as an alternative if not an outright replacement for Lagos. Lugard felt Lagos port was too shallow and its development constituted a drain on Nigeria’s exchequer. The principal officers in the colonial office in London were not persuaded about Lugard’s project and to outwit them, Lugard named the port after the secretary of state for the colonies Sir Lewis Harcourt. Sir Lewis fell for it and action for the new port began in 1913. The city around the port was well planned by British architects which accounts for the town’s sobriquet as “garden city “. Any visitor to Port Harcourt before the deluge of people from the hinterland would have described it as “little Lagos”.

    With the outbreak of the First World War, it became difficult to get British ships to bring coal from New Castle to Nigeria. Coal was absolutely necessary to run the railways which crisscrossed the country from Lagos to Kano and from Port Harcourt to Jos. Coal was also needed to fire the generators to light up the European government reserved Areas ( GRA) . It was in this circumstance that the colliery in Enugu was developed. The native Wawa people were too primitive to work in the mines so people were recruited from all over the country to work in the Enugu coal mines. Enugu owes its well-planned layout to its colonial origin. Another town that developed around the tin and columbite mines in the plateau was Jos. In fact, the European impact was such that a certain part of Jos was known as “Anglo Jos” perhaps until recently.

    There is no doubt that our British colonial heritage brought together heterogeneous population many of who had very little in common. This has led to bloody frictions in Jos between the indigenes and the Hausa who claimed that they built Jos. Old Jos was an amalgam of Hausa, Birom, Naraguta, Yoruba, and Urhobo; the Igbos were late arrivals after the tin mines had become unprofitable. It seems a modus vivendi now exists between the natives and the Hausa in Jos.Enugu has not experienced too much conflict between the indigenes and other Igbo settlers with the exception of resentment of the natives against those who exploited their backwardness to alienate their land to themselves during colonial and post-colonial rule when Enugu was the capital of the entire Eastern Region.

    Port Harcourt’s indigenes in Diobu and the Nkwerre people resented the dominance of the up country Igbo during the colonial and post-colonial period. In fact up till the 1940s, Port Harcourt was reasonably cosmopolitan. The Nigeria civil war and the creation of a Rivers State allowed the local people to ventilate their feeling against their Igbo neighbours by seizing their landed property and converting it to their own use under the rubric of “abandoned property”. When the war ended, the Rivers people even though a large percent of them speak the same language with the Igbo in the hinterland, refused to give up the properties of the Igbo.

    Now to Lagos the big elephant in the Nigerian room. Lagos is like New York big apple which everybody wants to have a bite of. Lagos since 1861 up to the amalgamation of all British territories to form Nigeria became a frontier of opportunity for Yorubaland and other immigrants from all across West Africa as well as the returnees from Brazil and Sierra Leone. After the amalgamation, Lagos was opened to all comers from the whole country. The colonial and post-colonial governments have spent considerable amount of money to make the place livable.  Facilities such as newport, new airport and housing estate to decongest the unwieldy urban sprawl of Lagos sprang up. Those who were displaced by the civil war and other ethnic conflicts up country always found home in Lagos. Incredibly people tend to find a way of living together in spite of differences in socialization from urban to village type of life.

    Now this seems to be coming under severe strain by those who want to use the force of population to seize control from the owners of the place using spurious arguments about how one can move from one state to another in America to contest election. Africa is an old continent and not like America that is a recently settled country. Until recently, you couldn’t become a German except by blood! It is foolish to deny the power of ethnicity in African politics as much as we deprecate it. It will be unreasonable for me to enjoy the right to contest in Lagos and in Ekiti at the same time or as Igbo propagandist TV has been threatening that an Anambra man will be the next governor of Lagos. Ideally that should be wished for through evolution but not by threat of unproved superiority of one ethnic population and tax contribution over those of the quiet majority who have been very generous to non-indigenes whose properties were preserved for them during the civil war with accumulated rents collected unlike what happened in neighboring states.  We need to build on trust that existed in the past and respect each other. There is no need for ethnic bellicosity and jingoism because at the end of the day, it is the poor people who are merely eking out an existence who will suffer. We need to preserve the past civility and not rock the boat because of electoral politics. Nobody disputes the ownership of Kaduna Enugu and Port Harcourt; why is Lagos different?

  • Gubernatorial elections: Impact of local issues

    All politics is local is a general belief among political savants. This will however not be true in nationwide presidential elections  and even in prime ministerial regimes where there is a growing tendency for local issues to take back seats in national elections. However,  the character of individual candidates and local issues may sometimes decide who wins or who loses in a particular constituency in spite of national voting trend. The last states elections have revealed quite a lot of interesting tendencies.The results in places like Kano, Oyo, Bauchi, Adamawa, Plateau, Benue and Sokoto have  revealed that local issues and the likability of the governors can be decisive.

    In Oyo for instance, some of the policies of the incumbent governor, Isiaka Ajimobi, have not gone down well with the people. Even though the Ladoke Akintola University is jointly owned by Oyo and Osun states , its closure for almost 18 months is blamed on the Oyo governor. The Ogbomosho people felt slighted and humiliated that the university named after their illustrious son was abandoned while a so-called brand new technical university  out of the reach of the average citizen was built in Ibadan. Furthermore, the Ladoke Akintola University is regarded as an economic catalyst for the sprawling Ogbomosho town which has few empowerment opportunities for its close to one million citizens. Even the various campuses of the Ibadan Polytechnic were also not funded and the result was industrial action which paralyzed the institution and threw into the streets, thousands of young people to add to those from Ladoke Akintola University whose institution had also been closed down by industrial actions of various university unions. When the students tried to meet the governor during a rowdy session, the whole situation ended in shouting exchange between the governor and the students. The young people who were affected provided the shock troops for the PDP and for all those who wanted to humiliate the rather abrasive governor. I hope the incoming governor will face frontally the issue of tertiary institutions in the state. My advice to him is to cut the Gordian knots of the ownership of Ladoke Akintola University by taking it over so that Osun State can face the problem of Osun State multi-campus university which is grossly underfunded  too. The new governor would also have to give  financial subventions  to the  Ibadan Polytechnic and its various campuses. Students fees would have to be at the level that is commensurate to what is expected at higher institutions in other parts of the country but it must not be excessively high to the point where the parents of the students will be unable to pay.

    I recently visited the Ibadan Polytechnic to ask why my ward’s results have not been sent to me and what I found in the physical dilapidation and unkempt environment was simply devastating and brought tears to my eyes. Students finish their programmes and results are withheld because one union or the other is on strike! The electoral humiliation of Ajimobi and his party has shown why it is important at least in the Southwest, for the government to carry along with it the educated elite, the educated young men and the intelligentsia generally.

    Ajimobi did very well in the infrastructural transformation of Ibadan and keeping peace generally for eight years.  Although he didn’t quite finish the job since many of the road reconstruction remain incomplete. He is the first governor in Oyo to administer the state for eight unbroken years. This in itself is a record. In the process, he stepped on several toes. But some of his problems were self-inflicted. It is not clear what informed him in creating parallel Obas to the Olubadan when there was absolutely no reason for it. The chieftaincy institution in Ibadan has endured for over a century and it is the least contentious in terms of succession to the throne in Yorubaland because succession to the throne was through promotion in the two lines of Olubadan and Balogun. Who becomes the Olubadan was therefore predictable and without rancour.

    Whatever Ajimobi’s faults, notably his acerbic tongue are, he  demonstrated nobility  of the spirit by congratulating Seyi Makinde the incoming governor who has demonstrated tenacity  of purpose by contesting for the post  of governor four times before winning just like President Buhari. He will need our prayers to succeed in a state where unlike Lagos State, people are averse to paying taxes on their properties. I don’t see any other way to raise revenue outside the Lagos style land use levy. If this is to be done, it must be state-wide and not excessive to the point of leading to resistance and even rebellion.

    What has happened in Oyo State is also playing itself out in the fierce competitions in Sokoto, Kano  and Bauchi which are normally “Buhari country”. But since these are elections run on local issues, the governors of Bauchi, Sokoto and Kano can possibly lose to their opponents. Kano is a tempestuous state of acute political awareness. The accusations of bribery and corruption levied against the incumbent governor have not gone away. When you add to this the factor of Kwankwaso, the governor is facing serious challenge. In Bauchi, the governor is simply unpopular. Even with the support of Muazu, the former PDP governor of the state and former national chairman of the party, Governor Abubakar is not having it easy against his opponent. But Bala Muhammad his opponent who is facing several indictments for corruption and money laundering while he was minister of Abuja Federal Capital Territory should not even have been allowed to run. It will be a pity if his cases are kept in abeyance if he upsets the incumbent governor of Bauchi.

    In Sokoto, Tambuwal the incumbent governor was earlier on playing a dangerous game when his party, the PDP, started spreading rumors of the APC going to remove the Sultan of Sokoto. The APC has said this is a tale from the pit of hell.  The contest there remains  on a cliff hanger and  it could go either way.

    The gubernatorial elections in Adamawa, Benue and Plateau states have not been concluded. Benue will definitely see the incumbent governor riding  on the wave of the symbolic victim of the terrorism of herders killing people in his state. Even though the problem is more complex than what the governor is presenting. But the consequence of the herder/ farmer conflict has seen to the end of Senator Akume’s political career. Plateau remains a toss up but Lalong will probably triumph over the geriatric General Jeremiah Useni. It seems that Jibrilla Bindow, the incumbent APC governor in Adamawa will probably lose not because he has not performed but because Abubakar Atiku is throwing in serious financial muscle into the contest.

    For those armchair commentators in the press, Plateau, Adamawa, Bauchi and Taraba are the home of perpetual conflicts  of the bedlam of ethnic groups of over 200 of the so-called ethnic groups in Nigeria. This mosaic of ethnic architecture is overlain by religion of Islam, Christianity and African traditional beliefs. All these local issues, differences and grievances come into play in gubernatorial contests where the huge and dominant charisma of Muhammadu Buhari does not constitute an intimidating presence. It is a case of chicken coming home to roost. A governor cannot hide under the canopy of the national party.

    In a way this is not necessarily bad. The states governments, going forward, must be much more scrutinized so that people can hold them accountable instead of everybody looking to and blaming the federal government for whatever goes wrong at the state level. Of course, like everyone, I believe the federal government must shed some of its fatty financial weight in favour of the thin and emaciated states. But some of the states should be held responsible for mismanagement, corruption and absolute incompetence. It is good that the votes of the people are beginning to count and anybody saying the opposite is just playing politics. The defeat of “big men” and untouchables during this election is a manifestation that votes count and INEC should be commended in spite of the unbelievable returns in some states even where voter turn-out is apparently low. The two parties in such states have mastered the techniques of voter inflation to the extent that they probably cancel  out each other’s inflated votes. All states of the federation must begin to seriously increase their internally generated revenue (IGR) because they cannot for ever look to oil and gas revenues as their only sources of income. They must embark on commercial agriculture wherever they have comparative advantage. They must also look into mining of hard minerals in their states as well as manufacturing, particularly in adding value to whatever agricultural  produce  and mineral deposits in their states. Reliance on revenues from oil and gas has simply become unreliable, untenable and unsustainable. These are certainly interesting times as the Chinese would say.