The Nation Newspaper

Category: Jide Osuntokun

  • Trump and the decline of the US

    When Donald Trump threw his hat into the ring for the Republican nomination, most Americans did not think he was a serious contender. There were others in the field with government experience either as governors or senators. Trump has no such experience. He was just a brash New Yorker with lots of money and television experience as host to a programme famous for his firing people. His critics even dispute how much money he has. He claimed to be a billionaire but his financial history is characterized by bankruptcies. In one of his businesses, he was awarding degrees in business without a university building or academic staff. The only thing he had was his braggadocio about how he could make people billionaires like himself after payment of appropriate fees. Many people were sucked into his scheme and when he was sued for fraud, he quickly gave their money back settling the cases out of the glare of the judicial system. He built many estates here and there and quietly banned blacks from owning any of his flats or apartment buildings. He also merely lent his notorious name to buildings all over the world, thus there were Trump Towers across the world. He also had casinos in Jersey and Las Vegas which closed down one after the other after fulfilling their money hacking purposes. He also ran the Miss World or Miss Universe pageants during which time he allegedly groped the girls.

    Now how can such a man be elected  president in the most advanced democracy and the most technologically advanced country in the world?  Under normal circumstances, he should not be elected dog catcher! He overwhelmed his Republican contenders by insults, bullying and  he reduced decent debates to exchange of insults and raw language. When he faced Hilary Clinton, he exploited Mrs Clinton’s secretive nature to say she has something to hide. Mrs Clinton’s long service and experience in government also proved her undoing during the election. Her use of private server for government e-mails did her incalculable damage. The shady and buccaneering way the Clinton Foundation was raising money sometimes using the facilities of the State Department to raise questionable donations was said by Trump to have amounted “to pay for play”. Incredibly, a man of Trump’s sexually explosive background was not ashamed to say former President Bill Clinton’s sexual peccadilloes disqualified his wife for the presidency and suggested Mrs Clinton bullied those women who were victims of her husband ‘s philandering and  that she prevented them from seeking justice.

    There were many  other reasons responsible for the rise of Trump chief among which was the loss of opportunities by blue collar white workers who lost out to workers in other parts of the world due to globalization. This sector of the American population who numbered about 40 percent of the population felt increasingly left out of the so-called American Dream because of its poor education vis-à-vis college educated young Americans.

    I remember discussing the prognosis of Mrs Clinton winning the election in November 2016 with Ambassador Akporode Clark and the wise analysis by this experienced retired ambassador telling me the Americans will not elect a woman after “enduring a black” for eight years. The analysis was right on the spot and has been proved right. This analysis has gained so much traction that President Barack Obama has had to deny being responsible for Trump’s election laying the blame at the door of the Republicans who for eight years had peddled the rumor that he was not born in America and was therefore not qualified to run for the exalted office of president and some of them had been responsible for the gridlock in Washington. Throughout the Obama years, Trump also represented the arrow-head of white American nationalism that felt threatened by Blacks, Latinos, Jews, Asians and by the youth and women coalition that was responsible for electing a black president twice for a period of eight years. Even Jeb Bush while campaigning for the Republican ticket said this much when he said he was the only white Republican who could defeat the strong Democratic coalition.

    Whatever was responsible for Trump’s election, it should be pointed out that while  he won the majority of the votes in the electoral college, Mrs Clinton won the plurality of the votes by about three million votes. But American system is the only one that does not reflect majority votes  but rather takes the election state by state as if it was different elections in American 52 states and territories.

    Now Trump has been president for the past seven and a half months and he has broken all known rules in American  democratic culture. He has packed his cabinet with retired Generals and right wing peoples spewing all kinds of largely unacceptable political messages that most civilized Americans find troubling. Because of general press opposition to his government, many of his appointees have had to resign because they were found to be unworthy of holding high offices of responsibility. His popularity has hung around 35 percent, the lowest in recent American history. Trump’s administration has suffered a high level of attrition in the revolving doors of coming in and going out of people in the White House. The government also suffers from accusations of nepotism with Trump’s son-in-law and daughter wielding unusual influence in government. Trump also has in residence one Steve Bannon who until recently before he too left a sinking ship served as some kind of Rasputin in the Trump court advising the president to follow a right wing trajectory not seen in American politics since Dwight Eisenhower.

    The president has alienated his neighbours in Canada and Mexico by abandoning North Atlantic Free Trade Area which bound the economies of the USA, Canada and Mexico, creating one of the biggest free trade areas in the world from which the three economies have ostensibly benefited. Trump says it has hurt American working class. He has withdrawn from the Pacific trading pact that would have created the biggest trading area in the world linking the economies of the North America, some South American economies and those of Asian countries bordering the Pacific Ocean. He was also not too excited about NATO, a defensive military alliance that had guaranteed world peace since 1945. He was determined on some trade wars with Europe, China and Japan.

    The only country he seems favorably disposed to is Vladimir Putin’s Russia that has been accused fairly of illegally helping elect Trump by leaking secrets about Hilary Clinton’s e-mails. It seems however that Congress would not allow any Trump-driven rapprochement with Russia. The final point of his unworthy leadership was demonstrated at Charlottesville in the state of Virginia when a mob of  KKK( Ku Klux Klan ) a cross-burning gang of black-killing and hating people to which Trump’s father allegedly belonged, and also including neo -NAZI group and other white supremacist groups invaded the small town allegedly demonstrating against the pulling down of the statue of General Robert Lee, a treasonable confederate general during the American Civil War of 1861 to 1865. The statue and others have been in recent times, symbols of persecution of Jews and Blacks and other minorities in the United States. A counter-demonstration led to one of these people using a high speed car to kill and wound the demonstrators. Rather than condemning the white terrorists, Trump seemed to have believed that there was a moral equivalence between the terrorists and racists and those protesting to reassert American values. After waiting for nearly 72 hours, Trump came out to condemn the racists but then immediately changed the issue to be between protecting American history and statues of people like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, founders of the American republic who were of course slave-holding Americans, thus reducing his own apparent failure of leadership to protecting American slave-holding national heroes like Washington and Jefferson.

    The point he does not seem to appreciate is that being heroes does not remove the fact that these people were moral delinquents and failures. We do not know where the ferment and political contradictions in America will lead the country.

    What is certain is that we are witnessing the decline of America from self-inflicted wounds leading to implosion which will definitely weaken America from within before an inevitable confrontation with the power of a rising China. This is a phenomenon which the virtual begging of China to rein in the North Koreans who are threatening to nuke America itself or to begin with, the American Pacific territory of Guam, clearly demonstrates. If American leadership under Trump knows a little bit about the reading of history predicted by the Grecian historian Thucydides of inevitable clash between a declining and a rising power, Trump should be doing everything to unite America for eventual conflict in Asia. This is of course assuming that this dangerous man understands the lessons of history.

    In the meantime, a country which prides itself as the moral and political leader of the world is being brought down by a president suffering from immense moral deficit.

  • Do something for Nigeria

    President JF Kennedy at his inauguration as president of the United States in 1961 challenged his countrymen and women by saying “Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country”. This was a call on American patriotism at a time of crisis at home and abroad. The Vietnam War was spiralling out of control and the civil rights movement was gathering pace. This iconic president died in the process of offering enlightened leadership.

    Nigeria is faced with grave challenge the like it has not seen since the civil war that ended in 1970.

    The recrudescence of the quest for self-determination and resuscitation of the dead dream of Biafra is the extreme manifestation of the desire for restructuring of the country. The demand for restructuring is a testimony to the fact that the over-centralized and unitary form of government masquerading as federalism is not working. This demand is not restricted to the South-east alone. The South-east demand may be rooted in the politics of sharing and not genuine belief in secession.  Nevertheless the agitation raises the fundamental issue of political alienation. But in order to put these problems behind us we ought to look at the architectural design of the Nigerian house. We all agree that there are too many states therefore leading to burdensome administrative costs. We need to reduce the federating states to about six or at most eight while the present states would be mere provincial administrations if the emergent regions want them. The local governments belong to the regional federating units and not to the federal government. What needs to be said is that we must commence talking about the way forward. If there is need to summon a constituent assembly, so be it.  Asking for a new structure as contained in the Jonathan expensive jamboree of 2014 which recommended creation of additional states is not the way to go. But after saying this we must all accept the fact that Nigeria is worth fighting for and dying for by our leaders. Any leader who does not feel Nigeria is worth dying for has no business being our leader.

    We all seem to believe that the oil and gas below our soil and seas are fundamental to the economic survival of our country. While this may be true, it does not tell the whole story. The contribution of our agricultural sector is more fundamental to the economic well-being of the country. Just compare the situation in Venezuela which was pumping out close to 10 million barrels of crude oil daily compared with the two million barrels Nigeria was producing in the best of times. Now Venezuela is prostrate on its belly because it has no money to import food. The case of our sister country Angola that was producing almost the same volume of crude oil as Nigeria is not different. Angola which depends on food imports is down on its knees in the absence of foreign exchange. The question to ask is why is Nigeria different? The reason is that we can feed ourselves without importing food if we decide to eat what we produce. Local production of cassava of which we are the largest producer in the world, growing of yams and local production of rice and corn will suffice for our national need of carbohydrates.

    We also have millions of heads of sheep, cows, and goats not to talk of chickens and fishes which will take care of our protein needs. We have different seasonal fruits and vegetables for nutritional balance. Nigeria is a case of a country that can have food sufficiency in record time if we are serious. Even without being serious, we can do without food imports. In my home, I hardly eat foreign food and I am not in any way missing it. Nigeria is exceptional in this regard as far as Africa is concerned. We enjoy in our economy the economy of scale which a large population confers on us. Our physical size and variety of weather if not climate makes it possible for us to grow a variety of crops from cocoa, rubber palm produce cassava, yams, potatoes and so on in the south and  in the Middle Belt of our country. We can also grow sorghum, groundnuts, beans, cotton and all kinds of spices in the northern parts of the country.

    If we properly harness all our resources, we will find out that there is more than enough wealth to go round rather than playing politics of poverty and ethnic division and confrontation. Our large size is a potential deterrence to any invader. This means we cannot be conquered easily. Any invader will have to defeat us in detail. Our size confers on us considerable amount of influence if not power in the world but certainly power in our region. We do not want to throw away all this.

    No country in the world is perfect. The wars going on in several parts of the world are enough to convince us that while we have problems, they are not enough to lead us to destructive warfare. The human suffering in places like Iraq, Syria, the new country of South Sudan which broke away from the Sudan as well as the war in Yemen are sufficient warning to those of us who will goad other people’s children to sectarian or ethnic war which will eventually end by negotiation. The question then arises as to the efficacy of conflict over negotiation. As Kennedy once said “we must not fear to negotiate but we must never negotiate out of fear”. If we want to negotiate our way forward, we must sincerely lay our fears on the table and we must all make serious attempt to remove whatever lingering fear each of us has about the current structure of government that is preventing us from rapid development.

    No part of our country is completely made up saints or sinners and we must not make bogeymen out of each other.  We are first individuals, then families before being members of our different ethnic groups. We all want the best for ourselves and our families and perhaps for our different ethnic groups. The task before us is to find ways by which wanting the best for ourselves does not impinge on the welfare of our fellow Nigerians. That is the essence of constitutional government. I honestly believe in the destiny of our country as potentially a leader in Africa. The position of the black man in a racially divided world is so precarious that we must not trifle with the only genuinely Black Country that can stand up for the dignity of the black man. This was the destiny bestowed on us at independence and our founding fathers accepted this mission and for over 50 years, our foreign policy was based on this and we made humongous financial sacrifice to work for the liberation of the black man on his own continent. We just cannot throw this accomplishment away. We have only won the political battle; the war of economic development is just beginning. We must coordinate our economic development with those of the 53-odd African states because as separate puny states, we will not go far and we will open ourselves to being undermined by the forces of neo-colonialism. If we get our economy going and there are jobs for those who need them, it really will not matter which member of the ethnic group is in or out of power. In any case, this is why we are seriously advocating redesigning the constitutional architecture of our country to locate power politics and its bitterness not at the centre but in the constituent regions. The respect this country used to have in the comity of nations was based on our size and promise. We need to put our acts together to regain our lost glory. We are not going to get this back through national fragmentation or division but by making genuine compromise and by understanding each other’s fears. We can have a win-win situation in which Nigeria will be worth defending and dying for.

  • My yesteryears

    The caption I wanted to give to this column was “There was a country” which will open me to charges of plagiarism of the work of the great story teller, the late China Achebe. But the sentiments I am going to express are the same. In biblical terms, it is probably correct to say that God has departed from the house of Nigeria. The murder of tens of people, The Guardian said, 47 people were slaughtered during 6am Mass in a Catholic Church somewhere in Anambra State on Sunday August 6.The reason for this, the journalist surmised, might be due to drug wars between two people from the same area where the massacre took place but who have become “billionaires “ in South Africa from the drug trade. Now Nigerians who glibly accuse South Africans of xenophobia particularly directed against Nigerians can now begin to understand the nature of the problem. I used to explain to my friends that our people are not saints at home but many are devils abroad. Some get involved in crimes of unimaginable nature. At the time the so called “Evans” was caught in Lagos, a compatriot of ours was apprehended for the same crime in Uganda. I am told Kenya visas for Nigerians are as difficult to get as the proverbial camel passing through the eye of the needle. Can anybody blame them? They want to sup with us with a long spoon .What has happened to us and why are we like this? Where did we miss the road? Can all these things that ruin us and our national reputation be due to resource curse?

    There was a time when Nigeria was good; when people worked hard and earned not a lot but were satisfied with the little they earned and did not worship mammon. I still remember growing up as a child in rural Nigeria in Ilawe to be precise where my parents were petty traders selling anything that was sellable. My father as a young man had gone “abroad” to the Gold Coast (Ghana). It was not to study but he studied as collateral side show to the hard work of mining manganese in Nsutta in the middle of nowhere. On his return home, he decided to be a merchant. He carried his merchandise which he bought from Lagos to the inner corners of Ekiti to places like Awo, Ikere, Oye, Egosi, (ilupeju) and finally Ilawe. His younger brother, Bembere was stationed in Ado Ekiti and his shop was the “Kingsway stores “of Ado Ekiti in those years of his commercial primacy before he veered into the transport business which ruined him financially perhaps because of the bad roads in Ekiti. I was not born when all this happened but my father kept a diary and having seen the upward mobility that education brought to people in the Gold Coast, he was determined to educate his boys and unfortunately not his girls. He would be referred to now as a male chauvinist!

    By the time he started having children from 1922 to 1952 over a period of 30 years, he had acquired more than a football team! He was also a caring father. My father placed emphasis on hard work and chivalry. He never caned us unless any of his sons ran away from a fight. My father celebrated any of his sons who defended himself successfully from a bully. Courage meant the world to my father. If there was any altercation in school involving any of his children and he was sent for, my father would tell the teacher even before the teacher spoke that none of his children would steal or tell a lie. And he was always right. He loved education but his half-brothers took to farming, planting cocoa, and taunting my father that he was wasting money on sending his children to school and that his children would grow up to be weaklings compared to their hardy and tough cousins growing up on the farms. I remember one of my uncles in his old age jokingly calling us lazy drones and thieves who cannot hold the hoe! To him farming was the only noble work and I think he was right.

    I was one of the young ones in the family, the last of my mother’s six children. When my father split the family into two, my mother who was the first wife headed the family left at Ilawe while my father took the rest of the family to Oye and later to Egosi (Ilupeju).  I grew up in this separate but one family. I only met my other brothers sparingly. In fact I never met the first born of my mother, the late Chief Oduola Osuntokun until he returned home as a graduate in 1951. In age we were separated by 21 odd years. When I was young, I did not know we had anything in common. Of course later in life due to the premature death of my father, Chief Osuntokun more than adequately fulfilled the role of a father and while my father spared the rod my “saro” brother did not spare the rod. He was like what Germans call a drill sergeant! The point is that there was discipline in every family. Perhaps our present problems in Nigeria are due to the breakdown of traditional families and the values of honesty, hard work, truth, courage and contentment everyone cherished.

    I remember when I started school, our uniforms of black stripes on white were woven by women who had looms in their houses and worked on them in their spare time after returning from the farm.  The cotton they used was grown by them and threaded by them using home-made crude implements. In short, nearly every home had mini factories making school uniforms! The cloth was cut and sewn into short knickers and smart “buba “ something like what people several years later called “Kampala”. We did not import khaki to be sewn as school uniforms. Certainly not in Ekiti of my youth. Unfortunately by the time we got to senior classes in primary schools, this backward industrial integration was sabotaged and replaced with imports and thus began the absence of synergy in our education and development. By the time I entered Christ’s School, Ado Ekiti, we began our journey of no return from mimicking the white man. We were forbidden from speaking Yoruba which was dismissed as vernacular and not a language. We were punished when caught doing the most natural thing, expressing ourselves and emotions in our own language. Our seniors became spies ferreting out those who spoke Yoruba secretly and quietly with one another. Those caught spent their Saturdays cutting grass which grew wildly on Agidimo hill where our school was located. By the time I dropped Latin in form four because we had no teacher and Reverend Canon Leslie Donald Mason, the principal who doubled as our Latin teacher, perhaps because of overwork said we should all offer Yoruba at the West African School Certificate examination, many of us found our own language extremely difficult.

    Question of students’ rebellion was alien to us and teachers never went on strike. But nowadays there are equivalents of ASUU in primary and secondary schools and teachers do not want to get their rewards in heaven anymore! I actually sympathize with teachers not because I am one of them but because what could have ameliorated our common lives like public health, transportation, unemployment benefits and sure and regular pensions are not just there. Today’s Nigeria is a case of survival of the fittest. This social Darwinism is at the root of all our problems. We must find our way back to the past when we were paid just enough but not stupendously to the point that there is nothing left for others and for common services.

    I am not an enemy of progress but what kind of progress permits slaughtering of church worshippers over drug money? What kind of progress permits legislators at the federal level to cart home monies monthly that their counterparts doing honest jobs cannot earn in a lifetime? This is why every little boy wants to be a politician or a kidnapper. We have a problem and we must face this squarely not only at the national level but at home, in our places of worship, at school and at work.   We must have a holistic approach to this wound on the national body before it becomes gangrenous.  Yes there was once a country called Nigeria where peace like a river flowed, where we were concerned with our neighbours’ welfare, where teachers in schools took seriously their roles of in loco parentis and parents showed gratitude and where a professor was at par with federal or regional cabinet minister socially and materially. We need to look at our reward system and service at all levels must deserve its commensurate rewards.

  • The second slave trade

    I always feel very bad and sad when the international electronic media show hundreds of Africans drowning in the Mediterranean Sea virtually every day. Those rescued claim they are running away from undemocratic governments, female circumcision, also known as genital mutilation, ethnic cleansing and religious conflicts. The truth is that most of them are running away from poverty, unemployment, frustration and uncertain future arising from insensitive governments characterized by lack of serious planning. In other words, these people are economic migrants rather than being political refugees. The case can of course be made that economic deprivation is almost as bad as political and religious persecution. Both can lead to death and their separation is merely academic. To keep young Africans at home, one must provide them means of economic sustenance. The west therefore has self-interest in not colluding with African countries’ leaders to rob their people and they must also seriously engage Africa in fair trade rather than the ripping them off as they presently do. African produce and raw materials are bought cheaply and are returned to them as finished products and are sold at many times the cost of production. Foreigners dictate the price they buy African goods and also the price their goods are sold to Africans. Africa has no choice in this and this unfair exchange is also a manifestation of Africa’s weakness in global power relations .This is what is at the root of the present modern slave trade going on in Africa.

    The trans-Atlantic slave trade which lasted for  almost five centuries  and which has gone down into history as forced migrations which according to my friend and colleague, Professor Joseph Inikori of Rochester University  in the USA,  involved the transplantation of not less than 15million hapless Africans to the Americas, that is South and North America. Most of these people came from Portuguese Angola which according to Basil Davidson was reduced to a “howling wilderness” almost denuded of its people after five centuries of the Portuguese ferrying their black cargoes across the Atlantic. The area between the Bights of Benin and Biafra known then as the slave coast approximates most of the Nigerian coast provided the rest of these black cargoes of involuntary migration to the new world. It is an irony that the growing and cultivation of something so sweet as sugar should have involved so much bitterness and suffering to the victims of slave labour on American and West Indian sugar plantations. Africans largely sold their brothers into slavery  even though there is evidence that slave wars were encouraged by the European slavers to facilitate ample supply of slaves to the slave ships anchored in slave ports of Luanda, Lobito, Escravos, Warri, Lagos, Porto Novo,  Accra, Saint Louis  and others. Most of those shipped across the Atlantic were forced into it. African potentates, middlemen and merchants colluded with European slave traders to remove the young and productive young men and women from West Africa where trade was concentrated. This trade constituted the basis of western capitalism which enjoyed centuries of free and unpaid labour according to Eric Williams in his 1947 Oxford Ph.D. thesis which became a classic entitled “Capitalism and slavery” subsequently.

    But today, most of those running away are young people. In the past, they were people with little education or no education at all. Now those leaving are sometimes graduates of tertiary institutions who cannot find jobs. They are also using all kinds of routes legal and illegal and sometimes very dangerous roads such as crossing the Sahara desert and the Mediterranean Sea. While this voluntary movement of people is going on, there is the odious human trafficking where young people particularly girls are lured into the sex trade. Some of the young girls claim that their traducers promise them good jobs in Europe only to be dumped in brothels in Libya and Europe. There are those young girls who knew that what they were entering into right from beginning was prostitution. It is very sad that some parents aid and abet the trafficking of their children. Some parents even sell their old homes to finance their children’s movement. There were cases where parents did this horrible thing and when challenged they claimed they did it to assist their children to get out of poverty. There are instances of some of such children after a few years sending money home from their earnings from this nefarious trade to fund their parents businesses.  In cases of involuntary trafficking, the victims of the trade are sworn to oaths in juju shrines to keep their mouths shut if they are caught. They also sometimes swear allegiance to their captors not to bolt away until they have paid their madams ‘or masters ‘investment in their relocation and placement in brothels in Europe. Sometimes young girls are taken from Nigeria not to Europe but to brothels in poor wretched countries such as Mali and Burkina Faso  in West Africa where they endure worse situation than what is prevalent at home more or less jumping from fry pan into fire. The ones taken to Libya when Muamar Ghadafi was in power fared better but immediately after he was murdered, all hell broke out and they became shooting targets for wild armed gangs in the country fighting for political turf. This horrible situation is what is fuelling the desperate movement to Europe occasioning drowning in the Mediterranean Sea. But in spite of this terrible ordeal the movement across the Sahara continues.

    The inhumanity of this trafficking ought to catch the attention of  leaders of African states and to lead perhaps to summoning of an extraordinary summit of the African Union or other regional bodies like ECOWAS or SADCC to tackle this shame and degrading horror. It is not just an African problem because people are coming from Bangladesh, Pakistan Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Yemen where wars are raging. The preponderant numbers in recent times are coming from Africa. Finding a solution to this problem is urgent because of its lasting effect on Africans and people of African descent.

    Racism is one of the residual effects of the trans-Atlantic slave trade where the justification of the trade was premised on the grounds that Africans were not really human and that enslaving them was freeing them from the barbarism of their African savage existence. It has taken centuries for Africans to partially shed this degrading and odious racism. The present, somehow voluntary, slave trade Africans are imposing on themselves will in future reinforce the belief of those like Rudyard Kipling  who felt that Africans are “half children, half devils “and not really people. We can thus see that it is in the interest of black humanity to so run the affairs of our countries that our children will have a future in our countries. I still remember my college days in Europe, America and Canada when Chinese were looked down upon as “china man” something derogatory like “nigger” and laughed at. But by their foot straps, the Chinese by fire and by force have pulled themselves into global reckoning. Nobody is laughing at the Chinese today. This was also the case with the Japanese. In London of the 1950s and 1960s, one could encounter advertisements for vacant apartments with the proviso “No Irish, no coloured (blacks) but Jap. Ok”. If we want to be respected, we must pull ourselves up, develop our countries and stop escaping to Europe and America and Canada in search of the Golden Fleece. There is enough opportunity at home if we look inwards. We have to mobilize our human and material resources to develop our countries .We have to put an end to stealing and looting our nations’ treasuries and stop colluding with the outside world to ruin ourselves. Unless we do this, we will always have a weak hand in dealing with the rest of the world. For us, as Nigerians, the time to get moving is now. The developed world will soon move away from reliance on hydrocarbons as a source of energy. Technology is going to render useless very soon what we depend on for foreign reserve. The way to go is industrialization, technological innovation and adding value to our agricultural produce. The days of relying on export of mineral and agricultural raw materials will soon be gone forever. The urgency of the situation needs to be understood by everyone so that instead of wasting our time on useless political disputation and our vast resources on importing cheap goods from Asian countries, we should settle down and seriously plan for the future of which this deplorable but salvageable present is part of.

  • Retirement and splendid isolation

    I finally retired from teaching at the end of the current academic session 2016/2017 at the Redeemer’s University Ede. I started my teaching career at the university level in 1966/67 session when I was a postgraduate student at the University of Ibadan. I was in my early twenties. It was an unusual time. Some of the Ibo lecturers and even some expatriates left the University of Ibadan because of the crisis and killings in the country for fear of being killed. There was a special course for final year students on “The scramble for and partition of Africa”. In the absence of the lecturer assigned to teach the course, the late Professor JF Ade Ajayi asked me to teach the course. I had no choice because this was an order which must be obeyed. I prepared very well before I started teaching the course. Most of my students were older than me and some felt uneasy being taught by me but after some disquiet and realizing they did not have a choice, the students settled down and I discharged my responsibilities with all my heart and all the energies at my command.

    I left Ibadan before the outbreak of the civil war and went to Canada as an Izaak Walton Killam scholar the Canadian equivalent of the British Rhodes scholarship. I remember in my final year of the PhD programme in 1970, I was again asked to offer a course in Commonwealth History to final year students at Dalhousie University, Halifax Nova Scotia one of the oldest, if  not the oldest university in Canada. In spite of my being naturally shy, my solid academic grounding in Ibadan had prepared me for the experience. After the doctorate of philosophy in history in 1970, I was appointed Assistant Professor of Commonwealth History at the prestigious University of Western Ontario, London Canada the richest city per capita in Canada. This like Dalhousie University was a lily-white university. My late wife, Abiodun was a student in the Faculty of Science; thank God I did not have to teach her. In order to overcome my shyness, I used to mesmerize the students by smoking pipe tobacco of the pungent Erinmore brand. On entering the class while the students were wondering what this black dude was about to say, I would envelope myself and the podium where I spoke with smoke. By the time the smoke cleared, the lecture would have begun. By the end of the academic year, I had become a much sought-after speaker in many lectures and seminars in the university. The 1960s were epochal years in Africa and the black diaspora in Canada and the USA. It was also a period of political ferment in francophone Canada particularly in the province of Quebec. I had well considered opinions on all these happenings.

    I left Canada for the University of the West Indies at Cave Hill Barbados an island which used to be described as one of her Britannic majesty’s crowned jewels on the account of being almost a tropical paradise for the rich. I was young and I wanted to explore the world. If I had been older and farsighted, I would have bought a four bedroom bungalow which the university offered to finance for its lecturers. After a wonderful year of swimming, eating fish and drinking rum, I returned to reality in 1972 and was shunted to the University of Ibadan, Jos campus. It was another happy place for me and other young colleagues most of who were from the south and experiencing the cold weather of Jos and the hospitality of its people for the first time. Governor Gomwalk, an alumnus of the University of Ibadan who invited the university to his state offered us plots of land in the prime area of the GRA. Few took up the opportunity because we felt we were birds of passage in Jos. I could have stayed in Jos forever but for the fact that we lost a male child because of substandard health facility. My wife and I left for Lagos University in 1974 from where I retired in 2005 to join Redeemer’s University as foundation Dean of the College of Humanities from where I have now retired. I had a wonderful and fulfilling experience mentoring students and younger academic colleagues. I believe I gave as much as I received from my experience at the Redeemer’s University Ede.

    After retiring from the University of Lagos, I was conferred the Honour of Emeritus professorship and on retiring from Redeemer’s University I was again made a professor emeritus. This is a double crown in my academic efforts. It does not mean I am on salaries in these two universities. In fact Redeemer’s University has put me on a salary of one Naira per year. I am told this is the only way by which I can continue to use their facilities when I visit. I am involved pro bono in the University of Lagos in the supervision of a doctoral student I will also be available to do the same at the Redeemer’s University if called upon to do so. In more civilized part of the world my status would have conferred on me not only an office but secretarial assistance since I plan to write some books as time goes on. The Nigerian university system has apparently not thoroughly thought out what they should do with distinguished retired professors who can still be useful in teaching and research and guardianship in the universities where the university culture is disappearing and is being replaced by mediocrity and materialism.

    Now that I am retired and in splendid isolation, I have suddenly discovered that I have too much time doing practically nothing at least for now. My friends are also not too much involved in anything. I am surprised that my generation has been virtually forgotten in the scheme of things. In the mounting national problems, one would have thought people of my generation will occasionally be called upon to make suggestions or to proffer solutions to one problem or the other. One would have thought retired academics who know about what universities should be like should be the ones being appointed chairmen and pro-chancellors of universities and polytechnics rather than failed politicians with their buccaneering attitude to appointments which they see as opportunity to eat. Personally I cannot complain and I thank the management of The Nation newspapers for giving me the opportunity to air my views and to ventilate and express opinions even when they are not sought. A friend and colleague  for whom I have tremendous respect once told me he was surprised that I am wasting my time pontificating on Nigerian issues because according to him those who should read your column have no interest in reading and consider it a waste of time reading not just newspapers but reading anything at all. He is actually right!

    I know chief executives from President to Vice President, President of Senate, Speaker of the House of Representatives, ministers and governors are given executive briefs by their permanent officials about what is in the press shielding them from what criticisms of their actions the news media carry. Thus they live in ignorant bliss thinking all is well. The reasons why this is so is that these chief executives have no privacy and time to read and reflect because hordes of hangers on continue to inflict their presence on these chief executives from dusk to dawn. I once witnessed the entire cabinet of a state still hanging around the governor’s residence at 3am in the morning. It is true that the affairs and work of government in Nigeria are done in the night! This is neither good for those in power nor good for the country. Governance requires sane mind, calmness, understanding of issues, ability to analyse data and opinions and recommendations of civil servants which a sleep deprived chief executive would hardly be able to do thus many of the state executives sleep-walk through problems that are  of immense importance to our nation . This probably accounts for our continuing to grope in the dark.

    To come back to retirement, I believe this is a time of reflection and leaving for posterity ideas which in the course of time may prove useful to those who succeed and survive us, for after all, we are no longer looking for fame or money but to leave a good name which is better than silver and gold. Our pensions are inadequate but as the Yorubas would say “tokete ba dagba tan omu Omo  ni nmu”. That is to say in normal circumstances the children of the old will support materially their parents. Many will say in these days of youth unemployment, it is the old who are supporting the young. This is a topic for another day.

  • Old age is like a plague

    The inimitable French patriot and president, General Charles de Gaulle in his old age said old age is like a plague which will affect us all at one time or the other. Charles de Gaulle, like his contemporary, Winston Churchill of Great Britain was one of the most colorful figures of the 20th century. He was so sure of his iconic stature that he said emphatically “Apres moi; la deluge”; somehow he looked down on fellow French men because of their politics of division. He was quoted to have said “If you lock two French men in a room to form a political party, they will come out with three!” As president of France, he ruled like the pre-revolution Bourbon kings to the extent that he was said to have said “La France; c’est moi”. Even if this was apocryphal, Charles de Gaulle’s image loomed so large that anything said about him and his France was believable!  I watched him in 1968 while I was a student in France retire grudgingly to his village of Colombey- les-Deux-Eglises after students uprising against his authoritarian rule.

    Now what is a plague? It is a disease apparently spread by rats or mice that has caused a lot of damage and death historically. There are two periods of English history that is associated with heavy and high morbidity and mortality caused by plague. Between June 1348 and December 1349 was the period known as “Black Death” when the population of London was almost wiped out. The second incident was between 1665 and 1666 known as “London plague” when tens of thousands of Londoners again surrendered to death caused by plague. There was no cure against it. Once it broke out, death was a certainty to virtually all and sundry. Those who survived it bore the burden of burying every day the dead and waited for the dying. It reminds one of what Albert Einstein said that in the event of thermonuclear war, all human beings will die either directly or through radioactive fallout but rats will survive to inherit the earth!

    This long preamble is to establish the certainty of death in human experience and existence. When I was young and as the youngest child of my mother, I always prayed for her that she will never die . This was because my father had died before her and the thought of being an orphan was not something I cherished. My mother would smile and say “if I didn’t die, whose footsteps or example would I be following”? She would then add that death would come when it would come. I never wanted to hear this. But my prayers were answered and my mother died in her 90s.

    The recent deaths of Professor Abiola Irele, Maitama Sule and my sister-in-law, Mabel Osuntokun all in their eighties brought to my thought the inevitability of our mortal end. We must of course thank God that our people these days are living longer than before when the average lifespan of Nigerians was 47 years. Of course, the average age still remains in the 50s but there is evidence to show that people are beginning to live longer than before. My illustrious brothers died in their 60s and people, including myself, began to feel we did not have the genes of longevity in my family! We have however turned the corner and confounded the wicked ones who may wish us dead before our appointed time.

    I remember Professor Irele with fondness because as a young university student, I read his articles and essays on negritude. The period immediately after African countries’ independence presented us with the problems of identity. Should we be seen as “black English men and women” some kind of miserable mimics of the white colonizer or Africans manifesting what the likes of Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana called “the African personality” or what the totally assimilated Franco-African and Franco-Caribbean from Martinique and Guadeloupe in the persons respectively of the Senegalese President Leopold Sedar Senghor and the Martinique-an, Aime Cesaire called negritude? It was Abiola Irele who made sense out of what was sometimes a charged debate. Sedar Senghor who ironically was married to a white woman as most of the apostles of negritude were, celebrated the blackness of our ebony skin as being suitable for the tropics and prevented us from sun induced cancers as in white skins, our thick lips were suitable for our clime. Nowadays, white women do surgeries to make their thin lips big like those of Africans that are regarded as good for kissing! Our big nose was to aid breathing in the heavy air in the tropics. Our joie de vivre, our music and dance and our emotional and intuitive attitude was contrasted with the dry and Cartesian and wicked and killer disposition of the whites. The point of our uniqueness and difference from other people was made by our independence leaders to the point of absurdity that made people like Wole Soyinka dismiss negritude by saying a tiger needs not advertise its tigritude since it will be obvious.

    Irele of course went on to distinguish himself as one of the greatest literary critics who by his essays made African writers better. He will be missed not only in Africa but in Europe and the Americas where at one time or the other, he lived and practiced his trade of literary criticism. As for Maitama Sule, people of my generation even when we were still in school admired him from a distance. He represented the happy go lucky branch of humanity in a conservative northern Nigeria of Ahmadu Bello, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa and Kashim Ibrahim. Maitama Sule partied around Lagos in 1960s with cabinet colleagues like T.O. S Benson and John Modupe Johnson. By his own testimony, when he heard that Princess Alexandria who represented her majesty, Queen Elizabeth at Nigeria’s independence would expect to dance at the independence ball with our Prime Minister who did not know how to dance and as a Muslim would not do it, young Maitama, with the approval of the Prime Minister, quickly learnt how to do ballroom dancing and carried the princess elegantly through a couple of foxtrot and jive to the surprise and admiration of all. Maitama easily made friends and he was a bridge to the youth and other parts of the country which were not familiar with the North and northerners generally. I was always bemused by his parody of Martin Luther King’s famous speech “I have a dream ….” with Maitama replacing King’s dream for black Americans with his own version of a Dream for Nigeria. There is no doubt that the Masanin Kano will be missed by his few colleagues still alive and the rest of us. The point must be made that no matter how distinguished one may be, death is an inevitable end. In my own town of Okemesi, our masquerades who in our culture are seen to come from heaven would always say – heaven needs not be in a hurry because we are all coming there!

    If we all know that all our accumulation of wealth is futile, perhaps we will moderate our struggle for wealth which is driving our people to extreme extent to get rich quickly. Kidnapping , fetish requiring human blood to get rich quickly, outright looting and financial self-aggrandizement when we occupy public positions are unfortunate manifestation of a culture which lives for today unmindful of what legacies we leave behind when we leave this mortality for immortality. Death is a necessary end and it will come when it will come and it is no respecter of gender or age. It is always a sad thing to hear the news of any one’s death particularly of young people but as we say in Africa, the death of someone we know is a signal that our own time we surely come.

  • Osun PDP’ senatorial seat victory

    I saw it coming and I predicted it to my friends that the leadership of the APC in Osun State was disconnected from the people. Governor Rauf Aregbesola has my support because he has done well for the people of Osun particularly in the education sector. He has built first class schools at primary and secondary levels, the two levels that are usually neglected in Nigeria. His school feeding programme has been embraced by the federal government and commended by foreign institutions and embassies in Nigeria. Whenever I travel to Southern Africa, I am always ashamed about the ramshackle buildings called schools all over Nigeria but Aregbesola’s schools have put a smile on my face. These schools are not just in the state capital of Oshogbo but they are all over the place. I had discussions with teachers in some of these schools in the last two years praising the governor for his revolutionary facilities for schools and the retort was always that salaries were not being paid to teachers in full. What does anyone say to people who say they cannot satisfy the needs of their families from their vastly reduced pay packets?

    Governor Aregbesola’s infrastructural programme was also revolutionary. He had plans to build good roads all over the state. He has also changed the face of the rather traditional and rustic town of Oshogbo in the last six years. He was also trying to link Oshogbo with the now dilapidated Ilesha-Ibadan expressway but he has not been able to fully execute the plan. He was also building an expressway to link Oshogbo with Offa on a road that is a federal road and like all the other magnificent plans, it seems the state bit more than it can chew. The federal government has not always been helpful. The federal roads linking the state with neighbouring states have been abandoned. The old federal road linking Ilesha, the biggest city in the state with Oshogbo the state capital is now largely unmotorable. The local people who do not know which road is state or federal blame Aregbesola’s government. The problem Aregbesola’s government has is that it is overcommitted. I wish this governor had all the money he needed so that he could have turned Osun State into the best state in the federation. He has plans to build a road that would have bypassed Ibadan to link Osun apparently through Ijebu-Igbo with Lagos-Benin expressway.

    In hindsight it seems Aregbesola could not cure himself of the Lagos mega infrastructural projects syndrome which he got used to when in the words of his biographer Professor Ayo Olukoju he was the “First Commissar of works” whatever that means! Because of these megalomaniac projects, the government of Osun State is over-borrowed and the debts are being paid monthly from federal financial allocation before whatever is left gets to Oshogbo. Public servants including teachers and judicial officers are being doled out money to in proportion to their earnings with junior workers getting most of their salaries. When Aregbesola’s first came to power, the first thing he did was to slash fees of tertiary institutions in the state.  This unwise enthusiasm was not limited to Osun it was something the APC governments in the South-west were guilty of. Some of the states quietly had to eat their vomit when they realized they had no resources to fill the financial gaps. I sympathize with these governors because the welfarist policies of the old Action Group and Unity Party of Nigeria have become so ingrained in our people that even the PDP governors in the South-west dare not depart from this state dependency culture.

    These preambular paragraphs are to explain the loss of the seat vacated by Alhaji Isiaka Adeleke following his unfortunate demise a few months ago. Isiaka Adeleke was a former governor of Osun State and popularly and affectionately called “Serubawon”. I do not know the origin of the name but the rough translation of Serubawon is “frighten them”. Isiaka Adeleke’s father was a senator and trade unionist in the First Republic. The Adelekes in Ede cannot reasonably be ignored. Isiaka’s younger brother, Dr Deji Adeleke is a successful businessman and founder and proprietor of Adeleke University in Ede.  This is one of the most resource endowed universities in Nigeria. It’s buildings are first world type buildings. This is a university employing hundreds of Osun particularly Ede indigenes in the junior ranks of the university staff. I do not know if there are other Adeleke family businesses apart from shopping complexes in Ede. The point I am making is that in a money-starved state like Osun, one cannot ignore providers of paid, emphasis on “paid” employment.

    When Isiaka Adeleke died suddenly, I nearly lost my life coming to Ede that Sunday evening following the sudden outpouring of grief leading to rioting and violence by the village underclass and urban proletariat. I have lived in Ede for the past two years to drive on the cratered and potholed roads of Ede city and Osun State in general.

    If there was any intelligence outfit in the state, the leadership of the APC should have known the sense of loss by the people of the state by the death of Senator Isiaka Adeleke. The proper thing for the governing party to have done the moment Ademola Adeleke indicated interest in serving out his brother’s term, was to have simply conceded it to Ademola Adeleke. First the party first disqualified Alhaji Hussein, who is a serving commissioner in the lately assembled cabinet after a  one man riot squad of the governor himself alone running the state. Then the party came back to call for  a new selection which now said Ademola Adeleke was no longer the APC candidate. This created a lot of confusion and Adeleke pitched his tent with the rival PDP. With the resources at their command and the sympathy of the general public and the piled up frustration with Aregbesola’s style of administration, it did not come to me as a surprise that Adeleke won a personal battle and victory for his family which felt the government of Osun showed little sympathy to them after the death of their iconic head of the family and a former state governor of Osun State.  The government may have been legally correct in setting up a coroner’s inquest to find out the cause of the death of Isiaka Adeleke, but this was against the wish of the departed senator’s family. The government’s argument that it accommodated Isiaka Adeleke in the APC after being forced out of the PDP, and persuaded Husain to stand down for him in 2015 is not convincing because the political weight of Adeleke is much heavier than that of Hussein. I hope reconciliation with the new PDP senator, Ademola Adeleke can be arranged so that he can come back to the APC.

    The government, immediately the rains stop, or even before that time, must find money to repair municipal roads in Osun State starting with the deplorable roads in Ede. The governor must go to Abuja to plead with the presidency for help. The defeat of the APC is a warning shot to the party. It must not ignore this. It must immediately react before it is too late or this will be a sad signal to what may happen in 2019. Many of us will be sad to see the corrupt regime of the past come back to finally finish off Nigeria.

  • Identity crisis in Nigeria

    Linguists have identified about 400 distinct languages in Nigeria. Almost three quarters of these languages are found on the Jos Plateau, Southern Zaria of Kaduna State, Bauchi and Adamawa hills and upper Benue River Valley as well as the Cross River valley and Middle Niger River valley. The area so described approximates the Middle Belt region of Nigeria. This is the region of Nigeria’s ethnic minorities. There are of course ethnic minorities in the Southern part of Nigeria especially in the so-called South-south region. Apart from these minorities who together constitute substantial component of Nigeria are the so-called majority groups like the Igbo, Hausa, and Yoruba. This group were regarded as the tripodal foundation on which the Nigerian house stood. The federal architectural design for the Nigerian house was built on the fact of this triune nature of Nigeria.

    For a long time this was the accepted reality until the so-called minorities in the three regions even before the exit of the British began to agitate for their own home rule or for special institutions to be created to facilitate their quick economic and educational development.

    The Action Group of Chief Obafemi Awolowo was the first to recognize the potency of this ethnic force by embracing the creation of states as the party’s strategy of winning power at the centre. Chief Awolowo recognized that the only way he could come to power was through a coalition of the various minority groups presumably under the leadership of his largely Yoruba party. The constitutional angle to this strategy was fiscal federalism, meaning a loose federation in which each federating unit managed its financial resources but contributing enough to the centre to run common services like defence, aviation, communication, transportation and currency and no more.

    The other two main parties, the NCNC (National Council of Nigerian Citizens) led by Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe and the NPC (Northern People’s Congress) led by Alhaji  Ahmadu Bello were opposed to creation of states for their  own strategic reasons.  Ahmadu Bello did not want the North, his base of power split. Azikiwe for the same reason wanted the East to remain undivided. He also was opposed to the federal structure of government preferring a unitary constitution as a way of overcoming ethnic divisions in Nigeria. Even though Awolowo and Ahmadu Bello were ideological enemies, they however were staunch supporters of fiscal federalism. Federalism was of course more realistic and Awolowo and Ahmadu Bello wanted control of the agricultural wealth of their regions whereas Azikiwe who led the agriculturally poor Eastern Region wanted Unitarian structure so that the East could benefit from a collective pool of the national wealth.

    This was the political setting that took us to independence in 1960. The story of how the northern and the eastern political forces combined to finish off Awolowo and to send him to jail exploiting the division in the Action Group is well known. During the Action Group crisis and the weakening of the Western Region, the Mid-west Region was created in 1963 from the West while unlike what Awolowo advocated which was, contemporaneous creation of state’s in the three regions, the remaining regions remained intact.

    The civil war gave Awolowo opportunity to see the creation of states as part of the strategy of winning the civil war and perhaps to realize his long held view on state creation. Thus the 12 states structure under Yakubu Gowon gave the minorities in the Eastern Region and in the North something to fight and to die for. Unfortunately, instead of keeping this 12 states structure, each succeeding military ruler has further divided the country into small and unviable states arbitrarily and without rhyme or reason and sometimes to satisfy the desires of those in power. We now have 774 local government areas and 36 states not counting Abuja which is a state but not in name. The result of this is that almost 80 percent of national resources are used in administrative costs of payment of salaries and allowances and humongous payment of federal legislators. There is no money left to maintain nationwide infrastructure of roads, rail, and other infrastructure such as ports, air ports and other means of communication and aviation.  Money so spent on administration would have provided jobs for our teeming population of youths who have now been mobilized into ethnic armies and movements by charlatans looking for what to eat. School dropouts are issuing statements on behalf of nations like the Yoruba, Igbo and Hausa while responsible people for fear for their lives are keeping quiet.

    There is nothing wrong in being patriotic and embracing one’s ethnicity but not to the extent of hating and denigrating fellow countrymen and women. It is my considered opinion that it is the dwindling opportunities for employment that is fuelling the ethnic fissiparous tendencies in the country. It is idle hands that the devil finds work for. It is the frustration that nothing is working and nobody is trying to find solutions to pressing problems that is making people to go back to their ethnic comfort zones. The question is where are the Nigerians and how do we build a country we can all call our own?  Karl Marx is right when he said economics is at the basis of all relationship. You are a good father when you can provide for your family. A country is worth dying for when that country can provide for you and for your descendants. We all want to live and provide for ourselves in a country which has a future for our families. In the absence of this, we look for alternatives. The lack of opportunities and the level of poverty in the land is driving us to the edge of the precipice.

    Looking at Nigeria in historic perspectives shows us that we are not as different from each other as we think. Going from the South-west, the Yoruba has always shared historical ties with the Nupe, Borgawa,, Kanuri, Igalla, the pre-Fulani Gobirawa in the north and the Edo in the south. The Edo had historical relations with the Igbo in the western periphery of their land. The Edo have some relations with the Nupe just as Igalla have with the Nupe. The entire Benue valley was influenced by the Jukun. Sometimes Jukun influence spread to the Hausa states. Hausa land looked eastwards to the Kanuri for enlightenment.  In other words there were chains connecting all our people in the distant past before the advent of British colonialism. We may be speaking different languages today but most of the languages spoken in Nigeria belong to the Kwa group of the Niger-Congo family of languages.

    The material culture of the Nigerian area as seen in the Nok, Ife, Ugbo Ukwu, Benin, Idah, and Bida leaves no doubt about the cultural sameness and uniformity of the Nigerian area before the advent of the British. The concentration of unique African culture of dance, song, cuisine, couture and civilizations in the area at the central Atlantic and at the trigger of the African continent imposes some kind of mission on this area in the leadership of the African people. If all this is true, why then do we have the problems of forging a nation out of the multitude of tongues it has pleased the Almighty to endow us with?

    What we need to do is re-engineering of the country to make it workable. The centre is too strong. We must devolve power to the regions whatever the number of them we collectively agree to have. We must free the resources of this country from over-administration and channel them to physical development and industrialization so as to create jobs for our people.  We must embrace the principle and practice of fiscal and cooperative federalism. If people have jobs and they can fully realize their potentialities, it will not matter to them who is president or prime minister. In any case, the arena of politics should be shifted to the regions while the centre will simply manage affairs collectively assigned to it. We spend too much time on politics and little time for development. It is not so in serious countries like Japan, Germany and Canada to mention a few.

    Whatever we finally agree to do in this country, we must realize that the forces and facts of history and geography have made it impossible for us to separate. We cannot change our neighbours so it is futile to be talking about separation. If we are not happy about our current political structure, we must agree to reconfigure it and this must not be done by threats and blackmail. We are and remain Nigerians.

  • NASS should put on its thinking cap

    I have been amazed at the pedestrian level of legislation in the National Assembly especially when reacting to executive bills sent to it, the most recent of which is the current appropriation bill. It seems the National Assembly is bogged down by considerations that are far removed from rationality and national interest. Some weeks ago, the National Assembly was noisily condemning the Ministry of Petroleum Resources’ plan to bring in private investors to run the moribund petroleum refineries in Port Harcourt. This was perhaps because Oando, a Nigerian company in association with an Italian company was involved. The involvement of these two companies would have led to their investing billions of dollars to bring the useless refineries to life and optimum production something that has not happened since the 1970s.  These Port Harcourt refineries and the ones in Warri and Kaduna have been attracting billions of naira allocations for so-called annual overhaul maintenance without any result leading Nigeria to importing virtually all petrol and diesel we use for running our vehicles and mechanical plants. These refineries have thus become a conduit pipe for corruption and the ruin of the Nigerian economy. The foreign exchange earned from export of hydrocarbons and agricultural produce that would have been used for industrialization of the country is uselessly expended on importing what we should ordinarily produce. This corruption during the last regime led to trillions of naira being paid to so-called importers of petroleum products on the politically induced liberalization of importation of petroleum products. Things were so bad that any politically connected person simply had to get a company registered and whether or not the company imported any petrol, its accounts got credited with billions of naira. The cases of this unbridled financial rape and looting have been in the courts for the past two years and it is almost axiomatic that they will die there as many of the corruption cases have experienced.

    I remember with sadness Abacha awarding a one hundred million dollars contract to Total to rehabilitate the Kaduna refinery and I asked myself – how much does it cost to build a new one? At that time Singapore was building a new refinery for the same amount our country was using to do regular maintenance! The point I am making is that maintenance of these refineries have become cash cows for those in power. Now if these refineries can be sold, why would anybody be against it? Before Obasanjo left power in 2007, he invited Dangote to buy the Port Harcourt refineries and he had plans to sell the ones in Kaduna and Warri. But perhaps out of perfidy or inexperience, Yar’Adua cancelled the sale of the refineries. This apparently led Dangote to commence building of his massive refinery in Lagos. This is a refinery all Nigerians are waiting for with bated breath to save us from export of our foreign reserves through petroleum importation. Imagine if our overpaid legislators understood what is in our national interest, they should have hailed the plan to privatize all the money-guzzling refineries. In other countries facing this kind of humiliation of importing what they produce, these refineries would have been sold for one naira each in case there is a law against giving away public property.

    The second example of lack of proper understanding is the debate on the budget. First of all, the National Assembly lacks the expertise to draw up a budget or tamper seriously with a budget that took experts in the civil service and consultants months to prepare. It is not the duty and role of the legislature to begin to inject into the budget what in the considered opinion of the experts does not belong there. This budget had been subjected to budget hearing before the final budget was drawn up. In other words, no one is saying the National Assembly appropriation committee should have no input, what we are saying is that it should not be  altered beyond recognition

    Babatunde Raji Fashola, the minister in charge of works, power and housing has been unjustifiably attacked for drawing the attention of the public to the National Assembly’s radically slashing the allocation for the Lagos-Ibadan express way and the Second Niger bridge from Asaba to Onitsha to the extent that work may have to stop particularly on the expressway because what is in the budget is not enough to pay for work already done. Rather than show understanding of the problem, the minister is being accused on petty grounds of ethnic considerations. He was flippantly told he is no longer a governor of Lagos State but a federal minister.  This is an insult. He does not need to be told that. It is like giving a dog a bad name to hang it .I do not know anybody in that less-than-august body whose nationalist credential is better than that of Fashola.

    First of all the Lagos -Ibadan road is a national road connecting the rest of the country to the major ports of Apapa and Tincan Island which handle more than 90 percent of the carrying trade of the country. The road is not a Yoruba or south-western road. The National Assembly says the road is scheduled for private/public partnership. Was the failure of this not responsible for government take-over of the project after almost seven years of dilly-dallying on the project?  Why must the most important road in the country be used as an experiment? Has it occurred to our legislators that this reasoning is responsible for the collapse of Apapa network of roads since repairing it must be subject to federal character?

    Has it occurred to our distinguished senators that 60 percent of the national economy is tied to smooth running of this North -South road? Lagos is the cash cow of this country in terms of export and import, custom revenue, excise levies and Valued Added Tax. Our legislators need to take crash course in Economics 100 to appreciate the importance of Lagos to the national economy. Lagos is key to the overall development and successful diversification of the economy. Secondly, with all the agitation in the South-east, one would have thought this is the wrong time to cut the budget of the Second Niger Bridge. This may fuel further agitation about marginalization of the south-east.

    I am for equitable national development, but it is not every budgetary debate that should be based on federal character. How does the development, for example, of Murtala Muhammad International Airport in Lagos to make Nigeria the hub for West African aviation be reduced to if you build an airport in Lagos you must build one in Ado-Ekiti or Yola or if you begin re- afforestation to prevent desert encroachment in Katsina and Kano you must do the same thing in Edo and Abia. We need to get serious. This petty, penny-pinching and puerile thinking on the part of our fortunate legislators who do not take their job seriously should be condemned. They should stop heaping insults on a man like Fashola who is adjudged as a man capable of running this country with distinction if he was given the opportunity.

  • Mabel Osuntokun (1932- 2017) – A virtuous woman

    The former Mabel Osanyin who married Joseph Oduola Osuntokun was the first child of the man who became the first bishop of Ekiti when the present four dioceses in Ekiti State were just one. This wonderful lady is being laid to rest tomorrow, Friday June 23 in Ibadan. She grew up in Kano where for some time, her father had served as a missionary in the Anglican Communion.  She grew up in Kano when the grandfather of the present emir was Ciroman Kano Sanusi before he became Sarkin Kano. Because of her sojourn in Kano, she spoke some Hausa and as a girl growing up in the restrictive cultural environment of Kano, she was rather shy and for a while withdrawn. Her father came from Ijebu-Jesha a town not too far from Okemesi where her future husband came from.  In other words both Mabel and her future suitor belonged to the Ijesha sub ethnic group of the Yoruba The Osanyin brothers apparently liked the northern part of the country where about three of their family found a place for their material sustenance. Her mother was an attractive lady who because of her initials L. B Osanyin was popularly known as “London Beauty”.  She was not an Ijesha like her husband. She complimented and added value to the work and life of her husband and she helped him build a solid middle class home which was rare in Nigeria of their time. She had a complex web of provenance stretching from Ado -Ekiti, Awo, and Ijero.

    Mabel Osanyin therefore belonged to the privileged class of children of the clergy especially at a time when the Anglican Communion (CMS) was the established church in Nigeria. She trained as a teacher. It was as a teacher that the man who later became her husband and who was looking for  a virtuous unspoiled and God-fearing and husband compliant lady found her and proposed marriage to her . She was 20 years old and perhaps too young and inexperienced for her suitor, a world wise, widely travelled man, a graduate, the second graduate in the whole of what is now Ekiti State, and a budding politician who was a member of the western house of Assembly. Oduola Osuntokun was almost a decade older than the young lady he wanted to marry. He was an irresistible handsome man with huge prospects for the future. He was a great catch and Mabel fell in love with him.

    In spite of ups and downs of life she stood by him in good times and in bad times. Their marriage was a wonderful union blessed with seven great children who have excelled in their various professions. Mabel Osuntokun that later became “Mama Tinu “ as she would be known by all and sundry was so beloved by all members of the Osuntokun family that whenever there was any argument between husband and wife the family always sided with the wife.  In this case blood was not thicker than water !When our father died and the burden of headship of the family fell on her husband rather than grumble she rose up to the occasion and supported her husband  in providing for the larger Osuntokun family.

    The inevitable storms in the life of a politician did not overwhelm her and she always took her problems to God. She who was used to affluence as the wife of a minister adjusted quickly when her husband had to go back to the humble life of a secondary school principal and teacher. She always made the home environment pleasant and soothing to her husband who sometimes found the transition so uncomfortable and dispiriting that he sometimes felt like a well beaten boxer. The larger Osuntokun family provided a psychological refuge at the time of difficulty and despair. Mabel in those years demonstrated financial and business acumen to provide for her growing family and one after the other her children became adults and were able to fend for themselves. She continued to provide a rallying point for members of the Osuntokun family outside her own immediate family. She was known by the growing little Osuntokuns as “Big Mummy” not because of her size, she was actually petite, but on account of being the wife of chief Oduola Osuntokun the scion and head of the family. Other women who came later into the large Osuntokun family looked up to her as the trailblazer. She fulfilled the role and loved the younger wives in the family who reciprocated by deferring to her in family affairs. Her husband in his later years was grateful to her for her unflinching support and unstinted love.

    Mrs Mabel Osuntokun, the child of an Anglican Bishop became a fervent supporter of the Pentecostal mode of worship to the extent that she turned her home into a chapel while her new denomination was building its church. She did not see any contradiction in this and her argument was that she would worship in any church where the name of Jesus Christ was the centre of worship. All her life she was used to being in the middle of large families whether in the vicarage where her parents lived and were supported by children of relatives and church members who were sent there for grooming or in her own family. When her children grew up and left home, she would go to the backwoods of Oyo State to bring poor children to live with her, send them to school and colleges and when they leave others will be brought to replace them in an unbroken chain of Christian charity. Whatever she had, she shared with others. She seemed to have found joy and satisfaction in not living alone but in harbouring total strangers and in stretching her hands of fellowship to the less privileged people who cannot reciprocate her acts of generosity.

    She lived for 85 years in good health until recently when her health deteriorated. She had the support of her children and members of the wider Osuntokun family and the Osanyin siblings towards the end of her life. She must have had satisfaction in knowing she was much loved and cherished. Life is fleeting and what will endure is not how long we live but how well.  Memories are for ever she will continue to be remembered with fondness and for good. In any case she lived long

    We have lost a wonderful, loving and caring person. She took care of everybody who needed care, food, shelter and love. She remained a beautiful lady till the end wishing the best for everyone. What we have lost is a gain by heaven. I have no doubt that her place in heaven is secure. I personally have lost not just a sister-in-law, but the lady who was responsible for my grooming and a lady who brought me up from a simple lad to a gentleman. Rest in perfect peace.