The Nation Newspaper

Category: Jide Osuntokun

Mounting problems in Nigeria

When the Muhammadu Buhari government came to power, we were very hopeful that many our problems will receive disciplined attention. The problems were many. But the most serious was the insurgency in the North-east part caused by Boko Haram which the last government was not able to tackle because of rampant corruption which unfortunately had spread to the commanding heights of the armed and security services as revealed by recent revelations during the trials going on in Nigeria at the moment.

The economy was also on its knees caused by the collapse of the hydrocarbon market globally and Nigeria’s mono-cultural economy which since the phenomenal rise in oil prices in the 1970S had been hopelessly dependent on rent collection and sharing of oil money produced by multinational corporations with little or no indigenous sharing in the technology of production and the knowledge of its marketing. This problem was further compounded by low intensity insurgency or rebellion in the oil producing Niger Delta which apparently felt a sense of loss when the president, a native son, lost the 2015 election. This then led to a reduction in production below what OPEC allowed us to produce. With the collapse of the oil market and exponential increase in defence spending as a result of Boko Haram insurgency, Nigeria was faced with double whammy of a problem of financial impecuniosity. This affected everything that needed funding like roads and railway infrastructure, inadequate power generation and distribution, transportation and aviation, education and health and day to day running of government and payment of salaries and pensions.

Ordinary people did not know the enormity of the problems and even the political elite of the country felt coming to power by the APC was not more than a revolving door of politicians who were basically similar in the way they viewed politics from the perspective of personal aggrandizement. Many must have been shocked when they found out that it could not be politics as usual. The national currency plunged to the lowest level against major currencies; inflation went to high heavens because even the little manufacturing that was going on was hopelessly dependent on importation of foreign raw materials without any effort at backward integration. Our economy was based on mere buying and selling of cheap imports from China, India, Indonesia and Vietnam and luxury goods from Europe and the USA. To cut a long story short, Buhari came at the worst of times! He even confessed that he felt overwhelmed by the many problems that plagued the country.

His initial approach was to ignore the professional politicians of even his own party and to rely for months on the civil servants whom he felt were apolitical. He has also been accused of nepotism in his choice of close advisers. He faced squarely the issue of driving away Boko Haram from the territories they occupied in Borno, Yobe, Bauchi, Gombe and Adamawa. He has largely succeeded in doing this by changing the leadership of the armed forces as well as the field commanders. He was also able to stamp his will on operations and this attracted international sympathy and support which were not forth coming during the Jonathan administration. Our immediate neighbours also reacted positively to Buhari because they knew his tough reputation. Of course Boko Haram may have been defeated and degraded but they are not finished yet. Nigeria for a long time to come will still be afflicted by the legacies of this incendiary movement.

The problem of the economy will not be solved quickly and easily. Even if the attempt at diversification succeeds, the gestation of the seed of the process will take a long time before its manifestation. The country will need a strong, determined and honest leadership to drive home reforms .The approach will not just be fiscal and economic alone; it will have to be through political economic route. This is because there is a structural dimension to the problem. A situation of over administration and little production is not helping. But it will take political and constitutional will to tackle this problem. This is where there is a serious problem.

The president’s health may have deteriorated over this welter of problems. This country has too much problem to be on political auto-pilot. When the cat in the house is indisposed rats will be free to run around says an African proverb. Since Buhari came to power, the South-east which ran the country with Jonathan suddenly exploded under the leadership of angry young men one of who is Nnamdi Kanu who is suddenly being lionized and elevated to status of a hero even by established politicians. Here is a young man ranting about Hausa, Fulani, Yoruba and particularly Obafemi Awolowo who in death cannot reply but Kanu keeps saying Igbo cannot forgive his family. How many fronts does this man want to fight and how many enemies does he want to make for the Igbo? One thing I resent is individuals claiming to speak on behalf of millions of their ethnic cohorts. It is a settled fact of our history that the years 1966 to 1970 or even the years 1961 to 1966 when the government of Western Nigeria became a football between the North and the East without anybody thinking of possible consequences were not our golden years. Yes millions of people died during the crisis. Many innocent Igbo people were killed in the northern pogrom and many innocent souls died in the civil war. But families of those killed in the first coup d’état , the Akintolas, Okotie-Ebohs , Abubakar Tafawa Balewas, Ahmadu Bellos , Ademuleguns , Shodehinde, Abogo Largemas, Kur Muhammad, Unuigbe, Adegokes and the Zakari Maimalaris also have reasons to be hurt. The point I am trying to make is that we need to bury the hatchet because there is enough blame to go round. We should not allow the burden of our history to weigh us down to a point of immobilism. This does not mean we should forget the past. Certainly we cannot do that. We must allow the history of the past to inform the present and to determine our trajectory for the future. This is why we must consciously design a political structure that must not marginalize any section or ethnic group in the country.

Perhaps the reason why these fissiparous tendencies in the country have suddenly manifested themselves is because of the apparent loss of influence by the Igbos in the current dispensation. The cause of this is political having voted against the ruling party, they should not have expected to be at the table where political dividends are being shared by those with political investments. But this is where care should have been taken for a more inclusive government. The constitution has actually taken care of this because every state has at least a minister in the cabinet.

What this country needs is development. I couldn’t be bothered if there are Yorubas in the government as long as I have good roads, security, electricity, jobs for the youth, good educational and medical institutions for all of us. It is our under development that is exacerbating our ethnic awareness and hostility to one another. In my life I have seen three French speaking Canadian Prime Ministers of Canada yet they number just about 28 percent of the Canadian federation. We play politics of poverty in this country. This is why as soon as we get political power we want to corner all the resources not for our ethnic groups but for ourselves. I hope one day our people will rise against those who use the strategy of championing ethnic interests for personal advantage and financial benefits.

Finally it is clear that the courts have stymied the campaign against corruption. Should the government not try and bring a bill to parliament to introduce trial by jury of equals as they do in the USA even in murder cases? It will be interesting to see how those who are robbing the country blind will fare in a system where all corruption cases are tried by jury. We have serious problems but these problems are systemic; we can tackle them if we put in place structures that would go to the roots of the problems rather than the current emotional outbursts and hate campaigns and deliberate falsification and manipulation of our recent past. We must be careful not to allow ourselves to be led by the nose to an unfortunate crisis and avoidable conflict.

June 15, 2017
Foreign policy in the service of domestic agenda

Diplomacy as an art of inter-state relations started in medieval Europe when younger members of the royalty who did not have an appetite for soldiering found a calling in diplomacy by representing the various crowned heads of European countries in each other’s courts. Since then, recruitment into the diplomatic corps has gone beyond royalty but the tradition of its roots still prevail in the ceremonies surrounding diplomatic posting, reception, departure and even the way diplomatic expressions and communication are couched. This is why up till today, ambassadors and high commissioners are addressed as excellencies as if they were heads of government.

Technically speaking, heads of diplomatic missions represent not their countries but their heads of state. In other words foreign policy is the preserve of the heads of state. Foreign ministers, ambassadors and others serve as aids to the heads of state in the formulation and execution of a country’s foreign policy. Because of this personal nature of a country’s foreign policy, the head of state can manipulate a country’s foreign policy to suit particular interests sometimes not absolutely related to his country’s interest. This scenario is however rare. When there are problems at home, a country’s President or Prime Minister can divert domestic attention abroad and when such policies abroad are successful, it would bring glory to the country and pressure on government would be reduced.

During the restoration of the Bourbon dynasty in France after the regicide of the French Revolution and the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte, the shaky Bourbon regime employed the search for glory abroad to divert French attention from the failure and inadequacy of the regime at home by embarking on an African empire in Algeria. This policy associated with the France’s foreign minister, Prince Auguste Jules de Polignac only succeeded to a point before the reality of the failure of domestic policy led to the undoing of the regime and its eventual removal thus ending a regime that had lasted for hundreds of years. This failure of the French experiment has however not decoupled foreign policy from its use to serve domestic politics. This tendency became apparent during the period of Britain’s paramountcy in the world during the 19th century. The use of foreign policy especially what has gone down into history as gun boat diplomacy was particularly effective when the British shelled some Greek ports over a minor incident but blew up the incident to celebrate British power. The mid nineteenth century which was the age of European jingoism and imperialism was captured by the British Prime Minister Sir John Palmerston’s statement following the abuse of one Don Pacifico, a Portuguese of British nationality in Greece in 1850. He said “just like the Romans of old could say civis Romanus sum and expect the might of the Roman army to protect him, so should a Briton be able to say civis Britanicus sum and expect the long arm of the British navy to protect him”. Another example from England was when the Jewish prime minister of Great Britain Benjamin Disraeli declared queen Victoria Empress of India in 1877 in a move to pander to the vanity of the British people so that they could forget or ignore growing social problems and inequality in the country . All these preambles are done to give the idea that using foreign policy to serve domestic ends has a long history behind it .

In recent times of the American century, every new American president has always found foreign intervention or foray into other peoples’ countries to be useful in announcing that a new sheriff is in town. From Truman to Trump, one can mention a few incidents of American demonstration of power and will in foreign policy. From the Korean War of 1953 when Harry Truman intervened to stop the communist take-over of the Korean Peninsula, to Dwight David Eisenhower’s interventions in Iran, Guatemala and other South American countries under the so-called policy of containment of communism. Kennedy’s policy of alliance for progress led to meddling in many South American countries with eventual unsuccessful Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and the mission creep in Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson’s full scale war in Vietnam and Richard Nixon’s extension of the Vietnam war to Laos and Cambodia. Even the apparently pacific natured Jimmy Carter had his debacle in Iran while Ronald Reagan had his hands full by bombing Libya, driving out of power of Noriega in Panama, invasion of the Caribbean island of Grenada. Bush senior drove out the Iraqis out of Kuwait while Clinton went after Al Qaeda by bombing Sudan and getting rid of the Serbian dictator Miloshevic while the younger Bush fought full scale wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and changing regimes at will.

Obama while not starting his own wars expanded the Bush wars before winding them down in Iraq and Afghanistan while the new Donald Trump regime felt compelled to flex his muscles by unleashing cruise missiles on Syria to demonstrate what he calls a strategy of peace through strength. The Trump administration facing all kinds of probes at home in connection with his presidential campaign’s alleged collusion with Russia may constantly have to call on foreign policy to salvage his regime at home. Russia since the disintegration of the Soviet Union has felt compelled to defend what their leaders call “Russia abroad” meaning defending the millions of Russians in the remaining 14 republics into which the Soviet Union broke into. Its dismembering of Georgia and annexation of Crimea from Ukraine were actions taken to assuage Russian nationalist feelings following the loss of its empire and to cover increasing economic problems at home. His Syrian involvement is to demonstrate nationalistic feeling of Russia still remaining a global player in world politics. The point being made here is that when a country is faced with challenges at home and decides to embark on some foreign activities abroad, its people would normally rally round the leader. The caveat is that such an adventure must be brief and successful. If it is too long, people will become disaffected and wearied. This practice of foreign relations being called to assist a government at home is not limited to big powers alone; even countries in the global power peripheries also indulge in it. The examples of Turkey fighting the Greeks over Cyprus or India fighting Pakistan over Kashmir or Ethiopia intervening in Somalia come to mind. In these days when soccer in particular has replaced military competition, people become patriotic supporters of their teams and indeed El Salvador fought a brief war over soccer with neighbouring Honduras!

Somebody recently asked me why Nigeria has suddenly become mute in international affairs. We have our problem of confronting our own local variant of international terrorism in Boko Haram. Nigeria used to help stabilize other African countries from Tanzania in the 1960s to assisting the liberation of Southern Africa and helping in extirpating the racist and odious regime of apartheid in South Africa in the 1980s and 1990s. Our country was also the arrow head of ECOMOG that by and large, helped to pacify the terribly distressed countries of Liberia, Sierra Leone and recently Guinea-Bissau and even Ivory Coast. Nigeria sent troops to an international coalition to confront Al Qaeda in the Saharan nation of Mali. Recently, Nigeria provided leadership in forcing out the sit-tight Alhaji Yahyah Yahmeh from his stranglehold on The Gambia. We have not tried to use these events to unify our people at home and to score political goals. Perhaps the largely successful Nigeria-led decolonization of Southern Africa leaves not much dramatic victories to be won. Our challenge is now economic development which rather than being dramatic can only be incremental and sometimes imperceptible changes. Furthermore, the medical challenge facing our president presents a formidable challenge to activism abroad. This is because the presence of the president in inter-state relations can be most important and decisive. In spite of this challenge, the president has visited most countries in West Africa and also the critical countries of Niger, the Cameroon and Chad with which Nigeria is involved in the fight against Boko Haram. It seems to me that Nigeria needs to emphasize more the international dimension of the Boko Haram conflict and therefore seek more international support and make more noise about fighting on behalf of the international community because if Boko Haram is successful, it will have widespread ramifications in west and central Africa.

June 8, 2017
Logic of roads construction and maintenance

The Federal Roads maintenance Agency (FERMA) placed advertisements in The Nation of Tuesday May 9 apparently to demonstrate to those of us who are asking if the agency has folded up or has been wound up by the federal government that created it that it is alive. This agency seems to exist in the minds of those who created it and in the minds of the hordes of civil servants earning their living without doing anything to justify the salaries being paid to them. Even the advertisement referred to is full of lies.

The agency claims to be rehabilitating Ife-Ibadan “Express way”. I travel on this road every week and I can confirm no work has been done on this road. In fact, the approach to Osun River Bridge near Asejire is so bad that a few vehicles have plunged into the river because of the bad approach to the bridge. The road from Ikire to Ilesha is hardly motorable. I also noticed that what the agency calls South-west zone apparently does not include Ondo and Ekiti states whose federal roads have been abandoned and the people there left to their own fate and yet those neglected two states produce the bulk of the cocoa Nigeria still exports and from which some billions of dollars are earned annually.

I recently travelled from Lagos to Sagamu following the blockade of the Lagos-Ibadan express way as a result of religious activities on the express way. I was sad about what I saw on that road. It is perhaps correct to call the “road “a bush path. Driving on the road was like driving on the moon. Yet this was the first road the British constructed in Nigeria. I saw thousands of trailers and other kinds of vehicular contraptions whose drivers took their lives in their hands to drive through the road. It took me five hours to ply a road of perhaps 60 kilometres. I kept asking myself – where is the federal government? Where are Lagos and Ogun state governments? This Ikorodu-Sagamu road is so strategic to the economy of not only the South-west but the whole country. It is not just the economy that this road is vital to; it is also strategic in defence consideration. What if Lagos suffered a sea invasion and it was necessary to move troops from the hinterland to the coast in case the enemy blocks the express way?

The major power generating station of Egbin is along this route. Sagamu is a major cement producing hub, necessitating movement of huge articulated trucks to and from Lagos for construction. Ikorodu itself is a putative port waiting for development. There is an army barracks on the road as well and Ikorodu area has witnessed incessant attacks and challenge by terrorists in recent times. If one may say the area is part of the Niger Delta which is increasingly becoming the soft under belly of Nigeria. If all these are not enough to attract government attention, there are innumerable small factories of iron and steel makers converting used and discarded vehicles into useable iron implements. There are also secondary and tertiary institutions in the axis.

Planning roads construction and maintenance should not be done haphazardly or merely on federal character basis but on its utility value to the economy and security of the nation. I know our resources are limited but this is why there must be some kind of rationalization in the use of these resources. I lived in Germany for about five years and as many people know, Germany has the best network of roads in the world. The famous Autobahn (express roads) run from north to south and from east to west. They were largely constructed like their old railways to move troops from east to west and vice versa to confront their enemies on two fronts. Adolph Hitler may conveniently be forgotten by the Germans and the whole world, but he left a legacy of these roads and the small affordable people’s cars (Volkswagen) to ply them. Walter Ulbricbht, the communist leader of East Germany (DDR) came up with the plastic car the “Trabant “in a miserable mimicry of the NAZI dictator. No one can deny that the efficient transportation network of Germany is a major factor in the economic miracle Germany witnessed since the end of the Second World War.

The point I am trying to make is that roads construction reflect a strategist worldview and goals he hopes to achieve and not just constructing roads as social welfare scheme.

We need to take a holistic view of our road network and seriously plan what we hope to achieve. I will give a few examples .There is a need to have four arterial roads running from north to south in this country. One road should run from Sokoto through Kotangora to Kaiama, Iseyin, and Abeokuta to the port of Badagry. Another road should run from Kano to Kaduna, Abuja, Lokoja, Okene to Benin. Another should run from Abuja to Minna, Mokwa, Ilorin, Ibadan, Lagos while the fourth should run from Maiduguri to Yola, Jalingo, Makurdi, Ogoja to Calabar.

Then there is a need for an East-West road from Lagos, Sagamu, Ijebu-ode, Benin, Asaba, Onitsha, Enugu, Aba, Port Harcourt. There is also a need for a coastal road from Lagos through Igbokoda, Warri, Yenagoa, Port Harcourt, terminating in Calabar. This may appear a gigantic order but it is always better to plan big. In China, the country initially relied on harnessing its huge human resources rather than its technological know-how to build roads, dams and houses. I do not see why with a serious government, Nigeria cannot do the same.

We are told that we have a population of 180 million people. Of course, I remain sceptical about this apparently exaggeratedly fabricated figure! To challenge the demographic cheaters, those who inflate population of their states should be asked to mobilize such population figures for development. The factor of economic necessity rather than the nebulous federal character determining what roads to construct and maintaining should be paramount. If the federal government were to stick to this kind of strategic conception and planning, then roads construction and maintenance will begin to make sense.

Other feeder roads will have to be devolved into the zonal authorities in a hopefully restructured Nigeria with devolved resources and responsibilities. But in the meantime, something has to be done to fix roads that are vital to economic recovery. I do not see what will be wrong if Lagos and Ogun states governments were to collaborate in fixing this Sagamu – Ikorodu road and then jointly billing the federal government or getting private entrepreneurs in to reconstruct the road and toll it. This terrible state of most roads in Nigeria would have to be addressed as a matter of urgency because as I write, people are dying on these dilapidated roads.

This road master plan should go hand in hand with a new railway age in Nigeria in which road transportation should not be the major way of moving people and goods around the country. There is no major developing country that depends on one mode of transportation. If we are aspiring to be one of the 20 biggest economies in the world, we cannot be enduring this primitive and almost primordial transportation system that even our grandparents would recognize especially the fact that our roads follow the same footpaths established by our illiterate ancestors.

June 1, 2017
X-ray of two years of Buhari administration

I deliberately chose to use the imagery of an X-ray, a medical device used to ascertain the state of ones lungs and heart to discuss two years of the Buhari administration. An X-ray can show how healthy a person is and what has to be done to regain one’s health or perhaps show that one’s health is so bad that a surgical operation would need to be done to save the patient. In this case the patient is both Nigeria and to a lesser extent the APC as a party in government.

Some two years ago many Nigerians, including my humble self, felt that our country was so badly governed that it had gone to the dogs so to say and we wanted a change. We were so desperate for a change that any alternative would have been preferred. Then came the bringing together of some disparate political groupings of the CPC, the ACN and a breakaway faction of the PDP. After serious negotiations it was agreed that General Muhammadu Buhari who had failed three times to be elected president should carry the flag of the APC against the incumbent President Goodluck Jonathan of the PDP.

Buhari brought to the ticket a messianic figure especially among the poor particularly in the north the so-called talakawa and the intellectual elite in the south which felt Nigeria was too big and important to be led by a bumbling leader like Jonathan whose only qualification for the post was that he represented an ethnic minority as well as the oil-producing region of the country. The argument was that even if he represented those two important elements, he had demonstrated no capacity to benefit the region. All that he was doing was to open up the treasury to a minuscule of people from the oil producing region as well as other Nigerians grovelling before him to share the patrimony and treasure of the country. His regime not only shared the proceeds of the oil of the country, he also in the words of President Olusegun Obasanjo turned the tragedy of Boko Haram overrunning the north-east of the country into an ATM for those around him. Military procurement was turned into a free for all while the children of poor people who constitute the bulk of the army rank and file were sent poorly kitted sometimes without shoes and with weapons that would not fire to confront better armed Boko Haram insurgents. While this was going on he and his minister of Abuja shared between them hundreds of hectares of land for “agricultural purposes” in Abuja. One hopes that whatever can be forfeited to the people and government of Nigeria will be swiftly recovered from all those who have appropriated public property for personal benefit .Two years is long enough for us to begin to see the result of “change”. HopE deferred can lead to frustrations.

Buhari promised to drive away Boko Haram from the north-eastern part of the country. I believe he has succeeded in this endeavour but more needs to be done. Boko Haram is still striking at it wishes in the North-east and the Chibok girls and other captured Nigerians are still in Boko Haram prison in the forest. Some people including government officials are allegedly feeding and feasting on the tragedy of the displaced and apparently abused victims of this terrible problem. About half a million children are said to be out of school and roaming around in the North-east. Unfortunately this will be the army of a future insurgency unless something is done. There is a need for coordination of federal, state and NGO’s effort in tackling the problem of the IDPS. It is haram for any individual or group to feed fat on the tragedies of others. There is a need for the army to make the final push aided by the police and all other security agencies to stamp out insecurity. Including cattle rustling and herdsmen menace all over the country. This is an area where this government has failed.

The economy in the last two years has been in recession caused by external shocks and militancy in the Niger Delta as well as our country’s hopeless dependency on hydrocarbon exports. It is hoped that the effort at diversification of the economy will work and that we will never again be held hostage by the international oil cartels and the militants in the Niger Delta. Our hope will be further boosted when the Dangote petrochemical industry in Lagos comes on stream late 2018 which will lead to national self-sufficiency in gasoline and other petroleum products currently being imported with foreign exchange which could have enhanced the value of our currency as well as used for highly needed imports that could boost our local productivity. This government must block forever all avenues for looting. This may require separate revenue courts to try by jury of ordinary people economic crimes. By doing so, the hordes of lawyers benefiting from the economic sabotage and misfortune of the country will be put in their places. This government must publish names and amount of money recovered from looters and money so recovered must not be lumped with general revenue but appropriated for special projects such as strategic roads and railways.

The infrastructure of this country still needs much to be desired. Roads are bad. Telecommunications are poor and inefficient and electricity is virtually non-existent in major urban area as well as in the rural areas of the country. We need 100,000 megawatts not the 3000 megawatts that have been available for the past decade without noticeable increase in spite of billions of dollars spent on the sector. There can be no industrialization without electricity. There is need to declare emergency in this sector and open it to the rest of the world with whatever incentive that is needed.

Finally we have to X-ray the politics of this regime. I am sorry to say that it took the regime two years before waking up to the demands of those who brought it into power for board and other appointments. When it was done, the appointments went to the wrong people especially to remnants of the old discredited regime. This regime seems averse to benefiting from the intellectual elite particularly in the south. The regime can learn one or two things from Bola Ahmed Tinubu whose regime and subsequent ones in Lagos State have been rewarded by their co-option of this critical group into governance. Most of the beneficiaries of this regime were in the previous regime or stood askance when the campaign was on to dislodge the previous corrupt regime. It is also clear that President Buhari’s political horizon is not as wide as it should be. He has not made use of the best people in the country who supported the movement to remove the last regime. He should have used political appointments to build a unified and united APC whose supporters will be committed foot-soldiers of the party in 2019 irrespective of whoever is at the head of its presidential ticket. The president should also have used political appointments to lure into the party people who did not support him so that he can build a mass movement around the party. Disaffection with his government is palpable in the South-west where party people feel they have been dealt a bad hand. This government must hearken to the voice and desire of the people to restructure the country. If the question of restructuring of the country is an emotive issue, the issue of devolution of power and resources should not be. A situation in which civil servants ,teachers, doctors and public servants generally all over the country are being owed a year or even two years salaries has become untenable and an urgent necessity. From revelations in recent times, looting of the treasury is mostly concentrated in the federal domain where there is too much power and resources and little managerial capacity to handle so much funds. I am not saying stealing is not going on at states level but the incidence of roguery at the centre compels us to demand devolution of resources and responsibilities. All parts of the country will benefit from it and it should not be seen as a zero sum game by any part of the country. It is better to manage this kind of devolution from above than wait for it from below.

May 25, 2017
Rollback of populism in the West

Brexit and the election of Donald Trump marked the climax of populism in the western world and perhaps in the entire world. In retrospect, I think the anxiety about populism and its twin of racism occasioning xenophobia was probably unnecessary. Even in Great Britain where it began, Brexit was decided by a narrow margin. The youth representing the future of Great Britain voted massively to remain in Europe; only the men of yesterday voted to leave and it was by a squeaky narrow margin. In the USA, Hilary Clinton won by three million votes over Donald J Trump in spite of the braggadocio of the New York loudmouth about his victory in the antediluvian electoral system where the electoral college and not the majority votes of the people decide presidential elections. The young people in the USA, representing the future also voted for Hilary Clinton while the rednecks, blue-collar working class in the rust belt, the misogynistic white men and envious housewives voted against Hilary Clinton.

Even in Great Britain where the opportunistic Theresa May who voted to remain has suddenly become the champion of the little Englanders agitating to be freed of European entanglement may still come to grief in an unpredictable electoral debacle in June. This is if the dreaming Jeremy Corbin can become more realistic and come down to earth and campaign on issues of bread and butter rather than the scraping of The Trident nuclear programme guaranteeing security and deterrence to potential enemies of Great Britain.

Since the Pyrrhic victories of the right wing in Britain and the United States, the spread of the populist tendencies have been halted in their tracks. Sometimes one tends to ignore the rise of liberalism in Canada where the young Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has opened his country’s borders to and welcomed thousands of Syrian refugees that are pariahs in the United States. No one can bet on how long the presidency of Donald Trump will last before he is impeached if he continues on the treacherous slope of going against political tradition and appearing to violate the separation of powers entrenched in the American constitution. His recent firing of the Director of the FBI and hectoring and abusing judges who disagreed with him over his immigration policy may yet signal the unravelling of his presidency. The good thing is that the American Vice President appears ready and capable of stepping in to head a normal administration.

The victory of the centre party in Austria against the right wing and racist party of Jorge Haider with its belief in national socialism (NAZI) was hailed as the triumph of reason over fear. This tendency was repeated in the Netherlands where the anti-Islamic party of Geert Wilders that had the support of those around President Trump was defeated in spite of the fear that the xenophobic campaign might have resonated with the Dutch middle class and workers who are resentful of the influx of North African particularly Moroccan migrants. To confirm that this was not a political fluke, we now have the outcome of the French election.

The victory of a political neophyte Emmanuel Macron beating all comers to clinch the French presidency is the icing on the cake of those campaigning for a halt to populism and xenophobia in the West. The two established political parties the Socialist and the conservative Republican Party formerly known as the Union of Popular Movement (UMP) that had alternated in governing France since 1958 lost in the first round of the French presidential election leaving only Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron to sweat it out in the political ring. At the end and in spite of support from Trump and Putin, Marine Le Pen and her National Front lost, winning less than 34 percent of the vote to Macron’s 66 percent.

Many interpretations have been made of this victory. Some have said the electorate did not vote for Macron but against Le Pen and her anti-Islamic, anti-immigrant and xenophobic policies. She of course said she represents the politics of patriotism while Emmanuel Macron represents the politics of globalization and integration in Europe. It is true that Macron makes no bone about his belief in Europe and globalization anchored on a revitalized French economy, reform of France’s rigid labour market and reform of Europe away from Angela Merkel’s tight fiscal austerity policies to a policy of investment and growth and expansionary economic policies somehow tolerant of inflation provided people particularly the youth are employed. Emmanuel Macron ‘s movement “En march” has now been changed to France en March or Republic en March to indicate a serious national movement ready to change France for good so that the alternative will not be the party of either the communist or extreme left or the party of Marine Le Pen. Emmanuel Macron has still the hurdle of the legislative election in June to climb. As I write, he does not yet have a single MP in the legislative chamber. His party is fielding about 560 candidates for the legislative elections in June and to be able to carry out his reformist programme, his party will have to win a majority in the National Assembly. This is going to be a tall order for a new party with scarce resources running against well entrenched political forces and parties.

If his movement, because that is what it is, does not have majority in parliament, he may have to appoint his Prime Minister from an opposing party, a political scenario the French call cohabitation. This will not be good for the young French President and it will be a bad augury for the future. If he fails, there may be no alternative for the French than to embrace Le Pen five years from now and we will all be back at square one worrying about the unravelling of the peace architecture in Europe anchored on Franco-German understanding, political and economic integration. It seems the French people are simply fed up with seeing the same faces of traditional politicians like Hollande, Sarkozy, Maurice de Villepin and others that they are ready to try the next generation which is what Macron represents.

If the French behave according to their radical and revolutionary past, they may give Macron a workable majority in the National Assembly. My worry is that Macron says he represents neither the Right nor the Left but the Centre. This kind of neither cold nor hot is not the kind of ideology that people can rally round. Already the conservative and rigid trade unions have started showing their hands of opposition to Macron’s plans of liberalizing the labour market away from the syndicalism which has not always been in the interest of the French people who are used to 35-hour weekly work and generous unemployment benefits and paid holidays.

For the time being, Europe can breathe a sigh of relief while waiting for events to unfold in June legislative elections.

Macron’s presidential victory has naturally been hailed by the EU bureaucrats in Brussels but much more important by the Germans whether of the Socialist (SPD) or the Conservative party of the CDU and its sister Bavarian counterpart the CSU. The two major parties are in a grand coalition in Berlin but Angela Merkel, the chancellor has intimated the German public that she is tired of the coalition government. Whatever happens in the next election in Germany, both political tendencies are pro-Europe. It is most likely that the SPD will win the next election and form a coalition government with the greens and the extreme left and possibly with the liberals (LPD) thus consigning Angela Merkel and her Conservative party into the political wilderness after more than 10 years as chancellor. The Germans of all stripes, except the presently irrelevant extreme right, are globalist in their orientation. The Germans like the Chinese produce goods for the whole world and have been free traders historically like the British. The SPD, if it wins the election in Germany will form a better partnership with Macron because they are in support of abandoning the tight monetarist policies of Angela Merkel for a policy of economic expansion that would lead to job creation for the youth in the European community. If it happens, this will inspire groundswell of support among the youth for the European project and discourage possible exit by the poor performing economies in the Iberian Peninsula and particularly member countries of the European Union in the Balkans and Eastern Europe.

It is economic discontent rather than any other reason that has been fuelling the so-called populism and rising xenophobia in Europe. Economic vitality in France and Germany will redound on the economy of the entire European Union and put paid to any fissiparous tendencies like the one that led to Brexit.

May 18, 2017
Judgement without justice

The Greek philosopher Plato is most famous for his book “The Republic” in which he tried to give his ideas about how an ideal state, that is, some kind of utopia should be governed. In short he advocated for a state ruled by a philosopher king supported by a class who through education would know what is right and would do it without deviation from the path of rectitude. This class would have no family of their own because it is when rulers have families that they are bogged down with family issues and are also prone to corruption associated with making provision for the family.

Plato felt families will be distractions for those trying to run an ideal state. Below the class of philosopher king would be the class of guardians who will protect the state from its enemies. The lowest class will be those of workers who will provide material sustenance for the state in exchange for excellence in rulership and protection. Property in this state will belong collectively to all thus removing cut-throat competition characteristic of ordinary state’s development along capitalist lines of the crude free enterprise characteristic of Ancient Greek states.

Plato tried to practice what he preached in Syracuse but met abysmal failure. Perhaps it was this failure that made him rethink his ideas and then wrote “The Laws” perhaps a much more practical compendium on governance. Plato had argued that a perfect state as developed in his Republic would not need laws because according to him, the presence of laws in a state is a manifestation of the failure of governance. After writing the “The Laws” he then wrote the “Statesman”. For practical purpose “The Laws” has been most useful because he developed the idea of supremacy of laws to that of persons no matter how important they may be. They should not be above the laws. This idea was further developed by Plato’s student Aristotle in his book “Politics”. Since the time of the Ancient Greece, the idea was further developed during the 18th century Age of Enlightenment when Greek philosophy was rediscovered in Europe through the agency of Arabic translation. The English common law tradition which we have embraced in Nigeria owes a debt to the enlightenment especially the French part of it especially the group who edited under Diderot the “L’encyclopedie”.

Today it is commonly accepted that laws are no respecter of persons. This is why the symbol of laws is a blindfolded maiden with a sword in hand, a familiar sight in buildings housing courts and other venues of the judiciary. Does this also mean laws are not just asses but they are also blind? No one will argue about the desirability of impartiality in judicial interpretation. But at the same time, there ought to be a correlation between offense and punishment. Punishment is for the purpose of deterrence and presumably of reformation. Judges are human beings and are thinking persons who should be able to pass judgements that make sense and should not pass judgement repugnant to fairness common sense and justice. When this happens then there is a miscarriage of justice. The law may be an ass but a judge should not be an ass.

Some three weeks back in an Oshogbo high court, four young people with ages ranging from 19 to 25 years were charged with stealing a motorcycle and wounding the owner with knife cuts. The leader of the gang was a 19-year old jobless hooligan. They obviously owned up to their crime. Reports of the case did not indicate if they had a lawyer. The upshot of the story was that the judge had no mercy on them and the four of them were sentenced to death and the judge said they should be hanged until they are dead. When I read the report, I felt somebody must protest this judgement as a miscarriage of justice. I condemn crime in its entire entirety. There can be no extenuating circumstances for robbing while inflicting bodily harm. Crime should be punished wherever it occurs. But justice should be tempered with mercy. I cannot understand why the judge should sentence four adolescents to death for stealing a motorcycle worth N40,000 in a country where billions of Naira are being unearthed, pardon the pun, with owners disclaiming ownership because the monies are proceeds of crime. What message is this judge trying to send to Nigerians? Is this judge not part of the same judiciary that is releasing thieves and delaying passing judgement on cases of wealthy Nigerians of the political class for years with one adjournment following another? Is this judge not belonging to the same family of judges freeing thieves on basis of legal technicalities thus retarding the development of this country? Is this judge not one of the judges saying the wife and children of judges can receive gifts running to millions provided there is no proof the decision of the judges in question was influenced by such gifts and largesse liberally dispensed by lawyers arguing cases before his lordship! In exasperation with this kind of behaviour, former President Obasanjo recently spoke our minds when he said corruption cases were taking too long a time for final judgement to be passed.

It can be argued that if we have good governance with little or no corruption there would be jobs for young people who are now robbing people as a way of surviving. The issue of unemployment among the youth leading to criminal tendencies would need to be addressed. We are operating a cruel, survivalist system without any social safety net while expecting acceptance of the yawning gap between the have and the have nots. Many of us are living in fear especially when we see hordes of unemployed youth aimlessly wandering around our homes.

I discussed my anxiety over this Osogbo case with a friend of mine who is a lawyer and his opinion was that the judge was simply following the laws and that if I am concerned I should plead with my legislators to review the penal code of Nigeria. He added that rather than sharing money and fighting over which committees are juicy for oversight functions, our legislators should busy themselves with revising the kind of laws our judge used to condemn the four young ones whose leader is a teenager. In civilized world of today, no one has the right to take another one’s life.

Of course, I know we live in an imperfect world, a world where Americans who in their classic Declaration of Independence in 1776 talked about man’s inalienable rights such as the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness yet regularly kill criminals with either electric chair or lethal injection. There are however exceptions in the western world where capital punishment has been largely abolished. In the Osogbo case, I am sure no governor would sign the death warrant for these young men. Their sentences should be commuted to a reasonable length of time. The purpose in this case should be reformation and not termination of life. A state should not commit murder for the purpose of defending property rights. I would of course support the laws of Moses of an eye for an eye if a criminal terminates another one’s life during the process of crime.

May 11, 2017
Past in the present and present in the future

It is for convenience that we human beings discuss our affairs in water tight compartments as if we can really separate the present from the past and the future from the present. As a human being, I am part of the past because I am a product and elongation of my parents and I see my future in my grandchildren. Just like human beings, the life of a state is a continuum in the sense that the present builds on the past and the future begins in the present. This is one of the reasons why history is an important discipline in all civilizations. When a country suffers a disconnect with its past, there is disorientation, chaos, planning without data cultural void and, reinventing the wheel , lack of confidence and focus, all of which manifest in underdevelopment. Development is not just building roads and other physical infrastructure, development is about people too. Various governments at various levels believe that tearing down edifices and building new ones is development but sadly this far from it. Conservation and change should be the philosophical principle of development. It is the lack of this fundamental underpinning of development that leads to the decay of existing facilities while we quixotically embark on building new ones. Cynics have always said that our people prefer new contracts which corruptly lead to pecuniary rewards and for self-aggrandizement than maintaining existing infrastructure.

I took some final year students of the College of Humanities of Redeemer’s University Ede to Ibadan on a lecture tour of historical landmarks in Ibadan recently and I am sorry to say that it was not a pleasant experience. Saint Anne’s School, the oldest girls’ school in Nigeria, more than a century old is just struggling. Thanks to the old students, the school maintains a facade of life but when you go in, one notices that God has departed from the house of Israel. The school that prides itself for producing first female vice chancellor, ministers including Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, innumerable professors and wives of past leaders including the wife of current Oyo governor can do with modernization of existing facilities and redevelopment of the boarding houses within a secure environment. It is boarding schools of the past that moulded the character of those great girls who went to the school. Can Oyo First Lady, being an old girl of Saint Anne’s adopt the redevelopment of this school as her pet project? The school no longer runs boarding houses because of insecurity. A country that cannot secure its female children in schools is not really a country but an agglomeration of villages and towns and a mere geographical expression lacking soul and purpose. Ibadan is not on the coast open to invasion by Egbesu boys humiliatingly terrorizing Lagos while government security forces are shamefully publishing a list of places to avoid as if government is merely in authority but not in power. If I was disappointed with Saint Anne’s, I cried when I saw Ibadan Grammar School, a school which used to be the pride of Ibadan. The place looks deserted with boarding facilities abandoned and teaching facilities unavailable. This was a school where I spent two happy years in the boarding house during my higher school years. What can I show my grandchildren in this ramshackle school? From Ibadan Grammar School, my students and I went to Government College Ibadan (GCI). Come and see how the mighty school has fallen flat on its face. I did not attend the school but went to Christ School Ado-Ekiti for which I am very proud and grateful to God because the school made me as it made others. But anybody in my generation who claims he did not want to go to Government College is lying. The reason why most people wanted to go there was because most, if not all their teachers, were graduates and most of them were from the United Kingdom. The school ran on English public school principles with emphasis on sports, academics, tradition and nurturing. Edward Abiodun Osuntokun, one of my brothers went there and we all used to admire him especially his mastery of the games of soccer and cricket as well as his embrace of English culture generally. We later found out that some of the chief examiners at the Cambridge Overseas School Certificate Examinations which we all sat for all over Nigeria were teachers in this school thus giving their students inside tract in the race of public examinations. But on reaching Government College at Apata Ganga , the school which our own Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka celebrated in his book the PENKELEMES years, I was shocked about the total decay and despair facing us. The children were filthily attired and scruffy. One of my students described them as riffraff. When I told my students those who had attended the school in the past such as Wole Soyinka, Oba Akenzua and Oba Erediuwa of Benin among notable Nigerians such as Dr Omololu Olunloyo, Professor Ladipo Akinkugbe, late Professor Olumuyiwa Awe among many others, my students could not believe it. Government College students on a Monday morning were roaming around scantily dressed with their dirty shirts hanging limp on their dirty bodies and dusty feet that left one without doubt that the kids may not have had their baths for weeks. Obviously the school does not run boarding facilities any more for fear of the children being kidnapped. We were so disappointed that we did not wait to find out what was the reason for the total collapse of a once famous school. The collapse began with the Unity Party of Nigeria ‘s free education at all levels when all schools were suddenly turned into day school thus sacrificing quality in order to carry out party ideology. From that time onwards, private schools replaced and filled the demand for good schools by parents who can afford them while the good old schools were taken over by the poor and the governments abandoned them and left them to their own fate. Thus the educational history and tradition of years were lost.

It was not only in Yorubaland that witnessed this decline and disconnect with the glorious years of secondary education. I shudder to see colleges like Barewa, Government College Ughelli and Government College, Umuaihia. I remember Professor Jibril Aminu, a visionary, if there was one, asking as federal minister of education to be allowed to redevelop these historic colleges and preserve them for the future but advocates of state rights stood against him and the result is what we have today. What makes English public schools such as Harrow, Eton, and Winchester famous is the age and tradition behind them. Oxford University is not known for its modern buildings but for its antique bungalow hostels and the scholarship behind them. This is the point we are missing in Nigeria by allowing our famous schools to wither away.

Instead of Oyo State building another so-called technical university, why can’t it simply take over Ladoke Akintola University and fund it properly while Osun State devotes its attention to its own underfunded university. Money will thus be freed to redevelop and rehabilitate the run down public schools for the sake of continuity and change. If Oyo state needs a paradigm in secondary educational facility as far as physical buildings are concerned, the governor should visit Osun State and behold the legacy schools Aregbesola is leaving for posterity .

What is happening in Oyo is definitely happening at the centre where federal properties like the colonial secretariat and the abandoned federal secretariat at Ikoyi are rotting away and being turned into homes of vagrants and criminals. These properties could easily have been handed over to the University of Lagos and or Yaba Polytechnic to be used as either hostels or business school campus or given outright to Lagos State to use for whatever purpose it deems fit. Or the federal government properties in Lagos including the abandoned and rotten National Stadium standing as a symbol of waste and lack of planning and petty jealousy by those who feel Lagos does not need to benefit if other states cannot benefit? Has it occurred to such people that Lagos is critical to Nigeria’s overall economy and development? What really concerns me is that in the race of develop there should be no place in discarding the past while concentrating on the present which future governments may abandon unless we collectively begin to plan on the principle on letting the past inform the present while the present points to the direction we need to take to the future. What better way to do this than by embracing the principle of continuity and change by not demolishing physical symbols of the past but maintaining them and changing them only where necessary.

May 4, 2017
Softly, softly on Sanusi 11

The question of the role of traditional rulers in Nigeria has come up again following the government of Kano setting up a probe into the finances of the Kano Emirate Council. I have had occasion to give a lecture on the position of traditional rulers in Nigeria with special emphasis on Yorubaland. In the lecture, I suggested or rather asserted that no Nigerian government can do what the Indian government did in 1947 and survive it.

When India became independent and became a republic, it abolished the role and power of the Maharajahs but allowed them to keep their palaces and the huge financial resources at their command. Many of their descendants have remained stupendously rich and still command the adulation of many of the descendants of their previous subjects. The Indian government was able to do this because of the advanced old civilizations of India and the level of education and literacy in the country.

The case in Nigeria is different. We of course have a heritage of old civilizations but without the literacy needed for social mobilization. Our people see our traditional rulers as the authentic government they can relate to. The modern government is very distant from them and does not have the legitimacy and cultural attraction symbolized by the traditional rulers. Thus we are a republic of thousands of kings which in itself is an anomaly and a contradiction. But it works.

Traditional rulers in Hausaland, Yorubaland, Jukunland and Benin belong to a different typology separate from those of largely acephalous and segmentary polities where people are traders during the day and rulers in the evening. Rulers in the latter are modern creations and are miserable mimics of serious institutions.

The position of Sarkin Kano goes back at least to the 14th century or even earlier following the evolution of kingship institutions after the arrival of Bayijiddah in Daura in the 9th century from where the major seven states of Zazzau, Kano, Katsina, Rano, Zamfara, Gobir, and Kebbi sprang. There were dynastic changes in Hausaland in the 19th century following the Islamic revolution associated with Uthman bin Muhammad bin Uthman bin Salih also known as Uthman dan Fodiye. From around 1804, the Fulani dynasty has ruled Kano in an unbroken chain of rulers from the same family and lineage. In other words for about 213 years, the dynasty in Kano, despite up and downs has remained a permanent feature of the politics of the emirate starting from before the coming of the British and now when politicians of doubtful character and legitimacy are throwing their weight around and attempting to harass a ruler who has become the tribune of the people.

When the British came to Nigeria, they were so impressed by the level of administration in Kano particularly the Beit el-Mal (Native treasury) that they virtually left the system unchanged only removing whatever was repugnant to civilized standards and not against human conscience especially in the mode of punishment of criminals. The salary of the emir of Kano was not only higher than that of the Sultan of Sokoto but that of Governor-General Sir Fredrick Lugard because Kano was the richest emirate. Emirs were paid from the one-third of poll taxes and jangali cattle taxes collected from each emirate while the British colonial government kept two-thirds of the taxes. In other words, the emirs of Kano have always belonged to a unique class. This uniqueness attracted love and hatred from fellow rulers. It was in this circumstance that Sarkin Kano Muhammadu Sanusi 1 got into trouble with Sir Ahmadu Bello, the premier of northern Nigeria and a prince of Sokoto who chaffed under what he regarded as the arrogance of the emir of Kano. Reasons of financial impropriety were cooked up to depose a popular ruler and replaced by one of his brothers.

The present Kano government of Ganduje must not allow history to repeat itself. Kano cannot afford the pain of political disequilibrium and disturbance that will ensue if it tampered with the sanctity of the Kano throne. The position of the emir is not only political but spiritual and the current emir apart from being an economist solid in the tradition of western scholarship is at the same time an Islamic scholar. He comes from a long tradition of scholarship embedded in well-known Kano activism heavily influenced by modernist tijaniyyah Tariqa. The emir’s father, the late Ciroman Kano, Alhaji Aminu Sanusi, one time ambassador of Nigeria to China, high commissioner to Canada etc. and former permanent secretary of foreign affairs ministry was a highly regarded man who walked out and away from his job at the ministry rather than kowtow to domineering military overlord in the late 1970s. I knew him personally and he had asked me if I could do a biography of his famous father Sarkin Muhammadu Sanusi. We were talking about this before his sudden death. I can say without any hesitation that what is about to commence in Kano is a witch hunt. This much was said by Alhaji Mahe Bashar Walin Kano who tore into pieces the cooked up figures of imaginary expenditure by the Kano emirate.

The reason for what is about to begin in Kano is because of the unease among the northern political elite that the Kano monarch had accused of pauperizing the talakawa over the years by not pursuing policies of education particularly of the girl-child in the north. The emir is worried about the yawning gap in western education between the north and the south and consequent instability currently and in the future if these problems are not addressed frontally. Even the Sultan of Sokoto, another forward looking ruler has said the same thing. The only difference between them is a matter of style and their military and civilian backgrounds. Removing traditional rulers or humiliating them has consequences. We remember the removal of Kabiyesi Adeyemi , the Alaafin of Oyo in 1954 by the Action Group government of Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the deposition of Sarkin Kano Muhammadu Sanusi by Sir Ahmadu Bello’s NPC government ,the Olowo of Owo by the military government of Colonel Adekunle Fajuyi, the reduction of the salaries of the Odemo of Isara to one penny a year by the Akintola NNDP government, and the removal of Sultan Ibrahim Dasuki during Sani Abacha’s thieving regime. This buffeting of traditional rulership has not eroded their importance and usefulness. This is why politicians always seek their support in peace time but most especially in times of crisis. It is surprising that at the time of insurgency in the north, any politician will be planning to undermine traditional institutions. Emir Muhammadu Sanusi has been proved right before. We can see this in the humongous sums of money being literally unearthed in many parts of Nigeria. When he said as governor of the central bank $20 billion were unaccounted for. The Goodluck Jonathan regime fired him as governor of the central bank. But who is laughing last now? If his voice in the wilderness will not arouse the conscience of our northern rulers, I will advise the emir to temporize a little, keep his peace until in the fullness of time his advice will become the received wisdom in the polity. The emir should understand the politics of realpolitik. In the past, Yoruba rulers were Kabiyesi that is someone whose wish is law; they were also vice regal of God on earth just as Muslim rulers in their domain were Amir al muminin but times have changed and the emir would have to navigate the treacherous labyrinth of political relationships in a peripheral region of Nigeria

April 27, 2017
General Adebayo in our ever green memory

When I heard the news of the demise of General Adeyinka Adebayo known as “Bob” to his friends and “Oga Bob” to younger Ekiti people who were close to him, I felt a large part of my lived history and experience are gone. General Adebayo’s place in Nigeria’s history is settled. He was the first Nigerian chief of staff, army, a position he held before the cataclysmic events of 1966 when the army intervened by force in the politics of Nigeria. When the counter coup d’état took place and General Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi was killed, he was next to Brigadier Babafemi Ogundipe in rank. When the latter’ s orders were refused by a sergeant who said he was waiting for his captain, it became obvious that order had broken down in the chain of command in the army and that only the person who had the command of the troops could lead.

Brigadier Ogundipe was spirited to London leaving Adebayo as the most senior combatant officer, senior to Lieutenant Colonel Yakubu Gowon who was announced as the new head of state, an appointment which Lieutenant Colonel Chukwuemeka Odumegu Ojukwu rightly but unrealistically disputed saying Colonel Adebayo was next in rank above them and should rightly have been given the command of the armed forces and therefore headship of the Nigerian state. This was a rather difficult time in Nigeria. Colonel Adebayo as a senior army officer at that time having experienced the killing of fellow senior officers like Ironsi, Brigadiers Ademulegun, Maimalari and others like Colonel Yakubu Pam, Abogo Largema, Ralph Shodeinde, and Unuigbe, felt that there was no point offering himself to be slaughtered just to prove his seniority. He also knew that in a military putsch, seniority would give way to those in effective command of troops. Initially he wanted to retire but he was prevailed upon by his colleagues to stay and that if he left, the unity in the increasingly polarized army would be gone.

The killing of his junior colleague Lieutenant Colonel Adekunle Fajuyi, the military governor of Western State and a compatriot from the same Ekiti where Adebayo came from provided a solution of what to do with the most senior officer not having a command. He was quickly made to replace Fajuyi at the beginning of the gathering storm of an impending civil war. He tried very much to use the rapport he still had with Ojukwu to persuade him against secession from Nigeria especially during the negotiations at Aburi in Ghana. The pain of the slaughter of Igbos in the north was too much to overcome. War became inevitable.

Administering the West posed some problems for General Adebayo. He needed to collect poll tax to finance his administration at a time when there was no oil revenue because of the war. Secondly, the shadow of Obafemi Awolowo just released from prison loomed very large in the region. It was as if the people did not really know who was in charge. There was also the enduring bitter division in the West between the Awolowo and Akintola forces with the effect that even the military governor had to gingerly negotiate his way in the treacherous political firmament of the region. Trouble in form of farmers’ revolt soon reared its head occasioning the loss of several souls before the so-called “Agbe Koya” rebellion could be put down by negotiation and by force involving chief Awolowo coming to the region to meet rebelling farmers.

While this was going on, war was raging in the eastern part of Nigeria and Adebayo was constantly in Lagos to advice on the military strategy needed to end the military campaign. When the war mercifully ended, Major General Adeyinka Adebayo was posted to the Nigerian Military Academy in Kaduna to undertake the arduous task of training and retraining junior officers and military cadets of the army. I believe he remained at this post before he retired after the overthrow of General Yakubu Gowon in 1975. One of the ‘ifs’ of Nigerian history is whether the civil war could have been avoided if the order of succession in leadership had been respected and Adebayo rather than Yakubu Gowon had become the head of state. One thing that is certain is that Adebayo as a sociable man would have gotten along well with his officers because he was a polyglot, comfortable in the major languages of Nigeria. He was a thorough and total soldier and had risen through the ranks and could be called a soldier’s soldier. He loved the army and soldiering as a profession. The 1966 interruption in normal military and army life horrified him.

On a personal note, I got to know him through my brother Captain Edward Abiodun Osuntokun of the Nigerian Army Electrical, Mechanical Engineers (NAEME) of the old days in 1963. Adebayo even though a senior officer as a colonel, brought him close to himself and when my brother died as a result of medical malpractice at the Military Hospital in Yaba , the then Colonel Adebayo was inconsolable. He insisted on court martial trial of those culpable but our family prevailed on him that it was not necessary because the deed was already done and no useful purpose will be served. This was a terrible time in our family and it was through this tragedy that our ties with Adebayo’s family became strong. When he was military governor in the West, my brother Kayode Osuntokun served pro bono as State House doctor. When I was a young lecturer in the Jos campus of the University of Ibadan between 1972 and 1974, I always stayed in his house at the Military Academy in Kaduna en route to Jos.

On his staff in the academy were Colonel Ibrahim Babangida and Major Ike Nwachukwu. He was always protective of his junior officers. I remember going out with them to Hamada hotel for a night out one day and when he sighted a soldier wobbling along the hotel corridors he shouted at him to halt, then he enquired who he was. He turned out to be the drunken driver of the then Brigadier Murtala Muhammad who was sleeping in the hotel. He promptly ordered the driver to be locked up while his boss should be informed in the morning. Adebayo cared for people. He was generous to a fault. He was particularly fond of his Ekiti people especially those who were making waves in academia and the professions. When he joined politics in 1979, he surprised many people about the effortless ease with which he operated almost capturing the chairmanship of the NPN without spending a dime compared to the huge amount the likes of Moshood Abiola and Adisa Akinloye spent. He found a niche in politics and remained engaged in politics till the very end as one of the leaders of the Yoruba elders. He finished his earthly journey well and strong. He was a contented man and all his children did well with Adeniyi Adebayo, a lawyer, and his first son rising to the position of governor in his own state. Adebayo deserves national recognition for his service to the nation and country. He was not a tribal or sectional leader or a local champion. Nigeria must find an appropriate symbol for his services. Naming a military institution or cantonment like Odogbo in Ibadan or the one in Ikeja would perhaps be the least that can be done to immortalize this great and worthy son of Nigeria.

April 20, 2017
Our economic problems in correct perspective

Nigeria is in recession is a fact. My prayer is that we do not transit from the present recession to depression. A cynic once defined recession as when your friend loses his job and depression as when one loses his job. Economics is a common sense science based on empirical but not experimental knowledge. The study of economics was for decades subsumed within the study of history until about the 19th century when in Scotland, it became part of what was called political economy.

Many historians still approach the study of history from the angle of political economy. This is a hangover from the Marxist interpretation of history which sees political development from the prism of economic relations. Economics as we now know it became an independent field of study as late as the first decade of the 20th century. This means that the so-called utopian economists of the late 18th and early 19th centuries were strictly speaking not economists but philosophers. Neither can one also categorize Adam Smith the author of the “Wealth of Nations” (1776) and the father of free trade, political liberalism and perhaps an early prophet of globalization an economist in the strictest sense of the word.

At the University of Ibadan, economics was first taught within the Department of History with emphasis on economic history. It was not until the late 1950s that the Department of Economics came unto its own. The debate is still out whether economics is strictly arts or science. Of course, economics is science just as history is also science, science here defined as knowledge. In fact, in many American and Canadian universities, history is taught within the faculty of social science because just like mathematics is the foundation for all the sciences both physical and biological, so is history the foundation of all social sciences. In fact history in the old Soviet Union and modern and successor Russian Federation, history is studied under the rubric of historical sciences.

Pardon my long preamble. The reason for the recession in Nigeria can be explained easily. As a country, we were involved in harvest and over time we were eating not only our fruits, we also ate the seeds. The lack of savings led to the situation that when the price of our sole commodity – oil fell in the world market, our economy went into a tail spin. To compound matters, the militancy in the Niger Delta led to a 50 percent cut in production and consequent reduction in revenue.

That is not all. The militants blow up of oil and gas pipelines including those carrying gas to electrical power plants led to reduction in power generation and distribution and reduction in industrial production and dependence on locally generated electricity by individuals. All this add to cost of production making prices of locally produced goods uncompetitive. This led to workers lay off and social disequilibrium manifesting in increased crime and criminality. The critical role of electricity is obvious when we compare electricity generated for a population of 180million in Nigeria being not up to 4000 megawatts compared to South Africa’s 150,000 megawatt for a population of less than 50million people. Industrialists in Nigeria say our minimum requirement is at least 100,000 megawatts

Available policy choices in this circumstance are severely limited. We can solve our problems by increased production in the agricultural sector to cut food dependency on foreign countries. This is the reason for government through the Central Bank of Nigeria increasing support for rice growers since within a generation, Nigerians have suddenly become addicted to rice eating with the result that we are the second rice importing nation in the world. If India and China each with a population of around 1.3 billion can feed themselves, we should be able to do the same considering the fact of our vast arable land. This will require determination and serious planning by the state and federal governments and individual entrepreneurs. We should also find ways of abandoning the imports substitution wrong strategy on which our industries are based. We should plan to replace all imports in the food industries. The same should apply to all other industrial production as much as possible. The preferential allocation of foreign exchange to so-called industrial sector should stop. Industrialists after all these years should source for foreign exchange independently of the government or the central bank. Industries should export to source for their foreign exchange.

All the four petroleum refineries should be given gratis, that is, free of charge to foreign companies with the only proviso that they should be made to function. This will end the corruption of annual budgets for repairs which in most cases are shoddily done or not done at all. Hopefully the Dangote refinery will come on stream early in 2019 and the combination of the production of all these refineries should turn us into refined petroleum exporting country like most of OPEC countries.

The savings from the revamped agricultural sector, the now functioning refineries, and the refocusing of the entire industrial sector would release foreign exchange to lift up the value of our currency and impact positively on the growth and development of the economy to the extent that we will be in a strong position to rebuild the Niger Delta in a win-win situation for the whole country. But whatever it will require including handing over the power sector to foreigners for a while, we must fix the power sector so that power will be available all the time. Without power, we will be groping in the dark and our innumerable generators will continue to ruin our environment and our health. Regular supply of electricity is the key to industrial development and modernization of all vital sectors like transportation, communication, health, education and research.

Lastly let us hope the current difficult situation would have taught us a lesson about prudential management of national resources away from squander mania of the previous regimes when our problem was not money but how to spend it. In this regard, I would like to advice the Lord Bishop of Ondo (Anglican Communion) to face his pastoral duties and not turn his pulpit into a political platform sermonizing about not probing previous regimes that may have been corrupt. Is the Lord Bishop totally ignorant of about almost 700 thousand dollars and billions of Naira seized by the federal government from members of the previous regime if as reported that the bishop said people are hungry while government is probing corruption. Can he not see the connection between a prostrate economy and the deleterious effect of corruption?

No country is perfect and immune from the boom and bust cycle of economic life. What we need do is to put the economy of our country on an even keel so that we are able to absorb all future economic shocks. We should not continue in this current state of dependency on the West or on the East. No country is totally an island but total dependency is not healthy. I also do not believe that the management of the economy by the current government is the cause of the current recession. The problem began a long time ago. What has happened is the cumulative effect of years of bad management. There is enough blame to go round. Let us ensure that when next we are faced with economic problems, we will have the buffer which heritage savings like sovereign wealth fund will provide.

April 13, 2017