The Nation Newspaper

Category: Jide Osuntokun

  • There was a country. How did we get here?

    There was a country. How did we get here?

    I still remember growing up  in  Ekiti, my own part of Nigeria when we did not have crude petroleum but had cocoa, palm oil, rubber and lots of hardwood timber which our regional government exported and the proceeds were spent on running the administration while a big part of it was saved against a rainy day. Some of the savings was used to support producer prices whenever the prices fell in the so-called world market as a result of over production.  Stability of producer price was necessary to encourage the farmers who produced the export produce. The marketing board that managed these savings was insulated as much as possible from political interference. It was the British colonial government that set this marketing board up and by the time we had party and responsible government in 1951, millions of pounds Sterling had accumulated as savings which the Awolowo government in the Western Region had access to from 1951 to 1959. Marketing boards were also set up for the eastern and northern regions of Nigeria but because those regions produced palm oil and palm kernel in the case of the East and groundnuts, cotton and hides and skins in the case of the North, they did not have the kind of money which cocoa brought into the coffers of the western Nigerian treasury.

    The year 1955 begins the period I am talking about when I was in my final year in primary school during the first year of the Action Group’s government’s free and compulsory primary school education scheme. My set moved from standard four to join with those in standard five to transit to primary six and the number of years spent in primary school was shortened from 10 years to eight years. There was fear that standards will be lowered but nothing of such happened and my set took entrance examinations to various secondary schools in the Western Region preparatory to starting in form one in January 1956.

    Most of us only took entrance examinations to schools in the Western Region. Certainly not to Lagos! None of our teachers encouraged us to do so because of what was said to be the corrupting influence of the coastal city. And our parents would not hear of us going to Benin and Warri provinces, part of Western Region for fear of the distance and differences in languages. There were a few intrepid ones who braved going there.

    It was the best of times.  We were all enjoying heavenly paradise here in Ekiti and the Western Region generally and in the country as a whole. One could travel to anywhere without molestation by the police or armed robbers and Fulani herders minded their own business as we did ours. Everything was good. We were not rich neither were we poor.  During our holidays, we joined our parents on the farms and those whose parents were traders hawked their wares on the street.

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    Running family economies was a joint program of parents, children, cousins and all kinds of relations with everybody making a contribution. The family unit was highly valued and our parents made sure they kept a tight hold on everyone and made sure they knew what was going on in everybody’s life. They also drummed into our ears about the importance of having a good name. A good name is better than diamonds and gold, they would say. Honour was more important than wealth. 

    My father didn’t mind if I fought in school as long as I won. You were not permitted to come home crying that a classmate of about the same age as yourself beat you up. We only had new clothes at Christmas and new year. If you were reasonably well-off, you got a pair of shoes as a bargain. This puritanical life style was embraced by everybody that I knew.  Our bigger and older brothers were in high schools and some were even in universities at home and abroad and our parents made us realise if we too worked hard and read our books, we too will go to high schools and reach the top. There was little career counselling; all we were told is read your books. Even when we were in secondary school, there was little or no career counselling apart from going to university to earn degrees in English, History, Geography, Chemistry, Biology, Physics and Mathematics and become teachers. It was grand being teachers in those days especially graduate teachers owning cars. Those who studied Medicine were guided into it by the “Hands of God“. It was not until later that we learnt that one could study Law, Accountancy, Engineering, Insurance and Finance. Going into the military or police was a no go area.

    In spite of the limitations of our rural environment, we did well. Our peasant upbringing endowed us with all that was honest and honourable. We never stole; we never embezzled or envied any one. We were satisfied with whatever it pleased the Almighty God to put in our hands in terms of shelter and ability to send our children to school like our parents did. We did not know anyone who became rich by being a civil servant.

    Politics when it entered our part of Nigeria was a call to serve not to eat. The only rich people we knew were contractors and cocoa merchants. We thought our country, or shall I say our region, will regenerate itself and our children will have the opportunity we had to live in a peaceful environment. But we were wrong.

    Our self-sustaining region was in 1957 made a self-governing part of Nigeria. We still retained control over our lives and contributed financially to the central treasury which relied largely on import and excise duties as well as charges on currency, posts and telegraphs, railways and shipping, and aviation. The regions continued to run their affairs as autonomous entities within the federation of Nigeria and enjoying common services of police and defence. The regions ran their own affairs competitively and cooperatively. Crude petroleum was discovered in Oloibiri (Bayelsa State) in the East but this did not make huge impact on the East which remained the Cinderella of the Nigerian family relations.

    As we progressed towards independence, the fierce competition for control of the centre began. The northern hegemony epitomized by the NPC in the centre was then aided by the Eastern subservience of the NCNC.  Then began the race to fill the posts being vacated by the British and to pack the ministries and parastatals with the ethnic cohorts of largely Easterners. Obafemi Awolowo who in all his political life had favoured strong regions appeared to have abandoned his position when he decided to challenge the NPC / NCNC chokehold on the centre by resigning as premier of the Western Region to go to the centre. With historical hindsight, he should have stayed in the West like his political enemy Ahmadu Bello stayed on in the North and sent his lieutenant, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa to the centre as lame duck prime minister which he would have remained if Awolowo and Ahmadu Bello had maintained their federal principled posture as they did in the Lancaster pre-Independence conference of 1959. This wrong tactical move sealed the fate of the carefully negotiated agreement for the disparate regions to remain together. These were territories big enough to be separate countries. They entered into what has turned out into an unhappy marriage which the military forced unitary system of 1966 has worsened.

    Nevertheless, the free-for-all looting and the  crazy feeding frenzy on national treasury which  began in 1970 after the  civil war ended, has gotten worse; electricity power  distribution has been sold to people who knew nothing about how to generate and distribute electricity.

    How does one explain the fact that the sale of gas and crude oil, the main source of the country’s wealth goes unaudited for years? The various parastatals in the oil industry are run not with the aim to earn income and augment national income, but to consume whatever comes in from sales of crude oil and Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG). Yet we complain that the country has no roads, no railways, no modern ports and airports. We have no hydro or any sort of efficient electric power.

    We have written and written that the dollar-guzzling petroleum refineries and petrochemical industries should be sold. We said it to Obasanjo, Yar’Adua, Jonathan and we said it to Buhari and we say it again to Tinubu if he will listen. The money we are queuing up in various capitals of the world to borrow would have been unnecessary if we ran our oil industry profitably.

    Unfortunately, this will continue until the crude oil in our hands becomes unprofitable and unsaleable. Those running our oil industry should just compare ourselves with the following countries in OPEC namely UAE, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, and Venezuela. Even with the American sabotage of Iran and Venezuela and war in Iraq, they still have superior infrastructure than Nigeria. The roads we used to travel on have all been washed away because of poor construction arising from corruption and kickbacks from those who constructed them.

    Nemesis has now caught up with us. The poor have left the villages to waylay us on the highways and rob and attack us in the cities. The poor are now demanding their own share of our common patrimony which a few have appropriated. The rich can no longer sleep because the poor are hungry, awake and angry.

    Before it is too late, we must go back to the negotiated constitutional agreement that led us to independence to avoid current and future head butting. I appeal to those who can make things happen for the better to support the current Tinubu government to make positive changes!

  • Trump, Putin and Zelenskyy in the eyes of the world

    Trump, Putin and Zelenskyy in the eyes of the world

    Foreign policy hardly plays any significant role in elections these days in most democracies unless the issue was really of an existential nature. Elections are won these days on bread and butter issues. This is unlike in the past when wars were fought to “make the world safe for democracy” or such idealistic slogans. The last elections in the USA was won on Trump’s promise to reduce inflation, particularly food inflation, and to bring prosperity to working class Americans through increased manufacturing jobs in the USA by so raising tariffs that any company that wants to sell in the American market would have to go  into production in America to make their goods competitive Labour prices would automatically go up when he removes illegal immigrants depressing the cost of labour and living wages would have to be paid to workers and that this will favour the workers. Of course he had a hidden agenda of making white America great again by removing illegal aliens who are mostly from the Third World.

    In the case of Vladimir Putin, his popularity is not based on his democratic credentials. Although, I have a feeling he could win an election on the basis of his wanting to restore Russian historical glory of the past from the Romanov Empire of Czarist Russia to the Soviet times even though like most empires, they were not based on the loyalty and support of the subject nationalities and the people. This nationalistic feeling would have made up for the oppression and economic deprivation common in the Czarist and Soviet Communist regimes. Empires in Europe and elsewhere from the British, French and German periods of domination in Europe appealed to their people on the claims of the ships and soldiers they could mobilise for war. Putin’s popularity is based on the political stability his regime has provided compared with the chaos that accompanied the collapse of communism in Russia and Eastern Europe.

    Whatever credentials Volodymyr Zelenskyy has are not based on proven democratic support but on the fact that he is a war-time hero. He was elected during an ongoing crisis of existential challenges and war-time exigencies have prevented his country re-electing and validating his democratic support or throwing him out of office. His heroic efforts at holding his country together in the face of overwhelming military challenges from Russia and Russian nationalist insurgents in Eastern parts of the country encouraged by mother Russia’s inspired  separatist sentiments.

    The picture of a small country being bullied by a former imperial country draws the kind of sympathy of a David fighting a Goliath.  The recent bullying of Zelenskyy on national television by the American president and the vice president to toe the American line or be made to face the music of slaughter by a much powerful Russian military has further solidified support for Zelenskyy at home and internationally. If the public has a vote, Zelenskyy would win hands down but in big international competition of the sort faced by Zelenskyy, he has no chance of winning unless the situation changes.

    There are signs the situation may change. Right now, President Putin appears not to want a settlement. What he seems to want is total surrender by Ukraine. He seems to deliberately delay the peace offer by President Trump of some form of an armistice based on ceasefire and maintenance of the military status quo. This is in favour of Russia which currently occupies about 20% of Ukraine’s territory adjacent to Russia in Eastern Ukraine. Trump’s suggestion for stoppage of bombing of energy and transportation systems and civilian infrastructure has only been observed in their breaches by Russia. Opening up of the Black Sea corridor has also been tied up with international removal of sanctions on Russia.  Putin ought to know that Trump who is virtually at war with other leaders in Europe is not in a position to lift the economic sanctions on Russia which are led by Europe. Russia has also linked ceasefire negotiations with peace treaty after the war including the final status of Ukraine including the limitations of what kind of military forces Ukraine should keep.  He also wants Trump to guarantee Ukraine’s ban forever from joining NATO which Trump without discussing with Ukraine and Europe has previously offered. These outrageous demands make nonsense of all the sacrifices of Ukraine since 2014 and her loss of territories and military personnel and the destruction of Ukraine by Russia through aerial bombing, artillery fire and missiles.

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     Since Trump has boxed himself in by campaigning that he would end the war in 24 hours and that Trump would listen to him alone, he is definitely under pressure to deliver. His boasting on his policy of “diplomacy through power” is facing the hardest test. If Putin humiliates him, he may be tempted as he had publicly stated, to cripple Putin through an attack on the Russian economy. He says he would unleash American oil weapon by flooding the oil market by American overproduction thus bringing down the oil fuelled war machine of Russia by apparently supplying Western Europe and possibly India. There is nothing he can do about China buying oil from Russia. The second option he has is that he may increase the supply of lethal weapons to Ukraine including the weapons that the former president, Joe Biden, was unwilling or reluctant to supply and finally suggesting of much more American military and financial support for Ukraine short of putting American military on the European theatre.

    The question is – suppose these don’t work? Certainly a capitalist in the White House would not want to lose everything in a possible thermonuclear war where there would be no winners. Trump would not risk a nuclear war with Russia because of defending a country faraway in Eastern Europe almost remembering Neville Chamberlain and his abandonment of Czechoslovakia in the face of Adolf Hitler’s threat in 1938.

    The war can of course end if Ukraine realises the futility of its situation and reaches a modus vivendi with Russia like the other 14 former states of the old Soviet Russian Empire. Russia can of course go through internal political upheaval in which Putin loses power and a post-Putin regime signs a peace treaty with a Ukraine that is under a friendly regime. All things are possible in a political and military situation.

  • The future of higher education in Nigeria

    The future of higher education in Nigeria

    One may even cynically ask whether Nigeria can survive in the current form and situation in which our people do not want to pay taxes or tolls for bridges and road’s maintenance but just to survive on extractive industries and commissions on hydrocarbons exports. It is obvious that we cannot discuss this problem in isolation of other problems in Nigeria.

    Education is capital intensive so we will need a lot of money to develop it. UNESCO has suggested the spending by developing countries of at least 25% of annual budget on education. No government in the history of Nigeria has ever approached this. Most of our governments because of the political instability of the country spend substantial amount of their budget on security including the police and the military and other uniformed organizations like customs, immigration, prisons and civil defence organizations. No one can blame them because without security there can be neither education nor development. Unless Nigerian universities can go into ventures that will give them money they will hopelessly depend on government.

    Universities would have to charge economic fees graded according to courses where engineering and medical and STEM students will have to bear some of the costs of inputs their courses would need. Universities would have to be innovative and mount short courses which people in government and the private and public sectors would find attractive and relevant for their future development.

    I see no impediments to well established universities in Nigeria opening up colleges to teach and award degrees in less developed countries on the continent as the University of London did for almost two decades in Ibadan and Accra and which British and American universities are still doing in the Middle East and Asia.

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    Ibadan or Lagos could easily have done this in medicine in Sierra Leone and the Gambia and can still do it in Liberia Togo and Benin. It’s a question of correct branding. In the 1970s, University of Benin in Togo was teaching French to Nigerian students and staff and earning good money from it. I attended one of these courses from the University of Lagos and I wonder why Nigeria universities can also not mount courses in English for students and staff in Francophone countries surrounding us. I see a further challenge to Nigerian universities continued existence when for profit universities such as Stanford, Oxford, Cambridge or Yale and Harvard open branch campuses in Nigeria.

    Unless we ban this scenario, banning of which may be prohibited under international law, this may happen in the nearest future.

    Nigeria’s universities may also have to rationalize out of existence courses that are deemed not in tune with development. This is already happening in the United Kingdom. The present sharp divisions between the liberal arts and the sciences or social and environmental sciences may yield ground for combinations not currently considered possible.

    Faculties of law in the face of Artificial Intelligence (AI) dishing legal opinions may not sell as the hot cake that it’s currently the case. The same is true of medicine where once a few medical parameters can be established through laboratory tests using AI, a diagnosis and drugs prescription will follow. This is already happening in the USA where because of the expensive nature of medical consultations, short cuts are being explored.

    The success of private universities like Afe Babalola in Ado Ekiti nearby, may give governments the option of privatization of some existing universities if there are buyers who can run them better than government. This will cut off the pressure of trade unionism in our universities so that they can concentrate on teaching and research. For many of the universities to survive at all, there may be need for wholesale reimagining of what a university should be and what subjects they need to specialize in. The present academic homogeneity in the universities in Nigeria where they are all teaching the same curriculum must yield to different specialization which parents and students will find more attractive and interesting. There is no point in students going to University of Ibadan to study veterinary medicine when they can go to ABU to study the same subject for example or for Marine Engineering being offered in Kano rather than Lagos. The present pedagogy in universities may need to be re-examined and the optimal size of universities and classes interrogated. In this regard the use of digital resources and communication tools will increasingly need to be provided.

    One thing that is becoming clearer is that students and their parents will have to take responsibility for themselves. It’s rather a cruel thing to say that more than half a century after independence, the dependency syndrome that my generation benefited from would be difficult to maintain. I have a sense of guilt when I remember the luxury of university education my generation enjoyed in the 1960s in the University of Ibadan. The consequence of that period of indulgence can be seen in the total collapse of housing facilities for students.

    I also see a threat or challenge from government’s overweening influence in university administration manifesting in naming and renaming universities at their own convenience of honouring political bigwigs or those who passed on without thinking of the loss of the university brand name so renamed. Governments must stop taking universities for granted and respect university autonomy guaranteed by the laws setting them up. This has implications on universities self-financing.

    Most of my concern in this piece has been with universities and not with polytechnics and colleges of education. If the polytechnics were doing what they are supposed to do but not just being poor copies of the universities, one would have much to say, but they have not fulfilled their roles as producers of technicians and technologists needed for technological development of the country. In a place like the UK where polytechnics were highly developed, they were simply converted to universities by the government of Tony Blair without any problems. No one can equate polytechnics with universities in Nigeria, so until they are what they were planned to be, it would amount to waste of time to lump their future with those of universities. They are not in the same category and if there is a need to have technical universities, those in Germany provide enviable paradigm.

    Finally there are questions which need to be posed. Is there a correlation between higher education and development? If there is, how come that where there had been an advantage of higher education in Europe and Africa, they are less developed technologically than Northern Europe? Why are countries such as Italy, Spain, Greece, Egypt and Morocco behind their counterparts in Europe? This can of course be due to other factors such as location, politics, and religion and so on.

    Taken together however, the quality of life of areas with earlier contact with higher education may be better than those with more technological advancement.

    The question to ask is the purpose of education and particularly university education.

    The people who have made landmark achievements in this world were not products of universities nor were they professors. Innovation is not the preserve of universities. Bill Gates, a contemporary example, had to leave Harvard University to realise his great strides in scientific advancement just to give a recent example.

    Michael Faraday was a self-taught experimental physicist and chemist in the 19th century who made significant contributions to electromagnetism and electrochemistry. He is best known for his discoveries of electromagnetic induction, electrolysis and the laws of electrochemistry despite his lack of formal education. He is regarded for haven changed the world because his work laid the basis of motors and generators. The Wright brothers, inventors of aeroplanes did not attend any universities. These people may be out of the ordinary and cannot be considered as a general rule but the point is that as the Germans have proved to the contemporary world, the great lever of development is the SMEs, not the huge companies nor the mega universities, important as they may be. Every aspect of education from primary, secondary to university is very important and Nigeria had better have an holistic approach to educational reform which has become an existential struggle.

  • Genesis and development of universities in Nigeria

    Genesis and development of universities in Nigeria

    I am writing this piece to educate people who do not know the genesis and development of universities in Nigeria.

    During the war years in 1943 the British set up the Elliot commission to report specifically on the organization and facilities of existing centres for higher education in British West Africa. At the same time there was another commission called the Asquith commission that had a broader mandate covering the British Colonial African territories including West Africa. The Asquith commission was particularly asked to look into the relationship between colonial university colleges and the University of London. It was a result of the recommendations of these commissions that university colleges were established in 1948 in Ibadan and Legon in the Gold Coast and a medical school for the whole of West Africa was located in the University of Ibadan. The Fourah Bay College established in Freetown Sierra Leone in (1827) and its special relationship with Durham University was left untouched while the new university colleges were to have special relationship with the University of London from where its students were to continue to earn degrees until 1961.

    In 1959, on the eve of independence in Nigeria, the Ashby Commission was set up to investigate into Nigeria’s needs in the field of higher education over the next 20 years. This was largely informed by the manpower that would be needed in an independent Nigeria to replace the British expatriate officials who will be leaving the country. The commission reported in September 1960. The recommendation formed the basis of the establishment of a new federal university of Lagos and subsequent establishment of regional universities in Ile Ife, Nsukka and Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria.

    The significance of all these commissions and their reports is that hitherto universities were established in Nigeria after detailed reports were commissioned about funding, location, staffing and needs of the country and nothing was done arbitrarily at the whim of the authorities. In those days there was a manpower board which attempted to find out national and state needs in various aspects of the national and state economy and administration particularly in teaching, the bureaucracy, transportation, police and security, the military, customs and immigration and the general economy as much as could be surmised. In other words, institutions were not just decreed into existence without linking them with the needs and employment. Critics have said this was a-narrow way of looking into the future but the attempt was to avoid graduate unemployment and the incendiary possibilities of that kind of situation. Whatever the case may be, the planned commissions avoided the possibility of the consequences of unplanned development.

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    The immediate situation after independence was that there were massive job opportunities in teaching and by the time of the Israeli-Arab war of 1973-1974 and the Arab oil embargo on the USA and the West, and consequent rise in oil revenues for Nigeria, the Nigerian economy opened up phenomenally in construction, commerce, transportation and educational expansion creating needs in many areas which made it much easier for the graduates of Nigerian universities to find employment. The so-called oil boom was ephemeral and by the 1980s, it had petered out and it led to a lot of soul-searching even in the northern parts of Nigeria where for the first time, graduates unemployment began to manifest. People began to ask for the purpose of the nation’s massive investment in higher education and university expansion from the traditional comprehensive universities of Ibadan, Benin, Lagos, Ile -Ife, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and Ahmadu Bello to building of new ones in Akure, Calabar, Port Harcourt, Jos, Bayero (Kano), Maiduguri, Sokoto, Abeokuta, Makurdi, Yola and Bauchi. The last four on this list were supposed to be specialized universities of technology and agriculture but in their development, the local university authorities injected politics into their development and they have mostly ended as comprehensive universities and some like Bauchi now have a college of medicine. I was involved in their planning and execution and they were not supposed to have been so developed.

    The NUC sent me and three academics to open offices in London, Cairo, Washington DC and Ottawa for the purpose of assisting the universities in staff recruitment, training, library and equipment acquisition just to show that the establishment of the new universities was well prepared. However when the economy in the 1980 hit some doldrums, the University of Yola was merged as a college with the University of Maiduguri temporarily before it reverted to status quo ante. Questions then began to be asked as to whether we were training the kind of graduates needed for the future. We knew agriculture was very important in the future of Nigeria but what kind of graduates in agriculture were we producing? We were also turning out thousands of graduates in science and engineering yet our roads and water projects were being built by imported engineers and scientists and there were very few indigenous builders. Our university intakes were lopsidedly in favour of liberal arts, education and social sciences.

    The whole question of over specialization at the undergraduate level of education was being asked.  Our faculties of education turning out graduates in such narrow areas as careers guidance and counselling, educational psychology and planning and administration came up for discussion and suggestions about making such educational areas of study, important as they are, into postgraduate studies were made and graduates in social sciences one without solid grounding in the history and anthropology of the country was challenged. The proliferation of faculties of social sciences turning out people in Sociology, Psychology, Social Work, seemed to have been ahead of our time. These questions were not comfortable so they were ignored and kicked forward for the future generations. Now it seems as if the chickens have come home to roost and the country is now faced with much more difficult problems of unplanned development of the present.

    Nigeria went through a period of military rule that with some interregnum went from 1966 to 1999. During this period, the country fought a civil war from 1967 to 1970 and was till 1979 under military rule until through international pressure the military government gave up power to a civilian democratic government which spent most of the time in corruption and economic mismanagement until it was overthrown in 1983. The military remained in power until 1999.

    Most of the development in higher education after independence took place under military rule. There was therefore not much democratic discussion about the future and most decisions were taken with bureaucratic and military fiat. Some of the decisions were excellent particularly the expansion of higher education to most parts of the country like the minority areas of the Middle Belt and the South-south but this was done without proper study of the absorptive capacity of the areas thus leading to mass migration of young people from their areas to urban centres of the country like Lagos where 60% of new graduates annually migrate to seek non-existing employment.

    Unplanned universities expansion

    What we have witnessed is the open sesame to private ownership of universities beginning with Obasanjo and his deputy Abubakar Atiku owning respectively private universities in Bells University in Otta and so-called American University in Yola. Obasanjo’s successor Goodluck Jonathan during a one night after-dinner speech in 2013 announced the opening of 11 federal universities, in one fell swoop, in states that did not have federal universities already and announced the vice chancellors of these universities and handed over to them N1 billion each for their initial take off. There were no plans, no governing councils that were to guide the orderly development of these universities and some of the vice chancellors had never done this kind of jobs before or been in any university senate or council of a university as some were recruited from abroad. Most of the money was spent on renting whatever hotel accommodation that was available in some of the inaccessible towns and villages where these new federal universities were located as “dividends of democracy“.

     The Pandora box of universities approval was opened and the National Universities Commission (NUC) whose remit was to advice government about the feasibility of these new universities seemed to have slept from 1999 to the present day and the results of which is the ballooning increase of universities in Nigeria to 270 federal universities, state universities, uniformed institutions (belonging to the, Air Force,

    Navy, Police, Army, Defence Academy) 148 of which belong to private institutions and the rest to states and the federal government. The situation is still fluid but I believe water will eventually find its own level with some of the private universities folding up and some of the state universities being merged or folding up and the category of the so-called uniformed universities rationalised in the face of reduced national revenue largely derived from hydrocarbons which are increasingly challenged as sources of energy in a world concerned about global pollution and climatic and environmental degradation.

  • Living in fear of herders and kidnappers

    Living in fear of herders and kidnappers

    For years, many of us had lived in dread of kidnappers and herders in our country. The campaign against and fear of these miscreants are not over yet but there is light at the end of a long dark tunnel. This was something we were not used to. The saddest part of the situation was that most of us voters felt President Muhammadu Buhari, being a retired soldier would handle the problem with military might by dealing mercilessly with these miscreants. But we were disappointed that as they say in Yorubaland “for the leaves of coconut tree to soften up, they actually became harder.” I don’t know the reason for his absolute inaction. The result of this was that most of us confined ourselves to the urban centres and abandoned the rural areas where our people lived and where we had our extended families and the graves of our parents and ancestors.  This abandonment of the rural and agricultural hinterland of the country was eventually to lead to famine, worsening the insecurity of the country.

    For me this was terrible. I had to be sending monies to friends at home and pastors of our home churches to help keep the graves of our parents in order. I sometimes felt very hopeless asking what kind of lives we were living and remembering what Yoruba bards used to sing to us “Enter your father’s house, there can be no fear in one’s father’s house”. For about a decade, I lived in fear of kidnappers even while traveling from Lagos to Ibadan. What I really feared was not the ones that killed people instantly but the ones who carried people to the forest and held them for days, months and years before releasing or finally killing them.

    I remember what my friend Honourable Eddy Mbadiwe suggested apparently out of frustration that those who want should be allowed to carry concealed weapons like Americans, so that they have a fighting chance against these kidnappers whenever they struck. He didn’t get much support but it was a positive suggestion for those of us who are able and willing to defend ourselves. People after vetting should be allowed to carry weapons as they do in America so that good people are not killed miserably by those who do not value the lives they carelessly take. We all suffered during the Buhari years and to preserve our lives, we stayed put wherever we were.

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    One of my cousins at home made matters worse when he told me that our folks at home were in league with the foreign kidnappers whom they assisted with intelligence about those visiting home. I jokingly said if I was ever kidnapped, I would say I was a retired headmaster of a primary school instead of saying a retired poor professor! I was made to understand that this would not wash because the marauders would say if you are a poor retired headmaster, what about your children?

    A funny colleague said he told his children not to offer any ransom or sell his only house to give money to kidnappers but that his children should plead with the kidnappers to feed him until he died. I asked him – what was the point of feeding him when one bullet would put an end to his suffering and misery? In order to avoid any unpleasant experience in my old age, I stayed away from travelling to my hometown and my state.

    Recently, I broke the jinx by travelling to Ekiti State and to Ado and Ikere, Igbara-Odo and to Ilawe where I was born. I didn’t get home to Okemesi, the home of my ancestors who incidentally were warriors and would not have understood why I was living in fear. My ancestors were made of finer and tougher stuff. They were like “rams who go to meeting grounds of other rams to ask for fight if there were no rams in their vicinity”.  They were as “handsome as tigers but deadly in combat”.  My people bore the names of Akin meaning courage and lived courageously. But those were the days! The days of chivalry are gone and there was no point of glorifying foolhardiness. But even up till today, Okemesi people are regarded with awe just like every Yoruba person knows Ekiti people do not take nonsense and they would fight to the death if convinced about the correctness of their action. 

    There is this interesting story during the Second Republic. There was to be an election at the state level and even though the UPN led by Obafemi Awolowo fielded Chief Adekunle Ajasin as gubernatorial candidate, farmers in Ekiti were accosted on their way to the farms instead of going to the polling booth and when asked for their lack of patriotism, they responded that they thought voting had ended with Awolowo and since he was not on the ballot they were no longer interested in wasting their time!

    During the second week of March, I went home to Ekiti and came back hale and hearty because I believe in the protection of God Almighty and told members of my extended family that we must never live in fear and like J.F. Kennedy once said “we must never fear to negotiate but we must never negotiate in fear”. Fear is the worst tendency in man and no man should live in fear.

    One thing that I also noticed in my trip is how very clean Ekiti towns and villages are. I am one of those who agree that they are clean because they are small but some other settlements in the North and the East are small and incredibly dirty. Whatever the case, their cleanliness is obvious and the people should be commended.

    I don’t know whether the petering out of kidnapping and highway robbery has something to do with the change of government, but one cannot but notice that the Tinubu government and the change of guards of the military, the police and other security organisations must have led to the improvement in national security. But just as the security situation is improving down south, the spate of incendiary movements in the North especially in the Northwest and around Abuja is increasing. Those concerned with security in those areas must move in quickly to decapitate the heads of the snakes so that we can have peace nationally. The security leaders need to demonstrate absolute transparency, sincerity, loyalty and courage. In a situation where people feel some elements in the security organisations are feeding fat on the security problems of the country is not good enough. Where a ragtag army of insurgents hold the country to ransom, something has to be done. People should not be made to live in mortal fear in a country where we have the police and the military. The security organisations must justify the huge allocations given to them year in year out. Unless there is peace, the government will not be able to provide the wherewithal necessary to maintain internal and external order. We should all be involved in fighting insecurity in our country. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. Whatever we do, we must realise that the much desired development cannot take place unless the country is secure and there can be no security if there is no development.

  • Trump-Zelensky confrontation

    Trump-Zelensky confrontation

    Any student of diplomacy and foreign affairs will immediately recognise the genesis, development and trajectory of the demand for “open covenants openly negotiated” being a product of the First World War which leaders blamed on “secret diplomacy“. The total casualties of the conflict have been estimated at about40 million people, broken down to around 15 to 22 million deaths and about 23 wounded military personnel ranking it among the cruellest and deadliest conflicts in human history. This estimate perhaps did not take account of the casualties of colonial subjects like the famous “Senegalese tirailleurs” from France’s empire in West Africa and soldiers from British and German colonial empires who were drafted to fight in a conflict for which they knew nothing about the cause.

    The end of the war was also followed by the so-called Spanish influenza pandemic which killed between 50 to 100 million people worldwide between 1918 to 1919.

    To say that this tragedy was caused mainly by the events that followed the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir apparent to the Austro- Hungarian Empire by a Serbian nationalist in Croatia in Sarajevo in 1914 is simplistic. But it is true that if the Vienna regime did not have a secret treaty with the German Second Reich’s supporting it for any action it might take against Serbia, it would have been more restrained in its reaction. The moment the Serbian government was given an almost impossible ultimatum which it still complied with and the Vienna government mobilised against it militarily, Russia came into the picture on the side of Serbia as a protector of Slavic peoples and Germany responded by ordering military mobilisation and both France and Britain because of their secret treaty obligations to Russia, mobilised to support their ally Russia, thus the event in Sarajevo led to a world-wide conflagration.  It was therefore understandable for people to find out the fundamental cause of the war which was zeroed on “secret treaties”.

    Nigeria can earn $2.5billion annually from trades with Morocco – Abbas

    The democratic forces in Europe, led by the centre for democratic control of foreign policy in Britain, and by the European socialists, following the overthrow of the Kaiser in Berlin, and the emergence of the new Bolshevik government in Russia, following the overthrow of the Czarist regime in Saint Petersburg, supported the idea of secret treaties being responsible for the war. Governments all over Europe published official national documents blaming the pre-1914 governments for the failure of diplomacy in Europe. This apparently was picked up by the American government of President Woodrow Wilson who made the abolition of secret deals as means of conducting foreign policy the core of his foreign policy and guiding principle of the League of Nations, the precursor of the United Nations.

    Since then, foreign policy experts have laboured to keep sensitive information away from the public but the American penchant for exhibitionism has always prevailed to the chagrin of the whole world which the whole world saw in the fracas just short of blows between the American president, Donald J. Trump, aided by his vice president, JD Vance and president   Volodymyr Oleksanddrovych  Zelenskyy of beleaguered Ukraine in the White House last Friday, February 28. Despite embracing “open covenants” as a new way of conducting foreign policy, the Second World War still broke out in 1939 because of the onerous diktat of the Versailles peace settlement of 1918-1919 which ignored genuine and fundamental reasons for the First World War.

    It is arguable whether the settlement of 1945, based on total defeat of Germany and Japan and a world peace imposed by the United States and Russian hegemony would endure in the face of rising powers of China, India, Germany and Japan and other countries not happy with the current situation.

    What seems to be happening is that the Trump regime as disruptors has apparently decided to abandon the long-term American policy of hemming in Russia by building allies around it in Eastern and South-eastern Europe as well as in the NATO expansion to the Baltic states. Ukraine and Georgia’s membership of NATO would have made it possible to surround Russia with NATO short range ABM missiles. In the abandonment of this policy, Ukraine has become expendable. This is why for a whole week, Trump and his vice president, JD Vance, had openly lambasted Zelenskyy as an illegitimate president running an expired term in office since his government had postponed elections because of the exigencies of war in his country which is understandable.

    In fact Trump had blamed him for starting the Russian-Ukrainian war thus turning the victim into the aggressor. Trump went on to call him a dictator to the embarrassment of even some members of his Republican Party, rather than calling Vladimir Putin a dictator. He had publicly said Ukraine must be ready to cede Russian-conquered territories to it and that Ukraine should not expect to join NATO. Then the American president without any facts said his country had spent $350 billion in military supplies to Ukraine since 2014 which is way larger than the about $150 billion internationally verifiable figure. For this huge amount, Trump openly began sending emissaries to Ukraine asking its government to cede mineral rights worth about $500 billion to the American government in an open, imperialistic fashion totally unhidden from the rest of the world and different from such old tactics  in which the policy would have been presented as helping a nascent democratic country.

    This not only caused embarrassment to American allies but to many Americans themselves. To smoothen the way of Zelenskyy‘s visit to the White House, President Emmanuel Macron of France went to genuflect before Trump and to humour him to support Ukraine. This was followed by the visit of the British prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer to say that Trump must not give in to all Putin’s demands or else there will be nothing to negotiate. So when Zelenskyy came, no one was expecting the blow-up that followed. For reminding the American president that President Putin didn’t keep his words in the past, Trump exploded, joined by the American vice president that Zelenskyy was not grateful to President Trump for wanting to stop the bleeding of his country to which Zelenskyy replied he had expressed his gratitude many times at least to the American people and their government. Zelenskyy should have kept quiet but he refused to do so as a leader of a country at war. If this had happened in a normal diplomatic setting outside the glare of the world, it would not have assumed the total breakdown between the American peacemaker Trump and the struggling Ukrainian government and its weak European supporters that it now has assumed. 

    It is remarkable that the American president does not want to hear about the fears of Zelenskyy, the president of the Ukraine and even that of Europe on behalf of which he will be presumably negotiating. In a normal situation, Ukraine should be at the negotiating table and so should the Europeans, but Trump considers them as irritants. Unfortunately, Trump is right to say it is only him as a major backer of Ukraine who can bring Putin to the negotiating table, not the crowd of weak European states and that he has the understanding of the Russian government that it will abide with agreements negotiated with him and he had told Putin that Russia has much  to gain from an honourable peace in Ukraine especially from lifting of American and western economic sanctions and opening up of American investment in Russia itself and lessening of global tensions as a result of peace between Ukraine and Russia. He said he can only achieve rapprochement with Russia with overt friendship and not antagonism to President Putin. 

    He is right that without an all-out war on the European continent, his approach seems to be the only viable option for now. This is however very sad especially the way Ukraine is being made to part on one hand with 20% of its territory to Russia and substantial amount of its mineral wealth to America, supposedly a supporter. This should teach the whole world that the days of global consensus are gone and we have arrived at a period of open rape of weaker countries by the stronger ones and that the idea of sacrosanct and inviolable international borders based on the principle of territorial integrity is gone for ever.

  • German election and the place of Germany in the world

    German election and the place of Germany in the world

    I have always followed the development in the political economy of Germany for several reasons. I spent three months as a postgraduate student in the Historisches Seminar in Hamburg University in 1968 when I was researching for my doctorate degree on an aspect of the First World Way in which Imperial Germany (Kaiserlichen Deutschland) was a major participant. Any student of History who has not studied German history has missed a lot especially about the importance of geographical location, political leadership, military power, a people’s sense of history and their place in it and nationalism as an important factor in the national trajectory of a people.

    I knew I had to visit the home of Bismarck to properly appreciate his position in German history. I also visited Germany when I was already a senior lecturer in the University of Lagos and had the privilege to have a ride on a German gunboat on the Baltic Sea and to watch the prickly relations between West and East German navies during the sad days of German division and loss of territories to Poland and Russia arising from Germany’s defeat in the Second World War creating feelings of irredentism in Germany up till today.  The German authorities’ knowledge of my understanding of German history made Chancellor Helmut Kohl to tell me in 1991 that I was a lucky ambassador who knew Germany before being ambassador and he was right.

    During the struggle for modern German unification in the1980s and 1990s, Margaret Thatcher, the British prime minister was opposed to Germany’s unification by saying she loved Germans so much that she preferred to deal with two German states rather than a united big one! Of course she was overruled by the Americans who, for geo-political reasons preferred a unified German state as a bulwark against Russian communism. To appreciate European politics and the place of Germany in it, one must be solidly buried in the political and economic place of Germany in the world. One may not like Germans because of the terrible horrors inflicted on Europe and the rest of the world by Nazi Germany, but one must appreciate their role as the fifth or fourth economic power in the world. One of my favourite professors whose books I read with avidity when I was in England was the Regius professor of modern history at Cambridge University A .J P Taylor who wrote a book on “The origins of the Second World War” in which he explained and tried to justify the rise of Adolf Hitler as being due to the unfairness of the Versailles diktat of 1919. Even though his scholarship was impeccable, he was shouted down by the conservative forces in Britain and a colleague professor, Alan Bullock, a Regius professor of History at Oxford University  wrote his voluminous study on Germany which he called “Adolf Hitler: A study in Tyranny” in which he systematically destroyed AJP Taylor’s thesis challenging his professional objectivity in the process. Since then, German war guilt has been established and Germany’s role in global politics and economy has always been viewed with historical hindsight and perspective.

    The recent German election in which the AFD (Alternatif fur Deautscland) came second to the CDU (Christian Democratic UNION) and its smaller Bavarian partner the CSU (Christian Socialist Union) has been received with alarm in Europe but not in Washington Republican circles where right wing parties are currently favoured and especially in the White House where right wing parties in Europe and Asia are seen as allies or potential allies. In a highly contested election in which about 80 percent of the electorate voted, the AFD got about 20.9 percent which was about 10.3 million of the vote while the outgoing German chancellor Olaf Scholz’ party got only 16.4 percent which translates to about eight million votes while the winning CDU/ CSU led by Friedrich Merz won 29 percent, translating to about 14 million voters. Other parties such as the GREENS got about 11.6 percent which is about 5.7 million voters , the Left (LINKS) leftover of the Communist Party and fellow travellers 8.8 percent about 4.9 million voters, BSW ( this is an extreme left wing party founded in 2024 ) got 4.97 percent, about 2.4 million voters, FDP (Free Democrats/ Liberals) 4.3 percent about two million voters.  This party was part of the coalition that has just been defeated. It will have no part in the next government because there is a law that prohibits any party with less than 5% support any role in government.  The fate of the FDP or Liberals, the party of the long serving foreign minister, Herr Dietrich Genscher in Germany until his death deserves comment. Liberalism as a credo of political party is now almost discredited everywhere in England, America and in Europe; it’s almost a bad label in the United States.  The other parties that do not qualify for representation in government or parliament include the LINKS (LEFT) which is by law excluded from coalition government.

    The perennial political situation of coalition governments in Germany is because the country is doomed by a complicated constitution and electoral system of broad agreement, not the majority passes the post as in England, it is difficult to have a clear winner of election in Germany. Herr Friedrich Merz now has to shop for partners to form the government. He is likely to approach the SPD of Olaf Scholz who may decide not to be in government because he has become very unpopular in Germany and he may want to rebuild the dwindling Social Democratic Party which for some time was very dominant in German politics. It was the party of Willy Brandt, Helmut Schmidt, Gerhard Schroeder before Scholz. Friedrich Merz would also bring the Greens along into his government because protecting the environment is a major platform and obsession in Germany.

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    I must say here from my experience that Germany is the greenest country in the world. When I was ambassador of Nigeria in the country and a member of our delegation to the first conference of parties to United Nations Conference on Climate Change dedicated to locating a secretariat for the conference, I had no reason not to nominate Bonn as the future secretariat because of the cleanliness and greenery of the city and our nomination was approved by the majority of the delegates. In short, we are likely to see a new German government headed by Chancellor Friedrich Merz in which the Social Democratic Party and the Greens will be involved and the AFD will become a powerful opposition in the Bundestag.

    The government will be confronted with the problems of resuscitation of the economy which has remained flat for three years because of competition from China especially in the automotive sector where Germany was previously supreme as witnessed by the predominant position in the world by such German cars as Mercedes Benz, Volkswagen, BMW, and their subsidiaries in Europe. German domination of the fast train technology has been surpassed by Japan. The Germans are still very prominent in chemicals, medical and pharmaceutical sectors. The problem is that Germany has been lagging behind in innovation and cutting edge technology and with the coming of AI dominated by the USA and China and increasing protectionism championed by the United States of America and China. Germany is facing a difficult future. Germans are even beginning to question the European idea in which German economy and politics are tied up with because it doesn’t give the country the leverage and space to negotiate an independent path separate from that of the 27 country European Union. Facing Germany is both the new American administration of Donald Trump which wants to meddle in the politics of Europe as seen in Elon Musk and JD Vance the American vice president’s supporting the AFD the right wing party in Germany during the recent elections. Friedrich Merz is also determined to take a more pro-Ukraine line in the confrontation between Ukraine and Russia and in building a more potent German army even though Germany’s protocol of surrender in 1945 prohibits this and this is why Germany does not have nuclear arsenals protecting it from Russia and has to rely on nuclear deterrence from Great Britain and France, former enemies. If push comes to shove, Germany may be forced to defend itself by all means possible in a Europe decoupled from America which is increasingly asking Europe not to rely on it and to defend itself.

  • Ibadan is taking a new shape

    Ibadan is taking a new shape

    I live in Ibadan and the Redemption City and sometimes for weeks I stay away from Ibadan because of unavailability of electricity in my area, sometimes for weeks, and to God be the glory for the spiritual and physical light available to us in the Redemption City, by the grace of God and the leadership of Pastor Adejare Adeboye. Yet my area is supposed to be in a low density area not far from Bodija, the first planned town in Nigeria after independence. The hellish heat these days makes life almost unbearable for people particularly elderly people. This is despite having a generator which does not really solve the problem because of the astronomical cost of fuel whether petrol or diesel. I have not yet tried solar option which is what some of my colleagues have adopted. Perhaps I will try solar devices when I am able to afford the cost.

    I know my readers will probably say look at this old man talking about solar options when people are not able to afford the cost of food necessary for survival. I plead guilty and I agree I bear, alongside people of my generation, vicarious responsibility for the way the country has been run down all these years but in our old age, we deserve some comfort for some of our positive contributions in the past.

    I can mention a thousand things and many risks taken by some of us to advance the national interest. Some of our young people may say that writing about the new looks of Ibadan is not worth celebrating because they should be regarded as ordinary events because they take place in all countries including African countries. Road construction and channelization should be regarded as routine. But when they are not routine in our clime, it is worth celebrating.

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    This preamble is necessary for me to be able to put in context the recent efforts of the Oyo State government because I have had reasons to be critical of the government before and it is just fair to applaud the government when it is doing well.

    A visit to Ibadan today will confirm the fact that Governor Seyi Makinde is in name and indeed, the executive governor of Oyo State. I sometimes laugh when a sitting governor is introduced as the executive governor of his state which I always dismiss as error of tautology but in the case in hand, the governor is really the executive governor just as any performing governor deserves the heavy duty description as “executive governor”.  Entering Ibadan from Lagos through the Alhaji’s Arisekola Road and driving towards Molete, one is confronted with digging of gutters at the intersection of Felele and Molete where for years there had been some kind of spring that floods the road perennially in wet and dry seasons. This is the section connecting the road to late Lamidi Adesina’s house at Felele which he refused or could not fix while he was governor of Oyo State. It seems the government is determined to fix it once and for all.

    From this point to Saint Anne’s School, heavy drainage equipment is at work digging deep gutters on both sides of the road. I pray this will be extended to all parts of the state capital and to all major towns like Ogbomosho and Oyo. Any government that can do this kind of work deserves to be commended. While on this road project, may I appeal to the Oyo State government to extend its revolutionary approach to road construction to the road linking Molete with Ibadan Grammar School and Saint Luke’s College going on to Saint David Cathedral in Kudeti. This road, for historical reasons, deserves to be fixed as a symbol of CMS contribution to the education and development of Ibadan. Government should look into the possibility of combined redevelopments of Saint Luke College and Ibadan Grammar school as a comprehensive technical college for training young people for the future industrial development of Oyo State.

    The importance of street lights in Ibadan should be highlighted. There is need for Ibadan to have a night economy. It’s wasteful for a huge city like Ibadan to go to bed at seven O’ clock because that’s when the sunlight goes out. Government can double the economy of the city by lighting up the city if the government can provide electricity outside the present electricity generation mechanism.

    There is also need for strict enforcement of traffic lights in the city. Government should also consider the tolling of some of the roads so that money will always be available for their maintenance. This is also the time to begin to plan the planting of trees and turning all our roads into avenues. This was the case with all major roads in Ibadan and in such places like Kano, and Maiduguri until some military governors decided to cut down the huge neem trees under the guise of beautification with streets lights! How could any sane person have done this in the Sahel towns of Kano and Maiduguri! Yes it was done while we all looked on in silent awe! We have to bring back the neem trees. Incidentally the leaves of the neem trees were potent cure for malaria when boiled and squeezed into juice.

    The government of Engineer Seyi Makinde should embark on proper and simple street numbering of Ibadan away from its present antediluvian confusing numbering.

    Let’s make Ibadan great again. I remember when we were young during the golden days of the old Western Region, Ibadan did not accept inferior status to Lagos the federal capital and those of us still in school basked in the glory of Ibadan. Ibadan has remained the capital city of Yoruba land with millions making the city their homes even if they had homes in their villages in Ekiti, Osun, Ondo, Ogun, Lagos and even Kwara and Kogi states because of their ethnic consanguinity with Oyo State people. There were of course people from all over Nigeria because of the presence of an institution like the University of Ibadan and the historical connection of the people from the present Edo, Delta and Bayelsa with the city of Ibadan from where they were administered. Those were the days and thinking of those days makes old people like us wonder if the creation of states was really worth the effort and the excitement that went into the splitting of Nigerian humanity into the present puny states only useful to the looters who have benefited from the division which, looking backward, amount to destruction of what could have been important blocks of national unity.

  • Post-colonial culture in Nigeria

    Post-colonial culture in Nigeria

    The vast majority of Nigerians after the amalgamation in 1914 continued to live their lives as before without noticeable change traceable to the imposition of colonial rule.  The most noticeable outcome of amalgamation was the gradual extension of the Beit-el mal (native treasuries) first introduced to the North by Sir Fredrick Lugard to the rest of the country beginning in Yorubaland and Benin.  The attempt to extend this to the acephalous Igbo societies by creating ‘warrant’ chiefs where there were no traditional rulers met with failure. The economic implication of this system was the levying of taxes in the names of native rulers who were now made to enjoy political and economic power out of tune with pre-colonial tradition and culture.  Resistance to this imposition did not succeed in the face of superior physical force in the hands of the colonial administration.  Rebellion and revolts were shot down by the use of soldiers and Nigerians were cowed and made to face the responsibilities imposed by modern mode of governance which involved payment of taxes as a passage of citizenships rite.

    The colonial phase of Nigerian history witnessed rapid economic changes, building of railways, roads and ports and even aerodromes.  Gradually our people were sucked into the western economic, political and social vortex.  With this came increasing contact between our people and the outside world.  Nigerian soldiers fought in two world wars, first between 1914 and 1918 in theatres in Togo, the Cameroons and East Africa.  Some naval ratings were even sent all the way to Palestine.  The Second World War saw more extensive use of our soldiers in the Ethiopian campaigns against the Italians and in Burma against the Japanese. 

    The involvement of our troops in these global cataclysms had serious political consequences. The weakening of the British in a changed world hastened the process of decolonization.  This process was hastened by the rise of African nationalism and the emergence of political parties each of which in different ways fought for the political emancipation of our country.  The growing political awareness led to cultural nationalism and the cry to “boycott all boycottables” that is to say Africans should go back to their cultural roots by jettisoning imported names and taking on native names.  This was particularly the case among the descendants of Nigerian repatriates from Sierra Leone resident in Lagos. They cast away their European and Hebrew names thus David Brown Vincent took an African names of Mojola Agbebi, Edmund Macaulay became Kitoyi Ajasa, Joseph Pythagoras Haastrup became Ademuyiwa Haastrup, Jacob Henry Samuel became Adegboyega Edun. Their examples were later to resonate with Azikiwe and Awolowo when they dropped their biblical names of Benjamin and Jeremiah respectively. 

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    The wearing of African clothes became fashionable.  Lugard would in his grave have approved this development unlike what he condemned in 1914 when he described educated natives as the “trousered Negros of the coast dressed in bond street attire who send their laundry abroad every other week for dry cleaning”.  In this changed cultural preference, the cultural gap between Southerners and Northerners in Nigeria began to close. Northerners never abandoned their babanriga for western suits and in most cases stuck to their languages especially the Hausa language rather than taking to English.  This was to be their undoing in a   world in which English was the lingua franca.  This cultural recrudescence also led to greater interest in the study of Nigerian languages literature and history.  The vanguard in this regard was provided by the University of Ibadan which by the eve of independence in 1960 began to develop new curricula for students in liberal arts and the social-sciences as well as adapting the physical and biomedical sciences for the African environment. The so-called Africanisation gathered pace in the civil service, the church and the judiciary and it was only a matter of time before Africans began to occupy the commanding heights of the economy and the politics of Nigeria and this had its cultural dimension in African pride and the assertion of what was called the “African personality”.

    The post-colonial cultural development

    With independence in Nigeria came a rising tide of expectations.  People wanted increased prices for their primary produce like cocoa, groundnuts, palm kernel and palm oil as well as cotton, rubber, hides and skins on which post-independence Nigerian economy depended.  The various governments of Nigeria tried to meet the expectation of the people but they were not always successful.  With the decline in producer price of farm produce, there was increasing migration of the youth to swell the urban conurbation of Lagos, Ibadan, Kano, Kaduna, Jos, Maiduguri, Benin, Aba and Port Harcourt.  The cities therefore became melting pots of cultures. The various governments particularly the one in the western part of the country spent vast sums of money from accumulated funds of the marketing boards on social welfare schemes such as education and health and urban planning and renewal. 

    The cities became more attractive to the youth who left the dreary existence of the villages for the cities in what has been appropriately described as rural-urban migration phenomenon.  With too many people in the cities the infrastructure could not cope and there began a gradual and slippery slope to a situation of urban decay and dilapidation. Crime increased and there was a corrosion of values everywhere.  Money became the most desirable object without consideration of how it was acquired.  Bribery graft, fraud and corruption alien to our culture have become the order of the day. 

    This phenomenon was accentuated and exacerbated by the incursion of the military into governance.  Force was seen as a veritable instrument of success.  There has been growing culture of aggression in Nigeria and a noticeable breakdown of the culture of respect for elders and others.  Some have ascribed this decline to exploding population which has led to increased competition for resources and jobs particularly among the people.

    Nigerian fraudulent practices have even gone international with advance fee fraud and drug and human trafficking being increasingly, associated with Nigerians.  Surprisingly or perhaps because of the prevailing hardship, the religion of Islam and Christianity have witnessed revival.  The orthodox aspect or traditions of these religions are increasingly challenged by sometimes extremist or even millenarian tendencies sometimes leading to a clash of votaries of these religious. Sometimes the battle-line as in the North of Nigeria is between the traditional Islamic religion and groups preaching a Shiite form of Islam in a largely Sunni milieu.  Among the Christian orthodox traditions such as the Catholics and Protestants have seen huge erosion of membership who now troop to the so-called Pentecostal churches.

    Founding of churches have become big business and many of the churches have gone beyond what orthodox Catholic and Protestants missions used to do in terms of establishment of schools and hospitals.  Some now have housing estates where the ordinary lives of the people are rigidly controlled.  Pentecostalism shares much in common with Islam in the sense that it is not just a religion but a way of life.  This has radically affected the culture of Christians, particularly as it affects marriages, child naming and burials.  The absence of government has also been replaced by the role Pentecostal churches play in the lives of Nigerians.  Some now provide educational facilities from kindergarten to universities.  This is also being emulated rather slowly by Muslims in a struggle for the souls of the people. 

    While all this is going on, there is also the effect of globalization on Nigerian culture.  Our economy is open to the rest of the world and with this openness come the importation of all kinds of things namely wine, food, films, educational materials and other things promoting particularly western culture.  It is not unheard of nowadays to hear calls for gay rights that would have been met with the worst kind of reaction in the past.  The modes of dressing of the youth even the kind of English spoken are pitifully American.  The dot.com generations have also exploited computers to perpetrate fraud internationally.  Nigerians like other people in the globalised world are not immune to the spread of pornography and even paedophilia and other kinds of sexual perversion unheard of in times past.

    Happy people, poor country

    Nigerians are credited to be one of the happiest people on earth.  Whether this is deserved will always remain a moot question.  The fact however remains that Nigerians generally speaking are “happy-go-lucky” people.  This probably applies more to Southern Nigerians who celebrate virtually every important landmark in life, particularly child birth, birthdays, marriages, graduation, promotions and eventually death.

    Culture is dynamic and a living culture must necessarily welcome accretions from other cultures.  Before the coming of colonialism Nigerian cultural plurality was also not static.  There were contacts among the people brought together in the Nigerian state.  What is obvious is that the spatial distribution of the various ethnic groups has been bridged by modern means of communication and transportation and by an increasingly centralized state.  The result of this is a developing national culture.  Nigerians usually stand out among Africans as aggressive, confident and clever people.  There are of course negative traits which can be attributed to Nigerians and which are traceable to the Nigerian environment. The post-colonial state with its emphasis on individualism and capitalism has also thrown up the desire to be successful by all means this is a feeling that is antithetical to the pre-colonial culture of communalism and everybody being everybody’s keeper; a feeling which has been amply demonstrated in the saying that it takes a village to train a child.  This is no longer the case.  This has been replaced by one being the architect of one’s destiny and God for us all and the devil takes the behind.

  • Medical education by control and command

    Medical education by control and command

    Since 2024, medical schools in Nigeria have been under the pressure of state and federal authorities to double their enrolment with little said about doubling their capacity to meet these commands by governments. When some of the governments are too much in a hurry as in the case of Ondo, Lagos and federal governments, they establish so-called medical universities as if these schools can exist in isolation of the biological and physical sciences and give them mandates to “produce” doctors as if doctors could be manufactured just like that!

    The ostensible reason for the urgency in medical training is the fact that young and old Nigerian doctors are going by the droves abroad or to other African countries for better opportunities and salaries and emoluments. It seems as if when medically trained people are in government, they also forget their training and they apply the same solution to an old problem. It never occurs to them that they could retain the services of their doctors by vastly improving the conditions of service of Nigerian doctors. I will never forget an experience of two doctor friends of mine, husband and wife, who could not afford to pay a rent of N100,000 a month for a one bed room apartment in Ibadan some years ago. This is after going through the rigour of medical education in Nigeria where doctors have sometimes to be jack of all trades doing the work of laboratory technologists along with their own. I have sympathy for doctors because of the terrible and sometimes filthy environment in which they practice and live and because I do make use of medical services as an elderly patient.

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    Politicians seem to have a mechanical view of doctors. When they hear that doctors have resigned and left for greener pastures, their knee jerk reactions is to “produce” instantly many more replacements as if doctors are pieces of manufactured goods that can just be turned out of medical factories. There is no thought about quality but quantity. Lagos State government simply established a medical university and gave it a command to “produce” 150 of them per year! We were not told whether the college of medicine of LASU would automatically become the new medical university. Where will the teachers to “produce” these doctors come from?

    Already, the existing teachers in the medical schools around have been poached and poached and the old and aging teachers can hardly cope. Unfortunately because Nigerian academics are so poorly paid, they always jump at administrative positions of being vice chancellors of medical universities or regular universities, instead of telling the people in government to keep their impossible missions to those hungry enough to jump at them. Any opportunity to be vice chancellors of some medical universities in an awkward and remote place will attract takers even though they know they cannot make a success of the mission.

    Doubling the intake of medical schools should normally lead to doubling the physical capacity of laboratories, medical libraries, numerical increase in numbers of staff, equipment, hospital beds and so on. It is sad that patients admitted into our so-called teaching hospitals have to provide their own buckets of water. The lifts don’t work and hefty men have to be hired by relatives of patients to carry patients up the higher floors in some of the teaching hospitals. Some of these hospitals operate in total darkness! When one sees some of our doctors struggle through life, one is frightened to surrender one’s lives into their hands. When some us go to medical clinics, we secretly enquire where the doctors attending to us are trained. If a doctor is poorly trained, it will show in the mastery of his or her art.

    I am told that the Nigerian trained doctors are highly prized abroad. Let us keep their quality high so that we don’t spoil one of the few professions in which we have distinguished ourselves. There is no need to spoil the market by producing inferior doctors because we want to meet a local need in a hurry. If the situation demands it, we can begin to train medical auxiliaries as they do in Cuba to fill the yawning gaps left by our fleeing doctors. In any case, nurses and pharmacists are already filling the gaps. We should be very careful about displaying our ignorance about medical education.

    There were times when Indian doctors were discriminated against worldwide because of the poor training in some Indian medical schools. India learnt a hard lesson and we don’t want to go through the Indian experience. I call on the Nigerian Medical and Dental Council to be alive to its responsibility and it should never allow politicians to force it to approve any poorly staffed and equipped medical school to operate. This is a solemn responsibility which it must take very seriously. Some people glibly say doctors should be bonded for some years because they are trained at public expense. I think we are still a democratic country and everyone should enjoy fundamental human rights which includes freedom of movement and choice of where to live and work. If we are to stop doctors from leaving the country, what are we going to do to lawyers, engineers, nurses, pharmacists, pilots and other well trained people but poorly remunerated?

    What I have said about emergency medical schools goes for the mushroom universities springing up all over Nigeria. Many of them are only universities in name only. We now have universities where laboratory equipment and books are borrowed from neighbouring universities whenever they are to be accredited. Many of them are staffed by roving associate lecturers and professors teaching in some cases in as many as four universities to beat the economic privations caused by poor salaries. The permanent staffs in some of the universities are also sometimes not fit for purpose despite all the efforts of the National Universities Commission to impose standards. Some of the vice chancellors are not even professors of long standing if they are standing at all! These are terrible things for one who has been in the system for many years to say.

    I blame the academics themselves for not standing for quality in their institutions because of the fear of losing their jobs.  People in government, whether state or federal, also share substantial share in bringing down the standards of education in the country. The public primary and secondary schools have for a long time collapsed because the people responsible for their standards have removed their children from these schools and taken them to private paying schools. The schools the public attend are patronized by the vast majority of our people who have no alternative. Incredibly as it may sound, poor people are also leaving the public schools for private schools that they can barely afford. Private school education is a big business in Nigeria.  There are a few good schools at the secondary level where alumni are involved in their running and funding. Some of these alumni-aided schools are justifiably run as if they are private schools because students have to pay fees. Our country is a capitalist economy and he who pays the piper dictates the tune.

    The collapse of the education sector is gradually moving upward into the university level and governments are establishing universities without first finding out whether they have the resources and staff and even the students from the poorly run secondary schools. Private universities have become bragging rights and many of them are universities in name only! Establishment of universities have become part of the so-called democratic dividends!  The announcements of them have been part of after dinner speeches by our political overlords.