The Nation Newspaper

Category: Jide Osuntokun

  • Prayers and advice to government

    In 1983, the Nigerian military after a disastrous federal elections marred by flagrant rigging took over power and chose the then Major-General Muhammadu Buhari as head of state. He issued a quotable statement that we have no other country than Nigeria and that emigrating was not an option for young Nigerians and that we were going to stay in our country and solve our country’s problems together. History seems to be repeating itself bearing out George Santayana’s dictum that those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. The same Buhari is faced with how to get Nigeria out of its economic quagmire caused by mismanagement of national resources, stealing, squander mania and collapse of the international price of hydrocarbons on which Nigeria’s economy has unfortunately depended over these years. The first administration of Buhari ably supported by Major-General Tunde Idiagbon dealt harshly with those who were found guilty of financial roguery as any military regime would have done. Those who were accused were dealt with through the legal system and no special military tribunals were set up. Revisionist historians and commentators sometimes give the impression that the military government of that time operated without following the law. It was only in the case of drug smuggling that some two young men were made to face the death penalty by the wrong application of a decree that was made retroactive. The other dark spot of that regime was the law of sedition that made publication of government secrets punishable by imprisonment. His Attorney General, the Distinguished and reputable Onitsha lawyer, Chike  Offordile  ensured that necessary decrees were crafted to deal with terrible moral and financial turpitude of those days. Ganiyu  Fawehinmi who cannot be said to be a military apologist supported the steps taken by that regime to whip us Nigerians into path of discipline and rectitude.

    I am recalling those days to compare with today when the president seems to be taking his time to avoid repeating any mistake of those days. We of course do not have the luxury of time. We are a rather impatient country and rightly so. We have waited for good governance for too long and now that it seems we may have one we are rightly and justifiably in a hurry to see the dividends of good governance.

    The president himself told the BBC in a recent interview that when a fish is rotten from the head, it affects the entire body of the fish meaning that since he is not corrupt he would prevent others from being corrupt. It is not going to be like a previous regime that says stealing is not corruption implying that stealing is tolerable! This is the first time we are having a regime since independence that sees a nexus between underdevelopment and corruption. There is enough in this country to take care of our needs and not our wants and our greed. There is a commitment on the part of the executive for good governance and transparency. Perhaps its example will resonate with the legislative and the judicial branches of government across the country. Sometimes we neglect to focus on the corruption in the judiciary because  of the arcane nature of the institution. A corrupt judiciary is in fact more dangerous to the welfare of the state than corruption in the other two branches of government.  This is because of the finality of judicial pronouncement. After the Supreme Court has decided, there is no other body that can countermand that decision. This is why we say the courts are the final saviour and arbiter for the common man. If we can curb corruption in all the branches of government, then we can breathe a sigh of relief and hope for good things to come the way of our country.

    If there is minimal corruption then prudent management of national resources will automatically follow. Questions of misappropriation, misapplication and misuse of resources will be reduced to minimum. Funds meant for the military will not be given to politicians. Loans secured for railway modernization will not be diverted to politicians as happened in the last regime and any one caught doing the wrong thing will be dealt with according to law. Judges will not be bought to deliver judgement according to the illegal deposits in their banks and paid holidays for them and their families by criminals. There was a case of  corruption involving a former governor who was facing 40 allegations before a so called learned judge . He promptly threw out all the charges and pronounced the former governor innocent. This same governor was seized by INTERPOL at the request of Britain to face same charges in London. He was not only convicted, his lawyer, wife and two girl friends are serving term with him in Her Majesty’s prison. This reminds me what a friend told me in Lagos some years ago that if he had a case in court rather than hire lawyers, he would take the money for lawyers to purchase judgment in the judge’s chamber! While trying to uproot corruption from state institutions, we must not lose sight of the judiciary.

    The economic situation will present the greatest challenge to this regime. I sometimes get angry when I hear apparently educated people blaming this government for the falling value of the naira vis-à-vis foreign currencies. It is simple arithmetic. Crude oil on which we are hopelessly dependent has fallen from a high of 140 dollars a barrel to 36 dollars and it is still going down. This has led to a diminution of foreign money accruable into our foreign reserves with the consequence of more naira in hands than dollar reserves. To strengthen the naira, we have either to export more produce apart from hydrocarbons or drastically reduce imports. There is no magic in this. If you bring a professor of economics from Harvard or the World Bank, he or she would not perform any magic. So the way forward is to find other sources of revenue apart from oil. We can increase taxes and also the efficiency of tax collection. The easy one is to increase Value Added Tax which is tax on consumption which will largely fall on the elite. But everybody must be made to pay taxes no matter how small. This is the way to make the people feel they own the government. They will therefore be more vigilant in protecting government property and calling to order those who think government property belongs to nobody. All these measures are for home consumption. A strong government at home will be respected abroad. This is where in comes in the exploitation of our relations with the outside world.

    This government must use its contact through membership in OPEC to prevail on its Arab members not to flood the world oil market with overproduction of crude. It is not in anybody’s interest. Non OPEC countries like Mexico, Canada, Brazil, Russia and some of the countries in the Caucasus must be made to realize that the collapse of the oil economy globally will not be in the interest of all. If the world goes into another recession so soon after eight years of the last recession, we will all suffer. It will be a difficult sell but we should try by asking for an extra ordinary meeting of OPEC to discuss a coordinated rescue plan for the global oil market. But charity must begin at home. We should put all efforts to engender a disconnect from dependency on oil, find other sources of income from agriculture, light manufacturing, efficient tax regime and exploitation of solid minerals. We are not the worst hit of all OPEC countries. We can grow all we need to feed ourselves and to export. We therefore need not be desperate.

    These are difficult times. We need not deny it. Financing our budget through borrowing is not as strange as some economic illiterates who have been criticizing the government would make us believe. Japan has the highest rate of borrowing in the world at 356 percent of its GDP and nobody is wailing that the country would soon go under. The USA is a close second in the rate of borrowing. As long as borrowing is not for consumption, the country can grow its economy out of this short-term debt. Those who are shouting about deficit budget are the same people who brought us to our financial knees.

    Whatever government is going to do or is already doing cannot be achieved without hard work. Our people must be told that they have to work hard and there is no more free lunch anywhere anymore. They have to be carried along. Many toes would have to be stepped upon physically and figuratively. Because of this the enemies of Nigeria both at home and abroad would like to destabilize the country or even overthrow this government through fanning of the ember of religious and ethnic fanaticism and division. Eternal vigilance and survival is the first law of nature. While government must follow the rule of law generally, it must not lower its guard and allow its enemies to deal a mortal blow to it.

  • Matters miscellaneous for year 2016

    How time flies! Year 2016 is already here. January is a month of deep thoughts for me. Two most important people in my life were born in the month of January. My illustrious brother, Benjamin Oluwakayode Osuntokun of evergreen memory was born on the day of Epiphany – January 6, 1935. If he had been alive, he would have been 81 years on January 6. The Kayode Osuntokun Trust will be celebrating his life and achievement with the usual annual lecture today January 7, appropriately at the Benjamin Oluwakayode Osuntokun Auditorium on the grounds of the University College Hospital, Ibadan where he spent almost all his working life of medical research and practice. This year’s  lecturer is a young  and brilliant Professor Olufunmilayo Falusi Olopade who is Walter L. Palmer Distinguished  Service Professor and Director, Centre for Global Health and Associate Dean for Global Health, University of Chicago, one of the most prestigious universities on planet earth. It is gratifying to note that given the right environment, our people perform excellently abroad and this young lady is not only a credit to her parents and Nigeria but to humanity at large. It is most fitting that the Trust has finally found a worthy lady to break into the group of eminent scholars who in the past 20 years have given lectures to celebrate a worthy academic forebear.

    January 10 is the birthday of  Abiodun Olayinka Adekoya, the girl God chose for me to be a wife. Even though God called her home almost 13 years ago, she will always live and be alive in my heart. People called her rose because of her light skin colour but I like to remember her as diamond because diamonds are forever. Whenever I remember my wife especially in the quiet of most nights, I shed tears most time involuntarily remembering the good old days and wishing to relive them. Loved ones of course never dies; they live in our memories and in the children and grandchildren left behind. Indeed my son has named his lovely daughter Abiodun after his mother. Wale my nephew has also given us the joy of a Kayode Jr. having named his son Kayode after his father and we also have six foot plus Benjamin in  my nephew Segun’s son named after his father. The Yoruba say Ina ku feeru boju ogede ku fomo re ropo meaning  a dying fire may be covered by ashes only to come alive and plantain trump always brings a fresh offshoot from the old trunk. In short man never dies because he continues living in his offsprings. Heaven needs not be impatient afterall, we will all be going there!  We on this side of the heavenly divide have tried to remember our loved ones through academic prizes and funding visiting professorhips. The Kayode Osuntokun Estate has done this in the University of Ibadan and I have instituted a prize for best microbiology graduate in Redeemers University in memory of my wife because that was her field of study. The Osuntokun family, joined by Kayode’s friend, Chief Dele Falegan have also endowed a large prize for best graduating medical student in Ekiti State University. I left Ekiti State University  where I was Pro-Chancellor with endowment for annual prizes in Law, Engineering, Social sciences, Humanities and Environmental Sciences. These prizes are to be awarded in perpetuity. This is my hope and not wishful thinking! I say this because our universities, incredibly, as it may sound, are not as organized and careful as they should be in continuously managing endowment funds. There is evidence of monies for endowment being lumped with general university money and being spent or stolen to the point that endowment monies are misapplied, misappropriated or outrightly stolen!

    This brings me to banking in Nigeria. Many of our banks are robbing us with all kinds of spurious charges; only GTB is not guilty of this. In fact GTB does not levy  account holders who are over 70 years any charges. This is unlike UBA which levies all kinds of charges sometimes running to over a thousand naira every month. I hate to say this: the owners of the bank go on splashing their unearned income all over the place in global and continental do-goodness while fleecing us here at home. Imagine if say five million accounts are debited a thousand naira for all kinds of charges for routine banking services of receiving salaries or pensions, that would  amount to five billion unearned income every month. They play on our intelligence that few will complain about a few thousand naira which will on the other hand add up to billions of naira. The CBN should step into this and stop the banks from taxing our pensions and deposits. Of course I know that taxes have to be paid on interest earned on deposits but not on routine transactions of withdrawals and payment of bills. While on the banks,  must we  be threatened by all kinds of fraudsters asking us to click on sites or be disconnected because of the  non-compliance with BVN  registration despite the fact that we have done this over and over? Sometimes our ATM cards are rendered inoperative  or cheques embarrassingly dishonored because our birthdays in the banks do not agree with the one on the BVN! Banks send me congratulatory messages on dates arbitrarily chosen for me by my banks and banks that I do not have accounts in. I even get bank statement from one bank that I never had account in! When you move from banks to GSM lines, it is the same scam. One is often threatened with disconnection because one communication body has said ones details are not properly captured. Deductions for services not rendered are made from one’s accounts and one is incessantly bothered by calls asking one to join for deal or the other. If I am to be reporting in the offices of these telecom companies every time I am asked to do this, it will be a merry go round kind of life. We go to banks to give details of who we are, we do the same for telecoms, same for national ID,  for passport, for drivers licenses, hospital cards, ATM cards, libraries cards, ID cards at places of employment and even hotel cards! Why cannot all these details be shared by those who need them? Do all these electronic devices involved not expose us to certain dose of radiation? In civilized countries, data is shared among several bodies rather the waste of time we are subjected to in this country providing the same data over and over and year in year out. What is happening in our country is that we are being dragooned into modernity without necessary infrastructure to facilitate this. All I can say is Lord have mercy!

    I hope this hard-pressed government will be able to find resources to repair our collapsed roads. I remember Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala telling us during Obasanjo’s administration that the money saved from payment of foreign debts after we paid in one lump sum our debts to foreign countries and commercial institutions will be used to fix our collapsed infrastructure. She also said the Abacha loot will also be used for the same. Nothing like this was done. Rather, the same Okonjo-Iweala allegedly transferred about $350 million one night to Dasuki to be shared among party men on the eve of the last election. The same woman is apparently back at her desk in Washington after her Trojan assignment of putting our country in economic distress where the West will have us belong. Good job madam economic whiz kid!

    This government must still fix the roads whether it likes it or not . I mean we cannot postpone living! If we have to install toll gates along our roads as long as these monies are properly managed and the money ploughed back into road maintenance, so be it. Government must also collect taxes from all adults to improve the quality of our lives and not to lavish on government officials and parliamentarians at federal state and local government levels. The oil and gas global market are not likely to recover this year. In fact oil price may go down below $20 a barrel. This is why I cannot understand the careless talk by some government officials that pump price of gasoline may be slashed below the current official price. What Nigerians are yearning for is availability not unreliable low prices. People are buying fuel at a price ranging between N120 and N180 depending on where one is. If fuel is available at N100, Nigerians will adjust to that fact and people should stop raising our hopes about cheap fuel only to dash them. We will have cheap fuel only when we have full refining capacity in Nigeria.

  • Gulliver’s Troubles

    Nigeria, unlike in recent years of plenty, is not ending the year 2015 with a bang but with a whimper.  Our economy is in doldrums not because of what the present government has done or not done but because of years of lack of planning and foresight. President Muhammad Buhari in this regard is twice unlucky. When he first came as head of state in 1983, the government before him had so mismanaged the economy that we were down to barter trade and extreme rationing of foreign exchange. The Shagari and Jonathan governments shared the unenviable records of rampant corruption, irresponsibility and squander-mania that one can say they were two sides of the same coin. If these two governments had not been changed and had been allowed to continue in their corrupt ways, there would have been a break down of law and order if not an outright revolution. The mind-boggling revelation of the corruption in the Jonathan government bears an uncanny similarity with that of the Shagari government that one will be pardoned if one were to say history has repeated itself. This raises in my mind a philosophical question whether people learn at all from history. This is why we say when history repeats itself it is a tragedy. Those found guilty during the first Buhari administration were dealt with severely only for Babangida to come and pardon them and returned their loot to them. Some of them are again involved in the present tragedy. The economy in the homeland has run aground and the international economic situation is not favourable to a quick fix unless a major war was to break out in the Middle East. May God forbid. We therefore must embark on quick restructuring of the economy. There is too much money being spent everywhere on administrative overhead. There are too many states, too many legislators at federal, state and the 774 local government levels. This is the time to begin to think of a unicameral federal legislature as well as part-time legislators at all levels of democratic representation. We have gotten used to eating fatted meat that it will be difficult cutting out the fat from the meat. But in our own interest and for our health, we must cut out the fat from our flabby institutions. This will not be easy and it will come with a lot of pain. Like necessary surgery we must do it to save ourselves. Anything that can be done to reverse the present situation at all levels of government where recurrent expenditure is double that of capital expenditure must be done. This will involve government stepping on the toes of vested interests. Government also has to ask all those who have embezzled state funds to disgorge and vomit them before being sent to jail. Any thing short of this will not send the right message and lesson. I have a feeling that this is our last chance in this country to get our trajectory right.

    Any government doing the right thing by the people will not be popular with entrenched interest of those who want to have wealth without sweat. The government must therefore secure itself from those who would want to violently change it.

    Survival is the first law of nature. Governments are instituted for the good of the people but there are evil men out there who want to continue ruining this country and we must not allow them. Some of these people will hide under religious movements of all types to destabilize the state. We have enough trouble with Boko Haram. Others will hide under the camouflage of ethnic associations agitating for one thing or the other. Others may come in form of trade unionism, whatever the hue and colour in which they may come they must be engaged in dialogue and persuasion. Any reasonable person in this country must know that the economic problem facing us is global. During the years of plenty, we neither saved nor prepared for a rainy and lean day and years. We ate our fruits with the seeds.

    But honestly speaking we are not in the worst situation in Africa or the world. Of course we are impatient as a people and giving to whining and complaining. Whatever we are facing right now is our collective fault and we must face the problem together and not give the people the feeling of a quick solution to a problem that has been festering for years. The solid minerals exploitation touted as a way out of our economic problem will take time. We have to find investors ready to participate in their exploitation. We also have to ensure there is market for them. Whatever solid minerals available must be commercially plentiful that they will last years and exploiting them must be environmentally sustainable. I believe that there is enough study done by our department of geological surveys to determine which of our solid minerals the world may want.

    I read what the Minister of Information and Culture was reported to have said about tourism sector replacing the dwindling fortune of gas and crude oil exports. I just laughed. I want to remind the Honourable Minister, Alhaji Lai Muhammad what Chief Obafemi Awolowo said while running for president in 1979 that if he won the first thing he would do will be to ban importation of used clothes, stork fish and close down the tourism board. He correctly stated that only a mad person will come as a tourist to Nigeria. It is not that we do not have things people will be curious about, but where is the infrastructure for tourism? No roads, no railways, no light, no water, no security! We need first to put in place necessary things first before inviting the whole world to come for a visit. I agree no country is perfect and our short-coming may be due to our size and huge population. As Chief Awolowo continued there may be people who have enjoyed themselves so much that they may want to experience suffering in Nigeria. We cannot bank on suffer-heads coming as tourists to Nigeria as a basis on which to build an enduring economy.

    All is not lost. We must all be ready to work harder and be patriotic asking not what our country can do for us but what we can do for our country remembering what J.F. Kennedy told his American compatriots in 1961. We must go back to agriculture, not the cutlass and hoe kind but mechanized agriculture. Government will have to buy ploughs and rent these out to farmers and encourage young people to go into farming. All textile mills in the country should be resuscitated. This will allow us to export textile products to the USA under the rubric of African Growth and Opportunities Act (AGOA) which other African countries have enjoyed while we were drunk on oil. The cotton for these textile mills must be home grown cotton. We must rehabilitate all tree crops like cocoa, rubber, palm oil, shea butter, and gum Arabic. We must also encourage massive growing of soya beans, groundnuts, maize, yams and cassava.  All schools like in my youthful years must have farms for practical agriculture.  We must not sink money into the bottomless hole of wheat production. We tried it during the Shagari and Babangida years with abject failure. We must go back to nature for sustenance. It is as simple as that. We must support animal husbandry through ranching and encouragement of our pastoralists to settle.

    There is so much to do that there is no time to waste. There are enough patriots all over this country that there is need to harness their ideas and efforts for purpose of production without being bogged down by innumerable meetings. We must get cracking so to say. In all these government must carry the people along including sensible members of the opposition who appreciate the predicament in which we find ourselves. Communication is very important. All ministers must give accounts of what they are doing through regular press conferences. The intelligentsia, that critical mass in the society must be carried along through periodic lectures by ministers in tertiary institutions. All Nigerians must pay taxes and they must be told what their taxes are going to be used for. In all these government must be accountable to the people. This is the only way we are going to get out of this quagmire. God will make a way where there seems to be no way. Happy New Year Nigeria.

  • Killing Lagos softly

    Some weeks ago I was in Lagos for an urgent business and I was shocked by the totally degraded environment of the city. This was at the height of a Saharan dust blowing across the whole of West Africa but it appeared more serious in Lagos because it was compounded by the smog hanging over the city. This smog was created by the exhaust from articulated trucks and petrol tankers evacuating petrol from the ports. The horrendous traffic snarl on the roads did not help. Vehicles remained on one spot for hours spewing carbon monoxide into the air. Added to this is the heavy human traffic in the town.

    These people have to be fed hence God knows how many pots were on open fire heating up the putrid air in the city and adding to the warming the city of 20milllion operating without the technological know how that would have been available to a city of this size in  a more civilized environment. While this was going on, many cities in China were faced with the same problem and city dwellers were shown covering their mouths and noses with protective gears. Of course in our own city of Lagos, people were breathing in this unsafe air totally oblivious of its consequences. There was no warning from government agencies and only God knows how many people suffering from respiratory diseases would have died.

    I can understand the bad smog in China with its 1.3billion people and its cities like Beijing and Shanghai of millions of people. But we should not be faced in Lagos with this kind of a killer of a smog I witnessed. This is the time when the federal government should insist that all vehicles plying the roads in our country must have catalytic converters to handle vehicular gas emission to at least purify the exhaust spewing out of the trucks, trailers and automobiles. The population movement to Lagos may have reached a tipping point when a solution would have to be found. Why can’t other ports be developed to diversify the ocean trade of Nigeria so that we do not put all our eggs in one basket? Between Lagos and Calabar are several ports crying to be developed to relieve Lagos of the unbearable and killing burden it is bearing. We must not ride a willing horse to death.

    It is unfortunate that all the plans to revive the railways in the past were clever plots to loot the national treasury, including as we are now told, loans taken from China which were deliberately diverted to other use to benefit the money-picking hands of political big-wigs in the recently defeated government of Goodluck Jonathan. If the railways were usable, the thousands of tankers and trucks on our roads and at the ports of Lagos would not have been necessary because heavy haulage in all civilized countries is done by rail. Imagine if we did not have the trucks and tankers on Lagos roads and ports, the place would have been saner.

    Those of us who grew up in Lagos remember how lovely Apapa  reservation area was in the old days being the other high-brow area apart from Ikoyi. This was before Victoria Island and of course Lekki. I know an in-law of mine who after working for many years in Saudi Arabia returned home and bought a property in Apapa. He is now regretting it because he is cut off  from all friends and relatives because no one in his correct sense will embark on a journey to visit anybody in Apapa no matter how much love one has for  such a relation. The vehicular madness in Lagos has made Apapa a no-go area. In December, most of Lagos roads are clogged with vehicles ostensibly those shopping for Christmas and the new year.

    The unloveable situation in Lagos is compounded by high rate of crime. The urchins known as area boys and those hawking all kinds of goods on the roads ranging from Asian junks to life chickens and other food stuffs use whatever they are hawking as a camouflage for robbery when it is dark after six o’clock in the evening. This has further reduced life in Lagos to hell on earth. The unavailability of electricity most of the time has led to everybody turning himself to power generating bodies. Virtually everybody generates his or her own power creating a nuisance in terms of noise and carbon emission.

    On top of this comes the religious houses of  some Christian and Muslim sects who compete with each other on who can make the loudest noise by the volume of their loud speakers. As soon as the Muslims finish their evening prayers, some Christian sects will drum through out the night and hand over to the Muslims who will wake  everybody up for their morning prayers.  Some of the Lagos people live in Ogun State but work in Lagos and even some who live in the outskirts of Lagos wake up as early as 4 a.m to hit the roads so that they can get to their offices at 8 a.m. The same people will not reach their homes until 11 p.m. It is a miracle that people do not go berserk and  kill others. The hardship in Lagos leads to  infidelity on  the part of husband and wife and lack of care and proper up bringing of children.

    Why does anybody subject himself or herself to this hell on earth? The answer is that there is no alternative. All the jobs are in Lagos. Rather than be jobless, up country people come to Lagos to die. I remember attending a conference of world cities when I was living in Germany. I proudly announced that I was from Lagos and that the city had over 10 million people. The mayor of Karlsruhe, a beautiful German city in the south of the country before I finished my introduction told me no African country can handle a city of that magnitude. I did not agree then but I now agree. The multitude of people in Lagos on the margin of society will help themselves and the Lagos government by returning home to their states where they will live a better life. When conditions for life in Lagos becomes impossible, the Lagos government supported by the federal government may do something drastic and dramatic before people kill Lagos .

  • Hard times and time for understanding

    The price of crude oil fell to US$36 a barrel recently and even at that Nigeria is even finding it difficult to sell its sweet crude oil. This is because of a glut in the global market due mainly to the fact of overproduction in Saudi Arabia where a nation of around 12 million is producing almost 10 million barrels of crude oil a day. This is also coupled by America’s self-sufficiency in energy because of its tremendous shale oil and fracking gas production. The USA used to buy about 60 percent of Nigeria’s production. It is today not buying any oil from Nigeria. In fact there is serious talk in the USA that it should begin to export oil. The USA is now so comfortable that it refused to allow a consortium of Canadian and American companies complete a trans-American pipeline that would have been taking crude oil across America to the Gulf coast from Canada. The refusal ostensibly was based on environmental considerations but in actual fact this was because the USA can now afford to play the environmental card because it does not need additional oil to compete with struggling American oil companies. The fact is that this project has merely been mothballed and would be resuscitated in the future particularly if the Republican Party wins the presidential election next year. Leaders of the party deny that the global environment has been abused because of industrial processes and therefore needs no abatement measures being taken. This is in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence. The import of this for Nigeria is that we have not seen how low the price of crude oil will drop. The slowdown in Indian and Chinese economies and consequent reduced demand for Nigeria’s export of hydrocarbons has created a buyers market and crash of oil prices. These two huge markets in Asia are critical to oil price regime. The oil-producing Middle East is right at their backyard and transport costs compared with costs in transporting African oil is lower. Furthermore, Iran is coming into the global market in 2016 in a big way following the agreement of that country with the international community to put a hold on its hidden nuclear weapons programme. Russia, the other big oil producer needs all the money it can get from oil to maintain the illusion of a major power and its military operation in Syria and because of these, it is producing as much oil as its capacity can bear. Current estimates put its production at about nine million barrels per day. There is therefore oversupply of the global oil market.

    What is to be done? If the Saudis can be persuaded that its strategy of driving aground American shale oil and fracking gas production is not working as expected even though some small companies have folded up, then appeal can be made to that country to reduce its oil production. This is a big If, because this desert kingdom and its innumerable princes have gotten so used to trillions of dollars of oil money for its political stability that it will be a Herculean effort persuading them to change course. OPEC should be persuaded to meet in extraordinary session to cut production. Countries like Mexico and Russia should be invited to coordinate their oil production with that of OPEC to save the industry in the interest of the global economy because at the end of the day, if the countries depending on energy production collapse economically with resultant political ramifications, the whole world will be destabilized. Cheap oil may be good for some but at the end of the day it is not good for the global economy. The world needs in the short term, huge financial resources to operationalize the COP 21 global agreement on climate change recently worked out in Paris. Critical to that agreement is innovation and adaptation and every country will need resources to carry out these mechanisms.

    We have been talking about economic diversification in Nigeria for decades but the easy oil money has dulled our collective brains. Now the chicken has come home to roost. Serious diversification and clean technology-led industrial production will take time. Our agriculture, neglected over the years of easy money cannot be revived by a wave of the hand. Even the ballyhooed solid minerals sector will need all effort at organization, correct legal regime and attraction of direct foreign investment. In spite of all these obstacles and impediments, we cannot just lie down doing nothing waiting for better times to come in an uncertain future. We must do something. A campaign to rationalize the use of foreign reserves must begin. Mbonu Ojike in the 1950s asked Nigerians to boycott what is boycott-able. We have to embrace that philosophy now. It will come with a cost. This is where communication comes in. Government at all levels must explain to Nigerians that the time of easy life has come to an end. No more champagne, red and white wine, brandies and whiskies, fancy suits and shirts. This is the time to make our tailors work and whoever is ashamed to wear made in Nigeria clothing must be ready to look for funds outside available scarce resources. The ministry of information and culture and indeed all ministries must help the president to pass the message to all Nigerians to be patriotic. Those who brought down the economy through outright looting and wastage of foreign reserves must be tried and jailed. Punishment must be sure, certain and swift. No more prevarication and wringing of hands about what to do about corruption. Whatever has been collected from looters must be made public and those involved publicly shamed. This is the only way to prevent recovered money being looted again as appears to have been the case in the Jonathan administration.

    Critics who are going around about Buhari not performing must be challenged to tell us what they would have done in face of a global economic meltdown we are facing where in Greece the rate of unemployment is 60 percent and the situation in southern Europe and the Balkans generally is just slightly better. While everyone agrees there is need for responsible opposition, but no one must be allowed to misinform our people that the president does not care or love his people or that he is punishing a section of the people because he is a hard man and an uncaring soldier! This uncouth criticism must be confronted head on. This government is our last chance to get it right. The difficult time we are facing is the right time to put us on the right trajectory so that when good times return we will be well set on a path of frugality, rectitude and integrity rather than on the path of waste, stealing and squander-mania which previously prevailed. In this regard all branches of government must show the light so that the people can find their way. The recent splashing of billions of Naira by the Senate to buy SUVs is not the right way to lead and the decision should be rescinded. This is also not the time for anybody to be agitating for any form of salary increase rather we should all be helping government and thereby ourselves to build a strong country with a virile and sustainable economy. Nigerians must learn to work and work hard. An economy based on unbridled importation of all sorts of junks from India and China and Indonesia is not a sound economy. We must learn to produce what we need.  We must not want what we cannot produce. An economy based on trading of other people’s goods is no economy. The time of political and economic frivolity is over – whether we like it or not!

  • Crisis of youth unemployment

    We do not have the reliable statistics but it seems incontrovertible that we as a nation are facing one of the worst unemployment problems of our modern history. At the end of British colonial rule in Nigeria and its immediate aftermath, educated Nigerians did not have to wander around for years looking unsuccessfully for work. University graduates up till the 1970s found jobs in the civil service, teaching, security services and in the rapidly expanding private and professional services. Even secondary schools graduates still found jobs in government and commercial sector of the economy. The end of the civil war in Nigeria witnessed stupendous expansion of the civil, military, and security services. This came on the heel of exponential growth of hydrocarbons production in Nigeria which paid for the various new jobs created after the war. The careless saying of some of our leaders then was that our problem was not money but how to spend it. We did not save some of the money accruing to us from the sudden wealth. The reason given for this was that our country was crying for development. The post-civil war years of rehabilitation and reconstruction also required the expenditure of huge amount of money which happily became available through the revenue generated by the relatively large volume of our oil production and the high prices the largely sulphur-free sweet crude brought to our national exchequer. The oil wealth also led to tremendous expansion of educational institutions at primary, secondary and tertiary levels. This expansion was not matched with expansion of job opportunities for young people streaming out of these institutions. Furthermore, our population has been growing geometrically leading to having too many mouths to feed. Our peasant agriculture has not been able to cope with this increase in population thus resulting in huge food import bill. This means that if we can have a modern agricultural sector, we will not only feed ourselves, we would be able to export agricultural produce but furthermore we would be able to provide millions of jobs for our people. Solid agricultural foundation will be the take off plank for our industrialization. We should be able to grow all the cotton needed for our textile mills. From textile production we should be able like most industrialized countries move to heavy industries.

    We have the basic ingredients for rapid development and massive employment. We have abundant human resources in terms of manpower. We have invested huge amount of resources in manpower development. It is of course true that our educational facilities are not adequate but they are sufficient to produce reasonably educated people who can be trained to learn through trial and error and on the job. We also have considerable amount of natural resources. We have reliable energy resources such as vast hydrocarbon resources like oil and gas and considerable amount of strategic raw materials like copper, columbite, bauxite, uranium to mention a few. We have vast agricultural land that can be put to use through rain fed agriculture and or through irrigation. Our country is traversed by two perennial rivers in the Niger and the Benue. We have other rivers and the right kind of topography that can be harnessed for hydro-electricity. We have a huge internal market of 170 million people and the ECOWAS market of almost 300million is open and available to us for exploitation. We do not only have vast arable land, we have abundant sunshine which is a source of renewable energy. The question then arises why we are still bogged down with this level of underdevelopment and consequent youth unemployment. The answer is leadership and lack of vision by those who have had the opportunity to lead us since independence. Our leaders, I must say, have been too timid in challenging our people to face the task of development. Instead of growing our economy through hard work they have taken the line of least resistance by merely collecting commissions from multinational corporations involved in our hydrocarbon exploitation. They have not turned the millions of jobless people lazing about into building corps deployed appropriately into where they are needed to build houses, construct roads, build dams, sea and airports under the supervision of technically competent people. Rather than do this, we farm out our jobs to foreign companies in Europe and in recent times to Chinese who are given huge contracts to build what Nigerians should be building themselves. We do not even learn the right kind of lessons with our interaction with the rest of the world. Our leaders troop to China to behold the achievements of the Chinese, an achievement that took the Chinese the last few decades to consolidate. They did not do this through speech-making but through tears, bruises and if necessary blood. There can be no crown without the thorns. We have enough examples of peoples who took great strides in development through sacrificial work. Russia leapfrogged the bourgeois stage of economic development into the industrial and space age through dint of hard work. I am always irritated by the number of beggars and underemployed youths on our city roads selling all sorts of junks for a living. If I am allowed to say, I will assert with all emphasis at my command that most of the young hustlers in Lagos belong to farm settlements. Our governments must have the guts and the nerves to force those who are physically able to work for a living  to do so rather than living at the margin and edge of society becoming drug-taking jetsam and flotsam of an increasingly hopeless and dangerous underclass of the lumpen proletariat.

    Critics of my analysis may be wondering whether I am recommending a communist or collectivist approach to solving our economic and unemployment problem. I am not interested in theory or ideology. All I know is that we have serious economic problem which we have to solve or we would all go under. I also know we can learn from other countries that were faced with the same kind of problem in the past and how they were able to solve them. We may not be Russians and Chinese. Neither are we Americans with their limitless resources in Gods own country. We may not be driven by an ideological credo but whatever will or may work, we should not shy from trying it.

    The present federal government is toying with the idea of paying N5,000 poor relief to jobless youth.  This is a good idea but it must be accompanied by work either on the farm or on building sites. Young engineers should be mobilized and given tools and deployed to build roads and houses and railways using the abundant labour of the unemployed who will receive the poor relief until through their yeoman effort, the economy revives and grows and normalcy and correct economic relations and right wages  return to the land. In order to do this legally, appropriate legislations must be passed declaring a state of economic emergency in the land. If needs be, we must for now close our borders to the useless importation of all kinds of junks from all over the world. We must eat what we grow and wear what we make and what our tailors sew and our shoemakers make. Imagine the millions of jobs that will be created in this way. By trying to do things ourselves and actually succeeding, we would be challenged to do more things and gradually we will start making better things and more sophisticated products. I remember how we used to disparage Japanese goods when I was young. The same talking down on Chinese products was visited on goods coming from China. But nobody is laughing at Japanese and Chinese products now. As the foremost and biggest Black Country in the world, we must challenge ourselves and even forget or ignore economic orthodoxy to achieve our goal of development, a development anchored on adding value to our God given resources. I am in not suggesting economic autarchy because we live in an interdependent world. What I am suggesting is that we must build on our comparative advantage in certain areas and bring what we have to the quantum of global products rather than our present situation of hopeless dependency on the western and Asian world leading to massive unemployment at home.

  • Education in Nigeria – 2

    The point I am making is that fundamental restructuring of the educational infrastructure is called for.  In the new educational architecture, there is a need to look critically at the technological and technical aspects of education. The present polytechnics are not doing what they are supposed to do. They need to focus on technological training of the young people. Polytechnics should stop mounting courses in business and social studies. There is no point in polytechnics offering courses in Public Administration, Business Administration, Finance and Mass Communication as they presently do. Without a sound technological education to back up small industries what the Germans call “mittelstand” which is the backbone of industrialisation and employment in advanced countries, Nigeria will not be taking the right strategy for industrialisation. Below the polytechnics, we also need to focus on technical schools and colleges to train artisans like carpenters, bricklayers, draughtsmen, electricians that would be needed in industries. The present ridiculous situation whereby carpenters, bricklayers, electricians and plumbers are recruited from Benin, Togo and Ghana in the absence of good tradesmen in Nigeria should be reversed through expansion of training facilities for these types of workers in our country. There is also a need to bring into the educational scheme tradesmen and their journey-men like tailors, mechanics, electricians, plumbers  hair-dressers and so on into some kind of arrangement with the technical schools, so that young people coming through this informal system can be certified as ready for work. The Germans and Japanese do this with considerable success. All these will need a radical rethinking by our educational planners away from the present situation of over-emphasis on certificates to the neglect of the practical aspect of education.

    I am happy the new government appears seized with the problem of education by suggesting full students accommodation in the universities. I am not sure that this is the solution . Yes, more hostels should be built. The universities libraries and laboratories must be modernized and  be well-equipped. Teachers must be encouraged to stay and scholarship must be provided for the training of graduate assistants. Lecturers must be trained and retrained. They must enjoy study leave and sabbatical leave and must be adequately remunerated. But where will the funds for all this come from? Students and their parents will have to contribute to their training. There is nowhere in the world where higher education is free. No  good thing can be free. The situation where governors and president of the country will suddenly for political expediency, cut university fees to N25,000 a year in some states, payable twice  does not make sense. This is like saying school fees have been pegged to less than 100 pounds. This singular action brought down state universities  and some of their federal counterparts to a state of penury and inability to pay teachers and other ancillary staff and to teach students. The outcome of their irresponsible acts have so embarrassed the governors and  the federal educational authorities that they do not know what to do. They are too ashamed to eat their own words and they have no money to give to their universities. This is one of the ways state and federal universities have been undermined by their proprietors  – the federal and state governments. Like the case of primary and secondary schools, the private universities in particular those not founded for profit may have to fill the void being left by the public universities that are dying because of too much interference.

    There may be nothing wrong with this scenario  of private universities filling the void in advanced countries like the United States and Great Britain. But even there, all good universities can access government research grants and development assistance. For a developing country like Nigeria, the role of the state in educational development must be supreme and not secondary. This is because the role of our higher institutions in physical and material development of our country cannot be overestimated. But we must begin from the beginning by wholesale revamping and restructuring of primary education, then move on to do the same thing at secondary level; then the improvement would reflect in higher education. This suggestion is not that the private sector’s role should diminish;  rather what is suggested is that the state must not abdicate its responsibility to private entrepreneurs. Their role must be secondary while the state must play the dominant role.

    In a new educational structure, the question of the curriculum would have to be tackled. The debate between functional or  esoteric education would have to be sorted out. Does the universities prepare young people for the work place? The answer of course is that students have knowledge imparted to them and it is the application of this knowledge that is required in the work place. Apart from the professional courses like medicine and allied disciplines and engineering, hardly do people take knowledge acquired in classrooms to the work place.  After all, wisdom and sagacity is the application of knowledge. I have seen young people with liberal arts degrees become excellent computer programmers. I do not believe in describing young people as certificated illiterates as some foolish people have been describing jobless graduates in order to escape the responsibility of not planning for employment of young people. Many young people may not be good in the use of the English language but what they lack in grammar they make up for it in their ability to amass information and analyze it – thanks to information communication technology. The development of ICT has made learning less onerous as was the case in my university days and the fact that students don’t spend all their time in the university libraries is not an indication that they have no access to information which in most cases is carried around in their little internet connected phones.

  • Education in Nigeria-1

    I read recently a piece by Bishop Hassan Kukah, the Bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Sokoto about the collapse of the educational system in Nigeria and his blaming principally the military regimes in our past. I am not one of those people who will blame all the ills of our society on the military or British colonialism. We have had some form of civilian administration since 1999 and nothing has changed. In fact, the situation today is worse than in 1999 when the civilian political administration took over from the military.

    The problem is systemic. It begins from primary school level where apart from expensive private schools, there is no education at all. Children of the poor who are in the majority go to dilapidated buildings that go for schools. These are just empty halls sometimes without chairs where the vast majority of our children are taught by tired, underpaid, or unpaid bedraggled teachers who in their frustration and  anger inflict corporal punishment with little or no provocation on the unfortunate young children who are too scared to complain or report the harassment to their parents.

    At a point, politicians decided that the buildings were too bad and they decided to improve on them. Rather than build structures that were attractive and edifying, they built something like chicken sheds without any aesthetic attraction for the children and they built this all over the country defacing public places in our cities. The contracts for these buildings became a stampede among politicians who were the builders. No standard was maintained and young children were herded into them like cattle. There were no chairs and no teaching tools. Primary schools all over the world are made so attractive that children would always like to show up in the morning. I have traveled all over Africa and Nigeria’s primary school buildings are the worst and constitute a standing disgrace to the so-called giant of Africa. These schools are not equipped for learning at all. It is generally known that you have to catch those who will be geniuses early. Young people in other countries are already playing with computers and using educational tools to make simple constructions that challenge and nurture the children’s creative genius. Apart from playing with sand, singing and jumping around like monkeys, our little children are not mentally challenged in government and voluntary agencies primary schools. But for the private schools, there would be no schooling to talk about at the primary level of education. The result of this is the wastage of human capital and release into the society, those who will constitute the lumpen proletariat of the future. This is the class of street people, armed robbers and those euphemistically referred to as area boys. Those of them who manage to enter secondary school would already be disadvantaged and would have to strain themselves before they can catch up with those coming from private primary schools. Thus two classes of Nigerians are emerging.

    What exists at the primary school level of education is replicated at the secondary level. Most government secondary schools left by the British have been destroyed by the inheritors of power after the British departure. Out of ideological premise of state control of education, the schools left by Christian missions were taken over by the state and they suffered destruction as the government secondary schools. There was the case of a political party in the Second Republic which turned all boarding schools to day schools thereby ensuring the collapse of discipline and eventual undermining the excellent academic traditions of many schools. But for the coming into being of many high fees paying private secondary schools, there would have been a total collapse of the secondary education sector.

    The upshot of this long preamble is that once the root is rotten, the tree would eventually die. No building can stand if the foundation is faulty. If we are serious, the repair to our educational system should start from the early years of a child’s educational experience. We must build good schools and tear down the existing wretched primary school buildings dotting our various landscapes and ensure their proper equipment. It is a fallacy to imagine reform of our educational system would begin at the apex of the educational architecture. This has been the problem in recent years.

    President Jonathan as part of his so-called achievement in education suddenly woke up one day and decreed that there must be a federal university in each state of the federation.  This meant starting 12 new universities. He did not stop there. He decreed that four federal colleges of education should be converted to universities and by the time he left office, he had licensed close to 30 private universities. As a scholar himself, one would have expected that he would factor into this the question of teachers, equipment and sustainable funding. He never did. The result is that some universities are appointing lecturers as professors and some are running their programmes with so-called adjunct lecturers who are in full employment in other universities. Some adjunct lecturers are teaching in more than three universities. It is a matter of logic and commonsense that these lecturers cannot be performing at optimal level. Even something more odious is happening. Some so-called universities have no books in their libraries and laboratory equipments which they then routinely borrow or hire when there is accreditation by the NUC. Some members of these accreditation teams have been found to demand and receive bribes from those running these universities for profit.

    It is obvious to me that a radical approach has to be taken to put the educational system on sound footing. To begin with, do we really need all the universities we have? I hate to suggest merging some of them, which we have done in the past. We had to do this in Ekiti where for political reasons, a governor increased the number of its universities from one to three.  This in a state that is virtually dependent on federal monthly allocation. Under Kayode Fayemi, we abolished two of these so-called universities outright and yet the state now is not able to fund adequately the one university left. In neighbouring Ondo State that could not adequately fund two universities, the governor went ahead and created another one, a so-called University Of Medicine.  There was no thought about where the funds will come from.  This cases of Ekiti and Ondo states is the more sad because the governor who started two new universities in Ekiti and his present counterpart in Ondo State are educated people – one an engineer and the other a physician. What sense does it make to have several universities that are not only poorly funded but in some cases not funded at all?  In Ondo State, the so-called University of Science and Technology, Okitipupa received no capital vote for four years and yet the same state, apparently for political reasons, has gone ahead to establish a new university. It is a mad man who keeps doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome. The problem is that universities are now status symbols of either wealth or development. They are now founded on the basis of federal character and their principal officers are appointed on the same basis irrespective of their suitability. The rapid expansion without adequate consideration of staffing, funding and equipment is a disaster for the country. The fruit of this haphazard expansion will haunt us in the future.

  • Africa’s humiliating relations with the world

    Recently, President Muhammad Buhari went to India to participate in an Indo-African summit. This was the first of its kind and we were told it will be an annual meeting in which the Indian Prime Minister will meet all the 53 heads of government of African states in New Delhi. The precedence for this humiliating conference was laid by France and China and later followed by the USA. Who knows what other country will summon all African heads of government and states to come to its capital for a conference? These leaders like school children whose names and countries are announced in a public address system always  step out to be recognized and led to the smiling emperor who will condescendingly shake their hands telling them to stand by for a group photograph. This humiliating experience in which African leaders dressed in local attires of their host willingly participate is totally unjustified and unacceptable. In international relations, there is sovereign equality of all states.

    Diplomacy operates on two wings of bi-lateral and multilateral  relations. If there is need for any country to talk to Africa as a continent, then such a country should come to Addis Ababa during the annual African Union summit. The UN also provides a forum for multilateral meetings if necessary on the sidelines of UN annual General Assembly meetings.

    This humiliation started with the neocolonial relations between France and la francophonie when all former French colonies in Africa which were heavily supported militarily and financially by France had to visit the élysée palace to get approval for their budget and policies. Interestingly, the former French colonies in Asia did not allow themselves to be submitted to this humiliation. It was most surprising when the same policy was extended to the whole of the continent and our people sheepishly accepted this treatment. Imagine Nigeria, a country of 170 million groveling before the French president. If we have anything to  discuss with France, do we have to follow 52 other African presidents who apparently have nothing to do at home? We must put an end to this humiliation. The situation where African presidents are dressed in Chinese or Indian apparels like clowns about to go on stage is not funny at all. The justification for this is that we need foreign investment and market for our goods. Yes we do and this can be sorted out bilaterally. Some apologists for this new way of relations with Africa may suggest that all Africa put together are about  500 million people whereas India and China are each over a billion people. Yes this is true. But it will still not justify lumping together of a whole continent this way. Inter tate relations is not based on demographic size even though population size counts as an important element of power. I do not see any gain in Africa exhibiting its weakness and poverty the way we are doing. Respect begets respect. If we do not respect ourselves, no one will respect us. It is not that Africa is totally helpless. The continent is sitting on resources that the world needs and without begging, those who need our resources will come begging us to sell to them.

    We do not have a union government in Africa so why are we being treated as if Africa is a country? Why is South America not being treated the same way?

    If our founding fathers were to see what is going on in the various countries they laboured to liberate from European colonialism, they will be horrified. Those were the days when a Kwame Nkrumah would  go to China or India and be feted by Chou en Lai, Mao Zedong and Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru respectively as equals. Several years later, the whole of the continent is treated as if it is irrelevant. President Nkrumah spent the better part of his political  life preaching about the desirability for Africa to unite. He wrote a book with the title Africa Must Unite. He made the point that individually African states are too small and that to make an impression globally, they must unite. He was correct. There are too many puny states in Africa. Most of them are unviable politically and economically. But the point is that not of them are this way. Certainly Nigeria cannot be described as too small to be viable. If the other countries are ready to troop out and be presented on a stage by foreign powers in the name of summit with that country, Nigeria should be sensitive and sensible enough to opt out. If Africa must unite, it must come out of Africa’s effort and not dictated from outside by China, India, France or the United States. While unity is desirable, it must not be at the expense of our continent’s dignity. The existence of the European Union has not led to the USA or China ignoring the bilateral relations between them and individual European countries. What is good for the goose must also be good for the gander. I suspect South Africa demurely and hesitatingly goes along with other African states on this issue in order not to appear ungrateful for the support of Asian states during the struggle against the apartheid racist regime in South Africa before 1994. Nigeria does not carry this burden and we must resist this humiliation as the foremost Black African Country. The Arab-speaking African countries are cleverly spared this disgraceful diplomatic treatment. This is, if one must say, some kind of racism where in global reckoning, Africans are seen as being of lesser importance than whites, Browns and yellow people.  Nigeria cannot be campaigning to be recognized as a potential UN Security Council member and be subjecting itself to this ridicule. If Nigeria as a result of maintaining its dignity will not receive technical aid or assistance, so be it. All the so-called technical assistance of the past 55 years since independence has not translated into prosperity  for all our people and missing out a few pennies from international donors will not undermine our development trajectory if we are a serious country. It is even better to develop on our own and not to depend on western or eastern or Asian paradigms of development. Never again must our country go to Paris Washington, Beijing, New Delhi or London as part of a continental summon to Africa by a non-African country. If we continue to do so, our children’s generation will not forgive us. How does one explain 90 year-old Robert Mugabe  and other geriatrics routinely going to India and China on these merry go round when at Mugabe’s advanced age, he should be playing with his great grandchildren at home?  The problem and solution to African development is at home not in the hands of development partners. If we do not know this by now, then it means our leaders have not learnt any lessons from the failure of these decades of development assistance. What we need is trade and trade will go any where there are commodities or articles of trade for exchange. Besides, this is better left in the hands of private entrepreneurs and not in the hands of presidents.

  • Nigerians and their love of titles

    When the new Ooni arrived in a motorcade in Ife, an excited commentator on radio started calling him, His Imperial Majesty. And I told myself here we go again. What is wrong with calling him the title  he has just acceded to as Kabiyesi Ooni of Ife, Oba Alaiyeluwa Adeleye Ogunwusi. Why dress him in borrowed robes of imperial majesty when there is no empire on which he will be ruling!

    Even the British crown that had an empire on which the sun never sets stopped referring to itself as imperial majesty. Sometimes we make ourselves the object of ridicule. Nowadays some chiefs ruling over villages are sometimes referred to as majesties or royal highnesses to the embarrassment of everybody. In the same vein, speakers of various houses of assembly  and the National Assembly are referred to as Right Honourable. This a British title that refers to members of the British Crown’s Privy Council. This is a title conferred on prime ministers and would-be prime ministers in Great Britain. Here in Nigeria, an African country, we have appropriated these titles without  knowing the import of it and reduce ourselves to miserable mimics of British parliamentary practice.

    We have gone to the ridiculous level of referring to people by their professional calling. Now it is not unheard of to hear somebody being referred to as Architect Lagbaja or Pharmacist Lakasegbe. There are so many of such ridiculous practices such as Engineer Jegede, Barrister Akinyemi and Accountant Olatunji and so on. The practice whereby a physician is addressed as Dr. Olawale is just to separate certain professionals working in one hospital from other allied medical workers. This simple device has now been copied and bastardized in Nigeria that we will soon have people’s names prefaced by their professional titles. We may have Bricklayer Johnson, Carpenter Dare or journalist  Akaraogun. We even have a situation where the same person is prefaced by several titles such as General Senator Alhaji Usman or Alhaji Chief  Dr. Ambassador Lamorin. All this smacks of vanity. A rose called by any other name will still be a rose. There is no need to acquire tittles without the temperament and dignity that go with them. Will it not be better if one comports himself in an exemplary way and as a result of this one is accorded respect than carrying about meaningless titles? I always laugh when I see a governor addressed as senator so and so. Is being addressed as governor not enough recognition?

    Of course we are not the only country where this social affectation exist. In Germany you can come across Professor Medical Dr. Ludwig or even Professor Historiker Fritz Fischer. Of course in the United States, you could have one addressed Secretary Clinton because one had previously served as Secretary of State. And once a senator,  congressman or ambassador,  you carry those titles to the grave. Since we do not have any tradition of our own, we sheepishly follow the practice. Our senators want to be addressed as Distinguished Senators. I was at the airport in Abuja sometimes ago and I heard one man shouting to the amazement of all of us – Distinguished Senator;  distinguished senator! I almost told him keep his voice down and stop making a fool of himself. Several years ago, members of the National Assembly, because of the love of Estacode allowance used to come to the USA as soon as they were elected to ostensibly learn legislative practices and procedures. Those of us then living there were always embarrassed. I will never forget an incident involving a member of such a delegation coming out of his hotel room chewing a long chewing stick in the morning calling loudly on Honourable somebody on top of his voice waking up other lodgers who had no choice but to invite the police. Ask me whether this honourable or distinguished parliamentarian was not a disgrace to himself and his country. Things were so bad during the Shagari regime that Americans told us they were tired of the innumerable members of parliament coming to learn from them. This was because as soon as the federal MPs left, state MPs would troop in to learn from the Americans. One cynical American told a delegation that they should do something in their own country that Americans could learn from. I hope  this gallivanting has stopped and that the country’s money is not being wasted on fruitless learning process.

    Unfortunately, this affectation for titles has spread to the spiritual realm. An owner of one small church calls himself not only Bishop but Archbishop. Some call themselves Cardinals mimicking the Roman Catholic Church. There are as many churches as there are titles. The bad eggs have given the house of God a bad name. A woman told his son living for a long time in the USA that she has just built a church on his father’s plot of land. When the young man asked his mother when she became a preacher, she shamelessly said she was not a pastor but she will give the church to a pastor and at the end of the month they would share the proceeds! In Nigeria anybody who goes to Mecca immediately goes around addressed as Al-haji or simply Hadji while their female counterparts are addressed as Hajia or Al-Haja. One then wonders how many Hadjis and Hadjias one will find in Saudi Arabia itself the home of the hajj. I am told Nigerians and other West Africans are the only ones who call themselves Hadji or Hadjia after the hajj. Their Christian counterparts would not be easily edged out of the competition. So we have people going around with JP  attached to their names. When I first saw this, I innocently asked the person when he became a Justice of Peace. I could not understand our penchant for titles when I was told JP meant Jerusalem Pilgrim!

    The one that I find most annoying is the proliferation  of academies. In France there is only one L’Academie  Francais to which all distinguished scientists  artists  and academics of distinction belong. It is the same in the former Soviet Union and now Russia. In Nigeria there were two academies of Letters and the Sciences. But as everything Nigerian, we now have academies of Engineering, of Education, of Admnistration, Social Sciences and recently of Pharmacy  as if all these could not be subsumed under the sciences and letters. We are not a serious people. You just do not wake up to set up an academy and begin to award fellowships. These are meaningless because to be fellows, you need to be associated with certain original contribution to knowledge or national life in your field. These mushroom academies can learn from the Academy of Letters to which belong giants in the field of literature, modern languages, history, philosophy, religion African languages and classics. There is no  reason why scholars in politics, economics, mass communication and education cannot be admitted into the Academy of Letters. In the same vein, there is no need for academy of medicine, pharmacy, engineering  when there is an academy of science. In fact legislation should force all these academies into Nigerian Academy.

    And as for our penchant with titles, musicians have rightly joined the game by calling themselves either names from academia or the church. Thus we used to have Cardinal Rex Lawson, a musician; or General Adekunle, another musician. There are several magicians calling themselves professors. I once met a Dr. Somebody who could not string words together to make a sentence. I later found out that there was one religious institute in Ikorodu or Otta near Lagos awarding doctorate degrees presumably to those who could afford the price. There is no level Nigerians will not descend to have a title. At the end of the day, water will find its own level.