The Nation Newspaper

Category: Jide Osuntokun

  • Terrorism: A historical perspective – 1

    Terrorism is popularly defined as the unofficial or unauthorised use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims. The other more comprehensive definition of terrorism by the US Code of Federal Regulations is the unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property, to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.

    For me, it is very difficult to define what constitutes terrorism. However, I define terrorism as violence directed at innocent people or institutions without any rational reason and for no cause or purpose other than those known to the terrorists and even if there is cause for such violence there should be respect for laws of military engagement protecting children, women, the infirm and old people as contained in the Geneva Convention. Terrorism is not a new thing.

    There are many incidents in human history that struck terror in the minds of the victims. The pogroms against the Jews in Russia, the Turkish massacre of the Armenians, the killings of Igbo in the North, the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, the various inter- tribal attacks and killings in many parts of Africa and Asia, the ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina by the Serbs in recent times all constitute acts of terrorism but are better treated under the rubric of genocidal acts and crimes against humanity rather than as terrorism as we have come to understand the term.

    What can be described as terrorism stretches back in history. It may even be difficult to arrive at what to call terrorism because one man’s terrorist may be another man’s nationalist fighter. It will surprise many that until 1994 the revered Nelson Mandela was on the official United States list of terrorists. Condoleezza Rice, the then National Security Adviser to President George Bush and General Colin Powell the then Secretary of State claimed to have been totally embarrassed and had to do something quickly to get his name out of the list.

    Between 1095 and 1297 or even earlier than that, Christian crusaders fought unsuccessfully to liberate the Holy Christian sites in the Middle- East from the Muslims and in this crusade they fought with considerable ferocity and violence to terrorise the Muslim community. Western knights killed and were killed in the defence of their faiths. The Muslim Saracens obviously thought the Christian knights were terrorists and the thought was equally reciprocated.

    Although we can say that the Christian crusaders had a purpose in their courageous fight against the Muslims whose religion they neither understood nor appreciated. Even in biblical history before the birth of Christ, the conquest of what is now Palestine by the people of Israel was not without violence. I do not want to go into what historians have called ‘just and unjust wars’. The point that I am making is that what today is terrorism did not just happen. Man’s long history has witnessed different types of terrorism in the past. However, the terrorism of modern times is quite different from the old form of terrorism which was either politically or religiously inspired.

    The conquest of the North American continent by white American settlers in order to realise what they call the American manifest destiny as well as the conquest of Southern America by the Spanish and the Portuguese conquistadores was done with tremendous ferocity and violence against the native peoples who must have considered them terrorists. The conquest and carving out of colonial empires by the West was done with much violence; Africans and Asians did not stand a chance against the maxim guns of Western imperialism.

    To come nearer home, when Sir Frederick Lugard was sent to Nigeria for its conquest and pacification, his mandate was to subdue all opposition by military force. As Sir Frederick Lugard while reporting home about his successes always claimed that he had to inflict maximum mortal casualties on Nigerians because according to him, black people value lives less than white people. Since western historiography is written from the perspectives of the victors rather than the vanquished, the violent aspect of colonial rule is hardly mentioned.

    Western historians will of course defend this violence as being necessary in order to save the Africans and Asians from the barbarism and superstition of traditional bondage. They would say, ‘we cannot make omelette without breaking eggs’ and that the end of western colonial rule must be judged in the globalisation of the world following westernisation and modernisation of the so-called primitive and underdeveloped areas of the world. The dark continent of Africa was lit by the light of western imperialism, they would argue. I am not one of those who would put all the blames of the underdeveloped world as being due to western colonialism. In any case, my late teacher, Professor J.F Ade-Ajayi dismissed the colonial phase as a mere episode in our long history.

    Wars have been part of human history since the beginning of time. Kingdoms have risen and fallen as a result of victory or defeat by one group or the other. The various empires of the world whether in Asia, Africa or Europe were established as a result of imperialistic desires of man and the ability to fight for whatever they believed. The wars of conquest can therefore not be seen STRICTLY in terms of terrorism no matter the millions of casualties suffered by people as a result of them.

    At least there were war aims that were sometimes carefully articulated by the leaders for which the ordinary people were mobilised to fight for. At least by our definition of terrorism, the First World War in which the whole world was involved and the more gruesome Second World War in which six million Jews were industrially murdered and close to 25 million Germans, Russians, English, Americans, Canadians, Japanese, Australians and New Zealanders, Africans, Indians, Chinese, to mention just a few, were killed, belong to different category of violence.

    Obviously, the Jews who suffered in the hands of murderous German SS officers would have seen their tormentors as terrorists. But their tormentors felt that they were removing the Jews who constituted a troublesome presence in Europe. So however weird, wicked, and unacceptable their reasons might have been, the National socialists of Adolph Hitler had their reasons for the so-called final solution of Jewish problem.

    In modern times in Europe, terrorism can be said to have become first a problem in mid 19th century when an anarchist ideology propounded by Mikhail Bakunin, a Russian ideologue advocated that the destruction of the then existing states and building new ones on their ashes was the way forward for Europe out of its problems. His ideas were quite complex and were to influence communist ideology and syndicalist movement in Spain without their acknowledging him. Many acts of terror were committed in his name all over Europe and governments then found it extremely difficult to understand what it was all about. But when his ideas are studied very well, they constitute important basis for the communist ideology.

  • Let us begin

    The journey of a thousand years begins with the first step, so let us begin the journey of the Buhari presidency. I think it was President Muhammadu  Buhari who  himself said to the cheering crowd who went to rejoice with him  on his electoral victory  that you want change now change has come! It has come indeed. The Jonathan crowd like Egyptians have disappeared hopefully never to be seen again in the corridors of power. Some of them will try to come back but Nigerians are wiser than they used to be. The total collapse of the state the last week of Jonathan in power showed us clearly  how close we were to total meltdown of the state. It was frightening to say the least. In  Ibadan where I live, we witnessed total paralysis .

    There was no fuel, no light and to diesel to power the generator, the mobile phones stopped working because there was no diesel for the power they needed, banks shut down because their computers broke down, the ATM machines were not working  so  we could not get money and I could not pump water from my dug-out well in the absence of municipal water supply . Hospitals could not function and the civil service was and  is still on strike because members claimed they have not been paid for six months. In some places, desperate young people took to brigandage and robbery. I had to ask myself whether life was worth living and also if it was not time to check out of the country.

    But where will I go in my evening years? In all my years of living in this country, I had never seen this kind of hopelessness. The interesting thing was that I was not angry. Even if I was, who will I direct my anger against? Everybody around me was abusing the outgoing government and head of state but I felt our problem goes beyond this out gone administration. I see it as a systemic problem and to solve it will require fundamental approach to governance. But are will really prepared to face the problem squarely and if necessary bite the bullet?

    I do not expect any radical changes in this regime  because honestly speaking, the time is too short and there is so much damage to the country and our individual and collective psyches that palliative measures are what we can take now while radical measures may have to wait for perhaps the next two years. We need to make the systems work first, take care of our immediate needs of security, jobs, salaries, electricity, water, roads, hospitals, schools, municipal and urban cleanliness.  As a university teacher, I sympathize  with many of my colleagues in state universities who have not been paid for months  and as a father I am sad that children in closed down universities are roaming around and some are getting killed in accidents driving their parents cars around without permission and with youthful exuberance. These are simple things in most countries but not in this overpopulated country of ours. Not all these things belong in the province of the federal government or what a president should ordinarily be concerned with. But their absence poses existential challenge to our people and therefore to the president. If there are institutions or people that are charged with the duties required to make things work and they are derelict in the performance of such functions they are to perform, then somebody must call their attention to it . There may be need for strong-arm tactics to force some people to behave properly or to obey the dictates of their assignment. Anybody not working for the corporate good of this country must be challenged and forced to do what is right. This is the essence of being in a national community which confers rights on us as citizens. If we all believe in the good of this country, then we should work towards its attainment because it is by this that we as individuals can fully realize our full potentialities. A situation in which individuals turn themselves into local governments providing themselves water by digging boreholes, electricity by having generators, security by having our houses wired with live electricity and surrounding our homes with tall fences and killer guard dogs and maiguard is in the long run not sustainable . Our efforts as individuals are futile because they are selfish and not based on the general good of our people.

    Take for example the state of education in this country. It is the norm that everybody who can afford it and those who can not have boycotted sending their children and wards to government or public primary, secondary and tertiary institutions. Their preference is private institutions where there is discipline and apparently more dedication and certainty of duration of years of study. Yet people like me went to public schools and we are not the worse for it. If we are serious about reform we should focus on primary and secondary education and if we get it right, it will have positive result on tertiary institutions with vast opportunities for improvement all round. I am not against private institutions but it should not be at the expense of public institutions going to the dogs so to say. I do not know any country in the world where primary and secondary education are mainly in the hands of private  business people as it seems Nigeria is destined to experience. This is just an example of all that is wrong in Nigeria.

    I was amused when I read what Professor Nebo our erstwhile minister of power said as an excuse for his failure as minister. He went on to advice Buhari to use force to put  down those vandalizing gas pipelines and also to compel oil companies to cooperate in the area of gas supplies. Why did he not tell Jonathan whom he served for about three years this simple truth? Has he just recovered his voice or was he simply afraid to speak truth to power? The time those who serve in government are able to stand and be counted is when we will be getting near finding solutions for our myriad of problems.

    President Muhammadu Buhari has a full plate and as the saying goes, he has to start from the beginning. I was delighted that his first trip outside the country as president is to Chad and Niger.  And perhaps Cameroon later on perhaps in one fell swoop. He is taking the security challenge facing the nation as first priority. I also like his statement that the headquarters of the army itself may temporarily be in the North East of Nigeria presumably in Maiduguri. I will suggest he follows this by posting senior officers of the National Intelligence Agency (N.I.A) as ambassadors to the these three countries so that they can be providing government with good intelligence reports about movement of insurgents in the border areas.

    The mercenaries from South Africa brought by the last regime have to be withdrawn. If we need fighting support, we should ask our traditional friends to assist. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty this should be inculcated to our people in the North of Nigeria and the whole country as a whole; defence is too important to be left to the armed forces alone. We as citizens should be ready to provide information and to make whatever sacrifices will be necessary to rid our country of anarchists. There was a time in this country when we contributed financially to the liberation of Southern Africa.

    Charity needs to begin at home. If needs be, we should again be called upon to contribute financially to the defence of the realm. We should also call on friendly countries especially our friends in the West to assist in whatever way they can and we must kit our armed forces well and supply them with most lethal and modern weapons and ensure that they are trained regularly. If we need support in this regard, we must never be shy to ask in this increasingly interdependent world. Everybody knows that terrorism knows no borders when humanity suffers somewhere, man suffers everywhere. There is so much tremendous goodwill for our newly elected president and we must not fritter it away or refuse to strike when the iron is hot. In spite of the current situation of near bankruptcy and the impecuniosity of the moment, we must put on our thinking caps and put the right people at the helm of affairs while still oblivious of whatever political debts owed and ethnic configuration we have to bear in mind.

  • The king is dead; long live the king!

    I remember President J.F. Kennedy’s  famous and everlasting inaugural speech  on that wintry morning of January 1961 when as the youngest President of the USA said among other things how the work of government is never done not in one term or even according to him in our life times. It was a prophetic statement because he was soon cut down by an assassin’s bullet even before he finished the first term. Of course he said other things like ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country. He idealistically said that America’s foes and friends alike should know that the baton  of the defence of freedom has been passed  on to a new generation of Americans nurtured in war and ready to pay any price in the defence of  liberty and freedom where ever they are threatened. Americans lapped it up especially coming from the mouth of the dangerously handsome young president. No American president can say that today and be applauded unless of course those Americans on the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party and their running dogs in the so-called Tea Party.

    When a king or Queen dies in England, the continuity in government is captured by the saying the king is dead long live the king. Amongst the Yoruba the same sentiment is contained in the statement Baba ku Baba ku meaning father has died but he lives on in the next oldest member of the family. All these preambular statements are to emphasize that the work of government is continuous and is never completely done by any regime. This is however not an excuse for inertia or clueless performance.

    The government of Jonathan now belongs to history and when the dust has settled and the healing hands of time have passed over the events of recent times, the judgement on his regime may or not be severe. The usefulness of such historical judgement will serve as a warning or compass to the successor regimes. What we can call instant history is that the Jonathan administration has fallen below expectation. This apparent failure can be seen in the collapse of the economy less than a year after the current reduction in crude oil price. What this means is that we were eating our fruits and seeds at the same time like a foolish farmer. Many critics including this writer had warned ad nauseam that the drunken financial fashion the country was being run was not sustainable. The stupendous salaries and allowances paid to members of the executives and legislators at local, state and federal levels were heavy enough to sink the ship of state. Now chicken has come home to roost. There is no fuel to run our homes and the national economy. Power generation is now just over 1000 megawatts and with no diesel the country would soon grind to a halt. Recently I went to Abuja and in the absence of aviation fuel, I had to return to Lagos by road something I had not done in 20 years. Most states of the federation stopped paying salaries since January with the consequence of parents being unable to pay their children’s school fees. Since quite a large percentage of parents now send their children to fee-paying private primary, secondary and tertiary institutions many young people are at home idling their lives away. The result of growing unemployment and underemployment is armed robberies complicating the already existing insecurity problems associated with Boko Haram and cattle rustling in the northern part of the country. Even the apparent reduction of militancy in the Niger Delta creeks is still early to be celebrated and the spreading spate of kidnappings for ransom constitutes reason for worry. The infrastructural deficit on our roads, rail, sea ports and the danger of inadequate aviation infrastructure are enough to overwhelm any government.

    Does it then mean that the outgoing administration was an unmitigated failure? The answer is not clear cut. What is clear is that the administration is not ending well in view of the fact that the country has ground to a halt. There is no electric power from the companies allegedly fronting for political big-wigs and there is no diesel to power individual generators and even those who have not been paid for six months by their governments have no money to buy petrol and diesel if they are available and they are not. I feel sorry for the outgoing president that he is ending his regime in a whimper and in an anti-climax. The only positive thing this government will be remembered for is the Almajiri schools inadequate as they may be in number. Certainly not the mushroom universities established for political considerations and the welter of private universities for profit licensed by the Jonathan administration.

    But what is to be done? The Buhari administration cannot be expected to perform a miracle when it is burdened by local and foreign debt of over $60 billion. It can at the same time not fold its hands and do nothing. It must not take on too many things at the same time but should tackle the problems one at a time unless where the problem has interlocking relationship for example the problem of power has bearing on appropriate pricing of petroleum products. Security and infrastructure are related and so is security and employment. Money, lots of it will be needed to tackle the myriad of problems facing the country. We must move away from a situation where only salaried workers alone pay taxes while the rich and the famous hardly pay taxes. If people do not pay taxes, then they won’t have a sense of ownership of the government. No matter how small, people would have to pay something to fund their government. Value Added Tax (VAT) must also be increased substantially because these are in most cases luxury taxes on the class most able to bear them. I have said this before: states should be advised to levy property and land use taxes to run their governments rather than relying on federal allocations which are really unearned petrol commissions.

    It is very gratifying to note that the incoming government says it will focus on agriculture and solid minerals exploitation. I will want to enter a caveat here. We heard this before. If we are going into agriculture, it must be massive agricultural business through loans to young graduates who want to go into the business as well as loans to existing farmers who have proved their ability and seriousness. Government must prohibit imports of agricultural products where we have comparative advantage. We should not be importing vegetable oils and rice. We should stop importing wines, champagne and hard liquors in order to conserve our foreign reserves and restore sanity to our country especially our youths who are on slippery slope to drunken degeneracy. We must ensure that our concentrating on solid mineral exploitation is not another Abacha freebies given  to powerful and well connected people in the name of solid mineral exploitation In this regard let big foreign companies be invited and provided tax holidays to encourage them to get involved in our new plans.

    Let the new administration recover as much money as possible from what have been stolen and use the proceeds to embark on massive public works by direct labour of our youth. This will generate enthusiastic support for the government and reduce youth anger and unemployment. The first 100 days will be crucial and government must ensure that it is not business as usual. We can no longer afford this and we have lost so much ground already and the people can no longer wait for action to tackle the problems of this country. We are down and it can not be worse than this and we can only go up. The best way to start while the iron is hot is to eliminate the so-called oil subsidies that have ended subsidizing the lavish and opulent life styles of politicians, plutocrats and oil oligarchs in our country. Everybody is fed up with the humiliating scarcity of fuel in an oil producing country and if the only way to solve this problem once and for all is to throw importation and sale of refined petroleum  open to all who have the capacity while fixing our refineries, then that is the reasonable thing for government to do  and  the question of subsidies will  be gone forever.

    Finally, what is left for most of us  to do is to wish our former President Jonathan, good luck in the years ahead and President Muhammadu Buhari Godspeed in the journey of piloting the ship of state.

  • Lame duck activism

    I have been bewildered by the sudden excitement and activities of the outgoing administration in the last two or so weeks. Letters of sacking of people and appointment of their replacement have been coming out of the presidency with amazing rapidity and frequency as if this was the beginning of the Jonathan administration. I can understand the president saying he remains in charge of the country until the night of May 28. Nobody can dispute this. What is disputable is the sense in giving out appointment letters of four years on the eve of the end of the president’s term. This appears to me as a sick joke.

    What is surprising is that people are turning out in their Sunday dresses to be sworn into jobs which all sensible people know will be cancelled by a single statement by the new administration saying all councils and boards of parastatals are dissolved with immediate effect. When I asked a friend why apparently sensible people are travelling long distances to assemble in Abuja to be sworn into councils and boards at this late hour in the life of the current administration, his answer was that the appointments would boost their curriculum vitae no matter if the appointments last only a week.

    The question really is that should state affairs be dealt with so cavalierly? I read the letter of General Adeyinka Adebayo to the president complaining about the rude way he was removed as Pro-chancellor and chairman of the Governing Council of the University of Ibadan. I felt very bad and sad for two reasons. I did not think my beloved General should have accepted the job in the first place. But having accepted it, he should have been treated with the dignity that a man of his status and previous exalted positions he held in this country when many of the current players on Nigerian stage were in diapers. Placing an advertorial  in newspapers to remove a man like General Adebayo was rude, indecorous  and unflattering especially without giving reasons and allowing the imagination to wander  away conjecturing all kinds of scenarios.

    The directive to a foreign company setting up manufacturing business in Lagos to move to Bayelsa State by somebody who has been in the presidency, first as vice president and later as president for eight years and then waiting for the last weeks in office before realizing that charity begins at home and then depriving one of his constituencies manufacturing jobs is what can be described as double jeopardy against the person of the president because he ends looking bad in Lagos and Bayelsa. The people in Bayelsa will say so he just remembered us while those in Lagos will say look at the man who was running around here some weeks ago telling us we are all brothers! No matter the economic rationale, the timing is bad. President Jonathan should be concerned about his legacy and what his place will be in the history of the country and he must not let last minute poor judgement ruin his legacy.

    Right now problems are piling up towards the end of his tenure. An oil-producing country is lying prostrate because there is no fuel at the pumps for people to buy. This in a country that has four refineries which for lack of vision are not working.  Dangote in 2011 offered to buy, I believe the refineries in Port Harcourt and Kaduna but this government refused and kept paying trillions to party men as fuel subsidies. Now, the chicken has come home to roost. The country is broke. The president is therefore handing over to his successor a bankrupt country. Not only that, the insurgency in the North-east is still active. This is in spite of hiring Boer mercenaries from South Africa to fight along Nigerian troops, the very type of people who used to shoot Africans as wild game during the days of the obnoxious apartheid racist regime. One of them was interviewed recently in England about the mercenaries’ treatment of Africans in Nigeria’s North-east, he merely demurred and said they treated them well! Coming from a people who recently felt Africans were untermenschen or sub humans, one can imagine how we who fought against the racist South Africans played into their hands while also paying them handsomely for our humiliation

    This president can go down into history as one that helped the country to overcome its wasting its oil revenue on consumption by the elite. Let this president carry the burden of cancelling the so-called subsidies on petroleum products. We are already buying the stuff at 120 or 130 Naira a litre. If this is what the price should be, let the president tell us and remove the burden from Buhari. I mean the president is not running for office again, he can afford to help us bite the bullet of deregulated petrol price. He will be remembered for his sacrificially bearing the burden of a policy that may not be palatable to most Nigerians but has become necessary in the peculiar circumstance we find ourselves.

    The president’s activism should not be confined and restricted to personnel changes in the dying hours of his administration; it should extend to a policy he genuinely believes in but was afraid to implement because of politics. He tried this earlier in his administration. We should not mind his sudden reduction of the price of petrol as part of his electoral politics. The time has now come when the statesman of a president comes forward with the right policy on deregulated price of petrol before the curtains come down.

  • Difficult decisions for incoming administrations

    Most of the people who have been writing on the next administration have expectedly been focusing on what General Buhari will do when he is sworn in. I have myself written on this before I realized that our country is broke. Although the outgoing Minister of Finance has advised us to focus on the positive aspect of our economy lest our negative criticism becomes a fulfillment, I try to see what is positive in a country that is unable to pay its bills. Virtually all state governments owe their workers five to six months salaries and in some ministries and federal parastatals, the federal government too is owing its workers some months salaries. A government that cannot pay workers is bankrupt. The question is how did we get to this sorry pass?

    We of course know the price of crude oil tumbled to 50percent of its previous level some months ago. It should not have required more than ordinary common sense for those managing our economy to know the volatility of the oil market and save for a raining day. The huge earnings from 1999 to 2014 were simply frittered away or stolen outright. Thank God for the fact that Obasanjo paid our foreign debt or else we would be asking for what happened to trillions of dollars earned during those years of plenty. Even in Biblical times, Joseph who was not an economist like our so called Harvard trained economist of under development set aside some of the bounties of nature during the seven years of plenty in Egypt against the seven lean years. In our case we simply declared surplus and wasted our plenty on mad importation of luxury items and all kinds of consumables including all brands of alcoholic drinks, wines and champagne. And whatever was left simply put, was either stolen or used to pay unearned salaries to government officials and their pot-bellied bureaucrats. We are now on our knees and I hope we do not go borrowing so soon after exiting from the London and Paris clubs that were holding us imprisoned in regimes of unending debt repayment. If Buhari had not won the  presidential election, we probably would have been sold the dummy that  we are under-borrowed  And then we would have begun the journey to economic slavery to western capitalists who loaned us the so-called coordinating minister of the economy.

    At the state level, with the exception of Lagos, taxes are not paid and in Nigeria as a whole consumer taxes  in form of VAT are just too low compared with 18 per cent paid in our neighbouring West African countries. Because of elections, governors unreasonably cut down university fees to the extent that universities in the South-west, for example can no longer pay salaries of staff because states subventions have simply dried up. There is nowhere in the world where students pay N25,000 to N30,000 a year and governors in some states said these should be paid twice and not once! I just shudder imagining the conditions in state universities where like their civil servant counterparts,  lecturers and professors are owed six months salaries. We are deceiving ourselves because no money equals no education. Hungry teachers should not be expected to and cannot really impart knowledge. The universities must be allowed to charge economic fees so as to free them from the stranglehold of state governments. Any government that wants free education at all levels can award scholarships to their students  or ask their local governments to pick up their educational tabs. The state governments should also look into the possibility of imposing land use charge to boost internally generated revenue to free them from the indignity of carrying begging bowls to the federal government every month until such a time when states will control the resources in them. I would have suggested down-sizing the bureaucracies but in a period of mass employment, that would be courting disaster of insecurity. States  must embark on public works through a revamped public works department (PWD) to engage our youths especially the technically trained ones to dirty their hands in the process of physical development of their country. We should bring back the old practice of schools having demonstration farms to bring practical agriculture to our young ones and thereby boost agricultural production. We did this in my youth before our senses were dulled by cheap petrol money.

    The coming president must tell us the truth of our condition by abolishing the so-called oil subsidy that is taking N2 -N3 trillion every year and putting them into the pockets of some oil oligarchs and party big wigs and plutocrats. We must boldly confront this oil malady and the president must tell Nigerians that he will not be part of this swindle of the masses. People will grumble; they may even riot but government must stay the course and educate the people and tell them what we will gain by following this honest  and righteous policy. We must also bring back the textile mills of Kano, Kaduna, Lagos and wherever textile mills have been closed down. This will lead to the creation of millions of jobs and reduce unemployment. We should also ensure backward integration by getting our people in the North to plant and supply the cotton yarn. While doing this, we must ban all importation of textiles without minding what western free traders say. We must of course put money into the agricultural sector and try to add value to whatever we produce. While on this we must give ourselves two years within which we must stop importation of petrol, diesel and oil derivatives. We need to earn more from domestic usage of our gas and its exportation.

    The electricity sector seems jinxed and it is trite to say without electricity there can be no development. By this I mean development in all areas including education, health, transportation and so on. Let me  say there is no alternative to having power to fire the country and whatever it will take to generate and distribute power adequately must be embarked upon through a mixture of power sources like hydroelectricity, gas, coal and uranium; yes why not? My son has worked for some years in the nuclear power industry and I know it is doable if the right people are recruited without deferring to federal  character.  Many of us do not have the luxury of time to wait indefinitely for Nigeria to develop. Hope deferred makes the heart ache and if we do not seize this moment to develop this country we may then have passed  the time of redeemability.

  • Professor Tekena Tamuno – A tribute

    In about a week from now, the mortal body of Professor Tekena Tamuno affectionately known as TNT will be buried in Okrika his home town in Rivers State of Nigeria. He was 83 when he passed on  and joined the saints triumphant. About two or so years ago, he told me that he had come a long way from his riverine native environment to the solid and stony grounds of Ekiti State. This was at the occasion of being honored with a Doctorate of Letters by Ekiti State University  to add to his earned D.Litt. of London University where he had previously gotten his B.A Honours and Ph.D degrees.

    Professor Tamuno had been one of my teachers in the university of Ibadan along with J .C . Anene, J. F. Ade Ajayi, Emmanuel Ayankanmi Ayandele, J. D. Omer-Cooper, Robert Gavin, J. B. Webster, Alan Ryder and Emmanuel Adiele  Afigbo. My recollection of these great men was the quiet mien of solitary academics carrying out research either in the archives  or in the research areas of the university library.

    Professor Tamuno was the quietest of them all! He was like a deep river that flows silently. At a time, he was shunted to  the then unpopular teaching of American history. The University of Ibadan while trying to get out of the  warm  and claustrophobic embrace of anglophone obsession with the history of England and the Commonwealth decided to give students the opportunity of comparative history which learning American history provided. As students, we knew there were no American history experts. Tamuno ably took on the challenge and discharged his responsibilities  creditably. Tamuno did not indulge in the use of bombastic language as one or two of his colleagues  did but he got in his points without much ado.

    His original area of research was the colonial consolidation of Southern Nigeria as well as the history  and evolution of the Nigerian police. This latter interest led him into studying  national security as a sub-specialty. Later on in life, he got involved in the study of the roles of palm oil and crude oil in the history of the Niger Delta . This was a natural thing for him coming from Okrika. Unlike Professor E. J. Allagoa  from Nembe, he was not interested in the micro-history of the individual islands; rather he took a panoramic view of the external influence  of either the oil companies and the Nigerian state on the Niger Delta. He was not what one will call an activist but in elucidating the history of the Niger Delta, he provided intellectual material for alleviating the problems of the area and he brought that quiet, diplomatic and scholarly approach to a  difficult and enigmatic problem. The authorities of the Nigerian state took notice because Tamuno  had spoken.

    Professor Tamuno held many academic positions in the course of his career. He was Head of Department, Dean of faculty of Arts, principal of the then University  College of Ilorin; Vice  chancellor of the premier university, the University of Ibadan, Pro-chancellor and finally stood at the apex of university governance pyramid  as chancellor of Bells university and lastly Redeemers university. He was at a time chairman, New Nigerian newspaper  and briefly served as Directing staff in NIPSS in Kuru. He was also a foundation Fellow of the Nigerian Academy of Letters.  He also served as chairman of a panel set up by the Nigerian government to produce some tomes on Nigerian history. He has packed so much into one life time that one wonders how he managed to do it. I have no doubt that his wife provided him not only a good home environment but also professional support  for his literary endeavors. As a  professional librarian, she must have helped in his research and writing.

    What is most remarkable about him is his humility which was quite frankly, overwhelming. He never had problems relating to his junior academic colleagues; he was never patronizing. If you gave your book to him to review and if he liked it, he will praise you to high heavens and if he thought it was not good, he will gently suggest areas which needed improvement. He seemed to enjoy very much being regarded as  just an academic colleague than hailed and treated as if he were a super person. He wrote a poem celebrating JOLLY PAPA which in the lingo of the Delta was some kind oh happy go lucky care-free person. The late Rex Lawson also sang about this Jolly Papa which I suppose encapsulated  Professor Tamuno’s attitude to life  in that life is too short to be lived brooding and oppressing fellow human beings. He made friends easily and did not have stomach for making enemies. In this he was heavily influenced by his Christian religion of brotherhood of all men. He was also full of humor and could be self-deprecating, enjoying the joke of being an Okrika-man  which in Yorubaland was associated with second hand clothing.

    I came towards the end of his life to see him as a personal friend  and whenever he met me or sent innumerable text messages to me, he will address me as my pro-chancellor on account of the honorary doctorate of Letters which Ekiti State University conferred on him when I was its pro-chancellor and chairman of Governing Council. I saw Professor Tamuno last on Good Friday in his usually cheerful mood  only to pass on a week or so later when announcement of the gubernatorial elections was being made. The coincidence was rather uncanny because one of his areas of academic interest is electoral politics in Nigeria. I was really shocked by his death. I knew he was ill last summer and went to the United States for medical attention. When I saw him on Good Friday, I was saying how happy I was that he had regained his good health and appeared to have fully recovered. I hardly knew I would not see him alive again.

    If there was ever a good man in Nigeria, it was Tekena Tamuno. Go well Jolly papa.

  • Buhari: Sweat and tears

    The founder of modern Germany, Otto Von Bismarck, after the failure of the 1848 Liberal revolution to unite the German states, told the Germans that German unification will not come through debate but through blood and iron. Meaning that if Germans wanted unification they would have to fight for it by war and by shedding their blood. Winston Churchill, war time Prime minister of Great Britain in those dark years of 1941 when defeat was starring Britain in the face told the British people that he had nothing to offer them than blood and tears.

    In view of the depressed economy of Nigeria and moral bankruptcy in high places, General Buhari must tell our people that we can pull ourselves out of the quagmire we are in by a policy of sweat and tears. This means in essence that there is work to be done and that in doing this work, we may go through lots of pain involving shedding tears and sweating. He has already said he has no magic wand to solve all our problems at once and that we must not expect any miracle but that he would offer moral compass by which to negotiate the stormy waters ahead of us. If all he offers is the moral leadership, I believe this would be more than sufficient.

    The problems facing Nigeria are both physical and psychological; it is easier to tackle the physical problems of infrastructural decay in form of bad roads, unavailability of electricity and pipe-borne water, poor health and educational facilities, poor environment, non-functioning of our railways, seaports, airports and general urban decay as well as the huge problem of unemployment.

    The psychological problem we have is not knowing when to stop taking from the public till, as well as embezzlement in order to provide for ourselves and families, moral decay and buccaneering attitude to public service and governance and general lack of integrity and prevalence of unrighteousness in our way of life.

    Many years ago, our first civilian President, Right Honourable Dr Nnamdi Azikwe of blessed memory, said the problem with us Nigerians was the problem of politics of poverty. He defined it as the desire of public officials to embezzle public money so that they and their family will not lack anything. We still have the problem with us.

    This attitude to life generally has permeated not only public life but also private commercial dealings to the extent that Nigerians in the corporate world and in public life are too steeped in corruption that they cannot help themselves. The problem of underdevelopment can be attacked if the president has the right kind of people working with him and, a grand plan to implement the other problem of moral deficit that is not something that can be easily solved. It will require the leadership acting as a beacon to those who may go astray when called to serve.

    The president is the head of the executive branch. The executive branch is the council of ministers and the departments working under them composed of civil servants. This is the branch that formulates policies and after approval from the legislative branch, executes policies. It is the executive branch that is in charge of contract awards and supervision. Eighty to ninety percent of the resources of states is handled by the executive branch. Hence, if there is going to be a reduction in corruption, the executive branch is going to lead the way. The executive branch must ensure that contracts are not padded for the purpose of kick- backs. It must ensure that the bureaucracy is not over inflated with un-needed personnel; it must ensure that a lean administration shorn of jobbers and nepotism is in place. The days of special advisers, special assistants, special-this and special-that should be gone, and gone forever. The days of a fleet of aeroplanes and cars for the executives should no longer be tolerated, and as much as possible, promotion should be based on performance and we should bring back the days of Public Works Department (PWD), so as to engage the service of young engineers and technicians in doing public works instead of all minor physical works being given to contractors.

    This will help to fight unemployment and our youth must be told frankly that the task of building this country is in their hands. Whatever is being done at the centre must be replicated at the state and local levels. A regime of accountability must be imposed on all levels of government through beefing up and activating audit departments at all levels. The executive must also ensure that all institutions charged with preventing public corruptions like EFCC and ICPC must be revamped and sufficiently staffed and well-funded to do their work. They must also be separated from he executive and merged with the judiciary so that they can do their work without let or hindrance. The days where prosecution takes a lifetime must be stopped. Cases before anti- corruption courts must be swiftly decided; those guilty must be sanctioned and punished. No regime can completely wipe out corruption and corruption is a global problem but we must be seen to be serious about tackling this hydra headed problem.

    If educational institutions are functioning well, if there are hospitals to take care of the sick, if infrastructure is modernized and efficient, if there is excellent public transportation, if there is welfare plan for the old, the women, the children and the unemployed, then, there will be no reason whatsoever to steal from the public treasury. This was the philosophy of Lee Kwan Yew in Singapore. He decided that he would so highly remunerate his workers that they would not steal and embezzle public funds and that people would work for and uphold the system that takes care of them. Let us try it here in Nigeria. If the executive is serious about cutting down corruption and the cost of governance, the legislative branch will have to follow suit and the same goes for the judiciary.

    The current package of emoluments and allowances for legislators is not sustainable. We are told that our current members of House of Representatives and of the Senate are the most highly paid in this category in the world. This is not an enviable record for a third world country. This has to change. What we are saying of the centre applies to the states and the local governments. We cannot honestly ask for a change of direction without all of us being committed to changes in the system.

    There has to be a change in revenue mobilization, a situation in which Nigeria charges a VAT of seven percent while other African states are charging 18percent must change. We have to increase VAT to 18percent especially at a time when our income for oil has been reduced by 50percent. Increase in VAT will hit the rich more than the poor because it is the rich who buy aeroplanes, cars and drink champagne etc. we should also adopt on a national scale, Lagos state land use tax and each state would decide how much it wants to levy. States had better get used to mobilization of internal revenue than carrying begging bowls to the federal government.

    Finally, we must direct our energy to industrialization, agriculture and exploitation of solid minerals as a way of diversifying our economy from over-dependence on oil and gas and when we have enough resources, we must radically transform our electricity generation and distribution because without this we will not have modern industries, health, transportation, industrial and communication infrastructure.

  • Nine new Private Universities: One too many

    On the recommendation of the National Universities Commission, the Federal government has approved the take off of nine new private universities mostly in the Southwest, South-South and North-Central areas where there are enough private universities already. The obvious questions to ask is where will these universities find good students, bearing in mind, the number of students who pass in five subjects at credit level, including English and Mathematics is usually not many. The existing universities sometimes have to struggle to find enough students to meet approved quota. Secondly, where will the staff to teach in these universities come from bearing in mind that foreigners would not accept current salaries paid to academics in Nigeria where a full professor earns two thousand five hundred dollars ($2500) a month at current rate of exchange. The result of this is that these new universities would poach staff from existing universities leading to a situation where people who cannot be senior lecturers in existing universities become professors in new ones.

    Thirdly, running a university is an expensive venture. If those who are establishing mushroom universities think they would make money, they are definitely in for a great shock. If proprietors are determined to make money, then they will have to cut corners in students’ accommodation, provision of laboratories and libraries and staffing as a whole. The result of this will be frustration of students and staff to the detriment of the institutions and vicariously to the detriment of our country.

    I have not said anything about employment for those coming out of these universities because I do not think this is a strong argument against training of young people. University education is for the purpose of training the mind and developing the total man or woman. Getting jobs should be regarded as secondary. If people are well trained no matter what discipline, they would either get jobs or start something on their own. Certainly, they would be in a position to shape the future of their country through critical participation in what goes on in the society as responsible citizens. An educated citizenry is a fundamental condition for development.

    I have said it in my column once that by the law of natural competition, a few of our private universities will die but that the ones established by corporate or sectarian bodies are more likely to survive. At least, I know a university that was approved some ten years ago that flew for sometime before crashing out of existence. More of this is likely to happen in the future. Finally, government needs to give itself a breathing space for consolidation of the existing private and public universities before approving new universities. Many of the present new universities both public and private are too small judging by students’ enrolment. Half of the over one hundred and forty universities we have in this country have less than five thousand students each and the entire number of students in the over 140 universities we have in this country is not up to one million. So it is not the number of universities that really matters, what matter is quality universities that can take more students in existing universities while saving cost on administration.

    I was at the centennial celebration of the association of commonwealth universities in London last year and one of the trends noticeable is that a few top universities in Europe and America are beginning to establish branch universities in developing countries and offering courses through electronic education and graduating students some of who have never been to America or England with degrees of Harvard, Yale, MIT, Oxford and Cambridge as the case may be. So instead of establishing many universities all over the place, would it not have been better if a few of our universities were made to develop university campuses in other parts of our country? After all, we have the historical experience of London University having colleges in Ibadan, Legon, Accra; Mona, Jamaica; Makerere, Uganda; Nairobi, Kenya; Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and Singapore, Singapore. The trend now is that some British and American universities are having large campuses off shore in China, Malaysia and the Middle East. Maybe if such branches were established in Nigeria, the cost of going there will be so prohibitive and few of our people would be able to go there and perhaps this accounts for approval of new universities in Nigeria. Whatever the case may be, the increasing number of mushroom universities in Nigeria, both public and private, calls for caution before we end up producing certificated illiterates who may be a scourge on the society that cannot meet their expectations for jobs and employment.

    I hope I will not be misunderstood that I am advocating, shutting the door of education against the teaming millions of Nigerian youths who want to go through the portals of universities. Universities in India and America are of varying degrees in educational quality. We of course, already have these varying degrees in the quality of our universities. This is in spite of the fact that the NUC foolishly imposes on all Nigerian universities homogenised programmes without allowing each university to develop its own character and uniqueness. I do not know how the NUC came to do this because the NUC in its formative years was patterned after the British higher education grants commission. It was meant to receive grants from the government and distribute to universities but overtime, the NUC in Nigeria has become not only a grants commission but an academic standards organisation. The result is that all the universities offer the same programmes whether private or public and there is no room for uniqueness or academic identity. This makes the point I made about a few universities in Nigeria being made to establish campuses all over the country and the present campuses of existing universities being turned into mere tutorial and examination centres. There is a need for debate about the need of higher education in Nigeria; and this debate was started in the commonwealth universities association centennial celebration; and there is a need for stakeholders in higher education in Nigeria to be actively involved because this is about our future; and our future cannot be left in the hands of a few bureaucrats no matter how highly educated they may be. Higher education is too important to be left in the hands of the to be left in the hands of NUC.

  • 2015 elections, Nigeria is winning

    There is a lot of anxiety about the presidential elections coming up in two days time. Many have worked themselves up to the point of hypertension as if elections are not a normal process of democratic renewal. I can of course understand why people are anxious. In fact, I have heard people predict that there will be civil war after the elections. There will be no such thing. I have said it in this column before that when we get to the edge of the precipice, we will temporise and somehow avoid falling over. I was in England last year when the Scots were voting whether to remain in the United Kingdom or not. Everybody was worked up and afraid of the consequences of that referendum but at the end, good sense prevailed and the Scots decided in favour of the union. I have a feeling that when the presidential elections are over, no matter who wins, Nigeria will settle down, and possibly begin again, the process of renewal.

    The fact that this election is being hotly contested is a good augury for the future of democracy in Nigeria. We can ignore the excesses of some politicians who have been making incendiary statements full of hate against one presidential candidate or the other. These people in most cases are fighting for their own survival and they do not represent decent opinions of our people. Some are foaming in the mouth about Buhari’s age and medical condition as if they have not seen people older than General Buhari hold executive positions in other countries. Perhaps they need to be reminded that just two months ago, the people of Tunisia elected an 88-year-old man, Béji Caïd Essebsi as their president. Also, I want to re-echo what Cardinal Onaiyekan said about the nonsense of making an issue of the age of General Buhari and his need if necessary to seek medical attention as a non-issue. Anybody of his age and even those who are much younger who have the means should seek medical attention anywhere. It does not make sense to say that a 72 year old man has medical conditions, this is normal, it is of no intellectual consequence. This writer is 72 plus and I will be ready to debate any issue on governance with anybody in Nigeria and outside Nigeria. The point I am making is that people should face more fundamental issues about Nigeria than the age of a presidential candidate.

    President Goodluck Jonathan has the constitutional right to want to serve a second term of four years and I am delighted that he is doing everything that is humanly possible to win the election. I am also excited about the fact that he himself and his supporters know that he is facing a formidable opponent and that the election can go either way. This is the first time in living memory in Nigeria that a head of government is being forced to fight for his survival. This is good for democracy. Suddenly, the president has realised his political mistake of totally marginalising the southwest in his appointments and budgetary allocations for infrastructural renewal in the southwest. His advisers, and intelligence chiefs have not been fair to the president. If they were, they would have told him about the physical neglect and the seething anger against him in the southwest. In the six years of being Head of State, bad roads have been the lot of our people, Ibadan-Ilorin, Ibadan-Lagos, Ibadan-Akure have remained death traps; electricity supply in the southwest has been fitful, inadequate and episodic. In Ibadan which remains the most important city in Yoruba land, the daily occurrence of blackout has been the experience of the people and this has retarded the growth of the city because all industrial and manufacturing plants have either been ruined by inadequate power or shut down completely.

    The experience in other parts of the country has not been marginally better. Out of the ten largest cities in the whole country, six or more of them are in the South West and urbanisation here brings its own problems and this makes the neglect of the area politically sensitive and explosive because information travel rapidly and widely. On the eve of the election, the president is now forced to touch remote places and plead with traditional rulers in the southwest such as the Oni of Ife, Alake of Egbaland, the Alaafin of Oyo, and even minor traditional rulers like the Alara in Lagos State. This is good for democracy. As commander in chief of the armed forces, the president is now visiting troops fighting against Boko Haram. I commend him for this and this is the way it should have been but it is never too late.

    General Muhammadu Buhari has also gone round wearing traditional accoutrement of various ethnic groups in order to ingratiate himself to them and their hearts. He himself knows that if he becomes president, he would while leading have to carry the people along. He would have to forget the WA1 Brigade of yesteryears and decrees with immediate effect. He has campaigned in all parts of Nigeria including the Delta, the home area of the present president. Both he and the president have also campaigned in the troubled and disturbed North East and in spite of the fear of untoward incidents, the campaigns there of the two of them have been largely free of incidents. This is the way it should be and Nigeria is winning. It is clear that our people can no longer be taken for granted and whoever wants to lead them would have to convince them that he is ready to offer exemplary leadership and be a moral avatar. In this respect, we must thank Professor Attahiru Jega, the chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission for attempting to conduct a rigging-free elections in 2015 through the use of the permanent voting card. This should presage electronic voting in years to come.

    May I recall the 1959 pre-independence federal elections and especially Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s revolutionary campaign in the Northern Nigeria using aeroplanes and helicopters to cover all the nooks and crannies of Northern Nigeria? On seeing this, Sir Ahmadu Bello Sardauna of Sokoto and leader of NPC was forced out of his aristocratic cocoon to campaign in dusty villages in Northern Nigeria with his flowing babariga sometimes covered with dust. We were told he never forgave Awolowo for this indignity. Whether this is a true story or not, our president by running helter-skelter all over the country is repeating history. Local and foreign pundits are suggesting that this election is going to be close but it seems the western powers and the media have written off the present president but whatever the outcome of this election, it is Nigeria that would win because from now on, no head of government; president, governors and local government chairmen would sit at home and write the outcome of elections without allowing the people to express their minds in a free, fair and transparent way.

    We are hopefully turning the corner in our electoral politics and we can only hope that INEC will not be sabotaged and that the elections will result in the renewal of stability and democratic governance in our country.

  • Professor Ayankanmi Ayandele: A Tribute – 2

    Professor Ayandele was my teacher at the University of Ibadan and he was a damn good teacher. Those of my generation who came under his tutelage admired him for his hard work and elucidation. If one took his lectures verbatim, one did not have to read any other book because he had a prodigious energy for research and he would have consulted many sources before delivering his lectures. He was given to the use of bombastic language which many of us young people admired and enjoyed and tried to copy. He did not need a microphone because he spoke loudly and when he was lecturing in the Arts Theatre people in the library could follow.

    He was dramatic in the delivery of his lectures. Sometimes he would use a simple word say “transformation” if you did not get it, he would change it to “metamorphosis” and students would say what? He would retort “it is an English word”. He did not speak French, so when he said Louis XIV said “l’etat C’est moi”, he will say it as any Yoruba man would “Letat sest maui” and the class will explode into laughter. He would not get the joke but the joke was on us because he would have moved on.

    Professor Ayandele was the most prolific of all the historians in his generation. Apart from his book, Missionary Impact on Modern Nigeria which remains a classic, he also wrote a voluminous biography of Bishop James Johnson with the title, Holy Johnson. He wrote The History of the Ijebus which remains a classic. He wrote many chapters in books and articles in referenced scholarly journals including a monograph on David Livingstone but the most enjoyable of his works for me is the book, The Educated Elite in Nigeria which was a compilation of the special university lectures which he gave in the University of Ibadan in the 70s. He was going to write a sequel to this book but unfortunately his health could not bear the exertion and rigour necessary for producing another book.

    I remember reading his book, Holy Johnson and feeling that I was reading about Professor Ayandele. Even the photograph of Bishop James Johnson reminds one of Ayandele. In the late 1890s and early twentieth century, educated Nigerians tended to be bombastic in language to the irritation of the owners of the English language. Bishop James Johnson shared this trait with his biographer who must have enjoyed reading the private papers of the bishop. Bishop James Johnson of course did not call himself holy; this was the perception of his sympathetic biographer. The bishop belonged to the class of educated Nigerians in Lagos that was so totally disliked by the Governor-General, Sir Fredrick Lugard and his younger brother, Major Edward Lugard whose critics described as the so called political secretary of the Governor-General with a fat salary and who in return described educated Nigerians as “trousered niggers dressed in Bond street attires who send their laundry to England every other week.” Professor Ayandele had prickly relations with his white colleagues in the department of History at the University of Ibadan. Perhaps this was due to his experience of racism while studying in England. His commitment to African culture shorn of the pretentions to western way of life was amply demonstrated in his book, The Educated Elite in Nigeria in which he described the Lagos westernised Nigerians as “deluded hybrids” who were neither Africans nor Europeans or as “wind sowers” because their downfall at the height of the nationalist movement was predictable unless they were ready to go native and become real Africans. Many of them later changed their names.

    Many of the European lecturers at the University of Ibadan in the late 1960s left in droves to go to Ahmadu Bello University where they felt more appreciated and far away from the fire brand nationalism of the people like Ayandele. Ahmadu Bello University was later to become the final resting place of European academics who lost out at the end of the British Empire and who were not ready to compete with uppity Africans of the like of Ayandele.

    Professor Ayandele was a serious scholar and a painstaking researcher but whatever he wrote was from the perspective of the African and he took license for generous interpretation of historical data to express his ideological commitment to African nationalist historiography. For this, we owe him a debt of gratitude. Professor Ayandele wrote history in the classical mode of literature. History to him was to be enjoyed and his use of flowery language was deliberate and to take historical scholarship from the compilation of dry data with little or no soul. He wrote like S.T. Bindoff, one of his teachers in England.

    I am surprised that professor Ayandele never won the national merit award. Of course, one is aware of the fact that sometimes, consideration of federal character unnecessarily creeps into what is supposed to be, an award for academic excellence. Be that as it may, Professor Ayankanmi Ayandele’s place in Nigeria’s academic history is settled. He was largely the founder of two academic institutions- the University of Jos and the University of Calabar. It is therefore surprising to me that when he died, neither the University of Ibadan nor these two institutions that he was closely connected with mourned him in death. Neither were there any editorials in the newspapers nor obituary comments from the federal government. This is not good enough for a life of service. Professor Ayandele had no hobbies but work. He had no family as such but the family of humanity and he was above ethnic prejudices and he was so totally loyal to one of his mentors, Professor J.C. Anene an Igbo man that when he died, he adopted Anene’s family as his own and took care of them. Ayandele was an eccentric academic but he was a good man and a good Christian. He would be remembered by those of us whose lives he touched. Adieu, great scholar, prolific writer, a man of ideas and letters and a prodigious builder of academic institutions. Ayandele was a good Baptist who before the advent of the current wave of Pentecostalism was given to paying his tithe and living modestly. He was a teetotaller and avoided the company of women of easy virtue. One hopes that the University of Calabar would immortalise this selfless man by naming one of the halls of residence or preferably the University Library just as the University of Ibadan named its library after Kenneth Dike its first Nigerian Vice Chancellor.