The Nation Newspaper

Category: Jide Osuntokun

  • Boko Haram, in the name of God, cease fire

    The spate of bombings and killings by Boko Haram in recent times including the recent one in Abuja has become frightening. No one can understand the justification for what has been happening for almost three years. If Boko Haram and its members are born by women and are created in the image of God, they should cease fire and negotiate with the authorities on what they want. Surely it cannot be that they want to convert people to their own kind of Islam by killing the same people including Muslims. It is unislamic for any Muslim to deliberately reduce the size of the Ummah– the community of Muslims. When this campaign started many of us thought that it was a campaign against Christians because that was what it appeared to be initially but now nobody can make any sense out of these terrible attacks. Perhaps to make an impression on all of us Nigerians, Boko Haram for the third time since their campaign began has struck a deadly blow at the outskirts of Abuja.

    First it was the Police Headquarters, then the United Nations building now a motor park at Nyanya. For those who are familiar with Abuja, Nyanya is where the poor people live irrespective of their religions. Some of us had sometimes thought that the Boko Haram rank and file were made up of poor people; some even saw their murderous campaign as some kind of class war. People tend to explain their campaign away as a reaction of the deprived and have-nots against the haves but how does one explain, striking at the hearts of the poor people’s quarter in Abuja?

    This violence does not make sense and it ought to end. Government is spending at least a trillion naira every year confronting these rural and urban terrorists in the north of Nigeria. This is a vast amount that could have been used to alleviate the suffering of the poor. It seems that our security forces and agencies have still not devised the right kind of strategies to confront this movement. It seems the intention of this movement is to make the country ungovernable even though they have largely been confined to the north-eastern part of Nigeria. Their ability and intention to strike in other areas are becoming worrisome.

    Personally for me, I want to appeal to members of the Boko Haram to lay down their weapons and come out and embrace negotiation. I say this because I spent years 1982-1984 in the then serene and quiet Maiduguri metropolis. I can never understand why the serenity of Maiduguri has become a distant past. Who would have believed that the point of entry of Islam into Nigeria and that the Kanuri, one of the most civilised people in Nigeria will be the one to be visited by this cruel tragedy? In their culture, particularly their cuisine, language and scholarship, the Kanuris are one of the best in this country producing the first crop of the Ulamas spreading the Islamic civilisation all over the country. In the production of modern western educated effendiyyah in northern Nigeria, the Kanuris were at the forefront. In fact the first Nigerian central Minister of Education, the late Sir Kashim Ibrahim was not only a distinguished educationist, a local patriot, a noble man of Borno, he was also the first indigenous governor of the entire northern region. If it were possible to see what is going on from heaven, what would he say about his homeland of Borno? And centuries before Sir Kashim Ibrahim, there was Idris Alooma, a forward looking Shehu of Borno who had built some kind of students’ hostel for Borno students studying in Al-Azar University in Egypt. This is the same Borno that produced first class politicians like Waziri Ibrahim, the apostle of politics without bitterness; Alhaji Zanar Bukar Dipcharima, frontline politician of the first republic and Alhaji Shetima Ali Monguno, a fine gentleman of great nobility of heart, a man of great and transparent integrity who is witnessing the degradation of his homeland in his evening years. Borno also produced Alhaji Ibrahim Imam, a revolutionary scholar politician and thinker of the first republic.

    Of course the Boko Haram is not a Kanuri movement but what I am saying is that it is largely destroying Borno, the home of these intrepid people and the movement has unfortunately been identified with Borno even though all kinds of copy cats and journeymen from other ethnic groups are now manifesting as Boko Haram. Outsiders particularly friends of Nigeria have suggested that the federal government should launch some kind of Marshall Plan for the development of the north-eastern part of Nigeria. Even if we have the resources, Nigeria alone cannot handle this task and if we deploy the entire Nigerian army to the north-east, they may not be able to put down completely this madness and terrorism. Besides, economic development can only take place in a peaceful environment.

    There has to be another strategy of wining the hearts of the people because it now seems that Boko Haram has a long hand that can reach any part of Nigeria. It is frightening to imagine what a determined group like Boko Haram can do to Nigeria. No Nigerian living anywhere should think that he or she is immune to terrorism; it is only a matter of time for all of us to become victims if we do not do something quickly. It has become clear that we alone cannot solve this problem we should therefore invite friends of Nigeria to help us. We are not the first country to witness this kind of insurgency, before us were Indonesia and Malaysia in the 1950s before the insurgencies there were successfully put down. Since then, the sophistication of weaponry in the hands of terrorists have made it difficult to suppress most insurgencies because of their embrace of suicide bombing. When people no longer fear death, it makes their being killed not a serious strategy because such a strategy is based on massive retaliation.

    The government should embark on provision of jobs for men who will then be physically exhausted by hard work and would not be dreaming and fantasizing about creating paradise here on earth or in heaven, it is only God who can do this. No man has the right to take the life of another man except if he has been found guilty by properly constituted authorities or in self defence. This is what the Holy Quran says; murdering people on a semi-industrial scale through terrorism is not an act of God.

  • State of roads in Nigeria

    As a young man, I enjoyed driving on Nigerian roads. The roads were much better than they are now. It also seems as if the Ministry of Works took its job much more seriously than they do today. Their officials did not collude with contractors to reduce stones, cement and tar that were used for constructing the roads and they seemed to last longer than they are today. Of course there was less traffic and in those days, trains ran on the railways and heavy haulage was done by rail not by land. Some people have suggested that those put in charge of the railway corporation deliberately ran down the corporation so that their trailer business could thrive. Whatever the reasons for running down the railways, the consequences are that the haulage business and their huge articulated trucks have not only ruined the roads, they have become a health hazard to our people. Efforts to revive the railways have not succeeded. Apparently because of lack of commitment and poor funding the result is that the only way of moving goods and people in the country is by road. The aviation industry which could have contributed substantially to the movement of goods and people is expensive for most people. This is why the question of the roads is almost a matter of life and death (pardon the pun). Without movement of goods, services and people the economy will not grow. This is why government has to pay attention to the health of our roads. In the northern part of Nigeria where the rainy season is short and where the land is flat with little or no mountains and hills except on the Jos and Bauchi plateaux, roads are much more easily constructed and maintained than in the south. But up north, the spatial distribution of population in wide areas and the size of the land mass that had to be traversed increase cost of construction in the north. In the south, roads sometimes have to pass through mangrove swamps and the rain forest and on large bodies of water leading to high cost of road construction. Unlike in many parts of the world where colonialism led to infrastructural modernisation, Nigeria inherited from the British overlords, poor network of roads. Roads leading out of Lagos at independence were winding narrow roads going to Abeokuta and Ibadan and subsequently to the east. To go to the north one had to pass through the tortuous roads from Lagos to Ibadan then to Ilorin and to Jebba across the Niger then to Kotangora, Tegina, Kaduna and then to Kano, Jos, Bauchi and Maiduguri. These were narrow and meandering roads that are not comparable to the roads we now have even though the new roads are poorly maintained. There is a need for a comprehensive review of the road network in Nigeria. First of all, we have to agree that the hinterland of Nigeria has to be linked to the coast. What this immediately suggests is that there is need to have four longitudinal roads- one running in the western part of the country from Badagry to Sokoto, another from Lagos to Kano, a third one from Warri to Bauchi and another one from Calabar to Maiduguri. Then there should be an east-west road linking Lagos along the coast to Port-Harcourt. If we have this type of autobahnen in the country, then it will be easy to move around the country and this will foster a sense of unity and rapid economic development. The coastal road from Lagos to Port-Harcourt has been on the drawing boards for several decades yet no action has been taken. Because the road will have to pass through mangrove swamps necessitating the building of many bridges, it will be very expensive but it is doable. If we do not have the money, this is the kind of project that a country should borrow money to do because it will pay for itself. All these roads should be toll roads so that their maintenance and the recovery of the initial cost of construction can be seamlessly taken care of. This is what is done in civilised countries. And now that we have declared ourselves the largest economy in Africa, we should have something to show for it. Already there is a dual carriage way running from Lagos to Port-Harcourt through the Sagamu-Benin-Onitsha-Enugu-Port-Harcourt dual carriage way. There is another one running from Lagos to Oyo and on to Ilorin if and when the Oyo-Ogbomosho section is finished. There is a dual carriage way from Lagos to Abeokuta. This should have terminated in Ibadan if we have some sense. There is a dual carriage way from Abuja through Kaduna to Kano and then to Maiduguri. The Kano-Maiduguri dual carriage way is probably the longest in Nigeria and cannot be truly justified on economic grounds. The Abuja-Lokoja dual carriage way is under construction and substantial amount of work has been done. Perhaps in the future, the Lokoja-Benin sector would be constructed. The Benin-Warri-Yenagoa-Port-Harcourt east-west road is also at an advanced stage of completion. In all this road networks, the South-west is being short changed. The dual carriage way from Ibadan to Akure stops abruptly in Ilesa and this does not make economic sense because Ondo and Ekiti states produce 80 percent of Nigeria’s cocoa and substantial amount of hard wood timber. One would also have expected a dual carriage way to link Ado-Ekiti and Akure and Akure with Benin. If we have the current powers and resources of the federal government devolved into the regions or zones, roads to link areas with economic potentials and resource availability will be constructed but as it is today, roads are constructed on political basis thereby economically shooting ourselves in the feet.

    One of the ways to assess the economy of a country is through its transportation grid. A country that is not in permanent motion is underdeveloped if not a dead country. A visit to any modern country will show goods and peoples being moved around by water on the high seas, by rivers, by air, by surface trains, by tramp cars, by underground trains, by fast trains, and by roads so that there is no delay in moving goods around because time is an important factor in economic development. Our primitive level of development only uses roads in transportation and this shows how much far behind we are in relation to the rest of the world. The British left us with a functional railway system just as they did in India. As populous and chaotic as India is, (at least they are seven times larger than us), they have managed to keep the trains running while we have run our own down and out. It is a shame that unlike before, we no longer have development plans in this country. Before the advent of the military into power in Nigeria, we had quiquennial plans by which some of these issues I am raising would have been taken up and debated and then put in a plan of development over the years instead of just building roads on the spur of the moment and largely for the political and not economic considerations; things would have been done on rational basis. The time may have run out for people of my generation but certainly the younger people of Nigeria should take the bull by the horns and deal with the problems of today in a systemic and systematic way so that their future will be brighter than ours. The current leaders of Nigeria will not have an excuse for not handing over the country in a better way to future leaders because of lack of ideas. The ideas are blowing in the winds and all they have to do is catch the vision. The rest of the world is not going to wait for us; in fact they will laugh at us if we continue to remain static at this primitive level of development. We have the people and the resources, then what is the problem really apart from the greed and corruption of our people particularly our leaders? Let the word go out that this generation of Nigerians and the generation to come will hold the leaders of our country responsible for this terrible state of underdevelopment for which they have consigned the country. The backward network of roads is just the tip of the iceberg in our level of underdevelopment because every other aspect and facets of our life are crying for developmental attention.

  • Rebasing of Nigeria’s GDP

    After more than two decades, the announcement of $507 billion GDP, almost an 80 percent rise on Nigeria’s last GDP should not come as a surprise. Imagine what it could have been if this country were well run and if this country had patriotic and knowledgeable leaders since independence. Imagine what it would have been if agriculture still had the pride of place and if we were still the largest exporter of palm produce, peanuts, gum Arabic and substantial amount of cotton and cocoa as well as rubber and hard wood timber. Imagine what it would have been if we still exported tin and columbine and if we were tapping the huge deposits of minerals like gold, uranium, bauxite, coal, bitumen and if we can feed ourselves from the vast arable land of our country. Imagine if we had peace and security at home and if Boko Haram did not exist and if we did not have the constant killing of farmers by herdsmen in many parts of Nigeria, we would have had a GDP substantially more than what was declared.

    Unlike many critics I do not see anything wrong in declaring that Nigeria has the biggest economy in Africa. Ordinarily, this should not be news at all; it should be the normal expectation of a country of 170 million people. What these figures do not mean is that we are a rich people because we are not.

    Sixty percent of Nigerians or more still live on one dollar a day. What these figures actually show is what lies in the future for us. If we get our acts right, Nigeria should be comparing itself with Brazil rather than with puny African countries. We have always known that in Africa, Nigeria, South Africa and Egypt belong in the same league. Although until now our economy was rated third but it is good news that we are number one. Of course in per capital GDP we are way down the ladder. If we get our acts together, we can only move forward. Imagine if we had 50,000 mega-watts of electricity supplied to Nigerian homes and industries we would not only have our youths in gainful employment, there will also be peace and security in our country. The cost and availability of energy is a great factor in industrialisation. If we had sufficient energy to industrialise our country and with a huge market of 170 million people internally and almost the same captive market in West Africa, we will not only be prosperous but also live in a co-prosperity area in West Africa.

    My hope is that rather than our leaders celebrating this rebased GDP it should be a clarion call for action. We need to open this economy much wider to foreign direct investment than we have done previously. The stupendous growth of the Chinese economy in recent times is due primarily to investment of overseas Chinese money and western capitalist investment. Admittedly these investments are predicated on excellent Chinese manpower and skill but without the opening up of China by Den Xioping, China would still have remained the back waters of the world as it was several generations ago but today China rivals the US economy and may yet catch up and surpass the US economy by year 2020s. Imagine if we did not have the level of corruption we have in this country and if we have the legal and governance regime that are attractive to foreign and domestic investments, the sky will be the limit for our country because we have huge agricultural land spread across equatorial, tropical, savannah and sahel regions of Africa. This geographical diversity makes us able to grow several types of crops both for domestic use and for export. We have a lot of work to do in Nigeria and if this country were working, we would not need all the time we spend on constitution making and politicking rather than on development. If most of our people were productively engaged, it will not matter which ethnic group is in or out of power because every region of the country will be contributing to the national purse from areas where they have comparative advantages. It is because we are not working that we have time to exaggerate the little differences in our languages and culture. Let us take this revelation of our GDP as a first step on a long journey to development. We are still a very poor country in spite of our rich endowments; we need to add value to our primary produce including the hydrocarbons that has put us on a high global pedestal. Is it not a shame that a country that has been exporting crude oil since 1956 and that has four refineries built is still importing refined petroleum products because of our inability to maintain the refineries? Instead of selling these refineries to whoever wants to buy them even at give away prices, we continue to corruptly make budgetary provisions for their maintenance when we know that such provisions are meant to fill the pockets of some of our rapacious leaders because the refineries never work and when they work, they only produce at minimal level. What amazes many commentators about Nigeria is the inability of our leaders to see that if the right kind of policies are adopted and best practices are inculcated into our system of governance, Nigeria will be in a win-win situation because the potentialities of this country are so great and enormous that all we need to actualise them is to find that leader or group of leaders who will galvanise them both material and human into productive processes. Let it be said that many patriotic Nigerians see this rebasing of our GDP as a pointer to the trajectory of development Nigeria must take. It is not the end; in fact it is the beginning. It is not something the current leadership should celebrate because they did not make it. It is a challenge to all of us. It is a revelation that we belong to a country that has a destiny which though not manifest can be attained if all work together for the good of all. To get to our destination, we will need friends in the international community as well as on the continent of Africa. We will need to harness our resources, we will sometimes need to throw our pride away and listen to our trading partners.

    Some leaders of South Africa have justly remarked about that country’s contribution to the rise of our GDP. We are all witnesses to South African investment in our retail trade, telecommunication and banking industries. That is the truth and we can also turn back and tell the South Africans that we also contributed to their political liberation and that is the truth also. We can still draw more support from South Africa with its vast pool of technological know-how and investible capital. South Africa has a more sophisticated economy and banking system and we can draw support from them. We also need to open up to Asia particularly India and China because of their vast pool of foreign reserves which we will need to open up our infrastructure which right now is at the primitive stage of development. We need to build railways to crisscross our country to move goods and people across the country. We must of course never forget our traditional trading partners in the west with which we have had more than a century and a half of economic collaboration. In other words, continuing rise in our GDP which hopefully will be rebased normally every five years should be a collaborative effort in which we will enlist the support of international community and graft this support on our own domestic readiness and ability to work and to resolve whatever internal political contradictions inhibiting progress in Nigeria.

    In conclusion, any progress recorded in any aspect of Nigeria’s life is worth-celebrating because we have very little to celebrate. Therefore becoming the biggest economy in Africa is worth celebrating but we must not get drunk on it because this rebased GDP is just the end of the beginning of an end which will not only see our economy grow, but also our people lifted from the morass of poverty which the insensitive policies and poor leadership of the past and present have condemned us to.

  • The APC team for 2015 Presidential election

    The emergence of the All Progressives Congress (APC) has given Nigerians for the first time in recent times, the chance for a true two party system namely: a party in government and a party in waiting. Democracy as a system of government offers the electorate the possibility of change especially if the party in government is not performing well. Since 1999 at least at the federal level, one party has been in government and it does not matter whether the party performs or not, it has remained in government either through the free will of the people, or as a result of manipulated poll. It reminds me of what happened several years ago when the European Union told the Kenyan government that it would no longer grant economic assistance to it if the one-party rule in Kenya was not changed. I remember what a funny colleague of mine from Zimbabwe jokingly said about Kenya and his country that they were practising “one-party multi-partism”, of course everybody laughed. Nigeria is too important to be subject of ridicule of one-party government.

    This is why the emergence of the APC is a positive development in the political life of Nigeria. In other words, Nigeria has an opportunity for peaceful change of government from one party to another party in the next election all things being equal. This opportunity does not mean this will happen. It is left to the sagacity of political leaders in the opposition party to make this happen. In other words, in next year’s election, it is for the APC to lose and not the PDP to win. No matter how badly the PDP government has performed, the APC must still offer a winning team for the electorate to find it attractive to vote for. If we were a normal country the PDP will lose the election of next year but we are not a normal country. The ethnic and the religious plurality of Nigeria make it incumbent on the APC to find a winning formula through the choice of its presidential candidate and his or her running mate. Since adoption and embrace of the presidential system in Nigeria, we have had a combination of Shagari and Ekwueme, Moshood Abiola and Baba-Gana Kingibe, Obasanjo and Atiku, Umaru Yar’Adua and Jonathan and Sambo and Jonathan. The pattern in these combinations has been a north-south combination and a Christian –Muslim ticket except in the Abiola and Kingibe combination. The conclusion from the above is that, to win, there is a need for religious balance as well as regional balance. The only exception in the religious combination is Kingibe and Abiola ticket which in spite of that exception still won the election simply because their opponents were weak and unattractive. If the APC wants to be taken seriously it must present a Christian-Muslim ticket. If it does something different, then it is not serious about taking over power in Nigeria. It is a shame that one should dwell on religious and regional backgrounds of candidates but we are talking about reality; the ideal thing may be to ignore ethnic and religious identities of candidates but it’s not realistic in the Nigeria of today. This is why the APC must perish the thought of a Muslim-Muslim ticket. The victory of Abiola and Kingibe was due primarily to the personality of Abiola who had over the years worked himself into the hearts of Nigerians, Muslims and Christians alike through his generosity of building mosques and churches for the adherents of the two religions of Islam and Christianity. Abiola was educated in a Baptist secondary school and was comfortable attending church functions, singing hymns and chanting psalms; there are not two people like him. So to predicate the future of the APC on Muslim-Muslim ticket is totally politically stupid. If the APC does this, it will destroy itself and that is the truth. Having said this, the APC must look into various options for the 2015 election. Because of the existing tradition of alternating the president of Nigeria between the north and the south, the presidential candidate of the APC must necessarily come from the north. Where in the north would depend on who the party feels can draw the maximum vote across the north. Since the last two elections in this country, I have always voted for General Muhammad Buhari. My reasons for wanting him to be president are as follows:

    First, I believe things are so bad in Nigeria that we need somebody of his character and persona to fix it. This I believe is in the collective interest of Nigeria and in the interest of the future of our children. This is a man who has been a state governor of what is today the entire north-east of Nigeria, Petroleum Minister and Head of State and he is not known to have vast amount of money through corruption unlike others who have held these posts before. Corruption eats deep into the body politique of Nigeria and we need nimble hands of a surgeon like Muhammad Buhari to operate it. In the process of surgery, you have to cut through the body. The patient may get hurt but at the end of the day, the patient may get cured.

    Secondly, in this country, both the leadership and the followership lack discipline. We need a leader who by example will show the way for the people to follow. Buhari and Idiagbon did this before so the man has a track record of discipline. The combination of discipline and honesty which we have in this man will lead us to our promised land. I do not know anybody in Nigeria who has this combination. I have heard that Buhari is a religious fanatic and a northern regional hegemonist. He may be this, but in a democratic regime he will be constrained by the constitution and I personally do not see anything wrong in being a strict Muslim or Christian and as for being a northern regional hegemonist, if we are honest with ourselves, don’t we all feel comfortable with people of our region? This is why we have a constitution and we can take care of these problems if we devolve power like it used to be under a proper federal system so that developmental activities will take place at the regions or zones while the centre in a restructured constitutional architecture will only deal in common services such as defence, customs and immigration, aviation and shipping, finance and currency and Foreign Affairs in a carefully calibrated constitutional design.

    The candidates of the APC is not for me or anybody to dictate but if the party wants to win, it must have a winning combination of candidates and there is no shortage of the right calibre of people within the APC. It is the duty of all of us who are interested in a multi-party democracy to advise a government party in waiting not to throw away its chances. The big wigs in the APC must borrow a leave from the Ahmadu Bello political book of the first republic and stay at home while their younger lieutenants go to the centre with their advice and political support. A dream APC ticket therefore will be either Buhari and Oshiomhole or Amaechi while Tinubu contests the senate with the aim of becoming senate president in 2015. Another possibility is Kwakwanso and Oshiomhole or Amaechi whilst Fashola contests for the senate for the purpose of becoming senate president whist Okorocha sponsors somebody from Imo State to become speaker. Anything short of this will not be ideal but anybody thinking of a Buhari-Tinubu ticket should perish the thought because the voters will not accept this. This is not because the two gentlemen are not good but what is ideal is not usually realistic. We need to have a breath of fresh air in the political terrain of Nigeria. Fifteen years of one-party rule is enough and Nigeria should not throw away the chances of another party coming into power because of the political unwisdom of its leaders.

  • Is Boko Haram an Islamic insurgency?

    Is Boko Haram an Islamic insurgency?

    The answer to this question depends on the aspect of Boko Haram one is dealing with. It seems that there are three types of movement coalescing into what is now called Boko Haram. One is a religious movement, another is a political movement and the third is a criminal component and it seems each is feeding on the other. Unfortunately there is now evidence that some army personnel who are not loyal to Nigeria are beginning to surface in the ranks of Boko Haram. In order to put these movements in perspective, it will be clearer if one looks at religious movements in the Sudan broadly defined as a whole. In the modern history of the western and eastern Sudan stretching from the Senegal valley across to the upper valleys of the Nile, Islamic fundamentalism has played a very important role. The most well known of Islamic revolutions in the western Sudan is that of Usman Dan Fodio, whose son Muhammad Bello and brother Abdullahi founded the Sokoto caliphate. Usman Dan Fodio was an itinerant preacher against syncretism, corruption and misrule among apparently Muslim rulers in Hausaland. Islam had been well planted in Hausaland since about the eighth century BC particularly in Kano and Katsina with many clerics from North Africa visiting Kano and Katsina to lecture at mosques there. But over time, the Muslim rulers of these areas became more materialistic, corrupt and dictatorial in the conduct of state affairs. Taxes were arbitrarily levied and collected on the peasants and the nomads. It was these grievances that Usman Dan Fodio exploited to lead a rebellion against the Habe rulers between 1804 and 1808. This movement succeeded beyond his wildest dreams and drove away from their throne Hausa, Nupe and the Yoruba rulers. There is no doubt that Usman Dan Fodio was a pious man but one needs more than piety to found an empire. The political and military prowess of his son Muhammad Bello and Abdullahi his brother facilitated the emergence of the Sokoto caliphate. By the time the British overthrew the caliphate, almost all the evils of the Habe rulers had resurfaced in the caliphate and had undermined the moral fabric of the state. This point was proved by the Satiru revolt of 1905/1906 led by the blind cleric Saybu Dan Makafo who was able to mobilise people against the corrupt practices of the caliphate leadership and its English and French successors both in Sokoto and Dosso.

    The example of the Fulani-led revolt and the creation of the Sokoto caliphate were followed by fellow Fulanis in Massina now part of Mali and led by Sheikh Amadu Bakr Lobbo El-amin in 1810 and between that time and 1845, an ascetic type of Islam was imposed on the community and the sharia and Islamic jurisprudence were strictly followed. A much wider movement in the western Sudan was led by Al-hajj Umar Tall a tukolor, a group closely linked with the Fulani who also established along the upper Nile valleys, a so called Segu-Tukolor empire in which he imposed himself on the largely Malinke ethnic groups in those areas. Al-hajj Umar is well known in West African history as the man who was responsible for spreading the Tijanniya brotherhood, a revolutionary form of Islamic tariqa that preached equality of all peoples. These three Islamic revolutions by and large purified the society and brought new regimes based on the sharia that were more favourable to the ordinary people. Although over time their decline and eventual fall became inevitable.

    A much bigger and militant movement employing modern methods of warfare as well as sophisticated arms took place in what was then known as the Egyptian Sudan in 1881. This has gone down into history as the Mahdia or the Mahdist state which lasted between 1881 and 1898. The Sudan was for several decades under Turko-Egyptian control and oppression in the form of arbitrary taxation, corruption and inept rule was characteristic of the regime. It was not too difficult for a millenarian movement led by Mohammed Ahmad who proclaimed himself Al mahdi in the tradition of Islamic thought prevailing in that area. This was based on a doctrine that in difficult times, an “Imam of the age” would come and take over rulership of the state, purify the society and bring the society nearer to God. Sheikh Mohammed Ahmad declared himself this “Imam of the age” and the messiah the people were waiting for. He was able to found a state between 1881 and 1898 before the combined forces of the Egyptians and the British defeated him under a Bible-waving General Charles Gordon, whose death aroused national sentiment in England. The man who later became British Prime Minister and Second World War hero Winston Churchill took part in the fighting against the Mahdist leadership. The Mahdia has left an indelible imprint on Sudan even up till today and the Umma, a political party led by the grandson of the Mahdi, the Oxford educated Sadek el-Mhadi has been in and out of power several times. It is quite clear that any movement claiming to be an Islamic movement should aim at purifying society and since Islam generally does not separate politics from religion, such a movement must have a plan of creating a state in which the sharia would be the law and some kind of theocracy would be the mode of governance.

    The closest thing we have to Boko Haram therefore was the Maitasine uprising in Kano in 1980 and its blind fury and murderous campaign against the society generally did not conform to any reformist paradigm of Jihad. It did not appear to have had a programme of creating a state or replacing the then political status quo. It was also secretive and syncretist in nature. It mixed Islam and traditional African religion. The Maitasine revolt however was on such a scale that a division of the Nigerian army had to be deployed against it. Muhammad Marwa its leader was apparently killed in the campaign against them. This Maitasine revolt later reared up its ugly head in 1982 in Yola and Bulunkutu at the outskirts of Maiduguri. It was also on the same level of violence as the one in Kano and thousands of people perished in Yola and Maiduguri. This latter offshoot of the Maitasine was apparently led by Musa Makaniki who after the violence in Yola escaped to Gombe and from there to the Cameroons before he was caught in 2004.

    The Boko Haram at its inception was more of a religious movement founded by Muhammad Yusuf apparently of Kanuri extraction and with some level of western education. Because of the grinding poverty and unemployment of the youth, he attracted some followership to himself and it seems in the competition for power by politicians, his services were sought but after electoral victory, he and his movement were discarded and security forces were unleashed on him before he was killed in police custody. His death was a signal for widespread revolt which is now led by certain Abubakar Shekau who may be in the pay of Al-Qaeda in the Maghreb and with possible link with the Somali Al-shabab. What is significant now is the apparent foreign involvement in what is going on. Compared with the Islamic revolutions of the western and eastern Sudan, Boko Haram and Maitasine movement can hardly be said to be Islamic movements. Boko Haram seems now to be rooted in local grievances against constituted authority and its followership is the army of the unemployed and uneducated and those with smattering knowledge of the Holy Quran and with the possible sponsorship of aggrieved politicians and the enemies of Nigeria both inside and outside the country.

    What is common to all these ‘Sudanese’ Islamic movements is their roots in economic grievances and political oppression by the rulers. They seem to begin during the dry season when food and water are in short supply and when the hard times then prevailing lead people to expect the coming of the Mahdi sent divinely to bring liberation and succour to the oppressed. Boko Haram with its murderous campaign killing women, children and fellow Muslims can hardly qualify as an Islamic movement.

  • A state of anomy in Nigeria

    Terrible things are happening in Nigeria these days. Some months ago, a state in the eastern part of the country began to witness the phenomenon of baby factories. Young girls from ages of 15-30 or thereabouts were lured into the houses of some madams or captured by apparently heartless and hard-headed individuals who kept these girls as captives and then got boys or men to impregnate them as if they were rearing pedigree dogs. When these girls delivered their babies, they were paid, depending on the sexes of the babies, anything from N300,000 to N400,000. The cycle was again repeated until somebody blew the whistle and these poor children were released. This phenomenon seems to have been peculiar to the south eastern states in Nigeria until it spread first to Lagos then to Ondo and Ogun states. Apparently the same gangs who were driven out of eastern Nigeria relocated elsewhere. The operation seems to be the same and the children of poor people were always the victims. Sometimes one gets the impression that some of the parents of these children were involved in these sordid affairs. One is not too sure whether the babies so produced are sold to people who genuinely want children and cannot have them or to shaman who use human beings for their rituals. Whatever the case maybe, draconian measures should be taken against these people whose acts and actions derogate from our humanity.

    In another part of Nigeria, in Ibadan precisely in a place called Soka forest near Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, some 28 skeletons of human beings were discovered along with a few people some chained down like dogs and at the lowest stage of human degradation. These people were being prepared for sacrifice to some deities. We do not know whether the operators of this evil forest are cannibals but thankfully, none of them has yet been captured eating human beings. This is a very strange discovery in Ibadan of all places because no such things have ever happened in any part of Yoruba land before. There have been incidences like this in some shrines in eastern Nigeria but it seems this phenomenon is spreading and all of us should be thoroughly ashamed of this. Immediately after the discovery was made, people began to speculate that some politicians may have been visiting the evil forest for rituals designed to give them electoral victories. This is totally unfounded and probably absolutely untrue. It just shows the level of the low esteem to which our politicians have fallen that they will be associated with this primitive occurrence. The mother and father of all these crazy happenings in Nigeria is the unwarranted massacre of school children by Boko Haram. It is unbelievable that a group calling themselves Muslims would wantonly attack school children while asleep and murder them in their sleep for no just reasons but for the fact they are in school to learn. In the same vein, children, women and old people are murdered by Boko Haram in Yobe, Borno and Adamawa states. The sophistication of the weapons being used makes one wonder whether these fanatics are actually Nigerians. The North-east of Nigeria particularly Borno State is the gateway for Islamic civilisation in Nigeria. The Kanuris who constitute the largest ethnic group in the North-east are one of the most sophisticated and enlightened people in Nigeria and they have been this way for centuries. How some part of this people can descend to the level of barbarity of the Boko Haram makes one wonder. I lived in Maiduguri between 1982 and 1984 and this was one of the happiest times of my life and I can hardly believe what I read in the newspapers about the killings that are going on in the same Maiduguri.

    For some years now, reports about nomads killing farmers or people of two different religions killing each other in Plateau State have made newspaper headlines and these killings have been going on daily basis with increasing ferocity. First of all, it began as a crisis between settlers and owners of the land but it seems to have degenerated and gone beyond urban areas to rural areas where Fulani herdsmen and indigenous farmers are at each other’s throats. The problem probably is that cattle rustlers steal the cows of Fulani cattle rearers after those cows trespass and eat crops of farmers in the region. The unending wars centre around the Fulani’s love for their animals and the economic losses farmers of Plateau suffer when their crops are eaten by Fulani’s cows. As if the problem on the plateau was not enough, this sad episode is being replicated in Benue State and parts of Nassarawa State bringing Tivs and Fulanis into conflict. The Tivs are one of the greatest farmers in Nigeria inhabiting the valleys of the Benue River and involved in age-long agriculture, growing yams and other tubers. The Fulanis bring their cattle in a long journey from the north to the south across Tiv land eating farm crops as they go along. In retaliation, the Tivs engage in cattle rustling thereby touching the wrong nerves of the Fulani who then retaliate with amazing ferocity. The Tivs are not a push over when it comes to defending their territories and the consequence of this is a war without end. In recent years, Fulani nomads and herdsmen are now found all over the country and there is a growing fear that what is happening in Tiv land and Plateau State can spread to other parts of Nigeria. There is therefore a call for dedicated pasture for nomads across the country. How to work this out remains a knotty problem.

    In the oil bearing Delta, militancy there has not abated. People are still routinely kidnapped for a ransom. The situation is so bad that recently, a relation of the president was kidnapped. Forty percent of the oil production is stolen by bunkerers who are somehow in league with international petrol robbers who are denying Nigerians of much needed revenue. In spite of the fat contracts being given to so-called militants to protect pipelines, the looting and siphoning of petroleum resources continue and the consequence of this is a drastic cut in state revenue allocation. Some states have had their allocation reduced by almost 20 percent for the past four months.

    The distress seems to be enveloping the whole country and even the northwest particularly Katsina which was spared the insurgency in the north suddenly came alive following the recent mass murder of innocent people while the president was even visiting the state.

    The overall picture of our country is not too good and one wonders what kind of dispatches the embassies will be sending home to their governments. The situation is very frightening and it does not seem that our government is able to handle the problem satisfactorily. What is at the core of this problem to me seems to be poor leadership, corruption, misgovernance, unemployment, poverty, inept policing and poor equipment of the police and the armed forces to the extent that the rag-tag irregulars of the Boko Haram is able to give our security forces a bloody rose. Perhaps instead of a political conference we should have a security summit. Of course, it can be argued that if we get our politics right, everything will fall into its normal place but for now, the question of general insecurity has become a disincentive to local and foreign investment in the country, the result of which is the massive unemployment in the country. The tragedy in which the department of immigration wanting to employ 4,000 people but decided to call 700,000 and to collect N1,000 each from poor applicants leading to the trampling to death of some of them including pregnant women brings us to the nadir of human degradation and unless our leaders rise to the occasion, we may be witnessing the beginning of a national collapse and a people’s rebellion.

    What is obvious to any discerning observer is that we are in trouble in this country and it does not seem those at the helm of affairs know this. Never in the history of our country has so much problems arisen to confront the people and government of Nigeria. The way we navigate our way out of this jungle in which we find ourselves will determine the future of this beleaguered republic.

  • Electricity, journey without end

    A year ago, President Goodluck Jonathan in a rather expansive mood told the nation that by December 2013 many of us with generators would be begging people to take them away from us because by that time electric power supply will be abundant and regular. It is now clear that the prophecy of the President has not come true and our hopes have consequently been dashed. I was Ibadan for about a week at the middle of March and throughout almost seven days there was no light in my high-brow neighbourhood of new Bodija extension. In this precinct, we have an agreement to shut down our generators by 11 O’clock at night so as to allow people without generators to sleep. Secondly, this was also necessary to avoid being targeted as a rich person because only rich people can afford the cost of generators, their maintenance, and the cost of diesel or petrol. And thirdly, our community security guards prefer to operate in the dark and therefore prefer absence of light which is the normal thing in civilised countries. The period under discussion is also the period when we did not have petroleum products in Nigeria so even if one wanted to put on generators, there was no fuel to fire the engines. I also need power to pump water from my well into the over head tanks for water supply since I have to operate like a local government supplying all my municipal needs. In the absence of power and in the circumstance of terrible heat then prevailing all over Nigeria I was reduced to a miserable life of stinking village peasant. This was the condition in our well regarded neighbourhood and one was therefore prepared to buy petrol or diesel at any price in order to have a reasonably tolerable life. I am going into all these detail to show that electricity supply is not only a key to industrial development but also a necessity of modern living.

    In 1999, when President Obasanjo took over power, we were told that the installed capacity of electricity in Nigeria was 6,000 megawatts and that only 2,400 megawatts were available for distribution. The country was then told that with the massive investment in building generating power plants, Nigeria by 2003 would have available 6,000 megawatts available power and at least 10,000 megawatts installed capacity. It is now 14 years since and the available power last week was 2,4000 megawatts. This is after several billions of dollars have been spent, several new generating plants built and commissioned, the old ones supposedly revamped at the cost of billions of dollars and yet we are back to square one. The minister in charge of power, Professor Nebo says the reason for this collapse is due to vandalisation of gas pipelines by militants in the Niger Delta. I do not believe this simplistic explanation. Sometimes in the past, we were told about drop in the water level in the dams, snakes hanging around electric transmission lines, thieves cutting transmission lines and other imaginative excuses. The upshot of all these is that a country of 170 million people that requires at least 100,000 megawatts of electricity is getting less than 3,000. The hopelessness of our situation becomes glaring when compared with the situation in South Africa where a country of less than 40 million people is generating about 50,000 megawatts. We have tried everything under the sun and even under the moon without a solution. Then we were told that privatisation is the answer. We have now privatised and the situation has gotten worse. The reason for this worsening situation must lie in the fact of either those who bought into the electricity sector are the wrong people with no technical knowhow or required people or resources to manage a critical sector of our national life. We are therefore in a quandary as a nation and it seems to me that the policy makers are throwing up their hands and resigning themselves to this present condition of absolute failure. The collapse of the electricity sector is manifestly the result of bad governance and poor leadership. A visit to our sister country of Ghana proves this point completely. In all my visits to Ghana and staying in hotels, I have never heard the sound of generators. There is a feeling that this present government is overwhelmed by the myriad of problems facing the country. The federal highways have collapsed, goods cannot be easily cleared at the ports, the roads leading to the ports are dilapidated, there is general insecurity all over the country, the recent tragedy of a million young people looking for 4,000 immigration jobs and some of them dying in the process is a signal if one is needed of a failed state. Let us hope that the jamboree going on in Abuja would come up with a new constitutional architecture for running this benighted country and this new architecture must device new structures for running this plural country instead of the over centralised system that we currently have. It should be possible for individuals of means to set up electricity generating companies in cities and villages and distribute and sell power to whoever wants it. The success of the Redeemed Christian Church of God camp in this regard should be a pointer to the future. Power is available 24/7 for a community close to 20,000 people because they have their own gas fired turbine and distribution network totally independent of government and the national grid. If this can be replicated all over the country this will put an end to our suffering and miserable lives. Legal institutions should be put in place and the banking sector should be encouraged to facilitate the replication of the success of the RCCG camp all over the country. For those who are old enough, this was the situation in Jos in the 60s and early 70s when a private company was generating and distributing power on the Jos Plateau. This was also the case with most big cities that had independent power generating plants. There is therefore a need to go backward to the future in this regard. We need to explore all possibilities to come out of this rot and without power, our country will not develop and the hopelessness of unemployment will continue to afflict our youths with consequent insecurity nationwide.

    The need for regular supply of electricity in a world that is increasingly driven by knowledge industries does not need any emphasis. If we are to join the rest of the world in the application of computers, in teaching and learning, in administration and planning, in distribution of resources, and in running our lives generally regular supply of power is an absolute necessity. Any visit to our so-called teaching hospitals in Nigeria will show how far back we are in the global race for excellence. Sometimes, sick patients have to be carried on the backs of their relatives upstairs in hospitals when the lifts will not work as a result of lack of electricity. Even the administration of drugs in regular doses cannot be done when the equipments fail. This is just an example and this can be multiplied several times over in several sectors of our lives. The fact that our streets are pitch-dark at night is an invitation to insecurity. A visit to New York a city that does not sleep puts most of our cities back in the Dark Middle Ages where we belong. It is even sad for me to be writing about electricity and water problems in 21st Century Nigeria which are taken for granted in most countries of the world including countries of the Third World. Many people outside Nigeria would find it pedestrian to discuss the issue of water and electricity supply. But of course in our country, we seem to be at the first stage of development in all areas of human life. This unfortunately is the sad reality of our life in this country. Sometimes you have the impression that our leaders may not realise this especially when they foolishly compare our country with the United States of America when they are demanding for unearned salaries and allowances. As a public commentator and public intellectual, one is like the voice of one crying in the wilderness without anybody listening.

  • subsidy

    All thinking Nigerians should be worried about the daily revelations of impropriety in the oil industry. This has led to arguments even within government about how much money is coming into government coffers from the oil industry. We had a situation where the suspended Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria Sanusi Lamido Sanusi gave an alarming figure of how much seepage from the oil industry Nigeria was experiencing. It is common knowledge that forty percent of oil production is being stolen by bunkerers and through damage to oil pipelines by so called militants in the Niger Delta. Every effort to combat this by government through deployment of security forces in the area and also paying off militants and awarding fat contracts to their leaders do not seem to have solved the problem. Therefore, when the CBN Governor announced that huge amount of money was lost between the NNPC and CBN many Nigerians were worried about the shenanigans going on in the oil industry.

    The alarming figure that the CBN Governor gave as money missing was first scaled down to $20billion and finally to $10.8billion. Even our World Bank surrogate of a Finance Minister confirmed this figure. Now as if working to answer the NNPC has come out with figures to wipe out the $10billion plus that has been a subject of argument. The NNPC has said that about $7billion of this money has been used to subsidise importation of kerosene even though there is an extant government policy on not subsidising the price of kerosene. The remaining three billion was accounted for in sundry ways which appeared to any thinking person incredible and cooked up explanations on how government money is being spent without budgetary appropriation this is outright illegal. We are talking about billions of dollars and not naira. It seems to me that the Nigerian public is being taken for a ride. No one is saying that whatever impropriety that is happening in the oil industry is new.

    It appears to me that the shady dealings are the norm of operation in the Nigerian oil industry. This opacity usually begins with allocation of oil blocs to anybody with influence in government and collaborators, and fronts of Ministers and top most politicians. This is how some Nigerians have come to immense wealth that some of them publicly declare that they do not know what to do with the unearned money they have accumulated. One sometimes wonders if the way we operate our oil and gas industry is unique to Nigeria because our neighbours in the ECOWAS region as well as in the Cameroons and Chad do not seem to operate their oil industries the same way we do in Nigeria. This is certainly not the case in most OPEC countries. And the difference is clear we are the least developed of all the OPEC countries. And we are the only OPEC member country that imports gasoline and diesel for internal consumption. The irony of this should shame us as a people. Nigeria has been exporting crude petroleum since 1956 from Oloibiri, that is 58 years ago, and in spite of having four refineries most of which are probably not working we continue to dissipate our foreign reserves on gasoline and diesel importation. This is why in spite of a barrel of crude oil selling over $100 for almost 15 years since 1999 to the present our foreign reserves that by now should have been more than $100 billion is still hovering around $43 billion.

    What should worry most of us is that with the development of shale gas oil in the US and Canada and possibly in Europe within the next few years and with India and China also following suit we may have the ground cut under our feet when there may be no market for sale of what is left of our rapidly dwindling hydro-carbon resource(s) and even if there is a market this astronomical price of over a $100 per barrel may not be sustainable. The logic of the situation therefore is that we should make hay while the sun shines. Most of our governments in the past, have always talked about diversification of the economy and the present government has also embraced the same slogan without any concrete plan to bring this into reality. I shudder to imagine what will happen in 10, 20 or 40 years time when our chicken would have come home to roost and when nemesis of the rampant corruption we indulge in would stare us in the face. This is why it is necessary for the youth of this country to be engaged in discussing and finding solutions to the problems of this country and not allowing old fuddle fuddies to ruin their future.

    The solution to all these messy oil deals is blowing in the wind and everybody can hear it. We need to stop sale of oil blocs to non-oil companies and individuals. It is easier to bring to book any corrupt multi-national companies than individuals and comprador agents of foreign companies. We also need to build up oil reserves rather than wiping out through corrupt sales of oil blocs all the known oil reserves of Nigeria. In the Province of Alberta in Canada, money accruing to the provincial government from oil production is divided into two and one part is invested in Blue Chip companies for citizens yet unborn who have a claim to the oil wealth of the province. The reason for this is that no one generation should spend the material heritage of a people. This same argument informs the massive investment in Blue Chip Companies by Saudi Arabia, Iran and Kuwait so that posterity could also share in the oil wealth of the present, we need to embrace this wise policy. We also must sell off all the oil refineries in this country to private companies even at a giveaway price so that the annual drain pipe of so called rehabilitation of refineries can end.

    It will then be left to the private owners to make the refineries function so that they can recoup whatever investment they have in them. This should be a win-win situation for us because the nature of capitalism is that private investors are not Santa Claus’s and the only way to make profit is through the sale of their products and our large market would give us the advantage of economy of scale thereby bringing down the pump price of refined petroleum products. Finally, government must take a bold decision about so called oil subsidy on all oil products. We should stop immediately spending money that is not appropriated in the budget as oil subsidy. Whatever we call it whether petroleum tax rather than oil subsidy would have to be paid by the public so as to eliminate the present opportunity for rampant corruption.

    These enumerated policy options cannot wait they have to be implemented right away so as to put the finances of this country on an even keel. Our people have suffered so much in a time of plenty and this cannot continue without dire consequences on the country. The general insecurity in the country and even the terrorism of Boko Haram are not unconnected with the hopelessness that have become the misfortune of the youths. It is in the interest of the poor and rich that we must find a solution to the general and generalised poverty and immiseration of our people. We now have a situation where the rich cannot sleep with their two eyes closed because the poor can also not sleep because of their empty stomachs. If we don’t take preventive action to stop the open robbery of a nation, we should be prepared for a people’s rebellion that will overwhelm the country.

    The poor people of Nigeria have waited long enough for the amelioration of their miserable lives. The young and educated Nigerians roaming about the streets without jobs have become cynics who see everyone better than themselves as the cause of their problems. All they seem to be waiting for is for a leader to galvanise their boundless energies in the right direction or against those who are oppressing them. We who are their fathers cannot be smug about it believing our hands are clean. Unfortunately, if we don’t speak up to change the direction and trajectory of our corrupt ways we will all in the whirligig of time be swept off in the fury of justifiable rebellion and violence of the masses. A word is enough for the wise.

  • A rewarding visit to Afe Babalola University

    On Thursday February 6, I paid an unscheduled visit to Afe Babalola University in Ado-Ekiti. My primary mission was to visit the founder, Chief Afe Babalola, somebody that I have tremendous respect for because of his exemplary life of determination and success. He is a man who built himself up by his boot strap. His formal education did not go beyond primary schooling at the Emmanuel School, Ado-Ekiti. Even though he passed the examination to the world famous Christ School Ado-Ekiti, he could not take up the opportunity because his parents were too poor to afford his fees. He was determined not to spend the rest of his life in the drudgery of farm life which was the only option open to him. He therefore embarked on self tutelage and correspondence courses through which he passed not only the ordinary level but also the Advance Level of the London University General Certificate of Examination. He then sat for the B.Sc Honours Economics of London at home and the LLB Honours of London before travelling abroad for the required numbers of dinners at the Inns of Court before being called into the English Bar. He returned to the country in the early sixties and registered as a pupil lawyer under the distinguished Olu Ayoola, one of the most brilliant lawyers in Nigeria in the early 1960s. Ayoola eventually ended his career as a high court judge after his illustrious life as a practicing attorney. My nephew incidentally is married to one of Ayoola’s daughters. Chief Afe Babalola then set up his own practice in a modest way but his hard work and determination made his success predictable. I first heard of Babalola sometimes in 1966 when he defended my oldest brother Chief Oduola Osuntokun after being charged to court along with the entire Chief S.L. Akintola’s cabinet after the coup d’etat of 1966. He more than justified the confidence my family had in him when he successfully defended my brother. Since then I have always been impressed by his phenomenal success.

    He has gained all kinds of laurels in his legal profession including the Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN) and several awards and prizes in England, Canada and USA. His chamber in Ibadan is reputed to have produced more Senior Advocates of Nigeria (SAN) than any other chamber in the country. He has been honoured both in Ekiti and outside Ekiti and his latest honour as Are Amofin of Yorubaland was conferred on him by the Alaafin of Oyo, Oba Lamidi Adeyemi III.

    Chief Afe Babalola first got involved in higher education when he was made Pro-Chancellor and Chairman of Council of the University of Lagos a position which he held for almost eight years during which time he was adjudged to be the best Pro-Chancellor in Nigeria. He donated an auditorium as a parting gift to the University of Lagos. His stint at the university brought him into the awareness of the sorry state of higher education in Nigeria and he was determined to do something about it.

    These preambular statements are meant to introduce the founder of Afe Babalola University. Babalola had a vision of excellence in higher education and he is now running with this vision in his own university in Ado-Ekiti. The university runs a collegiate system namely of the College of Engineering, College of Sciences, College of Social and Management Sciences, College of Medicine and Health Sciences, College of Law, and College of Pre-degree and Degree foundation programmes, totalling six colleges in all. The only thing that is missing in the University and apparently deliberately so is the College of Humanities because the emphasis of the university is physical and economic development without provision for humanistic and literary studies. Chief Babalola is obviously following directives of government which erroneously make no room for humanistic and philosophical groundings without which there can be no development. Development is not synonymous with physical building and infrastructure, it involves the fine arts of human behaviour without which there is no civilisation and this can only be gotten from liberal arts studies. This is an argument that I probably should not go into and this is not the place for such a debate. What is important for me to say is that he has built perhaps the most excellent private university in Nigeria. Course offerings go beyond the traditional disciplines found in many universities in Nigeria. I believe that the programmes of ABUAD are heavily influenced by American university tradition. For example, in the Department of Mathematics and Physical Sciences, students can graduate with degrees of Bachelor of Science in Biometrics, as well as Bachelor of Science in Medical Physics apart from the traditional areas of Computer Science and Information Technology, and other areas like Mathematics, Statistics, and Physics with Electronics. His College of Medicine and Health Sciences offers degree courses in Anatomy, Physiology, Nutrition and Dietetics, Sports and Health Science, Nursing, Medical Laboratory Technology as well as Bachelors of Medicine and Surgery. This college must be one of the most comprehensive colleges in the country. If ABUAD can find staff to teach all these courses, the university would be one of the best in the world. There is also a Bachelors degree in Tourism and Events Management in his College of Social and Management Sciences which obviously is tailored to meet specific needs in Nigeria today. In his College of Sciences, I noticed that he has special degrees in human biology as well as another degree in zoology and I am happy to note that unlike most private universities where zoology and botany are no longer offered these degrees are offered at ABUAD. For a country in the tropics and whose economy is partially based on tree crops, knowledge of botany ought to be a prerequisite for development.

    ABUAD’s 4,000 students are housed in exquisite hostels and fed in excellent refectories and are taught in well endowed laboratories, libraries and engineering workshops. The university is building a massive talents centre on three floors to provide facilities for all kinds of games including basketball, badminton, swimming, squash and dancing floors for students. The university is also building a massive hotel/guest house at the gate of the university which the founder believes will be the best hotel in Ado-Ekiti when completed. The institution is founded on the basis of NOT FOR PROFIT because whatever accrues to it is ploughed back into development and upgrade of facilities. To support this massive development, Chief Babalola has established a university farm that specializes in aquaculture that at its maximum level of development will not only be able to feed the students with fish but the entire city of Ado-Ekiti and its environs with fresh fish as well as smoked fish. That’s not all. The farm is also developing mass production of guinea fowls and quail birds, there is also a piggery but there is no poultry, obviously because Chief Babalola does not want to join the Nigerian crowd in the poultry business. There is a massive mango farm with close to 300,000 mango trees already planted. There is also a moringa farm and a laboratory attached to it producing moringa capsules, tea bags, cream etcetera.

    All these ventures would eventually serve as centres for entrepreneurial studies for the students so that they will not only be theoreticians but practitioners in the various fields of their academic endeavours. These ventures are also designed to sustain the university in future. Hundreds of young people are also gainfully employed in all these ventures.

    I did not ask for how much it will cost to educate a child there but obviously as they say in Yoruba land that whatever is good must have a price. A child could have a first class education here in Nigeria in this university and perhaps at a fifth of the price to send the child abroad with all the psychological problems involved. ABUAD reminds me of what the University of Ibadan used to be like when I entered it in 1963. It was like a piece of western architecture in the tropics of Africa. This is what ABUAD is like today. ABUAD is service at its best and I pray that many Nigerians of means like Chief Afe Babalola would follow his example instead of spiriting our money abroad for the development of other lands.

  • Agenda before the Constitutional Conference – 2

    We would also have to agree on what form of government, whether presidential or parliamentary. There are advantages for both. The presidential system embraces the principle of separation of powers whereas in the parliamentary system separation is not clear cut. This is because the cabinet is chosen from the legislature and the prime minister wields power in the legislature and the executive. But the parliamentary system is cheaper and a bad government can easily be changed without crisis of impeachment and from our experience in Nigeria, the president acts like a poobah in whose hands too much power are concentrated. At the end of the day, it is not the constitutional architecture that will guarantee good governance, it is those who operate the constitution but we can prevent dictatorship through devolution of powers and strengthening institutions of the civil service and the judiciary. These are the issues that would have to be agreed upon at the coming conference.

    We should have no problem agreeing on individual rights and freedoms and the third level of division of power at the centre. Where intense negotiation would have to take place is at the group or nationality levels. Once we agree in principle who owns the land, then the whole issue of fiscal federalism and resource control becomes a simple matter. These are the issues to be negotiated and agreed upon and if we are serious we should be able to do this quickly. The current situation whereby states exist at the mercy of the federal government would be done away with because the zonal governments will now have to fund the federal government from royalties, custom dues, excise duties, but not VAT and the issue of creation of states and local governments within the zones would have to be determined by the people who live there and would not be the business of the federal government. These negotiating principles if adhered to would remove acrimony and bad blood among conference attendants.

    Whatever they agree upon should be the grundnorm of Nigerian constitution and no government or national body should alter a word in it. This should be sent to the National Assembly as a presidential bill and becomes law after the assent of the president. Then this new constitution would come into force immediately following the holding of another set of elections at state and zonal levels. The present states would then become administrative units within the zones and they can either be increased or reduced as the zonal government decides. With coming into force of zonal governments, the current elaborate state structures would have to give way and governance at local levels would have to be on voluntary and non-stipendiary basis and the local governments would of course be restructured based on what is suitable for every zonal government. And there may be need for members of parliament at zonal and federal levels to be on part-time basis or as the zonal governments may decide. We may also need a constitutional provision stipulating that capital and recurrent expenditure at all levels must be on the basis of 70% capital and 30% recurrent so that government will not be seen as a cash cow as it is presently the situation. In other words, emphasis would be on development and not just on administration. This hopefully will put an end to the current prebendal politics operating in Nigeria.

    There are two critical issues that the conference must tackle, these are; federal finance, and national security. Having argued for fiscal federalism does not mean that one is totally oblivious of the need for even development in the country. This means of course that the federal revenue would have to be spent in such a way as to guarantee that there is an irreducible minimum of development below which no part of the country should fall. In spite of fiscal federalism, revenues accruing to the federal government from customs and its share of royalties as well as post and telegraphs, aviation and immigration and federal taxes should be sufficient to fund the federal government while the states or zones retain revenues derivable from their soil as well as Value Added Tax (VAT) which is a consumption tax and those consuming should benefit directly from this consumption tax which is currently distributed across the country in a rather unfair and inequitable way.

    The other important point is national security. As much as possible, every device must be made to constitutionally isolate and insulate defence and security forces from politics. The present mode of recruitment into the armed forces based on state or zonal basis should continue but at the same time, martial aptitude should be factored into the recruitment. It is not everybody who wants to join the armed forces on the basis of federal character who has a stomach for military service. The history of the world is replete with people who have special martial ability and who are pre-disposed to military service like the Gurkha in Nepal who have made military service in difficult situations a unique attribute of theirs. My study of the Nigerian military and the military profession globally gives me an advantage to pontificate on this particular subject. Some have argued for organising the Nigerian military on the basis of ethnic territorial forces like they do in England where you have Welsh, Scottish and Irish territorial forces, I do not think Nigeria is ready for this. The present military organisation and postings should not be tampered with. In any case, once the military is totally insulated from politics then we should have no fear of coup d’etat in which an ethnic group or groups manipulate the military for political advantage as was the case in our recent past.

    But on the police, we have to completely reorganise the system of policing of this country along modern lines. In most countries, there are usually several layers of police, starting from city and county police to state police and federal police. The advantage in local policing is that people with knowledge of the local environment including the language are better in controlling crime at the local level. Language competency should determine recruitment at the local, city and state levels. There is no point for example in making a Yoruba man Commissioner of Police in Kano and vice versa. People should be recruited to police their own areas. This is what is done in all federations from the United States to Australia and even in small Switzerland and Belgium. But there will always be room for federal police that will be responsible for inter-state crime as well as policing the federal capital territory.

    Whatever constitutional architecture we arrive at should be informed by our recent political experience in the last 53 years of independence. After a century of experimentation, we ought to have learnt some lessons if we are smart enough to know what works and what does not work. What does not work is over-centralisation and this is why there is an absolute necessity for political and economic devolution. The tendency even in places like Canada, Australia and the USA that are classical examples of federation is for federal political power to aggrandise at the expense of states. We must guide against this and the only way to guide against this is to have an iron-clad constitutional device to prevent this. This is the only way to have peace in this country by moving apart a little and coming together at the centre. As a Hausa proverb says “no matter how good a dancer may be, he is bound to bump into another person when dancing in a crowd”. This is what we have to avoid by embracing the policy of devolution.

    • Concluded