The Nation Newspaper

Category: Jide Osuntokun

  • Deji Falae, what a terrible loss

    A left Nigeria on September 30, thinking all will be well with our country until I come back but on Thursday October 3, all hell broke out. I got a call from a friend of Deji asking me if I knew where he was. I told him he should know that he would be in Akure where, as a state commissioner, he normally resides. He again sent me a text that he was asking me this in connection with The Agagu burial. Later another mutual acquaintance called me and started crying that Deji was no more. At this point I called my nephew Akin about this strange news. Then the whole episode was made clear to me. I felt very bad about this terrible loss. Deji was like a son to me. He had been introduced to me by Akin my nephew and I later found out he was also a friend to my daughter. I of course know his highly cerebral father and his mother who was my classmate at Ibadan Grammar school higher school class in the 1960s. Deji was my lawyer and helped me with estate services. Over the years he became one of my sons. I would never have thought I will be writing about him in the past tense. I watched his political trajectory with admiration and support not knowing in retrospect that he should have stayed away from politics and public appointment. This is just crying over spilt milk because what will be will be.

    I have agonized over this air crash over and over and wonder why the frequency in Nigeria. Of course with the pervasive corruption in all aspects of our life in Nigeria who knows whether pilots in our country are properly certified? Some of them may be flying with forged certificates. Anything is possible in our country. Some of the planes flying in our country were once described by our minister of aviation during the Babangida regime as flying coffins. One wonders if anything has changed. After a while we would forget about this tragedy and move on as if nothing happened. The only people who will continue to suffer are the families of the bereaved, parents, wives and siblings of the departed souls to whom the tragedy will remain forever a cause of sorrow.

    I remember the last time I saw Deji was at Chief Dele Falegan’s book presentation in Ado-Ekiti. I was the reviewer of the book and he accompanied his dad and mom who are close friends of the Falegans. I could see the joy of the parents when we had to acknowledge the young Deji Falae before his father as protocol demanded. Apart from speaking to him once or twice since then, I hadn’t seen him for a while and never did I think I would not see him again. Nobody can imagine what the poor parents will be going through right now. I do not know what to say to them other than to continue to pray for them for submission to the will of the all-knowing God who alone can make this wrenching tragedy plain to them. To the young family he has left behind, I pray and commend them into the merciful hands of God for Gods care and protection.

    This is the second time I have mourned the departure of a young person well known to me. The Dana crash which is still fresh in our minds took away several young people including Ehime Aikhomu. We wailed and cried and we were told never again, but here we are again. The time is past when government should take a hard look at the aviation industry in Nigeria and allow professionals and experts to run the ministry rather than money seeking politicians sent there to raise money for the next election campaign. In many parts of the world, air travel is the safest means of transportation but unfortunately not in Nigeria. Let us wring from our government that something will be done to put an end to these string of sorrow bearing episodes in our national life. To those of us who have lost loved ones the October 3rd episode, will live for very long time in infamy, sorrow and tears. We have no alternative to making air travel safe in Nigeria if we are not to continue losing our bright and the best people who are very critical to our national development. Many people out of fear prefer to travel by road no matter how distant the journey may be, but this is not the solution because the hazards on the roads are not inconsiderable. If one is not killed by armed robbers and armed police, one could be killed by the craters on the roads. We as a country have gotten to a point when we have to decide to take all necessary measures to ensure that air accidents  do not become a recurring decimal. ADIEU DEJI FALAE

     

  • The next century of Nigeria – 2

    The next 100 years would have to be different from this last century. The future is of course pregnant, nobody knows what it would bear. But as they say, the child is the father of the man. Unless we radically change the way of doing things, the next 100 years would be difficult. If we do not drastically control our population through appropriate demographic policy, our population would become a burden to us. The rate of growth of this population seemed to have stabilised somehow in the South-west perhaps because of education and the dwindling economy but in the South-east and in the North, the rate of population is still very high. In the North for example especially among our Muslim brothers, the fact that polygamy is tolerated by Islam makes it difficult to enforce any demographic policy unless the number of children is anchored on the woman rather than on the man. But in the South-east where polygamy is not too popular especially among the elite, it is still a matter of celebration when a single woman is able to have as many as 10 children. This sociological factor in population growth would have to be tackled. Religious differences will also have to be contained because it is not in our interest to have a clash of civilisations based on different religions. Religious and population bombs are going to be the greatest threat to Nigeria’s survival in the future. If we can deal with these two factors and rein in the rampant corruption and rapacity in the land and develop our economy away from the exportation of raw commodities, of minerals and farm produce and embark on an industrial economic development so that every Nigerian who wants to work can have work to do and also adopt a policy of careers open to talents and do away with any policy that smacks of affirmative action or discrimination, the next century should be a better century than this last one.

    With more and more Nigerians going to college and getting properly educated, and with the problems of the past being well known and being properly analysed, it should be possible for us to avoid the pitfalls of history if we learn the proper lessons from them. There are certain things that Nigeria must avoid. It is no use comparing Nigeria with America as some people glibly do. We are part of an old continent and we are not an immigrant society. Nigerians love their land and their soil. Different ethnic groups are associated with different parts of the country. The question of indegeneship and settlerism can tear this country apart if not well handled. This is not to suggest that the movement of Nigerians should be restricted to their home origins but the rights of autochthonous people must be respected and not circumscribed and overwhelmed by new arrivals from different parts of the country. It will not be right for people of different ethnic groups living with others to enjoy double privileges of enjoying rights of abode and rights of origin. This is what is the cause of the problem on the Plateau and several parts of the North and may yet pose a problem in the South particularly in Lagos where the question of indegeneship and settlerism is beginning to rear its ugly head. Ideally, all Nigerians should be able to live and work in any part of the country and enjoy the right of citizenship without hindrance but this has to be harmonised with the rights of native people and the successful balance of this in Malaysia should be the way forward.

    There is no country in the world that has no problems and Nigeria cannot be an exception. Our diversity was what necessitated our embrace of federalism as a system of government. Unfortunately, over the years, Nigeria has been moving towards a unitary system of government with consequent conflict. We should in the next century define state rights and find the appropriate economic structure that would preserve the rights of states to control their resources while contributing to a weak centre which would have then devolved powers to the states so that political competition would largely be at the state level rather than the do or die competition for control of the centre. If we do not go this way, we would not have learnt any lessons from the history of the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Malaysia and nearer home, Ethiopia and Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau in our region. Even good old Great Britain has found it necessary to concede virtual independence to Scotland and Wales in order to maintain the appearance of the unity of Great Britain. If a country that is almost 1000 years old can do this, we should anticipate future political development that would have disastrous consequences in our country and put in process anticipatory policies to obviate disastrous consequences. The essence of knowing what is possible is to make sure that we avoid what is avoidable and this is particularly important in the life of our nation. Finally, there must be a divine hand in the fact that the largest concentration of black people is in the area of modern Nigeria. This is also the heart of Africa; this is the place of authentic African culture and if Nigeria cannot manage its diversity, then the future of the entire African continent would be in jeopardy. This is why we must embrace our destiny as a people, and deliberately through education, teach our people that we have a responsibility to generations of future Nigerians and the black race as a whole. In a rapidly globalizing world, where as a result of technology the world is shrinking, we cannot as a black race lag behind other races. If we do, our survival will be in doubt because we may be seen as freaks who are not fully human or some kind of intermenschen not ready or fit to compete with the rest of mankind. This may sound rather unfortunate mentioning the factor of race. But the point is that the racial factor has always been important in international relations and we cannot wish it away. The point to make is that we as Nigerians have a responsibility beyond our immediate frontiers. We owe it to the people of Africa at home and in the African Diaspora to be successful. The success of course will depend on how well we harmonise our differences at home and chart a way forward and take our rightful place in the comity of nations. This is our destiny; it should also be our charge and our bounden duty in the next one century.

  • The next century of Nigeria -1

    One of the reasons for the amalgamation of Nigeria in 1914 was the economic complementarity of the two British protectorates of northern and southern Nigeria. In other words, it was an economic union but it is not certain that Sir Fredrick Lugard who was behind the amalgamation was prescient enough to hope that economic integration will lead to political integration. In fact, he tried to preserve the political, social and cultural dichotomies of the two regions of Nigeria as he met them. He did try to import indirect rule into the south-western part of the country with its strong indigenous monarchies which he wrongly equated with the northern emirate system and where there were no chiefs in the largely acephalous south-eastern part of Nigeria, he gave warrants to any strong man he could find in the society to become chiefs . This import of the northern emirate system into the south did not always work out. In fact evidence exists to suggest that it led to disaffection and revolt against the colonial government and its surrogates in the south.

    At an official level, the colonial administration tried to separate people of the south and the north with the effect that southerners living in the northern part of Nigeria lived in the strangers’ quarters or outskirts of towns appropriately named Sabon Garis (new towns). The same thing happened to northern Nigerians living in southern Nigerian towns. So there developed segregated townships, one for native and indigenous inhabitants and the other for their fellow countrymen and women coming from outside the regions. The two local administrations were also separated; the northern part of the country until the 1940s was ruled by orders-in-council, meaning by the colonial officials in collaboration with the Emirs while there was an element of democratisation in the south beginning from 1923 when elections were held in Lagos and Calabar to choose educated Nigerians into the legislative council of Nigeria in which the representatives of the north were largely colonial officials. It was not until 1946 that attempts were made to bring the north into the mainstream of Nigerian politics and by this time, the sense of nationalism even though found in the south and in some pockets among educated northerners particularly teachers was not felt in the entire country. The effect of this was that it was easy for the British colonial officials to persuade the northern leadership of imaginary threat from their southern counterparts which led to a comment by a critical colonial official who said that if somehow Nigerians had disappeared from Nigeria even as late as the 1940s, civil war would have broken out between the British officials in the north and the British officials in the south.

    The point to note is that by the 1950s, Nigerians themselves inherited the prejudice harboured by the British colonial officials in the north and in the south. The result was that when political parties were formed in the 50s, the Jamiyar Mutanen Arewa (JMA) which metamorphosed into the NPC (Northern Peoples Congress) and the Action Group which developed from the Egbe Omo Oduduwa in the South-west were regional parties formed to challenge the nationalist pretension of the NCNC (National Convention of Nigeria and the Cameroons) formed as far back as 1944 as a mass movement and was later to change its name to the National Council of Nigerian Citizens. There was no national party that cut across all the various ethnic groups. This shows to a certain extent that amalgamation did not lead to political integration of the country and the seeds of separation and dichotomy that was sown in 1914 has germinated and grown into a strong tree.

    Nigeria has witnessed series of ups and downs including a civil war and ethnic, religious and fratricidal conflict in some parts of our country in which people of different ethnic groups have found it necessary to kill one another in order to assert and preserve their identities and hold on to indigenous rights and land. The military since their intervention in government in 1966 had tried very hard to restructure the country in such a way as to minimise this regional fissiparous tendencies in the country by dividing the country into several smaller states for ease of administration and development. But it is a moot question whether the sense of separate ethnic identity among Nigerian peoples have been minimised. In fact some have suggested that the military itself as a way of control found it convenient to encourage this sense of separate ethnic identity among Nigerians. After the end of military rule, the politicians have not helped matters because they too have not been able to form country wide political associations rooted in national ideology. The fact is that most political parties in Nigeria seem to be agglomerations or associations of people formed largely for sharing what is euphemistically referred to as the national cake. The result is that Nigerian politics is about sharing rather than baking the national cake and this sharing is done along ethnic lines and those shut out of the sharing usually feel left out to the point of eagerness to bring down the whole national architecture on everybody’s heads. While this is going on, the task of creating necessary infrastructure on which to build a virile nation and an industrial economy that would provide jobs for the teeming youthful population has been abandoned. It seems every successive government becomes more and more corrupt, inefficient and inept than the previous ones. This is therefore not a good augury for the future.

  • Redeemer’s University’s 5th Convocation

    There are no strikes by students or by staff and this is what makes Redeemers University attractive apart from the Christian environment that prevails there. It is hoped that when the university grows to its optimal level of about 10,000 students or more and have full complement of colleges and staff, the sky would be the limit for what is possible. The Proprietor, Pastor Adejare Adeboye wants the university to be one of the best in the world. He also wants the products to be job creators and not job seekers. With trust in God, all things are possible.

    Redeemer’s University has been very lucky in the choice of its foundation Vice-Chancellor, Professor Oyewale Tomori, a distinguished Virologist and currently President Nigerian Academy of Sciences. He was an efficient, strict and disciplined Vice-Chancellor who did everything to demystify the office of the Vice-Chancellor and saw himself as primus inter pares among other professors. He related to the students like a father and I always remember him breaking down and shedding tears sometimes when he felt he had to take the difficult decision of sending a student away. He was also a very lucky Vice-Chancellor who had experienced people to work with. He has now been succeeded by Professor Debo Adeyewa, who until he came to Redeemer’s University was one of the Deputy Vice-Chancellors in the Federal University of Technology, Akure. He is a distinguished Meteorologist and Atmospheric Physicist who has brought into the university his passion for hard work and his love for God. He is a much younger person than Tomori and his approach to administration is quite different but no less effective. His obsession is to move the university to Ede as rapidly as possible and also to continue to build on the excellent academic tradition which happily exists in the university. The good fortune of Redeemer’s University has also been in the steady hands of Professor Fola Aboaba who has just retired as Pro-Chancellor and Chairman of Council and who was, so to say, present at its creation. The university is also lucky to have as its Chancellor, the distinguished historian and former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ibadan, Professor T.N Tamuno, who brings to his office his well known solidity of character and profundity of thought. And at the top of the hierarchy of the university is Dr. Enoch Adejare Adeboye, the Visitor, who had to be prevailed upon to accept the office of Visitor and who has never interfered in the internal running of the university and who in self-denial has been making huge personal financial contribution to the university and his example has been followed by his wife who has also made personal financial contributions to the university and has been a regular mobiliser of funds for several projects in the university.

    On a personal note, I have had tremendous fulfilment by working in this university and I know a little bit about university system and administration having taught in Canada, the USA, and in the West Indies and many universities in Nigeria, particularly in my alma mater, Ibadan and University of Lagos where I spent most of my academic career, I can say without any equivocation or fear of contradiction that Redeemer’s University is one of a kind. This is because we pay attention to the career development and academic growth of our students, we know them and we know their parents, we know whatever peculiar problem each student has, and we try to help in whatever way we can and this young people reciprocate by seeing us as friends, fathers, grand-fathers and this makes for a good community of students and scholars, which is what Redeemer’s University is all about.

    The university was the ninth private university to be licensed by the Federal Government. But in terms of ranking today, it would rank among the best if not the best. The major setback has been the non-movement to the permanent site in Ede, but this is being taken care of through the generous investment in the development of the permanent site of billions of naira by its proprietor. All being well, within the next one year, the university should be operating on its permanent site and hopefully commencing the development of its professional colleges of Law, Engineering and Medicine. If the period of the last eight years is something to go by, the future of the university is assured.

    In terms of value for money, I think parents and guardians should be satisfied with what they are getting when compared with the astronomical fees payable in other private universities in Nigeria. The icing on the cake is that students in Redeemer’s university are not only taught and educated by a crop of experienced teachers and younger people operating with the same spirit of service to God and man.

    On graduation, the students also get special blessing and prayers by the man of God its Proprietor. The university is of course not perfect. No institution created by man can be perfect. Whatever lacuna exists would be bridged and taken care of through the committee system by which most universities operate. The university must ensure that its Vice-Chancellor continues to operate as primus inter pares among a conclave of Professors. One of the things that has damaged and is damaging public universities in Nigeria, is that the position of Vice-Chancellors have suffered a disconnect from company of other professors in the university. Vice-Chancellors in public universities sometimes operate as if they were governors of their universities and go around with a retinue of security guards and even sirens and sometimes administration of public universities are done almost exactly like the state and the Federal Government with retinue of Intelligence Officers and other secret operatives. In such places, there are no debates and Vice-Chancellors operate like Poobah rather than academic leaders. Our various governments have encouraged this development by paying university vice-chancellors double what their professorial colleagues earn and by making the positions political rather than academic. This is why as soon as their terms are over, they rush to the National Universities Commission, NUC to become errand boys of the executive secretary and shamelessly help to send directives and decrees to their various colleagues still left in the system. This is one of the things that are killing the Nigerian public universities and it is our hope and prayer that this ungodly development would not spread to privat e universities. Although signs that these may happen are there especially when proprietors of some of these private universities give orders to vice-chancellors, who are reduced to the status of running dogs. Happily, this is not the situation in Redeemer’s University where the vice-chancellor and his colleagues, both academic and administrative operate as a united family.

  • N600 billion census budget outrageous

    The chairman of the National Population Commission (NPC), Festus Odimegwu said recently that he would need N600 billion to conduct the next census. This is at a time when the Federal Government through its act of omission or commission has shut down all state and federal universities in the country because it cannot find N87 billion being demanded by the teachers. It would not surprise me if this same Federal Government finds N600 billion to give to the census body when you cannot ride on any Nigerian road without running into huge craters and gutters. At the end of each census, we come up with spurious numbers that are not believed by anybody or believable at all. What is apparent in Nigeria is not always real, it is the case of the more you see, the less it counts. At election times, small states produce more votes than states that are much bigger and much more populous if only to get their preferred candidate elected.

    Apart from the census of 1956 which put Nigeria’s population at 32 million, all other censuses have been marred by forgeries. During enumeration of people, it is not uncommon for villages to contribute money to give to enumerators in order to boost their population figures and yet we call this a census. Enumeration of any kind in Nigeria is totally without integrity. When states are asked to come up with the number of school aged children, the figures given sometimes outstrip the population of the entire state. Any exercise requiring figures in Nigeria is usually manipulated because of the financial implications of figures in Nigeria. Would it not be better to save N600 billion and just get statisticians to give us projected population of Nigeria based on a baseline of 1952 and rate of increase at 3% per year or something of that sort rather than the spurious figures bandied around dishonestly by NPC?

    Nobody can swear on the figures of Nigeria’s population. Today, we are told that we are about 170 million but I do not believe it. I personally do not believe that Nigeria is more than 100 million; the remaining 70 million are ghosts as far as I am concerned. The idea of population count every 10 years should be jettisoned and replaced by population count every two decades. The money saved should be used for development of infrastructure of the country. Imagine what N600 billion can do in the development of Nigeria. Odimegwu and his NPC should be asked to go on holidays and come back 20 years after the last census and give us the chance to use the money saved to develop the country. Census is about people and about development. Arbitrary figures are of no importance whatsoever to the development of Nigeria and if we need to take the next census, we should do it scientifically by calling in experts from the UN to do area mapping of Nigeria and to point out the centres of concentration of people through settlement pattern and then project the overall population of our country. This can be done through area photography without the arduous, primitive enumeration and money guzzling system Nigeria revels in.

    We know that elections are around the corner and people are looking for money for election, but we can’t be fooled all the time. The figure of N600 billion for counting Nigerians, many of whom are poor, despairing and despondent such that they would take the money rather than being counted, if given the option is outrageous. There are so many outlandish things going on at the centre in Abuja; recently, the Nigerian Space Authority or something of that sort says it is planning to send Nigerian astronauts into space by 2020. When I read this in the paper, I just laughed that what a country! And I asked myself – how is that important to the ordinary men and even to men who are not ordinary? What direct benefit will sending an astronaut into space bring to Nigeria? Are we going to reinvent the wheel?

    Countries that are sending people into space are already developed and have the basic requirement of decent living for their people. Why would a country whose people still defecate in the bushes or in open space and whose people have no potable water to drink or electricity to light their homes and power their businesses, decent educational and health facilities, efficient transportation system be planning to engage in the expensive venture of space exploration when the Russians and the Americans, the two leading nations in this area are deemphasising state participation while encouraging the private sector to take over these expensive ventures?

    We make fools of ourselves by pretending to be a big power when in fact we are not. We should cut our coat according to our cloth and face the reality of underdevelopment and try to overcome it. This is the challenge we face, the challenge of husbanding our resources and embarking on rapid development, transformation and industrialising our country while we still have the resources accruing from hydro-carbon exploitation. Our mono-cultural economy cannot be sustained forever and in fact cannot be sustained for too long, we have only about 30 years to transform this economy or die. Future generations of Nigeria will not forgive us if we do not embark on the process of transformation right now. Unfortunately, there is too much politicking in the land, too much talk about election in 2015 when in fact nobody knows who would be around tomorrow. We need to do the first thing first, let those who are in government right now discharge their responsibilities to the electorate, fulfil the promises on which they were elected and let the future take care of itself. Nigerians are a long-suffering people and I admire them for that and there is even wisdom in being long-suffering because revolutions do not always pan out. It is better to be long-suffering and to hope for evolutionary changes rather than wish or engineer sudden changes. But sometimes herd instincts and mob mentality can push a people to the edge of a precipice when they feel that the situation is hopeless. We are getting to this point in Nigeria where the more we spend on power generation, the less power we get. For the past 14 years, power generation in Nigeria has not increased past 4000 megawatts and yet, billions of dollars have been spent on this sector without any appreciable change in our power generation situation. Electricity generation is not rocket science, other third world countries and indeed other African countries like our neighbour Ghana have managed to stabilise their power sector to the extent that generators are not as everywhere in Ghana as they are in Nigeria. Would it not be wonderful if the present regime can tell us categorically when every home in Nigeria will have power 24 hours every day? This is something that is taken for granted in most countries of the world even in countries where the frigid weather should militate against this. If we have a government that can guarantee regular supply of water and electricity, then we would know that we are gradually coming out of the stone-age in which we have been consigned by previous administrations. The needs of Nigerians are not many and not outrageous or outlandish. What we require are basic needs for decent human living and we hope and pray that one day, a government would come that would be able to deliver on this simple needs rather than giving us outrageous budgetary figures on space exploration and demographic enumeration.

  • A recent trip to Ghana – 2

    The Republic of Ghana is a thriving democracy under its current young President, Dr. John Dramani Mahama who is an intellectual in his own right. What I find extremely interesting about modern Ghana is that the country is run by the young people who are mostly in their 30s, 40s and 50s; the kind of people who will be pushed aside in Nigeria. The simplicity of the Ghanaian leadership is overwhelming. In my recent visit to Ghana, one of the Senior Protocol Officers in the Presidency who was in charge was a young lady in her 30s who was simply dressed in Ankara fabric sewn into a gown and I immediately imagined what a senior protocol lady in Nigeria would have been wearing. The minister of state for tertiary education was a young member of parliament most likely in his late 30s or early 40s. The Ghanaian constitution enjoins on the President to appoint substantial members of his cabinet from parliament. This is something those reviewing our constitution should look into. I personally like the South African model where the President is also the leader of his party in parliament so that he can channel his policies towards enactment into Acts of Parliament. There is so much to learn from Ghana that probably writing a book about it is what would be required. For example, there is no dichotomy between the cities and the rural areas. City houses are not vastly different from what you find in the rural areas and electricity is available everywhere. Hence, rural-urban migration is severely mitigated.

    The most glaring disparity between Nigeria and Ghana is the whole question of monuments and legacies. There are no monuments in Nigeria of the past; the houses of our past leaders are treated as ordinary abodes rather than national monuments. The Premier’s lodge in Ibadan I believe has been sold to an individual or turned into a high court. The Premier’s lodge in Kaduna, the so-called Arewa House is some kind of archive whilst the Prime Minister’s lodge in Lagos is now an army officer’s mess. The federal parliament and the original federal secretariat and its successor in Lagos have been abandoned, burglarised and vandalised and are now inhabited by rodents. We have not even been able to build the mausoleum for Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe in spite of millions set aside for it and the graves of our leaders are taken care of by their families. But when you go to Accra, Nkrumah’s graveyard and that of his wife are tourists’ attractions. There is a museum for his books, his clothing and even the bed he used in Lincoln University as a student. If it is not too late, may I suggest that there is a need to build in Abuja monuments to our heroes as well as a country home somewhere in the woods or hills of Abuja for our President to escape to for reflection so that he does not spend eternity in Aso Rock totally isolated from reality? Nigeria is much richer than Ghana in resources and wealth but much poorer in management and vision. I am passionate about the two countries, Nigeria is my home, my daughter is married to a Ghanaian hence, Ghana is my daughter’s home.

    There is little sense of nationalism in Nigeria and our flag does not attract the kind of attention and sense of patriotism that the Ghanaian flag enjoys. Yet you cannot build a nation without symbols and monuments. We just do not have rallying points and heroes around which we can build the sense of pride which a developing country needs. When I visited New Delhi, I was taken to Jawaharlal Nehru’s home and showed his house and his bed on his last days on earth and the simplicity was simply overwhelming. In Accra at the Nkrumah Gardens, the Cadillac car he used as President is preserved compared to the vandalization of Murtala Muhammad’s car deposited for ‘safe’ keeping in the National Museum in Lagos.

    Whenever I pass by Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s personal house in Ibadan and see crates of Coca-Cola in front of it, I feel a sense of loss about how the place could be turned into a tourist attraction. There is so much that is missing in our lives and it is not really a question of money or budgetary allocation. What seems to be the problem with us is that we simply have no sense of vision and mission and our sense of who we are is befuddled by our current problems many of which are self-imposed.

    Perhaps the problem of Nigeria is the official lack of the sense of history. I use the word ‘official’ advisedly because the ordinary man on the street has a sense of history and he can easily connect with the past. This is why the caliphate for example is still a strong force that connects the past with the present among the Hausa-Fulani. The institutions of the Ooni and the Alaafin are potent rallying points in Yoruba land and any politician who denigrates these institutions, does so it at his own peril. Even among acephalous societies of the Igbo, the Ibibio and other Nigerians who until recently did not have centralised institutions of monarchies, their sense of history is no less important and individuals can relate to this sense of history. But at the official level where for reasons best known to government, history has been yanked out of primary and secondary school syllabi apparently on the advice of Americans who came here in the seventies and advised our government to introduce what they call “social studies” in place of history. This is something they do not do in their own country where American history with its theme of their manifest destiny is drummed into the ears of young people so that they could feel they are a special people and almost a chosen generation. But we who need this sense of nationalism because our nation is in a state of ebullition were wrongly advised and probably deliberately made to operate in an historical and cultural void. Unlike Ghana, which has a sense of purpose under Nkrumah and would brook no interference in the educational system of their people, we have been made to go through a system of disconnect between the present and the past; the consequence of which is the total absence of the sense of history in our national life. After 53 years, we have no monuments to point to for the coming generation and to take tourists to while visiting our country. There are no national symbols of our sovereignty, of our history, of our unity. We think the numbers of cars and trucks on our roads and the variety of foreign restaurants and eateries and the innumerable generators and other manifestation of our dependency on Western culture are signs of modernity. We leave the exhibition of our 2000 year old civilisation in Nok, Ife, Benin, and Igbo Ukwu in the hands of oil companies in various metropolitan centres of the world happily without any condescension on their part. This should have been the duty of our government to showcase our past to the rest of the world but our leaders are more interested in feathering their own nest and looting the treasury and building mansions which their children will not be able to maintain and which would have to be turned to museums in the future. Perhaps it is not too late to make amends and I sincerely hope that when our leaders visit other parts of the world including Ghana, they would learn the lesson of building monuments for the future. Life is not about material well-being alone, there are things that appeal to the spirit. A nation could be developed physically but be spiritually poor. A city like Abuja for example may be beautiful but it has no soul and it is incumbent on planners to try and infuse soul into such a city. This is why Abuja is deserted at weekends and people flee to places like Lagos, Kano in spite of the fact that they are not as developed as Abuja. As a nation, we need to be thinking of the future and of our children and grand children and the legacies we would leave behind. This is why civilised countries spend huge amount of money on museums, art galleries, libraries, national monuments which are what will endure and not whatever money we have in bank vaults.

  • A recent trip to Ghana –1

    My father, David Osuntokun like most young people from my hometown Okemesi went as an adventurer to the then Gold Coast in the 1930s well before I was born. In my hometown of Okemesi, it was not unusual to find many people speak Fante or one of the Akan languages which they acquired when they were working in the then Gold Coast, now Ghana. My dad was involved in mining Manganese in Nsutta somewhere in the centre of Ghana. He also acquired some education and was able to function as a catechist on Sundays apparently ministering to the considerable Nigerian community in the mining town. Ghana was therefore referred to in my hometown as ‘Oke-Okun’ that is, “abroad”. Many of my people suffered in the 1960s when they were deported from Ghana by the Busia government. Unfortunately, this was reciprocated in the 1980s by the Buhari government when millions of Ghanaians who were economic migrants were deported for being involved in criminal activities. This was a charge that remained unproven. This is an episode that is better forgotten in the history of the amicable relations between the two countries.

    My dad made some money in Ghana and built a rambling house in our home-town Okemesi for himself and his two uterine brothers one of whom was older and the other younger and used the rest of the money he made to engage in trade as an Osomalo which was the favourite pastime in our area in those days.

    The point to make is that I have a history of relationship with what is today Ghana. In 1963, before I entered the University of Ibadan while I was teaching at Oduduwa College, Ife, I led a students’ excursion group to visit the then vibrant Republic of Ghana under its ebullient and visionary President Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah. We visited the University of Ghana at Legon, the then Kumasi College of Science and Technology, Achimota College in Accra where we stayed as well as Prempeh College in Kumasi which played host to us while in Kumasi. We also visited Tema, the artificial port created by Nkrumah on the Gulf of Guinea and the site of the Volta Aluminium Complex. We also went to Akosombo Dam where Ghana’s hydro-electricity is generated.

    At that time because of our young age, we did not quite appreciate what we saw. People of my generation somehow felt inferior to Ghanaians because they beat us regularly in soccer, we danced mostly to their musical tunes played by E.T. Mensah and Ramblers Dance Band and because they got independence in 1957, they were the leading African country. In spite of their size and population, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah towered above all African leaders. He, Sekou Toure of Guinea and Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt along with Pandit Nehru and Joseph Broz Tito of Yugoslavia and Dr. Ahmed Sukarno of Indonesia and possibly Chou En-Lai of China were responsible for launching the Non-aligned Movement. Nkrumah made our political leaders particularly our Prime Minister Sir Tafawa Balewa look puny and irrelevant in African politics. This made us young people to admire Nkrumah and Ghana well above our own leaders and our country. Nkrumah also wrote books which when I entered the University of Ibadan, we read in our political science class particularly his autobiography Kwame Nkrumah and his Africa Must Unite which was a call to all African states to unite in order to survive and to liberate the rest of Africa that was still under colonial or settlers’ subjugation.

    In fairness to Nigerian leaders of the first republic, Nigeria was and is a more complex country than Ghana because of our complexity of cultures and religions as well as the multitude of our languages. Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa has sometimes being dismissed as too conservative and ineffective but that is not true. He was more of a practical politician and a realist but unlike Nkrumah, he did not leave any lasting monuments or legacies of his regime.

    In Ghana today, tourists and officials of foreign governments cannot but be impressed by the monuments that Dr. Kwame Nkrumah left behind. The Flagstaff House that is, the office of the President, the Aburi Gardens standing some miles away from Accra on a hill and serving as an escape residence for the President more like Camp David in the United States and Checkers in London is a source of pride to Nkrumah’s genius of forward planning. He even built an Africa House on the grounds of parliament which he hoped would be the headquarters of the African Union to which he committed huge amount of resources in support of the Pan-African Movement and the liberation of the continent from colonialism. After his death in Romania of Prostate Cancer, his body was given full military honours and national burial in Conakry where Ahmed Sekou Toure had declared him a co-president after his overthrow in 1966. His body was later removed from Conakry and buried in his hometown of Nzima in the Nkroful area of Western Ghana and it was from there that Jerry Rawlings removed the body for the third time to be interred in a national mausoleum on the Accra polo grounds where in 1957 Nkrumah had declared Ghana independent. It was Rawlings who appreciated more than anybody the contribution of Nkrumah to Ghana and Africa’s development and it is interesting to note that today’s young people in Ghana live in adoration and gratitude to Nkrumah who laid the foundation of what is now arguably the best run country on the African continent.

    • To be continued

  • Welcoming the APC

    Welcoming the APC

    The emergence of the APC is good for Nigeria because it provides our people a viable alternative to the PDP government that has been in power for more than 14 years. Most Western democracies operate a two-party system i.e. there is always a party in government and another one in opposition keeping the one in government on its toes and providing a standing alternative to the government in power. This is the essence of democracy in many Western countries. There are of course countries in continental Europe like Germany and France where as a result of their culture, coalition governments of sometimes two or three parties seem to be the rule because of the intense factionalization in those countries. It reminds me of what General Charles De Gaulle used to say about French men that if you lock two French men in a room and ask them to form a political party; they are likely to come out with three political parties. In the history of Nigeria, the first time we ever had a semblance of a two-party system was during the Babangida era when two parties: the SDP and the NRC were decreed into being. Although we tend to criticize the military for all our problems, the imposition of the two-party system by General Babangida at that time was a master stroke. This was the system that gave us the best election that we have ever had and that produced MKO Abiola as the President that was never sworn in. Hopefully, the emergence of the APC will lead to credible elections 2015. At least we now have a choice of two national parties; one that has been in power for 14 years and for which we have nothing to show for it, and another that is ready to take power and has some credentials especially judging from the performance of some components of it in the South-west and in the North-east. The assemblage of seasoned politicians with credibility like Buhari and Tinubu and others should give the APC some leverage with the Nigerian voters. A lot of work of course has to be done in fashioning out a manifesto that is at least left of centre and that would be totally opposed to the abysmal corruption that the PDP has elevated to a philosophy of government. The two main planks of the APC for now are firmly rooted in the South-west and the North generally so demography favors the APC come 2015. Democracy is about one-man vote and with the lack of performance of the PDP generally, it should be possible for Buhari, Tinubu and other APC leaders to mobilize support in the North and in the South-west and also because the PDP itself is collapsing from inside, it will not be impossible to get the other parts of the country to join a winning band-wagon.

    All these of course are predicated on the kind of candidates the APC is able to choose for its presidential ticket. I speak as an outsider, if Buhari and Tinubu are able to control their personal ambitions and to look for a younger combination of credible people to run on the APC platform, the party stands a good chance of winning. The party should avoid anything that may make it look like a tribal or a religious coalition or party because its opponents would definitely exploit this if there is a tendency of the party in that direction.

    As for the Yoruba people, they now have a choice to make. The PDP used to appeal to some elements in the South-west by suggesting that the people would reap a lot of democratic dividends if they belong to the mainstream. The APC being a national party and more ideologically in tune with Yoruba political tradition should give the South-west the opportunity of genuinely belonging in the mainstream of Nigerian politics just as was the case with the SDP. The kind of mainstream offered by PDP has been found out to be totally not in consonance with Yoruba political tradition. After all, Obasanjo as president dragged the Yorubas into the so-called mainstream and they have nothing to show for it. The collapsed infrastructure in the South-west is a testimony to the PDP’s misrule even under Obasanjo. I would like to point out that what is good for Nigeria should be good for the Yoruba people. The Yoruba people do not want to be favored over others and they do not want to be discriminated against. Rather, what they want is equitable representation of all groups at all levels. Any fair assessment of the present regime cannot but come to the conclusion of total marginalization of the Yoruba people and the South-west. A situation in which the first 10 positions in the country do not have a single Yoruba among them is totally unacceptable for a people constituting about 40 million of Nigerians. The strength of the APC in the South-west is directly related to this marginalization.

    Secondly, the performance of the former ACN governors particularly in the upliftment of the infrastructure of the area is a strong testimony of what APC when it controls the federal government will do in the South-west. The PDP used to control the South-west before now and people should be reminded that their governors did virtually nothing for the people. In fact, people are now asking why it has been relatively easy for the ACN in the South-west to transform the infrastructure in the area while their predecessors were not able to do much. Just go to Ibadan, Abeokuta, Ado-Ekiti, Osogbo and Benin City and see what has been accomplished. These are the issues. Yoruba people are highly educated people and they like to play politics of issues not of personalities. Even though leaders like Tinubu, Akande, Osoba, Adeniyi Adebayo, Kayode Fayemi, Amosun, Ajimobi, Aregbesola and others are good mobilizers, but mobilization alone would not do unless there are issues around which people can be mobilized and the main issue in the South-west is the non-performance of the PDP and the marginalization of the Yoruba people. It is not just the leaders in the South-west who are saying this, ordinary commuters on the dilapidated roads and those who need power to run their small businesses and those who need security in their homes and on the streets are grumbling loudly and who do they blame, they blame the PDP federal government and this is rightly so. The issue is not about Tinubu delivering the South-west or Buhari delivering the North. In fact, nobody can deliver anybody. The point is the disenchantment, disillusionment and dissatisfaction of the people with what is going on.

    If the PDP were wise, they should quickly realize that the issue is not about personalities but about programs and performance so any campaign based on discrediting Tinubu, Buhari and other leaders of the APC would not wash. This question of issues will also resonate I must say among other Nigerians even in the South-south not to talk about the South-east. It is unfortunate that politics in Nigeria is based on the coalition of ethnic groups against other ethnic groups. One hopes that 2015 would usher in the same kind of movement that produced the same result of the election of a Muslim-Muslim ticket of MKO Abiola and Babagana Kingibe in 1993. As for the Labour Party in Ondo being a vanguard for the division of the South-west in 2015, I do not see that happening. The Labour Party in Ondo is built around the charismatic leadership of Olusegun Mimiko, a young man that I admire very much. But this is a flash in the pan when Mimiko finishes his second term, the Labour Party will be swept out of the South-west. There have been instances of political parties built around a one-man charismatic leadership in the past.

  • Financing development in Nigeria

    Since the discovery of oil in large quantities, particularly since 1970, the question of taxation has not always been in the front burner of discussion but with the inevitable decline in oil and gas receipts, we must begin to discuss alternative sources of revenue in this country. First of all, it is not healthy to depend on what amounts to collection of commission from oil companies by the national government and sharing it down the line to the states and local governments. This comprador capitalism is not healthy. The side effect of this mode of financing development is the rampant corruption in the country because the ordinary people are not feeling the pinch of taxation. Oil and gas money apparently do not come from people’s pocket so they are not in a position to protest against embezzlement at all levels. The inevitability of decline in national revenue arising from stealing of crude oil and under-declaring of production by multinationals as well as sabotage of gas and oil pipelines by criminals parading themselves as militants and finally the development of shale gas in the United States and Canada and possibly in Europe and Asia will no doubt have serious consequences on national revenue in Nigeria. This may save us from the curse of oil which has ruined the mentality of our leaders and the psyche of our people. The days of cheap money may be coming to an end. This should not be a cause of worry for the ordinary people; in fact we should look forward to it. Since 1956 when oil was discovered in Oloibiri, the present day Bayelsa State, we have not really exploited to the full, the use of oil for our national development but now that the days of cheap money is coming to an end and we have still not industrialised our economy or developed necessary infrastructure for an industrial take-off, we have now to begin to look at alternative sources of financing for development. Apart from a few people who are employed in the private and public sectors and who have taxes deducted at source from their salaries, most people in Nigeria do not pay taxes. This may sound unbelievable that there are billionaires in Nigeria who are in self-employment who pay no taxes. Taxing these people is a veritable source of revenue for development if government is serious about its responsibilities.

    There are two ways by which taxes can be collected – this could be in direct or poll taxes on income but since this is going to be difficult because of our poor statistics and limited commercial intelligence and the unfairness of levying uniform taxes on all. It may be wiser to rely on consumer taxes as well as property taxes.

    Consumer taxes can be imposed on everything that we buy especially in shops, restaurants, pharmacies, and other such organised places. Property taxes can be levied as the name implies on all landed properties in the country. Lagos state calls this land use levy. It is not a popular way of taxes but it is necessary, I applaud Lagos state for this innovation which if I must say comes directly from Canada. I also recommend this land use taxes to all states of the federation and the federal capital territory in Abuja. The caveat is that this is a state tax and not a federal tax and on no account should the federal government meddle in raising property taxes. In any case, any sensible person knows that the federal government in Nigeria is the most powerful federal government in the world and our president enjoys untrammelled power that is not comparable to any president in any place in the world and we do not want to increase this power. One hopes that the discussion on the constitution would severely devolve power from the centre to the states and the regions.

    Other taxes that should be raised are excise duties on industrial products manufactured in the country and my suggestion is that these excise duties should no longer belong in the province of the federal government. They should be state taxes in order to boost the revenue of the state so that development can be local rather than being sucked into the Aegean stable of the corruption at the centre. The federal government of course will continue to collect custom duties as well as mineral taxes and in this regard, it may be useful to have a profound discussion on mineral rights including oil and gas. The time may already have come to find a way out of the stealing going on in the oil-producing areas by resolving the question of ownership in favour of the oil and gas and mineral producing areas of the country. The federal government will therefore be in a position to impose any percentage of tax ranging from 0-100% on mineral production.

    Nobody likes to pay taxes and this is not a unique foible of Nigerians, it is universal but payment of taxes is necessary. There can be no democratic representation without taxes. We cannot have government of the people, for the people, by the people without the responsibilities that go with it in terms of sustaining the government through taxes and there can be no room for the people as stakeholders unless they pay taxes and the only way by which the people can take possession and own the government and be observant about what is going on is if they pay taxes to sustain the government. Hence, payment of taxes is good for the people because this is the only way they can rein in corruption through their oversight of government expenditure. All our cry of corruption will remain futile cry unless we are involved in funding the government but as of now, only a few taxpayers can legitimately shout foul when corruption is exposed. The others feel that government money is nobody’s money and can be stolen at will. In the 1960s, during the height of the Agbekoya rebellion in the old western region, the reason why the rebellion was widespread was because people were called upon to pay taxes particularly in the rural areas. The people were not opposed to paying taxes, what Tafa Adeoye and his people complained about was that money was being collected without commensurate development. In order to stop this bush fire from spreading, the government in the western region had to suspend the poll tax. This may not be the experience in the north where Jangali or cattle tax has been paid from time immemorial. What the history of taxation teaches us in Nigeria is that government must respond to the developmental needs of the people if there is going to be peace and the reason why we still have peace in spite of apparent lack of development and positive government response to our developmental need is because by and large, most Nigerians are not paying taxes. I call on our governments at the local, state and federal government levels to begin to educate our people about the need to pay taxes if we want development. This is the time to do this so that it is a gradual process rather than wait until the hydrocarbon market collapses before we embark on fire brigade method of levying taxes that will be needed to fund government operations. A stitch in time saves nine, if we do nothing now, we may not be able to do it when the time comes.

  • Hell on Lagos-Ibadan expressway

    On Sunday, June 30, at two o’clock in the afternoon, I left the Redemption Camp for an appointment in Ikeja, a distance of about 40km. I got to Ikeja at about six o’clock, four hours later. When the journey was taking too long because of the horrible roads and the traffic snarl, I many times decided to turn back but the median divide prevented me from doing so until I was almost at the Berger Bridge. I had a premonition that I had not seen anything yet because the traffic going towards the Ibadan end was beginning to build up. After a brief stay in Lagos, I hit the road to go back to the camp at about 7pm; I had no problem from Lagos to somewhere near the Mountain of Fire Camp. From there on to the Redemption camp perhaps about 15km away, I spent six hours. I did not get home until 1am on Monday morning. This is a record for a 40km journey that started on Sunday afternoon and finally ended Monday morning. Within that time, I could have flown to the United States from Nigeria.

    My colleagues said I was very lucky to have even made it home alive because whenever there is this type of traffic situation, people are routinely robbed while waiting in their cars and dispossessed of whatever money or valuables they might have on them. I kept asking myself where the Nigerian government is. Yet we are in a country that is over-governed with 774 local governments, 36 state governments and Abuja and at the apex is the Federal Government, the behemoth in Abuja. In spite of these multitudinous governments, the only arterial road linking the port of Lagos with the South-west, South-south, South-east and the northern states has remained in a state of total disrepair since the government of Olusegun Obasanjo in 1999. Since that time, trillions of dollars have been earned by the country and 80 or more percent of them have been spent on oiling government wheels and paying huge allowances to all kinds of government functionaries while the people have been totally forgotten and ignored. At about 12 midnight, I saw children and toddlers holding to their mothers who had alighted from the public run-down buses to trek home to various villages along the highway. On that particular night, it was raining cats and dogs and the peels of thunder and lightning were frighteningly audible everywhere. One can then imagine the way the little children must have felt. I asked myself several times over how Nigeria has got to this pass. I also asked myself what is so difficult in tarring and maintaining roads that our governments cannot do. If we can fail in this simple task of road maintenance, then how can we expect any institution in Nigeria to work? I hate to say that Nigeria is a failed state. Certainly on that night, I felt my country had failed.

    Since 1999, we have been hearing that this road will be reconstructed with five lanes on each side. The Obasanjo regime took us through the charade of concessioning the road to Bi-Courtney, a company that had no track record of road construction. For more than three years, we held our breath and we prayed that this road will be reconstructed. We were later told that the company did not have the capacity to build the road as if we didn’t know that from the beginning. We have also heard rumours that the road will soon be reconstructed and I dare say we do not trust any government anymore. Why must it be just one road that links Lagos with all parts of Nigeria? Yet it is not that people have completely lost their senses and can no longer reason, because I can see three alternatives if we are a serious country. The Lagos-Abeokuta axis can be developed to take some burden off the Lagos-Ibadan road. The old Sagamu-Lagos road through Ikorodu can also be redeveloped to serve as an alternative to this much abused road. The Lagos-Epe Ijebu-Ode road can also be redeveloped thus providing three alternative roads to this hell on earth called Lagos-Ibadan express road.

    The initial cause of the chaos on June 30 was the conference at Deeper Life Centre along the express road. This was a Christian conference obviously to praise and worship our Lord Jesus Christ and what should have been an occasion of joy turned to sorrow for many people including elderly people, little children, women who should not be on the road in the midnight and pregnant women some of whom lost their pregnancies as a result of the hardship inflicted on them by a church organisation. It is high time for all the churches and mosques along this highway to get involved in alleviating the pains of our people. I do not see why some of these churches including my own should not be asked to build flyovers carrying their worshippers to and fro their camps onto the highways without impeding the flow of traffic under the flyovers. I know that this can only be done with the permission of the state but some of the church leaders have influence with government and they should use that influence to persuade the government of the need for them to assume their civic responsibilities. We are a very lucky people in this country because Nigerians do not ordinarily rebel against governments but there are enough reasons why people should cry out before it is too late. Our people’s demands on government are very little because most members of the middle class provide the basic needs that should have been provided by government such as security, light, water, education and sometimes roads to their homes and businesses with the effect that government is almost irrelevant. The only reason we don’t have another Agbekoya or a people’s revolt is because apart from the salary earners, very few Nigerians pay taxes except those who live in Lagos and people like myself who have to pay Land Use charge. I hope this current paradigm of do-nothing governments will not endure for too long to the period where as a result of diminishing returns from oil, Nigerians will then be called upon to pay taxes. It is then that our government will be made to realise that democracy is government of the people, by the people but most importantly for the people. Our governments right now are not governments for the people. This is why the most important road in the country will be left unattended to while building in Abuja a 10-lane road running from the airport to the city while totally neglecting the economic and financial centres of the country.