The Nation Newspaper

Category: Jide Osuntokun

  • American elections and aftermath

    American elections and aftermath

    All predictions of close presidential election in the USA have been proven to be wrong. I was so shocked that I could not eat after the initial results were declared. Although in September I had written in this paper that Donald J. Trump would win the election stating that the dice was loaded against Kamala Harris. I had argued that the time to make herself known to the American electorate was too short. Biden only withdrew in July leaving the poor lady just about three months to campaign while Donald Trump had four years to run Biden out of town so to say.

    I further said America was not ready for a female president especially a non-white woman after rejecting Hilary Clinton in 2016. The Democratic Party was very weak on issues of inflation and immigration which proved to be the Achilles heels of Harris. The war in Ukraine was also seen as an unwinnable war draining American resources. This was a proxy war between Russia and the United States in which America had no direct leadership but was largely funding it. The Israeli war against the Arabs in Gaza and Lebanon was infuriating not only to Arab -Americans but the intellectual and the intelligentsia in the whole world and the weakness of Biden in supplying lethal arms to Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister but with absolutely no control of the murderous use of them made America look weak in relation to her puny ally Israel.

    I also thought that it would have been too difficult for Mrs Harris to detach herself from Biden’s poor image because she was still his vice president.  Apart from all these was the deep rooted racism in America where to be non-white was an unbearable burden. All these reasons made me feel that winning the contest was an uphill task for Harris.

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    But as the campaign went on and the pollsters bombarded us with polls after polls, I began to feel that Mrs Harris had a fair chance of winning particularly after debate with Trump in which she showed that Trump was a hollow giant with feet of clay. The lady demonstrated tremendous energy during the campaign and went to all the states of America apart from Hawaii. When the voting started, the whole world was given the impression that the results were a toss-up. But it turned out a clean sweep by Trump. This was because the Democratic constituencies in previous elections deserted Harris and the party. The women, the visible minorities of Blacks, Latinos, Asians, the elderly, workers and educated whites did not deliver as they used to do in previous presidential elections.

    Trump won in all the so-called blue wall states of Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, Arizona, North Carolina and Wisconsin. It seems what decided the election in Trump’s favour were two issues of immigration and inflation. Even though on paper the American economy is the envy of the whole world, this did not translate to prices in the supermarkets and the shopping malls. The hordes of immigrants billeted to cities all over America brought the issue of poorly managed borders home to everyone. The campaign emphasis of Harris on Trump’s character as a  misogynist, rapist, convicted felon, fraudster, tax evader, philanderer,  racist  and a bad man  generally did not gel with many Americans who felt Trump was as American as apple pie. Unfortunately for the Democrats, the defeat of Harris led to losses in the two Houses of the Congress- the Senate and the House of Representatives leading to Republican control of the presidency, the Senate, the House of Representatives and some will say the Supreme Court because unlike most western democracies, the Supreme Court in the USA is very political. What this means is that come next January when Trump is pronounced president, he will be able to carry out the most radical program in the government of the United States since F.D .Roosevelt. Any challenge against his program will easily be thrown out eventually when it gets to the Supreme Court. He has been assembling a cabinet of “disruptors”  whose mandate will be to shake up the United States and vicariously the world with it because America remains a global hegemonic power whether one likes it or not.

    He is bringing as his Attorney General, a previous member of Congress who was being probed for sleeping with underage children and of using illegal drugs. As Secretary of Defence, the greatest military establishment in the world, he is nominating a defence TV journalist who has never run any small organization before. As Secretary of Health, he is bringing the scion of the Kennedy family who does not believe in inoculation and vaccination and other accepted western medical practice that has become standard practice all over the world. He is bringing in as Communications Secretary someone who believes in the control of the media and possibly cancelling the licences of media houses critical of Trump. He is even threatening the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) and the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) He is asking Elon Musk, the richest man in the world to help him trim the bureaucracy and fire any member of it not Republican Party compliant. He has asked the governor of the central bank to be prepared to go even though the gentleman has two more years to go in his tenured appointment.

    “America First” would be his watchword in his foreign policy and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation NATO will be subjected to this test. This means he will be withdrawing hundreds of thousands of American troops from Europe and presumably from Japan and South Korea. The new Trump administration will certainly be interesting for the whole world. Perhaps when in reciprocity the world will also react to his regime of high tariffs, deportation of immigrants and sabre rattling, he may yet settle down and realise that a tree does not make a forest.

  • In defence of Wike on Abuja demolitions

    In defence of Wike on Abuja demolitions

    We are gradually becoming a nation of lawbreakers.  Some have attributed this development to people’s lack of confidence in the elite whose laws are our laws. Many believe they make laws not to serve the overall interests of the public, but to protect the interest of group members.

    For instance, it is generally believed that our lawmakers deliberately inserted lacunas in the Abuja Urban and Regional Planning Act which but for Nyesom Wike’s ongoing demolition would have allowed politicians who illegally took over Abuja green belt, and shanties dwellers, who illegally erected structures on land earmarked for public use by government to stay in court for up to 15 years.

    Following Minister Wike’s last week’s demolition of Ruga illegal settlement, at Wuye, harbouring more than 10,000 illegal occupants, human right group led by Martins Vincent Otse, popularly known as ‘VeryDarkMan’ (VDM), and Deji Adeyanju, a lawyer and activist, led the protest of the displaced people. Adeyanju, celebrated by the media as ‘a foremost human right activist, just about a year after leaving law school but dismissed by  Nyesom  as “an idle hand who became civil society activist after failing to secure his support for the national publicity secretary of PDP”, demanded the minister’s sack. Rather than deny Wike’s allegation, Barrister Adeyanju, who we now know is a PDP card-carrying member while wearing human right activist cloak, has been slandering and calling Wike names.

    And this is despite the fact that Abba Garo, the spokesman for the victims of Ruga demolition whose crusade Adeyanju is leading, has admitted that the displaced occupants could not lay claim to the land which he also noted had been demolished 22 times, with occupants returning to rebuild “because they have no alternative accommodation”.

    Nigerians are also aware that despite the heterogeneity, there is no part of Nigeria where outsiders are not welcome with open hands as long as they respect the values and culture of their host communities. It is therefore unimaginable that immigrants will move to Benin, Yola or Sokoto and start erecting structures without approval of the local authorities.

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    The only exception is perhaps Abuja where Garo admitted they have continued to break the laws ‘because they have no alternative accommodation’ and Lagos where immigrants destroy the lagoon shorelines with shanties. The promoters and enablers of criminality in the case of Abuja and Lagos are attention-seeking civil society groups and a section of the media that intend to impose their warped view of society on the rest of us. Otherwise, the idea of urban immigrants resorting to self-help is alien to our culture.

    The good news about Abuja however is that demolition Minister Wike, whether you like or not, has said no amount of blackmail was going to stop him from pulling down other illegal shanties and structures constructed on Abuja’s green areas. According to him, “If anyone builds on a green area without the necessary approval, then too bad. Those structures will be brought down; certainly, yes, they will be demolished without compensation to those who encroached on public land”.

    Femi Falana, (SAN) and a respected human right crusader has however condemned, the minister for his decision to demolish illegal shanties he described as ‘private properties. According to him, the demolitions are not authorized under the Urban and Regional Planning Act applicable in the FCT because “In the FCT, if a house has breached the law, the case must first be taken to the Urban and Regional Planning Board. If the property owner loses, they can appeal to the Urban and Regional Tribunal. If that fails, the case may go to the High Court, where an order for demolition may be issued.” 

    For him, Wike’s demolition of shanties is ‘alien and primitive’. He is therefore insisting the minister must follow provisions of Abuja municipal laws.

    But if the spirit of the law is ‘the search for the spirit of truth’ and the  essence of law is that it ‘supports the logic of reason and the interest of common good’, I think Wike’s approach is superior to the Abuja municipal law, crafted by those who don’t really care about public interest  And the Abuja Act itself, to use Falana’s words is “alien and primitive’ to the extent that the Abuja Municipal Act Falana wants to follow, is unarguably inferior to our traditional judicial system the colonial master met on ground when they first came in  the 17th century when our social organization was considered superior to that of Europe, according to PC Lloyd.

    Indeed the Abuja Municipal Act is an assault on Nigerian public by Nigerian elite who have been accused of converting most green area of Abuja land to personal use.  And an attempt to link the Act to the British judicial system from where we copied most of our laws is also no less an assault on Nigerian sensibilities. As a product of norms and values, the British judicial system, would never have contemplated a situation whereby a British politician would take over a land set aside for public use or a British citizen and His Majesty’s subject erecting shanties on privately owned land. Such aberrations only occur in Nigeria where jobbers as human right activists and some media platforms routinely canonise villains as saints while the rest of us play the ostrich.

    There is a new sheriff in Abuja who although may not popular but no doubt adept at elite game of political party intrigue, interest group pressure, deceit and even violence. (Recall he was the first to tell us how much he got from his then number one political enemy, President Muhammadu Buhari as derivation fund while his Niger Delta colleagues kept their peace). I think Wike is well prepared for the battle against Abuja’s powers and principalities.

    But it is however not difficult to know the source of Falana’s angst. From his Freudian slip towards the end of his interview with Seun Okinbaloye of Channels TV when he angrily declared “after all when the elite commit the same offence, they are asked to regularize”, we could deduce Falana’s anger is against his fellow elite members who are getting away with similar crime for which shanties’ illegal dwellers lose their structures without compensation.

    And this once again bring the focus on our educated elite, the scourge of the nation who Awolowo predicted would never able to guarantee justice for all Nigerians because of their greed for power and money. As it has turned out, every attempt to come up with a pro-Nigeria constitution by Nigerian elite since the end of the civil war has ended in a debacle.

    I can also not resist calling attention to the observation by Professor Bolaji Akinyemi, our former External Affairs Minister to the effect that there is no Nigeria billionaire in recent times who did not acquire his fortune through the Nigerian state. From the likes of Aliko Dangote, the government minted oligopolist, the airlines owners who acquire their wealth through foreign exchange round tripping, to the government oil well allotters, trillion naira profit making bankers to the super rich jet flying lawyers specializing in the defence of governors with stolen mandates, all rode to prosperity on the back of the state. And this perhaps explains why they often display their opulence and profligacy without restraint.

    Dear esteemed readers, let me end this piece by sharing with you our encounter (The Guardian Newspapers) with shanties illegal dwellers. In the late eighties, Lade Bonuola, Guardian editor-in-chief and managing director had secured some acres of land in OPIC, Isheri for the Guardian. In 2005, we decided to allocate the plots to senior editors and other category of staff that had put in between 15-20 years of service. Ogun State Surveyor General’s office facilitated distribution of Certificate of Occupancy to beneficiaries after payment of necessary charges by OPIC.

    The demand for additional payment by (Omo onile), land owners, was met and documented with a recorded video. Today, almost 20 years after, while building of all types have been erected on those plots by shanty dwellers, none of the over 100 legal owners, has had access to his plot.

    If ending the above madness that today defines Lagos and Ogun in Abuja is part of the goal of Minister Nyesom Wike who has already said ‘no amount of blackmail, intimidation, and abuses will deter him from “protecting lives and property in the FCT and ensuring that Abuja was one of the best cities in the world’, he has my back in the battle he has already launched against Abuja vultures.

  • Pastor Tunde Bakare is 70 years old

    Pastor Tunde Bakare is 70 years old

    The activist and indefatigable man of God and tribune of the Nigerian people Dr Tunde Bakare of the Citadel Global Church is 70. I was glad to have attended the one in a life worship and book presentation of his autobiography on Monday, November 11 followed immediately by a reception in the hall of the church attended by the Secretary to the Government of the Federation representing the president, serving and former governors, ministers, traditional rulers from the southern and northern Nigeria including emir Muhammad Sanusi, the Emir of Kano.

    I wrote with much interest, the foreword to Bakare’s autobiography titled “Definitely Not The Least”. The title indicates the fact that Tunde Bakare was the last child of his father, Sanni Bakare, a devout Muslim descended from the grand Imam of Abeokuta, Abdul Sidiq Bakare. In fact the Bakares were the first Muslims in Abeokuta, a town founded circa 1830 after the revolution and mass movement of the Oyo Yoruba into the Egba forests. This was after Fulani incursion into northern Oyo Empire and the Oyo’s consequent southward movement and pressure on their vassals, the Egba and Yewa people in present day Ogun State.

    The story of Tunde Bakare began in Abeokuta, a unique city for many reasons in Nigeria. This was the last independent city in Nigeria before its independence was abrogated in August 1914 at the outbreak of the First World War. Because of the unique history of Abeokuta, the town witnessed the first attempt at Christian evangelisation and its consequent cultural impact of western education on the town. This followed preceding Islamic cultural influence as a result of the considerable number of Muslims in the town. These two foreign cultures were imposed on the strong African tradition of the Egba people which many of them still held to, despite the two exotic religions of Christianity and Islam. Tunde Bakare is a product of the intermixture of the three religious tendencies prevalent in Abeokuta, then and now.

    This autobiography is the story of a boy born into a large Muslim family who fate dealt a terrible blow when at only two years old, his relatively affluent father died leaving him and his mother Eebudola to fend for themselves. The book is a tale of struggle by his mother, who through iron discipline, tried to shape the destiny of her son the way she knew how while the son tried to find freedom as a growing child in what he considered a cruel world of poverty and deprivation. He did what was possible to get educated, selling water, fetching wood to sell and helping his mother to sell whatever stuff she was selling to make ends meet. It was this harsh beginning of being alone in a wicked world that shaped the early life and times of Tunde Bakare. He struggled through primary and secondary schools changing from one school to another, leaving school for some time because of poverty only to continue again thus finding himself in embarrassing position of being behind classmates who were not as good as he was. This kind of humiliation at a young age strengthened his resolve to get on in life by dint of hard work and determination. He was also somehow lucky by the rather cosmopolitan nature of Abeokuta where he could see at a glance, what he found attractive in Islam, Christianity and Western education. Early in life, he wanted to convert to Christianity but was discouraged by the reaction of his mother and his relatives.  But he had seen himself becoming a Christian so that when he took the plunge and transition from Islam to Christianity later in life after moving to Lagos, he faced the harsh consequences which came with it because members of his family were not prepared to see a scion of a Muslim family brought up on the Holy Koran jump ship just like that. This denouement was not to take place until after he had had to move from his roots at Abeokuta to Lagos to improve on his rather pedestrian performance in his West African School Certificate examination. Having passed his examination eventually, he began to aim higher by getting a job and asking God to bless the labour of his hands through doing odd jobs like washing and ironing clothes, first for his teachers, and later for those who needed his services and enrolling in evening adult classes for Advanced level examination that would qualify him for university admission.

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    It was not until I read this manuscript before writing a foreword to it that I discovered a strange coincidence. He had a serious accident which led him to having to stitch his lower or upper lips and the lady who took him to hospital was a certain Mrs Agbelemoge who happens to be my cousin. Her father and my mother are cousins. It was around the same time that I met Tunde Bakare as one of his teachers who coached him for his Advanced level examination in History and government in the University of Ibadan extramural studies centre in Saint Jude’s Ebute Metta, I believe in 1977. If I am like Tunde Bakare, I will see the divine hands of God in our meeting and my taking keen interest and a liking to a student who I would describe as a precocious young man. It was through my intervention that Tunde entered the University of Lagos. Every step Tunde Bakare took in life has been preceded either by a vision, dream or hearing from God.

    He started his Christian journey in the University of Lagos and since laying his hands on the plough, he has never looked back. He used his training as a lawyer to serve humanity thus bringing his profession to bear on his Christian belief. His most difficult convert was his mother, Eebudola Asabi Bakare who he had previously sponsored to perform the pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina but who he converted to Christianity, the religion which she embraced with fervour of somebody born into it. This was very important to Tunde to whom his mother was very special as a person who believed in him and saw a vision of his son’s success as not only a religious leader but a secular one well before anyone else. Tunde Bakare cut his pastoral journey through tutelage under the  giant leaders  of Nigeria’s Pentecostal movement namely, Dr  Samuel Odunaike of the Foursquare Church, Dr  W.F Kumuyi  of the Deeper Life Church and Pastor Adejare Adeboye of the Redeemed Christian Church of God who leads the largest Pentecostal church in Nigeria.

    Along the way, he interacted with Pastor David Oyedepo of Winners Church and Bishop Mike Okonkwo of The Redeemed Evangelical Mission (TREM) – his contemporaries. He had his reasons for finding his independent path from the foremost leaders under whom he had served and associated with. He however found more rewarding his association with two American Pentecostal pastors Dr Morris Cerullo and Dr Lester Sumrall and particularly Dr Sumrall. Sumrall was an American Pentecostal pastor, evangelist, teacher, and missionary. He founded the Lester Sumrall Evangelistic Association and World Global College in his native New Orleans Louisiana. Sumrall was less well known than Cerullo in Africa and of course in Nigeria but Bakare claims he owes most of his spiritual development to him. Bakare’s Church, The Latter Rain Assembly and later on The Citadel, its successor were found  very attractive by the young people apparently because  of his youth and spiritual leading.

    Bakare was ineluctably led by divine inspiration into secular activism which is not strange for a young man who saw Christianity as not just a belief system but a way of life. Pastor Bakare could not restrict himself to preaching alone or embarking on crusades against demonic and evil forces in our society while the mass of humanity suffered a lot. He sees himself as a “messenger” of God to suffering humanity if not in the world at least in Nigeria and Africa (Kenya, Uganda, Zimbabwe) where do nothing governments sat on the necks of their people for very long time. This led him to organising pressure groups and leading demonstrations on the street in Lagos and Abuja against constitutional breaches and against prices of fuel and other commodities.  This soon brought him into clashes with people in authority and great admiration of the people who saw him as a tribune of the people and an electoral asset to people in power or in opposition.

    This was the situation which brought him into running with Major General Muhammadu Buhari against an incumbent President Goodluck Jonathan who was largely supported by the Christian community in 2011. This decision was taken by Tunde Bakare under divine guidance according to him and not for the love for filthy lucre, glory or fame but in the public interest. When he and his principal lost the election which he considered rigged, he never gave up and was able to persuade Buhari to run again in 2015 but not with him as running mate. Buhari subsequently won the 2015 election with generous support of Bakare. Buhari offered him several positions including High Commissioner to the Court of Saint James’s in London which he declined. The lack of performance for eight years by Muhammadu Buhari must have influenced him to accept the challenge and gauntlet to try to be president himself in the election of 2023 where he was faced with the African reality that leadership is mostly bought not earned.

    It remains to be said that when the history of this times is written, the name of Pastor Bakare’s remarkable story of a man who rose from poverty and deprivation to aspiring for the highest position in the land would be one of those to be included among the makers of modern Nigeria. Reading his excellent autobiography and the command of English by the author has been a labour of love and enjoyment. The story of Tunde Bakare is a testament to the love of God and his wife, Layide and the beautiful children she gave Tunde. The book is also a promenade into the intricacy and complexity of recent politics of Nigeria and the mortal dangers faced by an activist like Bakare who of course overcame fear because in all he did he had faith that God was leading him. This book deserves to be read by the critical mass of the Nigerian society.

  • Underage rioters and presidential pardon

    Underage rioters and presidential pardon

    There have been comments on the incarceration of juvenile delinquents in prison following the violent demonstrations in Abuja and elsewhere against what they called “bad governance”. We should all salute the president for asking the children to be released immediately. There are so many questions troubling my mind about this. Why were underage children demonstrating in the first place? Where were their parents? Government should follow their release with knowing what kind of homes they came from. It could be they don’t have homes and perhaps they are street urchins as we find in many of our towns today.

    The time has come for our various governments particularly the states and local governments to develop policies to face this problem before they get out of hands. This lumpen proletariat are the stuff of violence and revolution in the future. Why were these children not in school where they should be learning a skill or acquiring knowledge that may be useful to them in the future?

    Since when has it become the responsibility of children to engage in political action in this country? Who were the people goading these children to go to the streets? What kind of legitimate punishment can a society inflict on these errant children without appearing inhuman and harsh? We have remand homes for these kinds of children but are they available all over the country? My church, the Redeemed Christian Church of God, has these kinds of homes in some parts of the country. Government should join such missions to make the system effective and more encompassing.  Is the fact that so many children were involved in these demonstrations not a manifestation of failure of parents and government to have institutions that will prepare our country for the future?

    What can we do, going forward in terms of overhauling our educational system so that our children can develop a sense of civic responsibility? Of course, responsible adults have the right to protest against what they consider bad policies, but they should not bring children to swell their ranks and create a mob instead of responsible demonstration. Generally speaking, people tend to find security in committing crimes or misdemeanour when they are in large numbers and individuals cannot be easily caught for their bad behaviour. It is for this reason that demonstrators tend to recruit all and sundry to join them in creating a mob mentality in which crimes are not seen as crimes and easily detected.

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    Recently in Valencia, Spain, demonstrators were seen throwing stones and mud at the king and queen and the Spanish prime minister who went to commiserate with victims of flood in the country. This will not happen ordinarily but when people demonstrating are joined by others and become a mob, all sense of responsibility departs from them. In the case under reference, the prime minister of Spain was quickly spirited away to avoid being killed, the king and queen showing a sense noblesse oblige stayed despite the violence on the poor couple!

    Do we in our country sincerely have the correct attitude about demonstration against government policies without injecting ethnic sentiments which seem to ruin everything at every point our politics in this country and which in turn draws the anger and negative reaction of our governments whether at state or national level? All these are issues which we must discuss not only to deal with the problems of now but also that of the future.

    Are there genuine reasons to criticize our present government? The answer is of course yes.  The present government is certainly not responsible for the downturn of the economy but it is currently in situ and the government in power; so the government is vicariously responsible for the bad situation. There is no doubt that the people are suffering. We have never had it so bad in this country. The value of the Naira is so bad that it reminds one of Weimar Germany or Zimbabwe where one took money to the market in a basket and brought home in one’s hand a loaf of bread. A good loaf of bread now costs N2,000. If one wants to replace bread with yams, the cost is also prohibitive. I sometimes joke with yam sellers in my area whether the rate of exchange of dollars is also affecting the cost of yams. The answer is that the cost of transportation has led to the astronomical cost of home grown vegetables, fruits, yams, cassava and other Nigerian staples. The solution to this is massive production of food items. But who will produce this food items when the farming population has drifted to the towns and left farming to old men and women? 

    The role of government in this case is to embark on mass education to let the people know the solution to our problems. Government must not allow itself to be pushed to importing rice and other food items when we have the land and water and abundant sunshine as well as the people to produce what we will eat. The Holy Bible says he who does not work shall not eat. It is as simple as that. The purpose of government is to provide the security within which the people will fend for themselves. It is partly the absence of this security that is at the root of all our problems.

    If government that controls the organised means of violence is unable to guarantee violence-free society, the people would take to self-help leading to a war of everybody against everyone until a dictator arrives to provide this for all. Our commitment and embrace of democracy ends when that democracy fails to secure our lives. This is why people will protest. But government alone cannot solve all our problems. We as a people must also be determined to help ourselves. When I see young men roaming aimlessly around the streets sometimes begging, I know we have a problem. Escaping to other countries to do jobs they will not do at home is not the solution. We need a campaign of going back to the land. This campaign has to be based on our local government areas and states and not on the federation. The role of the federal government should be mobilising national and international support for the production and adding value to our products and exporting our surplus. This does not mean everybody must be a farmer. Only 4% of the population of the United States is actively involved in agriculture and through mechanisation and industrialisation of the process, they not only feed the entire United States but have enough to feed the whole world. This is the path to go. We have to move away from back bending hoe and cutlass agriculture to modern farming practice. Government and the banking sector have to generously fund agricultural production in our country and it is by massive production and exchange with the rest of the world that we will have enough resources to develop other sectors of our economy leading to having a stable economy and stable currency that would guarantee security of our savings and secure our economic future. Nobody is going to do this for us. There is no free lunch anywhere and we don’t have to be slaves to either capitalist free enterprise or centralised command socialist system that may have worked elsewhere. What we do and do well and if it works is what we need to adopt as a working paradigm for us and our own clime. There is no perfect system or country anywhere in this world. Many of the countries our people run to are actually in decline and are looking for what works better than what they have. The past in which some countries fed fat on the subjugation of others is gradually becoming a thing of the past and many centres of colonial imposition are not what they used to be and it is in the nature of things to see old things yield for the new and if we understand this and play our cards well and work hard, the future may yet be ours. We just have to be realistic. When I was at the University of Ibadan in the 1960s, students lived as spoiled brats. We had a choice of meals three times a day. We even had stewards waiting on us. Our rooms were cleaned by hired hands and we were entitled to laundry service up to 10 pieces of clothing including bed sheets every week. We had it too good and we didn’t know it!

    Sometimes I am ashamed to admit that my generation contributed to our current problems. We however have to snap out of our dreams and face the reality. Unfortunately our young people hark back to the past and they don’t want to pay for appropriate services as their colleagues do in other parts of the world and some of the parents goad them in their struggle with governments. This is why I applaud President Tinubu’s proposed conference of youth with the leadership of the present government who must be prepared to listen honestly to the young people who are our future and they must also be prepared to answer difficult questions which the youth will ask them.

  • Middle East: Struggle between Israel and Iran

    Middle East: Struggle between Israel and Iran

    Last Saturday, October  26, missile  and air attacks on the Islamic Republic of Iran by Israel were predictably expected and from all indications were choreographed to do tolerable damage on the aerial defence of Iran and damage the republic’s missile and drone production while avoiding its nuclear infrastructure and economic assets of oil and gas production. It is expected that Iran would exercise restraint and not go on tit-for-tat military response. But there is no certainty in all this. What needs to be said as an independent observer is the fact that the two dominant powers in the Middle East are Israel and Iran. They have again emphasised and demonstrated their resolve to protect and defend their interests no matter what. This fact was even recently asserted by the Israeli prime minister,  Benjamin Netanyahu  in a moment of candour, when he said that the  two ancient peoples of the Middle East, the Persians and the Jews would have to accommodate each other with the caveat that the Iranians must get rid of its obscurantist  terrorist, Shia, fundamentalist  regime bent on destroying the Jewish state of Israel while the Iranian government  on the other hand sees Israel as a Zionist regime imposed as a cancer on the Middle East on peaceful Arab population who are justly struggling to be free.

    Can these two wide gulfs in perception and strategic positions be bridged? The two regimes are victims of their own history and until they go from historical perception to the reality of the moment, peace would not be achieved. Whatever anybody may wish to say, it is a fact that Israel has come to stay. On its own, Israel is a major military power in the Middle East. In terms of science and know-how, Israel is a major contributor to knowledge and the wise application of this knowledge is power in the hands of the state of Israel.  With a population approaching 10 million, 2.1 million of which are Arabs, in an area of 22,145 square kilometres (8,630square miles), Israel is 420 kilometres in length and 115 kilometres in width at the widest point. Israel is much smaller than Belgium and compared with Nigeria’s size of 923,770 square kilometres, Israel is very tiny. While geographical size of a state may be an element of power because it would be difficult to quickly overrun and overpower such a state, but size is not always a big asset and the compact size of Israel means, it can easily be defended.

    The people of Israel are highly educated and can easily be mobilised in crisis.  Israel is a closet nuclear power. Israel also enjoys almost an unquestioning support of the most powerful country in the world, the United States. Some have even argued that it is the Israeli tail that wags the American dog!

    On the other hand, Iran (Persia) is a country of ancient people, the Persians who since Biblical times have maintained imperial dominance on the Middle East and part of Asia stretching to Afghanistan and across to South Asian modern states of Pakistan and India. Darius the great the fourth king of the Achaemenid Persian empire stretching from the Caucasus and West Asia to the Balkans in south eastern Europe and even to Egypt and North Africa before the birth of Christ ruled almost 44% of the then known world. In relatively recent times, it was the Persians who dominated the Islamic world, founding the largest empire during the Abbasid Caliphate between 750 and 1258, the third Islamic empire after Prophet Muhammad.

    In short, even in the present era, Persia or its modern variant, Iran, has been a victim of European occupation during the First World War by Russians in the North and the British in the South and during the Second World War by Germans and The Allies. The country as a result of its abundant oil and gas has been a victim of Anglo-American oil political shenanigans in relatively modern times until the Islamic revolution rid the country of foreign domination and influence. Iran has a proud past and is not likely to want to be subservient to any country either in the Middle East or anywhere else. There is no doubt about Iran’s place as a force in world history.

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    Iran follows the Shia tradition of Islam which seems to be the dominant tradition in Iraq, parts of Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and some parts of Afghanistan while the rest of the Islamic world follows the much more loosely organised conservative Sunni tradition that does not appear to have the hierarchical clergy of Ayatollahs and grand Ayatollahs.

    The strength of Iran lies in its vast territory of 1,648,195sq kilometres (636,372 sq. miles).

    It has a multi-ethnic population of 90 million people; the multi ethnicity is considered a source of weakness for the state and working towards fissiparous tendencies in the country. Iran has vast reserves of oil and natural gas. Iran is relatively scientifically advanced with capable nuclear scientists with capacity to produce advanced nuclear reactors and some will say nuclear bombs for which the country has been under severe sanctions by the United States and the rest of its western allies.

    Iran maintains strategic but loose ties with Russia and China but not on the same level that Israel has with the United States and its allies in the West. The proximity of Iran to the Arab states is both an asset and weakness strategically. American forces and influence in countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE sometimes poses a threat to Iran. A western led or Israeli war with Iran could lead to the destruction of gas and oil infrastructure in the Arab Middle East, the blockade of the straits of Hormuz, the major shipping of oil and gas to the rest of the world passes and consequent collapse of global economy. Because of this, a general war between Iran and Israel backed by the United States is very unattractive. This is why America would do its utmost to prevail on Israel not to be too aggressive and adventurous towards Iran.

    By taking on Gaza and Lebanon and particularly the parts dominated previously by Nasrallah and the party of God – Hezbollah and decapitating the movement by killing its leaders and also killing Yayah Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in Gaza and Ismail Haniyeh in Iran, Israel has achieved most of its war aims. The long hand of Iran around Israel has been cut and the threat posed by Iranian proxy near Israel has been virtually neutralized. In other words Israel doesn’t need to continue the war and this is the time to have ceasefire and negotiations with its neighbours and work towards a two-state solution with the rump of Palestine which is not likely to pose any threat to it. With peace with the Palestinians, the casus belli between Iran and Israel would have been removed and Iran can concentrate its efforts of economic development at home while remaining a champion and protector to weak Gulf and Arab states and maintaining a modus vivendi with Israel.

    Peace is a necessary condition for development and countries just have to get used to a world in which hopefully war will become old fashioned. This is particularly necessary in the tinderbox of the Middle East, the most explosive part of the world where there is an intermixture of religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), sea and air routes and energy resources.

  • U.S. Presidency: American ladies are coming

    U.S. Presidency: American ladies are coming

    In 1966 the Americans released a comedy film that parodies the fear of Russian communist invasion of the United States. It was a huge success that lessened the fear of communist subversion and eventual takeover of America.  Most  well informed people knew there was just no way Russia would have invaded a nuclear-armed United States or vice versa because of the then nuclear deterrence which has guaranteed the peace of the world since 1945 till now and prevented major conflicts between Russia and the United States. Although there has been several proxy wars between them in Korea, Vietnam, Southern Africa and Latin America.

    For the long history of American democracy which only granted the franchise to the women of America after the First World War on the basis that service deserves its rewards, America did not think ladies were fit for election into any office, not even that of a dog catcher!  The possibility of an American woman being voted president was inconceivable. But gradually the ladies of America began gradually breaking the glass ceiling of full American female participation in democracy. The first time this happened was when Elizabeth Woodhull ran for the US presidency in 1872 on the platform of the EQUAL RIGHTS PARTY, this was laughed out of court so to say and even when the black congresswoman, Shirley Chisholm, made her quixotic attempt in 1972, no one took her too seriously.

    But the first serious female entry into possibility of being in line of succession to the presidency was when Walter Mondale in 1984 chose Geraldine Ferraro as his vice presidential nominee. They lost the election probably because the American public was still very conservative to vote for Mondale who was considered too liberal on his own and not to talk of his running with a woman. The Republican Party tested the waters in 2008 when Senator John McCain, a war hero and a known conservative, decided to run with Governor Sarah Palin, a rabid racist ignoramus who had governed the sparsely snow-covered state of Alaska as his running mate. They were roundly defeated by Barack Obama and his running mate, Joseph Biden, the current incumbent president.

    The first breakthrough for the women of America was in 2016 when Hilary Clinton, a Democratic Party senator from New York and the wife of a former president, Bill Clinton with vast experience of government garnered in eight years of almost co-presidency with her husband, became the nominee of the Democratic Party in the United States. She lost a very bitter election which brought Donald J. Trump into the White House and has roundly divided the country since then. Hilary Clinton lost the Electoral College votes in the archaic fashion of choosing the president of the United States, not based on popular vote but votes cast in the Electoral College.

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    We are now faced with the second rerun of a woman heading the Democratic Party and being challenged by an irascible and uncouth billionaire, the same man who defeated Hilary Clinton, Donald J. Trump. The former president is heading a divided Republican Party and firing up the racial and ideological divisions in the United States and threatening fire and brimstone if he loses the election again because he wrongly believes that the election of 2020 which brought Joe Biden and Kamala Harris into the presidency was stolen from him. Substantial proportion of die-hard Republican voters believes him and some have joined him in saying there will be a civil war if Trump loses again. This is a credible threat which lovers of America cannot dismiss as mere bluff and braggadocio. What happened in January 2021 when an irate mob of Trump’s supporters tried to destroy the Congress and kill Vice President Mike Pence and the Speaker Nancy Pelosi is perhaps a foretaste of what an organised mob can do in a country usually thought to be the home of democracy where individuals collectively have more guns than the American military. The country is so hopelessly divided that a few weeks before the election holding on November 5, there is no indication where the political pendulum will swing.

    The election campaign has witnessed a lot of strange occurrences. Trump was shot at while campaigning in Pennsylvania by a young man apparently not happy with his rhetoric and uncouth behaviour while campaigning and talking about the race and sex of opponents of his ambition. Another man followed him to his home in Florida hiding in the bush near his golf course but he was happily, apprehended by sharp eyed security provided by the Secret Service of the United States. One can just imagine what would have happened if these assassins had succeeded. It could have become a signal for racial and political upheaval in the most powerful country in the world with consequent reverberations all over the world.

    American politics is not just a local or domestic issue; they concern the whole world because the United States for considerable time to come will remain a global hegemon. Whatever happens, in the next few weeks, pundits have said that the outcome of the election would be determined by what happens in the so-called blue wall states of Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona. These are states that in recent times have alternated voting Democratic or Republican in presidential elections and they may do the same this time around. What usually determines which party they vote for may be such issues as right to abortion which seems to matter very much to American sub-urban women who rightly feel they should have control over their bodies and the government has no business in what they do in their private sexual lives.

    Another issue is the question of the economy, particularly inflation which is really a global problem but the average uninformed American thinks he is the only one suffering from inflation. The issue of jobs in the so-called rust belt of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin which have suffered from the loss of American jobs to Canada and Mexico and China where automobile manufacturing have moved to because of cheaper labour cost, is a serious issue that may tilt support to one particular party or the other depending on party programmes and promises. This issue is also linked with flood of immigrants coming into the United States and depressing wages and taking jobs from the working class.

    Furthermore, the issue of the place of women in a patriarchal society is an issue in this election. Many Americans still believe that the place of the women is in the kitchen and the bedroom and not as political bosses ordering men around. Even when they are told about Prime minister of India, Mrs Indira Ghandi (1966-1977 and again from 1980 to 1984 when she was assassinated), the German Chancellor Angela Merkel (2005 – 2021), prime ministers of Great Britain, Margaret Thatcher (1979 – 1990, Theresa May (2016-2019) and Liz Truss (2022), prime minister Mrs Srimavo Bandaranaike  in Sri Lanka  (1960 – 1994),  prime ministers Edith Cresson in France ( 1991-1992) and Elizabeth Borne (2022 – 2024 ) in France also )and nearby in Mexico where Mrs  Claudia Sheinbaum  has just been elected president in a predominantly conservative Catholic country,  they will simply dismiss it as other countries but not in God’s own country, the United States of America. Sometimes this feeling is reinforced by Pentecostal Christian beliefs about the subservient role of women as a helpmate for the man. Foreign policy takes the last place in decision making for the vast majority of the common man and women in America unless when Trump links foreign policy with the inflation in America and calls for an isolationist policy of “America first”,  forgetting the interdependence of nations in this complex world. 

    There is the issue of the Israeli war on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank of the River Jordan which has now spread to Lebanon and which may eventually spread to the Islamic Republic of Iran which will please the Israeli war-like Prime Minister Bilyaamin Netanyahu who has always wanted America to join him destroying Iran. If his policy matures before the election, it will have ramifying effect on the election one way or the other. If America does not join Israel in fighting Iran, the Democrats will lose the Jewish vote to Trump; if it joins Israel, it will antagonise the global Islamic community including the large one in Michigan which may lead to Kamala Harris losing Michigan and possibly the election. This will be welcome news to Netanyahu who can play Trump on his fingers.

    The election in the United States remains a toss-up between the Democratic and the Republican parties until the American people makes their sovereign decision but if the world were to have a say on who they want to win, it will be Kamala Harris, a well-informed daughter of two American professors, a micro-biologist mother and an economics professor father. Destiny seems to have beckoned to Kamala Harris who is on the cusp of an historical win for the White House.

  • Fixing admission to higher institutions wrong

    Fixing admission to higher institutions wrong

    Some months ago, without an act of parliament, the minister of education decreed that henceforth admission to higher institutions and to universities in particular henceforth will be for children 18 years and above. There was no reason given for this peremptory decision and it was not subject to debate or respect to the existing situation where each university decided the age limit of students to be admitted.

    In civilised democratic countries, this decision would have been debated and based on experience and logic, but in our case where those in authority usually arrogate all powers to themselves as if they were omniscient and all-knowing in every respect. Yet this ministry had in its files policy on exceptional and gifted children put in place when Professor Jibril Muhammad Aminu, an erudite and brilliant cardiologist and administrator held fort at the ministry of education. There was even an embryonic policy to create special schools for gifted children to facilitate their cerebral development and consequent contribution to the pool of knowledge which the country can tap into.

    As usual in Nigeria, we always try to reinvent the spinning wheel as if we were just beginning in our journey of development. We always have huge budget on construction of things like roads, railways, harbours, buildings, universities, hospitals just anything has to be started from the beginning. There is usually no stock-taking of what exists and how it can be fixed if it is not working. Politicians and apparently their civil servant advisers are not interested in repairs and reforms or refurbishment. This is because of the humongous amounts that would be allocated for new construction and what percentage would be available for sharing and this is what has gotten us to our parlous predicament.

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    I have good news for our minister of education and his advisers. As I write, a 16-year old Nigerian girl, Esther Okade born in 2006 to a mother who is a mathematician, Omanefe  Okade and Paul Okade has  just gotten a PhD in mathematics at the age of 16 in an English university. This prodigy of a child at three years old was solving quadratic equations at six. Esther passed ordinary level examination at age seven and Cambridge University offered her admission to their undergraduate program in mathematics. The parents demurred but enrolled her in distant learning college or the Open University. At that age of 10, she was the youngest university student in England and by 13, she graduated first class in financial mathematics and now at 16, the young girl has gotten a doctorate in mathematics.

    She is also an author, writing books in algebra for children with titles like “yummy yummy algebra” and with the support of her parents, she founded a school in Nigeria’s Delta State called the “Shakespeare Academy” where traditional subjects in the sciences, mathematics, English and liberal arts, ethics, etiquette and public speaking are taught to young children. Her story as an English commentator said has demonstrated that “genius is not age-specific; from solving quadratic mathematics as a toddler at age of three and bagging a PhD in financial mathematics at the age of 16, Esther has told the world that all things are possible if talents are encouraged and nurtured”.

    This is the story of a 16-year old girl in a liberal environment and not subjected to administrative and unreasonable diktat because of hidden political reasons designed to level everybody down rather than pulling everybody up.

    Is it not therefore strange to my readers that in a country where policies are made to cater for slow learning people rather than to extraordinary people, what you get is what we are getting in governance today where we don’t seem to know how to make use of God-given endowment to attain the level of development expected of us as species of Homo sapiens?

    There are brilliant and gifted children and adults everywhere in this country. Academic brilliance is not restricted to any region or ethnic or religious group as some people tend to feel. From my more than 55 years of being in university education I know this. I also know from personal history of my family and those whose paths crossed mine in the past. At the age of 16+ my late brother, Oluwakayode Osuntokun had passed out of Christ’s School Ado Ekiti with distinctions in all subjects but English where he got a credit score. For years to come, this remained the enviable record until George Fola Esan equalled the feat and their performances was shown to us younger people what was possible. The two gentlemen later in life became globally known physicians in Neurology and Haematology at very young g age.  Kayode got all the degrees available in medicine and the prizes in his field climaxing it with invitation to Royal Hammersmith College Hospital as first black visiting professor and subsequently examining in the Royal College of Medicine membership examination. The sterling performance of Osuntokun and Esan was replicated by Jibril Aminu’s performance in Barewa College, Zaria and later in life as a cardiologist. Omololu Olunloyo has done the same thing in Mathematics at a very young age and  graduated in his class as the best student in the entire Commonwealth. Animalu has performed the same feat in Engineering Mathematics in an American university. The country did not wait for slow runners to run at the same speed with these academic heroes.  Life is an individual race and we run at different paces because we are individual subjects in the hands of the grand author of life, the Almighty God. The Imafidon children in England are no less distinguished in their precocious performance as brilliant children. The Imafidon family is said to “be the brainiest family in the world”. It is a family of seven. The first children were twins, Peter and Paula achieving ordinary level qualifications at the age of nine and entering University of Cambridge, while their sister, Christine by the age of 14 had a Master’s degree in mathematics at Oxford University where she was retained as a lecturer. The other children have continued to distinguish themselves in sports and academics usually before expected age of maturity.  If these examples were in Nigeria, they would have been caught in the administrative web of government regulations.

    I am not disputing the fact that maturity and education go together but not necessarily in every case. This is why I am advocating that administrative regulations in the case under consideration have to be broad and flexible. I have no problems with having general policies for admission but it must be advisory in nature and not like a sword of Damocles hanging on everyone.

    If I were a legal professional, I would go to court but I don’t have money to hire a brilliant lawyer to argue the case of those of us who believe government should be an enabler in our lives not a hindrance or hurdles we need to scale over. I asked publicly that Femi Falana the peripatetic public defender should take my case up. I wonder that with all the enveloping problems besetting this government, restraining young people from going to universities at whatever age if they pass the entrance examination, should be the least worry of this government.

  • Asiwaju Tinubu: The Lagos factor in Nigerian politics

    Asiwaju Tinubu: The Lagos factor in Nigerian politics

    Any study of Nigerian politics without special attention paid to the political economy of Lagos within the Nigerian political complex will be missing the key role of Lagos metropolis in the history and politics of Nigeria. Just as in the past, Lagos for the foreseeable future remains a formidable factor in Nigerian economy and politics controlling about 60% of the economy of the country and its major entrepôt. Historically, Lagos was the entry point of Britain into Nigeria. When a naval squadron bombarded the city in 1851, ostensibly to stop the slave trade, the people of Lagos realised that the wider world was interested in what went on in Lagos. This naval promenade was repeated in 1861 and Lagos was permanently annexed to the British Empire and run sometimes from the Spanish Island of Fernando Po, (now Bioko) and later from the Gold Coast where the British had had an older settlement. By the middle of the 1860s, Lagos then had its own administration but still subordinated to the Gold Coast administration.  Up on till 1875, the British were not really sure of what to make of its West African colonies. The West African Coast was regarded as the “white man’s grave” because of the malaria fever which killed off the white man within weeks of mosquitoes bite. Even when quinine was used in the 1820s as prophylactic against malaria, its effectiveness was still debated but was widely used by black liberated slaves on the West African coast especially from the settlements of liberated slaves in Saint Louis, Dakar, Freetown and Monrovia. Eventually white men began to tolerate the inhospitable climate and what was considered unhealthy environment of the coast for white people.

    In the meantime, black people at least in the immediate hinterland of Lagos kept moving in droves to Lagos. Lagos had existed as a small fishing village established by the Awori people circa 1200AD. Over the years, they had witnessed Egba, Ijebu, Egun people coming to join them. The dramatic movement of some Edo warriors in the mid-15th century to the place did not quite change the demography of Lagos but its government which from then on was patterned after the monarchical institution of Benin which it too had inherited from Ile Ife. This was the settlement the British took over in 1861. The population of Lagos increased exponentially from the 1820s onwards from the considerable influx of liberated slaves from Brazil and Sierra Leone. These were Yoruba ex-slaves who knew the area of their birth. This population increased from 1876 onwards because of the century of warfare in Yorubaland which began with the Owu war in 1796 and was terminated by the British conquest of Ilorin in 1896.  The period of war in Yorubaland facilitated the exodus of people into Lagos.

    It is a surprising coincidence that just as warfare in Yorubaland intensified in 1876, the British a year before had stated through its Secretary of State for the Colonies, Joseph Chamberlain, the Tory businessman from Birmingham, that Britain was then determined to acquire tropical colonies as “undeveloped estate of the realm”. This meant a forward policy in West Africa and in the Yorubaland hinterland of Lagos.  By the time the British were effectively in the control of Nigeria  in the 1890s, Lagos population had grown from the original Awori settlement to what can be called a cosmopolitan city without losing its Yoruba essence with cultural contributions from the various people who had made the city their home particularly the Anglophone Creole  from Freetown and their counterparts, the Brazilians with their strong attachment to Catholicism while the  indigenous Muslim elements were concentrated in the centre of the city with accretions from  sizeable Nupe elements.

    Lagos has always been a province of opportunity and freedom not only for Nigerians but also for West Africans.

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    Lagos was also the city which saw the emergence of virile newspapers with healthy dose of anti-colonial sentiments. With the press grew the sentiment of freedom and demand that Africa should be ruled by Africans and not by imperialists whose civilization was found to be exotic and different from acceptable African culture. The so-called educated elite in Lagos did not abhor everything British; what they were opposed to was the discriminatory practice which elevated the pigmentation of the skin over the character of the person. It is remarkable to note how advanced the political sociology of the Lagos elite was when compared with modern views of a racially neutral world. When the early Lagos nationalists like Drs J.K Randle and Obasa and Herbert Macaulay organised the very first political movements in Nigeria, they concentrated on the amelioration of social and political situation of the people of Lagos with the intention that a secure Lagos will be an attractive beacon to the rest of Nigeria. They have largely been proved right because over the years, Lagos has nurtured the political destinies of people like Herbert Macaulay, Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, and now Asiwaju Ahmed Tinubu. Other politicians have bestrode the Lagos firmament but on lesser scale than those of these three. It is remarkable that the three of them can trace their ancestry to places outside Lagos. Lagos has been a welcoming city and anybody who is prepared to work hard and struggle can make it in business and politics in Lagos. It is true that Lagos belongs to Lagosians. Lagos has never been a no man’s land. It was never a terra incognita. It was always an abode of people. People have always migrated to Lagos and have been absorbed by the people and their culture. People who come to Lagos and want to be Lagosians must embrace the people and their culture. This was what Yoruba speaking Herbert Macaulay from Sierra Leone and Nnamdi Azikiwe from Onitsha and what several Lagosians from diverse ancestry have done. Those who say Tinubu is not a Lagosian and that Alhaji Lateef Jakande was not a Lagosian do not know the history of modern Lagos. There are also those who say Atiku Abubakar is a Cameroonian and that the Baba Ahmeds are from Mauritania. Such people forget that we are all ancestrally from somewhere from where we are today.  Besides, migration is a common factor in African history and that is why many of our northern Nigerians became Nigerians.

    My ancestors came from Ajase Ipo  in present day Kwara and I am very proud of it. This does not mean I am not an Ekiti, a place where my great grandfather, Dada “Agbo dumogun bere uja, taku taku a bija pe” fought for and was ready to die for. Unfortunately the assimilationist tendencies now seem frozen because of electoral democracy where every vote counts.

    These preambular statements are designed to establish the point I want to make that is, we are from where we have fought and were ready to die for. I don’t know anybody who is more Lagosian than Asiwaju Bola Tinubu. Tinubu withstood the federal political hurricane unleashed on Lagos during the Olusegun Obasanjo presidency and used the period of adversity to look inwards and develop Lagos into the fifth largest economy in Africa.  He was prepared to die in the process for his belief. He definitely has paid his due.

    Now to the kernel of my piece. People have said Tinubu is not physically fit and the man said appropriately that the presidency is not a boxing arena. Buhari despite his health challenge held fort there for eight years. Although Asiwaju does not intend to follow the Buhari trajectory because he has better business and economic ideas far superior to that of Buhari. He has also proved beyond debate that he is an organiser of men and material to achieve designed targets. He proved this in Lagos and his successors have followed the same trajectory.  While governor of Lagos, he built a formidable civil service and teaching service open to all residents of Lagos marrying in good proportion the interests of “Omo Eko” and “Ara Eko”. Tinubu would never ignore the interests of Lagos indigenes and subordinate them to those of residents who have claims in other states apart from Lagos but at the same time, he believes in careers open to talents and would use the talents of outsiders to develop his favourite Lagos and now his country Nigeria. Tinubu’s reach globally is very long and wide.  I remember when he developed his policy of land use, he tapped the knowledge of Canadians and I can testify to this verity because I was then the chairman of Nigerian-Canada Chamber of Commerce.  As long as we continue to embrace the capitalist model of development, Tinubu has the golden touch to deliver even if he is not as robust as when he was much younger. Tinubu is now president of Nigeria and he has a wider canvass on which to paint and he still possesses the organising ability to assemble a winning team and perhaps he is one of the few people who can turn the economy around. But in doing this he needs the understanding of the people and their support, tolerance and the readiness to do whatever it takes and suffer the pain to see the country through the economic doldrums to which his predecessors have driven Nigeria into.

    For those who know a little bit of history, the most successful president of America in modern times was Fredrick Delano Roosevelt who engineered from his wheelchair the most radical social and political transformation of that country.

  • Deplorable state of some schools in Oyo State

    Deplorable state of some schools in Oyo State

    Some years ago while I was still teaching at the Redeemer’s University, Ede, I decided to bring some final year students to the city of Ibadan to see some landmarks in the city as part of the students’ course in nation-building. We began our visit to the vast city of Ibadan, the biggest city in tropical Africa or perhaps the biggest city in Africa in terms of its spread. The city of Ibadan, because of its history and size has problems that are peculiar to it. The city is a combination of modernity and underdevelopment; it is both city and village in some layout, and it is both conservative and liberal at the same time and it is the favourite of many people.

    One can have both city life and village life depending on which part of the city one lives in. Many of us consider the city home but we all know the limitations imposed on residents by the history of the city at least in contemporary political times. Ibadan was founded by immigrants coming from several Yoruba kingdoms but predominantly from Oyo. In the history of Ibadan, the military caste or people with military prowess have largely given the city its character.

    Despite its cosmopolitan beginnings, the city today does not permit new arrivals the same assimilation into its citizenship as before. This is why it will be difficult for residents who can even trace the arrival of their parents in the city over a hundred years to be elected into any posts in the city. It seems the old Ibadan melting point tendencies ended centuries ago. Ibadan is not alone in this tendency; it seems most Nigerian cities are like that today. It will be interesting for sociologists to investigate why Nigerian cities do not manifest the renewal tendencies and assimilation process manifested in many cities in other parts of the world.  I hope my readers will permit this meandering preamble!

    Back to the issue under discussion. I took my students to Mapo Hall which was the seat of the local government in times past , some kind of “hotel de ville”  if one can borrow from the history of  Paris  in France. There must have been some events at that time when we visited Ibadan precisely in 2015. The situation at Mapo Hall surrounding was noisy and rowdy and it seemed as if some local tough guys were showing who was in charge in the place. We saw some guys being hailed and heralded by followers and “Dundun” “Gangan” and “Bata” drummers and from what I could see there was some show off of power. My “ajebota” students were confused and not prepared for what we saw and I quickly took them out of the place after telling them a bit of the history of the place in colonial and modern Nigeria.  Mapo Hall is now the rallying point for political gathering, mobilisation and demonstration in Ibadan.

    After Mapo Hall, we visited Saint Anne’s School, the oldest girls’ secondary school in Nigeria. We were welcomed by the principal who gave a short history of the school to the students and I asked one of my students to respond and to tell the senior students of the secondary school why they should choose our university as their first choice of universities they wish to attend.  Saint Anne’s showed what impact a virile old students association can do for the maintenance of their old school. Like Christs school Ado Ekiti, Saint Anne’s is a good example of a school remaining a pride to both old and new students. We then drove to Ibadan Grammar School, one of my Alma mater because I went to Christ School Ado Ekiti first before going to higher school in Ibadan Grammar School which was one of the access routes to universities in Nigeria in the 1960s.

    I must say going to Ibadan Grammar School was with trepidation because I didn’t know the state of the school. The road to the school was virtually unpaved and a bridge over a small stream on the road seemed as if it might fall any time soon.  It seemed to be a bridge too far to put it in military terms of the Second World War! We eventually got to the school and believe me, I could not recognise any place there. Not even the assembly hall/chapel, the classrooms where I studied for two years, nor the windowless adjunct hall which I shared with 10 other boys as dormitory. The entire place looked so totally unkempt and abandoned and grown with wild grass. This was a school founded by Bishop Akinyele and the Anglican community in Ibadan in 1913 and where Archdeacon Emmanuel Alayande, the Bishop’s son-in-law, was principal for many years.

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    My students were eager to find out if Ibadan Grammar School was my old school. I couldn’t deny it and I had no explanation why the school of great men like the late Chief Bola Ige, Chief Bayo Akinnola, Professor Akin Mabogunje and many other people of blessed memory and those of us on this side of the heavenly divide went to remained in the dilapidated form we found it. The entire place lacked neither order nor rhythm nor reason. This school used to be a boarding school during my time. Sir Francis Ibiam, the governor of Eastern Nigeria sent his only son to the school and Sir Adesoji Aderemi, the governor of Western Nigeria had about three sons there. Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s son was there and the children of many distinguished men and women in the country were there. Our teachers came from all over the world, principally from England, India, and America and of course Nigeria. It was the school to go if one was not accepted in the strictly selective Government College Ibadan.

    Recently, just a week ago, I went back to the school out of curiosity and I was shocked to my bone marrow that to put it mildly, God seems to have departed from Israel. The situation was worse than what it was in 2015. My driver asked me why I was crying. I had to tell him that on seeing the bust of Baba Alayande in front of one of the rundown buildings, I just couldn’t restrain myself. I became very emotional about the total deprivation, despair and destruction of a great institution.

    Why is it that Nigerians don’t maintain anything and have a sense of history? Why must we begin building from the scratch?  This is our national affliction also. We seem to reinvent the wheel every time whether it is the case of roads, railways, industries, universities, hospitals, you name them: our governments are always building and commissioning new things while abandoning the old ones to disrepair. There are no simple toilets in our schools and universities! Yet we expect that the students going through the portals of these institutions will be ladies and gentlemen! Not a fat chance! It will not happen. Perhaps we need to resolve as a country that this will not happen again at all levels of government.

    During my historical provenance to Ibadan, I took my students to the Government College Ibadan, the pride of Ibadan and Nigeria in the past and I discovered that what I saw in Ibadan Grammar School was a microcosm of a general malady in Oyo State. There was no shred of what used to be a great school before now and yet this was the school that produced Wole Soyinka, Professor Dipo Akinkugbe, Dr Omololu Olunloyo, Chief Adegoke Adelabu and my own brother Abiodun Osuntokun. I did not bother to go to the Methodist Teachers College where Awolowo schooled. The situation would definitely have been the same. I remember Professor Jibril Aminu suggesting to the government of General Obasanjo that the federal government should take over the historic government colleges of Ibadan, Umuahia, Barewa and Kings College, Lagos for special development and preservation as educational monuments for future generation. I wonder what would have happened if his suggestion had been accepted. Will the old daemon of lack of maintenance culture not have reared its ugly head?

    Unless we realise that we as a country have a national problem of lack of maintenance culture, all the monies of this world would not suffice for our national development.

    My appeal to the Oyo State governor and all other governors of all the states of this federation is that they go round in cognito visiting all schools in their domains particularly the historic schools and find out what is going on there. Right in Mokola in Ibadan, the roofs of primary schools have been blown off with no sign of anybody responsible for repairs. I know some old students abroad are collecting money for repairs of some of these schools and incredibly as it may sound, state governments are asking for money so collected to be routed through them for repairs. There ought to be a special committee for schools repair and redesign and redevelopment with annual budgets. Students should be made to pay for school repairs and maintenance. I asked whether students do not routinely maintain their lawns again? All encroachment on schools grounds should be pulled down and roads to these schools should be upgraded and maintained. We should all know that our children are our future and if we don’t take care of them, they will all grow up to kill us and our children who are attending well maintained private primary and secondary schools while the children of the poor are in these wild environments where we have herded them as if they are animals .

  • Growing old: Personal testimony

    Growing old: Personal testimony

    General Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970) was reported to have said old age is like a plague which affects everyone. The meaning of this statement is clear because whether one likes it or not, and if one is lucky to reach old age since only eight percent of the world’s population reaches that age bracket, one is bound to go through several experiences before the curtains are drawn.

    I was in France collecting data for my PhD when General de Gaulle made this statement around 1968 when he was already 78 and had been holding leadership positions of the French people since becoming leader of “Free France” from 1944 to 1946 and had been president of France for many years from 1958 to 1969. He witnessed the radical students uprising of Daniel Cohn- Bendit and Rudi Dutschke in 1968 and he could not really understand why anybody would resist his regime. He tabled a reform programme and asked for its confirmation in a referendum, threatening that if his program was not approved he would resign. The French people just got tired of him and rejected his program of reform and he simply resigned and literally went home to die in his village of Colombey Le deux Eglises. He was apparently battling with some illnesses before the referendum.

    General Charles de Gaulle made many statements that are not easily forgotten. I was in Canada as a graduate student when in 1967 he visited Montreal in the French-speaking province of Quebec in Canada and emotionally said “Vive le Quebec libre” which was the language of French Canadian secessionists. This thoroughly embarrassed him, France and Canada. When he was asked if he understood English, he said he understood enough to understand Mr Winston Churchill’s poor French!

    One thing that no one can forget about him was his Gallic pride and arrogance which made him almost feel he was France. But his comment on old age is so cryptic that one cannot easily forget and these days as an old man I always recall it.

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    It was not until I turned 80 that I really began to feel the years God had granted me in my journey of life. Apart from one half-sister of mine who was over 80 before she passed on to the great beyond, I am the longest living person in my family. Both my grandparents and my mother lived over a hundred years but my father died when he was 60 and I was nine then and it was the grace of God and that of my brother, Chief Oduola Osuntokun that saw me through primary and secondary schools.  All my highly distinguished brothers died before they reached 70 years and I did not expect to live long on the account of my siblings’ short lives.

    I went to the University of Ibadan on scholarship and to graduate school first on University of Ibadan scholarship and when I got the Canadian Walton Killam Trust Memorial Graduate Students Award, I relieved the University of Ibadan the burden of paying for my PhD degree. I have had a very successful academic life which took me to teaching at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada as an assistant professor from 1970 to 1971, lecturer in the University of the West Indies 1971 to 1972. I came back home  in 1972 and  the University of Ibadan, my Alma Mater sent me along with other young people to Jos to establish what was then known as the University of Ibadan Jos Campus. Needless to say I thoroughly enjoyed the place because it gave me and others, opportunity to know our country and to shape the destiny of our younger compatriots.

    Unfortunately on a personal note, my  young wife  lost two pregnancies  in Jos due to inadequate health facilities which forced me to leave Jos for the University of Lagos in 1974 and where I retired from  in 2005. I however went for some public service in the National Universities Commission 1978-1982, University of Maiduguri 1982 to 1984, Ministry of Foreign Affairs 1988-1991, ambassador to Germany 1991 to 1995. After retirement, I helped my church with the establishment and running of the Redeemer’s University Ede from 2005 to 2016. I also served my state as Pro-chancellor and chairman of the governing Council of Ekiti State University from 2011to 2014 and finally retired from active service in 2016 because of old age and since then I have been in what the English would call “splendid isolation”.

    I don’t want to start saying I have been here and there which is not the point of this piece. Perhaps I should say the most important thing in my life since my wife joined the Saints triumphant in 2003, is that by the grace of God, Pastor Enoch Adeboye, General Overseer of the Redeemed Christian Church of God ordained me, first as a Deacon, and later as an Elder in the church and I am committed to doing all that lies in my power towards the advancement of the church and the gospel of Jesus the Christ.

    My experience as an old man is varied. Some establishment like GTB, one of the best banks in Nigeria gives elderly people the privilege of being first served before others when we go there for banking transactions and I must say I find this very satisfying. This was particularly the case during the Godwin Emefiele-induced change of currency and disappearance of money during the exercise. Nigerians easily forget things. What we went through under Emefiele was simply unforgivable. Old age in Nigeria, unlike abroad generally speaking, does not confer advantage on the elderly. In the UK and at least in some parts of the USA, once you are a citizen over 65, one is exempt from paying for public transport.

    In our culture the elderly are respected as repositories of wisdom. But it is not uncommon to see old people derided nowadays as those who caused the problems confronting Nigeria which young ones are now facing. They may be right but even the youngsters are more corrupt and smarter in it than their fathers that some of us are just overwhelmed when we see what young people do nowadays. With the exception of a few states where you can still find old people running the show, most of those in power at the national and sub national levels are under 65.

    Let me go to the physical degeneration aspect of being old, with my situation as an example.  When my son was nine in the 1970s, I always gave him a physical advantage by asking him to stay in front me for a distance of about twelve or so yards when running just to encourage him. But suddenly when he was nine and I was 40 plus, he told me if I want to run with him, we should start together. Of course when we started together, he always left me behind. I dare not try this with my son’s son in football or any race. I tried to engage Finn, one of my grandsons in long tennis march and was surprised when the young man diplomatically asked us to go home because I simply couldn’t get the ball over the net in several of my service games!

    There was a time we went for bicycle ride in Atlanta and to my chagrin, I found riding a bicycle extremely difficult and I had to ask my son and his family not to wait for me because I wasn’t fit enough. The last experience I had with one of my daughters’ family was when they took me for a canoe expedition on river called “Beautiful” an estuary of Lake Ontario. We had to paddle the canoe over a distance of eight kilometres. I was in a separate boat with my son in-law while my daughter and her daughter were in another canoe and my grandson had a separate boat where he was sole sailor. It took hours for us to reach our destination. Despite the fact that my son-in-law did most of the donkey job of paddling our boat, I was so exhausted that I couldn’t get out of the canoe unassisted when we reached our destination. I slept for about 10 hours that night because of the exhaustion.

    These days, the most rigorous exercise I am comfortable with is walking. I used to swim as a young man but I hardly do it with pleasure now.

    Loneliness can sometimes be good for our souls. This gives me time to ruminate about events in my country and to be obsessive about finding solutions even when nobody asks for my views and opinions. If the infrastructure were good, this is the time for people like me to sit down or up to write their memoirs and share their ideas for the future with men in power today and those who would come later.

    Finally apart from the cost of travelling, I am now no longer interested in travelling. It is a hazard going through the airports and immigration desks in foreign countries and queuing up for visa interviews in embassies and the tedium of hours in flight. Sleeping on strange beds in hotels and even in my children’s homes is not the best for me at this stage of my life. Reconciliation of one’s desire with one’s strength is the greatest challenge I feel as I grow older day by day and I have to sustain myself with medications which thank God I can afford but which the general Nigerian population can hardly afford.