The Nation Newspaper

Category: Thursday

Our political leaders have spoken

By Jide Oluwajuyitan

These are not the best of times for all Nigerian politicians especially with the creeping anarchy in the Southeast where separatist non-state actors have restricted elected governors to their state houses while they set fire on government symbols of power, releasing prisoners, indiscriminately killing members of security forces and even visiting guests; and Southwest, where Sunday Adeyemo, alias Sunday Igboho, and Gani Adams, the leader of banned militant Oodua group are exploiting southwest governors’ failure to stop herdsmen’s mindless killing of people in their homes, forest and farms to proclaim themselves leaders of pan-Oduduwa Republic separatist movement. The duo are today so popular among frustrated victims of herdsmen marauders that the former, a self-styled Yoruba activist and pan-Oduduwa Republic agitator, has threatened to eliminate politicians of Yoruba extraction who solicit for the support of Southwest sons and daughters during the 2023 general election. As for the latter, while Pa Banji Akintoye who provides intellectual support for the Yoruba quest for self-actualisation was prepared to pursue the Yoruba case through ‘the right to self-determination’ provision in the UN Charter, to which Nigeria is a signatory, he believes destiny has positioned him as the one to lead the Yoruba separatist battle by virtue of his traditional title of Are Ona Kankanfo that he has started complaining of infiltration of some prominent politicians in the Southwest.. “So for those who have been infiltrating the struggle, I will curse them for seven days and if they fail to heed the warnings, I think they would have themselves to blame”; he recently declared.

The president, the foremost politician in the country is conspicuously missing while his aides seem to be engaged in what late Gbolabo Ogunsanwo would have described as ‘crooked syllogism’- extending human rights provision in section 41 of our constitution to cattle so that they can freely ravage farmers farms unchallenged.

As for our representatives in Abuja, who for fear of bandits dare not visit their constituencies, they are busy playing the ostrich, moving around our major cities protected by the police, doing the same thing they have done for 22 years- pretending to amend a defective superstructure with a defective foundation and expecting a different result.

The nightmare of being a Nigerian politician today goes beyond their inability to meet the challenges of the moment. Their let-downs are daily brought to the consciousness of Nigerians through newspaper howling depressing headlines such as – Bandits kidnap 200 students of Islamiyya school in Niger; “We paid N180m to free our children-after 38 days in captivity-parents”; “MDAs failed to remit N20.6b to Consolidated Revenue Fund”; “Former Minister Diezani Madueikes’ $40m (N14b) seized jewellery, gold iPhone, to be auctioned”; Ebonyi herdsmen killings rise to 52″, “Niger bandits kill 16”; ACF Chairman, Chief Audu Ogbe, issued a travel advisory to northerners planning to visit the South-East” and “We close shops when Hausa youths were brandishing cutlasses”.

Unfortunately, that a great many Nigerian politicians are ‘unscrupulous, venal, cheats’, that for some of them, sincerity is naiveté; candour, artlessness and dishonesty and improbity, real-politick, does not mean we can do without them. We also know that those among them who genuinely set out to serve sometimes have to contend with party intrigues and ambition of party and non-party members and self-interest of pressure groups as against public interest.

As political animals, we need politicians. We owe our continuous survival as an organized society to their flexibility and adaptability to new realities, skilful manoeuvring of very often heavily-mined political field, their ability to easily exploit our innermost fears and their easy reconciliation of private affluence with public squalor.

Of course one understands the righteous indignation of many Yoruba youths who identified with Sunday Igboho and Gani Adams. But being no politicians, they cannot give what they don’t have. They cannot serve as Yoruba pathfinders.

We survived the conspiracy of the Hausa-Fulani and Igbo political elite between 1962 and 1966 because of our politicians including Awo who was unjustly jailed. He saw his travails as a sacrifice for his people. We did not also go to war over MKO Abiola’s annulled electoral victory because of our political leaders including Abiola who spoke of sacrifice during a television programme in the run up to the election by saying “in Yoruba land, when you are called upon to carry a calabash of sacrifice as restitution to the river, you may end up being washed away by the river along with the sacrifice you carry.”

The Yoruba similarly had an answer to the marginalisation by President Jonathan that they helped into office. Secession can therefore not be the answer to the mismanagement of our crisis of nation-building by President Buhari who has only two years left in office. What we were taught was that “bi owo eni o ba te iku ida, a ki bere iku ti o pa baba eni”. (You must carry out strategic studies and weigh the consequences of your action). Those counting on Igbo support if war breaks out have forgotten Ojukwu admitted declaring secession with only 16 rifles. Decision making is important aspect of Yoruba culture.

I am sure the Are Onakankanfo and those beating the drum of war on social media or from far away London are aware of the case of Àsá, a small town in Yewaland of Ogun State invaded by those described as Fulani bandits some weeks back. They reportedly gunned down or slaughtered those who could not escape after which they set fire on their houses. Those who escaped are now refugees in the neighbouring town, of Egelu in Benin Republic.

It must also be said that Garba Sheu and Malami’s unrestrained statements cannot be said to be a proper reflection of northern elders who have since insisted open grazing is no more feasible in Nigeria and Ganduje of Kano who as Fulani not only identified with the same views but has offered to rehabilitate all Fulani herders that desire to practice ranching in Kano.

Minus bad politicians which cut across the country, and military adventurers including Obasanjo, Buhari, Babangida and Abacha, Nigeria, our country is a beautiful country.

‘’Secession’, as Dr Olajide of Yoruba Elders Forum has observed “is (Igboho’s) personal desire which the present circumstances in our nation do not favour and will not make it achievable, and the fact that Yoruba have invested so much in the unity of this country and the making of Nigeria. The tribe cannot choose to opt-out without any adequate plans”.

Even Prof. Banji Akintoye in spite of crusade for Yoruba self-actualisation has never foreclosed it could happen within the greater Nigerian nation. Thus he has continued to say “This is our country. We have to pay attention to what is happening to it”. It is not a good thing to allow it to break up…It will break up if we don’t do something in a hurry”.

It is as well therefore that Bola Tinubu, the current Yoruba political leader along with Pa Bisi Akande, Segun Osoba and Southwest APC elected governors and General Alani Akinrinade came out last Sunday to call everyone to order. Leadership is responsibility. Our political leaders have spoken.

June 3, 2021
Who killed Gulak?

By Lawal Ogienagbon

That is an academic question, some may be tempted to say of the title of this piece, citing the police position on the Ahmed Gulak case. As far as the police are concerned, it is an open and close case. Their position is informed by their strong belief that they have found and killed the ‘killers’ of Ahmed Gulak. Na do he dey easy? People are wondering on social media.

They contend that if Gulak could be killed in the morning and his ‘killers’ found and killed a few hours later, why have the police not cracked the murder cases of Dele Giwa (1986), Bola Ige (2001), Marshal Harry (2003) and Funsho Williams (2006), among others, many years after they were killed? What gives the police the confidence that they actually killed Gulak’s ‘killers’? The story will be told as much as possible in the words of the police.

It all started in the early hours of May 30 when Gulak, a former aide to President Goodluck Jonathan, and erstwhile Adamawa State House of Assembly speaker, left his hotel in Owerri, the Imo State capital, to catch an early morning flight at the Sam Mbakwe Airport. He never got there. A few metres to the airport, his cab was waylaid by armed men, who shot him dead in cold blood. The two other persons with him and the Toyota Camry cab driver were spared.

After killing Gulak, the assailants drove off in their Toyota Sienna vehicle. What happened next is only known by those who witnessed the dastardly act and these are the other passengers and the driver. For now, the other passengers and the driver are only known to the police. This is understandable. Also, the police have not said anything about quizzing the other passengers and the information they got from them. The police have only volunteered information about the tips given to them by the driver that led to the tracking and killing of the hoodlums.

Ordinarily, we should be clapping for the police and saying bravo to them for their swiftness, but something is just not right somewhere. The police story does not add up. Did the driver tell them the truth or he just made up the story to save his own skin? Did the police verify his statement from the two others who were also in the cab when the incident happened? From all indication, the police did not have time for such nicety as they were in a hurry to get the assailants before they escaped.

Information from the other passengers too would have been of tremendous help in unmasking the killers, if only the police were not in haste to get just anybody to hang the killing of Gulak on. I am not saying that those the police killed committed or did not commit the act, all I am saying is was there concrete proof of their role in Gulak’s killing before they met their own death? The police may want to justify their action by saying that they acted in self defence. Their two statements, which are accounts of the last moments of Gulak before and after his death, were well crafted to absolve them of blame whenever, as they say, the shit hit the roof.

In the first statement, the police said the hoodlums operating in a Sienna ‘intercepted, identified and shot Gulak’ at a spot close to the airport. This, the police added, was based on what the driver told them. What this implies is that the hoodlums were on a mission to kill Gulak. By that statement, the police ruled out any other motive for the dastardly act. Should the police arrive at such conclusion without first investigating the case? Again, they said he left his hotel without informing the police or sister agencies in view of the fragile security in the Southeast and Imo State, in particular.

Is that the new norm? That citizens, whether high or low, must now inform the police about their movement for security reasons? Or, is this arrangement just for the high and mighy? If it is, does it not conflict with the Acting Inspector-General Usman Baba’s directive, withdrawing the police escorts of important personalities? To get the hoodlums, a combined team of operatives of the tactical unit, intelligence response team, and Police Mobile Force were quickly mobilised to the crime scene. Taking the direction given to them by the driver, they soon ran into the hoodlums where they were sharing onions allegedly seized from a truck coming from the north, to a crowd of people.

You can smell a hint of ethnicism in that line – a truckload of onions from the North seized in the Southeast – and that was coming from the police, which should know the implication of such statement. As if that was not enough, the police team now unleashed their firepower on the hoodlums who allegedly fired the first salvo on sighting them. Of course, the police are not expected to confront hoodlums with biscuits in their holsters in the course of enforcing the law. But the shooting to death of a suspect should be the last resort.

They can shoot to demobilise a suspect and prevent him from escaping in order to obtain information that will aid their investigation. Once a suspect is killed, that is the end because investigation may be stalled. I hope this will not be the case in Gulak’s murder. Did the slain hoodlums kill Gulak? Were they sent? Who sent them? Or, were they bandits? We may never know as they are no longer alive to say all they know about the incident.

Well, may be the driver, who appears to be the police prime witness, and the other passengers can be of help in this regard.

If not, the police are to blame for acting too hastily. Little wonder Governor Hope Uzodinma described the killing as political assassination, apparently based on the police findings. This is the seed the police has sown in his and many others minds. For Gulak not to die in vain, his killers must be brought to justice. The killing of his supposed killers in an encounter has only left the police wide open to suspicion of having something to hide.

Whereas, this may not be the case. It is left for the police to prove that.

June 3, 2021
Twilight and dawn of Nigeria

By Jide Osuntokun

I wonder how it is for Nigerians who don’t read and are not aware of the woes and tragedies in different parts of the country overrun by kidnappers, murderers, bandits and terrorists and who are deaf and cannot hear the news and cannot be told about what’s going on but who can see with their eyes people running in different directions. Will such handicapped persons not know war has broken out?

I am told that there is an Igbo proverb that says you don’t have to tell a dumb and deaf man that war has broken out because he will see it with his own eyes when people start running helter-skelter. No day passes in Nigeria without news of some gruesome murders committed by either so called bandits, kidnappers, terrorists and herders. Some government’s spokesmen have even tried to define these groups and Sheikh Abubakar Gumi who seems to know more about these people have told us the differences between them. We are told the bandits are just unemployed, hungry and angry young men who can be redeemed if government can find something for them to do or to eat. Some even unfairly compare them with militants in the Niger Delta protesting about poverty in the midst of wealth. Some even suggest sending them abroad to be trained as artisans!

I think the same Sheikh said the terrorists like Boko Haram and their affiliates are irredeemable and have to be confronted and in Nigerian army parlance “neutralized”. The herders are of two types. There are the local ones and the foreign ones from Mali, Niger and Chad. We are told the foreign ones are very dangerous and cannot be easily placated. The local ones are our own Fulani who in medical terms are benign but how to separate the wheat from the chaff is a problem. In Nigeria, the term Fulani is carelessly used to depict anyone carrying a stick and now an AK-47 and following herds of cattle. The real Fulani must either be laughing or furious about how their ethnic group is being used to describe just any cowhand in Nigeria. The herders have also become the kidnappers either when they have sold their cattle or rustlers have stolen their cattle they then try to recoup their losses by kidnapping people and asking for ransom. These local herders are not the owners of the cattle they follow from Maiduguri, Yola, Sokoto or Kano to the south. They are hired by the owners of the cattle who have agents to sell the cattle and repatriate the money to the maigida up north. These herders are from the underclass who merely survives on the measly and poor remuneration they make after their arduous journeys of over a thousand kilometres. When they see how much money they can make from successful kidnapping, they become addicted to the business and overtime their masters may find it difficult to find herders unless they go outside the country which of course they can easily do and recruit new herders from the millions of jobless and aimless young men in our neighbouring countries.

People have always asked why the poor animals are not ferried in trucks to their slaughter. Some are but the ones who need to be fattened along the route from the labour of equally suffering poor farmers are the ones who do the long trek accompanied by the poor herdsmen who may later become kidnappers. These kidnappers, I must say, are then joined by local criminals who want a piece of the action and who also want their share of the blood money. Because of arduous work they do some of these herders are addicted to hallucinogenic drugs. This is why they kill without any sentiment or emotions. Some of the so-called Fulani, especially the bororo are pagans and not Muslims so appealing to them in the name of Allah would fall on deaf ears. This is the only way one can see understand what happened in the case of the Greenfield University episode in Kaduna. The kidnappers demanded for N800 million to release the victims and when they felt they were not being taken seriously they slaughtered five of the young boys and girls and threw their bodies near the university where they were seen by passers-by. Eventually after 40 days of total absence of government, the parents recovered the remaining children after selling their homes and other properties to pay a ransom of N180 million as claimed by the parents. While the drama was going on, Sheikh Abubakar Gumi pleaded with the Kaduna and federal governments to pay the kidnappers N100 million and he suggested they would take the money even though vastly less than N800 million they demanded and that they would have freed the students.

I can understand Governor Nasir El- Rufai saying paying ransom would encourage the spate of kidnapping and because he had burnt his fingers before when he paid some terrorists to leave his state alone, they apparently took the money and continued in their terrorists attack on the farmers.

The Kaduna story can be replicated in several parts of Nigeria. It is even more serious in Zamfara, Benue, Plateau and Taraba states. The full scale war in the Northeast particularly in Borno, Yobe, Gombe and Adamawa are better known because of the deadly onslaught of Boko Haram and the forces of ISIS in the West African Province (ISWAP). People are afraid to travel by road anymore. Even Abuja to Kaduna, one of the most strategic roads in the country is now a no-go area. Even military convoys are shying away from it and officers now either fly or go by train on the relatively short distance which in good times would have been a pleasurable trip to see the countryside.

Initially the incendiary rebellion, because that is what it looked like, was restricted to the North but now it has metastasized to cover the whole country. The Niger Delta which seems to have seen some respite has again joined in the orgy of violence of their own or in resistance to herders’ onslaught on their area.

The Southeast is completely different case rooted in the deep and underlying feelings of marginalization by the Buhari regime with regards to appointments particularly security appointments. The old shadow of the Biafran war of the 1960s seems to hang dangerously in the Southeast. The herders’ invasions and killings in the southwest and rampant kidnappings and the destabilization of the economic activities of the place because of the fear of intercity travel have upset a critical mass of the people.

All these problems have been compounded by the economic effect and the uncertainty caused by the coronavirus pandemic. We are even very lucky for its less than severe mortality and morbidity in our country. I shudder to think of what would have happened to Nigeria if we were to suffer from the kind of the experience of India. With our primitive medical infrastructure, no one would be left standing! As I write not up to one per cent of Nigerians have gotten one or two shots of the coronavirus vaccines. Unless a miracle happens we will be sitting ducks when the serious wave of this terrible pandemic breaks out here

While we are faced with this twilight in our country, it does not seem the powers-that-be understand the existential nature of the problems. We are at the precipice and a little push may plunge the country into chaos if not war of all against all. If this happens, the war front may not be easily identified because while some may want to fight an ethnic war; others may fight a war of spoils and while others may want a war of the poor against the not too poor. In essence, we stand to lose the little we have achieved in the 20th and the two decades of the 21st centuries. Weapons merchants would be too glad to ply their trade here and the racist white world would enjoy blacks slaughtering blacks. One white politician cynically suggested that Africa would have been the best continent if not for the blacks. In other words, remove the blacks and Africa would be perfect for white colonization. Instead of facing the fundamental issues of our existence, we spend all our time on disputes over cows. We fight where they should forage, and where they should drink water. The rest of the world is even moving away from eating beef. Ireland is reducing the population of its cows by 50 per cent because cows emit too much methane which is causing global warming. It is common knowledge that beef is not good for our health.

Soon we will find out that the world is moving away from hydrocarbon dependency. Then, where will we find money to sustain our deep state of huge bureaucracy and a myriad of ministries, agencies and other paraphernalia of state that add nothing to the welfare of our people? If all this does not constitute the twilight of a country that used to lead Africa but now finds its voice muffled and is hardly consulted in decent international circles, then what does?

But after twilight comes a glorious dawn. If our leaders listen to wise counsel and to the cries of the suffering humanity in Nigeria, we may yet turn from the precipice and walk our way back chastened by the experience of this period, do an analysis of what is wrong with the present structure of our country and try to make amends. If we don’t do this then the answer is blowing in the wind!

June 3, 2021
The boychild and the crystal cabinet
By Olatunji Ololade

From infancy through adulthood, the Nigerian boychild needs saving but he is repeatedly ignored. Childhood was his crystal cabinet, the window into his carefree beginning when he dwelt in the body without ambivalence or fear. But puberty ends his trusting view of nature, triggering the ritual riddance of his innocence. And so begins his passage into savagery and containment.

Fate, dancing like a maiden, entices him by its pirouettes; trapping him like a bird, she keeps him in her museum of mortal specimens. She is Omphale with her male domestics or Iwapele seducing Akara Ogun with her garland of goodies and the forbidden room. But unlike Akara Ogun, puberty ushers the boychild into her forbidden chamber too early. He wouldn’t abstain until her demise. Consequently, he suffers the blistering baptism of burning truth.

Growing up is never easy. Puberty is his savage space thus this minute, he is the minor suffering sexual assault from paedophile parents, teachers, and guardians.

He is the 11-year-old victim of Abigail Okwe, a 37-year-old single mother of one, who started raping him since he clocked eight. He is the journalist and media consultant, who suffered serial rape from his 34-year-old maternal aunt from age 10 through 12. “Looking back now, I realised she was abusing me. I couldn’t tell anyone. She told me I was very lucky to be enjoying her,” said the Abuja-based father of four.

He is the two-year-old victim of Mohammed Ibrahim, a 67-year-old father of four, who sodomised him to fulfill an urge. He is the nine-year-old victim of Nonso Onyeje, 42, who subjected him to anal rape on the altar of God Delight City Church, in Achali Ibusa, Delta State.

He is 16-year-old Anthony, a sexual assault victim of Jesus Intervention Household Ministry’s General Overseer (GO), Reverend Ezuma Chizemdere, who reportedly raped him and 14 other teenage boys until he (Anthony) tested positive for HIV.

Sexual initiation thus becomes his razed temple of sex, from which the faithful disperse into the gendered wilderness. Having been repeatedly ignored by the slew of NGO-sponsored sexual awareness education and messages, he emerges from puberty’s temple with strange notions of sex and gender relations. A product of violent sexual abuse and corruption by random sources, he emerges as a rapist, a paedophile, a sexual aggressor driven on diets of victimhood.

Growing up, he feels a strange sense of emptiness: his life begins to feel like a fictional theme park. He dreams of bliss by imitating the lives of others, precisely more privileged peers. So doing, he models his existence like a theme park built around facets of the lives of others. How can he attain a wholesome life?

Slugging it through awareness, his life assumes the flurry of a caricature; its lucid dreamscapes and obscure vistas force him to question what being a man really is – or, more precisely, what it is worth.

From childhood through adulthood, he learns to buy his way into security, into value, into innocence, and the highly expensive gated simplicity denied millions of Nigerians.

While the odds favour him, he must learn to display unconscionable apathy towards the fate of the people trapped outside, thinking they were not smart enough and thus undeserving of his gated paradise.

Adulthood beckons with curious entrapment: money, work, power, acclaim, carnal lust, love, and renown. It seldom ends well when he yields to temptations of the modern world. His tragedy subsists in the male paradigm of rise and fall, affluence and poverty, power and weakness, health and sickness, love and hate, life and death.

His life unfurls as a shadowy analogy. Traditional manhood stories are picaresque, feel-good narratives of his becoming, he eventually finds. In contrast, a man’s life is fraught with challenges. There is neither certainty nor a sense of an ending.

His narrative is borne of pain and detection and his life, a perpetual struggle to hide what he cannot control. Ultimately, he struggles to ignore his mistakes in plain sight.

Eventually, he becomes the President who wouldn’t divest his soul of the bitterness of nepotism, basement arrogance, ethnic bigotry, frantic animosity, and clannishness.

He is the governor whose definition of service translates to administrative tyranny and embezzlement of public funds. He is the occult lawmaker extending his ‘reign’ by setting sail on an ocean of sacrificial electorate blood.

He is the courtier flaunting nimbleness and eloquence to entertain and goad all into complacence. A persuasive actor, he makes large deposits of religious and ethnic bigotries into our emotional bank accounts. When he withdraws, he does so to our disadvantage and the advantage of his ‘principals’ and ‘clients.’

He is the smiley face of the corporate state that has hijacked the government. He is the lobbyist, social and political influencer by whose antics bad leadership and corporations realise their callous plots.

He is the journalist, who wears face powder to deceive us, like Castiglione’s courtier; he is the columnist, slick disputant, and sophist, who masks brilliantly, the evils of the corporate state in bouquets of lies and beautiful English.

He is the elite technocrat, politician, and academic manipulating information and statistics to project illusions of growth and prosperity. He is the intellectual thug, who weaponises the government instrument of consumer price index (CPI) into persuasive propaganda.

He is the revered economist whose ‘genius’ keeps the official inflation rates low and substitutes on behalf of the government, basic products we once tracked to check for inflation, with ones that do not rise very much in price while keeping the cost-of-living increases tied to the CPI artificially low. Thus the disconnect between reality and what we are told.

In his search for a more promising future, he has grown from the 10-year-old wielding a plastic rifle and sword to mow armies of imaginary monsters and hostile cornstalks, into the smart-aleck intolerant of his spitting child image.

Finally, he understands, that the sword in his hands was never real and if he could go back in time, he would escape the wilderness of manhood.

In the same way, the hunter enters the forest in D.O. Fagunwa’s Ogboju ode ninu igbo irunmale, he enters the magic castle of his childhood and emerges from its eerie iridescence only to re-enter the nightmare as a senior citizen for whom twilight dawns inauspiciously.

Eventually, the magic wears off and he finds that the life he dreamed as a 10-year-old is unattainable by unimaginable leaps. Ultimately, he would find that it’s the same grind through various stages of manhood.

This year is far spent and he approaches 2022 trying to unravel and understand the interminable woes that make Nigeria and global earth uninhabitable for him.

Scorned, villified, neglected, he becomes the reason for the failure of every marriage, social, political, and economic redemption programme, according to the misandrist-feminist.

He is the thinker, the planner, and executor, the pathologist and undertaker of every progressive, inspiring social panacea. He is the theorist and pragmatist; the seed, the shoot, and the weed. He is the fig that lets down the leaf; the hand that nurtures and smothers.

He is the performer in the period of youth, the star that got dimmed in the middle of his scene because he failed to leave while the ovation was loudest. He is the rapist born of rape. The villain and the victim.
- This updated piece is published in commemoration of Children’s Day.
May 27, 2021
Garba Shehu and Malami as threat to our nation

Jide Oluwajuyitan

President Buhari has been accused of surrounding himself with associates who rather than identify with the pan-Nigerian vision that swept him to power in 2015 have chosen to exploit his personal inadequacies to serve other tendencies. Sadly, Shehu Garba, the president’s media aide and Abubakar Malami, his Attorney General and Minister of Justice have done everything these past six years except prove cynics and the president’s political foes wrong.

By siding with killer herdsmen who Sheik Gumi, Governors Masari, El Rufai and Mohammed confirmed to be Fulani immigrants from outside the country against Nigerians who are daily assaulted, kidnapped and killed, the duo have not only undermined the legitimacy of President Buhari who has failed in his primary responsibility of protecting lives and properties of Nigerians, they have in the words of Governor Ortom of Benue tried to reduce him to president for only the Fulani.

If we need further evidence that Garba and Malami work for neither President Buhari nor the country, their current display of blind fury and fierce opposition to the banning of ‘open grazing’ by 17 southern governors provides just that.

Before now, Garba Shehu fiercely opposed ‘Amotekun’ security outfit, established through duly enacted laws by Southwest state houses of assembly. “Whatever name they call themselves, they must operate under Federal government control” he had roared. He was however silent on the setting up of 10,000 strong Sharia Hisbah police corps by northern Sharia governors who believe their priority was to arrest anyone sporting “indecent dress”, prevent “gender mix in commercial vehicles” or seal-up hotels selling alcohol while bandits and killer herdsmen turned kidnapping of school children for ransom into an industry in nearly all the northern states. We have no evidence southern governors were consulted when their northern counterparts embarked on their crusade to rid the north of indecent dressers.

There was similarly no evidence these two “loyal gatekeepers” currently at war with southern governors over the banning of open grazing, raised objection when the National Economic Council as far back as April 27, 2018, agreed to trade ‘open grazing’ for the Livestock Transformation Plan of the federal government. They similarly kept their peace when the Northern Governors Forum banned open grazing in all states in Northern Nigeria on February 9. It is also curious that Garba and Malami who raised no objections when the Nigeria Governors Forum banned open grazing in all the 36 states of the federation on February 11, found their voices only after southern governors followed the initiatives of the Northern Governors Forum and Nigerian Governors Forum.

As late as last Tuesday, Garba Shehu was still full of fury over southern governor’s action. Claiming to be speaking for the president, he insisted the southern governors’ intervention was no solution to the herder-farmer clashes “that have been continuing in our country for generations”. Although not a lawyer, he questioned the legality of the southern governors’ initiative. “It is equally true that their announcement is of questionable legality, given the constitutional right of all Nigerians to enjoy the same rights and freedoms within every one of our 36 states (and FCT) – regardless of the state of their birth or residence”, he fumed. He concluded by falsely inferring the rights and freedom of northerners had been breached by southern governors.

Reacting earlier, Malami tried to draw a parallel between criminal immigrant Fulani herdsmen in southern forests and Igbo spare parts sellers in the north. “The banning” he had said was “as good as saying, perhaps, maybe, the northern governors coming together to say they prohibit spare parts trading in the north”. He then challenged the governors to go “back to the National Assembly to say open grazing should be prohibited and see whether you can have the desired support for the constitutional amendment”. Finally, he mischievously added: “It is a dangerous provision for any governor in Nigeria to think he can bring any compromise on the freedom and liberty of individuals to move around”. Like Shehu Garba, he also falsely insinuated the rights, freedom and liberty of northerners in the south had been abridged by southern governors.

But except for Garba and Malami, who seem to play the ostrich, Nigerians know the southern governors’ ban of open grazing has nothing to do with ‘freedom and liberty of individuals” but everything to do with the failure of the federal government to secure lives and properties of Nigerians.

And except for those playing the ostrich, Nigerians can easily acknowledge that just as there are many Igbo spare parts sellers in the north renting shops and acquiring properties to do their businesses, there are thousands of northerners including the likes of Aliko Dangote doing legitimate businesses that employ thousands of Nigerians in Lagos and Ogun states. We also have more thousands of Hausa beggars in the street of major cities in the south doing the only thing they know how to do-begging for survival, a bad commentary on the leadership of self-serving northern politicians.

Malami therefore does not need Femi Falana to remind him that “right to movement under section 41 and 43 of the constitution does not cover free movement of animals to destroy farmlands”, except he is admitting having the same mindset with members of Miyetti Allah who believe the life of a cattle in Nigeria is worth that of several men. They have at least on many occasions owned up to the killing of scores of men, women and children and sacking of communities in retaliation for their alleged stolen or rustled cattle.

But I think Falana should save his breath. Malami who once jetted to Dubai to have a secret meeting with fugitive Maina he later tried to smuggle back into the bureaucracy, Malami who replaced Magu, the former EFCC’s helmsman after a vicious battle, with a candidate from his state who had to be promoted with retroactive effect trailed by public outcry, knows what he is doing.

He knows it is illogical to draw a parallel between northern-based Igbo spare parts sellers operating according to the laws of their host communities and those Kano’s Governor Ganduje described as “ECOWAS’s herdsmen who first came to Nigeria with AK-47 assault rifles to protect themselves against farmers but now use the guns to commit crime”.

When he disingenuously says southern governors should refer the settled issue of open grazing to the National Assembly, he knows no serious structural changes can be effected by the current National Assembly members, the major beneficiaries of 1999 constitution rigged against Nigeria.

I therefore think that instead of dwelling on Malami’s incompetence in jurisprudence, we should be worried about the possible fallout of his current game of mischief.

Today our nation is already standing on the precipice because of President Buhari’s failure to identify with popular sentiments of Nigerians that elected him on issues of restructuring, fiscal federalism and state/community policing. Garba and Malami, the president’s loyal gatekeepers, with their well-scripted game of mischief pose no less threat to the survival of our nation.

All that the ill-informed millions of out of schools street urchins the northern political elite freely deployed to unleash terror during social dislocation in the past needed to be told to embark on a renewed orgy of killings is that northerners in the south have been shortchanged.

May 27, 2021
Supreme sacrifice

The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth – Ecclesiastes 7:4

Lawal Ogienagbon

Death, according to Shakespeare, is a necessary end that will come when it will come. On May 21, it came for the Chief of Army Staff (COAS), Lt Gen Ibrahim Attahiru, and 10 others, in the line of duty. Attahiru, three other generals, two majors, two flight lieutenants, two sergeants and an aircraft man died in a plane crash on their way to attend the passing out parade (PoP) of soldiers at the Nigerian Army Depot in Zaria, Kaduna State.

Attahiru, the other generals, the two majors, one of them the COAS’ Aide-De-Camp (ADC), and a sergeant, Saidu Umar, who was the army chief’s Orderly, all belonged to the same Service arm. The others, who made up the crew, were of the air force.

The trip would have been a homecoming for Attahiru, who hailed from Kaduna State. But the homecoming turned into a homecall following his death in the Nigerian Air Force Beechcraft 350, which crashed at the Kaduna Airport. These officers were going to a familiar terrain, a place they might have passed through as cadets or in other official or private capacity in the past.

Kaduna is home to the military and its officers. Many of them relish visiting the place. Some have even set up home there. It is the military country, so to say, where buddies catch up on the past and engage in social and official activities. Attahiru and the others did not plan that it would end that way. Albeit, the officers would have looked forward to the trip. After all, they were going to Attahiru’s home state. The army chief might have visited home and brought his men along. That was not to be. Their plane crashed, ending lifelong dreams and plans.

As a nation, we mourn these gallant gentlemen and officers for their supreme sacrifice. It is easy to say that as soldiers they knew that death was always lurking around them. That it could come at anytime, even where they least expected it. That it is like their shadow, following them wherever they went – whether in peace or war time. It is easy to talk like that until death comes the way it came for Attahiru and the others. Like them, we are all indebted to death and it is a debt we are going to pay when our time is up. No man has power over death.

Attahiru, Brig., Gen Abdulkadir Kuliya, Chief of Military Intelligence, Brig., Gen Olatunji Olayinka, Provost Marshal of the Army, Brig., Gen Mohammed Abdulkadir, Chief of Staff to Attahiru, Major Lawal Hayat, the ADC, Major Nura Hamza, Flight Lieutenant Taiwo Asaniyi, Flight Lieutenant Alfred Olufade, Sergeant Umar, Sergeant Opeyemi Adesina and Aircraft Man (ACM) Olamide Oyedepo paid the debt on May 21. They died in active service as they were going on an official function.

These officers were not going to war, which is why people are wont to say that soldiers knew what they were going into when they signed up for Service. They were going to honour new members of their constituency who were billed to pass out on May 22. The event was cancelled because of the tragic accident. Who holds such an event or any event for that matter at such a time? As a nation, our hearts are heavy. We mourn with the bereaved families. They have suffered most from this tragedy because it directly affects them, but they should not take it as a personal loss. It is a national loss. We lost no less a personality than our army chief in that crash.

This is not to diminish the status of others who died in the air mishap. All lives are important, whether of king or serf. The ACM, the sergeants, the flight lieutenants, the majors and the Brig., Generals, who died along with Attahiru in the crash, are as important as the COAS. But their stations in life cannot be wished away when analysing what happened. By so doing, we are not making one life look more important than the other. We are merely using their status, which is no longer relevant now that they are dead, to draw attention to the vanity of life.

What is the use of the positions they held when they were here now that they are over there? I shake my head over this poser; over this fleeting life, where we are today and tomorrow, we are no more. This life where we struggle to acquire everything under the sun only to leave them behind when the bugle sounds as it sounded for Attahiru, Olayinka, Kuliya, Abdulkadir, Hayat, Hamza, Asaniyi, Olufade, Umar, Adesina and Oyedepo on May 21. These fine officers are gone, but they must never be forgotten by their nation, which they served with their hearts and might.

For us the living, there is a lesson in their death. There is no better time than now to reassess our ways. When tragedy befalls us as a nation, as it happened in this instance, we should leave whatever we are doing or about to do and come together to mourn. It should not be a time to party and make merriment. It should not be a time to issue political statements dripping with venom and contempt.

It should be a time for sober reflection because that is what such a time deserves. At such a time, every other thing must stop for us to honour the dead. It is a duty that we owe them. It is a duty that we owe ourselves because the living too shall die. No wonder, the Good Book says: It is better to go to the house of mourning, than to go to the house of feasting.

Go in peace, gallant soldiers. My heart goes out to your families. May God grant them the fortitude to bear the loss.

May 27, 2021
Israeli- Palestinian question

By Jide Osuntokun

The question of the Israeli-Palestinian issue is so problematic that it is a minefield for commentators. It is an issue on which fools rush to pontificate but where angels fear to tread. Taking any position not favourable to the position of people of power could cost a person his or her job or even life especially in the United States and in some Western European countries. The arm of the Israeli Mossad is also very long! There have been huge demonstrations in big cities in Europe and America over the last weekend condemning the bombing of Gaza which led to the deaths of tens of young children and women as well as elderly people in an indiscriminate way of responding to Hamas’ indiscriminately raining rockets and missiles on Israeli cities killing and wounding a few people but frightening many. It is the comparison of the level of damage by each side that makes people accuse the Israeli response of disproportionality. It is becoming clear that Israel is beginning to lose the high moral ground because there is a natural tendency for the world to support the underdog in any conflict. Similarly, the cause of the Palestinians has lost much political support in the Third world and particularly in the Middle East where many Arab states have established diplomatic relations with Israel something that was unthinkable in the past. The late Senegalese president, Leopold Sedar Senghor, a poet, famous writer and a philosopher and one of the chief exponents of negritude, a cultural movement which celebrated the essence of being black, called the Palestinian- Israeli question along with the black experience “a trilogy of suffering peoples” and that whatever the situation may be, they should never be on opposite sides.

For me as a Christian, the Bible says we should pray for Israel. Some will distinguish between modern Israel and the new Israel founded in 1948 but I make no such distinction. It will therefore be irreligious of me to be seen to overtly criticize Israel but one can still be objective and fair in treating the subject. Israel has the most powerful military in the Middle East possibly more powerful than even Iran’s. If Israel were to appear to be losing in any confrontation with any power in the Middle East, the United States would possibly intervene to save Israel. This is why the USA is determined to prevent any Middle East country including Iran in having nuclear weapons. If the USA does not intervene to save Israel, the state of Israel itself will make it a war to end all wars in the Middle East by exploding the atomic bomb which it has without ever publicly owning up to it. This will be in consonance with the Ancient Jewish Masada complex in which in defending itself against the Roman Empire, the Sicarii rebels and resident Jewish families of the Masada fortress committed mass suicide rather than be defeated. Hopefully, the world will help Israel and Palestine to reach a modus vivendi by which two states can be created in the space of ancient Palestine. One thing Israel is determined to have is a Jewish State in which all Jews are welcome and that would prevent the Jews ever suffering another holocaust. This is understandable and everyone in the world who is interested in peace in the Middle East had better understand this. At the same time, the Palestinians could reasonably argue that they should not be held responsible for the European evil acts such as the Spanish Inquisition against the Jews, the Russian pogroms and the Nazi “final solution “of the Jewish question. The British created this problem ab initio through the declaration in 1917 by their foreign minister, Lord Arthur Balfour who promised the same territory to both Jews and Palestinians in Palestine then under the Ottoman Empire which Britain later administered and ruled under the League of Nations Mandate after World War 1. This is the origin of the present Gordian knot. When the land of Palestine was promised as homeland to the Jews under the pressure of international Zionism, the Jews claim was Biblical and their claim was buried in scriptures. The Palestinians were living and effectively in occupation of what is now Israel. The two people are descendants of Abraham (Ibrahim) and speak two Semitic languages but this commonality has been undermined by history of persecution on both sides. The Jews are victims on a global level and even now Jews still suffer from anti-Semitic physical and privately expressed anti-Semitic abuse. There is enough blame to go round but there is now a human problem that must be solved .The Jewish people in the State of Israel are going nowhere. The official policy of the State of Israel is to create a Jewish state. This essentially means there is no future for the Palestinians, and the so called “Arab Israelis” presently in Israel. They are deluding themselves about equality with Jews in Israel. Ethnic plurality would distort the essence of a Jewish State which is the goal of its Zionist founders. There has to be a way out of this conundrum. Some extremist Israelis sometimes say there is already a Palestinian State in Jordan. This will not fly because no Palestinian is voluntarily in Jordan or in Lebanon or Syria where there are substantial Palestinians living and merely being tolerated as refugees.

A Palestinian State would have to be created after careful negotiation with Israel. There must be stoppage of Jewish settlements on the West Bank of the River Jordan which are areas largely inhabited by Palestinians who are now being forced off their land. Gaza has to be linked with the West Bank through land ceded to the Palestinians by Israel in order to have a viable Palestinian State. Jerusalem has to be declared an international city accessible to Jews, Christians and Muslims because of the significance of the city to the three monotheistic religions. This is why President Donald Trump’s declaration of Jerusalem as capital of Israel has been largely unhelpful. The security of Israeli borders must be guaranteed by the big powers in the Security Council of the United Nations or through joint defence pact with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and if that is going to be cumbersome the United States should openly guarantee the security of Israel. Whatever geography of the Palestinian state turns out to be, it must be free and seen to be free from Israeli and incredibly from the kind of current Egyptian blockade. Palestine must also recognize Israel without any qualification. Israel must also be given a veto on imports of weapons to the emergent Palestinian state for a period of about 50 years to assure Israel of the pacific nature of Palestinian intention towards Israel. The Palestinian state should also be modelled on Costa Rica that has no standing army so that it can devote all its resources to human development without wasting its effort on weapons that would do no good for its people. In this way, Palestine would be setting a paradigm and standard of peaceful development for the entire Middle East region.

The way I have suggested will not be easy to negotiate but what is the alternative to peace and giving the Palestinians a stake in maintaining peace by having a state of their own? Peace in the Middle East would have to be accompanied by generous financial assistance by the European Union whose members were vicariously responsible for the Palestinian- Israeli problem. The countries in the Middle East swimming in ocean of oil must be pressured to make huge donations towards the development of the new Palestinian State rather than funding development of rockets in Gaza. The important thing is that the Palestinians must be made so comfortable that extremist parties like Hamas and Islamic Jihad committed to the destruction of Israel would not be as attractive to a frustrated and bedraggled people as they are currently attracted to them. The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) which is currently regarded as corrupt and ineffective should be assisted to recover its old glory that it enjoyed under Yasser Arafat. If it will not reform, it should be made irrelevant by supporting a liberal political replacement. I know the international community would shy away from “state building” because people’s hands have been burned in places like Lebanon, Somalia and Afghanistan but what will be required in the case of Palestine should be reasonably manageable. I believe with genuine international commitment, peace like a river will flow in Israel and Palestine and the statesman who will make this possible would be blessed as stated by the Jewish, Islamic and Christian faiths to which Israelis and Palestinians subscribe.

May 27, 2021
The governors’ game

By Lawal Ogienagbon

It was just a matter of time before they saw the light. The time came last week in Asaba, the Delta State capital, and the governors from the South grabbed it with both hands. Since they came up with their resolutions now dubbed the Asaba Accord or Asaba Declaration, depending on which you prefer, they have ruffled feathers, which I will not, like presidential spokesman Femi Adesina, call ‘unruly’.

Reactions to the governors’ resolutions from high places were swift. Senate President Ahmad Lawan, who is the number three citizen, and Speaker Femi Gbajabiamila, the number four citizen, could not understand why the governors would take such stand. Gbajabiamila was cautious in his approach, submitting that: “if truth be told, we all have equal share in the blame for what is happening today. Whatever challenges we have, we must all come together to resolve them”.

The Speaker could not have summarised the governors’ thoughts better. To Lawan, the governors retreated to regionalism to address a national issue. In a nutshell, the governors were seeking a collective approach towards addressing the country’s challenges. There is division in the land today and it is a serious problem, which we can only ignore at our own peril. The governors did not say anything new. They only underscored all the problems besetting us as one, indivisible country, which are now getting worse by the day. The governors are critical stakeholders in the Nigeria Project. As governors, they owe it a duty to ensure that not only their states, but the whole country is peaceful and governable.

For now, Nigeria is standing on the precipice and something urgent must be done to pull the country back from the brink. The governors were clear and unambiguous in their demands. Many of these demands are well known. They are issues which have been agitating the minds of many non-state actors, as those not in government are now referred to. If non-state actors, who voted for them, can call for restructuring, devolution of power, ban on open grazing, and review of the federal character policy, among others, where then did governors, who are original state actors, go wrong in echoing their people’s demands?

Being in government should not stop people from fighting for what is right. Those in government should not become so acquiscent as not to speak up when occasion demands. There is a caveat though – they should remember that they were elected to be problem solvers and not problem creators. To enable them discharge this responsibility well, they need to identify the problem in order to resolve it. With their Asaba Accord, the Southern governors have taken the first step of identifying the problem. To enable them take the next step of solving it, others at the national level must work with them.

They have thrown their cards face up on the table. The Federal Government now knows where the governors, not only from the south, but also with some from the north, stand on some vexed issues. On Monday, after their meeting in Ibadan, the Oyo State capital, governors elected on the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) platform backed the resolutions of their southern counterparts, who cut across party lines. That is the beauty of the Asaba Accord. It was forged out of a bipartisan meeting. It was not a party, ethnic or religious thing. It came out of a deliberate and conscious effort to correct societal ills.

Apologists of government will not see it as such. They will read political and other meaning to the governors’ resolutions. My plea to them is not to throw away the baby with the bath water. Let them look at the message and not the messenger. Is there a need for restructuring? Is appointment into key government agencies and military and paramilitary organisations not lopsided? Is open grazing the best way of breeding cattle in this age and time? Are Nigerians being evenly treated under this dispensation? Has the President been talking to the Nigerian people the way a leader should? Is national dialogue not urgently required to address these and other issues raised by the governors?

This is not the time to play the party, religious or ethnic card. It is not the time to point a finger to the governors and say see those who are talking. If we do that, these problems will remain with us and may sound our death knell as a nation. It is the time to take a collective decision on our future for the sake of generations yet unborn. Come to think of it, talks are not as costly as war.

The Ahmad Lawans and Abdullahi Adamus of this world can say whatever they like because they benefit from the system. If things continue like this, they would continue to enjoy those benefits, but for how long would that be? They should spare a thought for such eventuality and millions of their compatriots who are not so privileged.

People like them should not think about the present alone, but of the future as well. Where will Nigeria be in the next 10, 15 years, if things continue this way? Lawan, especially should know how grave the situation is. Geidam, his hometown in Yobe State, is today under the siege of Boko Haram. Getting Boko Haram not only out of Geidam, but from the entire Northeast, should be his priority as the third citizen and not the entrenchment of the old order.

May 20, 2021
First Bank: The fig that let down the leaf

By Olatunji Ololade

Good banking grows dreams, businesses, countries. It nurtures individuals and families. Ultimately, it suckles the future from the tits of the present. But bad banking manifests gruesomely, like a viral disease. Sometimes, it strikes like a pandemic, as was the case with modern Greece.

Oftentimes, it sprouts as inflamed tumours, much like the infestation of the First Bank of Nigeria (FBN), among others.

That First Bank got hijacked by a privileged elite is an open secret; that the latter misgoverned the bank and depleted it’s fortunes in pursuit of private interests is reprehensible. And that to forestall punitive checks, they embarked on an egocentric power trip, resounds the lore of a Grade B movie noir.

The plot and counter-plot got to a head on April 29; barely 24 hours after the FBN board of directors theatrically sacked Adesola Adeduntan, the bank’s Managing Director (MD), and named his deputy, Gbenga Shobo, as his replacement, the governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Godwin Emefiele, reinstated Adeduntan and sacked the boards of both the First Bank Limited and FBN Holding Plc.

If you ask Emefiele, he would tell you that FBN’s sacked board had it coming given the bank’s poor corporate governance, credit maladministration and risk management malpractices, on its watch.

Speaking to journalists, he disclosed that the CBN had previously granted “regulatory forbearances (pardon) to enable the bank work out its non-performing loans through provision for write off of at least N150 billion from its earning for four consecutive years.”

According to data from Nairalytics, First Bank had recorded a total loan impairment of over N565 billion between 2016 and 2020; and about N376.4 billion, more than half the total loans impaired, were provided for in 2016 and 2017 alone.

At the FBN, for instance, Emefiele revealed that the insiders who took loans from the bank, with controlling influence on its board of directors, failed to abide by the terms restructuring their credit facilities; the CBN’s inspection of the bank’s books in December 31, 2020 revealed that such insider loans had been materially non-compliant for over three years, he stressed.

Thus the CBN intervened to prevent Adeduntan from being consumed by corporate highjinks over his insistence on best corporate governance.

For “a bank where depositors’ fund is almost 10 times shareholders fund,” the CBN’s interest, said Emefiele, is “to protect depositors and minority shareholders who have no voice in this business.”

First Bank’s duplicitous strut is no doubt evocative of the 2008/2009 banking crisis caused by a fraudulent number of banks and bank chiefs. The CBN took over affected banks and spent billions of tax payers’ money to cushion the ripple-effects and save the banking sector from collapse.

Even so, the five major culprits cum bank chiefs got off with a gloved slap on the wrist despite the criminal charges against them which included fraud, market manipulation, concealment and grant of credit facilities without adequate security.

Apparently, Nigeria’s most dangerous enemies are not Boko Haram or the thousands of youths being recruited as armed bandits, drug mules and political thugs but those who afflict Nigeria with corrupt leadership, poor corporate governance, incendiary capitalism and louche globalisation.

This self-seeking elite have dynamited the foundations of society. By their designs, shades of corporate malfeasance subsist across the boards of several Nigerian companies, banks in particular.

In the absence of effective regulatory mechanisms, Nigerians depend on the media to sound the alarm lest corrupt bank chiefs and their associates in public office plunge the country into another financial crisis.

But even the media is handicapped. The corporate power that holds the government hostage has recruited a severely malnourished press to normalise its misappropriation of depositors’ funds even as it hijacks the potent symbols, language, and culture of corporate citizenship.

Recall that it took successive CBN interventions to reveal that Nigeria’s supposedly ‘big banks’ had sold us all on an illusion of contrived growth, at least until their sand castles collapsed, and government intervened to save them with ‘bail outs’ or tax payers’ money if you like.

First Bank’s managerial crisis affirms, among other truths, that banking has a devious underside; that businesses, individuals and households must ultimately learn to live within their means. And that the incumbent government’s mantra of frantic borrowing and taxation as means of providing affordable health care, vibrant industry, mean nothing in a nation caught in the asphyxiating grip of a crafty, self-seeking elite.

The malfeasance of several banks’ board of directors manifests jarringly outside their charmed business circuits and ‘high society’, where struggling SMEs and entrepreneurs are stifled of crucial funding.

Through the pillage, cub bankers and the general public covet mindlessly the illusion of genius brandished by bubble celebrities on the banks’ executive boards.

Graduate schools appoint them as guest lecturers and mentors; state governments recruit them into economic think-tanks; local NGOs and INGOs, student bodies and so on, scramble to feature them as board members, mentors, panelists and doyens of enterprise and financial intelligence in hurriedly scripted reality shows.

Amid the melodrama, students, aspiring bankers and magnates choose them as role models, thinking they would enjoy an easy ride to prosperity and Nigeria’s high society.

Many must be stunned to find out that they had set themselves up for disappointment. They had dreamed and planned their path to success on the befogged path of frost personae and specters, whose exploits are likeable to the ravages of enterprise carnivores even as their attainments resonate like the legend of the Himalayan Yeti, or the mystical Pamola, if you like.

Stripped of sugarcoating, the First Bank management has displayed financial recklessness, lack of fiscal intelligence and humaneness – like most bank executive boards.

Hence the urgent need for the CBN and the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) to pay good mind to goings-on in local banks’ boardrooms. Among other measures, they should jointly institute a rigorous vetting process of aspiring board directors of banks.

Successful candidates must be made to participate in a mandatory six-month boot camp for prospective bank directors, where participants would be vigorously scrutinized and re-orientated about humane fiscal intelligence, sterling corporate governance and citizenship. Licenses must be issued to successful graduates. Licensees involved in corporate misdemeanour including fraud, must be registered in a register of financial offenders and must be denied subsequent membership of executive boards.

There must be no sacred cows, given the penchant of prospective candidates to flaunt their oft over-hyped stature and experience to intimidate critics and regulatory bodies.

If bankers were so smart and savvy, they wouldn’t have bankrupted about 52 Nigerian banks while cashing out on government interventions. Some would call it being smart but I would call it sheer fraud. We must call criminality by its hideous names.

An Ivy League education, fancy certificates, donkey years of experience and often sexed-up ‘war stories’ are no excuse to defraud the indigent, working class depositors and a nation.

Yet this minute, they are weaponised by desperate bankers dipping into struggling depositors’ meagre accounts, using the latter’s hard-earned money to finance the private interests and guilty pleasures of a questionable upper crust.

May 20, 2021
Problems facing our universities

By Jide Osuntokun

There seems to be a correlation between advanced civilizations in the past with the founding and flourishing of universities. This accounts for the location of such universities like Bologna, founded in 1088 and currently has a students’ population of 87,760, Padua, established in 1222 with a students’ population of 62,500, Sienna, established in 1240 and currently has a students’ population of 20,000 and Naples Federico ii, established in 1224 currently has a students’ population of 80,000 all located in Italy which was arguably the most civilized country in medieval times. Eight of the 10 oldest universities in the world along with Oxford University, established in 1096 with a students’ population of 24,300, Salamanca (Spain), established in 1134 with current students’ population of 26,746, University of Paris ( La Sorbonne), established in 1160 with a students’ population of 50,000, Cambridge, established in 1209 with a students’ population of 23,247, Coimbra (Portugal), established in 1290 and currently holds a students’ population of 24,000 are located in countries with old and world renowned civilizations.

The two African universities of Al-Azhar (Egypt), established in 970 AD with students population in excess of 60,000 and the oldest of them all, Qarawinyyin founded in 859 in Fez Morocco currently has about 20;000 students belong to countries of ancient civilizations and traditions of learning .

It can easily be assumed that all these institutions started as centres of clerical training before morphing into the universality of academic institutions now known as universities. Universities in Asia and the Americas came much later but were established by inheritors of ancient civilizations. In the case of Africa, we had centres of Islamic learning in places like Djenne, Sannkore (Timbuktu), Kano and Katsina in precolonial times but these were not comparable with universities in Europe, Egypt and Morocco as indicated above. The university tradition in Africa as a whole is less than 200 years old. Fourah Bay College, Sierra Leone, (1827) and Cape Town University 1829 were founded in the 19th century as clerical institutions on the pattern of the old institutions in Europe while the University of Ibadan was only established in 1948.

The upshot of this is that university tradition has not sunk into the African mentality and this accounts for what we can call the aberrant behavior of universities’ administrations and governance in Nigeria in particular and possibly in tropical Africa as a whole.

The colonial universities established in Africa initially offered external degrees of well-established universities in the European metropolitan cities like London and Paris. These colonial universities eventually evolved into well-established African centres of learning while still maintaining the traditions of their European foster institutions. But this was not going to be for long. In the emergent African countries after independence, the idea of university autonomy was anathema. The powers that were in authority could not conceive of, or tolerate a situation where government funded institutions could be totally independent of government. Thus, governments constituted governing councils and chose vice chancellors of the universities.

In the beginning, those who were chosen as vice chancellors were absolutely deserving of their positions in the eyes of the public and the university communities and their academic colleagues. There was not much meddling by politicians in the running of universities for a short time in Nigeria. The universities were however not insulated from the vagaries of politics and political alignment and realignment in Nigeria in the 1960s. In Nigeria, what was subtle and clandestine meddling in the First Republic became flagrant and open intervention in the long years of military rule in Nigeria. The military intervention in Nigerian politics also coincided with the expansion of higher tertiary institutions in Nigeria. As new universities were established, their vice chancellors were appointed either on the principle of federal character or on the basis of patronage to friends or those connected to the seats of power at federal and state levels. Even the National Universities Commission, established on the pattern of British universities Grants Commission went out of its remit to influence the choice of vice chancellors because the military rulers knew very little about who was who in the universities. Not only did the NUC meddle in the internal affairs of universities, it also used the power of the purse to favour some universities over others. The 1960s remain the golden age of Nigerian universities. Things were not too bad by the 70s but since the 80s, the situation has changed for the worst.

The exponential increase in the number of universities without adequate planning about funding and staffing has made the status of universities ridiculous. Politicians now after heavy state dinners and consumption of drinks as part of their after-dinner speeches routinely announce the establishment of new universities as part of “democratic dividends”. President Goodluck Jonathan, a man who ought to know more about universities than his predecessors who never went to universities, announced in one fell swoop the establishment of 12 federal universities to satisfy federal character and as “dividends of democracy”, he immediately sited one in his own village!

Since his time, more than 100 universities, both federal , state , military, naval duplicating the Military Academy in Kaduna which is a degree-awarding military institution and hordes of private universities have been established. Most of these new universities share the same available local academic staff with the result that they are all poorly staffed and young academics who should be lecturers are prematurely elevated to professors and in some cases as vice chancellors. Recently the press carried the pictures of a young lady who was appointed vice chancellor of a federal university in Owerri who went back to her village to hire a band and she and her supporters danced vigorously round the campus. I found it funny and pathetic and I asked myself if the likes of professors Kenneth Dike, J F Ade Ajayi, Adeoye Lambo, Oritsejolomi Thomas, Eni Njoku , Kodlinye, Ishaya Audu, Iya Abubakar, TN Tamuno, Emanuel Ayandele, Dipo Akinkugbe and Ayo Banjo would have been dancing to drums from their towns and villages when they were appointed vice chancellors. This is the level of ridicule the position of vice chancellors in our universities have been reduced to. Even after so-called autonomy to choose their vice chancellors, the universities communities have not demonstrated maturity and wisdom neither have the communities where they are located shown any understanding and appreciation of the meaning of universities as universal institutions. Community leaders routinely issue threats against the universities if they refuse to select “sons and daughters of the soil “as principal officers of institutions in their areas. The universities have moved down from bending to pressure from ethnic groups to those of clans and villages. Even in large urban centres like Ibadan and Lagos, threats are usually issued against the institutions who fail to be grateful by appointing “outsiders “as vice chancellors. With bad leaders the universities are now riddled with politics and attendant and consequential corruption and lowering of standards.

This has led to a corrosion of the university idea and the value of the academic certificates given to students. One insidious effect of the homogenization of academic programs as demanded by the NUC is that all universities offer the same courses without them being permitted to offer courses that are unique to their missions and visions. This is not good in a federation of diverse needs and characteristics.

Some of the private universities offer some hope for the future. Some are very good especially the ones founded on religious ethics and philanthropy. But like most things Nigerian, some businessmen delude themselves of thinking that there is money to be made by establishing private universities. Such people will be disappointed. But unfortunately some of them are not giving up and their institutions are churning out graduates to increase the frustrated crowds of unemployed and unemployable young people roaming the streets of the urban conurbations of Nigeria and thereby constituting themselves into ready army of kidnappers and bandits and highway robbers who have to survive by all and every means since self-preservation is the first law of nature. There are also universities set up in neighboring countries by rich Nigerians catering to the mad urge for certification without knowledge by young Nigerians. Many of these universities in Nigeria and those in our neighborhood are merely universities in name and have overtime not produced the highly skilled and innovative manpower needed for our industrialization. Of course, water would eventually find its own level and the taste of the pudding is in the eating and employers of labor would invariably find out who is a graduate and who is not. This is the result of our total lack of manpower planning and penchant of muddling through and expecting all will be well. Of course, all is not well.

We need to overhaul our educational system and lay emphasis on training skilled middle level manpower and artisans. It is a shame that while our young men are riding “Okadas” taxi motorcycles, the building sector of our economy is dominated by carpenters, electricians, welders and bricklayers from our sister ECOWAS countries. The same is true of the hospitality sector of our economy. These are the areas of future growth of our economy which for security and economic reasons must not be left in the hands of foreigners.

The upshot of what I am saying is that we need to revise our colonial system of education and learn from how training of technical and skilled people have transformed economies of countries like Japan, Germany, China and South Korea. While university education is important, we need people who can transform theories into practice. We have a country to build. The weakness in the existing universities in Nigeria which are totally dependent on government funding has been exposed by their lack of preparedness in the face of the coronavirus pandemic. Asking students to receive lectures online when the lecturers themselves are not trained to do so and in the face of poor electricity supply to charge students electronic devices has created serious problems of pedagogy. The lack of realism on the part of government which forbids universities charging economic fees for university education is killing the institutions whose infrastructures are becoming antediluvian and unsustainable and unsuitable to train students for the 21st century. There is no doubt in my mind that there is a need for a revolution in our education system.

May 20, 2021