The Nation Newspaper

Category: Thursday

  • A patriot anthem

    A patriot anthem

    Olatunji Ololade

     

    THE true patriot, like the Delphic oracle, is maddened by vapours. His dissent is incensed by fertile consciousness; having experienced the towering injustice of the raptorial ruling class, he decides to rebel.

    His rebellion, however, is neither funded nor fathered; like an androgynous earth mother, it self-fertilises without help from society’s captors and oppressors: the corrupt presidency, venal governors, legislators, and international NGOs with a bleeding heart. He understands that they are all spawns of the same ogress womb, carnivores of the same badlands.

    But society and peers, like their captors cum oppressors, consider him victim of an errant demon. “Is he the only one? Must he rebel at all times?” they drone as he subjects all to the unforgiving spokes of his blindsight. Neither society nor its oppressors appreciate being de-robed or called out, he would learn.

    Like the unappreciated hero, the true patriot is eventually abandoned. An outcast, he is constantly assaulted and stigmatised for lacking modern society’s essential traits of being: narrow-mindedness, base sentimentality, and a hankering to traverse gloomy straits. Then he must nurture a taste for funded outrage, lust for sullied money, and expedient passivity.

    The true patriot is absent in Nigeria because the nation thrives on inertia. Submissiveness, bred by a culture of illusion, is exploited by demagogues, who present themselves as saviours to a grovelling citizenry.

    Demagogues promise glory without sweat, success without sudor, and get significant segments of the citizenry, mostly youth, hung up on the fantasy of a world without hardship.

    Eventually, the youth discover that they had been conned. High-strung and embittered over the immateriality of their much-coveted Eden, they become suicidal and apathetic.

    Such jadedness becomes a powerful element in ushering society’s submission to tyranny. It rids democracy of vibrancy, leaving it beleaguered. It afflicts a nation with spiritless youth.

    Where the youth participate actively, they are unperturbed by pressing social concerns. Where they exhibit concern, they display scripted outrage. Their lack of political literacy makes them susceptible to a pitiful range of diversions, like demagoguery and platitudinous chant.

    Wolin would call them victims of imperial politics but I would call them unbidden offering on an altar of vultures. A spectre haunts Nigeria’s youths. Having entered an unholy alliance with the rapacious ruling class, they do not constitute formidable opposition to scare corrupt leadership aright.

    Negative emasculated passivity flourishes when the youth subordinate themselves, unquestioningly, to the ruling class. Playing passive requires extreme sacrifice; the docile youth, in fulfilling his role as gelded, amoral being, must silence his mind.

    His predicament worsens by the government’s willful perversion of pedagogy. Where education festers as an affliction, scholarship and enlightenment become empty phrases, foisting on Nigeria, an illiterate, passive youth.

    Through the depths of his affliction, however, the Nigerian youth is efficiently managed by his oppressors. The corporate hierarchy that holds government and the citizenry hostage, effectively manages the youth by keeping him ignorant and manipulable, via donations to youth-driven NGOs with cosmetic purposes, for instance.

    The government equally does its part in keeping the youth docile and deployable towards selfish ends. How? By destroying Nigeria’s educational foundation as well as the possibility of its rebirth.

    A foundering educational system accentuates ignorance and apathy, particularly among the youth, whose inherited task includes the fosterage and sustenance of democratic consciousness for national rebirth.

    An educated mind is a questioning mind, which conflicts with the whims of Nigeria’s oppressors. Public officers, irrespective of party affiliation, would rather see the citizenry stew in ignorance than enjoy quality education and attain true enlightenment, lest they begin to pulse with discontent over the status quo.

    Aspects of government policies and spending render the average youth poorly educated. This year’s education allocation, like previous years’ may not enjoy a rare boost beyond seven percent of the national budget. Not with the COVID-19 crisis.

    President Muhammadu Buhari allocated a paltry 6.7% of his initial N10.33 trillion national budget to the education sector, lower than the 20 percent recommended by UNESCO as education budget for developing countries.

    Nigeria deserves, at least, an 18 per cent allocation to the education sector. This, President Buhari, must acknowledge in future allocations to the sector. He should make the best use of his second term, and scorn the ‘highly informed, expert opinions’ that counsel an ‘expedient’ and ‘radical’ recourse to the policies foisted on us when ‘structural adjustment’ forced Nigeria to reduce spending on education, health, and infrastructure, among others.

    There is no way a team of government apologists comprising ex-journalists, politicians, lobbyists, and party loyalists can effectively spin a precarious education budget. No degree of righteous umbrage and frosted psycho-babble could manage public dissent and discomfiture arising from such ill-advised spending.

    The bankruptcy of Nigeria’s economic and political systems are attributable to her comatose education sector, and an elite given free rein to organise education and society around “predetermined answers to predetermined questions.”

    The current system has been effectively rigged to produce what many corporate hierarchies persistently cite as “unemployable graduates.” The few “employable” ones are mostly scions of Nigeria’s leadership, and they are recruited from Ivy League and mushroom universities abroad, where they have been schooled only to fulfill responsibilities and find solutions that will preserve the status quo.

    They are incapable of asking the broad, universal questions – staples of a deeply grounded, socially conscious educational process. Both “employable” and “unemployable” graduates were never equipped to challenge the superficial and deepest assumptions of Nigeria’s decadent economic and political culture.

    They can neither discern nor convincingly evaluate, superficial aspects of popular culture vis-a-vis the harsh realities of political and economic mismanagement.

    They are ignorant because they had never been taught to condemn and scorn human nature’s propensity for moral grayness, when confronted with a choice between good and evil.

    Lacking a contemplative spirit, they do not understand why Socrates identified all virtues as forms of knowledge and why such knowledge may foster privileged civilisation.

    To train someone to manage an account for Goldman Sachs or PriceWater HouseCoopers, argues Hedges, “is to educate him or her in skill. To train them to debate experiential, systemic, and humanist ways of grappling with reality, however, is to educate them in values and morals.”

    Indeed, a culture that mistakes management techniques for wisdom, and fails to understand that the true measure of a civilisation is its compassion, not its speed at conquest and consumption, spiritedly condemns itself to death.

    In true Hedges-speak, humaneness is the product of enlightenment, a comprehensive, adequately funded, and supervised educational process, but Nigeria’s leadership is ignorant of such civilisation. It is a product of society’s moral void.

    Blinded by greed and bigotries, they neglect the gaping inadequacies of the country’s educational policies and spending, to service enduring, institutionalised corruption, like outrageous executive, legislative and judicial salaries.

    Buhari could yet midwife a constructive civilisation by treading the path less taken. An 18 per cent budgetary allocation, or thereabouts, to the education sector, followed by eagle-eyed monitoring of “projects,” could trigger Nigeria’s renascence, come 2021.

     

     

     

  • Buhari’s proposed agro-allied industries

    Buhari’s proposed agro-allied industries

    Jide Oluwajuyitan

     

    President Buhari in January this year directed the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Investment to establish agro-allied industry in each state of the federation.

    According to Mariam Katagum, the minister of state, the plan to establish agro-allied industry in each senatorial district in the country is part of government’s effort to achieve food security and stimulate economic activities.

    She also spoke about the textile industries where over 150 textile firms responsible for about two million jobs were forced to fold up due to smuggling of textile goods. CBN governor, Godwin Emefiele estimated the cost to the nation as an import bill of over $4bn

    This commendable initiative is the right step in the right direction. I think it was Simon Kolawole of Thisday that reminded us not too long ago that the solution to our food problem is not in directing everyone to the farm but in adding value to some of our farm produce.

    Akinwunmi Adesina of African Development Bank was also recently quoted as saying he was looking forward to the period Africa would be able to produce chocolate and sell same to 300 million Chinese as against the current exploitation by the west.

    The truth is that our food security and general prosperity lie in adding value to our farm produce as against commodity trading that has impoverished African nations for three centuries.

    For instance, it has been said the total revenue accruing to Cote D’Ivoire, the world biggest exporter of cocoa is less than 10% of the profit made by just one chocolate manufacturer in the USA.

    Buhari’s new endeavour is also in line with the dreams of our founding fathers notably Ahmadu Bello, the premier of the North during the first republic who set up the biggest public enterprise conglomerate in Africa and Obafemi Awolowo, his counterpart in the West who set up the Oodua group that became the backbone of the region’s development efforts.

    It is also on record that the federal government between 1960 and 1997 invested about $100 billion in public enterprises.

    But throwing borrowed funds into agro-allied industries if we don’t first address the reasons why those public enterprises set up by our founding fathers collapsed and bring to book those responsible for disposing off $100b worth investments for a paltry $1billion will amount to hitting ourselves with a hammer a second time and expect a different result.

    This column along with many other well-meaning Nigerians had pleaded with the president after his inauguration in 2015 to revisit and place on record for posterity, those behind the collapse of those enterprises as well as the main beneficiaries.

    What the president was asked to do was not new. President Vladimir Putin revisited the sales of public enterprises in Russia and compelled those who were not faithful to the terms of sales to return same to government.

    Putin’s initiative led to creation of millions of jobs for Russian youths and the economic recovery of Russia that was at a period a candidate for foreign aid.

    Chief Obafemi Awolowo once spoke of the greed of the Nigerian educated elite and their dishonesty. According to him, given a choice between them and the colonial masters, ordinary Nigerians would choose the latter because with them they are guaranteed of justice and fair play.

    A journey through memory will readily confirm the Nigerian political, economic, intellectual and military elite are the curse of Nigeria.

    Babangida, in order to consolidate his position after he and M K O Abiola had been used to depose recalcitrant Buhari in 1985 surrounded himself with some Aso rock political and economic professors.

    Knowing what Babangida wanted, the former convinced him he could decree political parties and also cut the umbilical cord between the old politicians and their political offspring while the latter fraudulently claimed there was no alternative to Structural Adjustment Programme despite warnings by the likes of respected Professor Sam Aluko who maintained  there was an alternative even to death.

    And that was the intellectual legitimacy Babangida needed to embark on sale of federal government owned companies with directive to his military state administrators to do same in the name of commercialization.

    Thus Ile Oluji Cocoa Industries was sold at give-away price while Cocoa Industry Ikeja was sold at an amount less than the cost of the land on which the industry was located, not to the children of cocoa farmers whose fathers’ sweat built the company, but allegedly to Babangida’s bidder from Kaduna State.

    The southwest military administrators led by Bode George were said to be instrumental to the buyer’s securing of bank loan.

    Using Margret Thatcher’s 1979 privatization exercise in Britain as justification, President Obasanjo and his PDP at the onset of the fourth republic sold off those enterprises Babangida could not sell before he was disgraced out of office over the June 12 debacle.

    However, unlike  Thatcher’s British  privatization scheme through which about 50 public enterprises were sold to about 10 million shareholders of Britain’s 52 million population bringing over 50 billion pounds to government purse, our own Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE) under Obasanjo, Atiku and El-Rufai according to report of a House probe, merely “supervised underhand dealings by privileged groups as shown by the sale of Daily Times, NICON, Nigeria Airways, Nigerian Newsprint Manufacturing Company (NNMC) Oku Iboku and Aluminum Smelter Company of Nigeria (ALSCON) Ikot Abasi”.

    Peugeot Automobile Nigeria Limited (PAN), Volkswagen of Nigeria Limited (VON), Anambra Motors Manufacturing Company (ANAMMCO) Enugu, Steyr Nigeria Limited Bauchi; National Trucks Manufacturers (NTM) Kano and Leyland Nigeria Limited Ibadan in the 70s, although not sold but were mismanaged by the elite.

    Automobile plants designed to produce 108,000 cars, 56,000 commercial vehicles, 10,000 tractors, 1,000,000 motorcycles and 1,000,000 bicycles annually with a prospect of providing an estimated 300,000 jobs collapsed.

    The thriving automobile support industry including Michelin, Dunlop and 16 battery manufacturing firms spread across Nigeria from Ojota, Lagos Trade Fair Complex, Nasarawa Kaduna, Jimeta-Yola, in Adamawa State, Oluyole in Ibadan and Nnewi in Anambra suffered similar fate.

    Importation and smuggling of used cars, sub-standard or used tyres and batteries, from China, Korea and Turkey have become thriving industries among Nigerian elite that ran the automobile industry aground.

    Criminality and lawlessness thrive in Nigeria because of absence of governance. There has really been no governance since the end of Obasanjo’s presidency in 2007.

    It is worse under President Buhari who has done everything to delegitimise his own government by some of actions and inactions.

    Those who are importing the labour of other societies into the country while our own children roam the streets for job are not ghosts.

    Past successive government as well as Buhari’s current administration simply lacked the political will to confront those who place their personal interests above that of the country.

    The setting up of agro-allied industries in each senatorial seat of the 36 states is desirable but as our people say – the virus that afflict the vegetable lives within the vegetable.

    With President Buhari’s ‘government of delegation by abdication’, the end products of his proposed agro-allied industries may not withstand an assault from unrepentant enemies that destroyed our once thriving pharmaceutical industry through flooding of Nigeria market with substandard drugs, the automotive support industry with the popular Michelin and Dunlop tyres the Exide and Ibeafo batteries with China-faked substitutes and the sabotage of the textile industries costing the nation an annual import bill of over $4bn.

  • Complicity of Africa’s political leadership in Blacks’ humiliation

    Complicity of Africa’s political leadership in Blacks’ humiliation

    Jide Osuntokun

     

    Is it not strange that the only continent where people have not demonstrated in large numbers against the recent slaughter of African-Americans is Africa which should have been at the forefront of the global protest? There were inconsequential demonstrations in Lagos, Cairo and Nairobi.

    One would have expected bigger demonstrations in Nigeria and South Africa at least. Yet, our ancestors collaborated with white slavers who carried hapless and helpless Africans across the Atlantic in a triangular trade in black cargoes between Europe, Africa and the Americas over a period of 400 years from the 15th to the 19th century.

    The number of our people that were landed in the Americas ranged between 25 and 50 million and those who perished or were thrown out of the ships when sick in the stormy voyage from Africa to the Americas and the Caribbean may have been in their millions.

    For all those years, blacks tilled the ground without any fees thereby providing cheap labour for the capitalist development of the new world. The profit from this trade provided the source of the development of the Americas and Europe itself.

    The late Professor Eric Williams  who later became prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago in his famous book “Capitalism and Slavery” demolished the theory of humanitarianism being responsible for the abolition of the trade and argued that it was the rivalry between the ascendant East Indian interest in Britain which provided alternative source of sugar that mobilized parliament to pass the abolition bill of 1803 and not William Wilberforce who may just have jumped on the bandwagon when abolition became a possibility.

    In any case the trade continued till the 1880s before it was permanently stopped while slavery in the British Empire continued till 1833 and in America till 1865.

    Dr Walter Rodney in his books “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa” and his  doctoral dissertation on “The History of the Upper Guinea Coast” compared the level of  development in Europe and Africa in the 15th and 16th centuries and did not find any yawning gap in the level of development between the two continents.

    The only difference was that Africa did not have the cannons and other precision weapons that made conflict between Europeans and Africans unequal and the undoing of Africa. Europe exploited this weakness to her benefit until Africa became ripe for European slave trade and eventual conquest.

    This short preamble is to demonstrate the fact that the slave trade by Christian Europe and colonialism provided the basis of the black man’s perceived inferiority to the whites who had to justify the slave trade and slavery by arguing that Africans were not really human because if they accepted the humanity of Africans, the slave trade and slavery would have amounted to sin and colonialism which followed was justified by Rudyard Kipling,  the British theorist of  imperialism  in his book “The White Man’s Burden” by saying Africans were “half children and half devils” who needed the white man’s guidance.

    In the history of racism, the British and their fellow Saxons like the Dutch and Germans bear greater responsibility even though  all Europeans generally bear a shared responsibility for racism .

    All races have the potential for racism. The Chinese for example see all non-Chinese as barbarians. The Japanese look at other Asians as good for conquest.

    The French have a cultural arrogance of being superior to other Europeans while the Germans see Russians and Slavic people as untermenschen (sub humans). Italians who are the descendants of the Romans of the great Roman civilization are today perceived as not up to the mark with other Europeans.

    The Portuguese and Spaniards who conquered and divided the whole world between them in the 15th century are now looked down upon as lesser breeds to Northern Europeans.

    Among us Africans, some look down on others as belonging to a people of a lesser civilization. This and our different tongues are the basis of African tribalism.

    The hallmark of any civilized person is to so educate oneself to realize the foolishness in believing in the superiority of one race or ethnic or national group over another.

    What can wipe off racism in the world is equality of power. International relations in its raw form is power relations.

    In the 1950s when advertising for tenants in Britain, one came across things like “Accommodation available, No Irish, No coloured, no Japs, and No Coolies (Indians) No Chinaman” (a derogatory term for Chinese). By the sixties, it was only coloureds and Irish that were not wanted; now it is only colored that need not come.

    In the race of life, the Blacks are now left behind. Who will dare discriminate against Chinese today? The long arm of nuclear armed China is there to protect the Chinese.

    Japanese technology and money have elevated Japan to the Group of Seven capitalist economies of the world. Nuclear-armed India is also seeking its place in the sun. The result of the unequal development in the world is the association of blackness with underdevelopment, inferiority and ugliness.

    The sorrowful part of the whole scenario is that African leaders don’t seem to be aware of the fact that the powerlessness of Africa has economic and political dimensions. As long as Africa is not respected, Africans will not get the right and fair terms of trade for their commodities.

    The so-called world price is what suits the people with power.  As long as Africa remains badly governed and its resources looted by African rulers and taken to foreign banks, Africa will remain poor and underdeveloped.

    As long as Africa remains buried in tribal warfare of one against the other, those who have power will continue to supply weapons for Africans’ mutual slaughter.

    As long as Africans remain in 52 puny states unable to mobilize its resources for development, Africans will remain unequal and discriminated against by others. As long as blacks in Africa and the diaspora do not support one another and continue to despise one another, they will continue to be humiliated singly and collectively.

    There was a link and correlation between African independence in the 1960s and the Civil Rights Act in the USA of 1965. As long as Africa remains a “shithole continent”, Africans in the diaspora will continue to be slaughtered like sheep without a shepherd.

    This is why we must break down the yoke of tribalism and micro-nationalism and build regional federations as building blocks towards continental unity in Africa, south of the Sahara. We should stop deluding ourselves about Afro- Arab unity.

    The Arabs actually introduced slave trade to Africa before the Europeans and slavery still exist in some of the Arab countries in Africa notably in Mauritania, Libya and the Sudan.

    One of the greatest mistakes made in Africa is that black South Africa let the nuclear bombs of apartheid South Africa slip from its hands. A black African country with nuclear power would have changed the equation.

    Young people on this continent must not hope for the day when other people in the world will treat them as equals.

    This will not happen until the ignorant political leadership currently prevailing in Africa is swept off the stage and replaced with forward-looking Africans who will shut the doors against foreigners and build their countries with their own energy and native intelligence before dealing with others as equal.

    It is the weakness of Africa in its own continent that is leading to humiliation of Africans everywhere in the world. Africa must cure itself of the disease of its leaders roaming around the world in China, Russia, Britain, France, Germany and Japan for handouts when all the minerals the rest of the world needs are in Africa.

    We should tell our leaders to sit at home and whoever needs our produce should come to us to negotiate with us as equals. We must stop the merry-go-round annual jamborees in which 52 or so African black presidents line up to be introduced as grinning little black children to Chinese, Japanese, French or whichever imperial powers that had invited them. Enough of all these stupid shenanigans.

  • Fasanmi, Fasoranti and Adebanjo and their unfinished task

    Fasanmi, Fasoranti and Adebanjo and their unfinished task

    By Jide Oluwajuyitan

    Ayo Fasanmi, 95, Reuben Fasoranti 94 and Ayo Adebanjo 92, old Awoists and pillar of Afenifere Yoruba cultural and political movement are honourable men. As noble men, they are a pride to the Yoruba nation. Unfortunately, they recently allowed inconsistent men who once swore by Buhari’s name, Tinubu’s name and Afenifere Renewal Group’s name to desecrate the inner shrine of the cult-like cultural association and the centre could no longer hold.  Today, the duo of Fasanmi and Fasoranti, with great pain to us, their children, lead different factions of Afenifere while youths who once looked up to them for direction drifted into over 70 disparate groups speaking with different voices.

    Ayo Fasanmi
    Ayo Fasanmi

    To the Yoruba, the commitment of our noble Afenifere cult members to the Yoruba cause has never been in doubt. It was their commitment to the unity of the Yoruba people who are by nature federalists that resulted in the giant strides in education, agriculture and industrialisation their people made between 1952 and 1962.

    But I am sure our revered fathers also know Yoruba never had leaders they could not handle. Sango fought wars and won territories after territories, S.L Akintola was an unapologetic Yoruba irredentist and Bola Ige was dearly loved by the people but they were all left to literarily commit suicide when they took the support of their people for granted.

    I am also sure our revered fathers know their people cannot be led by the nose. Awo, the sage as far back as 1947 had said the Yoruba would not vote for you because you are Yoruba if you don’t have policies that can positively impact their lives.

    Reuben Fasoranti

    To the credit of Awo and our surviving noble Fasanmi, Fasoranti and Adebanjo, who had the foresight to educate their people, the stakes are today higher. More than any other time in their recent history, the Yoruba after being liberated from darkness have become critical thinkers in addition to being discriminatory voters.

    In 2011, Yoruba helped installed Jonathan president. He spent the next four years marginalising Yoruba but only went to Sagamu on the eve of an election to flag off the construction of Lagos-Ibadan expressway which this column back then described as a ‘road show’. He set up a Confab where Femi Okunronmu played a vital role to show he identified with Yoruba quest for restructuring. The report was never implemented.  But the Yoruba people waited patiently for 2015 to pay him back with his bad coins despite the directive of our revered Pa Fasoranti and Ayo Adebanjo.

    It was the same story in 2019 when they campaigned against Buhari. The rejection of their directive by the people was not an act of ingratitude but a confirmation of what Awo the sage said back in 1947 that the Yoruba cannot be led by the nose.

    Ayo Adebanjo

    Yoruba desperately wanted the restructuring of the country. But they instinctively knew it was not going to come from Obasanjo who was the major beneficiary of the current chaos that literarily allowed him to climb the palm tree from the top by becoming an elected president without his Yoruba political base. They couldn’t have suddenly forgotten Pa Ayo Adebanjo’s confession that Afenifere was sold a dummy by Obasanjo in 2003 when he exploited their quest for restructuring to rig all the Yoruba governors with the exception of Lagos out of office. They did not forget Obasanjo did the same thing during the 2007 election regarded as the worst in our nation’s history which forced President Yar’Adua, the major beneficiary to set up the Uwais Commission. Relief only came to the west when Afenifere Renewal Group, instead of adopting the old Afenifere ‘operation wet e” approach to election rigging, chose to approach the judiciary through which stolen mandates in Edo, Ondo, Osun were retrieved. The Yoruba also remembered Pa Adebanjo after the judicial victory praising Bola Tinubu for liberating Southwest from Obasanjo and his PDP.

    Yoruba who hardly forget remember how Obasanjo has been pandering to the demand of the north since his first coming as Nigeria military Head of State in 1976. To consolidate his position, Yoruba did not forget he sacrificed General Olutoye.They remembered all his policies were geared towards appeasing the north over the death of Murtala Muhammed. They remembered that as against introducing  policies such as building more schools and training more teachers to address the educational challenges of the north that was according to Richard Sclar, Tafawa Balewa’s biographer, 70 years behind the south at independence, he initiated policies such as quota system of admission to tertiary institutions to slow down the south. As evidence of ill-will against Yoruba, Obasanjo took over regional economic and educational institutions including universities. For the discriminatory Yoruba voters, Obasanjo’s endorsement of Atiku in 2019 actually sealed his fate and our revered leaders’ intervention was a huge joke.

    Election is the most important variable in a democracy. Election must be won before any discussion of a party agenda. After the 2003 and 2007 election debacle, Afenifere Renewal Group seemed to be telling their fathers that they were the best equipped to win election. And they did. They also went into an alliance with a conservative north and for the first time in the nation’s history participated in running the federal government. The answer to President Buhari’s incompetence is not quitting but in working to ensure his success.

    The above narrative is important to let the trio of Fasanmi, Fasonranti and Adebanjo realise they are held in high esteem by grateful Yoruba they have served selflessly for over 70 years. They should see it as a honour that the people they liberated from darkness have in addition to being discriminatory voters become critical thinkers.

    But their task is not done. They must provide leadership to the over 70 disparate groups currently speaking with different voices for the Yoruba nation. Since it is part of our culture that a child brought to the world who does not strive to be better than his parents is brought to the world in vain, they cannot afford to throw away the baby with bathwater.

    All the groups are important starting with the Afenifere Renewal Group, the brain behind DAWN and Yoruba Academy and a group that has also demonstrated its capacity at winning elections and making friends outside the Yoruba nation; the Yoruba World Congress, an umbrella for Yoruba in diaspora. Professor Banji Akintoye who had worked closely with the group for over 25 years while in the US was recently elected leader in absentia by majority of the over 60 Yoruba groups that met in Ibadan. The population of Yoruba in the diaspora especially in South American countries where Yoruba language is recognized as official language and Yoruba religion has large following is said to be over 50 million. There is also OPC and some militant groups. Our revered fathers have a duty to reassure our angry and frustrated youths who today think secession is the answer to self-determination that we are a resilient and reflective people that choose its own wars. The Yoruba do not want the disintegration of their country but want for others what they want for themselves within a Nigeria that is efficiently managed. They must have good news for Papa Awo when they finally join him in the beyond.

  • Supreme sacrifice

    Supreme sacrifice

    Lawal Ogienagbon

    Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere – Martin Luther-King (jnr)

    BY now, the Supreme Court should be used to such things. The ways and the wailing of losing appellant politicians and their lawyers. There is no adjective that they do not use to describe the court after losing a case. Before they leave the court precint, they are already talking and spewing fire over what they perceive as “kangaroo judgement”.

    Mind you, the verdict is always described as such when they lose, but when they win, they dress the  court in superlative terms. “A fantastic judgement”; “their lordship did a yeoman’s job”; “aaah, that verdict will stand the test of time”, they go on and on. Since the court’s May 8 verdict in the Ude Jones Udeogu and Orji Uzor Kalu matter (better known as the Kalu case), there has been an unrelenting attack on the court.

    Incredibly, those who are expected to exercise restraint and educate lay men like me, are leading others in pouring venom on the court. There is nothing bad in criticising the Supreme Court’s decisions, but such criticisms must be informed and based on the law relating to that case. No two cases are the same except if they are related as per the issues at stake, fact and law. The Kalu case is a straightforward matter of alleged corruption preferred against him as former governor of Abia State, Udeogu, who was director of finance at the Government House, Umuahia, and Slok, Kalu’s company.

    They were convicted last December 5 by Justice Mohammed Idris of the Federal High Court (FHC), Lagos, after a 12-year trial. At the time of the verdict, Justice Idris had been elevated to the Court of Appeal. As a Justice of the Court of Appeal (JCA), Idris was no longer constitutionally empowered to handle the case which had gone round one or two other judges before him.

    To ensure that the case did not suffer further delay because of Idris’ elevation, Justice Zainab Bulkachuwa, President of the Court of Appeal, PCA, as she then was, granted him fiat to conclude the case in line with Section 396 (7) of the Administration of Criminal Justice Act (ACJA) 2015. Herein lies the problem that befell the case which Udeogu latched on to quash his trial and conviction at the Supreme Court.

    Section 396 (7) allows an elevated judge to return to the high court to conclude a part-heard matter, if given fiat by the PCA to do so. Based on Kalu’s request, Bulkachuwa granted Idris such fiat, but Udeogu urged the judge to hands off the matter because of his new position. His Lordship refused and insisted on hearing the case to its logical conclusion. He also refused an oral application later brought by Kalu after the former governor  realised the futility of his request that the file be returned to the FHC Chief Judge for reassignment to another judge because he (Idris) no longer had jurisdiction to handle the case.

    In law, jurisdiction is central to the hearing and determination of a case. If a court acts without jurisdiction, it acts in vain and whatever it does becomes a nullity. This is exactly what happened in this case for which the Supreme Court is now being  crucified. Should the Supreme Court keep quiet in the face of the breach of the Constitution because a case had spent donkey years in court? Will such action amount to doing justice to all the parties? Should cases be determined on the basis of law or sentiments? Where a law clashes with the Constitution, as does Section 396 (7) in this case, should the age-long interpretation of the supremacy of the Constitution be jettisoned because a matter has been in court for long?

    The position is and will always be that where a law clashes with the  Constitution,  the Constitution prevails because it is the grund norm, that is the supreme law of the country. The Constitution puts it succinctly in Section 1 (3): if any law is inconsistent with the provisions of this Constitution,  this Constitution shall prevail, and that other law shall to the extent of the inconsistency be void. Yes, a lot of resources,  time and energy was spent on the Kalu case, but that should not stop the courts from doing what is right in order to avoid a miscarriage of justice.

    Justice is at the bottomline of whatever the courts do and the Supreme Court, now led by Chief Justice Ibrahim Muhammad, must be seen leading the way in this regard. Where the lower courts get it wrong, as they sometimes do, the Supreme Court should and must step in to correct things. That is not to say the final court is infallible. Though the Supreme Court’s decision in Kalu’s case, quashing the trial and conviction of Udeogu is painful, it should not be upbraided for doing what is right in the circumstance because the outcome fell below some people’s expectations. It should also not be blamed for upholding the Constitution over ACJA. In Kalu’s case as in all cases, the rule of justice for all must prevail.

    As Justice Oputa, then of the Supreme Court, observed in the 1985 case of Josiah v the state: “justice is a three-way traffic, justice for the appellant, justice for the victim and finally,  justice for the society… it is certainly in the interest of justice that the truth of this case should be known and that if the appellant is properly tried and found guilty (emphasis mine), that he should be punished…” The question then arises: were Kalu, Udeogu and Slok properly tried and found guilty in line with this principle?

    The answer is obvious; they were not because they were tried by a judge who lacked the jurisdiction to do so. Bulkachuwa and Idris meant well in seeking to dispense with a case that had spent 12 years in the docket, but they should have done so within the ambit of the law. By not doing so, they acted ultra vires by relying solely on Section 396 (7) without recourse to Sections 1 (1), (3), 239, 240 and 253, among others, of the Constitution, which they, like other judicial officers, swore to uphold.

    The Supreme Court did not err by ordering Udeogu’s retrial and expunging Section 396 (7) from the ACJA. That is the position of the law and as the maxim goes let justice be done, even if heavens will fall. For the Supreme Court, this is coming at a very high price. That is a burden and not a blunder, which the court must continue to live with as the final court in the land.

  • Uprising against wanton killing of African-Americans

    Uprising against wanton killing of African-Americans

    Jide Osuntokun

    I was a graduate student in Halifax Canada in 1967 during the heydays of black protest against discrimination and all kinds of injustice in the US and shall I say also in Canada. I was therefore a witness to history and went through the mental torture of suddenly being made to realize there was something wrong in being black. I grew up in post-Independence Nigeria where we felt all things were possible if one worked hard to suddenly found oneself in a society where to be black meant to be ugly and unacceptable which  I found  jarring at my humanity. I was in total sympathy with my black colleagues who wanted to do something about the humiliation black peoples suffered in the hands of white peoples. I was very active in the African Students Union of my university quickly rising to the position of President of the association. I remember having chats with blacks in Halifax and asking them why they were not in the university to which they always retorted that they “ain’t got no business  there” which was a pity because there was a sizable population of blacks there mostly from all over Africa and the West Indies. By the time I left the university after my Ph.D. in 1970, its gates were then opened to black Haligonians. People like Rocky Jones, a black power advocate was already admitted to the law school on basis of “affirmative action” Rocky Jones modelled himself after  young black activists like Rap Brown, Stockley Carmichael, Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver, the writer of the fantastic book titled “Soul on Ice” which became a must read by students in those halcyon days. Some us daring black students used to go to Rocky Jones’ house to be harangued by “brothers” and “sisters” coming in from the United States to solicit our support for the black struggle in the United States. Our engagement was not as overt or as violent as those of black students in Montreal who in 1968 stormed and damaged university computer centre in Sir George Williams University which is now part of Concordia University in Montreal Canada.

    The situation of black students and presumably blacks generally changed for the better after the tumultuous 1960s which witnessed the murder of Martin Luther King junior and Robert Kennedy, the former Attorney General of the United States and brother to President Kennedy the slain United States President  and the most sympathetic politician to the black cause in the United States . There is a tendency to give Martin Luther King  and his non-violent marches all the credit for black advancement in the US  without acknowledging the role of the young black leaders who offered a violent option for black advancement for the whites to choose which  one they were prepared to live with . There is no doubt that there has been some movement in the right direction. There have been many black mayors, congressmen and some senators. Blacks have been appointed to the Supreme Court and a few of them have risen to cabinet positions in both Republican and Democratic presidential administrations. To climax it all, Barack Obama became president from 2008 to 2016.  There has been noticeable improvement in lives of some distinguished and highly qualified people. The question is to what extent has this affected the lives and fortune of black humanity in the USA. The answer is that it has not affected black humanity as a whole.

    After Obama’s presidency, his successor has done everything possible to rubbish his legacy. In fact no less a person than the former President Jimmy Carter has observed that  white Americans voted for the racist Donald J. Trump as a reaction to their suddenly realizing their country had been run by a Blackman for eight years . It must also be stated that while president Trump got the majority of the votes in the warped system of their Electoral College, he was beaten by Mrs Hilary Clinton by almost four million votes. If America were truly a democracy, Mrs Clinton should have been the president since 2016.

    Since coming to office as president, Trump who began life as a Democrat has moved with wherever the political wind blows to and has finally found home among the racist crowd in white America amongst those who want him to make “America great again” which is a euphemism for making “America white again”. At a time when America needs moral leadership, they have not found one in the White House. In fact, Trump has made racism acceptable in high circles of political and intellectual leadership in America. He does not find anything wrong in Swastika flag-waving Americans beating up other Americans and driving their vehicles into rival demonstrators thereby killing women and men who are asserting their rights to voice out their democratic opinion. He has been tweeting that when “ looting begins shooting starts” in reaction to demonstrators protesting the murder in public glare of an unarmed George Floyd, a black American already handcuffed but who the police snuffed out his life by slamming him on the ground and kneeling on his neck until he died when he could no longer breathe.

    The offense of this man was that he allegedly offered a counterfeit $20 bill to purchase something in a grocery shop. This happened in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His death was a signal for the explosion for pent up emotions against the police and those who sent them .This followed in recent times, wanton killing of blacks in the USA. In July 2014, Eric Gardner was choked to death by policemen in New York. In August 2014, Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson Missouri; the same happened in Baltimore Maryland when Freddie Gray was also murdered by police. Other blacks like Philando Castile, Alton Sterling and Delrawn Small followed. Recently, Ahmad Arbery was murdered by off-duty policemen of father and son in Georgia while jogging because they thought he was involved in house-breaking .This litany of blacks being wasted goes back to the period of slavery when blacks could be shot as part of shooting practice. Apparently the American police still think they have a license to kill. Most of those dying in the on-going coronavirus pandemic are blacks who have no health insurance or who have lost their jobs. This is the America where the police has become boogeymen to black peoples who are permanently made to live in fear for their lives, yet when America goes into one of its wars of pacification as global policeman, these poor blacks are the first to be conscripted because serving in military and its wars provide blacks avenue for advancement. Of course when they are demobilized, they are picked up or shot by the police for small infraction of the law.

    George Floyd was killed for using fake $20 which he may have been given innocently in normal business transactions. Instead of President Trump offering soothing words to the families of those killed by the police, he was boasting and calling on the Pentagon to deploy lethal weapons in the streets of America and also saying he will unleash ferocious and wild dogs on the demonstrators. The saddest part of this story is that he may yet win re-election in November when he runs on the slogan of guaranteeing “Law and Order” coded words for putting the blacks in their place. Thank God the governor of New York State Andrew Cuomo has bravely spoken in favour of the demonstrations while deprecating the violence and looting by people on the lunatic fringe of the demonstrators.

    There have been solidarity demonstrations in Toronto, Canada and some cities in Europe in spite of the restraining factor of the coronavirus. How I wish our young people in our country and the rest of Africa showed solidarity with suffering black humanity in the USA. When Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa made his inaugural speech on October 7, 1960 in the United Nations in New York, one of the things he said was that Nigeria would support the rights of all black people wherever they were in the world. We have now unfortunately arrived at an unenviable place in our nation’s political and economic trajectory where our voice is muffled because we have mismanaged all our opportunities and now where our voice should be heard clearly we are cringing before our international creditors who manipulate the levers that pull strings in the Breton Woods institutions of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to which we owe money or hope to borrow from. If African countries cannot protest  against the humiliation suffered by our people and protect  them, should we not be able to hide under the African Union and at least express our sorrow  about the plight of our people who continue to be treated as if black lives do not matter?

  • What we love will ruin us

    What we love will ruin us

    Olatunji Ololade

     

    From COVID-19’s torment, Nigeria resumes her tradition of descent. This country has resorted to her old ways; like the androgynous drag queen, ‘she’ has gifted the rapt visionary at lust’s easel with the whistling bum on her girder.

    “Come defile us!” Nigerians urge, few hours after President Muhammadu Buhari relaxed the lockdown. The nation coos in a tenor unbecoming of Africa’s supposed political and economic titan; titan is a strong word, perhaps. This minute, Nigeria intones basement giggle, like the proverbial ghommid plundering beneath Africa’s castle walls.

    In accepting the government’s ‘gift’ of freedom, Nigeria devours the worm with the apple. Nationwide, industry breathes, clerics rejoice and chant preachments of relief, and prostitutes cheer in a blanket of extreme poses, inviting private glances to their public pleasures.

    Other states may consume the worm with the apple but Lagos eyeballs it as a false fruit of rebirth; the city fears becoming food for worms hence Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu’s reluctance to grant worship houses unrestrained freedom to “fish” and fleece.

    As Lagos grapples with rising body-count and tally of the afflicted, Sanwo-Olu dreads COVID-19’s re-enactment of its Italian, American alchemy. Lagos must neither splay nor split to a merciless ravage of its innards lest it becomes yet another mutilated bower.

    Lagos is the epicentre of the coronavirus outbreak in Nigeria with 5,277 coronavirus cases, 48.8 percent of the country’s total of 10,819, as of June 2. Thus despite the Federal Government’s lifting of the ban on religious gatherings nationwide, Lagos warned clerics and worshippers against reopening places of worship – likewise Oyo and Kaduna States. This is no doubt a very shrewd and responsible decision vis-a-vis the Presidential Task Force (PTF) on COVID-19’s cancellation on Monday, June 1, of the ban on religious gathering.

    The government’s decision was stupefying, given the PTF national coordinator, Sani Aliyu’s admission on Tuesday, June 2, that places of worship are recognised as a major potential for spreading COVID-19 infection, as demonstrated in several outbreaks globally.

    Lagos had been having meetings with Muslim and Christian religious leaders during which the possibility of reopening religious houses was totally ruled out. Safe choice. It would be more sensible and responsible for the state government to place an indefinite ban on religious gatherings, of any sort until Lagos satisfactorily curtails the pandemic.

    Of course, lifting the lockdown has its advantages: industry may resurrect and the masses may vie to reclaim all that was lost and stilled, but of what benefit is it to the citizenry that the government reopens places of worship while COVID-19 increases its ravage across town and city?

    If COVID-19 has taught us anything, it is that faith may flourish amid private homesteads, far from the commercial offices and pulpits of merchant clerics. Apology to the ones that were truly ‘called’ wherever they truly exist.

    There is no gainsaying Nigeria stirs with an impulse for commerce and drama, post-lockdown. As the country resumes to familiar bustle and grind, however, let us not forget the lessons availed us through the lockdown.

    COVID-19 has its benefits; asides its merciless ravage and termination of livelihoods and lives, it taught families, societies, and nations to immerse and hover at the edge of a hitherto forbidden locus of experience. It taught us to read. It taught many to rediscover love for printed and digital literature. It taught us to hold our breath, and let words into our core, amid the rapid currents of life.

    The virus is spellbinding. It affixed Nigeria to a seat. It hurled roving parents into a stagnant spell with their wards. It fixed a book in several hands and ignited a hankering for news among the old and the young.

    The pandemic gave us order. Although the order was not necessarily just and kind, it taught individuals to seek knowledge at the core and periphery of civilization. It taught us to read to save ourselves and the collective. Every superficial and profound remark, article, or paragraph by a journalist, writer, reporter, and novelist, in traditional or new media, became food for thought.

    Through the lockdown, many people rediscovered life’s essentials, far from the guttural cry and antics of the maddening herd. It taught many to remodel their lives around a new normal. For some, the new normal manifested as a routine walk in the park, in the company of loved ones; for some, it was family game time and movie hour. For some, the new normal unfurled in an intense love of books and visionary literature.

    One would think that as the lockdown is lifted, development stakeholders, multinationals, the media, artistes, local and international NGOs, schools, and the manufacturing sector, to mention a few, would unite to give stimulus to society’s shrunken arteries. Wrong.

    Freed from the lockdown, Nigeria stirs to the lure of pagan sex and violence (saddening, sensational murder-rape stories), decadence, and chaos. No sooner than the lockdown was lifted than the camera seduced society to decadent realities.

    Enter reality show drama, where plot and dialogue become insolent word-baggage. This minute, the most eye-intense of genres restores pagan antiquity’s cultic fanfare. If previous reality shows perpetuated fables of lust and disintegration, the forthcoming edition will commemorate the internment of the pre-adolescent mind in a grave of delusions.

    More participants on the shows will personify a deep cry for help; like Hoyle’s misdirected mortals, they will learn from avoidable mistakes, not from example.

    COVID-19 made humans of us all and the lockdown thrust in our faces, the stark imagery of our mortality. The grim truth leered at us from the pages of literature, newspapers, and the Holy Books. Yet Nigeria returns to its beaten path: reality shows, deathly politics, and cutthroat commerce.

    The average citizen re-emerges as a non-person, subject to mass cheering and shunning; like a participant in a reality show, he lives life like a lottery. In pursuit of the sweepstakes, his imagination is once again let loose to roam, uninhibited, but his body is bound in ritual restriction.

    He becomes a daemonic tool, a sacrificial totem maddened by intoxicants: alcohol and human milk, fluid of slovenly genitals – the paraphernalia of shows like the BBN.

    Would anybody read anymore? “What Orwell feared were those who would ban books,” Neil Postman wrote: What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.

    Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumble puppy.

    As Huxley remarked in “Brave New World Revisited,” the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for

    distractions.” In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us. Apology to Postman.

     

     

  • The city is our plague (2)

    The city is our plague (2)

    Olatunji Ololade

     

     

    THE city attains dazzle by the exploits of both the government-activated mogul and the syphilitic slattern, but isn’t everyone some form of diseased hustler in the Nigerian city? Isn’t the wild and dirty ‘hustle’ the point of the metropolitan dream?

    From Lagos to Port Harcourt, Jos to Abuja, the Federal Capital Territory, the city extends its reach, channelling perverse sheen of modernness, by raping the countryside.

    It was hay, however, that allowed populations to grow and civilizations to flourish among the forests of Northern Europe. Hay moved the greatness of Rome to Paris and London, and later to Berlin and Moscow and New York, writes Dyson.

    Hay was responsible for Nigeria’s first brush with economic glory. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) estimates that between 1962 and 1968, Nigeria’s major foreign exchange earner was the agricultural sector. Palm oil and groundnut made up around 47% of the country’s exports. However, Nigeria’s position as an agricultural powerhouse declined through its oil boom.

    Understandably, President Muhammadu Buhari sought to revivify the country’s agricultural economy at his assumption of office in 2015, and then, 2019.

    Despite Buhari’s rural preachment, the country’s fixation with oil renders her a whited sepulchre sullied by wastefulness and vice, the soot that will not out.

    Nigeria needs agriculture, and there are good reasons for the administration to focus on agriculture. Agriculture employs about 70 percent of the population thus it can be used to drive sustainable growth prospects via a value chain that turns raw commodities into processed goods for domestic consumption or export.

    The government must seize the moment to fund diversification of agriculture to make it more appealing to a vast youth population that is spiritless about farming but might be attracted to processing, marketing, and other business opportunities along the value chain.

    The food emergency in northeast Nigeria brought on by the Boko Haram insurgency, infrastructure deficits, and COVID-19, and the government’s response to them emphasises the need to expand the agricultural sector to guarantee food security and nutrition.

    But while the rationale for prioritizing agriculture is sound, many reforms will have to be enacted if the sector is to flourish, argues Robert Downie. These reforms must also include measures to save rural Nigeria by the sheen continually sponged off its greenery by the city.

    ‘I wonder what they teach them in the city.’

    ‘That’s easy,’ announced Chonkin. ‘To live off the fat of the countryside,’ intones Vladimir Voinovich, Russian novelist, in his literary classic, The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin.

      Some truth, according to COVID-19

    Between craft and credulity, the voice of reason is stifled, writes Burke. I would say, that, somewhere at the crossroads of bêtise and discernment, the voice of reason gets bludgeoned and smothered to death by the raucous din of the Nigerian hordes – comprising government and civil societies.

    Nigeria should be different when the coronavirus is done with us. In truth, we have more to be thankful for through the pandemic. Much are the blessings that are very difficult to see whilst running the rapids on the river of life but they become apparent once we’re eddied out like now, the spirited Curmudgeon would argue.

    For instance, the streets enjoyed relative peace and less pollution by the lockdown – save for the few instances, when bandit-youth and hungry urchins invaded our neighbourhoods to dispossess residents of their hard-earned savings even as they robbed the kitchens of left over soup, semovita, garri and yam flour.

    Thanks to COVID-19, the world, and Nigeria in particular, have attained a better understanding of the essential and non-essential things of life. Nigerians now understand that nothing about the English Premiership, Spanish La Liga, German Bundesliga, among others, is essential to their existence.

    The African Cup of Nations, European Nations League, World Cup, like club tournaments are actually worthless endeavours, notable only for their hyperbolic chants of broadcast rights, player worship, and gladiator culture.

    Nigerians now understand, that, the Big Brother Naija reality show, among others, and its mob culture of cult-worship and media frenzy are worthless to our survival and existence as a nation.

    Now, we know how impotent, self-serving and incompetent most public officers via the government’s infestation of the country by COVID-19 as it refused to shut the airports and other entry points in order to let their wards return home from their overseas travel. We also know how assiduously the citizenry could work to trade their civil liberties to the impotent, incompetent government for a false sense of security.

    Thanks to COVID-19, we finally understand the extent of the affluent’s detachment from their supposedly charmed life: overseas shopping binges, vacation travel, and exclusive shindigs and ‘statement soirees’ abroad are all part of a perverse, wasteful, childish, performance theatre, often ill-conceived and worthy of scorn.

    Now, we know how recreant, corruptible, acquisitive, and fake social media is. We have realised the limits of science, its delusions of omnipotence, and fear of being shown-up or challenged by traditional herbal medicine.

    COVID-19 heroes

    The heroes of an epoch, writes Hegel, must be recognized as its clear-sighted ones; their deeds and their words are the best of their time. The true heroes of this epoch are the farmers sowing and harvesting our food, without protection and under persistent attacks by murderous herdsmen; they are the transporters and truck drivers, traders, and neighbourhood grocers making sure food gets to the markets and our tables.

    The true heroes are the medical personnel waging a seemingly endless war on the frontlines, against COVID-19, without appropriate protection and incentives from the government. The true heroes are the street sweepers keeping our highways clean; they are the police and civil defense officers, and other paramilitary manning our neighbourhoods and interstate boundaries; they are the military fighting to rout terrorism despite the pandemic.

    Lest we forget the journalists; the reporters, correspondents, writers, editors, columnists, and newscasters, who leave their homes daily without appropriate incentives and protective gear, to report from the trenches, the true nature and ravage of COVID-19.

     

     

    The dormant Ministry of Works

     

    IT is the height of transgression for a government and its functionaries to shirk their responsibilities to the people in times of need. Consider, for instance, the government’s refusal to repair the country’s bad roads during the lockdown.

    The Federal Ministry of Works is disconcertingly dormant, comatose, perhaps; for that could be the only explanation for its decision to leave major highways in a permanent state of disrepair through the lockdown.

    The badly cratered stretch of the Lagos-Abeokuta highway, among others, has become commuters’ major nightmare. Trucks somersault continuously at deadly gorges at Ajala bus stop, Meiran, Caaso, Agbado Kollington Bus Stops through Ajegunle, Dalemo, Temidire, Sango Ota.

    Lest we forget the deadly chasms that stretch from underneath the Sango bridge through Ota, Itele. En route Ifo, Abeokuta, Ogun State, the highway collapses in deep gorges at Ijako, Owode, Iyana-Ilogbo, and Papalanto, to mention a few.

    The Ministry of Works is dormant. The Minister of Works must be on vacation. Perhaps they await reportage and photographs of civilian deaths along the perilous paths and bypasses of the Lagos-Abeokuta expressway.

  • Need for institutional memory in Nigeria

    Need for institutional memory in Nigeria

    Jide Osuntokun

     

    In 1972 as a young academic at the then University of Ibadan, Jos campus, I decided to examine the life and times of Chief S.L.A. Akintola, second and last premier of the Western Region of Nigeria.

    This was strictly to be an academic exercise which would, as required by the nature of historical scholarship, be based on documentary evidence as well as oral interviews.

    I was also reacting against the problem of paucity of written documentation about the African past which students of my time in the 1960s encountered in the University of Ibadan which was then the centre of nationalist school of historiography.

    I was determined to play my part in ensuring that the generation of my children, if they decide to find out about their past, will not be hampered by lack of relevant literature.

    I am not sure my generation has done all it can do to establish a body of knowledge that would help elucidate the past and foreshadow the future.

    I believe we have tried. The Ibadan History Series to which I contributed a book cover many countries and themes from politics, war, economy, the press, Christian evangelization in Southern Nigeria and Islamic revolutions in northern Nigeria and other west African states and their impacts on politics and society in West Africa.

    They also cover early European contacts with Nigeria going back to the 15th century and the Mfecane the Zulu dispersal in Southern Africa as well as French expansion in west Africa and the different legacies of European colonialism in West Africa.

    When I began looking for official records of the Akintola administration, I was shocked when the secretary to the government of the region or what was left of it when the Mid-West had been hived from it, told me there were no records.

    I asked what was the meaning of that? He plainly said they did not have enough space for old records and that as soon as one head of government left office, they simply burnt all the papers to make room for the incoming administration.

    Needless to say, I was shocked. He then added the clincher that they did not even have the papers of the newly departed Brigadier Adeyinka Adebayo who had just been promoted to the rank of Major General and moved to Kaduna as Commandant of the Military Academy.

    I reminded the gentleman that there was a National Archive in the University of Ibadan not too far away from the secretariat where official documents were by law supposed to be deposited.

    As an aside, the National Archive has branches in Enugu and Kaduna. I have doubts if the National Archive has had any budgetary provision for years.

    I had for my self-imposed assignment of writing the book on Akintola to go to the University of Ibadan library to rummage through the brittle old newspapers from the 1930s to the 1960s covering the period of the man’s epiphany and assassination in 1966.

    I supplemented my newspapers sources with oral interviews in Ibadan, Lagos and Ogbomosho. Almost 50 years later in 2016, Dr (Mrs) Dere Awosika, one of Chief Samuel Festus Okotie-Eboh’s children wanted to mark 50 years of her father’s untimely death in the hands of military assassins by putting on record her father’s contribution to the economic development of Nigeria.

    She approached me to help with the project. The time for the assignment was incredibly short. I then suggested we prepare a book of anthology of his public presentation of national budgets spanning almost a decade and a generous introduction of who he was and the Itshekiri people to which he belonged to the usually uninformed Nigerian citizenry.

    I sent research assistants to the National Archive in Ibadan for relevant information. We drew a blank! Then we went to the Cabinet Office (office of the Secretary to the federal government).

    It was the same result. Then I felt surely, the Ministry of Finance or the Central Bank which Okotie-Eboh created would have copies of his budget speeches. That also was a forlorn hope. I then went on the internet and the University of California at Berkeley had them.

    They couldn’t be accessed online but one had to go physically to Berkeley, California. We did not have the luxury of time. I was about to give up when someone suggested we ask Chief Phillip Asiodu, a former permanent secretary known for keeping important records.

    To my surprise and joy, Chief Asiodu had them in his private collection. Should I have been surprised? Perhaps no.

    Chief Asiodu went through the portals of Oxford University and the university also went through him unlike most people who, as soon as they returned home from studying abroad, went “native” and forgot all they studied and the culture of organized life that produced the excellent institutions from which they benefitted .

    A country does not develop without institutional memory. The present is as part of the past as it is part of the future. One generation builds on the shoulder of a preceding generation.

    Any country that begins every epoch by laying new foundation and writing its development plans on a tabula rasa will never make it.

    Just look at the numbers of conferences, plans, visions Nigeria had been involved in dreaming in the last 60 years, each beginning as if we were reinventing the wheel and yet we have nothing to show for them.

    No one is sure whether copies of such vision documents lavishly funded by the national exchequer are deposited anywhere for future reference.

    We seem to run our governments blindfolded and always groping in the dark for a way out. It is not just the presidency that needs institutional memory, all our institutions particularly vital ministries like education, finance, defence, foreign affairs, need institutional memories.

    As a matter of urgency, every ministry must be asked to have libraries and archives. Do we have records of our gas and oil industries for example? Do we have figures of how much oil and gas have been exploited from our shores and from where? Do we have documents on each individual company involved in exploration and exploitation of our hydrocarbon resources? Do we have records on who and who have been running the affairs of the national oil company and their achievements and failures and what new entrants into office can learn from the past? Do we have figures of export of hard wood timber and consequent deforestation of Nigeria?

    In these days of computerization, whatever needs to be stored for future should be done. Certainly, all universities should have records which can be stored electronically.

    I remember going to my alma mater, the University of Ibadan, to help a nephew collect academic transcript some years ago. I was directed to an underground office near the zoo. When I reached the place, it was in total darkness.

    The place was manned by some elderly women and their boss who was naturally a man! After a lot of fuss, I was led in by a kind woman who knew how to walk in the dark. She unabashedly said I should hold on to her in the dark.

    We eventually arrived at a dimly lit space which harboured thousands of files. All the ladies searched manually until I gave up my search. They begged me to mention my experience to their vice chancellor so that they could be given a generator to lighten their darkness so to say.

    This was after I told them how much could be generated from their office if only they could computerize the place and run it efficiently.

    Anybody who has ever done social science or humanities research in France, Britain and Germany would have an idea how much those countries make in fees charged to allow users to make use of their materials.

    The Public Records Office in London or the Les Archives Nationales in Paris and the Archive of the Quai d’osay in Paris (Foreign Office) and their counterparts elsewhere attract professors and research students who in their thousands spend millions in those countries while on research trips.

    In other words, apart from the importance of keeping these records, they are also useful to nationals and foreigners who want to carry out research and if needs be, fees on entry can be charged.

    Is it not a shame that information on Nigerian affairs are not readily available here in Nigeria but are to be found in British, European and American universities and archives? This reminds me of an incident when I was in Germany.

    I was visiting Bavaria, one of the most important states in the German federation and a village was thrown in as something that would interest me.

    I was taken to the office of the Burgermeister (mayor) who surprised me by bringing out my biography of Sir Kashim Ibrahim and wondered if I was the author.

    Germans like books and venerate intellectuals. Is it therefore strange to anybody how technologically and culturally advanced the Germans are?

    Let me appeal to the powers that be, to encourage the keeping of records and fostering institutional memories of wherever we work but most especially, the memory of our states and country for the coming generation so that they don’t grope in the dark like their forbears about what happened in their history.

  • Lopsided appointments and nation-building

    Lopsided appointments and nation-building

    Jide Oluwajuyitan

     

    The mood of the nation today allows Buhari to ignore the elders, and if he so desires, seek from his Daura village a minister for Federal Capital Territory who would not cede prime Abuja land to a sitting president, his wife and secretary to government, ministers of petroleum and finance who will not jointly preside over the theft and disbursement of N1.7trilion to fuel fraudsters; a minister of internal affairs who will not fleece young job seekers of over N1billion and end up supervising state murder of some of them through sloppy arrangement”.

    That was this column’s September 2, 2015 call on President Buhari to ignore the reactions of Professor Nwabueze, Pa Edwin Clark and Pa Okunronmu to his first wave of appointments which they claimed heavily tilted towards the north.

    With the level of incompetence displayed by President Buhari’s APC government in managing our crisis of nation-building in the last five years, many will today readily admit we have merely replaced the impunity and recklessness of Jonathan and his ministers with the impunity, sectionalism and cronyism of Buhari and his ‘loyal gate keepers’.

    The basis of my optimism in 2015 was Buhari’s promise to make a U-turn from a 50-years journey through an uncharted dark alleys that led to nowhere  and return to Awo’s “Path to Nigerian freedom” never taken, which guarantees social justice for our multi-ethnic society that shares some parallels with India where smaller ethnic groups that cannot stand on their own form a federation within India federation of big ethnic nationalities.

    Most of those who voted Buhari in 2015 strongly believed the author of ‘Nigeria has no other country they can call their own’ and who Maitama Sule in 2015 described as: “a Nigerian with sense of justice and fair play”; was out to enthrone social justice.

    If he ever erred, his miracle-seeking supporters thought, it would be on account of impatience to see the country attain her potentials. Even those he had jailed in 1984 for reporting the truth that ‘embarrassed government’ gave him another chance.

    Disagreement over ethnic and religious representations are but symptoms of crisis of nation-building associated with multi-ethic, multi-lingual and multi-religious state like ours.

    Quite often, the answer to unity in diversity is a workable federal arrangement that will guarantee freedom, liberty and equality for every linguistic group, making up the federating state. This is never achieved through coercion, the option chosen by the military since 1966.

    And this is why all the self-serving military social engineering efforts such as JAMB, quota system of admission to tertiary institutions and federal character in recruitment and appointment have become of sources of disharmony than foundations of unity.

    But what went wrong? First, President Buhari has shown no inclination towards governing the country. He instead chose to abdicate governance to loyal gate-keepers who were not equipped for modern art of governance and who probably never shared his pan-Nigeria passion that won him the 2015 election.

    Forgetting the buck stops at his table, he allowed his warring self-serving ‘loyal gate keepers’ to substitute bureaucratic systematic processes and organized hierarchies that are necessary for maintaining order and ensuring maximize efficiency with arrogance, impunity and favouritism.

    The Presidency was in chaos. Without reference to the acting President, Lawal Daura organized mid-night invasion of Supreme Court justices’ houses and later the National Assembly.

    Abubakar Malami without clearance from anyone went to Dubai for a meeting with Abdulrasheed Maina, a fugitive offender on the run from justice after an indictment by a probe set up by the National Assembly. Malami even attempted to smuggle him through the back door into the bureaucracy.

    Forgetting that participatory democracy in a multi-cultural, multi-lingual and multi-religious setting  makes interventions of constituents groups and individuals in political decisions and policies that affect their lives imperative, the gatekeepers started to exploit the president’s weakness including studying his body language to fill key positions not on the basis of merit but tribe and religion inclinations.

    Yusuf Magaji Bichi from Kano was appointed on September 14, 2018 to replace Matthew Seiyefa from Bayelsa who had replaced Lawal Daura, a prominent member of Aso Villa house of commotion. Some elders from Southern Nigeria and the Middle-Belt claimed six competent senior hands in the State Security Service, who were from the South were bypassed to appoint Bichi, a northerner who had retired from the service.

    On September 14, Zainab Ahmed replaced Mrs Kemi Adeosun who resigned over NYSC certificate scandal as finance minister.

    The trend continued with the replacement of Babatunde Fowler as chairman of Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) with Muhammed Nami and Dakuku Peterside as Director-General of the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA) with  Dr. Bashir Jamoh .

    Punch newspapers in its August 1, 2016 editorial called attention to what it described as President Buhari’s ‘unprecedented sectionalism’.

    According to the editorial, “the president ‘ring-fenced himself with appointees from his northern constituency; recruited a retired military officer to man the Department of State Services; imposed a personal acquaintance as Chief of Staff, and loaded the other security and law enforcement agencies heavily in favour of northerners  and ‘in spite of public opinion, he replaced the immediate past Inspector-General of Police, a Southerner, with a Northerner, an Assistant Inspector-General whose ascension induced the retirement in one fell swoop of 21 DIGs and AIGs who were senior to him.’  The paper had advised the president to “rise above primordial instincts and become a father to all Nigerians”.

    On August 10, 2016, a coalition of Christian groups raised an alarm  not just  about the lopsided appointments in the security services, but also about what was described as the privatization of  the education key positions including the National University Commission, (NUC) the polytechnics, Colleges of Educations, TETFUND, JAMB, NTI, NABTEB and UBEC controlled by northerners.

    A prominent member of the northern political class and Second Republic lawmaker, Junaid Muhammed on his part had described the situation where about seven names he alleged are the president’s relatives, constitute the power behind the throne in the villa as the “worst form of nepotism in the history of government in Nigeria.”

    But as indicated above, nepotism, favouritism and lopsided recruitment and appointment are but symptoms of crisis of nation-building which according to ex-President Obasanjo “must be given continued attention to give every citizen a feeling of belonging and a stake in his or her country”.

    Even with our First Republic’s three regions (later four), there were struggle for federal positions. The response of the Western Region to the control of federal institutions such as Yaba College of Technology, University of Lagos and University of Ibadan by Igbo, the junior partner in the NPC/NCNC coalition was to set up University of Ife to cater for the interest of her people. That was possible because we ran a fiscal federalism.

    Fair and equitable representation helps in managing crisis of nation-building. But what reduces tension in a multi-ethnic society is a workable federal structure that guarantees social justice for all citizens.

    There is no part of our country that is today guaranteed peace with the export of insecurity and almajiris to other parts of the country by the same north that controls most of the security formations and seven of the eight key positions in the education sector.