The Nation Newspaper

Category: Thursday

  • Akinjide: Patriot, quintessential politician and legal luminary

    Akinjide: Patriot, quintessential politician and legal luminary

    Jide Osuntokun

     

    I got familiar with the name of Chief Richard Akinjide from about 1956 in my first year in secondary school when, believe, he lived along Onireke road in Ibadan not too far from Links Reservation where my brother, Chief Oduola Osuntokun lived as minister of finance in Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s administration.

    Akinjide was then a young lawyer in his twenties. He had trained in England before returning home to join the NCNC to which a faction of the Ibadan People’s Party called the Mabolaje Grand Alliance led by the mercurial and tempestuous Adegoke Adelabu had gravitated to, after Chief Adisa Akinloye had led the more bourgeois members into the Action Group in 1951.

    Akinjide was perhaps too sedate for an Ibadan politician. He was not given to oratorical display necessary for advancement in Ibadan of Adegoke Adelabu.

    He was a Christian like Adisa Akinloye in a largely Muslim city. Ibadan’s foundation as a war camp that developed into a rural conurbation in the 19th century, has to a large extent, shaped its politics even until recent times.

    The role of strong men in Ibadan history was decisive and catapulted it into an imperial city in the 19th century, a development Professor Bolanle Awe captured in her article on “Ibadan imperialism in the 19th century”.

    With the introduction of electoral politics to Nigeria, the new politics was coloured by the history of the immediate past of many of the people the British tried to knit into a political union of Nigeria.

    Between 1951 and 1958 Ibadan’s politics was more or less synonymous with the life of Adelabu. The role of Adelabu in the politics of the period is ably captured in the book by Kenneth W. J. Post: “The Price of Liberty: Personality and Politics in Colonial Nigeria”.

    Adelabu was a phenomenon in the politics of the old Western Region. He was at a time the leader of opposition to the visionary government headed by chief Obafemi Awolowo and later went to the centre In Lagos and rose to ministerial appointment under the NCNC/ NPC coalition government headed by Alhaji Abubakar Tafawa Balewa.

    Any young man like Akinjide who wanted to have any place in Ibadan politics had to worship in the shrine of Adegoke Adelabu. Adelabu had successfully psyched the Oyo Yoruba people at large to feel they could not play a second fiddle in a government headed by Awolowo an Ijebu man.

    This feeling was rooted in the historical antipathy between the Ibadan precolonial regime that was determined to expand to the coast for the purpose of trade with the white man as well as securing weapons to prosecute its wars against the Fulani occupation of Ilorin and expansion into the Yoruba country.

    At the time there was no pan-Yoruba feeling of uniting against external aggression because each Yoruba kingdom including Ilorin was in competition to replace Oyo after its collapse in the 1820s and this accounted for why the Ijesha, Ekiti, Igbomina, Ife , Akoko allied with the Ilorin  and why  Ijebuland and  the Egba blockaded the access to the coast against the Oyo/ Ibadan  forces.

    The history of animosity of some of the people against what was perceived as Ijebu domination in the Action Group  party  of Obafemi Awolowo would not explain the wide spread influence of the NCNC in the major Yoruba cities like Ijebu Ode, Ilesha, Iwo, Abeokuta, Oshogbo, Akure, Ado-Ekiti, Ondo and even Ile- Ife, Shagamu and Ila-Orangun.

    The earlier penetration of the growing urban centers of Yorubaland by the NCNC between 1944 and 1951 when the Action Group was formed gave the NCNC a head start in Yorubaland’s electoral politics.

    The NCNC at its formation was led by a Lagos Yoruba, Herbert Macaulay, grandson of Bishop Ajayi Crowther. Of course, the dynamism and aggression of the NCNC leadership in Yorubaland made the struggle with the Action Group almost a matter of life and death.

    The Action Group had the support of the obas and rich cocoa farmers and large. indigenous trading houses in Lagos and other parts of Yorubaland. The Action Group was like a guerrilla army that dominated the rural areas before making an assault on the big towns.

    Politics in Yorubaland was like war in the 1950s and 1960s. On top of this was the yoking of the Mid West with Yorubaland to form the Western Region, another obstacle which the Awolowo-led Action Group had to overcome because the NCNC was the dominant party in that part of the region.

    But because of his dedication and hard work, Awolowo led the Action Group to victory in regional elections between 1951 and 1959. But it was not easy. I know this because I was a keen observer. This was the territory in which Akinjide had to operate.

    He had to massage the ego of his principal, Adelabu, while confronting the formidable Awolowo whose genius in planning was unparalleled in Nigeria.

    Even within the  western wing of the NCNC, Akinjide had to kowtow to  Babatunji Olowoofoyeku and Joseph Fadahunsi  of Ijeshaland, Kolawole Balogun of Oshogbo, Remi Fani-Kayode of Ife-Ila  Orangun area and the likes of Adeoye Adisa, Durosaro and Lekan Salami in his Ibadan redoubt after the death of Adelabu in a ghastly car accident on Lagos-Ibadan road in March 1958.

    But as a young man, time was on Richard Akinjide’s side. He was secretary-general of the western wing of the NCNC and was elected to parliament in Lagos in 1954 and re-elected in 1959. By this time, Awolowo had moved from Ibadan to Lagos in expectation of becoming prime minister in the event of the victory of his party in the 1959 federal election.

    Chief Ladoke Akintola, the leader of opposition in Lagos had been switched to the premiership of western Nigeria.  By this time the Ijebu leadership bogey in the Action Group was no longer an issue and Ibadan politics had to be fought on issues such as taxation and commodity price particularly of cocoa.

    Akintola as a politician was also equal to whatever the voluble politicians in the NCNC was capable of throwing at the Action Group.

    Everything appeared peaceful in the Western Region until crisis broke out in the Action Group in 1961-1962 occasioning a declaration of emergency rule in Western Nigeria following fighting in the Western House of Assembly in Ibadan in 1962.

    The crisis in the Action Group arose as a result of personality crisis between Awolowo and Akintola stoked by external forces in the NCNC in particular and their NPC partner in the coalition federal government at the centre. The reasons for the crisis had been discussed by several authors including my humble self.

    It will however suffice to say the Nigerian crisis began in the West as a result of frustration among the leaders of the Action Group following their inability to have a role in independent Nigeria commensurate with their ability and the resources of their region.

    The over-ambition of the NCNC in particular to take over the government of the West as a first step in their strategy to dominate the whole country contributed to the crisis. Chief Akintola out played them when he turned the table against them by exposing the party as an instrument of ethnic domination in which the Yoruba wing of the party was a mere onlooker.

    In this way, he snatched the western wing of the party from the main party and with his own wing of the Action Group then called the United People’s Party, formed the NNDP in 1964. Akinjide became the secretary general.

    The party then went into an alliance with the NPC to confront the alliance of the rumps of the NCNC and the Action Group in the 1964 poorly managed federal election.

    The resultant government saw Akinjide playing a prominent role as minister of education. He was very decisive in balancing the lopsided appointments in the ministry which saw virtually all important federal institutions in the country headed by people from Eastern Nigeria.

    He followed this up by ensuring equitable distribution of federal scholarships to higher institutions to previously excluded ethnic groups.

    There was no way he could do this without creating ethnic tensions but he refused to yield his position. His action I must say, got the support of those opposed to his politics in Yorubaland.

    The NCNC and the Action Group were determined to fight back. The Western Nigerian elections of 1965 provided a redline on which the two parties decided to make a stand.

    The elections were flagrantly rigged. Then all hell broke loose and “operation wet e” was launched against the government and petrol was liberally poured on prominent government supporters including obas who were then set on fire.

    This presaged the coup d’état of January 15, 1966 in which the prime minister of the federation Alhaji Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, the minister of finance, Chief Festus Samuel Okotie-Eboh, the premiers of the North, Alhaji Ahmadu Bello and the West, Chief Akintola were brutally killed.

    Many senior army officers like the two brigade commanders, Brigadier Adesujo Ademulegun and his wife, and Zakariyau Maimalari as well as colonels Ralph Shodeinde, Kur Muhammad, Lt. Colonels Abogo Largema, James Pam and Lieutenant Arthur Unegbe were murdered.

    The sectional nature of the Chukuma Nzeogwu coup led to a reprisal coup in July 1966 which saw the death initially of officers from the East but then deteriorated to mass murder of innocent civilians of Eastern origin.

    This was the signal for the civil war from 1967 to 1970 during which millions of unfortunate people in Eastern Nigeria died as a result of military action or collateral damage of starvation. Chief Akinjide managed to escape being killed because of the prominent role he played in balancing the ethnic equation at the centre.

    He refused to serve in any military administration particularly in Western Nigeria even when offered a post during the civil war between 1967 and 1970. He however played a major role in the constitutional drafting committee headed by Chief Rotimi Williams in 1978-1979.

    When the ban on politics was lifted in 1979, he and the remnants of the Akintola group in Yorubaland teamed up with northerners and some easterners to form the National Party of Nigeria (NPN).

    He stood for the gubernatorial election against Chief Bola Ige of the Awolowo-led Unity Party of Nigeria and lost. He was Shehu Shagari’s lawyer who argued that since he won two-thirds of the votes in 12 states and two-thirds of two thirds in the 13th state  out of 19 states instead of 13 out of 19 states, he had fulfilled the electoral requirements demanding winning at least in two thirds of the 19 states of the federation and should therefore be declared winner.

    Awolowo took the case to the Supreme Court and lost a fruitless battle in which the military was backing Shagari. Akinjide because of his role in the judicial process became persona non grata among the Yoruba who felt he sold his soul to the north just in exchange for the post of attorney general of the federation.

    The subsequent Shagari government was absolutely ineffective, inept and corrupt and by December 1983, it was thrown out of power after a shambolic re-election in 1983.

    Once beaten twice shy, Akinjide escaped to London for a decade or so practicing very lucrative legal profession including giving consultancy service to the Abacha government in Nigeria’s case with the Cameroons over the ownership of Bakasi peninsula.

    When after 16 years in the saddle  from 1983 to 1999, the military installed one of themselves as civilian president, Akinjide joined the then ruling party the PDP (People’s Democratic Party), this time as one of the patrons and got his daughter, Jumoke appointed minister in the Jonathan government, an appointment which got her into trouble over sharing of campaign funds which were alleged to have been diverted from funds meant for military operations against Boko Haram. The case was still pending when Akinjide died at the age of 89.

    Chief Akinjide was a scholar politician who along with other intellectuals at the University of Ibadan in mid-1960s published a broadsheet called “The Nigerian Opinion” to challenge political orthodoxy of the time and to interrogate extant political dogmas and the structural political configuration militating against progress of Nigeria.

    Akinjide found his niche among scholars while also engaged in political realism of party politics. The Nigerian politics of his time did not rise above ethnic competition for jobs but he tried to bring a sense of balance to the competition by insisting on fairness and equity.

    He seemed to have suffered a disconnect between himself and his Ibadan constituency, the more involved he got with national politics. His aspiration for national leadership role reduced his influence in Ibadan.

    On the whole, he seemed to have ended up disillusioned about what present day Nigerian politics has become where there is absolutely no sense of building a nation from the multitude of ethnic groups and where “a winner takes all” philosophy seems to pervade politics.

    He began as a young idealist rooted in Ibadan local politics then rose to national preeminence but ended as a Yoruba leader licking his wounds along with his ethnic cohorts and bemoaning the inequality of the present structure of the country and its government.

     

     

  • The crowd in resistance to Covid-19 lockdown

    The crowd in resistance to Covid-19 lockdown

    Jide Osuntokun

    When the news of the arrival of what originally was an unknown ailment akin to flu broke out in Wuhan China, nobody outside China had a clue about what was coming to their own part of the planet. It was not only Donald Trump who was calling it the “Chinese or China virus” many people did not think it will later become a pandemic plague affecting the whole world. This pestilence has radically changed the world and the world will never be the same. Any one or any country that would continue as before will live to regret it. The Spanish influenza of 1918-1919 killed about 15million people worldwide. No one knows how many people this one will kill. The best scenario is that it will kill any figure from 300,000 to 3.3 million in Africa alone in its first wave. If this is true, the figure for Nigeria will range between 75,000 to 825,000. May this scenario not come true.

    When our government took so long studying the situation, I was one of the impatient commentators who felt we were dealing slowly with what was an emergency. Eventually our governments both at state and federal levels came up with different approaches to the problem of saving the people from death especially in the face of an unrelenting pandemic. We have, by the divine grace of the Almighty God, been given time to prepare, unlike countries in Europe and America which were hit with immediate morbidity and mortality of the pandemic within a short time. Countries in Europe were so hard hit that severe measures of total lockdown were taken in countries like Spain, Italy, France and Germany before Britain muddled through, leading to high mortality that may well beat the experience in Italy and Spain. The United States with its population of 332 million spread over a vast continental land mass could not order a lockdown of the whole country and had to leave each state to deal with the issue as it affected them. It is understandable while America could not lockdown the whole country like China did for months. The US is a democratic country operating a federal constitution. The result of its inability to take strong measures and force them down the throats of its citizens is the ballooning mortality centring on the coronavirus epicentre in New York. Even the limited lockdown has led to resistance in many states in the United States.

    The resistance is being encouraged and organized by conservative political groups enjoying the support of President Donald Trump who in several tweets is calling on Americans particularly in states run by Democratic Party governors to “liberate their states”. We now have several rowdy people coming to the streets asking their governments to open up the country to business and commerce as if the pandemic does not exist. This is a strange reaction to a pandemic that has no cure and can only be controlled by social distancing and testing to identify who is infected in order to prevent the wide spread of a deadly plague. Demonstrators who have in the past month lost their jobs are saying more or less that they would rather die of the virus than of hunger. If this is happening in the US and in some parts of Europe and Asia, one can only imagine the situation in Africa. Before the coming of the coronavirus, Africa’s economic situation was very precarious.

    When our president locked down Lagos, Ogun and the FCT, many of the states particularly in the south followed suit with one form of restriction or the other. Many applauded their decisions for many reasons one of which was that people were overwhelmed by the various scenarios of what damage to their health the coronavirus could cause. Nigeria is absolutely unprepared to meet the challenge of this pandemic.  All we can do is to emulate the action of other governments in other countries. It has now dawned on us that the different situation here in Africa perhaps calls for a different approach. What that approach should be is not clear to me. We do not have malls where groceries can be bought in clean and controlled environment. We also do not have electricity for refrigerators. But most important, our people have no jobs and some hustle every day to put food on the tables for their families. In the context of the extended family setting, social distancing would probably not work. The important thing is to recognize our reality and try and work around it. Distributing food, I believe, is too cumbersome to work. Sharing cash is problematic in an underbanked society like ours and sharing money publicly is rather an unwieldy way of applying palliative measures of tackling the condition of the abjectly poor members of the society.

    Corruption is so deeply embedded in our society that one cannot trust our people with equitable sharing of money or food to the needy. In fact, many will see this tragedy that has befallen us as an opportunity to make fast buck! Perhaps the network of mosques and churches could have been used to share money to the needy. The clerical people have always been involved in one form of poor relief or the other. The upshot of what I am trying to say is that lockdown does not seem to work and the present system of poverty palliative has not worked either. This is therefore the time for wholesale examination of what kind of welfare state we must build now and in the future in order to avoid total collapse of society. The coronavirus has exposed the fragility of our society. This fragility became more noticeable following the inability of our economy to provide jobs for our ballooning population of young people. This unemployed youth is a growing time bomb that may explode anytime soon – coronavirus or no coronavirus. The horde of unemployed youth in Lagos and Ogun states who trooped out of their hovels where they live to take to the streets and to form gangs robbing people in their homes where they were obeying the government-imposed lockdown is very frightening indeed. On accosting their petrified quarries in their homes before robbing them, the gangs of these unemployed youths sometimes lectured them about how many years they had been roaming the streets after graduation without jobs while their victims and their children live lives of luxury in their leafy secluded neighborhoods. All that these young ones need to embark on a revolution is leadership. Fortunately for the government and those of us in leadership positions in our country is that this crowd is at a pre-revolutionary stage. From studies carried out in the past, these hordes of down and outs called the “sans-culottes” and “bras nus” during the French Revolution may be useful in storming the Bastille, but they soon burn out if not properly led. The British Marxist historian George Rude  who specialized in the importance of crowds in history and wrote a seminal book on the “The crowd in the French Revolution” identifies how this crowd of disenchanted rabble can become a weapon in the hands of smart and evil and determined demagogues to bring down the entire superstructure of society. Just as the crowd can be very useful weapon in the hands of revolutionaries, it can also create its own grave diggers because of its excesses which will spark a reactionary response and the call for law and order which only a man on horseback, that is, the military can provide. It is therefore in the interest of democrats to ensure that their policies do not breed the crowd of the lumpen proletariat bringing down the pillars of society which will therefore lead to the emergence of reactionary terror in which the crowd and the democrats would lose out. We can all see the rising Jacobinism in our cities every time there is a demonstration or an industrial action or strike. Anybody who seems to have done better than the average Joe on the street is inevitably a target. There is emerging a fracturing of society along age lines with the youth blaming the old who are alleged to have mismanaged the country with the consequence of the underdevelopment of our country today. Nobody is defending the defenseless property-owning class in our society and who in most cases are isolated and are too fragile to physically confront their traducers especially when they are robbed either in their homes or on the highways.  In the recent case in Lagos and Ogun states, the police force was nowhere to be found when it really mattered. Should one be surprised? Not really because there is a class solidarity between the crowd and the police. The target of the crowd tries to help themselves by surrounding their homes with killer pedigree dogs and foreign mai-guard who may not be reliable or may constitute a threat to them at the end of the day or join invaders when they are offered a share of their loot. The urban revolt is a manifestation of deeper malaise of the unequal society which the post-colonial society in Nigeria has fostered. This is why the coronavirus pandemic must signal a radical change in the way we manage our affairs and run our governments in Nigeria. It cannot and must not be business as usual. If we do not tackle the problems of unemployment, population explosion and underdevelopment, our future as a country will be dicey. We better find leaders who understand the dynamics of the change we are seeing with our own naked eyes rather than leaders who are still buried in the politics of ethnic cobbling and permutation.

     

  • Kyari: A postmortem

    Kyari: A postmortem

    By Lawal Ogienagbon

    From the outset, everything about his battle with Coronavirus otherwise known as COVID-19, which eventually claimed his life last Friday, was shrouded in secrecy.  When the President’s late Chief of Staff (CoS), Mallam Abba Kyari, caught the virus, the media ran the story at its own risk because officialdom was not ready to confirm the report. The Federal Ministry of Health (FMoH) and the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) only mustered the courage to talk after his death and burial.

    The omnibus Presidential Task Force (PTF) on COVID-19 in which the FMoH and NCDC serve, holds a daily briefing in Abuja, but it never mentioned Kyari’s name until he died. Why? One can only surmise that the PTF decided to tread gingerly where it concerned Kyari because of unknown consequences. The task force was being careful not to offend Kyari or those close to him because it did not know how they would take the report.

    What the PTF did not realise is that Kyari was never the issue. What is at stake is bigger than Kyari and any other person for that matter. Coronavirus is a highly dangerous disease which can wipe away the earth if information about it and those infeçted is not properly shared. This is why other countries are not hiding information about persons who catch the virus, no matter their status. When British Prime Minister Boris Johnson came down with the disease,  the authorities spoke out, telling the nation about the status of its leader.

    Britons prayed for their leader while he was in intensive care in a public hospital until he was discharged and returned to the ward. The PTF missed a golden chance to use the Kyari case to drum home the enormity of the danger of COVID-19 to human existence. Rather than keep sealed lips on Kyari, it should have used him as a poster case on the need for all to imbibe the World Health Organisation (WHO) Protocols on how to avoid getting or spreading the disease. Those on the PTF find it convenient to talk down on Nigerians because they are small fries but lack the courage to cite the case of a big fish like Kyari to drive home the point about how deadly the virus is.

    It was only after Kyari’s death that PTF Chairman Boss Mustapha found his voice to tell the public that the unfortunate incident shows that COVID-19 is real. With due respect to the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, that is not true. COVID-19 had long shown that it is real by striking many eminent persons around the world,  including presidents,  kings, princes, prime ministers and their spouses. By striking Kyari too sometime last month, it brought that realness closer home, but the PTF failed in its duty to use the CoS’ case to strengthen the campaign against the deadly virus. The PTF was set up to prevent the spread of Coronavirus in the country and not to deliberately keep quiet when a big gun catches the virus. To do so, amounts to shirking its responsibility and a disservice to the nation.

    There can be no two sets of rules in the anti-COVID-19 war. Let no one be deceived, this virus knows no status, office, super or no super power. It does not differentiate between the rich and the poor nor look at skin pigmentation. Let me refresh our memories with a quote from the March 5, 2020 piece on this page: “Coronavirus is no respecter of status, age or nationality. Top government officials, including a vice president,  and some footballers, among others, have fallen victims of the pandemic”.

    This was long before Kyari tested positive for the virus as reported by the media on March 25. What happened in other parts of the world before then and how those countries handled their cases should have prepared us for what to do when the nation finds itself in the same quagmire. The PTF saw what was happening in all those places, but it learnt nothing from them. It saw how those countries handled high calibre cases. They did not give anybody, whether king or serf,  preferential treatment. Once you had COVID-19, off you go to the isolation/treatment centre. The PTF has been shouting itself hoarse that private hospitals are not allowed to treat COVID-19, with the Health Minister, Dr Osagie Ehanire, warning “my professional colleagues” not to treat such cases “secretly or in private”.

    One cannot say when the FMoH accredited some private facilities to start handling COVID-19 cases, but what is known is that Kyari went into such a facility on March 29 when he issued a statement on his status. But as recently as last week, Ehanire was still saying that private hospitals had not been approved to take those cases. Well, to every rule, there is an exception.  Kyari might have been exempted because of his high office, but the public should have been informed because of any eventuality as none of us has power over life and death. Let me emphasise that the PTF badly handled information surrounding Kyari’s case right from when he contracted the virus last month until he died last week. Even after his death, the double standards it displayed in matters concerning him are still there for all to see.

    Just last week,  it said victims’ remains would not be released to their families for burial as the bodies are still contagious. But that same week, it allowed Kyari’s remains to be buried on Saturday in a public cemetery with a large number of people in attendance, who flouted all known safety measures for preventing the spread of the virus. Reacting to this development on Monday, it apologised for what happened on Saturday, claiming that there is no known WHO Protocol that says COVID-19 victims’ bodies are contagious. Why then did it wait till Kyari’s death to make that clarification?

    So, will families, henceforth, be allowed to collect their relations’ bodies for interment? What is sauce for the goose should be sauce for the gander. May Kyari find rest in the Lord’s bosom.

    Akinjide’s 12 2/3 moniker

    How did Chief Richard Osuolale Akinjide (SAN), who died on Tuesday, come about the nickname 12 2/3? It all happened in 1979 during the legal battle over that year’s presidential election. The electoral dispute was a litmus test for the Supreme Court. Everything hanged on its pronouncement which was being awaited on September 26, 1979. Sixteen days earlier, the Court of Appeal, which served as the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal, had dismissed the claim of Unity Party of Nigeria’s Chief Obafemi Awolowo that President Shehu Shagari of the National Party of Nigeria did not win the election as he did not score 25 percent of the votes cast in two-third of the then 19 states of the federation. The Federal Electoral Commission (FEDECO) had declared Shagari winner on the basis that he scored 25 percent of the votes cast in 12 2/3 states, which it interpreted as two-third of 19 states.

    Awo disagreed, insisting that two-third of 19 states was 13 and not 12 2/3 as there cannot be a fraction of a state. So, the issue before the Supreme Court, the Presidential Election Appeal Tribunal, was as clear as daylight: what is two-third of 19 states? Awo, through G.O.K Ajayi (SAN) argued that it was 13. Shagari, through Akinjide submitted that it was 12 2/3. All waited with bated breath as the seven-man panel of justices comprising Atanda Fatai-Williams (CJN), Ayo Irikefe, Chukwuweike Idigbe, Mohammed Bello, Andrews Otutu-Obaseki, Kayode Eso and Muhammadu Uwais read its judgement,  just  five days to the Presidential Inauguration on October 1, 1979. In a 6 – 1 decision, the court upheld Akinjide’s submission of 12 2/3  and validated Shagari’s election.

    In a minority verdict, Eso disagreed with his colleagues, upholding Awo’s claim that two-third of 19 states is 13. The majority decision, which the court said would not be cited as authority in future, paved the way for Shagari’s inauguration and his subsequent appointment of Akinjide, who has earned himself the 12 2/3 moniker, as attorney-general and minister of justice. Akinjide was among the best in his profession, attaining the prestigious rank of SAN with Awo, G.O.K Ajayi, Kehinde Sofola, Remi Fani-Kayode, Augustine Nnamani, Ben Nwabueze, P.O. Balonwu, Mudiaga Odje, Nwakanma Okoro, Olisa Chukwura, E.A. Molajo and T.A. Bankole-Oki in 1978. Akinjide ran a good race. Rest well, chief.

  • Abba Kyari’s life of service

    Abba Kyari’s life of service

    By Jide Oluwajuyitan

    Abba Kyari, a man who lived a life of service, died last week, literarily on his feet serving Nigeria, a country we now know from outpouring of emotions, he loved with passion. He had contracted the dreaded corona virus in faraway Germany where he had gone to negotiate power generation contract with Siemens. Without knowing he was infected, his last outing was presiding over a board constituted to prevent the spread of the deadly virus in Nigeria.

    Oh death the leveller, before whom “sceptres and crowns must tumble down; on the dust be equal made”, if only your fresh harvests could know what friends and foes alike think of them after death especially in our country where mourning often takes the form of elaborate celebration of both legacies of great deeds and repellent misdeeds, perhaps departing would have been less agonizing.

    While alive, Kyari, according to the media which possess awesome power to create and reduce celebrities to nonentities, saints to fiends, symbolized everything that was wrong with Nigeria: dysfunctional federal centre, resistance to fiscal federalism, the stumbling block against restructuring, Fulanisation and Islamisation conspiracy theories etc. He was the punching bag for disgruntled and marginalized Nigerian ethnic nationalities.

    With the president’s directive that public officials, ministers, elected governors, ambassadors, top career civil servants and National Assembly members must pass through his Chief of Staff, those who regarded Abba Kyari as the de facto president held him responsible for injustice, lopsidedness of appointment, instability and social imbalance in the country.

    He was a victim of many unproven allegations including alleged N500m MTN bribe and the commercialization of the Boko Haram insurgency war following his alleged stoppage of military arms procurement already approved by the president. Kyari never defended himself.  Neither did anyone defend him. The media did not even try to investigate.

    It only became obvious after his death last week that neither Nigerians nor the media that could not agree on the date of his birth knew anything about an enigma called Abba Kyari. Channels TV claimed he was born in 1952, TVC 1949, and Leadership 1948 while Punch said he was 81 years old! Despite being very conspicuous as a former managing director of UBA and an editor of defunct Kaduna based The Democrat and chief of staff to the president in the last five years, he remained anonymous until his death in the service of the nation.

    But one man who knew Kyari intimately is President Buhari, his principal and buddy of 40 years. Unveiling his friend last week, Buhari, in a tribute titled “TO MY FRIEND, MALLAM ABBA KYARI, told Nigerians that Kyari who he said “was made of the stuff that makes Nigeria great was the very best of us”. He said unlike his detractors, Kyari “never sought elective office for himself. Rather, he set himself against the view and conduct of two generations of Nigeria’s political establishment – who saw corruption as an entitlement and its practice a by-product of possessing political office.”

    And admitting by inference for the first time that the buck stops at his table, President Buhari had said of his “loyal friend and compatriot for the last 42 years, working, without fail, seven days each and every week”, Kyari acted forcefully as a crucial gatekeeper to his presidency. With dependable and loyal gatekeepers like Kyari, those who describe the president as ‘Baba go slow’ can now understand why a President whose style of administration is “delegation by abdication”, was sometimes missing in action or went asleep at some critical periods such as during the herdsmen’s mindless killing across the middle belt region or an attempt to illegally establish RUGA colony in Benue State without the consent of the governor.

    It must also be observed that Kyari was un-obstructive. Operating in complete anonymity, he did everything his own way. He even chose where to die, by opting for First Cardiology Consultants, a biosecurity-compliant facility, Ikoyi, an approved COVID-19 centre instead of making himself centre of attention in Lagos State or the federal ministry of health battling with increasing number of COVID-19 patients.

    Abba Kyari was also a process man. If there was non- compliance with President Buhari’s directive of “strict observance of the social distancing rules as prescribed by the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), safe hygiene practice as advised by relevant local authorities, that was not his own making as that happened after his death.

    And if he was not buried according to the Nigerian Centre for Disease Control guidelines, a big concern for Abuja residents, Kyari was not responsible for what happened after his death. In any case Dr. Mohammed Kawu, acting Secretary, Health and Human Services of FCTA has taken responsibility by assuring Nigerians that mourners who were not well kitted would be rounded up for isolation so that necessary test could be conducted on all of them to ensure they do not contaminate others.

    With Kyari’s death, his detractors including leaders of ethnic nationalities such as Afenifere, Ohanaeze, the Middle Belt Forum, party members, ministers and social media terrorists, our insensitive, self-serving National Assembly members will now have to look for a new scapegoat. He had waged his last battle against the National Assembly when he wrote them a letter over their 17 days paid leave ostensibly to prevent the spread of COVID-19 only to refuse to be screened at the airport on their return from Corona virus-invested Europe and USA.

    With Kyari’s death, the war is over. Many have now seen the light. The president’s wife, Aisha who led the crusade to free her husband from a cabal allegedly led by Kyari has offered her sympathies to the Kyari family and prayed God to forgive his sins. For Lawan, the Senate President, Kyari “was a man of deep convictions and courage, who understood his role and performed it with uncommon dedication” and for Femi Gbajabiamila, his counter-part in the Lower House, “Nigeria had lost a patriot in the person of Kyari”.

    For Obasanjo “Abba Kyari’s death must be painful to  Buhari” while Tinubu, Obasanjo’s sparring partner, wants Buhari “to take solace in the fact that he died in harness, in the service of his country,”; Atiku was “saddened by the death of Buhari’s Chief of Staff,” while Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi, described Abba Kyari as “a forthright, seasoned and remarkable administrator”. For Malami, the “death of Kyari, a paragon of virtue, patriotic citizen, flung him into deep pain and agony”. Even the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) believes “Kyari sacrificed his life in service to motherland” while the Nigeria Governors Forum (NGF) spoke of “passion and integrity of a patriot who wished nothing but progress for his country”. Wike who described Kyari “as a patriot, trustworthy, humble and caring leader”, believes “he contributed immensely to the development of the country”.

    Others who are celebrating Kyari in death include Atedo Peterside, the ANAP Foundation COVID-19, Soludo Chukwuma, James Ibori, Adamawa’s Ahmadu Umaru Fintiri, the leadership of the Trade Union Congress (TUC), the president of African Development Bank, Dr. Akinwumi Adesina, OPEC Secretary General among many others.

    With his celebration by erstwhile political detractors and the Nigeria media that once demonised him, just one week after death, Abba Kyari was probably a man greatly misunderstood man by Nigerians.

  • COVID-19: Looking inwards for a cure (1)

    COVID-19: Looking inwards for a cure (1)

    Olatunji Ololade

    When politicians think they are writing history, says Rafael Behr, they are often just doodling in its margins. I agree. I would also argue in Behr-speak, that someday, President Muhammadu Buhari would look back and wish he had done more, and faster, to avert the spread of the coronavirus aka COVID-19.

    Buhari would wish that he had hastened the country into lockdown sooner, but by humane palliatives; planned better the logistics of testing and supplying protective equipment. And, yes, how much he wishes those things will depend on how harshly he is judged by his specific actions or inaction. The same applies to Nigeria’s lawmakers and 36 state governors.

    As the infection rates escalate, Nigerians must understand that it is not their fault that COVID-19 spreads like wildfire. It is the government’s fault. By hook or crook, via negligence and deliberate malfeasance, the government facilitated the invasion of the country by COVID-19.

    By refusing to shut the airports and land borders, the government imported the gothic virus from its hotspots in the so-called first world of castles and abbeys, invasive technology and modern medicine, into the sublime theatre of Nigeria’s desolate nature.

    But COVID-19’s invasion of Nigerian space is just another cul-de-sac. The presidential cabinet, National Assembly, and 36 state governors, despite their habitual dunderheadedness in matters of development, education and health matters, brilliantly converts the country into a rotting sepulchre by their reaction to the pandemic.

    State governors, except Dapo Abiodun of Ogun State, enforce the lockdown like some punitive measure. Despite his shortcomings in several areas, Abiodun adopts a humane measure, allowing the citizenry brief windows to stock up provisions before effecting the lockdown.

    Yet some government agents, partners and law enforcers maniacally enforce the lockdown like a punishment. In a viral video, three police officers could be seen attacking a defenceless woman violently with sticks and canes. There in lies the failure of government resource staff orientation, public communication and the intervention efforts.

    Of course, you may come by a few diligent, pleasant and amiable officers, whose demeanour exemplifies sterling humaneness, candour and courtesy to the citizenry they were appointed to serve.

    Then we have the publicity junkies and accidental celebrities among commissioners, cabinet ministers and state governors, whose demeanour lacks the finesse, maturity, humility and compassion required of public officers, especially in a time of crisis.

    Yes, Governor Babajide Sanwoolu and his team have been making commendable efforts in enlightening Lagosians about the pandemic while instituting ameliorative strategies.

    Subsequent weeks would herald an upsurge in infection rates; the figures will escalate and incite fears among the citizenry. The citizenry need not worry. There is no need for panic. Rather than instill fear into the citizenry, the government must make them understand that testing positive to COVID-19 hardly translates to a death sentence.

    Lagos has done a lot in this respect, although there is greater room for improvement on palliative and intervention efforts by Governor Sanwoolu and his team.

    But as the virus ravages America, Asia and Europe, doomsday predictors have begun playing to the script, perfecting their roles as scaremongers and muscles to shady philanthropists, big pharmaceuticals and medical research organisations. They warn African countries to brace themselves for grave consequences, projecting more than a billion cases and 300, 000 deaths on the continent due to COVID-19.

    The projections released on April 17 portend doom for Africa even as the staggering estimates resound a call to action. Medical experts and researchers, however, urge Africa to apply lessons from its recent history of battling epidemics such as Ebola and HIV, as well as lessons from countries that are currently hotspots of the pandemic.

    Experts on The Conversation Africa team, for instance, recommend the dissemination of accurate information, a co-ordinated and equitable response from medical and civic communities, and governments ramping up of testing capacity.

    To this end, the Nigerian government has betrayed flashes of initiative at curtailing the spread of the virus even as its social mobilisation and communication campaign is fraught with unpardonable errors and inefficiencies.

    I would add that African leaders, and the Nigerian government, in particular, look inwards for possible cure and potent palliative to the virus. Recently, the Madagascan President, Andry Rajoelina, officially launched a local herbal remedy he claims can prevent and cure the novel coronavirus.

    Rajoelina gave the official launch to a herbal tea claimed to prevent and cure coronavirus, according to an AFP report.

    “Tests have been carried out, two people have now been cured by this treatment,” Rajoelina told ministers, diplomats and journalists at the Malagasy Institute of Applied Research (IMRA), which developed the beverage.

    “This herbal tea gives results in seven days,” he said, downing a dose, and stressing thus: “I will be the first to drink this today, in front of you, to show you that this product cures and does not kill.”

    The drink, called COVID-Organics, is derived from artemisia a plant with proven efficacy in malaria treatment and other indigenous herbs, according to the IMRA.

    The principal ingredient in the drink is derived from Artemisia annua or sweet wormwood. Dried leaves from the plant are considered to have medicinal properties in Madagascar. But there is no evidence, claims the western media, to show that it actually works against COVID-19, a respiratory disease that has claimed more than 165,000 lives and infected almost 2.5 million people across the world.

    Despite reservations by health experts, about the safety and effectiveness of the herbal beverage, Rajoelina’s government brushed aside any such reservations and said the concoction would be offered to schoolchildren, as it was his duty was to “protect the Malagasy people”.

    “Covid-Organics will be used as prophylaxis, that is for prevention, but clinical observations have shown a trend towards its effectiveness in curative treatment,” said Dr. Charles Andrianjara, IMRA’s director-general.

    Corroborating him, President Rajoelina said the product will be made available for free to the poor, ignoring reservations by mainstream scientists that the drug has not been assessed internationally, nor has any data from trials been published in peer-reviewed studies.

    Rajoelina makes his claims in the wake of news reports that Nigeria’s Prof. Maurice Iwu had found a cure to COVID-19. It was hardly astonishing, however, that few days after the news went viral, the Minister of Science and Technology, Dr. Ogbonanya Onu, dismissed the reports, stressing that the United States is conducting tests on a ‘chemical compound’ isolated by Iwu, as a possible cure for coronavirus. He dismissed reports suggesting that Iwu had found a cure for the disease, adding that his initial finding was that the compound could cure SARS.

    It’s a very great shame that Nigeria still has to grovel before a foreign nation and seek the latter’s validation for what could possibly be her leverage to greatness. At this juncture, it is pertinent to ask: To what end are the millions of naira committed to health funding and research? How valuable is the role and establishment of the Nigerian Institute of Medical Research (NIMR)? How proactive is the institute in networking with sister institutes on the African continent, to conduct ground-breaking studies and find a cure to Africa’s most pressing health challenges?

    How truly patriotic and compassionate is the Nigerian government as it moves to curtail the ravage and spread of COVID-19 in the country?

  • Nigeria was sick before COVID-19

    Nigeria was sick before COVID-19

    Olatunji Ololade

    Before COVID-19, medical tourism was Nigeria’s guilty pleasure. An ambiguous sick rose coveted by the ruling class and privileged segments of the citizenry. Its a cavern of the unseen, where deathly tools manifest deficient healthcare and secret crimes of black market operators comprising quack doctors, organ harvesters and traffickers.

    Knowing this, President Muhammadu Buhari urged Nigeria to wean her heart of lusts for medical tourism abroad as Wordsworth urged England to wean its heart from poisonous food in ‘October,’ a sonnet of 1803.

    Like Wordsworth, Buhari waxed lyrical, urging Nigeria to shun patronage of overseas healthcare. Tough luck, Buhari; Nigeria is on her knees, enraptured by illusions, she sucks from the wrong spigot.

    Deficient healthcare corrupts nature. It violates the physical and psychic frames of its victims. Ultimately, it kills. Speaking at the Second National Health Summit of the Nigeria Medical Association (NMA) in Abuja, in November 2019, President Buhari, represented by the health minister, Osagie Ehanire, highlighted its dangers, stating that medical tourism would reduce if Nigerian hospitals offer quality service.

    Besides costing the country a whopping N400 billion annually, many risk falling victim to organ thieves and traffickers. They also suffer exposure to quack doctors and substandard healthcare.

    Simply put, embarking on medical tourism abroad was akin to hopping from a frying pan into the fire, sometimes. Picture Nigeria as the frying pan, how hot does it get?

    Just recently, photos posted by a certain Sawaba FM Hadejia, generated buzz online as they purportedly reveal the shocking incident of a surgeon performing an operation on a seriously injured patient on the corridor of the Hadejia General Hospital, Jigawa, with a torchlight, due to power failure.

    The imagery manifests as a sad commentary on Nigeria’s comatose health sector where hospitals are understaffed and doctors perform surgeries using torchlight due to frequent power cuts.

    Notwithstanding, President Buhari restated his resolve in his new year speech, to continue reforms in water sanitation, education, and healthcare sectors. He stressed his government’s liaisons with international partners such as GAVI, the vaccine alliance, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to access support for his social welfare initiatives.

    A few months earlier, Mr. President said there was an urgent need to address brain drain in the health sector. He said the Federal Government would like to dialogue with doctors and nurses, “to study ways of retaining our skilled workforce, trained at great expense to the state, as determined by the Postgraduate Medical College.”

    Perhaps he truly meant well. But Mr. President’s “candid” and perhaps heartfelt homilies deflected the moral questions triggered by substandard healthcare.

    It parries disconcerting queries arising from inadequacies of medical initiatives thus establishing the nation’s healthcare system as a major index of rising inequality, social injustice, profligate governance, a depressed economy, political corruption, and maladministration.

    Notwithstanding, Buhari persuades citizenry of means to ditch overseas healthcare and patronise Nigeria’s inadequately funded and understaffed public health facilities or rather, the extortionate private hospitals often manned by poorly trained staff.

    More significantly, he mocks the fate of the poor, unemployed masses, whose sad fate it is, to wither and die on the deathly corridors of public health centres. Some may encounter a conscientious, diligent doctor, who would pull all the stops to accord them a semblance of satisfactory healthcare from time to time. Oftentimes, they won’t.

    Yet health indicators decline in the absence of aggressive interventions to stop the medical brain drain. The Nigerian Medical Association (NMA) estimates that of the 75,000 doctors registered in the country, about 40,000 practice outside Nigeria. In the UK alone, it was estimated that 12 doctors from Nigeria are registered every week, with more than 5,250 Nigerian doctors already working there.

    The proposed 2020 budget of the Federal Ministry of Health was N427billion, which amounts to about 4% of the budget. This is despite a 2001 pledge of 15% of the national budget towards healthcare by member nations of the African Union at a meeting chaired by Nigeria.

    In sharp contrast, Rwanda has risen from the ashes of its genocidal past to evolve the most sought-after healthcare system in Africa. The country’s budget ensures that the health sector gets over 20 percent of funding juxtaposed to the Abuja declaration of 15 percent.

    The World Health Organization regards countries with less than 10 doctors per 10,000 people to have an “insufficient” number of medical personnel.

    Thus Nigeria’s doctor-patient ratio estimated at 1:6000 is regrettable when compared to the ratio of doctor-patient in India (1:2083) and in the United States (1:500).

    Currently, less than 5% of Nigerians are covered by the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS).

    Federal response to the anomalies has so far, being feeble. If Buhari means well, can he vouch for his kitchen cabinet, the legislature, and medical tourist governors? Can he show over 190 million Nigerians or thereabouts how his administration cuts back on frivolities and tames the profligate lusts that drive public officers to seek medical care abroad?

    The country’s poorest are worst hit by the state of the health system as primary healthcare centres (PHCs) lie comatose from inadequate funding, lack of equipment and medical personnel.

    Enter COVID-19 and Nigeria enjoys donations from presumably well-meaning politicians and corporate citizens. While we commend the generosity of donors, Nigerians must never shy from probing the quality of the donors’ citizenship as public officers and corporate citizens.

    What are their antecedents in public space? And why are the donations offered in eggshells of narcissism and artifice? Of the corporate donors, Nigerians must ask, “What is the actual nature of their corporate citizenship and social responsibility beyond the cloud of conceit and doctored media reports?”

    There are truths that no degree of spin by Public Relations units of government and big business could stifle. It is noteworthy that Nigeria is in this current mess because previous and current public officers, governments and corporate partners failed woefully in addressing the problems of the health sector.

    It is sheer chicanery for a governor or lawmaker to donate half of his salary, knowing it represents a minute fraction of his undeserved monthly take home.

    Consider the curious case of a lawmaker, for instance; if hypothetically, a senator’s salary is about N750, 000 per month, and his sitting allowance is N13 million per month. By declaring half of their salaries as donation to fight the pandemic, each would be donating N375, 000 to the cause.

    It would make better sense and manifest as worthy sacrifice if they give up their outrageous and undeserved N13 million sitting allowances for the rest of the year.

    How grateful should Nigeria be to a political donor who has taken more from the people than he has ever given to them. How thankful should we be to a corporate donor whose entrepreneurial exploits has impoverished several communities and destroyed large swathes of land?

    Some of the donors constitute the reason large segments of the citizenry cry out to God at night; by their exploits, Nigeria suffers neutered dreams and the escalation of citizenry deaths, from dusk through dawn.

     

  • The hands have it

    The hands have it

    Lawal Ogienagbon

     

    WE were not here in 1918, so we cannot say how that year’s Spanish flu pandemic which killed 50 million people worldwide was reported. No fewer than 500,000 were said to have died in Nigeria.

    Not only that, schools, mosques, churches, among others, were also shut then. In short,  there was a lockdown, as we have it in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Lagos and Ogun states today. So, there is nothing new under the sun, just as Solomon said in the Bible.

    How was it like then covering the most devastating disease of the 20th century? What were the measures taken to stop the spread of the flu? Were people asked to pay attention to their hands every second of the day as we are being told today to avoid catching the Coronavirus otherwise known as  COVID-19? These were some of the questions that crossed my mind as I pondered over the measures prescribed by experts to keep us safe from the virus.

    Whether we will or will not catch the virus, we have been told, lies in our hands. Our fate,  from time immemorial,  has always been in our hands. While growing up, our parents never missed any opportunity to tell us that. “You this child, it remains in your hands if you wish to become somebody in life”, goes the raw translation of the Yoruba version of that admonition. Indeed, our hands have a lot to do with our life. We use our hands for so many things. We use them, whether you are right handed or a Southpaw, to write.

    With our hands, we choose our leaders through voting; we use our hands to bath and to dress up; we use them to eat. We do all these and more with our hands except if  we are so deprived. Nobody prays to lose any member of his body because they are all important in their own small way.

    Our hands, which are an offshoot of our arms,  beginning  from the shoulder, are the major focus in this season of Coronavirus. Everything people say today begins and ends with the hands, especially how they should be kept clean at a time like this.

    It is all about being hygienic. Maintaining proper hygiene is the only way people can avoid being infected with the virus. There has been no other time than now that the importance of our hands is being emphasised.

    It is now that many of us are  realising the truth in what our teachers were telling us then in primary school about hygiene and the regular washing of our hands. I still remember how we were lined up in the assembly and asked to stretch out our hands, with our teachers going round to check them.

    Woe betide the pupil whose nails were dirty. He would be beaten with the edge of a ruler on the back of his hands. It was the days when teachers were teachers and acted as true disciplinarians without any thought of defiling their female pupils.

    These teachers led by example. They not only told us what to do but showed us how to do it. They showed us practically how to be hygienic through the constant cleaning of our hands.

    Read Also: Lockdown: Residents defy government’s directive in Ilorin

     

    There was hardly a classroom that did not have a bowl of water kept on a wooden stand.  At the end of their class and right before our eyes, our teachers will wash their hands with that water and wipe them with a napkin attached to the bowl.

    Seeing our teachers doing that, we did not need anybody to tell us the importance of this simple task of washing our hands after engaging in any chore. It has taken the explosion of Coronavirus around the world to remind us of the importance of hand washing.

    Perhaps, if we had imbibed the culture of hand washing long before now, the virus would not have ravaged the world the way it has done. Well, it is better late than never. After being dealt with by Coronavirus, we have all woken up to the truth in the aphorism that a child would only learn from earthly lessons.

    We have learnt our hygiene lesson the hard way. This is why today hand washing with soap or to apply alcohol based sanitiser on our hands as part of measures to keep COVID-19 at bay has become a singsong.

    Presidents have become ambassadors of good hygiene as they go on air to appeal to their people to wash their hands with soap regularly or apply alcohol based sanitiser on them, maintain social/physical distance, cover their mouths while coughing or sneezing with a tissue paper or bent elbows, all to avoid catching or spreading the virus.

    If nothing, one thing Coronavirus has done is it has made us to take serious certain basic hygienic measures which we hitherto took for granted. One that readily comes to mind is the washing of hands after using the loo.

    The hands again. Yes, the hands. Our continued existence revolves around our hands. And it will always be so. Do we wish to live to tell the story of Coronavirus? I am sure I know what your answer is. If I am right, then it lies in your hands.

     

  • On resistance to lockdown in Lagos

    On resistance to lockdown in Lagos

     Jide Oluwajuyitan

     

    A lockdown was on March 10 imposed on Lagos by President Buhari as a result of the ongoing ravaging Corona virus pandemic. Last Tuesday, it was extended the by 14 days claiming the “repercussions of any premature end to the lockdown action are unimaginable”.

    The shutdown has no doubt left many who depend on daily wages stranded. But to mitigate the effect on the most vulnerable, the Lagos State government has been distributing food packages to about 200,000 most vulnerable households with plans to double the aid.

    However, some privileged elites in exclusive residential estates who did not see any reason to make sacrifices have employed services of lawyers to enforce their fundamental human rights.

    Others including bandits and hoodlums who similarly do not see the relationship between the health of state and their continued well-being have taken to robbing residents of some Lagos residential areas.

    This development only confirms the fears of the owners of Lagos that many fortune seekers see only a city to be freely pillaged without giving anything back.

    It is perhaps for this reason, that a journey back through history will show very clearly that successive fortune seekers driven to Nigeria by Britain’s 1873 depression and the Fulani and Igbo that have held Nigeria hostage over control of Lagos since independence, have only one thing in common –reaping without investment.

    Britain, for instance, in a typical act of banditry, obtained a treaty of the cession of Lagos with King Dosunmu in 1861 only to depose Kosoko in order to take control of prime Lagos Victoria Island.

    Of course, the Fulani, after conquering Gobir, the star city of the Hausa states in 1804, Ilorin in 1823 was set for Lagos until their caravan was stopped in Osogbo by the Ibadan army in 1838.

    But it was a temporary set-back. Revealing Lagos was their ultimate goal, Ahmadu Bello in 1953 after an encounter with street ruffians who at Iddo train station referred to him and his northern delegates as British stooges for rejecting Enahoro’s “motion for independence in 1956”, swore when next he would be coming to Lagos, he would come with his sword to complete his grandfather’s interrupted journey to the sea.

    It was instructive that when Lagos became a federal territory, successive ministers for Lagos affairs from Alhaji Ribadu, Yar’Adua, Kontagora, Barnabas Gemade and Adisa were all from the north.

    Following her seizure by Igbo after January 1966 night of many knives, it was retrieved July 1966 by Murtala Mohammed, Danjuma and Gowon after paying Igbo back blood for blood in Ibadan, Abeokuta and Lagos.

    Murtala Muhammed, their leader, after ferrying their wives and children to Kaduna in a hijacked British Airways aircraft threatened to sink Lagos with dynamite and pull the north out of the federation until he was talked out of his momentary madness by British and American diplomats who jointly convinced him that secession by the north from Nigeria at that period would be suicidal.

    What else could have led a man who had enjoyed all the good things Lagos could offer including a wife and mother of his children to threaten sinking Lagos with dynamite but the fear of losing Lagos to arch enemy-the Igbo?

    Between 1979-83, with plan to relocate the federal capital from Lagos to Abuja, President Shehu Shagari abandoned the construction of the Third Mainland Bridge just as he according to Jakande, second republic governor of Lagos State, derailed the take-off the Lagos Metro Line project by refusing to sign even after the counterpart funding had been deposited in the bank by Lagos.

    Even with federal capital in Abuja, General Babangida, with the help of his minister of justice, Clement Apamgbo could not help coming up with Decree 53 of 1993 backdated to January 1, 1975 to confiscate choice Osborne land for himself and his cronies

    There are historical facts to support the thesis that Igbo’s deadly struggle with Fulani since independence was over the soul of Lagos.

    The Igbo’s desperate battle to take control of Lagos started with Dr. Olorunnibe’s refusal to step down for Zik to represent Lagos in the Federal House in 1952.

    Ozumba Mbadiwe was to later move the motion to take Lagos out of the West, a motion ignored by Balewa. The 1952 false claim that Zik was cheated from forming the Western Region government was all about Lagos.

    At the London 1957 Constitutional Conference, Awo was the only man standing against Igbo demand that Lagos be ceded out of the West.

    Writing on History of Ethnic Tension and Resentment in his Trouble With Nigeria, Chinua Achebe on why Nigerians hate the Igbos had said “Although the Yoruba had a huge historical and geographical head start, the Igbo wiped out their handicap in one fantastic burst of energy in the twenty years between 1930 and 1950.”

    He was right.  Awo and his AG manifesto for the 1951 election followed a survey carried out in the East which showed that the area had more secondary schools, more primary school enrolment, more hospital bed spaces and more tarred roads than the West. By 1959 however, the tide had changed as a result of resourcefulness of Awo and his Action Group and their free education programme.

    Read Also: COVID-19: Lagos ready for cash transfer to poor, vulnerable

     

    In 1962, Igbo and Fulani came together to fight a common enemy by illegally declaring the state of emergency in the West. They imposed S.L. Akintola, rejected in the polls by the people on the region. The Yoruba concluded that “bi iku ile ko ba pani, tode o le pani”.

    (It is better to first deal with the enemy within). Without posing any threat to the lives and properties of Igbo and Fulani across Yoruba land, they made the Yoruba nation ungovernable for Akintola with the whole region looking like a war-ravaged area with smoldering, burnt houses littering the streets of major Yoruba cities.

    This was why many believe the January 1966 coup could not have been about saving Nigeria or serving the course of justice but designed to help to ease the takeover of Lagos by Igbo especially after the constitutional crises that forced both Zik and Balewa to approach the military for support.

    Events during and after the coup support the thesis that the control of Lagos was the cause of all the killings. General Ironsi, according to Richard Akinjide, only needed to have sworn in the next most senior surviving minister as acting Prime Minister.

    But he instead took over power and promulgated Decree 34 of 1966, turning the country from federal to a unitary state in order to consolidate his hold on Lagos.

    Odumegwu Ojukwu even after securing his Biafra nation would not allow Lagos to go without a fight. His first action was to hijack British Airways aircraft with which he carried out the bombing of Casino Cinema, Yaba.

    Instead of defending his Biafra, he was on his way to Lagos after overrunning Benin where he appointed Okonkwo as administrator before he was stopped at Ore by Yoruba hurriedly formed battalion.

    To show Lagos was the ultimate prize, he did not forget to reassure Col Banjo that he would be appointed administrator of West while he, Ojukwu, would take the decision as to who to appoint administrator of Lagos.

    The current resistance to lockdown by a few privileged elites and bandits is but a confirmation that fortune seekers in Lagos do not often behave differently.

     

  • ‘You dropped the ball there’

    ‘You dropped the ball there’

    Lawal Ogienagbon

     

    ONE of the big revelations in this present administration is Speaker Femi Gbajabiamila, who did not hide his interest in occupying that office from the word go. If truth must be told, he has not disappointed so far. We got a taste of what to expect from him shortly after he was elected to lead the House of Representatives last June.

    Without mincing words, he said he would step on toes, if need be, adding: “we will shake the table”. The Number 4 Citizen has been doing just that. Through his acts and omissions, he has shown that being in government does not mean that you should not do what is right by the people.

    Thus,  we should not shy away from saying so, if he is doing what is right. Not many in his position can do what he is doing. We have seen how Speakers before him acted.

    To say that Gbajabiamila has brought a breath of fresh air to that office will be an understatement. Less than a year in office, he has shown that the Speaker must speak for the people and not the government of which he is a part.

    He does not spare top government officials who appear before the lawmakers. He asks them the hard questions, thereby putting them on the spot. Check: Hajia Sadiya Farouk and Dr Osagie Ehanire, ministers of Humanitarian Affairs,  Disaster Management & Social Development,  and Health, respectively. Farouk and Ehanire had no answers to the questions he asked them.

    Farouk could not give details about the social integration programme,  just as Ehanire could not say if health workers who are in the frontline of the Coronavirus war were being paid hazard allowance.

    The minister, who claimed that the health workers were only taking temperature and all that,  said: “I don’t know if they are being paid hazard allowance”. The Speaker retorted: “How can that be when you say the Coronavirus is novel. You dropped the ball there, honestly”.

  • Future of NNPC refineries

    Future of NNPC refineries

    Jide Osuntokun

     

    The management of NNPC, the Nigeria-owned oil company issued a statement recently that it had decided to give to third parties the management of their refineries in port Harcourt, Warri and Kaduna after the completion of their turn around rehabilitation rather than run the refineries themselves.

    I must confess that I see their decision a bit late and out of tune with best practice anywhere in the world. In 2007 and towards the end of his second administration, President Olusegun Obasanjo decided to sell the refineries to business men with demonstrated capacity to run businesses.

    I believe Aliko Dangote was one of those who invited to buy two of the refineries then. The reasoning behind the decision to sell the refineries was that annual or periodic servicing of the refineries had become a drainpipe to national treasury and a source of corruption of unearned income for people connected to those in power.

    Selling them was also in consonance with Obasanjo’s embrace of market economics championed by his friends in the West who justly felt state intervention in economic development in the Third World has not really paid off.

    From our history, we ourselves came to realize that “government business was no one’s business”. Public corporations merely provided jobs for the boys and gave leaders the easiest way of avoiding deep thinking of how to solve unemployment problems in post-colonial Africa.

    But after 60 years of independence, we should, if we are not mentally retarded, be able to think properly and do the right things to advance the development of our country .

    Unfortunately the sale of the refineries was canceled by Obasanjo’s successor Umar Yar’Adua apparently under the influence of his radical group from Ahmadu Bello University who wanted the new president to cut his umbilical cord with the man who made him president.

    One of the reasons for our underdevelopment in this country is the fact that we do not manage our resources well.

    There is no reason why a country that has earned trillions of dollars from hydrocarbons and agricultural products since independence should be vegetating at this level of underdevelopment.

    The way we manage our affairs is a magnet for corrupt nationals of other countries who come to our country to join our corrupt countrymen in the frequent feeding frenzy on our national resources which should have been judiciously invested in the development of our country.

    We all see people from the Asian continent for example who come to our country with nothing but the shirts on their backs, use our banks to raise capital which they use to enter into so-called joint ventures with powerfully connected people to access preferred areas of our economy with privileged information to make cheap money without any hard labour.

    When the late Professor Tam David-West was alive, he advised that these refineries should be sold because they had become bad investment.

    I had written on this platform several times supporting those who advocated the sale of these refineries on the grounds that the money being wasted on their servicing could have been used to build new ones.

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    I even wrote that the refineries be given gratis to the companies that built them on the proviso that they put them back to production. If done we would not have spent close to N10 trillion importing refined petroleum products  in the last 10 years and perhaps the new owners of the companies would have not only been paying taxes to the various governments of Nigeria, they would also have been earning hard currencies for the country from export of some of their products.

    It is too late in the day to be spending billions of naira on so called turnaround of the refineries when they could easily be disposed off as they are. Setting up another outfit to supervise their management in joint operation with a third party is going to a dead end which does not make sense. I pray that our rulers will realize that they are not ruling over fools who can be fooled all the time.

    It is a pity that our representatives in parliament do not carry out their oversight duties properly. If they do, they should have posed the right questions to the executive and try to stop this unwise and uneconomic venture of the NNPC.

    We just do not have the time to be fooling around at the time when the usefulness of the oil industry is time bound in a world moving inexorably towards non carbon source of energy.

    The concern for the abused environment and what that poses for the survival of the human race will, whether we like it or not, force the world to abandon the use of hydrocarbons in the foreseeable future.

    Whatever money that can be made from our country’s hydrocarbons resources now should therefore be judiciously and wisely utilized. Gone should be the days when money from oil and gas is distributed as handouts to political hangers on.

    The ongoing coronavirus has exposed our country’s political leadership to the growing anger of the youth who deprecate our absolute state of unpreparedness. There are no modern hospitals. Equipment necessary for modern hospitals are not present in the few hospitals that we have.

    Electricity without which a modern health system can’t work is unavailable and most of our hospital staff are inadequately and poorly trained due no fault of theirs. The staff we have are poorly remunerated leading to mass migration of hospital staff abroad where they are not only well paid but better equipped to face the challenge of practicing medicine in the 21st century.

    Good health system like the British National Health Service (NHS) requires adequate and proper funding and that is why the kind of wastes and unreasonable government practices in Nigeria will not be tolerated in other countries and we should henceforth not tolerate it in Nigeria.

    This is why the so-called farming out the running of refineries to third parties in Nigeria must be stopped. The contracts for the turnaround of the refineries must be cancelled and replaced by outright sale or giving out the refineries free of charge to those who built them with the condition that they make them work.

    The benefit immediately to Nigeria is the husbanding of our resources and saving the yearly one trillion naira that would have gone into refined petroleum importation which is in itself marred with corruption as well as the millions of dollars for turnaround servicing of the dollar guzzling refineries.

    This present government cannot be talking about blocking the loopholes in government spending while tolerating the shenanigans going on in the NNPC.

    Business cannot continue and must not continue as before if and when we survive the coronavirus which has exposed our soft underbelly of absolute unpreparedness. The work of government needs to be taken more seriously as from this time on.

    Our people have become very sensitive to maladministration at every level of government. The present stimulus package as palliative for the hardship caused by the coronavirus is being mismanaged. Food and other materials including money that were promised our people are being poorly distributed to the discomfort and discomfiture of the people.

    Even though some of the people know that government lockdown imposed on them is for their long-term interest, many are saying that they may be killed by hunger before coronavirus catches up with them. It just cannot be business as usual.

    Nobody must be allowed to make money out of the misery of our people. Not even at a time when the coronavirus has become a leveller not knowing the rich from the poor. In any case what does the rich do with money nowadays when one cannot access the money in the shut banks or ride fancy and expensive cars on closed roads.

    We are in a new world! Everybody should be better prepared to face this new world with new attitude and commitment to work both as individuals and as government.

    It is in this light that I appeal for frugality, deployment of government resources to where they are most needed and cutting off unnecessary fat. Economics is not neuro-science, rather it is common sense science.

    No individual would run his personal business the way we have been running the oil industry since Oloibiri in 1956. Is it any wonder that since 1956, the NNPC cannot on its own without joint venture partners explore and exploit for crude petroleum or gas?

    It has remained a sleeper partner collecting rents and commissions and selling oil that it does not produce while paying humongous salaries and allowances to its over bloated staff opaquely recruited with no public oversight.