The Nation Newspaper

Category: Thursday

  • These times

    By Lawal Ogienagbon

     

    THESE are interesting times. You could describe them as either the best or worst of times, depending on where you stand on the issues confronting us as a nation. What are the issues? They are the Federal Government’s declaration of the Western Nigeria Security Network (WNSN) popularly known as Amotekun as illegal and the Supreme Court’s sacking of Emeka Ihedioha as Imo State governor.

    The Southwest governors who initiated the Amotekun security outfit are not happy that the government through its Minister of Justice and Attorney-General of the Federation Abubakar Malami (SAN) stabbed them in the back, as it were.

    The government, they said, was carried along in all the arrangements to set up Amotekun. Nothing, they added, was done behind the government. Moreover, the Inspector-General of Police, Mohammed Adamu, was involved in the talks to raise the ethnic militia because of the security challenge in the region.

    This challenge is not peculiar to the Southwest. The other regions are also facing a similar problem. In the Northeast, Northwest, Northcentral, Southsouth and Southeast, people are at the mercy of bandits, kidnappers and insurgents. The Northeast, especially, has been under Boko Haram siege for over 10 years.

    It was the Boko Haram insurgency and the need to assist the military to fight it that gave birth to the Civilian Joint Task Force (CJTF) in Borno State. The CJTF has not been a push over in that war. Though, it has lost many men, it has kept at the job because to give up will be a triumph for evil.

    We must all come together to fight evil. Whether through CJTF, Hisbah (the Islamic police used in some parts of the Northwest to enforce Sharia laws) or Amotekun, the war against evil must be fought on all fronts.

    The military and para-military organisations are doing all they can to tackle the problem and we must commend them for that. But there is still much to be done and they cannot do it alone. If they can see the CJTF and Hisbah as complementary, why can they not also accept Amotekun as such? Who is afraid of Amotekun?

    The fear of Amotekun may have stemmed from the fact that it can be used to deal with herdsmen who have been terrorising some parts of the Southwest. There is no hidden agenda behind the setting up of Amotekun than to address the security challenge in the region.

    It should not be seen as the modern day Agbekoya set up to fight what some people perceive as the Yoruba war. Amotekun will protect all that reside in the Southwest no matter where they come from.

    As long as people are law abiding, they have nothing to fear about Amotekun. The government should not through its action demonise Amotekun; it should not give it a bad name in order to hang it.

    If the government knew it was not comfortable with the Amotekun idea, it should have told the governors so from the outset, instead of leading them on, only to denounce their efforts after the baby’s birth.

    What is illegal in an outfit which is to help the police and related organisations in maintaining law and order? What is bad in Amotekun giving the police information about hoodlums and vandals in certain areas?

    Read Also: Soyinka knocks Balarabe for anti-Amotekun remarks

     

    Amotekun was not set up to compete with the police or to do police job. The police have nothing to fear about Amotekun. They were created to fight crime just as Amotekun was born because of the prevailing depressing security situation in the region, with kidnappers taking over major roads in broad daylight and escaping with their victims into the surrounding forests.

    What is the point of having a government if it cannot address the security needs of the governed? Before the people of the Southwest take their complaints to the President in Abuja, they would first table them before their governors, who are closer to them.

    The governors risk the people’s anger if they do not live up to their expectations. Security is key to human existence and any government which cannot guarantee the safety of life and property has failed in its paramount duty to the people. So, for the Southwest governors not to fail their people in this most important task, Amotekun was born.

    For the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), the loss of Imo to the All Progressives Congress (APC) at the Supreme Court is painful. To make its anger known, the top hierarchy of the party staged a protest in Abuja on Monday.

    Led by its National Chairman, Prince Uche Secondus, and former Anambra State Governor Peter Obi, the party believes that justice was miscarried. The apex court declared APC’s Hope Uzodinma winner of the election after adding his cancelled votes in 388 polling units to his earlier score in the March 9, 2019 governorship poll.

    No one will be happy to lose an election in court after being declared winner by the electoral umpire. The PDP has all the right in the world to protest the court’s verdict, but will that action resolve anything? No, it won’t.

    The best thing is for the party to return to the apex court and ask it to review itself after having heard the reasons for the verdict. It is a long shot though whether the court will reverse itself in this circumstance.

    The only way out of this perennial problem is for the Independent Naional Electoral Commission (INEC) to conduct free and fair elections,which will be acceptable to all.

    It will cost INEC nothing to do that, but instead it continues to compound our electoral woes with rash and illogical actions, leaving the courts, in most cases, with no choice than to correct its anomalies.

  • Tehran crowd, warlords and American justice

    By Jide Oluwajuyitan

     

    The ongoing cycle  of violence in the old Persian Gulf of Iran, Iraq and Syria that led to the  cold-blooded assassination of Iranian nationalist, General Qassem Soleimani,  branded a regional terrorist by America who, by killing him on Iraq soil can also under the international law be regarded as international terrorist, President Trump’s threat to unleash  his ‘$3 trillion beautiful machines’ for harvests of more deaths and the unintentional  downing of Ukrainian airline leading to the death of over 172 mainly Iranians nationals were all but  a confirmation that Homo Sapiens are beasts whose natural habitat is the jungle where life is cheap, brutish and short.

    It is not that God does not know the nature of man, the worst of His creation. “The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” (Moses in Genesis 6:5) It is on record that Cain even went on to murder Abel, his brother forcing God to decree “So now you are cursed from the earth, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand.  When you till the ground, it shall no longer yield its strength to you. A fugitive and a vagabond you shall be on the earth.”

    God’s institutionalization of His commandments to check mankind’s avariciousness and recklessness only hardened the minds of accursed fugitives who responded by institutionalizing injustice through, first, slavery, then capitalism and globalization, all designed to appropriate human and material resources of endowed underdeveloped nations of India, (‘the jewel of the crown’), the Persian Gulf, the Democratic Republic Of Congo, Libya and Nigeria among other African nations.

    The enduring dominant narrative even as warlords and their gangsters live on the sweat and blood of their victims is ‘the white man’s burden’.

    Thus after sponsored streets demonstrations, Muhammar Gadhafi who deployed the oil riches of Libya to create an egalitarian society, turned a disparate desert villages into a modern state and also liberated African nations from the strangle-hold of IMF and World Bank, had to be murdered by British, French and American gangsters in breach of international law to save democracy-craving Libyan youths from their despotic leader and regional terrorist.

    Iraq’s Saddam Hussein who Britain, Germany, France and USA armed to fight their proxy war with Iran for eight years was declared a terrorist and murdered by American forces ostensibly to save the people of Iraq from their despotic ruler.

    The narrative was not different last week when Iranian nationalist Qassem Soleimani who was organising attack on Iranian enemy- rings in the Persian Gulf was labeled terrorist and killed by those who believe ‘might is right’ and who under their policy of maximum pressure campaign, characterized more by emotion, imposed crippling economic sanctions on Iran after unilaterally withdrawing from an internationally-negotiated agreement which all participants and UN Inspectors agreed was working.

    But how and did Iran become a regional terrorist to enforcers of American justice?

    Iran was an Old Persian Empire with a highly developed culture at an age when the forebears of her today’s enemies were living in the caves. Her abundant resources especially fossil fuel deposits, controlled by Britain until 1952, were to become her curse.

    William Knox D’Arcy, a wealthy British who played a prominent role in the oil industry in Nigeria also played similar role in Iran through Anglo-Persian Oil which later became British BP.

    Read Also: Rouhani to Iran military: explain plane downing

     

    An attempt by Iran at self-actualization and control of her resources following the lowering of the British flag in 1952 led to the nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. As a result of the tension that followed, Britain and the CIA in a code-named operation Ajax overthrew democratically elected Dr. Mohammed Mosaddeq.

    This was followed by jailing and killing of many leading Iranian political activists from the Nationalist and Communist parties. Winston Churchill, who as British First Lord of the Admiralty helped Britain to secure a large portion the Anglo-Persian Oil  before World War 1 played a prominent role in the decision to overthrow Mossadeq and  reinstate  Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, who had been overthrown in the Iranian revolution,   back to power

    Iran which was never at any time a British -colonised nation was between 1901 and 1951 a client state. It was the British that encouraged Reza Khan who later crowned himself king (Shah) to carry out a coup. It was the same British that replaced him with his son Mohammed Reza Shah when British interest was threatened.

    And  for nationalising Iranian oil, it was the British that labeled  Dr. Mohammed Mussadeq, the prime minister whose  support came from the streets and the students a “megalomania  verging on mental instability who could only be stopped from allowing Persia to fall into Communist hands only through coup d’état”.

    It was the British that drove Iranian politicians to seek support of ‘the Tehran crowd of traders, students, poor urban urchins and misguided poor Iranian religious zealots.

    And finally,  It was the pursuit of  British neo-colonial and Anglo-Iranian oil interest that led to  “the fall of the Shaz In 1979,  the bringing back of Ayatollah Khomeini with Islamic courts, veiling of women, stoning of adulterers and chopping off of hands of thieves” (Brian Lapping, End of Empire’)

    In the last two weeks, the world has been given an opportunity to see different faces of the ‘Tehran crowd’: the hungry, the ugly and the angry, creations of Britain, France and Germany who believe that in in the animal kingdom, some animals are more equal than others and of course America whose new definition of American justice is ‘might is right’

     

  • This chalice filled with blood

    By Olatunji Ololade

    The year 2019 presented as the umpteenth scene of Nigeria’s grotesque political drama. Its first quarter unfurled cloaked in blood and sadism of clashing tribal characters. Herdsmen plundered subsistence farms up-north, crossing the middle-belt into Nigeria’s south-lands, to rob and murder impoverished families tilling the soil to eke a meal.

    They maimed rural fathers, murdered and raped mothers and daughters in righteous rage a la Boko Haram. The latter, characteristically, continued its campaign of violence and death in the north-east. Despite the formidable exploits of the armed forces, the massacre persisted in real time. It persists even as you read.

    Thus at the start of the year, the dominance of despair seemed so complete and insurmountable, as usual. Government habitually played dumb, issuing excuses and uninformed ripostes to critics and opposition’s wanton diatribes. As the carnage persisted, the government was unruffled and the governed stayed inert.

    The government knows the governed (electorate) through sadistic plowing. Nailing the latter down by a leash of cash and manipulative sentiments, elected representatives, like a bloodthirsty cult, caught their shrieks in a metaphoric calabash. The vessel was chillingly archetypal, reflective of indigenous cults’ demonic bloodfest.

    The government’s gourd vine connotes its egoistic self-preservation: career politicians desperately sought re-election or a change of public office hence the insolence of out-gone governors who went on to become senators, even in states where the electorate died by their ineptness and brazen pillage.

    The ruling class’ metaphoric calabashes are their exaggerated pride and incestuous self-idolatry. A poisoned chalice. Like the Biblical whore of Babylon, they held their gourds scummy with lusts and amorality; one governor, following eight years of his maladministration and impoverishment of the state and electorate, sought to install his son-in-law as governor to continue his pauperisation legacy. Another with a curious kink for risible caps, fought to install his “chosen wizkid” as his successor in a badly governed state, where the electorate struggled to escape his asphyxiating tenure.

    The insolence persists across the country and political platforms; politicians pant to the venom of serpents interred in their possessed spirits. We have seen how such individuals and their bungling parties sadistically mauled sound to sight; sighs and cries to streaming blood.

    While it has become hackneyed that the people must learn to become their own saviours, I hereby reiterate that it is never too late for the Nigerian electorate to divest the country’s battered chests and earth of murderous forms. Lest we end up as tissues and blood in their gourds.

    Yet the monstrous ruling class reflect our decadence back to us. They actuate rather than constrain our perversions. Boorstin would call it the mirror effect. The ruling class’ administrative hearse becomes the realistic carriage of our death-tending impulses. On their watch, insecurity persists: terrorism, kidnap for ransom and armed robbery flourishes.

    Fraud, embezzlement of public funds persist in this government as its predecessors, though in tidier proportions. Public officers, afflicted with inferiority complex, god-complex, and inordinate greed, among other esteem issues, subject the citizenry to interminable miseries occasioned by deadly, cratered highways, declining health and education institutions, a depressed economy, gory, methodical massacre of the citizenry by bloodthirsty terrorists, herdsmen, kidnappers and political thugs.

    Notwithstanding their tormentors’ failings, the electorate returned them to power in  2019.  Enter 2020. The gruesomeness persists in real time. In 35 months, voters will once again, fall victim to an ageless ruse repeatedly weaponised by the ruling class. Every politician seeking public office understands that the political arena is a theatre, where the most essential skill required is artifice.

    But that is simply one way to look at it. The political arena equally unfurls like a dangerous red light district, an expansive brothel, where electorate bodies are the stringed instruments hysterically plucked by politician-patrons.

    The governed, or electorate if you like, are sometimes mauled like rape victims in a frenzy, as reflective in the imagery of the country’s badly governed states.

    In this decadent theatre, politicians emerge as master harpists, making dark melody by the electorate’s torment, in fulfillment of their guilty pleasures. Through their anguish, the electorate becomes Nigeria’s faceless natives, bleeding saps for whom the ruling class’ much sought utopia manifests as infernal dystopia.

    The discerning see through the artifice. They know the pleading candidate’s smile masks a scowl. They know that incumbent public officers and the opposition seeking to usurp power from them are birds of a feather, criminals on flipsides of the divide, deploying the media among other tools of mass propaganda to create a sense of faux intimacy with the citizenry.

    The incumbent ruling class sustains its vice grip on power and public office by weaponising tokenism and politically compromised media.

    With such instruments under their control, they know they do not need to be competent, sincere or honest to earn trust, win votes and elections, they only need to appear to have these qualities.

    More importantly, they know they must be adept at creating and establishing a false narrative of their sainthood and the opposition’s villainy. The consistency and emotionality of the story are paramount. And the story must be entertaining and wildly infused with absurd drama.

    Consider for instance, the sad case of Salome Abuh; the former councillor and Women Leader of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) was set ablaze on November 18 in her home at Ochadamu, by hoodlums.

    The incident occurred in the wake of the November 16, 2019 governorship election in the state. Suspected thugs who invaded Mrs. Abuh’s home in the afternoon reportedly locked all exits in the house, doused it with petrol and set it on fire. Eyewitness accounts hold that they prevented the deceased’s neighbours from coming to her rescue as they shot sporadically to scare them away and kept watch until the building was razed down. Mrs. Abuh reportedly attempted to escape through a window but was prevented by the metal burglary proof and bullets raining in her direction.

    Asides random assassinations of the Abuhs of our world, scandalous affairs of paedophile, bribe-taking, machete-wielding governors, and a threesome-loving lawmaker caught pants-down, are inconsequential in considerations of their suitability for re-election. Rather than make them pariahs, it earned them empathy and votes.

    As medieval royalty deployed court drama and conspiracies to divert the attention of their subjects from daily miseries, so do the ruling class and opposition divert electorate attention from the real issues. Thus their obsession about 2023 elections even as they bungle this dispensation.

    The real issues aren’t what they project to us via propaganda and media reports. The real narratives are in everything they would rather not tell us. What is the nature of government expenditure on Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and the result of such spending? What is the real impact of the anti-corruption fight? Of government spending, how much is truly committed to education and health financing? Does the government still pay itself outrageous salaries?

    What has the incumbent government done differently from its predecessors beyond the bounds of its statutory responsibilities? Do Nigeria’s two most prominent parties deserve the electorate’s trust? Must the same ruling class be retained in power? Why?

    These are some of the real issues. Civil societies, the media and other segments of the electorate must align in the establishment and support of a platform and candidates truly deserving of their votes. Its about time.

  • A seer’s act

    By Lawal Ogienagbon

     

    FOR many pastors, prophesying is the main thing. They thrive on predictions and do not bother whether what they claimed to have heard actually came from God or not.  As long as their predictions put food on the table, it is okay by them.

    Indeed, they engage in prophesying because of filthy lucre; they spew out what they claim to be from God in order to milk their hapless flock. They see prophesying as business and they do everything to make the most out of it.

    These so-called prophets can do anything for money. They shun the Lord’s warning not to use His name in vain. But  they call on the Lord’s name because it profits them. Many believers are easily deceived because of their gullibility. This makes them to fall easy prey of these false prophets, who at a glance, know what they want: a miracle.

    Miracles do happen, I agree, but not at the rate some pastors dish them out. In a 30-minute ministration, a hungry pastor can come out with tons of predictions on all aspects of life, which he knows will certainly relate to the challenges facing his sheep.

    By so doing, he is preparing the ground for them to see him after service so that he can extort money from them. There are genuine pastors alright, but the workers of iniquity among them have given the whole bunch a bad name. Their punishment, says the Lord, is waiting for them.

    Hear Him: ‘’many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? And in thy name have cast out devils? And in thy name have done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity’’.

    Despite God’s admonition, the tribe of these evil pastors keeps growing. It is, however, refreshing when you see those among them really doing Kingdom work. They speak when they hear from God and make it known without embellishment.

    Although, it is human nature for people, including some highly revered ministers, to show off, when that happens, you can still see the Spirit of God in them. Reverend Father Ejike Mbaka of the Adoration Ministry, Enugu, is a minister who courts controversy like no other man of God.

    Mbaka speaks as the Spirit leads him and he is never afraid to come out with what he hears from God. One forum which has served this purpose is the yearly watch night service which holds at the Adoration Ground in Enugu every December 31.

    Mbaka’s calling seems to be political in nature because his predictions which have put him in trouble with highly placed people in the past are mostly political. He can also easily take offence if political leaders do not contribute to his cause of improving the lot of the poor.

    He has clashed with former Governors Chimaroke Nnamani (Enugu) and Peter Obi (Anambra) for not being on the same page with him on certain matters. Some of his predictions are usually controversial.

    Read Also: Mbaka – the man and his prophecies

     

    Check: his prediction that President Muhammadu Buhari will beat former President Goodluck Jonathan in the 2015 election. Check: his prediction that Senator Hope Uzodinma will become Imo State governor.

    His prediction about Uzodinma came last December 31 and since then, he has been the butt of criticisms by some politicians and some of his colleagues, who felt that he was dabbling in political matters.

    Mbaka did not start doing that today and he is not going to stop now, no matter how much other ministers criticise him. You may not like Mbaka, but you cannot ignore him, especially when he reels out his political predictions. It took 14 days for his prediction on Uzodinma to come to pass.

    ‘’No prophesy has ever been declared on this prayer ground without coming to pass…in spite of all that would happen this 2020, there is hope. In Imo State, there is hope. Hope, hope, hope…hope in Imo State! Imo people have suffered (but) God is raising a new hope that would be an agent of salvation for them.

    He is coming with a new flag to restore the dignity of that noble land…lift your candles as I bless Hope Uzodinma; and I empower him to, spiritually, take over…’’ Mbaka said he did not know how this was going to happen, warning those that would be offended by his prediction not to come after him since he was only conveying the message of the Holy Spirit.

    Truly, as he said, the prediction came to pass on Tuesday, as the Supreme Court catapulted Uzodinma of the All Progressives Congress (APC)  from a loser in the March 9, 2019 Imo State governorship election to the winner.

    The verdict automatically removed Governor Emeka Ihedioha of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) from office. According to Mbaka’s prediction, ‘’he (Uzodinma) is coming with a new flag to restore the dignity of that noble land. A new leadership that will break barriers and there would be joy in the land of Imo’’.

    For Uzodinma, there cannot be a better gift to mark the new year. His own gift to the people will be to fulfil the promise of his coming as contained in Mbaka’s prediction.  As his name, Uzodinma implies, may the road be good as he embarks on this journey.

  • Psychology of greed and the principles of conflict – 2

    By Akintunde Akinkunmi

     

    We have already looked at some possible causative factors for the existence of greed and corruption, and we now turn to the nature and consequences of this veritable pestilence in the Nigeria of today.

    The simplest and best definition of corruption I have ever come across is that it is “the misuse of entrusted power and resources (by heritage, education, marriage, election, appointment or usurpation) for private gain”. The great virtue of this definition is that it encompasses the public and private sectors, and that it encompasses the entire hierarchy of society, from the top echelons to the humblest levels of society. The examples which follow are not strictly limited to Nigeria, but I am sure they will strike a chord for all of us:

    • In politics, it undermines good governance by flouting or subverting formal processes and procedures
    • In elections and in legislatures, it distorts representation in policy and law making
    • In the judiciary and in law enforcement agencies, it undermines the rule of law
    • In public administration it undermines the efficient provision of services
    • In government, it reduces the strength of the institutions of the state through the siphoning off of resources and the buying and selling of public office; it also undermines the legitimacy of government, and the levels of the populace’s trust in their government
    • In the private sector, it increases the costs of doing business, costs which are passed on to the consumer

    In 2004, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimated that between 1960 and 1999, $400 billion dollars was lost to corruption in Nigeria – at today’s exchange rate, that equates to N144 trillion; by comparison, the federal budget for 2020 is N10.33 trillion.

    Put another way, if you laid 400 billion one- dollar bills end to end, you would have enough to make 75 round trips to the moon. These are funds that could have provided hundreds of thousands of kilometres of good roads, hundreds of thousands of equipped and functioning schools and hospitals, and millions of public servants and pensioners who receive their salaries and pensions in a timely manner.

    This is therefore not an inconsequential problem, either in scope and in consequences, and I submit that a problem of this magnitude requires a systemic approach that involves a concise, coherent and focused application of overwhelming force in order to disrupt and ultimately defeat it.

    Principles of conflict

    NATO defines military doctrine as “the fundamental principles by which military forces guide their actions in support of objectives”. Since the central reason for the existence of any military force is to fight and defeat its enemy, the creation of effective fighting power is therefore key to this. There are three components of fighting power, namely:

    • Physical component – the weaponry and other hardware required to do the job
    • Moral component – the rules that govern what we do, and include concrete things like the laws of armed conflict, and less tangible things like motivation and morale. (According to Napoleon Bonaparte, in conflict, “the moral is to the physical as three is to one”)
    • Conceptual component – doctrine.

    It is on the last of these I intend to focus.

    Having, for the purposes of this discussion identified greed and corruption as our adversaries, it would be as well at this point, to quote from the British Army’s Doctrine Publication: “whether the belligerents are states or other entities, all conflict is essentially adversarial, human (involving friction, uncertainty, violence and stress) and political. Conflict is a reciprocal contest of will, in which multiple adversaries and actors act and react to each other, often unpredictably, in a struggle to succeed.

    Adversaries seek constantly to mitigate their own weaknesses, avoid opponents’ strengths, and focus instead on aligning their own strengths against weaknesses. As human dynamics lie at the heart of all conflict, it follows that the nature of conflict will continue to be influenced by and represent the entire spectrum of human behaviour, emotion and capability….our physiology limits what we can do physically…our psychology means that our decisions and behaviour are informed by our perceptions of what is happening”

    It will be apparent to you all by now that there are some parallels between some of the highlighted words in this doctrine publication, and our previous discussions on the subject of greed.

    Let us now acquaint ourselves with the Principles of Conflict.

    Our starting point must be the careful selection of our aim – what are we trying to achieve? It would be a mistake, in my opinion, to try and achieve the total elimination of greed/corruption, for the simple reason that it is simply not possible; as long as human beings are involved, there will always be corruption.

    That said, is it possible to mitigate it, and if so, how? I am reminded here of the words of General Colin Powell, at the time the Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, (and later Secretary of State), talking about the plan to expel invading the Iraqi Army from Kuwait in the first Gulf War: “First we’re going to cut it off, and then we’re going to kill it”.

    Elegantly simple and easily understood by everyone from General down to Private. For our purposes, we can rephrase our aim thus: “First we’re going to cut off as far as possible the avenues by which greed can mutate into corruption, and then we’re going to kill it by making the consequences of being caught as unbearable as we possibly can”.

    Talk, however, is cheap, and has to be followed up by action – the Iraqi Army was not expelled from Kuwait simply by General Powell’s elegant prose, it was expelled by the focused and relentless application of overwhelming force to back up his words.

    And we must maintain our aim by being relentless, as to fail to do this gives the adversary the breathing space to regroup. In our case, we must ensure the vigorous application of existing laws and processes, and I would suggest that the first step is to overhaul, radically, if necessary, the instruments of law and order, especially the police and the judiciary.

    Read Also: Court throws out EFCC’s plea to screen witness in Maina’s trial

     

    None of this is likely to happen in the absence of determined and visionary leadership, because changing the culture that engenders and sustains greed is likely to be much more difficult in the absence of this key factor.

    The maintenance of our selected aim implies the need for offensive action, as set out above, for our chances of victory will be increased by knocking and keeping our adversary off balance, overwhelming his capability to decide and act, and eroding his will to continue the fight.

    In so doing, we impair his ability to maintain his morale, whilst increasing our ability to do that as our own forces begin to see progress in overwhelming the adversary.

    Catching our adversary by surprise means he is likely to be unprepared for our offensive action, and this in turn further impairs his ability to fight back; but in order to surprise him, we must make plans within a bubble of security that gives us the freedom of action to strike at a time and in the manner of our own choice.

    There is, however, little point in spreading ourselves so thinly that in trying to attack everywhere, we are effective nowhere; we must therefore concentrate our forces and fighting power, preferably pitting our strength against the adversary’s weaknesses, in order to further degrade his ability to effectively respond to our onslaught.

    Given that our resources are unlikely to be limitless, we must shepherd what we have, applying it where we get, as it were, and the biggest bang for our buck, thereby applying the principle of economy of effort.

    Our adversary, however, is unlikely to simply roll over and let us walk right through him – he is much more likely to fight back with every weapon in his armoury. We must therefore be prepared to be flexible in our responses to his inevitable counterattacks.

    Both our attack on our adversary, and our response to his inevitable counterattacks, are more likely to be successful if we identify, seek out and cooperate with allies with whom we can share the dangers, burdens, risks and opportunities.

    And finally, we must ensure that our efforts to combat this adversary are sustainable, and not a one-day wonder, by laying the foundations for, and building enduring institutions that will ensure that our fighting power, and our freedom of manoeuvre in deploying that fighting power is maintained.

     

    • Maj-Gen (rtd) Akinkunmi, MBBS LLM FRCPsych FRCP (Glasg) psc VRSM(+) formerly of the British Royal Army Medical Corps delivered this paper at the 21stAnnual Benjamin O Osuntokun Memorial Lecture on January 6.

  • Nigeria’s sick rose

    By Olatunji Ololade

     

    Medical tourism is an ambiguous sick rose. 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 urges Nigeria to wean her heart of lusts for medical tourism abroad as Wordsworth urges England to wean its heart from emasculating food in ‘October,’ a sonnet of 1803.

    Like Wordsworth, Buhari waxes 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 is 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 has 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 must understand that his “candid” and perhaps heartfelt homilies deflect 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.

    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. On the flip side, the waiting rooms at secondary and tertiary public health facilities are overcrowded with patients waiting to see doctors.

    Often people have to stand or sleep outside to keep appointments with medical personnel who are often undermanned, insouciant and exhausted.

    Patients are forced to purchase medical consumables including plaster, gauze, syringe, injections, syringe, hand gloves, antiseptic wash, among others, in public health facilities – university teaching hospitals inclusive – across the country.

    The consequences are never fair on the impoverished who are often left without money to pay for their treatment by the time they purchase the consumables.

    Unstable electricity, inadequate funding, poor remuneration, and disgruntled health workers make the hospital environment too hostile for palliative care thus driving patients away, into the caverns of quacks and medical tourism abroad.

    The situation is compounded by a troubled economy, seismic insecurity, and nepotism in recruitment processes, resulting in many doctors leaving the country.

    There is also the issue of foreign-trained medical students failing the assessment examination conducted by the Medical and Dental Council of Nigeria (MDCN); a situation senior medical practitioners ascribe to their attendance of substandard medical schools in Eastern Europe and Asia.

    It’s instructive that they are hardly given licenses to practice in the countries where they schooled, argued MDCN pundits. In April 2017, 501 medical students, trained abroad, sat for the MDCN examination conducted at the University of Ilorin Teaching Hospital in Kwara State. Only 132 of them passed the examination.

    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 is 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 is 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 health delivery system is used as a best-case scenario by many experts. It is also famed for its success in implementing the community health insurance program which has improved access to quality health for citizens.

    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). Despite growing evidence that medical graduates no longer see a bright future working in Nigeria, the Minister of Labour and Employment, Emeka Ngige, recently stated that the country has surplus doctors.

    To reverse the trend, President Buhari, recently, directed the Federal Ministry of Health and other relevant agencies to urgently formulate policies and programmes for achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for national development.

    However, budget limitations, inadequate infrastructure, poor fiscal governance, and corruption aggravate the country’s health challenges. Currently, less than 5% of Nigerians are covered by the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS).

    At the backdrop of these challenges, President Buhari’s frequent trips to the UK to seek treatment for an undisclosed ailment manifests as a sad irony to millions of Nigerians denied the kind of quality healthcare he seeks abroad.

  • Psychology of greed and the principles of conflict

    By  Jide Osuntokun

     

    The Oxford English Dictionary defines greed as “a strong desire for more wealth, possessions, powers, etc. than a person needs”. Its counterpart, the Cambridge English Dictionary puts it thus: “a strong desire to continually get more of something, especially money”.

    Another definition of greed is that it is “the excessive desire to acquire or possess more than one needs or deserves, especially material wealth”.

    All these definitions of greed could be reasonably described as involving a diminution, if not the complete absence of of satiety, and this might be an opportune moment to look into our brains in search of a possible causative explanation of greed.

    Neuroscientific theories of greed

    The hypothalamus, a structure about the size of an almond, is located at the base of the brain, and, for something so small, it exerts a significant effect on several of the functions of a living human being.

    These include, for example, regulating a number of metabolic processes, linking the nervous system to the endocrine system via it’s near neighbour the pituitary gland, and, crucially for the purposes of this lecture, forming a major part of the limbic system, which is involved in the key functions of emotions, motivation, learning and memory.

    The ventromedial nuclei of the hypothalamus house the satiety centre, which, simply put, tells us when we have eaten enough, whilst the lateral nuclei prompt us to eat.

    Now, it is obvious that these hypothalamic functions relate to the intake of food, but the critical factor here is that the same hypothalamus, as mentioned above, is also part of the limbic system, which is the link between subcortical structures and the cerebral cortex; in other words, between the satiety centre, emotions and behaviours/actions.

    The obvious (to my mind, at least) question that needs to be asked here is this: is it possible that the phenomenon of greed, as defined above, may be partially have its origins in malfunctioning neuroanatomy or physiology?

    In order to address this question, it is necessary to consider other potential causative factors, and to do this I move from the brain to the mind.

    Psychological and philosophical theories of greed

    The Chinese philosopher, Lao Tsu, writing in 500BC, wrote that “There is no calamity greater than lavish desires, no greater guilt than discontentment, and no greater disaster than greed”

    The Ancient Greeks describe the concept of pleonexia, defined as the insatiable (that word satiety again!) desire to have what rightfully belongs to others, modified by John Ritenbaugh in 1988 as “ruthless self-seeking and an arrogant assumption that others and things exist for one’s own benefit”.

    According to the Ancient Greeks, pleonexia was both immature and immoral, and thus to be signs of “an atrophic superego leading to perdition”.

    The 17th century English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, in his 1651 book Leviathan, had this to say: “If in this case, at the making of Peace, men require for themselves, that which they would not have to be granted to others, they do contrary to the precedent law, that commandeth the acknowledgment of natural equalitie, and therefore also against the law of Nature. The observers of this, are those we call Modest, and the breakers Arrogant Men”

    It will come as no surprise to anyone that there are divergent views on the subject of greed. At around the same time that Hobbes wrote Leviathan, the English physician and philosopher, John Locke took exception to the idea that there was such a thing as greed, preferring to regard it as “enlightened self-interest”.

    Writing in Capitalism Magazine 19 years ago almost to the day, Walter Williams, Professor of Economics at George Mason University in the United States, opined that, “without greed, our current economic and social structures would implode….greed produces profitable economic outcomes most times and under most conditions”.

    So…is greed innate, or do we learn it?

    One theory holds that, in addition to the obvious nutritional benefit of an infant suckling at its mother’s breast, there is also an additional element of pleasure involved – and that this pleasure is replicated in acquisitiveness, where possessions are acquired not just for need, but for the pleasure involved in taking, holding and hoarding.

    This theory, however, has the obvious flaw that, whilst the vast majority of us have at one time suckled on our mothers’ breasts, not all of us (hopefully!) “have an excessive desire for more than is needed or deserved, not for the greater good, but for one’s own selfish interest, and at the detriment of others and society at large” (Burton, 2014).

    So, what sets the greedy folks amongst us apart? We have already referred to the possibility of flawed neuroanatomical structure or neurophysiological function. Neel Burton suggests that greed may also arise from “early negative experiences such as parental inconsistency, neglect or abuse.

    In later life, feelings of anxiety and vulnerability, often combined with low self-esteem, lead the person to fixate on a particular substitute for what he or she once needed but could not find” He goes on to point out that, as human beings, we have a unique capacity to project ourselves into the future, up to and beyond our death, and that we are all, to varying degrees, haunted by our own mortality.

    This, when taken in combination with our strong survival instincts, generates anxiety “about our purpose, meaning and value”.

    This existential anxiety, although mostly subconscious, occasional intrudes into our consciousness, prompting us to seek comfort through compensatory behaviours – of which greed is but one.

    And then there is the factor of our culture. Where, as I would argue is the case in Nigeria, our culture places a premium on materialism, is it possible that we could become immune to satisfaction? If so, is that aided and abetted by the complex interplay between possible structural abnormalities and impaired physiological functioning in our brains, as well as early and on-going negative life experiences? Or is Nikelly right when, in 2006, he averred that greed is nothing more than “cultivated behaviour fueled by economic or cultural values, and is neither inherited nor universal”?

    Read Also: ‘2023: North must shun greedy elements’

     

    Whatever its parentage, greed often spawns other problems: deception, spite, envy and theft, to name but four. Abraham Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs is often presented as a five-level pyramid, with needs at the higher levels of the pyramid coming into focus only when the needs at the lower, more basic levels of the pyramid have been met.

    Maslow described the top level of the pyramid as a growth need, because it enables him or her to reach their fullest potential as a human being; the problem with greed in this context is that it gets the individual stuck on one of the four lower levels, and thus unable to “self-actualise”, as Maslow puts it.

    Again, I strongly doubt that anybody would dissent from the suggestion that we live in an increasingly religious and religiously polarized society in Nigeria (and, in my humble opinion, also an increasingly godless one).

    And yet, I know not of a single major religious faith that does not explicitly and strongly disapprove of greed, for the obvious reason that it not only exalts self above whichever deity one happens to believe in, but also because, as mentioned earlier, one result of greed is to deprive one’s fellow man of what belongs to them.

    In summary, therefore, greed may be the result of a multitude of factors (neuroanatomical and neurophysiological defects, attachment theories, adverse life experiences, existential anxieties, learned behaviour fueled by cultural or economic values), and its harvest (bitter or sweet, depending on one’s particular perspective), include innovation and economic growth on the one hand, and deception, envy, theft and spite on the other.

    I invite you all now, at this point, to consider substituting the word “GREED” for the word “CORRUPTION” in the context of the Federal Republic of Nigeria in 2020.

    You might well question the validity of what appears on the face of it to be a bold suggestion that greed and corruption are synonymous….and you would have a point.

    Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that corruption would neither exist nor thrive without greed, and that not all greedy people are necessarily corrupt. So, whilst it may not be strictly true to portray them both as being synonymous, there is nevertheless a strong association between both.

    • Maj-Gen (rtd) Akinkunmi, MBBS LLM FRCPsych FRCP (Glasg) psc VRSM(+) formerly of the British Royal Army Medical Corps delivered this paper at the 21stAnnual Benjamin O Osuntokun Memorial Lecture on January 6.

  • Profile in courage

    By Lawal Ogienagbon

     

    HIS mien is deceptive. It does no justice to his tough character. Merely looking at him, you will not know that Governor Babagana Zulum of Borno State packs a lot of punch.

    He does not brook nonsense and it is not in his character not to call a spade a spade. He is ready to take on people, no matter their status, as long as the cause is right.

    The governor has time and again proved that he is not in power for the sake of it but to see to the well-being of his people.

    He is not your archetypal politician who believes only in self. Zulum has consistently shown that he is there for the people, come rain, come shine.

    When his people are in pain, he is in pain. Truly, when the righteous are in power, the people rejoice. The people of Borno have been rejoicing since Zulum came to power last May 29 because he feels for them. They know that they have their governor’s back.

    So far, Zulum has not disappointed them. Each passing day, his popularity continues to soar because of his readiness to do anything for his people. If the need arises, he is ready to confront Boko Haram for them.

    It sounds incredible, but it is true. If you have been wondering why his predecessor, Kashim Shetima, described him as the best man for the job, you now know why.

    As a commissioner under Shetima, Zulum proved his mettle as a public officer who is ready to lay down his life for a worthy cause.

    Unlike many of his peers, he has never forgotten where he is coming from. A man from humble background, he has not allowed his present station in life to get into his head. He is not carried away by the executive powers he wields as governor, rather he has remained humble and true to himself.

    How would it have been if other governors were like him. How will they when all many of them want is to use their high office to intimidate others, especially their opponents.

    They forget that power is transient and that, as the inimitable Nnamdi Azikiwe told Ukpabi Asika many years ago: ”no condition is permanent”.

    In life, there are no permanent champions but current champions, who give way to others when their time is up. But what they will be remembered for is the impact they had on others in their own time.

    Do our politicians really care about how they are remembered after office? If you do not remember where you are coming from and do not give a hoot about others while in office, how will you be bothered by the legacy you leave behind? Zulum is of a different hue.

    A man who rode bicycle to work as a professor has shown that having a common touch does not remove anything from being a governor. Rather, it enhances the governor’s image and endears him to the people.

    In some high places, Zulum may not be their beloved because he ruffles feathers. He does not do it to show off but because he is pained by what he sees.

    Read Also: Boko Haram attacks communities

     

    When the military introduced what it called Super Camps in some Boko Haram ravaged parts of his state, he quickly cried out that the camps were not serving the purpose meant for.

    The camps, he explained, were too far from the people they were to protect. The military disagreed, but he made his point and today, we can see who is right and who is wrong.

    To some, a governor must not buck the system of which he is a part. But is speaking the truth to your colleagues in power bucking the system? Zulum has charted a path for himself as governor and that is to protect the people who voted him into power.

    On Monday, he was miffed when he saw hundreds of people at a checkpoint on the Maiduguri/Damaturu road kept under the scorching sun by some soldiers and policemen because they had no national identity card.

    The military claimed that it introduced ”Operation Show Your ID Card” in order to rearrest fleeing Boko Haram insurgents.

    But Zulum was shocked to see the soldiers and policemen ”extorting money” from the people because they had no identity cards.

    How many Nigerians have these national identity cards which the military is asking people to produce on demand? Is it that easy to get this ID? Many who registered for the national identity card years ago are yet to get it. All they have are slips to prove that they have been registered.

    When will their cards be ready? The government will do well to answer this question rather than allow some soldiers to use this to extort money from people who due to no fault of theirs have not been able to get their national identity cards.

    Disgusted by what he saw at the checkpoint, Zulum flared up: ”This is unacceptable. How can you subject people to this kind of torture all in the name of National ID Card? And you are all here collecting N500 and N1000 from poor travellers who do not have a national ID card? Rebuffing the entreaties of a soldier, Zulum went on: ”This is not right.

    The Federal Government has not created an enabling environment for our people to get their National ID Cards and you are here collecting N500 and N1000 as a fine for not having what the Federal Government has not provided for all”.

    Reporting the soldiers to the Theatre Commander, Maj-Gen. Olusegun Adeniyi on his arrival at the scene, Zulum, who wondered why money was being collected  from the travellers, said: ”I saw them with my eyes. I spoke with people that were asked to give money!

    You must know that the government and people of Borno State are behind you and your men. But you must call call your soldiers to order; you must check their excesses”. Adeniyi promised to investigate the matter. I pray that something will come out of that investigation.

    The military should not see Zulum as an enemy because of the way he spoke. It should see him as a concerned person because the security of the state is in his hands. If the people should turn against the military for subjecting them to such treatment, the consequences will be dire.

    The Army Operations Media Coordinator, Col Aminu Iliyasu’s statement that the governor’s ”outburst was capable of reversing the gains recorded so far in the ongoing fight against insurgents and other criminal elements across the nation” is uncalled for.

    The governor’s criticism was for the military to put its house in order before soldiers turn the war against insurgency into a money making enterprise. Their duty is to protect the people and not to extort money from them.

  • The best is yet to come for Nigeria

    By Jide Osuntokun

    A friend of mine wondered why most columnists in Nigeria write like Prophet Jeremiah about the doom that is about to befall our country and wondered if there was nothing good about Nigeria to write about. Of course, we should all thank God that we have a good country we all can call home.

    We have abundance of rain and sunshine and large territory on which can grow crops that sustains our ever-growing population.

    By and large, we have a land where there are several points of light all over Nigeria where the 21st century is a reality and our people are living some reasonable kind of life and not just vegetating like plants and animals at the mercy of Mother Nature.

    At least we have been able to dominate our environment although we have realized that this domination is not always positive but in reality, our environment is subject and open to abuse.

    But the question is are we happy at where we are? Is this all we can do with our God-given opportunities? Are we going to be hoping for a better country forever? Is something wrong with us as a people? Are we freaks of nature doomed to failure forever?

    When are we going to move from tribalism and nepotism as directive policies of governance to meritocracy and scientific thinking and planning? When are we going to progress from our pedestrian approach to national life to planned growth and development? When are we going to move away from episodic bursts of growth arising from sale of bounties of nature to development based on human ingenuity, innovation manifesting in goods and services needed to make our lives better?

    When are we going to add value to our agricultural and mineral resources as our contribution to global articles of trade? When will our scientists contribute to human pool of intellectual knowledge? When will our universities and centres of learning become producers and repositories of knowledge?

    When will our artistic and literary contributions be so excellent that our country will be so recognized as the new Greece or Rome? The questions are many and they can only be positively tackled by governments that have plans and are ready to aggressively pursue their execution.

    We had Vision 2010 and Vision 2020 that we spent considerable amount of resources producing but never put into use but locked up in government archives. This is a new year and we should resolve not to continue in our approach to national and sub national affairs as business as usual.

    There is too much frustration in the land. There is too much poverty in the land. Are we then surprised about the level of violence? We will not secure this country unless we tackle the problem of poverty.

    No amount of the number of policemen and soldiers we deploy without corresponding economic development and job creation will secure our lives and properties. We must go to the fundamental roots of our problems. It is insanity to keep doing the same thing the same way and expect different results.

    In the olden days when people went to school, worked hard and graduated, they did not graduate into unemployment; rather they found jobs which provided ladders of upward social and economic mobility for themselves and their families.

    The extended family system provided a sustaining mechanism for social stability so that the extreme poverty now visited on our country was not this pervasive. All this has broken down and with it has come corresponding collapse of ethics and morality.

    Our credo has become survival of the fittest and a dog eat dog kind of life where all things are acceptable in the mad rush to make money. Murders, religious perversion, brigandage, terrorism, kidnapping, rapes and all kinds of corruption are permissible.

    Nothing seems to shock us any longer. Hundreds of thousands of our young people are rejecting their country by taking sometimes on foot, journeys across deserts, jungles and oceans to South Africa, the Sahara Desert en route to Europe. Many of our young people are in brothels even in poorer countries than Nigeria.

    Some of our nationals have had their organs harvested for operations in Europe and the Middle East. If our situation does not call for a state of emergency, I don’t know what calls for it. We got to this collapse not suddenly but gradually over time.

    There is however no mistaking the signs of an approaching total collapse unless all of us, that is, those in government and the national intelligentsia rally round a common cause of salvaging the country. Delay may be too late in the face of galloping growth of population compounding our problem.

    The hydrocarbon resources of gas and oil that make us act in weird and crazy ways will soon become products of little economic use and leverage because of the world’s determined decision to abandon them as sources of energy in order to save the planet earth and mankind itself.

    I am an optimist when it comes to the case of the future of this benighted country. I guess I really don’t have a choice. Several years ago, the same General Muhammadu Buhari who has changed his khaki military uniform for babanriga famously said “We have no other country than Nigeria…we will all stay here and solve our problems together”.

    I am of that view also. In any case I am too old to leave the country for some God-forsaken cold country. I am also of the belief that all countries have problems unique to them.

    Read Also: Buhari: how we’ll improve electricity supply this year

    Our problems may be poverty and underdevelopment but we are still close to basic humanity and presumably to crude nature which unfortunately still affect the way we do things and our relationship with those who speak different languages to the one we speak.

    We need to take a census of what works in our states and at the national level and ask questions as to why others don’t work as they were supposed to do and then find rational solutions to them. We should also decide how to educate our people particularly at the grassroots level and to endow young children with civic education and responsibility so that when they become adults, they will not be a problem to society.

    We have said ad nauseam in this column what seems to have widespread support, that we need to take a second hard look at the political configuration of the country and design an appropriate architecture for effective management of resources for rapid development.

    There is too much concentration of power and resources in the centre occasioning rampant looting and stealing on an industrial scale. We need to also make all our legislative houses at the centre and state levels part-time so as to free resources for physical infrastructural development of the country.

    We certainly do not need 774 Local government administrations and 36 states plus Abuja making 37 in number. All these can be replaced by a quarter of the existing number without harm to normal development.

    We should never forget that until 1946 the whole of Nigeria was administered by a Governor General in Lagos and three lieutenant governors in Kaduna, Ibadan and Enugu and a host of administrative officers.

    I am not suggesting this was an ideal situation but to move from that clinically efficient system to the present over-administration and political jamboree with no plan of employment is simply unreasonable and unacceptable.

    We must bear in mind, for those who may say what I am suggesting is unconstitutional that constitutions are made for man and not man for constitutions.

    My answer is whose constitution are we really running? Is this not a pruned down military constitution of the past put together under my late colleague, Professor Justice Niki Tobi who was given an unenviable task of rushing through a constitution by Abacha/ Abubakar AbdulSalami regime?

    What we need is not some wooly legalese of a constitution but a basic short document like the American constitution that we can continue to amend if and when necessary.

    This can be done by select body of people representing all the states of the federation and other critical stakeholders like the military, the police, the universities, the chambers of commerce, the manufacturers association, the judiciary, labour, and religious bodies.

    This assemblage of people must be manageable and not more than 100 and given six months to produce a basic law which after its subjection to a national referendum shall be followed by presidential proclamation.

    The emphasis of what I am suggesting is rapid development, jobs, jobs and jobs which when available will lead to increased security.

    Mustapha Kemal, The Ataturk did this kind of thing to the remnant of the effete Ottoman Empire in 1919 and dragooned Turkey into modernity, transforming a country that used to be derided as the sick man of Europe into a modern medium power with a secular constitution guaranteed by the military.

    Is Buhari a Mustapha Kemal? If he is not, we can help him become one. The future of Nigeria is just too important to be left in the hands of one man surrounded by unelected self-seeking advisers and a Naira-guzzling parliament. Happy new year, Nigeria.

  • The love of money

    By Lawal Ogienagbon

     

    IT IS a new year, but we are carrying certain things, especially the craze for wealth from past years, into it. We are all involved in the rat race for money. We want to make it big because of the respect associated with wealth. People respect the wealthy; they adore him and fawn all over him because of the crumbs they will get from the master’s table.

    Only a lucky few get to benefit from the rich whose source of wealth, in most cases, is shrouded in secrecy. Many covet wealth and respect, but are not ready to do an honest job to become rich. All they are out for is the money; how they make it does not matter. ”As long as I am rich who cares about how the wealth comes about”, they are wont to say.

    This is the kind of attitude that has pushed many, especially our youths, who are in higher institutions, into seeking wealth at all costs. Because of this ”I must be rich” mentality, they have dipped their hands into all sorts of things.

    They are into cyber crime, which is better known as Yahoo, Yahoo, drug trafficking, kidnapping, armed robbery and money rituals. They want the respect that comes with being rich, but they do not want to earn their wealth respectably.

    Our society is at a very low point today because of this sheer wealth craze. Everywhere you turn to, it is the same old song of money. It has become a refrain, just as the late Hubert Ogunde sang about it some 50 years ago: ”Owo, owo sha ni, ka ma ra moto, ka ma kole, owo, owo sha ni…” Even a boy born yesterday wants to become a billionaire overnight. Schooling no longer has any attraction for them.

    The easy way out is making it big through illicit means and because society showers appreciation on the rich, no matter the source of their wealth, these people get away with anything, including murder.

    Our society is the worse for what is happening. For too long, we have kept quiet and allowed the indolent to flourish where they do not have any means of livelihood.

    Those in their neighbourhood know that they do not have a job, yet they keep quiet when these guys start to ride exotic vehicles and build mansions which people who have worked for donkey years cannot afford. Yes, I know, it is not how far, but how well.

    But that altruism is predicated on the fact that the one so blessed must be seen to have toiled like others before making it big.

    You do not just wake up one morning and start living it big and expect people to say: ”it is not how far, but how well” when the source of your wealth is doubtful. Wealth smiles on who it will, but the lucky person must be hardworking.

    It was out of frustration that Owolabi Adeeko decided to take his destiny in his hands in order to become rich overnight. At 23, the young man should be thinking of what to do with his life after school. But he chose the easy way out: money ritual, because, according to him, he could no longer bear seeing his family being poor.

    He said things were no longer going well with his parents economically, most especially, his mother who used to be the family’s breadwinner. Instead of him to look for a menial job and earn a honest living, what did he do? He sought assistance from Pastor Segun Philip who asked him to bring a human being for money ritual. So, he took his girlfriend Favour Daley-Oladele, a student of Lagos State University (LASU), to the pastor

    Read Also: Police to prosecute suspected killers of LASU student in Osun

     

    The girl was killed and the pastor harvested her vital parts for ritual for a contract sum of N250,000. Owolabi said he and his mother ate the girl’s heart.

    The Adeekos and the pastor are in police custody. If we blame our youths for their waywardness, what will we say of pastors, alfas and their ilk who indulge these youngsters?  Men of God are expected to be teachers and counsellors guiding others about the way of life.

    As ministers in the temple of God, be it a church or mosque, they are expected to live holy and lead by example. They are not expected to preach one thing and do another.

    Things have gone bad in our land today because our so-called men of God do not have the fear of God. All they believe in is the perk of their office, which is contrary to the dictate of their calling. ”Freely, you have received, freely give”, says the scripture.

    Sadly, many of these pastors do not believe in those words. Before they do anything for their flock, they ask for money. How can things work in a society where money rules? As we begin another year of grace, may God touch our pastors, youths and their ilk for the betterment of our society.

     

    Jonathan’s justified anger

     

    ONLY a suicide case will go on such a venture. To attack the home of a former president is not a tea party. Those thinking of such mission must be ready for the worst. And they got it last December 24 during their nocturnal attack on the Otuoke country home of former President Goodluck Jonathan in Bayelsa State.

    Despite knowing that the place will be highly fortified, the marauders still embarked on the deadly mission. They got more than they bargained for.

    But who are these marauders? Were they on a sponsored mission? Who is after Jonathan? Was it politically motivated? Or is it the usual attack by militants in the Niger Delta?

    An attack on the home of a former president is an attack on the state. So, this matter must not be treated lightly. As Jonathan said when he hosted the Navy and the Joint Task Force (JTF) in Otuoke on Monday,  the attack must be investigated to prevent a recurrence. ”Be thorough`as you seek to bring the perpetrators to book and ensure that such mindless attack does not happen again in any part of the country”.