The Nation Newspaper

Category: Thursday

  • Wind sowers

    SUNDAYS are celebrated in Christendom. The reason for the celebration is well known. Sunday is the day chosen by the Lord as Sabbath Day – the day He rested after creating the world. The scriptures tell us that the Lord hallows the day. Since we are created in His image, we are expected to toe that line. So, on Sundays, many churches are filled to the brim as worshippers throng them in obedience of the Lord’s command.

    In the Southeast, Catholicism holds sway. Virtually every household is a  Roman Catholic. Catholicism and mass go hand in hand. What other Christians call service is mass to Catholic faithfuls and the mass starts early. The first mass starts by 6am and by 7, 7.30am, it is all over. No matter when it holds, the church is always full. Since we have started outgrowing the fear of Boko Haram attacks on churches on Sundays, worshippers have begun to let their guards down.

    These days, they worship God without looking behind them to see if a suicide bomber is lurking around or driving through the gate. What is the point in being in church and be looking here and there because of fear of being attacked by some beast, who take the name of the Lord in vain? But unknown to the worshippers at St Philip’s Catholic Church in Ozubulu, Anambra State, last Sunday, some beast in human skin chose that day to settle a drug war score. The church was built by a drug baron for the use of his community. Since society no longer questions people’s source of wealth, the community has been using the church without asking where the donor got his money from. To him, it is sowing. But God is not unclean and so will never accept unclean things. Cleanliness, the Quran says, is next to Godliness.

    The donor is engaged in a war with another drug baron and both men have been gunning for each other’s life. They are based in South Africa, but their tentacles extend beyond that country. They have boys at their beck and call who do all sorts of job for them. These boys not only carry drugs, but also kill for their masters. The donor was at home to, as usual, flaunt his wealth and play Father Christmas. In a society where families find it difficult to make ends meet, many flocked his home for one assistance or the other. You need to see  the video of him on social media where he was spraying money as if it has gone out of fashion.

    Our love for freebies may yet be our undoing in this country. Is it poverty that has turned some people into beggars? Why do we find it hard to ask questions about how some nonentities came by their wealth? What should be the role of priests in our society? Should the men of God accept gifts from people whose source of wealth is not known? How should churches treat suspicious characters, such as drug barons, looters, robbers and kidnappers et al? Should we keep quiet about their atrocities all because they donate to the church or give hefty sum of money to pastors?

    What happened in Ozubulu has shown that we can only keep quiet over these crooks’  lifestyle at our detriment. I am sure many who did not know the donor nor ever got a kobo from him paid the supreme price when gunmen came looking for him. As the Yoruba would say, they paid for what they did not buy with their lives. The church should be the place to teach moralty and uprightness. Everything good must be taught there. But what do we see these days? We find pastors shouting from the rooftops that God loves a cheerful giver. Yes, the Good Book says so, but It does not tell us to collect money from people of shady character. If God so loved money, Jesus won’t have driven out gamblers and moneychangers from the temple with these words:

    “It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves’’. Many pastors have turned churches into dens of thieves because of their love for money. By their action, they have driven away the poor from church because those people feel ashamed to attend service since they cannot give and give and give as their pastors want. These pastors have given the word shepherd a different meaning. They are supposed to look out for their sheep, but it is now the other way round. These days, the sheep must always look out for the shepherd or else they will become the butt of sermons which have no root in the scriptures. If many of our pastors have lived up to the doctrines of their calling, what happened in Ozubulu won’t have happened. It is the failure of the men of God that has brought us to this pass.

    My fear is that we may not have seen nothing. Worse things may still come if we do not change our ways. If we continue to worship money and eulogise those whose source of wealth is unknown, the Ozubulu massacre would be child’s play compared to what may happen elsewhere in future. It is sad that a drug war found its way into the house of God. This should be a time of introspection for our pastors. Where did they miss it? It is not too late for them to retrace their steps. If they had condemned what these crooks are doing and refused to touch them with a 10-foot pole, these no-gooders may have changed for good. But because they were encouraged by their pastors, who always took money from them under the guise of doing God’s work, they felt they were on the right path.

    How will any pastor feel over the killing of women and children, who were mostly the victims, in what Anambra State Governor Willie Obiano called a “gang war” brought into Ozubulu from abroad? The blood of these innocent souls will continue to cry for justice until their killer is found. The scriptures teach us to reflect on things that are true, honest, just, pure, lovely and are of good report. But our pastors will not teach these virtues. They are only interested in money, money and money. They are unlike the Apostle Paul who knew what it was to both abound and suffer need.

    Maybe, the Ozubulu massacre will teach them to, henceforth, know what it is to be full and to be hungry. A pastor who does not know hunger can never know what his poor sheep are going through.The Ozubulu killer can only run, he can never hide. May he be brought to justice soon.

  • Morocco seeks membership of ECOWAS

    The Kingdom of Morocco, in North Africa, has applied to join the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas). Its application was submitted to the Organisation at the 51st Ordinary Session of its heads of states in Monrovia, Liberia on June 4, 2017. It is under consideration by the15 member states of the Organisation, including Nigeria. No decision has been taken yet on the application, but there were media reports that the meeting had expressed ‘general support’ for Morocco’s application to join the Organisation. Now, this is no indication of approval or commitment on the part of members of the Organization to admit Morocco to Ecowas. The heads of state directed the Ecowas Commission to examine and advise them on Morocco’s application ‘in the light of the provisions of the Ecowas Revised Treaty of 1993″. The report of the Commission will be presented for consideration to the 52nd Ordinary Session of the summit meeting of the Organisation in December, 2017, in Lome, Togo. This will allow member states adequate time for multilateral consultations on Morocco’s application.

    Nigeria has officially maintained a dignified and studied silence on Morocco’s application. But there can be no doubt about its strong opposition to Morocco’s bid to join Ecowas of which, with Togo, it is a founding and leading member. The Foreign Ministry is believed to have advised the government against supporting Morocco’s application. Based on this advice, it is believed that Nigeria has made its reservations on Morocco’s bid for membership known to other member states. Given Nigeria’s political and economic influence in the regional organization it is unlikely that its views on Morocco’s application will be ignored, or treated lightly. Most of the member states of the organisation share Nigeria’s apprehensions about admitting Morocco to membership of the Organisation. It should not be too difficult to reach a consensus on rejecting Morocco’s bid for admission into Ecowas.

    Equally, two former Foreign Ministers, Professor Bolaji Akinyemi, and Amb. Ignatius Olisemeka, have in separate public statements, expressed their reservations and opposition to Morocco’s bid to enter Ecowas. The Association of Retired Career Ambassadors of Nigeria (ARCAN), with a membership of over 200 retired career ambassadors, has also expressed its strong opposition to Morocco’s bid to join Ecowas. A few weeks ago, the Lagos and Abuja branches of the Association had a meeting with the Foreign Minister, Mr. Geoffrey Onyeama, at which they presented him with a joint memorandum outlining their objections to Morocco’s bid to seek membership of the organisation. The Minister assured the ARCAN deputation that its paper will be considered at the highest levels of the government, and will receive its due attention. There is broad support in the government for ARCAN’s reservations about Morocco’s bid to join Ecowas.

    Now, what are the grounds for objecting to Morocco’s admission into Ecowas? First, as its name implies, the Organization was established in 1975 to promote economic cooperation among states in the West African sub-region of Africa. Morocco is a North African state, not a West African state, as stipulated by the basic treaty establishing the Organisation which was concluded in Lome, Togo, in 1975. General Gowon and President Eyadema of Togo were the prime movers and initiators of the Organisation. When it was established, neither Morocco, nor any other African state outside the West Africa region, were invited to join the Organisation. The Abuja Treaty of 1993 also resolved that Ecowas was one of the five regional groups that should constitute the building blocks for the African Economic Community (AEC). Similar regional economic organisations have been established in the Northern, Western, Central, Eastern, and Southern regions of Africa. All these regional economic communities are in existence and functioning reasonably well.

    Morocco belongs to the Arab Maghreb Union (AMU), of North Africa, with its headquarters in Rabat, Morocco, as well as the Arab League. In fact, the Abuja Treaty of 1993 is not in support of African states joining two or more regional economic communities. In effect, it is the objective of the African Union (AU) to eliminate and discourage multiple membership by its member states, as this could complicate the move towards both regional and continental integration.

    Now, it is clear that Morocco is not in the West African geographical zone as defined by both the 1975 Lome Ecowas Treaty and the 1993 Abuja Revised Treaty. It does not, therefore, meet the basic criteria for admission into EOWAS. It is, by virtue of its geographical location in North Africa, simply not eligible for membership of the regional organisation. It is not even contiguous to any West African state as defined by the AU.

    The second reason for rejecting Morocco’s application for membership is that, for Morocco to be admitted, the basic legal instruments establishing ECOWAS will have to be changed. This will be a tedious legal process that could damage the unity and cohesion of the organisation as its members will be divided over any unwarranted change in its legal instruments. This will undermine the unity of purpose in the organization. It will be a totally unnecessary diversion of the organisation from its basic objective of promoting economic cooperation among its members. Virtually all members of Ecowas already have bilateral economic relations with Morocco. This will not necessarily be enhanced by admitting Morocco into the regional organisation. The Arab Maghreb Union of which Morocco is, more appropriately, a member should offer it an adequate platform for economic cooperation with its neighbours. So should the Arab League. Its admission will dilute the membership of Ecowas and weaken the organisation to which Nigeria has been fully committed since 1975 when it was established. The central issue involved in the admission of Morocco into Ecowas is not about Nigeria’s influence in Ecowas, but the integrity of the organization

    Thirdly. Morocco’s bid for admission into Ecowas is based on unjustified political and economic considerations that are incompatible with the objectives of the organization. Morocco wants to join Ecowas to use it as a political and diplomatic platform to promote its illegal annexation of Western Sahara and to subvert the legitimate aspirations of the people of the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) to their independence, despite the dubious claims of Morocco to sovereignty over the state. In 1984, when General Buhari was military head of state, he strongly supported the admission of the SADR to the OAU. This was to underscore Nigeria’s full commitment to the total decolonization of Africa. The decision to admit the SADR regrettably led Morocco to withdraw from the OAU immediately. In January, 2017, 33 years after it withdrew Morocco was readmitted as a member of the AU. Even in the Arab Maghreb Union and the Arab League, of which Morocco is a member, its membership of both organizations has been disruptive as it seeks to use both organisations to promote its political and economic ambitions in the Western Sahara. Morocco has for decades been in isolation and in open disagreement with virtually all its neighbours on the issue of independence for estern Sahara. Its current effort to join Ecowas should be seen as a part of its grand design to annex SADR for the exploitation of its huge natural resources, particularly phosphates. But the UN has declared as illegal the continued exploitation by Morocco of phosphates and other natural resources in the state. Any trade agreement with Morocco on the sale of phosphates from the SADR will be in violation of the UN ban. Its admission to membership of Ecowas will create a political and diplomatic conflict that will not be in the collective interest of the organization. It could lead to its break up.

    Traditionally, Nigeria has and should continue to have good bilateral relations with Morocco, including the promotion of economic relations. The two countries have strong cultural links that should be maintained. But for the reasons given, Nigeria should make it clear to both Morocco and member states of Ecowas that it is not in support of Morocco’s admission to membership of the organization.

    Amb. Oladapo Fafowora is currently President of the Association of Retired Career Ambassadors of Nigeria (ARCAN), Lagos branch.

  • Senate versus Umar

    It is times like this when the voices of reason is silenced  by the  infantile  blabbering  of the likes of Ayo Fayose and Fani-Kayode in the West, drowned by the delirious raving  and hate messages of Kanu of IPOB in the East and  muffled  by the ranting of Arewa rabble-rousers  in the North even as our errant elders play dumb. And this is just as the 8th Senate continues to assault our sensibilities while our nation is racing towards the precipice that invokes nostalgic craving for Awo’s voice of reason which his political adversaries who carouse while he studied to find solution to Nigerian problem ignored at their own peril in 1953, 1962 and 1966.

    But in the destruction of the noble line, as the saying goes, there is always a survivor. Since Col. Dangiwa Umar distanced himself from Babangida and his army of ‘anything is possible’s annulment of the commonweal of Nigerians in 1993 by resigning his commission, he has continued to demonstrate through his periodic intervention in the affairs of our country that, unlike many of the other members of the political, military and intellectual elite of his era, beguiled and enchanted by Babangida’s charm, his allegiance to the Nigerian state transcends his loyalty to a god-father.

    Last week, distancing himself from current members of the political class who have come to accept heinous crime such as treachery, opportunism and corruption which define the current 8th Senate as ‘real politic’, Umar, was brutal with the truth. The 8th Senate, he says are “on a mission to crash the federal government’s war against corruption using the power of ‘oversight’ as cover”. If we are in doubt because our vision is beclouded by those who freely deploy religion and ethnicity as weapon of war against Buhari while they are neck-deep in corruption, he admonishes Nigerians “to take more than a passing interest in the controversy generated by the actions of members of the Senate Committee on Customs, Excise and Tariffs and that of the Nigeria Ports Authority. He went on to confirm the 8th Senate is out to serve none but their members by revealing their ferocious war against the Customs Comptroller-General was on account of his refusal to support continued rape of the country by some members of the Senate.

    As proof, he cited the importation of 1,200 metric tons of rice in 30 40-foot containers, fraudulently declared as yeast to evade payment of appropriate duties by a company owned by an influential member of the Senate. Ali, the Customs Comptroller-General he says, refused to release the seized items based on the dubious alibi provided by “the leader of the Senate Committee on Customs, Excise & Tariff” to the effect that “his findings shows it was the clearing Agent not the importer that called the goods ‘yeast’ instead of ‘rice’.

    Umar was not done. He went on to also allege that the same senator involved in the rice importation scandal also owns a company that secured a contract to dredge the Calabar Channel which the Bureau of Public Procurement has condemned as violating all due processes. This and the fact that there was no evidence the contract was ever executed were not sufficient disincentive for the senator to “demand and get a whopping $12.5million upfront payment from the NPA or to ask for a purported balance of $22million”.

    The humiliation and persecution and inquisition of Ali and Ibrahim Magu and the numerous petitions against the Managing Director of NPA, Umar says are closely linked to the resolve of these patriotic public servants to do what they believe is the best for our country. This strategy, although Umar did not say it appears to be a rehash of what happened during Umaru Yar’Adua’s administration when some prominent actors in the current 8th Senate joined James Ibori and other tough guys as governors, to run Magu, who was at the time investigating prominent governors that mismanaged the resources of their states, out of EFCC into detention and Ribadu into exile.

    These are serious scandal except in the 8th Senate ‘house of scandal’ where it is regarded as a comedy  by those who after attributing the source of their stupendous wealth to God,  write a book on corruption and assemble those facing corruption charges in court as chief launchers. But then the inauguration of the 8th Senate itself was preceded by a monumental scandal unknown to democracy in this environment. The trading off of the victory of the party on whose back they rode into parliament was soon overshadowed by the police claim that the Senate rule used for the election of the principal officers of the 8th Senate was forged. This was soon followed by yet another scandalous claim that Nigerian senators are the highest paid lawmakers in the world. We however now know they earn only a little over N7m that their counterparts in the lower house collect monthly.

    It was not long before the next scandal broke out. Some former governors-turned-senators, in addition to scandalous severance packages they worked out for themselves before transiting were said to be earning double salaries. It was pensions – the Senate President corrected – adding that a letter had been dispatched to the Accountant General of his former state to stop the payment into his account. As for those who regarded Senate procurement of the state-of-the-art SUVs for themselves after taking personal car loans and at a period the states they represent had several months of unpaid workers salary arrears, they were reminded that the executive also bought cars for ministers. As for Dino Melaye’s scandalous claim of being alumni of some prestigious universities across the globe, a Senate internal probe at least confirmed he was a proud recipient of a third class degree from Ahmadu Bello University (ABU).

    The impounded SUV bullet proof – new addition to the Senate President fleet – cleared with forged papers to deprive government in which he is number three was blamed on the importer. The same template was adopted to explain off the imported rice fraudulently labelled yeast to evade payment of tariff. This time around however, the clearing agent and not the importer is the culprit.

    Now Umar, who claimed to have identified the culprits, has set the terms for armistice: “Senator Saraki must enforce discipline among his colleagues. No member of a committee, much less a chairman, should remain in his duty post once credible information about possible crime is received on the person”. This is an impossible task which we know is not going to happen. Let Saraki or whoever has not sinned in the 8th Senate either through criminal conspiracy or criminal silence, throw the first stone.

    The stage for a ferocious and imminent battle is therefore set between Umar and the 8th Senate, both claiming to fight on our behalf. The former is counting on his 23 years of standing on the side of truth and fairness while the latter is entering the battle arena with an overflowing baggage of scandals punctuated by treachery, opportunism and blackmail. It can also not be good news to the scandal-weary 8th Senate that Umar, is neither Itse Sagay, Ibrahim Magu, Ali or Raji Fashola who as government employees can be invited, browbeaten, humiliated and dismissed as incompetent.

    Umar is not leaving anything to chance. Knowing the 8th Senate is no respecter of its party leaders or of public opinion, he is appealing to our conscience. His final appeal: “Nigerians must not leave the likes of Hamid Ali, Ibrahim Magu, Hadiza Bala Usman,(former BPP -DG) Emeka Nzeh et al at the mercy of these strange lawmakers; politicians that have demonstrated time and again that they are in politics to serve themselves and themselves alone”.

  • My yesteryears

    The caption I wanted to give to this column was “There was a country” which will open me to charges of plagiarism of the work of the great story teller, the late China Achebe. But the sentiments I am going to express are the same. In biblical terms, it is probably correct to say that God has departed from the house of Nigeria. The murder of tens of people, The Guardian said, 47 people were slaughtered during 6am Mass in a Catholic Church somewhere in Anambra State on Sunday August 6.The reason for this, the journalist surmised, might be due to drug wars between two people from the same area where the massacre took place but who have become “billionaires “ in South Africa from the drug trade. Now Nigerians who glibly accuse South Africans of xenophobia particularly directed against Nigerians can now begin to understand the nature of the problem. I used to explain to my friends that our people are not saints at home but many are devils abroad. Some get involved in crimes of unimaginable nature. At the time the so called “Evans” was caught in Lagos, a compatriot of ours was apprehended for the same crime in Uganda. I am told Kenya visas for Nigerians are as difficult to get as the proverbial camel passing through the eye of the needle. Can anybody blame them? They want to sup with us with a long spoon .What has happened to us and why are we like this? Where did we miss the road? Can all these things that ruin us and our national reputation be due to resource curse?

    There was a time when Nigeria was good; when people worked hard and earned not a lot but were satisfied with the little they earned and did not worship mammon. I still remember growing up as a child in rural Nigeria in Ilawe to be precise where my parents were petty traders selling anything that was sellable. My father as a young man had gone “abroad” to the Gold Coast (Ghana). It was not to study but he studied as collateral side show to the hard work of mining manganese in Nsutta in the middle of nowhere. On his return home, he decided to be a merchant. He carried his merchandise which he bought from Lagos to the inner corners of Ekiti to places like Awo, Ikere, Oye, Egosi, (ilupeju) and finally Ilawe. His younger brother, Bembere was stationed in Ado Ekiti and his shop was the “Kingsway stores “of Ado Ekiti in those years of his commercial primacy before he veered into the transport business which ruined him financially perhaps because of the bad roads in Ekiti. I was not born when all this happened but my father kept a diary and having seen the upward mobility that education brought to people in the Gold Coast, he was determined to educate his boys and unfortunately not his girls. He would be referred to now as a male chauvinist!

    By the time he started having children from 1922 to 1952 over a period of 30 years, he had acquired more than a football team! He was also a caring father. My father placed emphasis on hard work and chivalry. He never caned us unless any of his sons ran away from a fight. My father celebrated any of his sons who defended himself successfully from a bully. Courage meant the world to my father. If there was any altercation in school involving any of his children and he was sent for, my father would tell the teacher even before the teacher spoke that none of his children would steal or tell a lie. And he was always right. He loved education but his half-brothers took to farming, planting cocoa, and taunting my father that he was wasting money on sending his children to school and that his children would grow up to be weaklings compared to their hardy and tough cousins growing up on the farms. I remember one of my uncles in his old age jokingly calling us lazy drones and thieves who cannot hold the hoe! To him farming was the only noble work and I think he was right.

    I was one of the young ones in the family, the last of my mother’s six children. When my father split the family into two, my mother who was the first wife headed the family left at Ilawe while my father took the rest of the family to Oye and later to Egosi (Ilupeju).  I grew up in this separate but one family. I only met my other brothers sparingly. In fact I never met the first born of my mother, the late Chief Oduola Osuntokun until he returned home as a graduate in 1951. In age we were separated by 21 odd years. When I was young, I did not know we had anything in common. Of course later in life due to the premature death of my father, Chief Osuntokun more than adequately fulfilled the role of a father and while my father spared the rod my “saro” brother did not spare the rod. He was like what Germans call a drill sergeant! The point is that there was discipline in every family. Perhaps our present problems in Nigeria are due to the breakdown of traditional families and the values of honesty, hard work, truth, courage and contentment everyone cherished.

    I remember when I started school, our uniforms of black stripes on white were woven by women who had looms in their houses and worked on them in their spare time after returning from the farm.  The cotton they used was grown by them and threaded by them using home-made crude implements. In short, nearly every home had mini factories making school uniforms! The cloth was cut and sewn into short knickers and smart “buba “ something like what people several years later called “Kampala”. We did not import khaki to be sewn as school uniforms. Certainly not in Ekiti of my youth. Unfortunately by the time we got to senior classes in primary schools, this backward industrial integration was sabotaged and replaced with imports and thus began the absence of synergy in our education and development. By the time I entered Christ’s School, Ado Ekiti, we began our journey of no return from mimicking the white man. We were forbidden from speaking Yoruba which was dismissed as vernacular and not a language. We were punished when caught doing the most natural thing, expressing ourselves and emotions in our own language. Our seniors became spies ferreting out those who spoke Yoruba secretly and quietly with one another. Those caught spent their Saturdays cutting grass which grew wildly on Agidimo hill where our school was located. By the time I dropped Latin in form four because we had no teacher and Reverend Canon Leslie Donald Mason, the principal who doubled as our Latin teacher, perhaps because of overwork said we should all offer Yoruba at the West African School Certificate examination, many of us found our own language extremely difficult.

    Question of students’ rebellion was alien to us and teachers never went on strike. But nowadays there are equivalents of ASUU in primary and secondary schools and teachers do not want to get their rewards in heaven anymore! I actually sympathize with teachers not because I am one of them but because what could have ameliorated our common lives like public health, transportation, unemployment benefits and sure and regular pensions are not just there. Today’s Nigeria is a case of survival of the fittest. This social Darwinism is at the root of all our problems. We must find our way back to the past when we were paid just enough but not stupendously to the point that there is nothing left for others and for common services.

    I am not an enemy of progress but what kind of progress permits slaughtering of church worshippers over drug money? What kind of progress permits legislators at the federal level to cart home monies monthly that their counterparts doing honest jobs cannot earn in a lifetime? This is why every little boy wants to be a politician or a kidnapper. We have a problem and we must face this squarely not only at the national level but at home, in our places of worship, at school and at work.   We must have a holistic approach to this wound on the national body before it becomes gangrenous.  Yes there was once a country called Nigeria where peace like a river flowed, where we were concerned with our neighbours’ welfare, where teachers in schools took seriously their roles of in loco parentis and parents showed gratitude and where a professor was at par with federal or regional cabinet minister socially and materially. We need to look at our reward system and service at all levels must deserve its commensurate rewards.

  • Nigeria elevates wisdom of the dung-beetle

    As you read, methodical folly becomes Nigeria’s perennial fascination. The gross and barbaric proliferates in plain sight. And society approves the descent down the pole of morality and civilisation. Thus men and women with character of a dung-beetle, the scarab, are worshipped and glorified as rare gems.

    On the watch of such characters, the democracy we declared recoils into a spent shadow. The scarab was primeval Egypt’s minister of decay, her epitome of muck and amorality. In Nigeria, scarabaeans dominate the corridors of power. They have turned government into a death cult, a painted tomb of justice and progress.

    Seventeen years on, in the grip of such blood-drenched mascots, democracy afflicts us like the proverbial slut making a surreptitious exit with her drunken lover’s wallet. Consequently, we suffer poverty of character and this manifests as quiet, wily, mean-spiritedness; akin to the patience of the wild that holds motionless for endless hours, the corrupt police at illicit checkpoints, the kidnapper in his lair, the assassin in his ambuscade and the thieving public officer on his perch. This patience is illustrative of the predator hunting its prey.

    Oftentimes, it manifests in uncontrollable spasms that have seen us bury our best and elevate our worst, in abject negation of the cycle of morality and the universe.

    In such stew and stink, many a Nigerian of commonplace roots live through each day without ever contemplating or criticizing their living conditions. They find themselves born into dehumanising squalor or somewhat indecent circumstances and they accept such sordidness as their fate and exhibit no conscious effort to better their lot, beyond what their immediate circumstances dictate.

    Almost as impulsively as the beasts of the wild, they seek the satisfaction of the needs of the moment, without much forethought and consideration that by sufficient endeavor, they just might improve their living conditions. However, a certain percentage – comprising men and women of privilege – guided by personal ambition, consciously strive in thought and will to attain higher status but very few among these are concerned enough to secure for all, the advantages which they seek for themselves.

    Very few men are indeed capable of humaneness that inspires martyrs to persistently rebel against glaring social evils, in the interest of less fortunate members of the society. But there exists a few however, that are truly bothered by the impoverishment of their fellow citizens regardless of any risk or discomfort it might attract to them personally.

    These few, driven by compassion, tirelessly seek first in thought and then in action, for some way of escape; some new system of society by which life may become richer, more joyful and devoid of avertable evils that mars the present. But surprisingly, such men oftentimes, fail to curry the support of the very victims of the injustices they wish to end.

    This is because more unfortunate sections of the Nigerian populace are hopelessly ignorant, apathetic from excess of toil and disillusionment, apprehensive through the imminent danger of instantaneous chastisement by the ruling class, and morally defective, owing to the loss of self-respect resulting from their degradation.

    Thus despite our claims to modernity, higher education, sophistication and relative rise in the standard of comfort among wage-earners in the country, the Nigerian society have failed to achieve better living conditions and a better society even in the throes of rising demand for more radical intervention and reconstruction of the social order.

    It is no surprise however that the Nigerian citizenry has persistently proved a dismal failure. And the reasons are hardly far-fetched: Nigerians have a problem with differentiating between appropriate and inappropriate political behavior.  That is why the nation’s democratic experiment like any other system of governance practicable by us was doomed from the start.

    What exactly has democracy offered? A 4-1-9 progressive plan that booms circumspectly like it had been doctored as part of a cold-war era propagandist scheme. But despite our self-righteousness and persistent cynicism about the current order, we really cannot explore a more worthy alternative than what we have now. The average Nigerian can’t bear to be led by a truly honest, visionary and accountable leadership.

    Apparently, we possess an overwhelming and oft-convincing inclination to self-destruct thus our lack of a coherent and defensible political ideology essential to the evolution of a progressive leadership and state.

    The average Nigerian is no more electable than the leadership he endures yet he loves to speak truth to power; even as he simultaneously smothers his protests by extolling the ruling class, whose dominance he seeks to terminate. No matter who is elected, the demographic and economic realities of Nigeria will persist, and there is a very limited range of politically-viable solutions for dealing with them.

    It’s about time Nigerians consciously evolved in thought and will, in pursuit of saner social order. But such conscious evolution can only be achieved by re-orientation in scholarship and purification of though.

    The foundations of scholarship and knowledge must be tirelessly reconstructed to guarantee more progressive responses to internal problems of social advance — problems of work and wages, of families and homes, of morals and the true value of life – and all these and other inevitable problems of civilization must be resolvable largely by elected representatives of the people by reason of their exposure, leadership skills and humane constitution.

    This informs a greater need for study and thought. It requires appeal to the rich experience of past and current mistakes, in the journey towards the reduction to the barest minimum, the possibility of future mistakes. The answer to Nigeria’s widening income and social gap – which has so far manifested in preventable crises and persistent state of insecurity – is to found an educational process geared to steer successfully, the commonplace trains of thought away from the dilettante and the fool stereotype.

    It’s about time poor, struggling members of the nation’s working class and youth divide, scorned the maxim that holds that their worries are always reducible to a cup of rice, a loaf of bread or paltry bribe. The paths to stable peace and security winds between honest toil and dignified manhood.

    The better society that we seek requires the guidance of skilled thinkers, the loving, reverent comradeship between the low income earners and ambitious middle class, emancipated by training and culture.

    Such human elements would no doubt be conscious of the fact that not even the sustenance of oil subsidy, higher wages and a fairer economic system could protect its members from the usual handicaps and monstrosity constituted by the incumbent and predatory ruling class.

    Hence they would be able to understand that positive change, must be mooted and achieved by upright youth and working class, in further substantiation of their capacities to assimilate the culture and refinement of humane civilization.

    A veritable step towards such reality is to vote the incumbent administration out of office and elect a younger, less ethnic, less directionless, visionary and benevolent leadership. But to achieve this, the youth must establish a more truly progressive, vibrant and detribalised social and political platform.

  • Abuja tough guys and constitutional amendment

    I sympathise with Nigerians who had expected the attempt by the National Assembly to amend some key elements of our constitution as answer to our crisis of nationhood. The high expectation was understandable since we have become a nation of miracle seekers where people believe they can reap what they did not sow.  I for one never share the optimism of those who believe our current class of lawmakers can give what they do not have.

    A brief recourse to the past will show that such expectation was a forlorn hope. First, most of the current Abuja actors that constitute our new political class were those born after 1966. Their only form of political socialisation was a passage through   Babangida’s school of democracy.  And It is on record that the first set of ‘new breed” politicians, the  products of  that new orientation such as Tom Ikimi and Babagana Kingibe, chairmen of Babangida decreed two parties sided with the military against Nigeria at a critical period in our nation’s history in1993. We also have it on record that the set that followed in 1999 was no less anti-Nigeria. After first killing their leading light over sharing of spoils of  office (or war as Obasanjo called it), they  settled down  to share among  themselves, in the name of privatization, the nation’s investment of over $100b for a paltry $1.6b. When there was nothing left to sell, they shared   our national patrimony under a dubious government monetization policy. The 2010 group was represented by Goodluck Jonathan, described by one of his colleagues as “an ATM without secret pin number” – was no less vicious. Since for President Jonathan, stealing government money was not corruption, ministers and party stalwarts were given free hand to satisfy their greed. The current recession is the price the nation is paying for the greed of this set.

    The reigning group led by Saraki and Dogara has been the most daring. They have no apologies for placing the interest of their members before that of the nation. They went an extra mile by first executing a civilian coup against their party to earn their current positions.  By their outing last week, they have demonstrated they are not about to commit suicide after all the risk just to be regarded as patriots. That option is definitely not an option to those who are ready to impeach the acting President and pull down the whole edifice on their own heads for being reminded that diverting budgetary allocations from important national projects that touch on the lives of Nigerians to controversial constituency projects was unpatriotic.

    First, it must be remembered that the whimsical declaration of LGAs as third tier of government by Obasanjo following Ibrahim Dasuki Commission’s recommendation was not aimed at enhancing development at the grassroot level but at securing legitimacy for the military administration.  If there was any consideration for development at all, it was about individuals such as retired military officers who benefited most from Babangida’s Directorate of Food, Roads and Rural Infrastructure (DFRRI) campaign which became an avenue for siphoning funds and traditional rulers who also receive 5%of LGAs allocations directly from Abuja for doing absolutely nothing. Local government was patterned after the command structure of the military and funded from the centre became a strategy for undermining the independence of the states and for institutionalization of corruption.

    The National Assembly understands that all politics are local. It was not by accident that Awo and Ahmadu Bello started their political careers as local government chieftains. But our current lawmakers as in character, granted autonomy to LGAs instead of correcting an abnormality as there is no federation in the world, as Soludo, the former CBN Governor observed a little while ago, where the federal government allocates funds to local governments that are not accountable to it.

    Similarly, the national assembly’s abrogation of States Independent Electoral Commissions (SIECs) is a betrayal of the federal arrangement.  The challenge before the National Assembly was empowering SIEC to enhance its credibility just as we have done with INEC at the centre. INEC itself cannot be  said to be made up of angels with so many of their officials facing trials for receiving millions as bribe to rig the 2015 election on behalf of some candidates and political  parties. In any case, one of the reasons the United States from where we copied the federal arrangement advertises to support the credibility of their elections is that they are conducted by states irrespective of parties in power.

    That Saraki and Dogara presided over constitutional amendments to make themselves members of the Council of State should not surprise anyone. After all, they executed a civilian coup to secure their present positions and will be in good company as they join other coup plotters in the National Council of State.

    Passing a constitutional amendment to support state legislatures’ financial autonomy is also in bad taste. It means taking a cue from the upper houses, state assembly members can now pay themselves whatever they want. They don’t have to wait on governors to procure for themselves state-of-the-art SUV cars or add imported bullet proof SUVs, cleared with forged papers to their speakers’ fleet.

    Provision for immunity for speakers of state legislatures is nothing but corruption fighting back. Henceforth, EFCC cannot question the Speakers of Houses of Assemblies for financial infractions, false declaration of assets or be asked to defend their honour if per chance they are mentioned in the Panama scandals.

    If there is one decision that portrays the current Abuja “like-minds senators” as a pack of unserious lot, it is their rejection of devolution of power. They are in other words saying the current situation where we have  about 88 items in the exclusive  list, 33 items on the concurrent list  without a residual list which has rendered the states impotent  while a dysfunctional centre makes a mess of functions such as roads, agriculture ,health, education, and security that are best handled by states – is fine.

    With six months delay and eventual  padding of the current budget by Saraki and Dogara houses while the rest of the country including Abuja  suffer  from collapsed infrastructure, it should be obvious to Nigerians that without devolution of power, whoever  occupies seat of power in Abuja is a hostage to vicious tough guys in the National Assembly.

    There is so much at stake for those benefiting from our current crisis of nation-building. We cannot put our destiny in the hands of self-serving law makers whose salaries we do not know until recent disclosure by Senator Buruji Kashamu who declared during a quarrel with Ladi Adebutu  that “your monthly take home is N7m. When you multiply that by 48 months you would have earned a total of N336 million” in two years.

    We as a people must stop playing the ostrich and accept that we need an umpire probably the United Nations. We should remind ourselves that even with our founding fathers who were adjudged to be men of vision and character, the national question was resolved in London in 1954 with the support of Britain. Today we have a more vicious political class and a more determined Fulani hegemonic power that is resolved to hold on to their current advantages such as greater number of states and LGAs which make revisiting the national question long resolved before the intervention of an ill-equipped and ill-educated military in 1966 an arduous task.

  • Nigerian leaders need to listen

    Nigerian youths are speaking – and speaking emphatically, incessantly and increasingly trenchantly essentially the same things. We their elders need to heed what they are saying.

    In totality, Nigerian youths from separate areas of Nigeria are saying profound and fundamental things. I don’t have to agree with them before I try to understand what they are saying. My profession as a historian conditions my mind to peruse what people communicate, what people say or write or do, and to seek to discern meanings and trends in them.

    Various groups and associations of Nigerian youths are questioning the validity, the value, and the existence of Nigeria as a country. The rest of us need to stop, listen and ponder.  In particular, those whom God has elevated to the position of prominent citizens, leaders and rulers among us must stop, listen and ponder – and then try to respond appropriately and with the best intention to produce the best results therefrom.  We are taking grave risks by ignoring or trivializing the noises emanating from the ranks of our youths.  If we laugh off these noises in the belief that they will peter off and vanish, we may be making mistakes that could prove to be of cataclysmic consequences.  No, we cannot afford to miss the message in these noises. They do not look as if they will go away. I repeat: we need to listen.

    For years now, various youth groups among the Igbo nation, one of the largest of our nations, have been clamouring for the separation of the Igbo nation from Nigeria in order to create a new sovereign country of Biafra. Some have come as Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra, others as Biafra Zionist Movement, and yet others as Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB). Their ways of doing things may differ, but their messages are the same – separation of the Igbo nation into a new country of Biafra. And today, that message has caught on considerably among the Igbo nation. In Igbo city after Igbo city, we are seeing countless thousands of Igbo youths (and older citizens) come out to the streets to hear and cheer the youth who leads IPOB.

    Historically older than the noises of Biafra, the noise among the youths of the Delta has been going on virtually from the moment of Nigeria’s independence in 1960. Started soon after independence by no bigger a person than a university student, it has been sustained in waves after waves since then. Today, in the hands of considerably larger crowds of educated youths, the noise for a separate sovereign country of the Ijaw nation (our fourth largest nation) has grown wider into a call for a sovereign Delta country. And these youths of the many nations of the Delta have found very effective ways to make their noise loud – by inflicting repeated damages on the oil production facilities on which the Nigerian economy depends.

    Among the large Yoruba nation of the Nigerian South-west, our second largest nation (after the Hausa-Fulani nation), and our most successful nation in socio-economic development and modernization, youth noises for separation and for a sovereign Odua Republic have grown gradually through several “self-determination” groups. Those noises have now become very loud indeed. A few days ago, many of the “self-determination” groups came together, jointly proclaimed the formation of a Yoruba Liberation Command, and issued a very masterful statement inaugurating what they claimed to be the beginning of the final struggle for the sovereign republic of Odua. In ways characteristic of their Yoruba nation, they stretched out a hand of fellowship to the Biafra struggle among the Igbo, the sovereignty struggle among the Delta youths, and even the sovereignty demands of the youths of the Hausa-Fulani nation (otherwise known as Arewa North), and urged all for future cooperation among the separate countries that are now seeking to be born.

    I am sure that many of my readers today would be surprised to read here that there are sovereignty demands among the youths of Arewa North too. Yes, there are. In 2014, an Arewa Youth Development Front, led by highly educated youths, organized various demonstrations in Arewa cities, visited highly placed Arewa citizens, demanded that southerners resident in the North should relocate back to the south within two weeks, that northerners resident in the south should return to the North, and that, without delay, the “failed experiment of Nigeria should be terminated”. Then, some weeks ago, a large combination of Arewa youth groups issued a very major statement to Nigeria and the world, giving an ultimatum to the Igbo people resident in the north to quit the north not later than October 1, advising northerners resident in the south to start returning to the north, and – yes – demanding the dissolution of Nigeria. Not only did they say that they did not want to have Igbo people living in their Arewa homeland any longer; they also added that they did not want their nation to continue to live in the same country with the Igbo nation, and urged the United Nations to help organize a referendum that would enable the Igbo people to vote to go away from Nigeria and become the sovereign country of Biafra which Igbo youths have been clamouring for – in short, that Nigeria as we know it be broken up.

    Thus, we have masses of the youths of our four largest nations – Hausa-Fulani, Yoruba, Igbo and Delta – demanding the separation of their nations from Nigeria and the dissolution of Nigeria. And, the fact that these crowds are “youths” must not mislead us into under-assessing their strength. The four nations they represent amount to about 165 million out of Nigeria’s total population of about 200 million. In each of these four nations, these youths constitute the majority of the population. They also constitute, far and away, the most educated generation, the most literate, the most skilled in modern things, and the most exposed worldwide. Whatever these people say about our country is enormously important – far too important to be taken lightly.

    Therefore, we need to make great efforts to understand why various large groups in this very important generation are seeking separation of their nations from Nigeria and the breaking up of Nigeria, and why their messages are growing popular in their nations. Those reasons are, for the most part, not difficult to see. The major one is that the generation above these youths, the generation that controls the commanding positions in Nigeria’s political and economic life, have senselessly appropriated to themselves all the benefits of Nigeria’s existence. They have put iron-clad holds on Nigeria’s common heritage, excluded the youths that are coming up from behind them, and seek seriously to provide virtually nothing for succeeding generations.

    The youths, highly educated, highly informed and world-wise, can only look from their conditions of deprivation at their elders who have established a system that enables them (the elders) to engross and steal all the resources of the country – money, urban land and estates, shares in public establishments, etc. They can see the children of this small older generation being thrust into all the best jobs and business opportunities, while the overwhelming majority of youths walk the streets jobless for years after graduation, unable to settle down and organize their lives. The youths are aware that the controllers of power in their country have slashed far down the provisions for education, that the quality of education in Nigeria has declined and is declining, and that Nigerian youth’s competitiveness in the world is declining. Most of these youths would flee abroad if they could. Countless thousands of them are lined up in front of foreign embassies daily. Each knows friends and former classmates who have, in desperation, joined other youths audaciously trying to reach Europe through the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean Sea, and who have perished thereby. Many know bright girl classmates who have ended up in enforced prostitution or sex slavery abroad. The overwhelming majority of our youths are surrounded by horrible realities and memories.

    In different ways, they all blame Nigeria. Universally, they dream that in smaller and ethnically compact separate countries of their own ethnic nations, there will be a good chance for new socio-economic orders, and more empathic governance. To them, Nigeria has become a monster that must be disbanded. All their separatist statements rant against Nigeria – and against Nigeria’s ruling class. Even the Arewa youths who are hitting at the Igbo are also hitting at the Arewa ruling class. If nothing changes, this intrinsically powerful generation will soon break up Nigeria.

  • The coming debates

    The coming debates

    What would life be like without politicians? It is all dull, drab and damp, no doubt.

    Politicians are like the ocean and its rippling waves. When they blow their top, the effects reverberate all over the land. When they tear at one another at the National Assembly, the media bring us the scenes live in the comfort of our homes. We are entertained and for a while there is no talk of being shortchanged; we get value for our votes – and cash into the bargain, sometimes.

    Forthrightness is not their defining attribute. When they cause trouble, they tell us it is all for peace. When they are blinded by ambition, turning against their benefactors, they claim it is all in the interest of the people. When they award themselves hefty allowances and salaries, they call it service.

    Our politicians are in their best elements when they are provoked to strike at one another, hurling invectives like some Balogun market traders who have not sold anything all day. They exhibit uncommon creativity, waxing lyrical and philosophical – all at the same time. Besides, they could deliver their anger with the savagery of a lion dared by a goat, sinking their teeth into their opponent’s body.

    Consider the encounter between Imo State Governor Owelle Rochas Okorocha and former Aviation Minister Femi Fani-Kayode, who claimed the visit of some governors to President Muhammadu Buhari in London was a fluke. The governor called Fani-Kayode “unintelligent” and “disrespectful”. He said Fani-Kayode was living on his father’s and grandfather’s glory.

    Besides, he called him an “overpampered child”. A pampered  child at over 50?

    Who is a pampered child?

    The obese one who swims in ice cream and gobbles pizza like a hungry workman? The one who, even though of age and mature, still treats everything of value like the toys of his childhood days?

    Does this description fit the former minister? Does he behave so? Is this a fair comment or a blow below the belt?

    The former minister picked up the gauntlet. He joined battle with Okorocha, describing him as a “sociopathic self-hating Igbo who is suffering from a terrible and debilitating inferiority complex”. He challenged His Excellency to a public debate for Nigerians to decide who between the twain has “native sense”.

    What is native sense? Even before the big debate that Fani-Kayode proposed, some public commentators have launched their own unsolicited and unrestrained debate. They have been describing and defining “native intelligence”, saying: “Is it collecting N1.7b (according to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC)) from the arms cash and telling the judge, “yes I collected, but it’s all in the line of duty and I don’t think I owe anybody any account”?

    No date has been fixed for the debate.

    No love is lost between former Delta State Governor Emmanuel Ewetan Uduaghan and university teacher cum businessman Pat Utomi, a professor who is aspiring to be governor of Delta on the platform of the All Progressives Congress (APC).

    Uduaghan advised Utomi to start his aspiration as a councillor.  A professor as a councilor, of all things? What aberration, Utomi may have thought.

    He lunged at Uduaghan, asking the former helmsman to account for N20b Independent Power Project (IPP) funds.  He  accused Uduaghan of plunging the state into a N600b debt onto which his successor Dr Ifeanyi Okowa has piled some N60b. The professor would like a public debate on how to use scarce resources for the benefit of the people.

    The former governor described Utomi as “the last managing director of Volkswagen Nigeria”, which he accused him of running aground.

    A former commissioner, Chief Paulinus Akpeki, weighed in. He recalled that Utomi was an honorary adviser to Uduaghan. “Ask him the project that he said they should do in his village, what happened to it? What role did he play on the project? It is very sad that people who have skeletons in their cupboards should begin to make noise.”

    Even as we are yet to hear from the ebullient professor, the busybodies masquerading as public affairs commentators have been making all manner of insinuations,  Did Utomi corner some juicy contracts? What was the project meant for his village and what happened to it?

    Perhaps Utomi is waiting for the proposed debate to shed light on these and other matters.  Step in, please, event planners.

    The other day when the Presidency released the picture of recuperating President Buhari and some governors, it sparked off a bitter argument. Some, among them Fani-Kayode, said it was all some abracadabra.

    Fani-Kayode said the picture from London was “old and fake” because it was indeed taken on another occasion, His proof: he was “reliably told” and “curiously, all the drinks on the table are Nigerian products and Nigerian-made”.

    “Did the governors take all those drinks along with them to London to see the President?” Fani-Kayode asked.

    Instead of simply calling for a debate, those who do not like Fani-Kayode dismissed the former minister’s argument as “illogical, puerile and foolishly mischievous in conception and plainly stupid in delivery”.

    Is it difficult to find Nigerian drinks in London, which is the second home of many Nigerians? they queried.

    A source close to the former minister has just told me that despite everything the Presidency has said, he insists that the photograph was fake all through. He will soon issue a challenge for a full town hall-type debate on the picture.

    Apparently taking a cue from Fani-Kayode, one of its most valued members, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) joined the fray. It described the photograph as “an insult on Nigerians”. “They don’t even think that it is necessary for the President to send message to Nigerians or for themselves to come and tell us what happened during that meeting,” PDP spokesman Dayo Adeyeye said.

    Some of the governors came on television to talk about Buhari’s health. Alhaji Al-Makura, the Nasarawa State governor, swore that he made the trip to London. He said whoever was in doubt was free to inspect his travel papers.

    Against the background of people saying only APC governors were on the trip, the Presidency facilitated another trip to London. Two PDP governors joined the delegation. Was the PDP persuaded?  Doubtful.

    I wonder why the PDP and Fani-Kayode have not called for a debate on this sensitive matter. That must have been a big oversight.

    Even before the PDP joined the fray, one of its men whose public image many would argue is a true testimony to all that the party stands for had challenged the APC to show proof that Buhari was alive. Ayo Fayose, the governor of Ekiti State, threatened to release what he said were the authentic photographs of the President who he swore was on life support.

    After the governors’ London trip, all has been quiet. What went wrong?

    Is Fayose in possession of some strange photographs, perhaps taken by some sophisticated electronic device planted somewhere at the hilltop mansion in which His Excellency lives in Ado-Ekiti? Was Fayose scammed? Who did?

    If indeed he had been scammed as some of his opponents have been saying, then the scammers must indeed be among the world’s first eleven in the business.

    We are really looking forward to when His Excellency will put this sensitive matter behind him at a well organised public debate.

    In Port Harcourt, the Rivers State capital, so much has been going on. The governor’s ability to perform despite his belligerency has been hailed as a rare gift of nature, which His Excellency Nyesom Wike continues to bask in. His former boss and predecessor Rotimi Chibuike Amaechi, now Minister of Transportation, says Wike continues to stack up documents to push the charge that he (Amaechi) is corrupt. Wike keeps threatening to unleash such documents on the public space.

    Why not a well-structured public debate to settle this matter once and for all?

    Senate President Bukola Abubakar Saraki has been talking about how and why the upper chamber refused to clear Ibrahim Magu for the EFCC job and why the budgetary allocation for the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway was slashed. Minister Babatunde Fashola says the slashed votes went into some boreholes and such community projects which the lawmakers consider more crucial.

    Motorists continue to die on this road as if it was built to take lives. Now the contractor Julius Berger, has left the site because it has not been paid. Southwest leaders are up in arms against the lawmakers. They do not have to be.

    They should simply call for a debate on why they think this road deserves attention. The lawmakers will then have the chance to state their grouse against the road.

    Isn’t that the way of democracy?

  • The second slave trade

    I always feel very bad and sad when the international electronic media show hundreds of Africans drowning in the Mediterranean Sea virtually every day. Those rescued claim they are running away from undemocratic governments, female circumcision, also known as genital mutilation, ethnic cleansing and religious conflicts. The truth is that most of them are running away from poverty, unemployment, frustration and uncertain future arising from insensitive governments characterized by lack of serious planning. In other words, these people are economic migrants rather than being political refugees. The case can of course be made that economic deprivation is almost as bad as political and religious persecution. Both can lead to death and their separation is merely academic. To keep young Africans at home, one must provide them means of economic sustenance. The west therefore has self-interest in not colluding with African countries’ leaders to rob their people and they must also seriously engage Africa in fair trade rather than the ripping them off as they presently do. African produce and raw materials are bought cheaply and are returned to them as finished products and are sold at many times the cost of production. Foreigners dictate the price they buy African goods and also the price their goods are sold to Africans. Africa has no choice in this and this unfair exchange is also a manifestation of Africa’s weakness in global power relations .This is what is at the root of the present modern slave trade going on in Africa.

    The trans-Atlantic slave trade which lasted for  almost five centuries  and which has gone down into history as forced migrations which according to my friend and colleague, Professor Joseph Inikori of Rochester University  in the USA,  involved the transplantation of not less than 15million hapless Africans to the Americas, that is South and North America. Most of these people came from Portuguese Angola which according to Basil Davidson was reduced to a “howling wilderness” almost denuded of its people after five centuries of the Portuguese ferrying their black cargoes across the Atlantic. The area between the Bights of Benin and Biafra known then as the slave coast approximates most of the Nigerian coast provided the rest of these black cargoes of involuntary migration to the new world. It is an irony that the growing and cultivation of something so sweet as sugar should have involved so much bitterness and suffering to the victims of slave labour on American and West Indian sugar plantations. Africans largely sold their brothers into slavery  even though there is evidence that slave wars were encouraged by the European slavers to facilitate ample supply of slaves to the slave ships anchored in slave ports of Luanda, Lobito, Escravos, Warri, Lagos, Porto Novo,  Accra, Saint Louis  and others. Most of those shipped across the Atlantic were forced into it. African potentates, middlemen and merchants colluded with European slave traders to remove the young and productive young men and women from West Africa where trade was concentrated. This trade constituted the basis of western capitalism which enjoyed centuries of free and unpaid labour according to Eric Williams in his 1947 Oxford Ph.D. thesis which became a classic entitled “Capitalism and slavery” subsequently.

    But today, most of those running away are young people. In the past, they were people with little education or no education at all. Now those leaving are sometimes graduates of tertiary institutions who cannot find jobs. They are also using all kinds of routes legal and illegal and sometimes very dangerous roads such as crossing the Sahara desert and the Mediterranean Sea. While this voluntary movement of people is going on, there is the odious human trafficking where young people particularly girls are lured into the sex trade. Some of the young girls claim that their traducers promise them good jobs in Europe only to be dumped in brothels in Libya and Europe. There are those young girls who knew that what they were entering into right from beginning was prostitution. It is very sad that some parents aid and abet the trafficking of their children. Some parents even sell their old homes to finance their children’s movement. There were cases where parents did this horrible thing and when challenged they claimed they did it to assist their children to get out of poverty. There are instances of some of such children after a few years sending money home from their earnings from this nefarious trade to fund their parents businesses.  In cases of involuntary trafficking, the victims of the trade are sworn to oaths in juju shrines to keep their mouths shut if they are caught. They also sometimes swear allegiance to their captors not to bolt away until they have paid their madams ‘or masters ‘investment in their relocation and placement in brothels in Europe. Sometimes young girls are taken from Nigeria not to Europe but to brothels in poor wretched countries such as Mali and Burkina Faso  in West Africa where they endure worse situation than what is prevalent at home more or less jumping from fry pan into fire. The ones taken to Libya when Muamar Ghadafi was in power fared better but immediately after he was murdered, all hell broke out and they became shooting targets for wild armed gangs in the country fighting for political turf. This horrible situation is what is fuelling the desperate movement to Europe occasioning drowning in the Mediterranean Sea. But in spite of this terrible ordeal the movement across the Sahara continues.

    The inhumanity of this trafficking ought to catch the attention of  leaders of African states and to lead perhaps to summoning of an extraordinary summit of the African Union or other regional bodies like ECOWAS or SADCC to tackle this shame and degrading horror. It is not just an African problem because people are coming from Bangladesh, Pakistan Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Yemen where wars are raging. The preponderant numbers in recent times are coming from Africa. Finding a solution to this problem is urgent because of its lasting effect on Africans and people of African descent.

    Racism is one of the residual effects of the trans-Atlantic slave trade where the justification of the trade was premised on the grounds that Africans were not really human and that enslaving them was freeing them from the barbarism of their African savage existence. It has taken centuries for Africans to partially shed this degrading and odious racism. The present, somehow voluntary, slave trade Africans are imposing on themselves will in future reinforce the belief of those like Rudyard Kipling  who felt that Africans are “half children, half devils “and not really people. We can thus see that it is in the interest of black humanity to so run the affairs of our countries that our children will have a future in our countries. I still remember my college days in Europe, America and Canada when Chinese were looked down upon as “china man” something derogatory like “nigger” and laughed at. But by their foot straps, the Chinese by fire and by force have pulled themselves into global reckoning. Nobody is laughing at the Chinese today. This was also the case with the Japanese. In London of the 1950s and 1960s, one could encounter advertisements for vacant apartments with the proviso “No Irish, no coloured (blacks) but Jap. Ok”. If we want to be respected, we must pull ourselves up, develop our countries and stop escaping to Europe and America and Canada in search of the Golden Fleece. There is enough opportunity at home if we look inwards. We have to mobilize our human and material resources to develop our countries .We have to put an end to stealing and looting our nations’ treasuries and stop colluding with the outside world to ruin ourselves. Unless we do this, we will always have a weak hand in dealing with the rest of the world. For us, as Nigerians, the time to get moving is now. The developed world will soon move away from reliance on hydrocarbons as a source of energy. Technology is going to render useless very soon what we depend on for foreign reserve. The way to go is industrialization, technological innovation and adding value to our agricultural produce. The days of relying on export of mineral and agricultural raw materials will soon be gone forever. The urgency of the situation needs to be understood by everyone so that instead of wasting our time on useless political disputation and our vast resources on importing cheap goods from Asian countries, we should settle down and seriously plan for the future of which this deplorable but salvageable present is part of.

  • Parable of the press and the Nigerian spectacle

    This minute, the fable persists of Nigeria’s ‘crooked’ press. The incumbent government conceals the true nature of President Muhammadu Buhari’s ailment ‘to prevent the press from twisting the truth into lies’ and sensational news, it claims. In turn, a disenchanted public accuses the press of unpardonable rot and indolence.

    On radio, TV, social media and the newspapers, ‘critics of note’ berate the nation’s press. At the backdrop of this entitled rage, the public bemoans the descent of the press. Neighbourhood pubs pulsate with howls of liquor-smashed folk bemoaning the dearth of ‘investigative journalism.’ Pastors, Imams, labour leaders and self-styled activists mount the soapbox to bewail and flay the press. Political, corporate, intellectual and spiritual hoodlums weave a discordant melody of scorn and syndicated hatred.

    This gory imagery of the press however, reveals the core of the Nigerian persona. The press is crooked because it serves and hails from an infinitely corrupt, dishonourable and uncivilised society.

    The press afflicts Nigeria so because it is peopled by men and women sired by debauched tribes, degenerate communes and lineages. Show me a corrupt reporter and I will tell you captivating stories of ancestral filth and decadence, communal muck and insolence, institutionalized greed and selfishness.

    Were our families, communities, religious temples and other social institutions untainted by filth, the nation’s press would be free of unscrupulous characters – after all, they are every journalist’s bastions of socialisation.

    By its press, Nigeria suffers rebirth of degenerate image, an explosion of tarnished persona. The incumbent press fulfills our institutionalised tendencies, glorifying the rough edges of primordial vice and giving it a trendy tone.

    The Nigerian press painstakingly redefines journalism in society’s besmirched image because failure to do so is tantamount to career suicide or economic hara-kiri. Those who attempt to be ‘professional’ or ‘ethically different’ become unbidden martyrs on the nation’s altar of smut.

    Remember Dele Olojede, the Pulitzer-prized journalist. Having earned international acclaim for doing good journalism, he ventured into the nation’s amoral swamp with the swagger of an idealist. Olojede sought to create a professional medium as fabled Peter Pan sought purpose in mythic Neverland. NEXT, his brainchild was certainly imperfect, but it was a welcome alternative in a swamp of caged, commercialised media.

    Olojede’s dream suffered stillbirth; NEXT, for all its cheek and vaunted splendour, espoused the tenets of fragile fiction. Little wonder Nigeria flipped to ‘Epilogue’ one sheet after NEXT’s preface. Forget Olojede and his defunct NEXT, several ambitious professionals and ethical journalism have been interred on the famished paths, where tall dreams fade to snide realism.

    Yet Nigeria craves Renaissance Press. Government and the governed bemoan the dearth and  death of good journalism even as they plot and effect the murder of the journalist in the street. Need I recall the willful murder by society, of brilliant men and women by whose spark, journalism attained honour and a pride of place among most honorable callings?

    Society thwarts good, ethical journalism wherever it finds its random sprouts. Driven by varied, selfish interests, politicians, so-called ‘corporate titans,’ activists, NGO-entrepreneurs, clerics and several other classes of refined thieves and criminal masterminds, bemoan the death of a vibrant press at the backdrop of their frantic, coordinated struggle to tame and enslave the press.

    You must know that companies’ expend a large fortune via their Corporate Affairs Departments to ‘kill negative stories’ and ‘befriend the press.’ In the mix, big business endow the academia with massive funding to create and implement academic theories and experiments geared to tame and emasculate the press.

    And if you would look beneath the smokescreen of Public Relations’ ridiculous, dandy theories, you would find a devious, criminal and contemptible plot to hinder socially responsible, public service journalism.

    But while businesses exert sinful influence on the press, politicians own the press. Government departments, functionaries and  agencies ply the press with intimidating advertisements; governors, senators, council chairmen, the presidency among others, keep the press on a leash of ‘carrots’ and intimidating largesse, in desperate bid to ‘own the editors’ and ‘determine the news.’

    Lest we forget the journalists playing dumb to degenerate, vainglorious, overbearing Mullahs and ‘General Overseers (G.Os)’ or ‘Spiritual Daddies’ if you like. Nigeria should never forget how the nation’s Christian leadership goaded former President Goodluck Jonathan with deceptive, currency-activated prophecies to fulfill their decadent lust for mammon and hatred for Buhari, who they claimed would ‘Islamise Nigeria.’

    And marching in virtual lockstep with these shades of despicable characters is the country’s amoral, impoverished citizenry. Driven by greed and inexplicable malice, large sections of the citizenry foster and fulfill the savage lusts of the nation’s leadership. Hence their inclinations to serve as duplicitous pawns and cannon fodder to the ruling class’ firestorms.

    The humiliation of the journalist persists in the hands of his employer. Salaries still range from N15, 000 per month at entry level to N70, 000 per month at managerial level across most media. Just three media houses may claim exceptionality in this respect and this reality is known to the government, big business, advertisers and general public that the Nigerian journalist is an endangered species, haunted by his employer and tormented by the public he serves.

    These sad realities lead to daily exodus of skilled and promising hands from journalism and hourly influx of quacks, fortune hunters and blackmailers into the profession.

    Yet Nigeria demands a free and effervescent press, peopled by flawless professionals, inured to the ethics of investigative, public service journalism. Even as such admirable traits and unimpeachable character are rarely attributable to every segment of society.

    Nigeria’s critical mob, like the fabled treacherous rabble, seeks fulfillment of tyrant fantasies: the fantasies often vary between the destruction of an unpopular government, despot or worn-out civilization by the press. Reality however, affirms the duplicity of Nigeria’s critical mob.

    The latter is continually tamed and kept on a leash by a ruling class that capitalizes on its obvious handicaps: its impulsiveness, insensibility to reason and judgment, poverty of soul and intellect, its irritability and overt sentimentality – which are undeniably characteristic of beings belonging to inferior forms of evolution, like savages and carnivores.

    I stand corrected given the penchant of the citizenry to flout traffic rules, moot imprudent plots and decapitate one another driven by religious, ethnic bigotry.

    The Nigerian press won’t fulfill the society’s utopian fantasies. No. The press will continue to subvert Nigerians’ noble expectations of it in perfect understanding the society’s cultural shift from uncompromising morality to unbridled amorality and hedonism. The press won’t give society honest, developmental news because every segment of the society strives to unmoor the journalist from his role as a crucial appendage of the nation’s conscience.

    This minute, the press feeds society biased definitions of reality as determined by big business, government, looters, lobbyists and other civil society. Contemporary Nigeria embraces the emotional pageant that has turned news into paid publicity and mindless entertainment. The journalist in response, kowtows to lusts and vanities of modern society. The press understands that the call for good journalism is mere spectacle and display, a fulfillment of Nigeria’s lust for pagan ostentation. The press is you get is the press you deserve.