The Nation Newspaper

Category: Thursday

  • The integrity of brutes and eternal wildlings

    Nigeria is not the greatest country in Africa. ‘It’ will not be the greatest country in the world. ‘It’ is a creature borne of incest. But it is hardly the ‘contraption’ frequently alluded to by generations of revolutionary poseurs and armchair Trotskys – it is piteous and ideologically shallow of them to wish our problems away by simply calling for an end to the ‘forced marriage’ of cultures and ethnicities, an enterprise which blame they lay solely at the feet of the country’s colonial predators.

    Nigeria fails as a nation because we fail as a people and progenitors of African civilisation. Rather than project a superior culture of nationhood and society, we choose to curate the worst that our forebears dared espouse, coating it as the ‘Nigerian factor,’ and our flamboyant code of conduct.

    Thus we covet an incestuous relationship with self – the dark, chthonian parts of our innate nature. We mould our clan where racial foolery fraternizes with vile. Senior citizenry molest our young in a never-ending cycle of sleaze and ‘moral’ pedophilia. But the young are hardly the prey we think they are. Every second, they morph from starry-eyed victims to eager participants in our dehumanising ritual of violence, mental and biological aberration.

    Ours is a classic tale of Darwinian waste and mayhem, the squalor and rot of Nigerianness; a distortion of African civilisation. But we block the true import and consequences of this hideous cycle on our psyches and our future as a nation; that we might retain our integrity as brutes and eternal wildlings.

    Western science and cultural aesthetics predictably become apparatus in our frantic attempt to revise the Nigerian horror into imaginatively palatable form. Notwithstanding our frantic lunge for substance and acclaim on frontiers where the world’s more advanced civilisations project their race and oneness, Nigeria remains hideous in name and status. While we make exaggerated gestures in fields of space science, information technology, industry, sports, and so on, Nigerian children die at birth and thousands of mothers die in painful labour. The youth are unemployed. Public officers loot public coffers with impunity and disregard for Rule of Law. Law enforcement officers turn violent affliction on the citizenry and society they are meant to protect. The executive, legislative and judicial arms of government mesh in a fetid whirl of strife and plunder. Anarchy rules our hinterlands and metropolitan Nigeria.

    Within such stew and stink, Nigeria ranked 152nd of 188 countries in the 2016 African Human Development Index (HDI) according to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Thus we are back at the crossroads of vile and extinction. There has been no improvement in our plight.

    While this piece too, resounds as hackneyed howl and lamentation; a regurgitation of grotesqueness we inflict on our fatherland and the towering monstrosities we have become.

    Our ultimate nemesis is the Nigerian youth. The youth epitomise the nub of discord and deathly rally ripping the tide and march to progress of our fatherland. But why do promising youth evolve like brutes and loathsome trolls? How did our once incandescent spokes of dawn erupt in moonshine?

    Many have attributed the afflictions of the Nigerian youth to bad leadership, nonstop dominance of the predatory ruling class and tiring recalcitrance of the younger generation to engage in communal and national politics in a beneficial manner. Many more would readily diagnose the maladies of the nation’s youth to structural banes and the perverse culture of citizenship by which they are weaned and ushered into adulthood.

    In the wake of plausible and often farfetched analyses, too many ‘patriots’ conveniently excuse themselves from the nexus of blame and severally propound the sad realization that Nigerians are innately incapable of self-determination and self-governance. Many have recommended the American example, the British palliative, the Chinese abracadabra and Malaysian ingenuity to mention a few, as the ultimate measures to resolve the nation’s ills. How?

    These arguments have overtime, attained a language of their own and thus evolved as a dialect of dissent and exaggerated renunciation. Thus the nation’s academic and political elite frequently marshal clashing precepts as solutions and justifiable putdown of the ruling class and the lower working class, as their politics dictate.

    A more damning view identifies the breadlines’ persistent ‘claims to victimhood and sense of entitlement’ as whiny and symptomatic of a dense and irresponsible citizenship. Between the conflict of hyperboles and corny reproach, Nigeria suffers the affliction of intellectual miscreants,  promising youth-turned-foetal-adults.

    As youths, the coordinated tragedies afflicting our consciousness daily append the only real structure to our lives as oppressed Nigerians. The burdensome reality of fast slipping youth, the recurrent rites of bigotry and ethical quandary of coping with the strict moral code of adulthood and ideal society, obscures our understanding of life’s ultimate purpose and meaning.

    It spurs millions of misguided Nigerian youth to engage in mad, desperate dash for fast and fleeting riches even as ripples of their actions keep hundreds of millions more in the doldrums and binds of despair.

    Consequently, the revolutionary dissent that sprouts from oppression is pitiless and unbending. It radically splits our world into ‘insensitive ruling class’ and ‘clueless lower class,’ ‘elite’ and ‘downtrodden,’ ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots.’ It fosters even more fragmented discord that continually pits Nigerian Christians against Muslims, Hausa against Igbo, Igbo against Yoruba, Yoruba against Ijaw.

    It fosters spurious segmentation of our society into moral and amoral,  good against evil, and apostates versus believers. Within this poisonous clime, the Nigerian child is born. If he survives birth hour, he is violently thrust into adolescence and misshapen adulthood.

    From Boko Haram and Niger Delta Avengers (NDA) terrorism, internet fraud, cyber-terrorism, financial/bankers’ terrorism and political terrorism emblematic of the ruling class, recent developments in the country present a sad prologue to a heinous and wider conflict between the nation’s rich ruling class and the impoverished majority of the breadlines and disappearing middle-class.

    A bloody and protracted war thus ensues: this war, caused by diminishing resources, chronic unemployment, substandard health facilities, rising food prices, big business and government conspiracies against the Nigerian state, manifest at alarming proportions daily and by the second.

    Thus our society is flung rudderless on a seething sea of sleaze. Now that our world as we have made it, begins to collapse, we withdraw from the possibility of rebirth, and choose to exploit ‘infinite possibilities’ in our fragility and doomsday predictions.

    The youth predictably become prominent actors in the theatre of ruin and discord. They become the muscle to actualise the ruling class’ blueprint of collapse. But if we consider our plight deeply enough, we would find that no child of the ruling class is co-opted in the drama of violence and death. They are tucked away, safe abroad.

    Picture the NDA, Boko Haram, MASSOB, IPOB, OPC, and so on without youth drawn from the breadlines and society’s boondocks. Will our governors, legislators, the presidency and aristocratic divide people these groups with their sons, daughters and wives?

    It’s about time we shunned the politics of retrogression, spurious militancy, bloodshed and devastation to embrace growth and immense possibilities achievable in progressive endeavour, like a political platform mooted by the youth, for all, and Nigeria’s future.

  • On Nigeria’s foreign policy constraints

    On Nigeria’s foreign policy constraints

    In an article titled ‘Still on Foreign Policy’, in his column in The Nation on Saturday, March 18, Mr. Segun Ayobolu, a gifted writer and columnist, argued very passionately for what he called ‘greater coherence, focus and vibrancy’ in Nigeria’s foreign policy. He recalled a previous article in the same paper by him in April of last year in which he characterised President Buhari’s foreign policy as ‘too tepid, tentative and unimaginative’. This time, and more explicitly, he complained that President Buhari has, since coming to power two years ago, assumed a central role in our foreign policy which involves him travelling abroad too frequently. He considers this unnecessary and argues that the president should now allow his Foreign Minister, Mr. Geoffrey Onyeama, a man with a very impressive educational background, obtaining university degrees from Columbia, Harvard and Cambridge, to take over fully the running of our foreign policy. As he says  more directly, ‘It is the responsibility of his foreign minister to come up with innovative ideas and initiatives to help actualise the foreign policy vision of the president’ which, according to him, should be the promotion of ‘the highest standards of integrity and governance in Africa’.

    It is not difficult to understand the frustration that Mr. Ayobolu feels about the direction, or seeming lack of it, of Nigeria’s foreign policy. It is a view widely shared by the Nigerian foreign policy community and, possibly, the wider public, both of which want Nigeria, with its huge population and natural resources, to pursue a more dynamic foreign policy, and play a more influential role in African and world affairs. A dynamic foreign policy could even provide a useful diversion from our failures at home. In his article under reference he recalls with some nostalgia and pride Nigeria’s prominent role in the heroic struggle against apartheid South Africa and the liberation of Southern Africa from colonial rule, both of which objectives have since been achieved. With Nigerian immigrants now being violently attacked in South Africa, some critics will argue that the rewards of such a vigorous policy in Southern Africa are not so apparent now. I do not share this view as I believe that Nigeria’s active support for the decolonisation of Southern Africa was in our long term national interests.

    But the international situation and Nigeria’s domestic setting then were vastly different from what they are now. There is a time and season for everything, including foreign policy. Nigeria was not then under such intense domestic tension and internal divisions as is the case now. Our economic situation was far better then. The economy was strong and growing steadily. We were not in a recession then. Even then, Nigeria’s possible influence in world and African affairs is really condign. It remains largely a potential achievable in future after Nigeria has sorted out its huge domestic problems.

    To justify his call for a more ‘vibrant’ Nigerian foreign policy Mr. Ayobolu refers in his article to Professor Bolaji Akinyemi’s prominent role in foreign policy when he served as Babangida’s Foreign Minister. In this regard he mentioned Professor Bolaji Akinyemi’s initiatives on the Technical Aid Corps, the idea of the Concert of Medium Powers, and his advocacy of the ‘black bomb’. These were undoubtedly great ideas and bold initiatives which I have had the privilege and opportunity of discussing with Professor Bolaji Akinyemi several times. Of the three bold foreign policy initiatives he took when he was Foreign Minister, only that of the Technical Aid Corps came to fruition. And the future of this is by no means certain given our current grave economic challenges. The two other ideas he promoted did not quite take off largely for lack of official support from his own government. The Babangida military government was far more preoccupied with domestic affairs and its own survival in power. The idea of the Concert of Medium Powers also failed to materialise largely because of lack of interest and support from the states that were to have formed the group. Many of the prospective members thought it to be a duplication of the Non-Aligned Movement, now virtually dead. In the case of his advocacy of a ‘black bomb’ the idea, coming from a country with a huge power deficit, was obviously premature and impractical. Much more importantly, even the Babangida military government did not give these two bright ideas much support. For all his imaginative and bold initiatives in foreign policy Professor Bolaji Akinyemi was removed as Foreign Minister after barely two years in office. As Foreign Minister Professor Bolaji Akinyemi would have done much better in a well structured, stable, and western prosperous country. His ideas were obviously considered too big and ambitious for Nigeria. I have to refer to the similarly bold ideas of two former Foreign Ministers; General Ike Nwachuku’s ‘economic diplomacy’, and Mr. Ojo Madueke’s ‘citizens’ diplomacy’, both of which equally failed dismally for lack of domestic support and financial resources.

    Now, on the issue of President Buhari’s alleged frequent foreign travels abroad, this was only in the early years of his administration. He has travelled abroad far less than President Obasanjo who spent the first six months of his tenure virtually abroad, or even President Jonathan. And it was President Obasanjo’s frequent foreign travels and personal diplomacy that achieved for Nigeria the huge debt relief from its international creditors. It is common practice that new heads of state, on assuming office, want to travel abroad to get acquainted with their foreign counterparts and  come to grips with the nuances of very complex international issues in diplomacy. Recently, President Buhari has not been attending some of these international summits for health reasons. Besides, he does not seem to me to be unduly interested in foreign affairs, preferring instead to focus his attention on Nigeria’s critical domestic problems where he may make a difference from past governments. In fact, an aggressive or ‘vibrant’ foreign policy by Nigeria is not possible right now because of Nigeria’s grave political and economic challenges which have to be resolved first. Mr. Ayobolu admits this when he wrote in his article that ‘Nigeria lacks a viable economic base to sustain a vibrant foreign policy’.

    In any case the era of powerful and influential Foreign Ministers such as Andrei Gromyko (Soviet Union) who was Foreign Minister for over 40 years, or Dr. Henry Kissinger (USA), or even Anthony Eden (UK) has gone for good as a result of the emergence of new global powers and centres. In addition governments everywhere are becoming increasingly centralised with presidents and heads of state assuming more and more powers, even preferring to run their foreign policies and diplomacy. The new age of rising international summits and multilateral diplomacy also compel presidents and heads of state to travel more frequently abroad and be more visible. Even in Britain the prime ministerial style of government is looking more and more presidential. Many people do not even know who the British Foreign Secretary is. Boris Johnson (UK) cannot wield the kind of influence that his predecessors as Foreign Secretaries did.

    Mr. Ayobolu also suggested in his article that Nigeria should take the lead in ‘promoting democracy and good governance in Africa’. But we must lead by example and he will be the first to admit that Nigeria’s credentials in these two areas are extremely weak. Our democratic institutions remain very fragile while, internationally, we are not known for good governance. With insurgences and ethnic tensions everywhere even the future of the country is by no means certain. Even in Africa there are at least a score of states that are more democratic and better governed than Nigeria. How can we then seek to promote abroad what we do not have at home? No one in Africa will be disposed to treat such an initiative from Nigeria seriously. It was President Obasanjo and President Thambo Mbeki of South Africa who, with the inspiration and support of Tony Blair, the British Labour Prime Minister,  took the lead in getting African states to accept and endorse NEPAD and APRM, two projects on good governance intended to address Africa’s grave political and economic challenges. But nothing has really come out of these two bold initiatives. The commitment of African states to these two great ideas has weakened considerably because of internal problems that its two leading proponents, Nigeria and South Africa, are now facing. In fact, President Thabo Mbeki lost power because of his focus on foreign affairs and his consequent neglect of South Africa’s grave economic problems, particularly his dismal failure to create jobs for the teeming and unemployed black South Africans.

    Even as an Oxford graduate and a former President of the Oxford and Cambridge Universities Club in Nigeria myself, I have not met Mr. Onyeama personally. I am impressed by his academic qualifications. But I think he is a ‘realist’, not a ‘theorist’ and that he understands fully the limitations and constraints on Nigeria’s foreign policy. In a paper that a team of foreign policy advisers of which I was a member submitted to President Buhari’s transition team in 2015 after the presidential election, we advised him to pay more attention to our critical domestic issues than on foreign policy issues. I think he has heeded this advice. The only area in which we advised possible new initiatives was the need for Nigeria to forge new links with such regional powers as China, India and Brazil, all of which have something to offer Nigeria in terms of economic cooperation and in technology.

    That remains my personal view and I think Mr. Onyeama is right in not taking any serious foreign policy initiatives now. As is well known the Foreign Service itself is facing very severe financial constraints. It is not being well funded. Both the Ministry and our foreign missions are desperately in need of more funds. The senior diplomatic staff is demoralised and needs to be encouraged regarding their future career prospects. Rather than engaging himself in an unnecessary vibrant diplomatic foray in foreign policy that offers little or no reward, the focus of the Foreign Minister should be more on the much needed funding and restructuring of the Foreign Service. After all, no matter the merit of a foreign policy initiative or idea, it can only be effectively promoted by a dedicated, efficient and committed Foreign Service.

  • Buhari’s historic burden

    As a young university student in the 1950s, I saw my country beginning to blossom in the world. As one of the leaders of various student organisations, I had the privilege of travelling fairly extensively in Africa and some other parts of the world. I could see that as independence approached, other countries of Africa looked up hopefully to Nigeria to provide the needed leadership on their continent.

    One day in Addis Ababa, a few months before Nigeria’s independence, the Ethiopian Minister of Education (later Prime Minister), Endaktachu Makkonen, placed a hand on my shoulder and said, “My young Nigerian brother, congratulations in advance on your country’s coming independence. All of us Africans hope that as you Nigerians prepare for your independence, you are also preparing for the leadership role expected of you in our Africa. A lot of things on our continent will soon depend on your Nigeria. We hope you Nigerians understand that.”  Those remarks filled my heart with pride and joy and my eyes with tears – and I can never forget them. (They still tend to fill my eyes with tears today).

    The greatness has never happened – and it may never happen.  We started to stumble in the very first years after independence, mostly because the persons in charge of our federal government at independence failed us abysmally. They developed the destructive ambition of making the federal government the controllers and commanders of all of Nigeria, instead of striving to make the Nigerian federation work harmoniously along the lines in which it had been structured by our pre-independence leaders. We are used to blaming the soldiers who then seized control from these first federal rulers, because these soldiers then went on and twisted our federation beyond recognition, and thereby destroyed the prospect of orderliness and harmony in our multi-nation country. But it was our first civilian federal rulers that started the downward spiral – and it is still their thoughtless and dangerous ambition that still guides the relentless destruction of our country even now.

    Quite early in the course of the destruction, one of the pre-independence makers of our federation, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, even though he had suffered battering and brutalisation at the hands of his colleagues, came back, and tried to return our federation to its right course.  He gave everything to this new effort, studied widely and intensively in order to be a solid and faithful servant of his country, and attracted armies of patriotic, mostly young Nigerians, to work with him in the noble venture. We in those patriotic armies, working under his guidance, were ready to work sacrificially to return our federation to its rational structure, and employ our country’s growing incomes to turn our country into a land of stable prosperity and greatness – a land of equal educational opportunities for all children, of skills promotion for all youths, of rural development and agricultural progress, of rapid entrepreneurial and business growth, of high quality productivity in all fields, and of great commerce, with emphasis on exports, connecting with the whole world.

    Unfortunately, the escalating rot and corruption proved too strong to be overcome by Chief Awolowo and his patriotic armies. Nigeria continued its relentless fall. By 2005, many informed observers worldwide were predicting that Nigeria could not possibly continue to stand – and that Nigeria would soon fall. Today, those predictions are getting more and more frequent, and more and more plausible.

    As I have watched this dismal picture day after day in my old age, I can’t believe that this is still the Nigeria I used to know. When Muhammadu Buhari stepped onto the scene as elected president, I breathed some sigh of relief. We all knew him as an enemy of public corruption, and he was true to that reputation when he immediately declared war on public corruption. But, in his hands in general, our country has fallen faster and faster – and appears now to be about to experience some sort of terminal collapse.

    Sadly, this is mostly because Buhari obviously cannot free himself from the clutches of the ideas and ambitions of his little corner of Nigeria – his Fulani ethnic group. I don’t think that any objective observer would now doubt that what is closest to Buhari’s heart are the plans and projections of his Fulani people. Even though most sections and peoples of Nigeria are demanding that the Nigerian federation should be returned to its pre-independence structural health, Buhari has flagrantly responded that he has no respect for their voices and no intention to look at what they are saying. His appointments to leadership positions in the security forces seem to indicate that he believes that the security forces will do for him and his clansmen the work of silencing the many other peoples of Nigeria.

    But the worst of all the signs of continued decline of Nigeria is now the relentless and unrestrained attacks on security and peace in Nigeria by Fulani nomadic herdsmen, a section of President Buhari’s kinsmen. In most parts of Nigeria (but particularly in the Middle Belt and the South),  Fulani herdsmen are destroying farms with their cows. If farmers dare to protest, the herdsmen, armed with some of the modern world’s most sophisticated weapons, then fall upon them, killing and maiming men, women and children, and destroying their villages. In some parts of the Middle Belt indeed, the herdsmen have been shown to the whole world to be engaging in systematic ethnic cleansing and genocide. To all this, the Buhari federal government has not shown any firm and effective response. In fact, from many parts of the country, the outcry has been that the local victims tend to suffer more from the responses of security personnel than the villains tend to do. Farmers are afraid to go to their farms, and some have been reported as saying that they have totally given up farming.

    This is no longer politics. For most peoples of Nigeria, it is a potent existential threat. And the fear is making a lot of Nigerians edgy about Fulani or Hausa presence in their midst, since most people do not recognise the difference between the Fulani and the Hausa. Thus, in Ile-Ife in the Southwest, a city in which a Hausa trading and labour community has lived for probably centuries, an assault by a Hausa or Fulani on a local woman easily exploded into a conflict in which some Ife indigenes were killed – provoking a response which then led to the death of many Hausa and Fulani. In the light of what Fulani herdsmen are reported to be doing all over Nigeria without much official resistance, aggressive actions by Fulani or Hausa residents in any part of Nigeria can quickly be seen by the locals as another show of Fulani arrogance, impunity and disrespect of others.

    In short, we Nigerians have now reached the absolutely highest level of fear, distrust and explosiveness in our living together as peoples of one country. And it is a pity that all this has come in the time of Buhari’s presidency. Can he change things? I pray so.

  • Senate as self-proclaimed friend of the masses

    I am not sure many Nigerians, except perhaps the miracle seekers among us who believe they can reap what they did not sow, expect much joy from Saraki/Ekwerenmadu’s 8th Senate. For throwing his party into disarray after trading off its hard-earned victory at the 2015 polls, it was obvious to many that Saraki was motivated by reasons other than service.

    The leadership of the Senate represented by Saraki has not only defied his party, rendering it impotent, it has moved on to defy public opinion whether in frittering away over three hundred million naira to buy state-of the-art Toyota land cruisers , paying themselves outrageous salaries, and earning pensions as serving Senators against public service rule. The Senate’s tools include blackmail and self-help tactics.

    Thus, hiding under the anonymity of ‘ayes’ and ‘nays’, two weeks back, the Senate, for the second time, rejected the nomination of Ibrahim Magu as the substantive chairman of EFCC. There is a record to show Magu is a conscientious, efficient and dedicated public officer His achievements have been celebrated locally and internationally.

    Reflecting on the Senate conspiracy against Nigeria last week, Itse Sagay said: ”Since Nuru Ribadu left, we have not had a man with such sterling qualities as Ibrahim Magu.” But that counts for little to a Senate that often forgets power goes with responsibility. As Palladium, who is not a fan of Magu’s methods, also put it last Sunday:”those who rejected him for the second time last week knew he was the right man for the job, they knew they were putting down a public figure who seemed to have prepared for this job all his life, they knew it would be difficult to find someone so imbued with his kind type of commitment but the conspirators had too much to lose to care.”

    Magu was rejected on the basis of DSS uncomplimentary report, even after the man had robustly defended himself before the Senate. But the Senate, which has often resorted to blackmail and self-help when its interest is threatened, predictably attached more weight to   the words of DSS than the embattled Magu. The problem, however, was that there were two contradictory DSS reports.  For failing to invite the leadership of the DSS to appear before it to explain the manifest contradictions and inconsistencies in its reports, the “Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP) believes the Senate seems to have acted mala fide by picking and choosing the least favourable DSS report to reject Magu’s nomination.”

    To seal Magu’s fate, Dino Melaye, quoting the SSS report dated March 14, stated: “ Magu has failed the integrity test and will eventually constitute a liability to the anti-corruption stand of the current government.” For most Nigerians, it is the Senate that has failed the integrity test. Nigerians don’t need to be reminded that, for many of the Senators facing corruption charges, the fear of Magu is the beginning of wisdom.

     

    Senate vs. Ali

    Once again, the on-going faceoff between the Senate and the Comptroller- General of Nigeria Customs will appear to be about self-help. To begin with, in his examination of the legal validity of the controversial Nigeria Customs policy and the legal competence of the Senate to summon the Comptroller-General of Customs (CGC) to justify the policy, activist lawyer, Femi Falana has said:  ”the policy is illegal as the NCS is completely estopped from collecting additional duties from vehicle owners who had paid the duties charged at the time of importation.” The choice before the management of the NCS, according to him, therefore, is not a suspension of the illegal policy but its outright annulment without any further delay. This, of course, according to him, does not preclude the authorities of the NCS from arresting and prosecuting highly placed individuals who usually forge importation documents.

    And also quoting relevant section of the constitution (88 (2 ) he   submitted that “the Senate lacks the vires to summon the CGC on policy matters,” since the decision of the Senate has nothing to do with making laws or exposing corruption, inefficiency or waste in the disbursement of funds appropriated by it. “The summoning of the CGC therefore constitutes not only a blatant violation of the Constitution, there is also “no legal, or moral basis for the arrogance of power being displayed by the Senate, whose leadership has recently been linked with the illegal importation of a bullet-proof limousine with fake papers to evade the payment of appropriate customs duties.

    But Melaye, speaking for the Senate, says   the battle of the Senate against the Customs chief is over “Pervasive corruption and incompetence in the Customs Service.” He puffs and huffs about the ”vibrant, sincere, patriotic excellent Senate under the leadership of the irremovable president of the Nigerian senate.” The problem, however, is that Nigerians are already familiar with a Senate that has demonstrated over time that it is deficit in honour and integrity by resorting to self-help each time its members are called upon to face their own demons. For instance,  rather than allow their leader to defend his honour before the Code of Conduct Tribunal, 84 like- mind Senators passed a vote of confidence in their leader, they also insisted the president of the Tribunal cannot try their leader because one of his personal staff was once indicted for corruption and, finally,  they alleged their leader would not receive fair hearing because of some past comments by the judge. Two years on, they have continued to prevent their leader from defending his honour and integrity.

    The Senate’s case is not helped by an on-line platform, the Sahara Reporters, which revealed that on January 11, 2017, the Nigeria Customs impounded a Range Rover Sport Utility Vehicle (SUV) worth N298m that would have normally attracted a duty of N74m but on which a measly N8m was paid. The online publication further alleged that “Shortly after the seizure of the car, the Nigerian Senate mounted a vigorous attack on the Nigeria Customs Service, demanding that the agency stops any further efforts to confiscate vehicles found to have evaded payment of duties.”

    In defence of the Senate leadership, one can argue its political enemies bent on witch-hunting are once again on the prowl. The tragedy for the Senate and its leadership, however, is that in the past such witch-hunting produced many witches. It is also like when Melaye puffs and huffs about the democratic setting of their current 8th Senate, Nigerians are bound to ask:  What was democratic in a process where Saraki admitted hiding in a car for 4 hours, and sneaking into the Red Chamber to be adopted by acclamation by 49 opposition members and a handful of his supporters, effectively disenfranchising 51 of his fellow APC Senators who were at the period having a meeting with the president?

    And when Melaye assaults our sensibilities with his ”vibrant, sincere, patriotic excellent Senate under the leadership of the irremovable president of the Nigerian Senate,” fighting “pervasive corruption and incompetence in the Customs” on “behalf of the poor masses, the talakawas and the mekunus,” the masses they are trying to seduce know better that with friends like the Senate, Saraki and Melaye, they need no enemies.

  • El-Rufai and State of the Union

    El-Rufai and State of the Union

    By virtue of his relationship with President Muhammadu Buhari, Kaduna State Governor  Nasir El-Rufai has unfettered access to the seat of power in Aso Rock. So, barring any problems, he can see the president at anytime for discussion on national and other issues. Also, being a governor, there are other avenues for him to meet the president for talks. The El-Rufai we  know may have explored all these avenues at one time or the other. Did he utilise them? Did he explore these avenues beforesending a memo to the president on September 22, 2016.

    In the memo, he raised salient national issues bordering on governance, the running of their party, the All Progressives Congress (APC), and the alleged stifling of ministers by a cabal in the Presidency. What the self-styled ‘’Accidental Public Servant’’ said in his memo is not new. It is what we hear everyday from people complaining that the Buhari administration has not done anything to soothe their pains almost two years after coming into office. Since the president lives among us, he has on two or so occasions,  acknowledged that the people are not happy with his administration and appealed to them for understanding.

    Though not his first memo to the president, this has generated a lot of heat because of the believed that he leaked it.  El-Rufai may not have lived up to the pedestal he expects of the president, but then he cannot be held responsible for the country’s problems because he leads a microcosm of it. But because he is not a saint (who is?) does not mean that he should not speak out when things are going wrong.

    As a member of the same party with the president, they should join hands together to find solutions to the country’s problems. He should not heap all the blames on the president. If Buhari fails, it is APC that fails and that failure will be that of all members of the party. Through his memo, El-Rufai pointed out what he considered the problematic areas for the president to work on. His memo shows that he is pained that nearly two years after their party came to power, Nigerians have yet to feel the impact of the ‘’change’’ it promised them.

    ‘’Mr President, there is an emerging view in the media that you are neither leading the party nor the administration and those neither elected nor accountable appear to be in charge, and therefore the country is adrift. We are facing an unprecedented national economic crisis, but our administration has failed to roll out a coherent response and action plan, or even appeal to our patriotism with a rallying cry to unite and sacrifice in the face of adversity’’, he said. The governor was blunt in his critique of the Buhari administration. If you ask me, I will say that is how it should be if we wish to make a headway as a nation. We need those who are insiders in government to speak the truth to themselves  for the sake of our country.

    Really, it would not have cost El-Rufai anything to keep silent as if all is well. We all know that things are not as they should be because of the mismanagement of the past. But for how long will we continue to dwell in the past? The electorate voted the APC because of their believe that the party will wipe away their tears and return the country to the path of greatness. The Buhari administration has started well, but it needs to do more for it to continue to have the people’s trust. Blaming past administrations, as El-Rufai pointed out in his memo, will not solve the problems. What will do the trick is for the Buhari administration to pull itself up by the bootstrap and tackle the problems frontally.

    Hear El-Rufai : ‘’You have inherited serious political, economic and governance problems that you had no hand in creating, but now have a duty to solve. These inherited problems were aggravated by the continuing slide in crude oil prices and the renewed insurgency in the Niger Delta that reduced oil production by more than 50 percent! In my honest opinion, we have made this situation worse by failing to be proactive in taking some political, economic and governance decisions in a timely manner.

    ‘’In very blunt terms, Mr President, our APC administration has not only failed to manage the expectations of a populace that expected overnight ‘change’ but has failed to deliver even mundane matters of governance outside of our successes in fighting Boko Haram insurgency and corruption. Overall, the feeling even among our supporters today is that the APC government is not doing well’’.

    His summation is not farther from the truth. El-Rufai may have been impolitic in his approach, but should we always reduce matters of governance to politics all because we are in the ruling party? We need jolts like this from those within the system to hasten our growth as a nation. May El-Rufai’s wake up call ginger the president and his party to greater action.

  • The Russians are coming

    Many years ago, Hollywood released a hilarious movie entitled The Russians are coming, depicting the paranoia that surrounded American-Russian relations during the anti-communist campaign championed by Senator McCarthy. Not Senator Gene McCarthy, but Senator Joseph McCarthy who led the infamous movement between 1947 and 1956. The thrust of McCarthyism was to see communism in every liberal idea and to persecute and prosecute those who had what was regarded as “Un- American” or perhaps anti American proclivities.

    Quite a few decent academics and talented left wingers in the arts suffered unjustly from this campaign before wise counsel prevailed. But in spite of the more rational view of Russia that followed, distrust of Russia persisted. Any politician who broached the idea of rapprochement with Russia was treated with disdain and distrust. This was understandable in the Cold War years of 1949 to 1994 before communism collapsed in Russia and the Russian empire disintegrated into fifteen ‘’independent states,’’ some of which, like the Baltic states of Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia,  have become members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO).  Ukraine, the biggest in terms of population after the Russian federation, and having its own nuclear weapons, surrendered them for the right of independent existence guaranteed by the big powers of the USA, France, Great Britain, Germany and the Russian federation.

    Unfortunately, Russia violated this solemn pledge by seizing the Crimea from Ukraine and supporting secessionist forces in Eastern Ukraine, apparently in its pursuit of protecting “Russians abroad.” Vladimir Putin, Russia’s eternal ruler,  has not reconciled himself with the reduced stature of his country from being a super power to a second-rate power in possession of nuclear weapons enough to bury the world several times over just like the USA . He forgets that power is not measured by how much destructive power a nation has, but how much soft power it has. The Russian economy is not more than ten percent of the American economy and is way behind its Chinese counterpart. Indeed, if we are to look at the world today, it is a unipolar world and may, in the nearest future, become a bipolar world of the USA and People’s Republic of China.

    Russia nowadays survives on export of oil and gas and armaments, which exposes its economy to the vagaries of changing commodity prices.

    In spite of this scenario, the Russian federation continues to hanker after big-power status. This is why it is defending unto death its naval and military bases in Syria, in spite of damage to its own economy, and in spite of laying waste Syrian territories and lives just to maintain a murderous Bashar -al-Assad in power.

    The same tendency is manifesting in its hostility to the Baltic states of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania, as well as to Georgia, Ukraine and any successor states of the old Soviet Union that tries very hard to be independent in fact and in deed, by toying with the idea of joining NATO like Georgia and Ukraine would wish if left alone.

    Russia is, technically speaking, a “democratic “state, perhaps more like a state of “guided democracy,” to use a terminology popular in the 1960s and 1970s. What the antagonism between Russia and the USA in recent times has proved is that beneath the veneer of ideological differences between communism and capitalism, which characterised their struggle during the Cold War, were geopolitical contestation and consideration of power. Russia had expected the withering away of NATO after the disappearance of the Warsaw Pact, as a mark of amity or, at least, understanding that things have changed. After all, even an anti-communist like Great Britain’s communist hater, Mrs. Margaret Thatcher, had described Mikhail Gorbachev as somebody she could do business with.

    What was left of communism was dealt a death blow by Boris Yeltsin who created the Russian federation. It was the expansion of NATO to former Russian area of influence in Eastern Europe that seemed to have irked Russian rulers that nothing has changed. But can Russia embark on a new arms race without permanently damaging its economy?

    This was why Putin favoured Donald Trump over Hilary Clinton in the last U.S. election. He seemed to have thrown at it all possible effort, including throwing caution to the wind. Putin’s hands are all over the place in the secret meetings between Trump surrogates and Russian operatives, including Russia’s long-serving ambassador in the U.S., the suave and avuncular Sergei Kislyak.

    The Trump people were rather naive that they were not being watched by American intelligence. I was on official visit to Russia in 2005 with a colleague from the presidential Advisory Council. We were well received and lodged in an official hotel by the Russians. I made several calls to my daughter in Canada. The Russians wanted me to know that they were listening! Whenever we went for meeting, someone would go into my room to open my box and scatter my clothes on the floor.  I got the message and I stopped phoning.

    Now that Trump has won,  the latent American Russophobia has been soused and is fighting back,  and seeing Russia meddling with and plotting against American democratic system of government.

    There is nothing wrong in Trump wanting to reset Russo-American relations and allying with Russia to stamp out international violence and terrorism and reduce general tension in the world.  Some of the people around the new president who are alleged to be white supremacists also want to forge a “white power “alliance in what some of them see as a future racial struggle for world domination.

    It seems to me that, at least temporarily, the Russians have miscalculated and this is seen in Trump’s desire to increase arms buildup by a ten percent increase in military budget, which neither the Russians nor the Chinese can match.  Trump is doing this to blunt any attack on him as being soft on Russia. But, at heart, Trump, for whatever reason he has, wants to reset the relations between his country and Russia in the nearest future on the grounds that in international politics there are no permanent friends or permanent enemies but permanent interest.  He said this much in his recent speech to Congress when he said some of the current American allies were its enemies in the past. He was apparently referring to Germany and Japan. However it must be said that a Russo -American rapprochement will not be bad for the world.

  • Dear Ajantala…

    May these words resonate as timeless truth. Let them resound like the crickets’ chirp at dawn. I hope you lean above this page and find it true like the fabled Al Jannah, where every second tarries and every day passes as the finest moment of celestial life.

    Tell me, is heaven truly the perfection of a higher thought? Have you felt hurt, pain and the trepidation of not knowing if you would live till the next second?

    On earth, our lives are fouled by stress and discord. This life you covet is in fact, distraught. And the scenes you find colourful from heaven above are actually tainted by coffee-tan blots of human blood.

    We stir to strife, live in chaos and sleep one–eye open to endless threats of volatile nights. We have left the simple paths with no complications. Today, we coast broadening highways to early graves. It’s a miracle child, our people die young.

    Every year, we survive the mad fires of the ember months to die while January unfolds it finery.

    And having failed at making our own happiness, we seek solace in others’ joy. Guess you snickered at our madding din because a black man emerged the president of America. Our people believed that Obama would change the fate of black Africa. You see, we could be quite silly.

    We are in the era of Muhammadu Buhari thus stealing is now corruption. Yet our people pine for the epoch of former president Goodluck Jonathan, when stealing was never corruption and deified goats were allowed limitless access to ravage our yams.

    Having failed at most things, we smack our lips shamelessly to criticize the status quo forgetting that our lives are what we make of it. Bet you are mortified by Dasuki-gate, Oduah-gate, among other scandals.

    We should rise in virulent protest but all we do is rant on the pages of newspapers. And those of us too poor to afford a newspaper are content to vent every morning, at every available news stand. It’s like the terror of a drunken crew before a virulent storm. Every invective enrages the tempest some more, until it swallows cantankerous crew and ship in a rummy sip.

    We have cursed the times so much that the good times are wary to come by us. I think the good old days may never come our way again lest we turn them as bad as the present.

    I hear those of you in heaven are privy to everything. So tell me, how did Moshood Abiola really die? They said he was killed with the white man’s poison, now they say he was strangled to death. Who killed Dele Giwa, Bola Ige and the Igwe couple? Tell me, who broke into my locker when I was in high school? They stole my N55, kulikuli and a bag of garri. Pardon me for the detail but I suffered too much that very school year.

    I wonder if you have decided your occupation. What role will you play as a citizen of humanity? Will you be teacher, doctor, banker, journalist, policeman, singer or actor?

    I hope you are aware that, these days, it’s hard to come by nobility in every chosen profession. Trust me, as a Nigerian, you have to come prepared.

    If you will be a doctor, better come with no conscience and a modest degree of perseverance. The better you are at ignoring dying compatriots and demanding police reports from accident victims the better for you. Perhaps you will come with a knack for embarking on strike actions and forgetting surgical instruments in helpless patients, sedated to death in hospital abattoirs or Operating Theatre, if you like.

    If you will come as a teacher, please ask heaven for an enormous amount of fortitude. You will need it in seasons of bad spell, when your account is empty and your expenses are mounting; when your kids are crying ‘hunger!’ and your wife is going gaga; when your colleagues in other callings are erecting mansions and you have to sneak into your one–room apartment to avoid your landlord. You will need perseverance when students you taught drive by you in posh cars, while you hop on rickety Danfo and LT trucks. You will need it when students taught by you mature into administrators and yet deny you your salary at the end of every month, and your gratuity at retirement. I hope you understand that unlike the doctors, you will hardly enjoy the benefits of industrial action.

    If you join the police, you will have to decide if you would be good cop or bad cop. Life as a bad cop is quite rewarding. Come with no conscience, no compassion, and no respect for your uniform. Be prepared to raid commercial transporters at illegal check – points. Be prepared to turn a blind eye while compatriots by whose taxes you are clothed and fed are robbed, murdered and molested.

    As a good cop, you will suffer undue humiliation and victimization from your colleagues, superiors and compatriots whose safety shall be your utmost priority.

    You will be forced to arrest AK-47 and Uzi wielding robbers and assassins with faulty pistols and assault rifles. Your guns will be less sophisticated and devoid of bullets.

    You would live in squalor, in barracks fit to house wild hogs and weevils. At retirement, you will watch colleagues slump to death as you fight for your gratuity. You will age dreading that your kids may have to appear with your corpse to claim your benefits.

    If you will tread my path as a journalist, you’d have to decide on being conscientious or vice versa. Whatever divide you inhabit, you will be scorned by the masses whose interests you seek to protect. Oftentimes, you will flounder at the crossroads of truth and prejudice. You may choose the latter path goaded by convenient justifications for choosing the dark side.

    As a banker, you will be paid like an armed robber. You will earn too much for doing too little in the interest of your compatriots. You will steal customers’ savings via hidden and unfair charges, and other frauds you will commit in connivance with or at the behest of your superiors.

    Whatever your chosen path, I hope you will think of the collective good. At times, it doesn’t hurt to tread the lighted path. I should know better. I have been around enough.

    Our people are a curious breed. In the wake of our misdemeanours, we desperately seek absolution from pretentious Pastors and Alfas. Although some of us embrace being totally hideous, too many among us purchase a little forgetfulness at the mall. Today, we live for fresh obsessions; it is the era of the Palms Shopping Mall, Shoprite, Just Rite to mention a few.

    Even the poor go there to feast their eyes and titillate their vanities, touching and feeling; staring at luxury beyond their means, in show glasses. I guess this too, is some form of therapy.

    Tell me, what should I name you? I would love to name you after Malcolm X but he was murdered in his prime. How about Ajantala? Perhaps you would come bearing the full essence and nature of the mystic being; it is the only way to survive on earth.

  • Oga at 90

    •Ex-principal joins nonagenarian club

    OGA MBO! Those two Yoruba words were all that is needed to nudge us back to reality. As soon as the first person among any group of pupils sights him from afar, he would bellow out : Oga mbo! In most cases, because we know that we should not be where we are gathered, we will take to our heels. Some will run back to their classrooms, if nearby, others will take off for God knows where as long as they are not caught just standing doing nothing or loitering during class hours.

    We beheld Oga, who turns 90 on Saturday, with fear borne out of respect. He did not condone indiscipline. He was ever ready to wield the cane in order to whip us into line. Oga was not your run-of-the-mill principal. He knew his job inside out and his teachers respected him for his sagacity. By the time, my set entered Ahmadiyya College Agege (ACA) in January, 1977, Oga was already a household name in the teaching world. He played a prominent role in the chain of secondary schools then ran by the Ahmadiyya Movement-in-Islam, which later became Anwar-ul Islam Movement-in-Nigeria.

    The name change prompted the change of the names of its schools to reflect the new order.

    In our revered Oga, we found not only a teacher, but a father, counsellor and guardian. Alhaji Jimoh Adisa Gbadamosi, popularly known as J.A.Gbadamosi was a teacher of teachers. Gbadamosi, who received the Officer of the Order of the Niger (OON) in 2002, was stern, loving, caring, tolerant, quick witted and considerate. But as loving as he is, he did not spare any pupil that crossed the line. Oga was strict with us because as he normally told us he wanted us to uphold the school’s motto : Aut Optimum Aut Nihil (either the best or nothing) wherever we went. He was a hands on teacher. He combined his job of administering the school with teaching with ease.

    Oga put ACA on the academic map in all ramifications. The school was not found wanting in curricula and extra-curricula activities. Under him, it was a pride to be a pupil of ‘Diyya College, the fanciful name by which we called our school. He was an all-rounder – a teacher who mixed teaching with sports. Little wonder, all the pupils were virtually footballers. For us, every available space was a pitch on which to display our talents.

    Oga encouraged the blossoming of these talents. On many occasions, he watched us, while perching on his swagger-stick,  play soccer or engage in other activities on the field and track pitch.

    Oga was our mentor. He wanted the best for his boys and he went all out to get it for us. Ahmadiyya was a boys’ only school where we (especially those of us in boarding house) all felt free to live a communal life. He taught us to believe in ourselves and he armed us for life with the kind of education he gave us. To him, Ahmadiyya’s boys and girls should not play the second fiddle wherever they found themselves.

    My mates and I are lucky to have passed through Alhaji Gbadamosi. He treated us not like his pupils, but like his children. He will resume very early when many of us will still be dressing up for school in our dormitories; come to the hostels (Fanimokun, Kenku, Allison and Oshodi Houses) to see that things are in order, before returning to his office to start working. Such principals are rare to find these days. Those were the days of the Gbadamosis, the Father Dennis Slatterys (of Finbarrs), the Rev Adegbites (of Baptist Academy) and the Olowus (of CMS). With principals like these, the nation’s secondary schools then were as good as any in other parts of the world. Sadly, today, despite the huge fees being paid in some private secondary schools, our schools are nothing to write home about. They are more or less glorified primary schools.

    I long again for the days of the Gbadamosis, et al, in our schools. It is only when we have such people in place that the standard of education can be comparable to what it was those days. J.A.Gbadamosi led a home of teachers. His wife, the late Alhaja Azeezat Adebisi, was also a teacher. She died on May 13, 2015, at 81. How splendid it would have been if mama were to be alive to celebrate with her heart throb at 90. Oga left worthy legacies in all the schools he served. In an August 27, 1968 letter titled : “To whom it may concern”, doyen of journalism, the late Alhaji Babatunde Jose, who led the Ahmadiyya Movement in the late 60s and early 70s, said of him: “He has played a very important role in the educational programme of the movement and his contribution to the development of Ahmadiyya Secondary Schools has been second to none”.

    In another letter dated March 23, 1977, the late Jose described Oga as ‘’a man of total integrity devoted to the immense responsibilities entrusted to him for the educational, spiritual and moral development of the students and the efficient management of the schools”. Similarly, former Lagos State Commissioner for Education the late Chief Adeniran Ogunsanya, in a May 20, 1977 letter, wrote : ‘’As principal of one of our secondary schools, he was exemplary in his administration. His personal nature made him an ideal leader of men in the midst of teachers and students alike”.

    On this occasion of Oga’s 90th birthday, one can only pray that he lives the rest of his life in peace and good health and continues to enjoy the company of his children, grandchildren and great grandchildren and of course, current and old students of ACA. Happy Birthday, sir.

  • Agony from lack of electricity

    Under normal circumstances we do not always have electricity in my area of Ibadan.  Whenever we have it, the current is usually so low that it does not always carry our air conditioners. Even at that I sometimes hear people in my house asking for how long we are going to have power; the question always suggests that power will go off in a rather negative expectation of inefficiency and inadequacy.

    In a situation like this, my generator, like those of many Nigerians,  is the regular power supply while the public power supply is the stand by. This is however not sustainable. The cost of diesel is now so high that very few people can afford to run their generators for more than a few hours in the night.

    People in my area reached a gentleman’s agreement that all generators must be switched off by ten at night .The people in my area are much civilised. They don’t want to keep those who do not have generators awake at night by the noise coming out of their generators. The other more compelling reason is that thieves and robbers usually target houses which have generators. I used to think light keeps away intruders. Apparently this is not the case in Nigeria!

    Recently my generator broke down irretrievably and it was hell for me. It has been unusually hot in Ibadan in recent times. I also have writing and reading schedules to meet which cannot be done in the dark. In my desperation I got in touch with friends about how they were coping.

    Somebody told me what another friend, a widow, did when she could not cope. She called her children to file immigrant status for her in the U.S. Luckily this was before Trump took over the White House by storm. She sold all her stuff including the house she and her husband laboured to build and to which she was sentimentally attached. This must have been traumatic. The lady however said she has had it with constant struggle just to live. She wanted to spend what was left of her life in some comfort and certainty of services needed to keep her sanity.

    When I was told about this solution, I said I won’t go that route.  Unlike when I was young, I can no longer bear the cold of the winter weather. I was given another option of installing solar panels on my roof. The cost which I was told was the cheapest I can get was one million six hundred thousand Naira. I asked what I would get for investing this huge amount. I was told I will connect my fridge to this solar power and will have lights in my bed room and the sitting room while alternately switching lights on and off as I move around the house. I was also told that I would have to switch off the fridge at bed time to preserve the power stored during the sunny day.  Air conditioning, even in my bed room, would be out of it.

    I discussed my predicament with friends who advised me against the solar power option because I was told it will all end in frustration after committing so much funds to the solar project. Now what should I do? Whenever there is no light I dress at home like Fela Anikulapo Kuti, meaning going around in my birthday suit. Luckily, I do not get too many visitors coming to my house unannounced. . Luckily, I have a  jalabiat which I can quickly throw on my naked body if someone was visiting without long notice..

    This is the plight which the sale of NEPA to friends of the previous regime has inflicted on me and on many Nigerians. So what do I do? I suppose I can continue to pray. But I have an advice for those who should generate, transmit and distribute power.

    Before the centralisation of power generation and distribution in Nigeria there were independent power generating power plants in each city. Certainly, there was an independent power station in Jos that originally serviced the tin and columbite mines on the plateau as well as supplying power to Jos and neighbouring villages.  I saw this with my own eyes in the 1960s. If I am correct, cities like Kaduna, Lagos, Port Harcourt, Kano Enugu and Ibadan had independent power stations.

    I do not remember Ibadan being in this kind of darkness in my youth. Of course, we did not have air conditioning then and the numbers of homes with power were not as many as they are today. But this is not an argument against decentralisation. This is what is done in more advanced countries where when there is a breakdown of power supply in one area, power can be sourced and transferred to areas that temporarily lacked power. What I am suggesting is building of more generating power stations independent of one another and directly supplying their consumers in areas in their immediate neighbourhoods.

    I will suggest a visit by those in charge of electricity supply in Nigeria to the RCCG city near Lagos that has its own turbine fired by compressed natural gas and supplies power 24/7 to people living in the city. I am sure there are some other private settlements like this in Nigeria. Imagine if every major city in Nigeria did this instead of the pollution-causing individual diesel generators bringing not only pollution but respiratory diseases to adults and children alike. We have tried every measure to solve this power problem without success. Shouldn’t we try something different to show we are not collectively suffering from insanity? Because when one does the same thing and gets the same results without changing, it is a sign of lunacy.

    This is what has been happening in all areas of Nigeria’s life since the intervention of the military in Nigeria’s politics in 1966 when they brought their commandist structure and world view into our national life. This has destroyed the basis of our competitive and cooperative federalism. We can see the dead weight of this tendency on our education, sports, and infrastructure and, particularly, finance where so much money goes to the center where it is routinely stolen.

    While on the issue of electricity we must as a matter of urgency have a mix of fuel and sources of power including hydro power, coal, gas, and possibly nuclear. The latter may sound a bit academic because of our unseriousness as a people. The fact is that our children in diaspora including mine have the experience and competence to do this if attracted back home.

    People like me have been complaining about our electricity inadequacy; our children inherited our grumbling.  I pray we hand this country to our grandchildren better than the way we found it.

  • Obasanjo’s legacies at 80

    For both  admirers and political foes of Obasanjo, the presence of former United States’ Ambassador to the UN, Mr. Andrew Young, former Secretary General of the United Nations (UN), Mr. Kofi Annan, and about fourteen serving and former African Presidents  and who is who in Nigeria politics at the inauguration of the Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library (OOPL) to mark his 80th birthday in Abeokuta two weeks back, was but a confirmation of his status as a “global statesman,” a pride of Africa and a gift to Nigeria.

    Many have attributed Obasanjo’s rise from a “barefooted village-school boy” to fame and fortune to destiny. But I think fate has very little to do with Obasanjo’s larger-than -life achievements.  He “set out early at dawn”to haunt for fame and fortune and pursued his goals with great tenacity without, in the words of Andrew Young, “caring about who he made mad.” He does not share the prejudices of his Yoruba people. Other people’s laws are never his laws. He publicly admitted “nothing embarrasses him.” He routinely cuts deals with enemies of his political foes as long as the end justifies the means.

    Yes, Obasanjo, as Sunday Mbang has said, built a church in Aso Villa, attended morning devotions with his family; but Obasanjo has never been a miracle-seeker. Knowing fate without hard work is dead (James 214-16); he worked hard during his first coming to build a solid economic base for Nigeria.  He set up a number of refineries connected by about, 4,500 kilometres of pipeline across the country. He reorganised Nigeria Airways, leaving it with about 33 aircraft by the time he left office in 1979. He established vehicle assembly plants in Lagos, Kaduna and Enugu and decreed government must use assembled-in-Nigeria Peugeot cars. To guarantee we feed ourselves, he launched Operation Feed the Nation and followed up with a land use decree to make land available to state governments and private investors.  He built up a huge external reserve and our naira was as strong as the pound sterling, and much stronger than the dollar. Obasanjo, as Sunday Mbang has said, remains the best Nigerian president to date.

    Obasanjo  also moved beyond Murtala Mohammed’s rhetoric of “Africa has come of age,” by working  with others to strengthen the Africa Union, establish the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) and the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM), designed to promote democracy and good governance. He has also “served as chairman of the Group of 77, chairman of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, and chairman of the NEPAD Heads of State and Government Implementation Committee.” He was very active in the international mediation efforts in Angola, Burundi, Namibia, Mozambique and South Africa. Obasanjo undoubtedly remains the face of Africa in the international community. For the former US Ambassador to the UN, Mr. Andrew Young, “without Obasanjo, Africa might have still been in a desperate position.”

    But as chroniclers of history, we must also search for how Obasanjo broke out of his lowly background and in the words of Vice President Osinbajo became ”a world statesman and a gift to humanity.”Let us examine the flowing explanations from military scholars and Vice President Osinbajo.

    But first, the sociological explanation from Ahmadu Bello who in his autobiography, My Life, told us it was the disadvantaged in society that were first recruited into the colonial army. President Muhammadu Buhari was humble enough to admit that but for Ahmadu Bello who picked him up from his Daura village to join the military he would have remained a Fulani herdsman Most of those who joined the military, therefore, did so in order to climb the social ladder.

    This historical fact seems to get further support from the late Professor Takena Tamuno’s “status coup” thesis  which finds expression in the least endowed  even within the military (a Sergeant Doe in Liberia, Mobutu, a cook in Congo, Ironsi and Abacha in Nigeria)taking over political power. Obasanjo was to write in his My Command that he achieved on a platter what Awo, his superior, could not achieve through a lifelong struggle.  They killed merit. Their values became the values of society.

    Vice President Osinbajo presented another intellectual explanation for how Obasanjo, literally “climbed the palm tree from the top.” As a beneficiary of Tamuno’s “status coup,” theory, Obasanjo became one of the few men in history known to “make history and write history in his own words.” Consequently, when Obasanjo, a leader who believes heavens help those who help themselves, had an opportunity to make history, he made investments with high dividends in view.

    That the same northern military and political elite that rejected the leadership of Brigadier Ogundipe ten years earlier (1966)  endorsed him as Head of State in 1976, was  a reward for his pro-north and pro-Nigeria stand during the civil war ((1967-1970).  His movement from prison to the presidential palace in 1999 by the same northern military and political elite that rejected MKO Abiola and his pan-Nigeria 1993 mandate was a payback  for foisting  incompetent Shehu Shagari instead of competent Awo, who according to Odumegwu Ojukwu, was the “best President Nigeria never had,” on Nigeria in 1979. And from hindsight, his foisting of ailing Yar Adua and incompetent Goodluck Jonathan on Nigeria was self-serving.

    And precisely because Obasanjo is writing the history, he conveniently ignores Robin Luckman’s observation that his generation “plunged the nation into a civil war.” Instead, he and his generation chose to hold the nation hostage in the name of war of unity; or as Babangida fraudulently puts it, “sacrificing their present for our future.”

    And finally, Brigadier General Alabi Isama who described Obasanjo as an “Incredible opportunist” in his Tragedy of Victory presented Obasanjo and his generation’s baleful legacies. Our unity, he says, is more tenuous today than it was in 1966; that the two million lives lost (out of which the Igbo accounted for 1.5 million) were lost in vain and that while those killed on the allegation of corruption left no estates behind, Obasanjo’s generation seized all the estates including those inherited from the colonial masters.

    We can also add that they destroyed the best bureaucracy in Africa, traded the best universities that produced the Wole Soyinkas, Chinua Achebes, and Awojobis for their own high fee-paying private universities and left us with carcasses of once thriving industries they forcefully seized through an ill- implemented privatisation programme. And perhaps more tragically, they destroyed a party system and abridged a political socialisation process dating back to 1923; and in their place, they foisted on the nation a PDP, run with military mentality of sharing spoils of war from conquered territories.