The Nation Newspaper

Category: Thursday

  • The coming persecution

    The coming persecution

    THEY may seem drab and dull, lacking depth and ingenuity, but you just cannot fail to notice the prescient warning. President Goodluck Jonathan’s perspectives are surely remarkable.

    Just last Sunday at a church service he predicted that his ministers and aides would face persecution, warning them all to get set for what he may have seen as a troubled future.

    “For ministers and aides who served with me, I sympathise with them; they will be persecuted. And they must be ready for that persecution,” Dr Jonathan said, adding philosophically: “To my ministers, I wish you what I wish myself. They will have hard times; we will all have hard times.”

    His Excellency’s allocution in which he mentioned no names, was an allusion to the rumour that the incoming Gen. Muhammadu Buhari administration will seek answers to many thorny issues in the polity. But a note of caution: the “hard times” Jonathan predicted does not indicate that those who will soon be ex-ministers will be flat broke and taste poverty. Never. They are made for life.

    The next day, the All Progressives Congress (APC) addressed Jonathan’s fears, saying nobody will be persecuted.

    “That the President-elect is a man of integrity is not an issue for debate, and he has made it clear that he will not be bogged down by endless probes,” party spokesman Lai Mohammed said. He went on: “However, the hands of the incoming government will not be tied by those who have chosen to play the victim and exhibit a persecution mentality. Whoever has any reason to be afraid must lay bare such reason before Nigerians.”

    That was really charitable; magnanimous. But there were those who did not allow the President to leave the sanctuary of the church before lending credence to his prognosis. In fact, many have been asking: Is Jonathan now a prophet? They launched into acerbic comments on his innocuous speech. I am sure that you know those who could have been so uncharitable, those busybodies who never see anything good in Jonathan’s transformative administration and its leading lights. They, without any thought for the laws of defamation, started mentioning names of those they said should be ready to defend their integrity.

    Incidentally, those mentioned are the very people whose skills and actions and connections have contributed much to the success of the Transformation Agenda (T.A.), the fulcrum of the administration’s achievements, the gains which its critics – sometimes unfair and other times thoughtless – have pilloried to no end.

    Leading the pack is the President himself. His legacies are being dismissed as if they do not matter. We are being told that when he stormed onto the scene in 2011, there was a biting fuel shortage. Now, he is, according to these self-appointed chroniclers, leaving long, unending and snaky queues of angry motorists passing their nights at filling stations. Besides, say the critics, there is a mountain of subsidy debts. Fuel merchants are threatening to kill the already grounded economy unless they are paid. Billions.

    Arrogantly, the critics ask: “Should he not be called to account? Don’t we have the right to ask him how it all collapsed? Is he not in charge? If he is let off in peace, where then is the accountability that he preaches with such relish?”

    The commentators have been so unsparing in their inquisition. It is as if they are eager to justify what Lai Mohammed referred to as “persecution mentality”. In just about six years, Boko Haram has taken more lives than the 30 months Civil War. Now, the sect is beating a retreat, our gallant troops in hot pursuit. Why did we have to wait for this long to stop Boko Haram? Isn’t this leadership deficiency? Will the war ever end if we don’t ask questions? Why were weapons not supplied on time? Who got the contracts?

    Too many questions, among them those that have been fully addressed by the President.

    Why has the power sector become such a horrible case of thousands of megawatts without electricity, despite the huge funds –some $5b, we are told – that have been sunk into the system? Universities are still struggling to free themselves from the hangover of a one year strike – one of the longest ever – because the teachers claimed that the government betrayed them. What actually happened? Doctors have been on strike many times.

    These are some of the issues being raised by those immersed in the persecution syndrome. The inquisitors, you may wish to know, are those people who will never understand the thick line between “corruption” and “stealing”, muddling up everything.

    The same unrepentant pessimists are the ones who were saying Petroleum Minister Diezani Alison-Madueke was on the run. They have accused her of everything and credited her with nothing. Not even the much vaunted Petroleum Industry Bill – a piece of legislation that would have made the big difference in the oil sector if it had not got stuck in intrigues and politics.

    When the former Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) governor, Mallam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, now Emir of Kano, alleged that $20b oil money was missing, a huge row broke out. The money was not “missing”, said some officials who should know; it was merely “unaccounted for” or “misappropriated”. Committee after committee gave various figures but never told the world where the cash had gone.

    Eventually, forensic experts were called in. Auditing giant Pricewaterhouse Cooper’s report was a closely kept secret until one day when the President dared them all and threw it open. The minister had said $1.48b was to be returned to the treasury; the report said $4.29b.

    Holding aloft the auditors’ report, which the experts said was done in a most  hostile environment for such mental exertions, the minister’s enemies, those who claim – usually without iron-cast proof or any proof at all – that the industry is stinking of corruption have been asking for her head. They became more vociferous after President-elect Muhammadu Buhari said he was going to reopen the matter of the missing money. Haba! Didn’t Jonathan himself explain that there was no way such cash would go missing without America knowing?

    Before then, these self-appointed anti-corruption crusaders and idle activists had accused Mrs Alison-Madueke of racking up a N10b bill on chartered flights. Ah! How unconscionable can people be? Have they ever thought of the hassles of taking a commercial flight? What if one of those files marked “Confidential”, those containing new oil blocks allocations, for example, gets missing on a turbulent commercial flight and gets into the hands of disgruntled elements? What if the minister’s headgear and colourful make-up get ruffled and rumpled as passengers rush to get off board? What happens if any of those exquisite pieces of jewellery falls off during the push-and-shove that attends such all-comer flights? Will flying commercial allow for all those last-minute talks with key aides before landing for those all-important meetings? Some consideration, please. Not persecution.

    Mrs Alison-Madueke need not bother. Wasn’t Stella Oduah, a princess, persecuted for spending a mere N255m on two bullet proof cars? Where are her traducers now that she has been elected by her ever appreciative Anambra North people as their senator? A church in Fegge, Onitsha, has just named her “Veronica of our time”. Didn’t the bard say “sweet are the uses of adversity?” In other words, even persecution has its remuneration.

    Also likely to be persecuted is Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, whose exceptional assiduity fetched her the exotic title of Coordinating Minister for the Economy. She has been excoriated for, according to many unlicensed analysts, presiding over the profligacy of the administration. They have been citing the depleted foreign reserves and the lean Excess Crude Account as if Mrs Okonjo-Iweala spent all the money on shoes and bags.

    These same emergency economists are the ones saying thousands are out of jobs, refusing to listen to Mrs Okonjo-Iweala who insists that millions of jobs are being created for those who wish to work. Besides, she reminds us all that our economy has been rebased and it is now the biggest in Africa. Which does the lady deserve –claps or slaps?

    Her persecutors insist that she must tell Nigerians how much went into waivers, SURE-P, “You win I win” and all those fanciful programmes that political opponents have described as “huge scams”, just like kerosene and petrol subsidy.

    For Femi “Amebo” Fani-Kayode and his colleague in deceit, Dr Doyin Okupe, a prince, the duplicity seems to have ended. Fani-Kayode has returned to court to continue the battle to save his neck from money laundering charges. The Nigeria Deposit Insurance Corporation (NDIC) has sued Okupe for borrowing money from a bank and not paying back.

    Are they being persecuted for doing their job – those who do not understand call it a dirty job – with such an unusual passion?

    Nigerians  have been pushing for a probe of the Immigration Service jobs scam that took 16 lives. The government has paid compensation and the families of the dead have been given jobs but the inquisition won’t just stop. Who owns the company that collected money from the job seekers? Who has been punished for the tragedy? Is it lawful for a government department to run such a scheme? Is Interior Minister Abba Moro one of those who will be persecuted?

    Honestly, I sympathise with Dr Jonathan and his team, who have been struck by this “persecution  mentality”. They should take it easy. Isn’t it all part of Change?

  • Difficult decisions for incoming administrations

    Most of the people who have been writing on the next administration have expectedly been focusing on what General Buhari will do when he is sworn in. I have myself written on this before I realized that our country is broke. Although the outgoing Minister of Finance has advised us to focus on the positive aspect of our economy lest our negative criticism becomes a fulfillment, I try to see what is positive in a country that is unable to pay its bills. Virtually all state governments owe their workers five to six months salaries and in some ministries and federal parastatals, the federal government too is owing its workers some months salaries. A government that cannot pay workers is bankrupt. The question is how did we get to this sorry pass?

    We of course know the price of crude oil tumbled to 50percent of its previous level some months ago. It should not have required more than ordinary common sense for those managing our economy to know the volatility of the oil market and save for a raining day. The huge earnings from 1999 to 2014 were simply frittered away or stolen outright. Thank God for the fact that Obasanjo paid our foreign debt or else we would be asking for what happened to trillions of dollars earned during those years of plenty. Even in Biblical times, Joseph who was not an economist like our so called Harvard trained economist of under development set aside some of the bounties of nature during the seven years of plenty in Egypt against the seven lean years. In our case we simply declared surplus and wasted our plenty on mad importation of luxury items and all kinds of consumables including all brands of alcoholic drinks, wines and champagne. And whatever was left simply put, was either stolen or used to pay unearned salaries to government officials and their pot-bellied bureaucrats. We are now on our knees and I hope we do not go borrowing so soon after exiting from the London and Paris clubs that were holding us imprisoned in regimes of unending debt repayment. If Buhari had not won the  presidential election, we probably would have been sold the dummy that  we are under-borrowed  And then we would have begun the journey to economic slavery to western capitalists who loaned us the so-called coordinating minister of the economy.

    At the state level, with the exception of Lagos, taxes are not paid and in Nigeria as a whole consumer taxes  in form of VAT are just too low compared with 18 per cent paid in our neighbouring West African countries. Because of elections, governors unreasonably cut down university fees to the extent that universities in the South-west, for example can no longer pay salaries of staff because states subventions have simply dried up. There is nowhere in the world where students pay N25,000 to N30,000 a year and governors in some states said these should be paid twice and not once! I just shudder imagining the conditions in state universities where like their civil servant counterparts,  lecturers and professors are owed six months salaries. We are deceiving ourselves because no money equals no education. Hungry teachers should not be expected to and cannot really impart knowledge. The universities must be allowed to charge economic fees so as to free them from the stranglehold of state governments. Any government that wants free education at all levels can award scholarships to their students  or ask their local governments to pick up their educational tabs. The state governments should also look into the possibility of imposing land use charge to boost internally generated revenue to free them from the indignity of carrying begging bowls to the federal government every month until such a time when states will control the resources in them. I would have suggested down-sizing the bureaucracies but in a period of mass employment, that would be courting disaster of insecurity. States  must embark on public works through a revamped public works department (PWD) to engage our youths especially the technically trained ones to dirty their hands in the process of physical development of their country. We should bring back the old practice of schools having demonstration farms to bring practical agriculture to our young ones and thereby boost agricultural production. We did this in my youth before our senses were dulled by cheap petrol money.

    The coming president must tell us the truth of our condition by abolishing the so-called oil subsidy that is taking N2 -N3 trillion every year and putting them into the pockets of some oil oligarchs and party big wigs and plutocrats. We must boldly confront this oil malady and the president must tell Nigerians that he will not be part of this swindle of the masses. People will grumble; they may even riot but government must stay the course and educate the people and tell them what we will gain by following this honest  and righteous policy. We must also bring back the textile mills of Kano, Kaduna, Lagos and wherever textile mills have been closed down. This will lead to the creation of millions of jobs and reduce unemployment. We should also ensure backward integration by getting our people in the North to plant and supply the cotton yarn. While doing this, we must ban all importation of textiles without minding what western free traders say. We must of course put money into the agricultural sector and try to add value to whatever we produce. While on this we must give ourselves two years within which we must stop importation of petrol, diesel and oil derivatives. We need to earn more from domestic usage of our gas and its exportation.

    The electricity sector seems jinxed and it is trite to say without electricity there can be no development. By this I mean development in all areas including education, health, transportation and so on. Let me  say there is no alternative to having power to fire the country and whatever it will take to generate and distribute power adequately must be embarked upon through a mixture of power sources like hydroelectricity, gas, coal and uranium; yes why not? My son has worked for some years in the nuclear power industry and I know it is doable if the right people are recruited without deferring to federal  character.  Many of us do not have the luxury of time to wait indefinitely for Nigeria to develop. Hope deferred makes the heart ache and if we do not seize this moment to develop this country we may then have passed  the time of redeemability.

  • Swelling echoes of change over Nigeria

    All over Nigeria these days, and wherever else one may meet Nigerians, one can feel swelling echoes of change. I was only a teenager in the early 1950s when the big constitutional structures began to be put in place for preparing Nigeria for independent nationhood. But because my parents and other significant kinsmen were heavily involved in the local politics of those formative years, I was very much aware of the wind of change sweeping over Nigeria. Those were sometimes dizzying days, but the echoes of expectation and change now sweeping over Nigeria are hardly less dizzying.

    Today’s atmosphere of expectation and change is easy to explain. After a decade of vibrant growth, excitement and hope in 1952-62, we Nigerians have seen nothing but decline, decay, and hopelessness in our country since 1966. Sure, a petroleum bonanza began to gush floods of money into our economy from the 1970s, but it did so in a growing context of degeneracy among the men and women who guided the affairs of our country. As our father, friend and mentor , Obafemi Awolowo, used to say , it is not money that develops a country; it is the human mind, applied in a purposeful, focused, disciplined and self-sacrificing manner, that produces development, progress and prosperity. Increasingly lacking such high qualities of mind in our leadership cadre, our potentially great country slipped inexorably down a bottomless abyss. In fact, in the past 30 years (that is since 1985), we Nigerians have increasingly seemed like floaters in the world, disoriented floaters without a country we can call home with some modicum of certainty and pride.

    In these dark years, as Nigeria scuttled down its dark and darkening void, some rare flashes of light interrupted the darkness at some points, and seemed briefly to be about to arrest the fall – only to be immediately smothered by the powerful darkness. Today, surprisingly, the man who lit the last of those brief flashes of light is waiting to be ushered back to the presidency of our country. For the people of my generation who saw and experienced the golden age of the 1950s, and who experienced the short exhilaration of its probable return in 1984-5, this Muhammadu Buhari presidency is a rebirth of enormous proportions. The generation of our children and grandchildren, who today constitute the majority of our total citizenry, share this excitement or expectation too; but it is unlikely that they feel it exactly as we do – because, unlike us, they did not see the starting light of the 1950s, but have been raised almost entirely through the darkness and the fall after it. And yet it is they who must now grab the light that will, hopefully, be ushered in soon, and use it to breed real and lasting energy, sanity and prosperity for our country.

    As I wrote in an earlier series in these pages, my first reaction to the beginning of the Buhari war on corruption in early 1984 was one of hostility. And that is because he simply jumbled the good with the bad, and indiscriminately rammed into prison the barons of the corruption and those of us who had been fighting the corruption. When I was released from prison (after being asked absolutely no questions throughout my incarceration there for months), I was angry. Moreover, I could not settle down, because Buhari’s lieutenant in my Ondo State had ordered thousands of youths arrested and charged with various serious offences in connection with the massive violence that had greeted the rigging of the Ondo State gubernatorial election of 1983. Around court houses all over our state, angry youths and parents were getting into fisticuffs, and generalized violence seemed likely. I wrote to the state military governor, Governor Otiko, advising him to calm the situation by doing what Governor Fajuyi had done in a similar situation in the Western Region in 1966 – that is, proclaim an amnesty and give some help to those whose businesses had been damaged in the violence. He invited me to his office, but the 90 minutes I spent discussing with him there was just a waste of time – he could not understand the purport of what I was advising him. His simple-minded understanding was that Buhari and Idiagbon wanted him to be tough on all and sundry in Ondo State. It was weird.

    That, however, was 1984. Today, in retrospect, I seriously wish that the Buhari adventure had succeeded and lasted many years, wobbly though it had been in parts. All that has followed after the ousting of Buhari in 1985, and until now, has been horribly crooked and destructive. These are the years during which it has become the accepted tradition that whoever serves as president of Nigeria must be so rich afterwards as to be counted among the richest people on earth. And, as the Nigerian president has become the Robber-in-chief and Bandit-in-chief, he has inevitably also become the Corrupter-in-chief – because it is in his interest to throw the door wide open to all other public officials to grab and steal grow rich. He needs to do that to protect the process and the preservation of his own loot. He needs also to establish the control of the presidency over all of Nigeria’s money and resources – and the Nigerian president is now sometimes like a character in a comic opera, dancing and trampling over endless fields of cash. Some foreign reports suggested in recent months that a Nigerian president’s election war chest is usually bottomless.

    The constitutional, political and moral consequences of all these are boundless and cataclysmic. Our elected officials, and even our professional public officials, expend much of their competence over the scramble for huge personal wealth through the most creative corrupt practices known to man. Many stories about Nigerian public officials are like fairy tales – and are difficult to believe. Public officials who dutifully attend to the business of the public have more or less vanished from our land. Beyond the political elite and their friends and cronies, almost all the rest of Nigerians are paupers. Truly productive enterprise has become an endangered species among us – and the quest for money at all costs, and without any basis in true productivity, has become our common badge. Our country has long ceased to be a federation – and what it is now defies definition. A foreign author wrote in a book recently that Nigeria is a failed state that strangely manages to keep standing.

    But now, Buhari is heading back to the presidency, and with a very formidable deputy, Prof. Osinbajo. The echoes of change are rising and swelling.  We Nigerians can understand it if some of the changes are merely superficial and cosmetic – but the fundamental changes are imperative. For instance, can any abiding change occur in our country if the powers and resources wantonly accumulated gradually in the federal centre since 1966 remain there, and the state governments remain the beggar entities that they now are, and our country’s monumental inefficiency continues? We agree with Buhari that change cannot happen all at once, but it is crucial that plans for fundamental, structural, change be quickly forthcoming. These done, Buhari and Osinbajo seem set for the kind of enthusiastic support that no other presidential team has ever received in our history.

  • Why a revisit of past is ‘must’

    Last Sunday, at the Cathedral Church of Advent, Life Camp Gwarimpa Abuja, President Jonathan did what he does best- sharing his thoughts on all issues be it politics, economic or even security, with his congregation. My “fears are for the ministers and aides who served with me”, he told his Christian loyal supporters, adding in an effort to play the victim, “I sympathise with them; they will be persecuted, and they must be ready for that persecution.” But Lai Mohammed, APC spokesperson allayed the president fears by reassuring him Buahri will not be bogged down by endless probes. He however did not forget to add “those who have played poker with the nation’s destiny must be willing and eager to clear their conscience before man and God”.

    I think this is type of exchange is one more compelling reason why we must revisit the past. It is in the interest of all. We already know what Jonathan and PDP stand for. It is only the uninformed who will be surprised that PDP, a creation of the military, an institution associated with pillaging conquered territories, produced wheelers and dealers who operated as if they have no stake in Nigeria. Military-baked PDP ‘new breed’ politicians cannot but act with impunity. The late Sunday Afolabi, internal affairs minister who went to jail for his involvement in the identity card contract scam admitted PDP is ‘come and chop’ party.  But long before that confession, John Campbell had during proceedings at a hearing on the topic: Nigeria in Turmoil, on 19 March, 2010, at Chattam house, London, dismissed PDP as a “party that came together, with no ideological or programmatic basis, but simply as essentially a club of elites for sharing of oil rents and political spoils”.

    And PDP has no apology. Between 1999 and 2003, 17 of its 22 elected governors were either convicted or on the run from justice for financial malfeasance. There was the Halliburton case in which PDP stalwarts took a bribe of $180m to secure the LNG Bonny plant contract. There was the bungled Turn Around Maintenance contract for the refineries by PDP stalwarts. It was PDP men who during one of their vicious ‘family quarrels’, revealed that what  Obasanjo and Atiku did in the name of privatization between 1999 and 2003  was to literarily  share Nigeria’s commonwealth among their PDP members who had access to state money. When there was nothing left to share after privatization, a fraudulent undertaking, by their own admission, they came up with self-serving monetization policy which legitimizes the sharing of a national patrimony a transient government was expected to hold in trust for our children. It did not occur to them that there would have been nothing to share if Balewa, Zik and Awo had sold their official houses to themselves.

    But our deep understanding of what PDP and its leaders stand for only reinforces the need to probe aspects of their past activities that have implications for tomorrow. Let us start with the Petroleum Products Price Regulatory Agency, (PPPRA). The outfit with a staff strength of 249, supervised by an unwieldy 22-man strong board, gobbling scandalously whopping salaries and allowances of N57.9 billion per annum was touted as an answer to long queues at filling stations which greeted PDP accession to power in 1999. Its mandate was among others to “make the products available at reasonable prices”. The Bill for the establishment of PPPRA was promptly passed into law in February 2003. Sixteen years down the line, at the twilight of PDP’s exit from power, the queues are back with thousands of motorists marooned in filling stations across the country. PPPRA is a house of fraud. A Punch newspaper editorial recently brought the past to pain when it reminded us  about“the N2.53 trillion paid out in 2011 as petrol subsidies to cronies and “ghost” businessmen when the National Assembly approved only N245 billion that year”. None of the PDP stalwarts and their children indicted by the House probe has been successfully prosecuted, a development the outgoing president put on ‘slow pace of justice in our environment’.

    Also needed to be revisited is the frittering away of N7billion on rural electrification project.  It will be recalled that EFCC on June 14, 2010, claimed the rural electrification exercise “were used as conduit pipes with which funds of the Rural Electrification Agency were siphoned and were awarded to companies either not pre-qualified to be awarded the contract, or were phony or non existing companies”. But once Justice M.G Umar of Abuja High Court absolved all the PDP men and their collaborators on March 24, 2012, claiming ‘he was unable to find a prima facie case or complaint disclosed in the proof of evidence against the respondent’, the government did not even bother to appeal.

    We have the former Minister of Aviation, Princess Stella Oduah, now a senator-elect from Anambra, whose alleged overpriced amoured car deal with Coscharis forced the nation to pay attention  to a loss of as much as N64b  to import tax waivers scam in the first half of 2013 financial year. As it has now turned out, while Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the Minister of Finance claimed her ministry “approved only N70.73 billion worth of duty waivers and exceptions in three years, the customs the implementing agency has insisted the value of waivers processed for the same period was N1.4 trillion”.  President Jonathan who governs through delegation by abdication believes his minister of finance could do no wrong even after her 2011 television appearance fiasco where she justified payment of subsidy to those that turned out to be children of PDP stalwarts who never supplied a pint of fuel.

    The incoming government’s immediate challenge will be the power sector. Unfortunately, PDP and its leaders could not even agree on how much the nation has expended on the power sector since 1999. Independent foreign experts put the figure at above $50b.  President Jonathan’s own three-year roadmap after an expenditure of about $8b pushed the power capacity to 4,517MW in December 2012 before nose-diving to the current estimated 2800MW.  Dagogo Jack, chairman of the presidential task-force on power who presided over Jonathan’s Roadmap for Power Sector Reform which gave birth to six generation companies, 11 distribution companies and a national power transmission company, recently claimed government has no control over private firms.

    And finally as a way of solving some of the above riddles, there may be need to probe all those who donated a whopping sum of over N21b to support President Jonathan’s failed re-election bid. Of the N21bn, Jerry Gana, a key actor in Jonathan energy reform who was in the Abuja church last Sunday to bid Jonathan farewell as he had done to his past predecessors since 1985, donated N5 billion on behalf of his unidentified friends and “associates in the power sector.”, Tunde Ayeni, chairman of Skye Bank Plc and also a key actor in the power sector donated N2 billion on behalf of himself and his unnamed “partner” and “friends.” This type of donation raises question about the outgoing government’s plan to arrange a N213 billion bailout for government favoured private sector operators who have been confirmed to be stalwarts of PDP.

    The donation of N1billion by the transport and aviation sector at a period they are indebted to the banks to the tune of N300 billion may expedite the plan of the incoming government to convert the Jonathan fleet of over eight aircrafts to form the nucleus of a new national carrier while EFCC is set after the current reckless operators of private airlines; and of course a probe will indicate if the automobile industry donors of N450 million, include beneficiaries of import duty waivers.

    The Punch in its editorial of December 23, 2014 states “there is an instinctive conclusion among the Nigerian public that the Jonathan government is the most financially corrupt, fiscally irresponsible, politically insensitive and socially disconnected in Nigerian history”. Both Jonathan and Buhari need the probe for different reasons.

  • The guilty are afraid

    WHEN WE do well, we are ready to shout it to high heavens. We are only being human by doing so. No man excels in what he does and wants to hide it, the same way that we light a candle and put it on a stand and not under a bushel. But when we are wrong, we look for all manner of excuses to keep the blame away from ourselves. In such a situation, we start to look for scape-goats. We are never in the wrong; it is the other person that is always wrong.

    Our politicians know  how to play the blame game, especially after losing elections. Without batting an eyelid, they can reel out over one million reasons why they lost; who is responsible for that loss and how the loss was planned before the election. We have seen that happening in the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) since its woeful loss in the last elections. Its national leader, President Goodluck Jonathan, too has not been able to restrain himself from bellyaching over the outcome of the elections.

    Despite being hailed for conceding defeat to President-elect Muhammadu Buhari and calling to congratulate him, it is becoming clearer by the day that he may not have been that sincere after all. The outgoing president did what he did to fulfil all righteousness and be seen by the world as a true democrat. Dr Jonathan would have passed the test if he had stayed the course and remained loyal to self and country. You cannot be a true democrat by words only, it must also reflect in your deeds.

    The president’s actions in the past few weeks leave much to be desired. He has been behaving like someone who is afraid. It all started after the president-elect said he would revisit the alleged $20 billion missing oil money for  which the accounting firm of PricewaterCoopers (PwC) probed the books of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC). After receiving the probe report, the Jonathan administration told the nation that the firm found that no money was missing. PwC, it said, directed that NNPC should pay $1.4 billion into public coffers.

    This was all we were told until Buhari said he would revisit the matter. As soon as he spoke, Jonathan ordered that the report be released. What Nigerians saw in that report showed that the government was not honest when it initially briefed them about the report. The government then told us what it felt we should know and did not give us the entire gamut of the report in which the firm complained, among others, of not being allowed access to certain documents vital to its assignment. So, from the beginning, PwC was hamstrung in carrying out the task because the government only availed it of documents that will not incriminate the administration or those close to it.

    In such a situation, what was there for PwC to probe? Nothing because those who ordered the probe knew what the outcome would be even before the exercise, which as it were, has turned out to be a waste of time and scarce public resources. All hope is not lost, with Buhari’s promise to revisit the issue. The president is, however,  yet to overcome his fears of what the future holds for him. At every opportunity, he involuntarily states his fears, letting us into his mind. The president and his men need not be afraid if they have done well. Let them take a critical look at themselves and tell Nigerians in all honesty and sincerity that they served us wholeheartedly.

    They cannot do that because they had other motives for coming to power. This is why they are jittery on the eve of their exit. The President and his men cannot dictate the terms on which they should be judged after their exit. That is not possible. It is left for the incoming government to decide how to look at the outgoing administration based on what it claims to have done. If it has served the Nigerian people well, then it has nothing to fear, but if otherwise, it has questions to answer. Let Jonathan for one minute put himself in the position of the incoming President Buhari, will he be happy if his outgoing predecessor were to be talking the way he is now doing?

    If Jonathan truly wishes his incoming successor to succeed as he has been telling the world, he would mind his language. There are things best left unsaid during a transition like to avoid drawing  attention to one’s self.

    I do not understand why Dr Jonathan spoke the way he did at last  Sunday’s farewell service for him at the Church of Nigeria (Anglican Communion), Cathedral Church of Advent, Life Camp, Gwarimpa, Abuja. He said he would be persecuted. By who and for what? He did not say. He was merely specious in his submissions while trying to win the public sympathy he does not deserve. ”For ministers and aides who served with me, I sympathise with them; they will be persecuted. And they must be ready for that persecution. To my ministers, I wish you what I wish myself. They will have hard times; and we will all have hard times. Our ways will be rough”, the president said.

    Just as he has been doing in the past few weeks, he is just being preemptive of what may happen to him after he leaves office. What he seems to prefer  is for Buhari to take over from him on May 29 and keep quiet as if all is well, but Nigerians know that all is not well. If Buhari does not ask Jonathan  questions after coming to power, then he should be prepared to face the wrath of Nigerians, who are eagerly waiting to see many in this outgoing administration pay for the harm they have done to our country. Whether Jonathan likes it or not, the matter is beyond Buhari. It is between him and the Nigerian people, who are interested in the record of his administration. Since they cannot get it from him, their only hope is Buhari, who cannot afford to fail them.

    What this tells us is that no matter the position we hold, there is always a day of reckoning. Today,  for those in this administration, that day is at hand, but we should not mock them; we should sympathise with them.  Let us  learn from what they are going through so that we do not find ourselves in their position in future. They will not be persecuted, but whether they like it or not, they will be asked questions. It is not too much for us to ask how they governed us in the last four years. Since the president spoke in the church last Sunday, let us also refer him to the Bible by asking this question :”If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted?”.

    If the president and his men feel that they have done well, they have nothing to fear; but if otherwise, they should be ready to pay the price and they cannot tie the hand of the incoming government from taking action through their resort to cheap blackmail and base sentiment.

  • Femi Fani-Kayode…the shame

    Femi Fani-Kayode, Doyin Okupe, Reuben Abati, Olisa Metuh and company earnestly asked Nigerians to vote for Goodluck Jonathan. In their gratuitous quest to feather their nests, they declared and perpetuated with unusual gusto, a harmful war against new President-elect Muhammadu Buhari of the All Progressives Congress (APC). They lured Nigerians to wage infinite wars with truth and wisdom, asking us to establish ageless monuments to Jonathan in the spirit houses of flaws. These comic characters and presidential court jesters prayed that Nigerians re-elected their principal at the March 28 polls. Simply put, they wanted us to save their jobs. Thank God we didn’t.

    We listened to their eloquent drivel, incoherent rants and wanton justifications of President Jonathan’s reelection bid with a stunned combination of stupefaction and physical revulsion.

    It was a daemonic aria, a flight of decadent will and imagination. Of this pathetic gang of vanishing minds, Fani-Kayode was simply a cipher. Shamelessly, he imposed himself in our psyches and the travesty that passed as Nigeria’s government of transformation. Fani-Kayode thus particularised his contributions with terrible and uncanny detail, threatening our sympathy for his plaintiff principal, President Jonathan. No doubt, the former aviation minister is a gifted propagandist of the chthonian order, a metamorphosist adept at clothing dross as gold and masking terror as succour.

    The scene prefigures the transition or ‘transformation’ if you like, of the Nigerian citizenship from gradual decline to irredeemable degeneracy. Few days to the presidential elections, Fani-Kayode and company urged that we forget the Chibok girls. They wanted us to forget the NNPC scam, $9 million illicit arm deal, immigration job scam and death of innocent, jobless graduates. They wanted us to overlook their principal’s tacit approval of Stella Oduah’s aviation cash fraud. They wished that we forget Otehgate, devaluation of the Naira, rising PMS pump prices and scarcity of fuel. They urged that we applaud the shady sale of the Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN, declining standards of education and health services, bloody bomb blasts, thousands of unaccounted corpses and the persistent scourge of Boko Haram.

    In this prevalent osmosis of death and despair, Fani-Kayode attempted to justify that which is unjustifiable: he mounted the soapbox, garnishing prevalent ills with bouquets of insolence and desolate wit. His love of grandstanding and pretensions to candour rankle an ominous note even in retrospect. Fani-Kayode, tangled with President Jonathan’s reelection dream, perpetuated a piteous portrait of President Jonathan as a pregnant mother gasping to deliver a dead embryo through tentacles of mental and physical complications. The vain and narcissistic borders of the reelection dream eventually burst through and the delivery’s tragic essence springs from the brutal contrast between President Jonathan’s pitiful vanity and Fani-Kayode’s catastrophic melding with his dream, till it got delivered as stillborn. It’s like the holocaust and the apocalypse.

    Thus President Jonathan today, stands at ground zero, incinerated by the hate flames frantically fanned by Fani-Kayode and the presidential gang of apologists and petty loyalists. It was instructive to see Fani-Kayode brazenly tow the path to infamy to a pathetic end; even as Nigerians joined the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to count the votes and it became glaring that his principal was being trounced, Fani-Kayode continued to propagate a pitiful campaign in defense of President Jonathan claiming the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) candidate was leading by about three million votes. It defies common sense and wisdom still, that, at that point Mr. President hadn’t seen through the bluster and deceit of Fani-Kayode and his gang of loyalists.

    Now that President Jonathan has lost the election, it will be interesting to see what will become of Fani-Kayode. Will he truly stay put in the PDP and keep faith with the party in its feeble quest to bounce back or will he resort to his usual ways and pitch his tent with the new political power bloc, APC?

    Fani-Kayode is a poseur. No doubt he has a sense of persona and becomes visibly embarrassed particularly when reality punctures his bauble as was the case when he suffered widespread condemnation and ridicule over his misguided utterances about Igbo women; not to forget the shame and regret that coursed through him when the APC released a mosaic of his passionate denouncement of the PDP presidency and the party in general.

    Having failed to insinuate himself within the ranks of the APC, enjoyed a lifeline when President Jonathan, for reasons that defies logic, appointed him as the Director of his Media and Publicity campaign team. Predictably, he let go of reason and launched himself as a missile severally, against new President-elect Buhari and the APC. There is no use reproducing the hate campaign he propagated against the APC and Buhari, what is noteworthy at the moment, is his silence. Fani-Kayode has lost steam, his mortifying zeal and irrationality. It is even more instructive to see top chieftains of the PDP come out to denounce him and his appointment as President Jonathan’s campaign chief on national TV.

    Hence for Fani-Kayode, the dissembling begins. As he frantically await the Federal High Court ruling – which has been adjourned till June 18 – on the money-laundering charges instituted against him, Fani-Kayode will continually dwell in a jailhouse he witlessly sauntered into, goaded by his fantasies of invincibility and delusions of grandeur.

    In Fani-Kayode’s pitiful fate subsists valuable lessons for all seeking to tow his path. Nothing corrupts; nothing disintegrates a man’s character as the principle of moral agnosticism. That is, the idea that one must be tolerant of anything and that ingenuity consists in never distinguishing good from evil and taking sides. It is obvious who profits and loses by such a precept, isn’t it?

    Fani-Kayode put himself on trial every time he opened his mouth to speak yet he failed to devise a measure of checkmating every propaganda and irrationality he so desperately projected in the interest of his principal. Bolstered by the culture of amorality and intellectual hooliganism that the outgoing presidency shamelessly perpetuated, Fani-Kayode arrogated to himself, the freedom to utter any sort of irrational judgment and expected to suffer no consequences.

    He failed to understand that the things he condemned or extolled actually exists in the objective reality that is open to the independent appraisal of others. The values he projected has overtime become the essence of his socio-politics and being.

    In the long run, Fani-Kayode, though he was employed to do the PDP’s filthy job, ended up as a dirty liability to the PDP. The most prescient portrait of President Jonathan is found in the tantrums of men like Fani-Kayode. Fani-Kayode shamelessly validated the vicious obsessions, violent impulses, moral weakness, hubris and inevitable self-destruction of the outgoing presidency via his unguarded vituperation. His distressing executions were variously punctuated by flashes of delusion as he tiresomely posed as an intellectual, to imbue the same ruling party and presidency he once castigated, with hollow sophistry and pretensions to wittiness.

    Few years from now, in his twilight to be precise, it would be amazing to know the thoughts that would run Fani-Kayode’s mind amok as he mounts a feeble struggle to tame or make peace with the demons he joyously summons today. He would probably wish he heeded the subtle counsel of morality and the caveat of objective reality.

  • Crying over split milk

    UNTIL it suffered a huge loss in the last general elections,  the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) prided itself as the biggest party in Africa. It may be so, but its size was and is still not a measure of its popularity. It is only big in name and not in ideology. PDP is a party of anything goes, with members more interested in themselves than in the country. The problem of PDP is leadership, which it brought upon itself. The party was founded by some great minds, even though they did not share the same ideology.

    The circumstances of the time brought these political tacticians together long before 1998 when former Head of State Gen Abdulsalami Abubakar threw the political space open. Years before Abdulsalami came to power, the late Gen Sani Abacha, who he succeeded,  had held the country in a vice-grip. The late Abacha was a mean dictator, who did everything to make life miserable for Nigerians. Rather than challenge him, many of our politicians went to bed with him.

    Those who challenged him were few and far between. They were the lone voices in the wilderness. It was a costly venture challenging the late Abacha; so it was better, those lily-livered politicians thought  to dine with him with a long spoon. So, when the late Abacha lifted the ban on politics after crudely shoving the late Chief M.K.O Abiola into jail, our politicians began to dance tango instead of coming out boldly to participate in the process.

    Except for one or two politicians – the late M.D.Yusufu and Lawan Gambo – no other came out to challenge the late Abacha, who was rumoured to be harbouring plans of transmuting to civilian president. The action of the then parties lent credence to this claim. They all adopted the late Abacha as their presidential candidate. He would have emerged unopposed for the exalted post if he had not died suddenly.  The late Abacha and those politicians would have had their way if not for divine intervention. They had everything going for them until the unexpected happened and their plan fell flat on its face.

    Abacha’s death on June 7, 1998 loosened the mouths of those politicians, who never saw anything bad in him when he was alive. We know those politicians and their roles then. They are still playing this role of going with any government in power no matter how bad that government may be. But the politicians with the love of their country at heart, who took on the late Abacha and envisaged a better future for Nigeria beyond him, never for once allowed him to rest. The late Abacha too gave it back to these politicians, but they were undeterred.

    These politicians were the brains behind today’s PDP; they went through hell in the hands of the late Abacha and his security goons for daring to stand up to the dictator and provide an alternative voice for the people. As far  back as 1997, these politicians had seen that the ship of state was tottering and so came together to salvage it. It all began with the All Politicians’ Summit convened in 1997 by former Vice President Alex Ekwueme. The summit was disrupted by security men.

    Ekwueme and his associates were not deterred; they saw that as a temporary setback. In no time, the group of 18 (G18) emerged, with Ekwueme as its leader. Members of the group did not share political ideologies. Some were progressives and some were conservatives, but they had a common cause – to form a party that will meet the yearnings of the people. Following further consultations, the group increased to 34 (G34). On August 13, 1998, it formed the Peoples Democratic Party. With the exception of the late Solomon Lar, Chief Audu Ogbeh and Senator Barnabas Gemade, who were PDP chairman at one time or the other, no other member of the original G34 ever held that position in the party.

    The founding fathers of the party have since been  sidelined, leaving it in the hands of those, who know next to nothing about its ideals. The party’s loss in the last elections exposed so many things about PDP, which incidentally was founded by great minds. The PDP has only been  PDP in the past 16 years because it is in power. It is not being run as a party, which should evolve policies, plans and programmes for the government. The party’s founders never expected that things would  turn out this way. Their plan was to make the party the envy of others in the country and on the continent.

    Those that hijacked the party from them do not seem to share this ideal. This is why PDP is where it is today. With its loss has come the blame game. The party is blaming the Presidential Campaign Council (PCC) of causing President Goodluck Jonathan’s defeat in the election because of the hate campaign spearheaded by his wife Dame Patience, the rabble rousing Femi Fani-Kayode, the garrulous Ayo Fayose and the loud mouthed Doyin Okupe, among others. Where was the party when they were doing this? What did it do to stop them? If it had won the elections, would it be whining like this? What all this shows that PDP is not organised. If it is, the PCC would not have seized the presidential campaign from the party.

    The PCC should have taken directives from the party and not the other way round. If the party left the initiative to PCC for fear of offending the president, that is its cup of tea. It should bury its head in shame for not living up to being a party in the true sense of the word. A party which dances to the tune of any of  its organs is not a party and that is not the kind of party that should lead  our country. What the PDP should do now is to return to the drawing table and see how it can revive the dream of its founding fathers because therein lies the way to its being that great party, which those running it now so much wish it would become.

    But with the squabbling in the party over its loss in the last elections, can PDP bounce back and redeem itself? Time will tell.

  • Restructuring: Buhari’s major challenge

    On October 31, 1959, Chief Obafemi Awolowo told a distinguished audience including Sir James Robertson, then Governor General of Nigeria that very few events in his life time had given him so much pleasure as opening the Western Nigerian Television Service, (WNTV),  which he  described as ‘a modern miracle’. It was the first in Africa.  The structures housing the project took less than three months to build with the help of 300 workers. Sir James Robertson in his opening remark paid glowing tribute to the ‘enterprise and determination’ of those behind the project and their overseas partners’ for achieving such a feat in such record time. The inauguration of the TV station was the icing on the cake of other achievements of the Western Region between 1952 and 1959. The regional government had not only successfully implemented its free education programme, it awarded during its first year in office, local and international scholarships  to youths of Western Region than all the colonial government awarded to the entire country in their years.

    The giant strides made by the Western Region were possible because we operated a workable federal arrangement. And the credit for that goes to the British colonial masters who realized very early that most of the educated elites with eyes on becoming new inheritors of power lived in denial pretending our cultural differences had been greatly exaggerated by accident of colonial rule. The colonial regime therefore took it upon itself to tell us the obvious- that the ‘Hausas of Zaria are different from the Bantu tribes men of the valley of the Benue’ just as the Scandinavians in the Baltic are different from the Slavs of Bulgaria; that we are a ‘collection of mutually independent native states, separated by difference of history and tradition, by ethnological and racial, tribal, political, social and religious barriers’.

    Consequently, Hugh Clifford, the then Nigerian Governor General in an address to the Nigerian Council on December 1920 was unequivocal about a British policy designed to produce a ‘regional government that secures for each separate people, the right to maintain its identity, its individuality and its nationality and its own chosen form of government which have been evolved for it by the wisdom and by the accumulated experiences of generation of its forbearers’.   This stated policy was what later influenced the constitutional changes of 1954, 1957 and the 1958 Lancashire debate at which October 1, 1960 was chosen as the date for our independence.

    With the collapse of the first republic through the intervention of forces loyal to those who had earlier expressed their preference for a unitary system in a multi-ethnic society,  we have – in the absence of an impartial British arbiter –been living in denial, running a federal system only in name. Expectedly, children of the Western Region’s miracle of the first republic have been in the forefront for a struggle for a restructured Nigeria.  However, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, former CBN Governor and current Emir of Kano while labeling them as advocates of a ‘return to a nihilist era of ethnic agendas and tribal warfare’ accused them of engaging in ‘rabid tribalism and provincialism’.

    What was probably lost on Sanusi who not too long ago claimed he was proud of his grandfather who supervised the famous Kano groundnut pyramids’ is that Yoruba advocates of a restructured Nigeria were yesterday’s children of cocoa farmers whose taxes were creatively deployed through marketing boards by Awo and his colleagues to provide free education, build industries and GRAs for those who have today turned out to be successful entrepreneurs, businessmen, lawyers, doctors and academics. But for the British structure that allowed each region to develop at its own pace without interference from others, and the dedication of Awo and his self-made colleagues to the cause of Western Region’s youths, there was only a thin line between them and the children of the groundnut farmers who ended up as emir’s labourers, almajiris or worse still ‘maitatsine’ religious fundamentalists..

    For the Yoruba, restructuring is not ‘primarily about providing a constitutional frame-work, a formula for sharing the spoils of power’ as claimed by Sanusi. The Yoruba have a template of the ‘1959 miracle’.  Restructuring  is  a vehicle for  all ethnic groups at different levels of cultural development including those Clifford in 1920 identified as ‘cannibals inhabiting some hill tops’, ‘the anti-social tribes’ and  ‘the naked warriors of the jungle’ for equal opportunity to develop at their own pace without interference from others.

    Besides the Yoruba, other prominent Nigerians have in the light of our experiences in the last 16 years, identified what a restructured Nigeria should look like. For Chief Emeka Anyaoku, a former secretary-general of the Commonwealth, ‘the present ‘36 federating units and the federal capital territory, each with its full paraphernalia of administration, spending disproportionate amount of its resources on recurrent expenditure’, is responsible for the collapse of education and health sectors and infrastructural decay’. The most appropriate structure of governance for Nigeria, according to him should be a return to a ‘true federation of six federating units with each developing at its own pace, and the proceeds from “God-given” national resources’.

    And as for Atiku Abubakar, a onetime vice president of the country, ‘the current federal structure arrogates too much functions and resources to the government at the centre, and thus killing the spirit of innovation and enterprise among the people’. He has therefore advocated for a political and governmental system that “empowers local authorities and gives them greater autonomy to address peculiar local issues, and enhances accountability, while contributing to the general good of the country.”

    Here is where the president-elect viewed as the elixir for all our socio political and economic ailments comes in. As CPC candidate in 2011, he was the only presidential candidate who had restructuring as part of his agenda. Restructuring also featured in his current APC manifesto. The template has been made for him. We can start by devolution of power to the already identified six geo-political zones to allow them face their own demons. The federal government has no business in education, health, agriculture local government etc. Government should dismantle all the money guzzling agencies and transfer their services and the resources to the new zones or regions. The Federal Road Safety Commission, like many other government duplications have more than enough personnel to form the nucleus of state police for the new zones.

    We are not being asked to invent the wheel. Europe after two brutal world wars realized part of the solution to hostility is a workable federal arrangement based on the peculiarities of their different communities.  Today the whole of Europe is working towards becoming a federation.

    What will finally define the Buhari government beyond fighting corruption, turning the economy around, making us proud Nigerians  once again, all of which have been taken for granted by  millions of Nigerians who have faith in his capacity to deliver on his promises is how he tackles the forces benefitting from the current anarchy we call a federal structure which allows  politicians who by just  claiming to be a Nigerian  before being Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba or Munchi etc becomes president without representing anyone or secure oil block and made billions without work. That, as one can infer from Edmund Burke’s argument, is like climbing the palm tree from the top. No one can be a good Nigerian if he is not first a good representative of his or her people.  Ahmadu Bello and Obafemi Awolowo who distinguished themselves as representative of their people are today remembered more by Nigerians than any living or dead former Nigerian head of state.

  • Professor Tekena Tamuno – A tribute

    In about a week from now, the mortal body of Professor Tekena Tamuno affectionately known as TNT will be buried in Okrika his home town in Rivers State of Nigeria. He was 83 when he passed on  and joined the saints triumphant. About two or so years ago, he told me that he had come a long way from his riverine native environment to the solid and stony grounds of Ekiti State. This was at the occasion of being honored with a Doctorate of Letters by Ekiti State University  to add to his earned D.Litt. of London University where he had previously gotten his B.A Honours and Ph.D degrees.

    Professor Tamuno had been one of my teachers in the university of Ibadan along with J .C . Anene, J. F. Ade Ajayi, Emmanuel Ayankanmi Ayandele, J. D. Omer-Cooper, Robert Gavin, J. B. Webster, Alan Ryder and Emmanuel Adiele  Afigbo. My recollection of these great men was the quiet mien of solitary academics carrying out research either in the archives  or in the research areas of the university library.

    Professor Tamuno was the quietest of them all! He was like a deep river that flows silently. At a time, he was shunted to  the then unpopular teaching of American history. The University of Ibadan while trying to get out of the  warm  and claustrophobic embrace of anglophone obsession with the history of England and the Commonwealth decided to give students the opportunity of comparative history which learning American history provided. As students, we knew there were no American history experts. Tamuno ably took on the challenge and discharged his responsibilities  creditably. Tamuno did not indulge in the use of bombastic language as one or two of his colleagues  did but he got in his points without much ado.

    His original area of research was the colonial consolidation of Southern Nigeria as well as the history  and evolution of the Nigerian police. This latter interest led him into studying  national security as a sub-specialty. Later on in life, he got involved in the study of the roles of palm oil and crude oil in the history of the Niger Delta . This was a natural thing for him coming from Okrika. Unlike Professor E. J. Allagoa  from Nembe, he was not interested in the micro-history of the individual islands; rather he took a panoramic view of the external influence  of either the oil companies and the Nigerian state on the Niger Delta. He was not what one will call an activist but in elucidating the history of the Niger Delta, he provided intellectual material for alleviating the problems of the area and he brought that quiet, diplomatic and scholarly approach to a  difficult and enigmatic problem. The authorities of the Nigerian state took notice because Tamuno  had spoken.

    Professor Tamuno held many academic positions in the course of his career. He was Head of Department, Dean of faculty of Arts, principal of the then University  College of Ilorin; Vice  chancellor of the premier university, the University of Ibadan, Pro-chancellor and finally stood at the apex of university governance pyramid  as chancellor of Bells university and lastly Redeemers university. He was at a time chairman, New Nigerian newspaper  and briefly served as Directing staff in NIPSS in Kuru. He was also a foundation Fellow of the Nigerian Academy of Letters.  He also served as chairman of a panel set up by the Nigerian government to produce some tomes on Nigerian history. He has packed so much into one life time that one wonders how he managed to do it. I have no doubt that his wife provided him not only a good home environment but also professional support  for his literary endeavors. As a  professional librarian, she must have helped in his research and writing.

    What is most remarkable about him is his humility which was quite frankly, overwhelming. He never had problems relating to his junior academic colleagues; he was never patronizing. If you gave your book to him to review and if he liked it, he will praise you to high heavens and if he thought it was not good, he will gently suggest areas which needed improvement. He seemed to enjoy very much being regarded as  just an academic colleague than hailed and treated as if he were a super person. He wrote a poem celebrating JOLLY PAPA which in the lingo of the Delta was some kind oh happy go lucky care-free person. The late Rex Lawson also sang about this Jolly Papa which I suppose encapsulated  Professor Tamuno’s attitude to life  in that life is too short to be lived brooding and oppressing fellow human beings. He made friends easily and did not have stomach for making enemies. In this he was heavily influenced by his Christian religion of brotherhood of all men. He was also full of humor and could be self-deprecating, enjoying the joke of being an Okrika-man  which in Yorubaland was associated with second hand clothing.

    I came towards the end of his life to see him as a personal friend  and whenever he met me or sent innumerable text messages to me, he will address me as my pro-chancellor on account of the honorary doctorate of Letters which Ekiti State University conferred on him when I was its pro-chancellor and chairman of Governing Council. I saw Professor Tamuno last on Good Friday in his usually cheerful mood  only to pass on a week or so later when announcement of the gubernatorial elections was being made. The coincidence was rather uncanny because one of his areas of academic interest is electoral politics in Nigeria. I was really shocked by his death. I knew he was ill last summer and went to the United States for medical attention. When I saw him on Good Friday, I was saying how happy I was that he had regained his good health and appeared to have fully recovered. I hardly knew I would not see him alive again.

    If there was ever a good man in Nigeria, it was Tekena Tamuno. Go well Jolly papa.

  • Youth…like paper cups

    An Ivy League education without ethics makes a trust fund ‘baby’ an expensive toy without batteries. Substandard education makes the middling youth even worse; it moulds him into a broken toy without appeal. They are both disposable but they enjoy patronage anyway – by the ones Wole Soyinka eloquently described as the wasted generation.

    The Nigerian youth is a breed with all the personality of a paper cup. Thus like paper cups, we are used and disposed by men and women unfit to be elders. Yet whatever callousness we are forced to endure, our elders are not to blame. They shall not be blamed, for we made ourselves unbidden offering on the altar of vultures.

    It is the malady of this age that the youth are too busy preaching that they have no time left to learn. In Nigeria, we are too busy dumbing down that we barely have time left to grow. It is a sad manifestation of stunted growth that we evolve into foetal adults and spend the rest of our lives seeking the comfort of debilitating “life boats.”

    It is even more disheartening to see us adopt as a favourite past time, the pillorying of our elders and the rapacious ruling class. Many a Nigerian youth love to prophesy the worst about our fatherland thus it is never surprising to hear the average Nigerian youth pronounce with emphatic pessimism and relish that “This country is doomed,” and “Nigeria is finished.”

    The Igbo youth laments his persistent marginalization from the scheme of things/bounties. He believes Nigeria is skewed to work against him and fellow Igbo because his peers from other ethnic groups are wary of his towering acumen, industry, courage and political savvy. The Hausa youth believes he has inalienable right to statutorily and heavenly accorded rights to reign supreme and lord it over his peers irrespective of merit. And the Yoruba youth, goaded by sentiments of his higher wisdom, towering depth in diplomacy, culture and politics believes that he is entitled to the best the country has to offer, on a platter of gold.

    Every youth desperately perpetuates his sense of victimhood and entitlement. The idea is to keep whining until he gets lucky and corners an immense portion of the proverbial national cake – with minimal exertion and at no cost.

    We used to be regarded as the promising youth, the gifted generation that would rescue Nigeria from the brink of irredeemable ruin. But that spell of hopefulness has dissipated now. Our “wasted” elders have seen through the swollen belly of our pride. They know we are increasingly handicapped by greed and lack of creed. By creed, I mean a coherent and specific set of goals, a consistent series of norms according to which society is to be remade.

    Since we have learnt to blame the ruling class for everything, what is it that we want from the ruling class? We don’t need their permission to make something of the world where they have failed but we still live our lives seeking their permission to evolve positively and mature.

    It takes courage and an enormous reserve of decency to evolve a humane ideology and establish it. We haven’t the courage and will, and this interferes with our ability to accomplish progressive change. More worrisome are our violent attempts to be radical; eventually they resonate too feebly as a kind of rudderless activism.

    We identify all that is wrong with our society but we are never specific about what must be done to correct them. It is relatively easy to join a picket line and tirelessly castigate our elders and ruling class for everything that is wrong with our lives but these actions, while they demonstrate frustration, in some instances even heroism, deal generally with symptoms of· our problems and not the solutions. All the picket lines in the world will not resolve ills of fraudulent and impatient youth, perverted values, greed, racism, disillusionment with study and substandard education.

    A broad wave of disillusionment and darkness persists above the silver linings we desperately wish to succeed our darksome clouds. Yet with precision and unfaltering devotion, we work ourselves up into such a state that we can only see the volcanic flare of our destructive acts as glitters of grandeur. We have perfected the art of standing on barrel-heads to spout and be seen, while we engage in pursuit and acquisition of mostly unearned wealth and greatness. Eventually, we luxuriate and spread out like a green forest with sour fruits and severed roots.

    Apparently, we suffer a throwback to the 70s – the era that launched a trend in which Nigerians became preoccupied with themselves more than the survival of the nation. Self preservation has become an inexorable obsession of many youths seeking to escape the slow, steady path with its craters of mishap and socio-economic vagaries. What Joshua Lubin identifies as the “Me” decade has indeed, recoiled inward rather than concern itself with crucial national issues, like national progress and ethical rebirth. Therefore, popular culture attracts dubious labels such as “narcissistic” and “decadent” from critics and the “wasted” older generation.

    The Nigerian youth has become so self-involved that almost every action and train of thought perpetuated by him serves as an instrumental resource to situate this generation in historical context, as perfect illustration of the much-hackneyed and over-exploited “Lost Generation.”

    Our inordinate quest for self-fulfillment further establishes us as the worst that could possibly happen to a heavily endowed nation like Nigeria.

    But we aren’t actually so bad. If we could look inwards to summon latent will and channel it towards the rejuvenation of outdated mores of morality and simple decencies, our lot might yet change, for better.

    It shouldn’t hurt to evolve faith and be steadfast in it. If we could discard whatever sentiments we hold about Bukola Elemide aka Asa, we would find in the musician some worthy anecdote about the quality of faith. Asa believed in her dream of stardom. And she relentlessly pursued it through the stark streets of ambition, the wilderness of failure spasms and institutional adversities to become whoever she is and whatever she is today. If I had used Soyinka, or Late Babatunde Jose, many would claim they grew up when Nigeria neither smothered dreams nor murdered hope. Hence my choice of Elemide, the minion who managed to become a poster icon for generations of Nigeria’s music hopeful.

    Yet many would read this and consider it “Pollyannaish.” To this lot, any hearty lunge at hope or belief in a brighter tomorrow manifest as blind optimism and a pathetic attempt to be patriotic even while it’s absolutely idiotic to do so. They would love to see the nation ruin in order to justify their inordinate cynicism and yearnings about the pointlessness of the Nigerian dream. They continually affirm their ill will and prayers of doom for the nation by tirelessly projecting separation and insurmountable bleakness on the Nigerian state. Individually, their contribution towards nation building is virtually non-existent or abysmally low, they are amazingly adept at sowing seeds of doubt and disillusionment amongst their peer and younger generation. But they love to be seen as heroes of truth and the new world.