The Nation Newspaper

Category: Thursday

  • When will Nigeria earn international respect again?

    For some years now, Nigeria’s role in international affairs has been on the decline steadily. With its immense size and huge population, our country ought to play a more significant role in world affairs. But that is not the case now. It is not being treated with the respect that should be normally due to it as the most populous country in Africa and the continent’s largest economy. In a study, “Gulliver’s Troubles’, a collection of essays on Nigeria’s international relations by distinguished Nigerian and foreign scholars, published a few years ago, to which I made a contribution, the consensus of the scholars was that Nigeria’s role in world and African affairs had declined significantly, and that given Nigeria’s immense resources and wealth, it was punching very much below its real weight.

    Now, what is the basis of this consensus? Although Nigeria has continued to participate actively in African affairs, it no longer commands the influence it once had in regional affairs. As the largest economy in Africa and the biggest contributor to the budget of the African Union (AU), its counsel ought to be taken seriously in the organisation, as was the case until recently. When it contests for top positions in the AU, or some of its economic agencies, it loses consistently to member states that should wield less clout financially than Nigeria. Twice, it lost such vital positions in the AfDB. This is clearly an indication that, unlike in the past, Nigeria is no longer able to mobilise support for its candidates in such vital regional organisations. Even among its immediate neighbours, such as Niger, Chad, Benin and Cameroon, Nigeria’s influence is steadily on the decline. When Nigeria needed the support of these countries to effectively tackle the Boko Haram insurgency, it was summoned to Paris by the French government to a meeting with its own neighbours. This sort of thing would not have occurred in the 70s and 80s when Nigeria’s voice in African affairs was strong, and when most African countries still held it in high esteem as the leading country in Africa.

    But since then, our country has become the object of crude and disrespectful jokes among many African leaders. Robert Mugabe, the President of Zimbabwe, a country that enjoyed Nigeria’s unstinted support during its liberation struggle, was reported as denouncing Nigeria for its widespread corruption. Specifically, he derided Nigeria as a country where planes would not take off until the pilots were bribed. Of course, this was an exaggeration for which Nigeria should have demanded from him an immediate apology. But I am not aware that we demanded such an apology from this man to whom Nigeria gave $500,000 in 1980 to fight the crucial independence election in Zimbabwe in 1980. The money was handed over to him personally in his residence by the late Chief  S.G. Ikoku and I. Similarly, the President Of Uganda, Museveni, was reported as criticising Nigeria for asking for foreign assistance in tackling the BH insurgency, adding that his country, Uganda, would never ask for foreign military assistance in dealing with its internal difficulties. Yet, in 1962, when there was a mutiny in the Ugandan Army, it was to Nigeria that the Ugandan government turned for help. The Nigerian Army helped put down a similar armed rebellion in Tanzania.

    But President Museveni was quite right in admonishing Nigeria for seeking to rely on foreign powers to help it solve its insurgency problem. Uganda is a country that I know quite well, having once served there during the terrible years of Idi Amin’s infamous rule. It is far less endowed than Nigeria and, in normal circumstances, should hold Nigeria in high esteem. But that is no longer the case. It was expected by other African states that a country with Nigeria’s immense resources, and the erstwhile reputation of its armed forces in peace keeping operations all over Africa, should be able to bring the BH insurgency to an end without recourse to foreign powers. And what has been the practical effect of seeking foreign assistance for an insurgency that we should have put down easily? It has been very little. As recently admitted by the Nigerian Armed Forces, the foreign powers that we brought in to help the country have virtually abandoned us. They complain that Nigeria was really not serious about tackling the insurgency headlong, and that Boko Haram has infiltrated the highest levels of government, a fact that even President Jonathan once admitted. How could we expect much military collaboration from foreign powers when President Jonathan is seen in Chad in the company of Modu Sheriiff, a former governor of Borno, who has been openly accused of complicity in the emergence and rise of BH? They have concluded rightly that military collaboration with Nigeria involves high risks to their military which they are unable to accept.

    However, Nigeria’s loss of influence in African and world affairs goes beyond our failure to end the insurgency in our country. Nigeria is increasingly being thought of as a failed state that, despite its huge resources, has been steadily on the decline in terms of the quality of governance. The World Bank and other multilateral financial agencies are up beat about Nigeria’s impressive growth rate, estimated at over 6 per cent. But what is the practical effect of this impressive and steady economic growth rate? It has been very insignificant. Nigeria continues to have some of the lowest human development indices, even in Africa. With more than three times the population of South Africa, its closest economic rival, it generates less than a third of South Africa’s electricity supply. Its educational, health and infrastructure deficits continue to lag behind those of South Africa and some other African countries.

    Why is it so? It is because of the widespread corruption in Nigeria, which has continued to undermine economic and social development. Virtually all the state institutions, including the executive, legislative and the judiciary, have broken down completely. The other day, the Chief Justice of the Federation was reported as complaining that the judiciary was rotten, with many judges openly taking bribes to distort justice. The bench too is believed to be just as corrupt. I need not mention the vast sums of money that routinely disappears from Nigeria, including the recent attempt to launder $9.3 millon in a so-called arms deal in South Africa

    All of these negative developments impinge on our foreign policy the quality of which ultimately depends on foreign perceptions of our country. It is our domestic situation that determines our foreign policy and our role in international affairs. Our foreign policy will not be taken seriously or effective if we are held in low esteem internationally. Our role and influence in international affairs will inevitably decline. The Foreign Minister was recently reported as saying that Nigeria was sending nearly 600 delegates to the current UN General Assembly session. If this is true, it must be the largest of any delegations at the UN, including that of the United States. When I served at the UN, we did not have more than 12 delegates at any UN General Assembly session. Even then, I thought our delegation was too large, particularly as most of the delegates were not really interested in the work of the UN. After attending one or two meetings and collecting their huge allowances they simply disappear from sight, without contributing anything to our work at the UN.

    A few days ago I told a former colleague of mine that Nigeria no longer had a foreign policy, a claim that I also made to a former foreign minister. Both of them agreed with my observation, and blamed the sad situation on negative developments at home, particularly the preoccupation of the federal government with the unstable domestic situation and political tension in Nigeria. This situation takes too much of the time of the President leaving him with little or no time for strategic planning in foreign affairs. He is not short of good advice from the Foreign Ministry, and many of the foreign affairs agencies and institutes that are obliged to offer him advice. But, despite his frequent foreign travels, he has little or no time to engage his advisers in a strategic review of Nigeria’s foreign affairs. This is the reason for the drift in Nigeria’s foreign relations and why Nigeria has lost much respect globally.

  • A President to die for

    Let me tell you of your precious heritage. It seems to be mine too even though I refuse to subscribe to such wretched norm. Yet no matter how much I try to deny its tragic course, the ties that bind arrests my heart, as it does, yours.

    And so do we live with whatever grotesqueness survives. Hence this year as all others, our dearest hopes have been wasted and crushed. Every hour manifests as twilight and Nigeria for all her seductiveness and charm, is tainted by the hopelessness we swore to end.

    Our best image is still desolate and austere, because we remain unfaithful to a land whose promising years again, slither from our grasp. A new dawn beckons but we have chosen to betray its silvery spokes of promise and luck. Thus today, the sun rises to set at mid-morning and practiced joy scorches and breaks under the spokes of premature daylight.

    Perhaps you disagree, but we are still that clueless bunch, grumbling and cursing in our ratty sheepskins, cringing from familiar hardships we have learnt to bear while we sleep with the demons from whose designs our tragedies emerge.

    Again we are set to elect familiar ogres we do not know to power. Some of them we know we ought to shy from but we would still go ahead to vote for them, won’t we?

    Granted the reins of hope come 2015, shall we choose misery and tragedy undiminished? Shall we choose ruin over rebirth; distrust over trust; shallowness over depth and puerile platitudes over the precision of promising logic?

    Shall apathy and greed compute desire’s trajectory? Will worded daydreams mature beyond impotent fantasies and delusions of grandeur? Come 2015, we shall know if truly, we had endeavoured to install the leadership for which our hearts beat. We shall remember today with despair or joy, and wonder if truly we endeavoured to explore the souls of Goodluck Jonathan, Muhammadu Buhari and so on that we may ascertain the one whose heart truly thrums the percussion to die for.

    We shall remember our candidates’ claims and persuasions to power and how base sentiments or elevated logic convinced us of their suitability for the posts to which they aspire. Whose politics promises change we can believe in? We should get to know in a few months if Mr President does not chicken out like he did last time, from the national presidential debates and shadow debates – platforms by which we could assess his excuses for manifesting on our psyche and realities as Nigeria’s worst excuse for a President ever.

    Will Jonathan chicken out? Will he demand that advance copies of questions be made available to candidates that studio audience be prevented from posing questions to candidates, like he did during the last elections?

    The raising and dashing of expectations is at the heart of almost every great political drama as it is in every ill-fated political dispensation. In our case, the manifestations are quite ridiculous. Hence the urgent need for the conveners’ of future debates to aspire to the highest standards of organisation and conduct.

    How, for instance, shall the studio audience be selected? With what assortment of citizenry shall it be comprised? Will it for instance, include able representatives of the proverbial average man on the street? What of the unemployed…the teacher, student, police, aged, journalist, handicapped and market women of the sidewalk? Will they be excluded again because some self-styled opinion leader believes it would be too demeaning and counter-productive to include them?

    Forget the organisers; the success of the process would eventually depend on you and me. Let us hope we are accorded fair and able representation. And if that be the case, let us begin to hope that representatives we choose aspire to the highest standards of conduct and representation, for our sake.

    And having chosen our representatives, let us endeavour to ponder the questions that we ought to ask. Let us attempt to ask the questions that truly matter and demand such answers that will indeed, drill them, analyse them and beam as much of their adroitness as their incapacities to the world.

    This is the moment we have been waiting for; the moment in which, practiced as our candidates may be, we should reveal the men apart from the boys, the wise from the foolish, the realist from the idealist and most importantly, the candidate who is tone-deaf and incapable of identifying with our fears and heartfelt yearnings.

    This is the moment we pay good mind to the issues that matter, the moment we make each candidate defend his antecedents in governance and private enterprise. Let us make each candidate defend his daintily clad manifesto as we judge how confidently and pragmatically he proffers solutions to the problems that persist and smother. We could demand – albeit uncompromisingly – that every candidate explains for instance, what impacts his Niger Delta palliative and intervention in the sad fate of LafargeWAPCO’s host communities would have on peasant poetry in the areas.

    We should ask the questions that test and confound that we may get to ascertain the indignation of our self-acclaimed patriots at the squalor of our living condition even as we question their promises of modern and affordable housing, true federalism, fiscal prudence, quality health, education and so on. We could ask how they would pay for these things and at what cost to you and me.

    We should make each candidate define his philosophy of social reform and his psychology of welfare governance to the benefit of the grassroots. And let us be wary lest we pass over the best-credentialed candidate just because our sentiments and gut counsels us to do so. Such wantonness will reflect unabashed lack of visceral understanding that the assessment of a presidential candidate involves as much test of you and me – as it does, every candidate aspiring for our votes.

    Let us seek that ineffable quality the writer, Katherine Anne Porter, had in mind when she defined experience as “the truth that finally overtakes you.” Let us be guided by our past and present encounters with every candidate till date.

    Our ideal President should be ruthless and compassionate, visionary and pragmatic, cunning and honest, patient and bold, combining the eloquence of a poet with the timing of a jungle cat. He should transcend the borders of our racial divides so effortlessly that it seems reasonable to expect that he can bridge all the other divisions – and answer all the impossible questions – plaguing Nigerian public life. He should encourage every valid expectation as he does our most fantastic yearnings – promising greatness at least, not entirely in the abstract.

    He should understand that statesmanship and valour need to be planned not blurted and that there are all sorts of questions and consequences to ponder before he takes the next politically expedient step every time. He should be able to scorn or at least tone down to a minimum, the arrogance implicit in leadership and corruption characteristic of power.

    He should understand the simplicity implicit in strength and the ruthlessness unspoken in humbleness. He should be able to overturn all the standard political assumptions simply by being himself. And we should get to love him for it and want more of him.

  • A tale of two friends

    I do not know when their friendship started, all I know is that a strong bond existed between them then. The late Chief Gani Fawehinmi (SAN) and Dr Olu Onagoruwa (SAN) were like Siamese twins at a time. They did everything together. Where you saw one, the other would not be far behind. Theirs was more than friendship . It was more of kinship.. They were there for each other.

    Their friendship was the envy of many of their colleagues who wondered what brought both men together. They wanted to know what the late Fawehinmi and Onagoruwa shared in common that made them to be so close. Whenever the late Fawehinmi was in trouble as he often was, Onagoruwa was always there for him and vice versa. But, most times, it was the late Fawehinmi who was always in the news because of his legendary fame of bucking the system.

    Onagoruwa is no push over too in challenging the establishment, but he was no match for the late Fawehinmi, who seemed to have capacity for trouble. In the late 1980s and 1990s, it was fun watching these men going in  and out of court, challenging the military government on one infraction or the other. It was a time that challenging the military, in whatever form,  was a taboo. As far as the late Fawehinmi, whom many simply referred to as Gani, and Onagoruwa  were concerned the only taboo was for them not to speak out or act against injustice.

    These brothers, these friends were a two-man army, who fought side by side. They paid the price for their decision to be on the side of the people and by implication on the side of truth. They were denied certain privileges by their professional association and the government of the day also made life difficult for them. Friends also kept a distance from them for fear of being blacklisted by the government of the day. To be a friend of the late Fawehinmi or Onagoruwa was unheard of then simply because they were seen as rebels.

    But they were rebels with a cause, who fought for the betterment of  society. Both men walked where angels feared to tread. They understood each other perfectly well. One knew what the other should do in case of any trouble. This was why for years the military could not decipher what made both men  tick. The duo may be on short fuse and I should know, having been at the receiving end of their anger, this does not detract from their humanity. Let me cite two instances to buttress my point.

    Shortly after his release from one of  his many  incarcerations by the Babangida regime sometime in 1989, The Punch, which I worked for then, ran a story which the late Fawehinmi considered offensive and pronto, he fired a letter to the editor, asking that the paper should retract the report or he would go to court. Barely 24 hours after, a lawyer from his chamber was in the editor’s office, with another letter from him, asking that the paper should ignore his threat, adding that he could not afford to fight a paper which did so much for him while in detention.

    I was to run foul of Onagoruwa sometime in  1990 while handling the Inside the Courts page at The Punch. In an article on the page, I used a word which Onagoruwa did not find funny. Despite being a lawyer to The Punch then, he still complained to Justice Augustine Ade-Alabi about the article, which he said described him in words he did not find funny, and urged the court to order the reporter to mind his language, henceforth. Justice Ade-Alabi noted the complaint of Onagoruwa, who said he would not push the matter further because he is the paper’s lawyer, and directed the reporter to choose his words whenever he is writing. I learnt one or two things about the tort of libel from that episode.

    I have gone this length to establish the relationship between the late Fawehinmi and Onagoruwa for the benefit of  those unaware of their cordial relationship  to know how close they were before the break-up. What led to their parting of ways  was Onagoruwa’s decision to serve as attorney-general and minister of justice in the late Gen Sani Abacha regime. The late Fawehinmi did not want his bosom friend to take up the job. But Onagoruwa was prepared to serve the nation to prove a point that you could be in government and still  do what is right.

    The late Fawehinmi did not see it that  way. He believed that his friend would compromise on becoming part of the government and asked him not to take the job. It was a painful parting of ways. For those who know, the late Fawehinmi did not do things in half measures. Whenever he drew the battle line, there was no going back. It was so in this instance. Right from the time his bosom friend took up the nation’s chief law officer’s job, he saw nothing good in him again, even after Onagoruwa had left office. The late Fawehinmi was highly critical of Onagoruwa that many did not know that they were so close before Onagoruwa came into the late Abacha regime.

    Onagoruwa lived up to his promise to be his own man in government. He resigned in 1994, barely a year after coming into office following the promulgation of decrees, which he said he knew nothing about. His action cost him a lot. His lawyer-son, Toyin, who was managing his chambers, was killed some months later. Onagoruwa himself was a target of many attacks from which he miraculously escaped. But, his family suffered. Onagoruwa lost his wife and his health took a nosedive. In the past 20 years, the man has been pining away.

    But no matter, God will always honour His own. Though it may tarry, it shall come to pass. For years, both men were denied the highest honour of their profession which they deserve. The Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN) is an honour which many lawyers covet, but it is given to the chosen. Many believe that they deserve it, so year in, year out, they apply for the title. In bringing their applications, they count on others to get them approved. No matter how brilliant a lawyer is, if there are no good words from members of the Legal Practitoners Privileges Committee (LPPC), which sits on these applications, on his behalf, he would not be made a senior advocate. It is as simple as that.

    To become a senior advocate, a lawyer must be in good standing with  those who will determine his fate. For long, the late Fawehinmi and Onagoruwa were not and the title passed them by and the legal profession  was the poorer for it. In 2001, the late Fawehinmi, who for years was referred to as Senior Advocate of the Masses (SAM), was given the title. The late Fawehinmi became SAN without an Onagoruwa beside him to celebrate the well deserved honour.

    Thirteen years later, Onagoruwa’s turn came. As fate would have it, Onagoruwa became SAN five years after Fawehinmi’s death in 2009. I watched brokenhearted as Onagoruwa was being conferred with the honour by Chief Justice Aloma Mukhtar in her chambers and not in full public glare on Tuesday. Onagoruwa was on a wheelchair as he received his well deserved honour. At a stage, he broke down in tears, wiping his face with a white handkerchief. It was not an occasion for tears; it was one of joy,  but something would have made him weep. What is it?

    Was he shedding tears of joy? Was he remembering his late wife and what would have been if she had been alive? Was he remembering his friend who became his harsh critic when he took up the job of attorney-general and minister of justice? Was he remembering how unfair the system has been to him – and of course many other Nigerians in the same shoe with him – over the years? Sir, your days of weeping are over. Rejoice because you lived to see this day. Though it was delayed, it finally came, to show that whatever will be, will be (Que Sera, Sera). Congratulations.

  • General Benjamin Maja Adekunle: A tribute 

    Everybody knows that on the federal side of the unfortunate Nigerian-Biafran civil war, the recently departed Brigadier -General Benjamin Adekunle was the most successful field commander but also the most colourful and sometimes  arguably the  most controversial officer. He was also the favorite of the international press. I was a post graduate student in Europe and North America during the civil war and we followed the course of the war eagerly and Adekunle’s activities dominated the air waves. He was largely responsible for building a brand new army division through the recruitment hurriedly from Lagos and western Nigeria,  young men who wanted to see action and rushed  through training before deployment into the hot theatre of war .

    This was Adekunle ‘s Third Marine Commando division. Because of the origin of this army formation, it required sometimes unusual and unorthodox mode of discipline which Adekunle provided.The two other divisions, namely the First and Second divisions,  were formed around the nuclei  of well-trained and professional  army units of the pre-civil war years. Due to Adekunle’s indomitable will, he was able to make good fighting men from the new recruits that gained more and more experience and effectiveness as the civil war ground on. Adekunle’s marine commando was deployed in the difficult Niger Delta where with the cooperation of the navy, made an amphibious landing on the islands in the Niger Delta and from there fighting his way from the creeks into places like Bonny and Port Harcourt.

    Before this feat no one thought the army was capable of this kind of achievement. And from one island to the other, Adekunle’s troops between 1967 and 1969, cleared the present Rivers State  and the then Cross River State  Of Biafran troops and fought their way into the heartland of Igbo land capturing Aba, Owerri and Umuahia though they later  lost Owerri and  Adekunle had to be asked to go and rest and Obasanjo asked to take over from him. He promptly ended the war after reorganization and infusion of discipline into the ranks of apparently power drunk rank and file who became over confident of their fighting ability.

    The Second Division of the Nigerian army fighting through the then Midwest region managed to clear the region of Biafran troops but suffered heavy losses in abortive efforts to cross the River Niger from Asaba to Onitsha and huge losses at Abagana before it was able to link up with the First Division of the army which had fought its way from Makurdi to Enugu through  the northern heartland of Igboland. Without taking anything from the first and second divisions of the army and their commanders, General Muhammad Shuwa and General Murtala Muhammed  whose troops naturally met much stronger opposition from the Biafrans in their heartland, Adekunle’s  troops fought in minority areas until 1969 when Adekunle and his troops entered  Igbo land and virtually finished the war before the change of command from Adekunle to Obasanjo.

    Adekunle was a strict disciplinarian who on finding out that one of his officers, Captain Macaulay Larmude had shot an unarmed  civilian  in 1968 got him court-martialled and executed publicly to teach any other gung-ho officers who would not abide by military orders of operation.

    After the war when the cement armada clogged the ports of Lagos, the federal government called again on Adekunle to clear the ports. This was an assignment which, through his unorthodox methods, brought him more enemies until his association with some free-wheeling and high flying  Nigerian women led to his premature and unexpected retirement from the army, which was his life. Murtala  Muhammed’s short administration tried to rehabilitate him by sending  him on  a mission to assist the Angolans in their campaign against Portuguese colonialism. His remit apparently involved arming the Angolan cadres.

    This was a mission which at the end of the war of liberation of Angola in which Nigeria along with Cuba, and the defunct East Germany  helped defeat Portugal and South African forces in Quito Cuanavalle. This brought glory to Nigeria to the extent that the longest avenue in Luanda, the capital of Angola, is named after General Murtala Muhammed. Adekunle apparently, due to licentious living and poor management of his resources, fell on bad times that by the time the NPN government of Shehu Shagari took over in 1979, Adekunle pitifully became some kind of security officer sometimes seen standing unobtrusively behind campaign podium. Towards the end  of his death, he had been abandoned by Nigeria and died poor and unsung.

    On a personal note, I met Adekunle in the late 1970s when I tried to persuade him to write his memoirs. His response was that he knew too much about the country that if he wrote he would shake the Nigerian edifice to its very foundation. I tried to persuade him without success that I could help put his memoirs in diplomatic language that will still tell the truth without offence. Adekunle was a fascinating man. He was a true Nigerian. He was born in Kaduna. His father was from Ogbomoso while his mother was a Bachama from Adamawa. Adekunle himself had a wife from the Niger Delta. He spoke about 10 Nigerian languages including Fulfulde,Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, Bachama, Ijaw and Efik.  When I met him, he reminded me of Napoleon who was a very short General like Adekunle with unusual military skill.

    He was a soldiers’ soldier. He was a credit to Sandhurst, that military academy that trained the first crop of officers and gentlemen of the Nigerian army. If the civil war had not been among brothers, Adekunle’s exploits would have gone down into history like those of his military colleagues in other lands. He remains an unforgettable hero of the Nigerian-Biafra civil war and his place in Nigerian history is settled.

  • Nigeria under PDP 

    The above aptly captures my outings on these pages in the last four years. This focus is precisely because no other party has been able to withstand the intrigues of PDP since the outset of the fourth republic. The Alliance for Democracy, (AD), even under the highly respected late Bola Ige fizzled out when infiltrated by PDP moles. The AC and its successor ACN could not make much impact as a result of endless wars of sons and fathers which define Yoruba politics where the aggrieved often appeal to outsiders for help. The PDP swallowed five of seven governors elected on APP within eight years. Labour and APGA are PDP surrogates. On the other hand PDP has remained the greatest mobilization agent since 1999. When it sneezes, the nation cashes cold. Its actions and inactions affect our past, present and define the future of our children. The insensitivity and the cavalier way the party presented Jonathan as its candidate for the 2015 as if the electorate does not matter was not accidental. Jonathan even with his disabilities is the only asset PDP has for 2015.

    PDP is an association of wheelers and dealers with no identifiable ideological world-view or a coherent manifesto. In place of party manifesto, Obasanjo in 1999 talked of “a total transformation of Nigeria’ through urban development and privatization, stable power supply, roads and infrastructure and constitutional review”. Yar’Adua came up with his own unwieldy ‘Eight-point agenda’ which the party paid little attention to. President Jonathan came up with his own ‘transformation agenda’, a five-year development plan 2011-2015 which focused on ‘strong, inclusive and non-inflationary growth; employment generation and poverty alleviation and value re-orientation of the citizenry’.

    John Campbell, a former US envoy for instance described PDP during a debate on Nigeria in the British House of Commons a few years back as ‘an elite cartel at the centre of power in Nigeria, a political party that came together … as essentially a club of elites for sharing of oil rents and political spoils.’

    The government has provided enough facts to validate Campbell’s thesis. The privatization exercise as detailed by Nasir El Rufai during a House of Representatives’ probe showed that it was designed to share out blue chip companies built through taxpayers money to privileged members of the political class. The monetization policy was used by PDP and Obasanjo to immorally sell inherited patrimony from colonial masters which rightly belong to our children to party members and their sympathizers. Other evidences include the theft of about N1.7 trillion through fuel subsidy deal which involved highly placed members of PDP and their children. There was also the pension scheme scandal where one of the major actors has continued to receive protection from government. The probe set up by President Jonathan to look into the cases of abandoned projects in the last 15 years showed that it would take five years of budgeting to implement uncompleted projects if no fresh projects are embarked upon. Of course there is the outstanding issue of unremitted $10 billion oil sales revenue which cost the whistle blower-the former CBN Governor his job. Only last week, the South African authorities confiscated the sum of $9.3m illegally ferried into the country through a private jet belonging to the CAN president.

    Starting from 1999, of the 23 PDP governors, 17 were arraigned for corruption. A few that have served their terms along with others who are still expected to be in court defending their integrity have been rehabilitated by government as party chieftains, ministers, or elected senators and governors. Within the same period, many of the party’s leading lights such party chairmen, senate presidents, and speakers were found guilty of corruption.

    To show that little governance goes on in Abuja outside sharing, Obiageli Ezekwesili, a co-founder of Transparency International and former minister of solid minerals and later education, recently called attention of Nigerians to the new fad of Federal Executive Council holding meeting over award of contracts when there are statutory bodies responsible for such duties.

    Besides corruption, another enduring legacy that should haunt PDP as we move towards 2015 is insecurity. It started with Niger Delta insurgency leading to political sharia riots and today’s Boko Haram which the president admitted had killed over 12,000 mostly innocent Nigerians in the last five years… Operating in between are the rampaging Fulani herdsmen killing and maiming innocent people in the north central states of Kaduna, Benue, Plateau and Nasarawa.

    Although the Boko Haram sect has been active since the administration of Olusegun Obasanjo, mindless killing of innocent Nigerians started some five years ago under Yar’ Adua. Government has been unable to contain the sect activities which started with attacks on churches, mosques, police stations and military barracks and then motor parks and populated streets of Kano, Kaduna, Maiduguri. Then the insurgents shifted their mindless killings to some  schools where they carried out selective murder of male students. What drew world attention to government helplessness was the shameful abduction of about 300 girls from their dormitories in Chibok in April this year.

    But in spite of its liabilities, the party is probably counting on its selling point which is its big umbrella which besides protecting all those who swear on PDP oath, also drips honey that quenches the thirst of its members. Thus family members who strayed out often scrambled back as they often find it difficult to survive outside the PDP family umbrella. Atiku Abubakar  had to overcome many hurdles including prostrating before Obasanjo as well as his Adamawa local branch officers each time he has had  to crawl back. Kalu Uzor Kalu is daring his local branch that has insisted he is not welcomed. Bode George even after serving a jail term wrongly has found no other party that can quench his thirst. Ikimi, Fani-kayode, Fayose were not just thirsty but famished by the time they returned to their natural habitat. Babangida Aliyu of Niger was not just back after leading a rebellion; he had the unenviable duty of announcing President Jonathan as the PDP sole candidate for 2015.  Even PDP former tormentors like Nuhu Ribadu and Ali Modu Sheriff have found the PDP honey very tempting that they would swallow any insult to crawl under its umbrella.

    But even at that, Jonathan who controls the big umbrella, is an asset to PDP that canonized him for 2015. This is a president who has won all his past battles without waging any war. Others fought his wars and sometimes committed political suicide in the process. The SNG fought for him to be sworn in as acting president…Ogbuluafor was sacrificed to ensure Jonathan crossed the PDP hurdle that stood between him and PDP ticket in 2010. Obasanjo claimed he sold his candidacy to opinion leaders round the country on the understanding that he would run for one term after completing Yar’Adua’s term cut short by  death.

    But Jonathan himself, a master of political subterfuge made his canonization in spite of his disabilities by the governors and BOT a fait accompli. Every PDP man has a price. The governors also need continuous protection. As Obasanjo once hinted, Jonathan knows how to make wise investments. How will governors without character who proclaimed themselves winners of governors forum election they lost, refuse to pay back their debt when Jonathan demanded dividends on his investment? BOT’s unprincipled leaders like Tony Anenih and Jerry Gana who have been parts of ‘any government in power’ since Babangida era owe their continued relevance to Jonathan. Of course we can only suspect the source of billions of naira the Transformation Ambassadors of Nigeria (TAN) committed to media campaign claiming without proof that ‘our roads have never been so good, that farmers have put poverty behind them, that almajiri school have solved problems of poverty in the north, that siting of new universities in states without federal universities are answers to the decay in the educational sector. There was also the TAN claim of eight million signatories of Nigerians who earnestly want Jonathan to run. The PDP wheelers and dealers need Jonathan.

  • What Scottish nationalism teaches us

    The large nation of England and the small nation of Scotland agreed, by an Act of Union in 1707, to form a union. From the very first day, however, there were always some Scots who did not want union with England – who wanted the Scottish nation to preserve its separate identity. Such people were the founding fathers of modern Scottish nationalism.

    Not long after 1711 (roughly from the 1780s), the nationalism of ethnic nations gradually grew into a force in Europe. It started with the French. Emerging from their French Revolution, the French became a strongly unified nation, went forth to try and conquer all of Europe, demonstrated how strong and proud a unified nation could be, and made every other European ethnic nation jealous. In response, the Italians, who had been living in separate small kingdoms, forcibly unified their country together as one country of Italy in 1861. Ten years later, the Germans followed suit and became one Germany. Then the many small nations that were parts of some large countries began to demand their own separateness too. Such demands resulted in the breaking up of such multi-nation countries as Austria-Hungary and the Turkish Empire into smaller countries.

    But the most powerful countries of Europe did not yet fully understand ethnic nationalism, especially the nationalism of small or weak nations. Therefore, when they broke up Austria-Hungary and the Turkish Empire, they grouped some small nations to form what they thought would be viable countries – such as Yugoslavia (consisting of Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Albanians, Bosnians, etc), Czechoslovakia (consisting of Czechs and Slovaks), etc. They also established boundaries that split up some nations – such as the Kurds (today 30 million in population) who were split between Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria. And when European countries came to Africa and Asia to create empires for themselves at the same time, they did what they had done in parts of Europe – they forcibly grouped some nations to form new countries, and they created boundaries that split up many nations.

    Since the beginning of the 20th century, the world has learnt more and more one hard lesson – namely, that these multi-nation countries, and these boundaries that split up nations, are simply unrealistic and, therefore, unsustainable. Nations, no matter how small, are incredibly tough entities, each being a product of many thousands of years of evolution. Nations don’t usually die. Countries that are made up of different nations usually break up sooner or later along ethnic national lines. All the powerful multi-nation empires of the past broke up in that way. All the multi-nation countries of today are in trouble; almost all are unstable; many have broken up; more and more are moving towards breaking up. And the United Nations has ruled that each ethnic nation has the right to choose to be a separate country.

    If a multi-nation country is well-governed, prosperous, powerful and proud (like Britain is), it is not so easy for the nations in it to break away. That is what we saw last week in the Scottish independence referendum. Enough Scots see so much to love in Britain that they don’t want to separate from Britain, but the nationalists are proclaiming that the struggle continues. In contrast, if a multi-nation country is (like Nigeria) poorly governed, corruption-ridden, makes its citizens poor, and makes its citizens ashamed in the world, its chances of quickly breaking up are very high. The Soviet Union was phenomenally powerful, but its central government was, in its relations with its small nations, far too domineering and repressive – and the country broke up, with each nationality becoming a separate sovereign country.

    Realistically, therefore, Nigeria is not likely to live for much longer. Nigeria is too strongly set in its path of crookedness, corruption, unfairness, hopeless poverty for more and more citizens, mutual hatred among nations, conflicts, and stiff-necked resistance to change. Nigeria has become a monstrous agency of destruction of all morality, and even all human virtue. And the result is that more and more Nigerians are retreating from love for Nigeria to love for their own small nations in Nigeria. For Nigeria, the basis for being one country does not exist anymore.

    A couple of years ago, our Wole Soyinka said that if changes didn’t come soon, he could see Nigeria breaking up. We can say today that things are not only not changing, but that things are getting worse and worse. The growing indication now, therefore, is that Nigeria may be entering into an era of separate nationalisms. Igbo nationalism, Yoruba nationalism, Hausa-Fulani nationalism, Kanuri nationalism, Edo nationalism, Nupe nationalism, Ijaw nationalism, Birom nationalism,  and so on – these now seem likely to dominate Nigeria’s near future. And the reason is that more and more of the people of each of Nigeria’s nations feel that their nation is being gradually destroyed in Nigeria, by Nigeria.

    When I wrote in the Gbogun Gboro column some months ago that many of the enterprising Igbo people were fleeing from their “battered Igbo homeland”, one Igbo reader took offence at that phrase. He or she thought I was denigrating or deriding the Igbo people. But I wasn’t doing any such thing. What I was doing was saying what we all know to be true – namely, that Nigeria has seriously battered the Igbo nation. As the Igbo were rising up by the 1950s, the prospects were great that their kind of dynamism could quickly produce a technologically and industrially notable nation in Nigeria and Africa. But the drastic disorientation occasioned by Nigeria has brutalized that prospect. And more or less the same has happened to every other Nigerian nation.

    Concerning my own Yoruba nation, I can say we were broadly and confidently prospering by the 1950s, and that we are poorer today than ever before in our known history, thanks to Nigeria. When I see countless thousands of highly educated Yoruba youths roaming the streets for years without jobs and without hope, when I see large crowds of highly educated Yoruba men and women lining up at foreign embassies every day seeking visas to escape from the Nigerian hell, when I see videos or read about highly educated Yoruba and other Nigerian  youths trying to walk across the Sahara Desert in order to reach Europe though North Africa (with many of them dying in the desert), I, who in the 1970s had excitedly given up my successful career to go and help build a great Nigeria,  am today filled with overwhelming sorrow and worry about my Yoruba nation.

    I know, of course, that there are some of the Yoruba elite who are benefiting, or who hope to benefit, from the Nigerian corruption outfit, and who therefore want Nigeria to continue. But I am relieved that, in all directions, large numbers of Yoruba people are recognizing and accepting that our nation needs to free itself from the grip of destruction and establish an independent existence of its own. I look forward to seeing a Yoruba nationalist movement (like the Scottish nationalist movement) emerge among these masses of patriots, and I desire to march with them in their peaceful but focused and resolute independence demonstrations. That, I am sure, is the path ahead.

  • In dark time

    As rock hollows, tide after tide, glassily strand the sea, so do our hearts impede our spirited strides. As we grow older, wisdom shrinks in our bumbling husks to the size of the Touch-me-not, at twilight. Like feudal lords over serfs, a rapacious ruling class holds sway over us. The same families are still in charge because we have refused to take charge.

    As you read, the Nigerian youth regresses into a fleeting fracture of the towering immensity and hope he ought to represent. More worrisomely, many of the nation’s youth seem to develop mental arteriosclerosis 40 years before they get the physical kind from chain smoking, binge drinking, gluttony and mental indolence.

    It’s every man for himself; the ruling class will not bat an eyelid even if our youth is wasted beyond redemption, as long as their children inherit their stash of the country’s looted wealth.

    The ordinary youth however, continues to perpetuate that sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes as “wisdom” among the rich but arrant foolishness of the masses. Hence the successful doctor, banker, journalist, engineer, accountant to mention a few, amongst us, do not care about anything and anybody else.

    Yet we pine for positive social change in which we could thrive. The few that claim to be intellectually endowed and progressive in thought amongst us seek to acquire knowledge and skills necessary to actualize their dreams of bliss but even this few have no taste at all for the vagaries of honest industry.

    We live and thrive on a perversion hence when we cry for a historic revolution and youth-friendly society, our thoughts pander to a more permissive and corrupt society that will aid our mad, desperate dash for unearned wealth or what we deem our share of the Nigerian dream.

    This is our Nigerian dream: a lush, breathtaking future that de-emphasizes honest toil and accords our vanities a caressing glance. We dream of strings of bank accounts at home and abroad; we hope to drive the best cars, live in palatial mansions in highbrow areas and enjoy the most lucrative contracts and job offers even when we do too little to deserve such perks.

    Our lust for the fleeting banishes reality. And this depravity is pervasive. Decades ago, it manifested as worrisome and inordinate self-love; today, we re-establish it as the language of the socially inspired and politically correct. Hence the frenzy by which we seek out and worship industry titans, political messiahs, entertainment superstars and other celebrity icons. It’s all part of our desperate ploy to substantiate our vanities by seeking ourselves in those we worship and establishing a false intimacy with them.

    If modern gospel of prosperity and motivational literature won’t make us celebrities, then celebrity idols, reality television and sheer violence will. We impatiently wait for our cue to walk on stage inside our theatre of the absurd to be admired, feared or envied. Our vanities cramp the growth of our human spirit: they restrict the resuscitation and positive engagement of our productive faculties. Thus we find it hard to subscribe to such faith, simple decencies, honesty and values that demand that we enthusiastically dedicate ourselves to progressive personal growth and realistic rejuvenation of the Nigerian enterprise.

    That is why we have pathetic fops like Asari Dokubo and company threatening to destroy Nigeria and perpetuate ethnic genocide if President Goodluck Jonathan retains his seat or is booted from office come 2015. It is unforgivable idiocy and utter insanity for any youth to lend himself to such pitiful causes despite glaring political and socio-economic constraints that the incumbent administration foist upon us. This is not to absolve preceding governments of culpability but it is simply too repulsive in thought and action for the contemporary Nigerian youth to root for leadership that has done too little to improve standard of living in the country even as it gorges on resources meant for the sustenance of the collective.

    A societal madness has begun to occur: bigoted, unemployed youth and bigoted, employed youth; lost souls wandering the streets of Nigeria’s major cities, day and night, like loose molecules in an unstable social fluid have begun to ignite. Thus our cities have become covens of immense cruelty where youth, fired by angst, a lingering sense of hurt and revolt, take alarming steps from threatening violence to perpetrating it. Traditional neglect of the youth as negligible integers of growth has evolved to dangerous generalizations and the demonization of peaceful majorities.

    Today, economic forces create an overriding sense of disenchantment and futility among the youth. Additionally, the tyranny and insensitivity of the ruling class accentuates reactionary attitude and self-aggrandizing pursuits amongst the youth. The prominence of social justice and equality movements has dissipated as we become more concerned with identity politics than the greater good. Ironically, the ruling class, their close associates and scions are the only beneficiaries from this splintering of Nigeria into racist and more selfish associations.

    A prevalent crisis of confidence has occurred in reaction to the social turmoil. More youths are feeling empty and without purpose yet we continue to moot revolution like the next best thing we could orchestrate after our last follies have fallen silent. We forget, still, that there is a time to speak and time to act; time to scream and silently orchestrate the inestimable violence of uprightness.

    Our much vaunted “Occupy Nigeria” movement failed because the Nigerian youth is innately lacking in grit, honesty and ideal; thus we remain perpetually exploitable – victims of what George Bernard Shaw, terms “the stupid system of violence and robbery which we call Law and Industry” and an opportunistic malady that Noel Ignatin rightly identifies as “the original sweetheart agreement.”

    Eventually, the Nigerian youth is written off and our grievances dismissed as the crazed rant of a pathetic mass of revolutionary impostors. Here, then, is the crucial temptation facing us; either we acquire at least a provisional and concrete ideology and the ability to commit ourselves to more progressive enterprise, or we expose ourselves to greater exploitation and disillusionment. More often than not, we are tempted to give up and retreat, in search of some comfortable, greener pasture where we can luxuriate and “survive” according to the idiosyncrasies and social conditioning several “developed” nations deem worthy of us; this is always the resort of cowards and the feeble-minded.

    The alternative is to drastically overhaul our values to become more progressively inclined and concerned with the political, the economic and social; to acquire the competencies and the skills necessary for the tasking work that must be done if the social structure of Nigeria is to be even slightly modified. Solutions can never be discovered without profound understanding of law, governance methods and the economics and social organization of humane statehood.

    It’s about time we cultivated progressive interest in such realms and practicable goals and norms for their actualization; without these, we will continue to flounder in the sea of often ‘well-meaning’ but ineffective good intentions.

    These are dark days for the Nigerian youth. We are going through a particularly unpleasant form of hell but it’s a hell that we have made for ourselves by our ghastly greed, laziness and inarticulateness. But we have still got youth on our side and thus the possibility of change.

  • 2015: Jonathan’s cross

    2015: Jonathan’s cross

    THERE seems to be nothing they won’t criticise. Nothing. No matter how little. His dress sense, his culinary sense, his mannerism, his peregrinations and – wait for this – his choice of friends.

    How unfair they have been to him. Those idle fellows whose only business is minding other people’s business. They see the speck in other people’s eyes and neglect the log in theirs. They go by all manner of dubious names. Activists.  Social critics. Commentators. Opposition. Spokesmen. Observers. Analysts. And more.

    Their target? Who else other than President Goodluck Ebele Azikiwe Jonathan, GCFR, who seems to have developed a strong chin to take all the blows. He has been impassive to it all, apparently after being counselled by his dutiful minders that such attacks are merely his opponents’ strategy to stop him from the 2015 race, the all-important game for which all other aspects of our national life have been diminished.

    Dr Jonathan was in N’djamena, the capital of Chad, the other day to discuss with President Idris Deby how to tackle the madness that has sliced off a chunk of Borno State in the name of an insurgency driven by the Boko Haram sect and fuelled by various factors, including corruption and lack of political will.

    A usually reliable source who would not want to be identified for security reasons swore to me that only Dr Jonathan and his host were discussing behind the huge mahogany door of an inner room in the presidential lodge, away from the prying eyes of security boys, press boys and the army of hangers on in starched brocades and oversize suits cleverly addressed as aides.

    Just from nowhere the next day, a photograph was splashed all over the newspapers of President Jonathan – bowler hat, long dress with a dangling golden chain, glittering buttons and all – President Deby and former Borno State Governor Ali Modu Sheriff ,the one called SAS, the one who for a long time was secretly accused of founding and funding the terror machine that is Boko Haram, an issue that has since been placed in the public domain.

    A mere photograph. That was all those fellows, the critics aforementioned, needed to descend on the President again. They said he was travelling in the company of a suspected Boko Haram godfather. If any matter of great security implication is to be discussed, should it be in the presence of such a man? Where is the Villa’s sense of circumspection? In what capacity did Sheriff sit at that meeting?  Who invited him? The questions were many. And those were from the lenient and liberal of the critics. The harsh ones went on to allege and assert – without any proof whatsoever – that Jonathan conspired with Sheriff to unleash the monster that they are now battling to rein in.  In fact, some of them claimed – again, without any proof whatsoever – that the Commander-in-Chief actually went to hold talks with the sect’s leaders after the former governor had cleared the way for him. Haba!

    All this because of a mere photograph, a material that could be discarded anyhow without any sense of loss.

    Aren’t these idle fellows setting a dangerous precedent? If they are not checked now, they will not only recommend whose company the President should keep, they will want to endorse who should share his table, his bed, his jet, his thoughts and all the paraphernalia of his exalted office.

    But the Presidency did not allow the matter to go unnoticed. Thanks to Dr Reuben Abati who issued a statement explaining the circumstances under which the photograph was taken. We now know that the President never travelled with Sheriff , who, according to him, has had a long standing business relationship  with Chad. Sheriff, said the presidential spokesman, was only part of a crowd of Nigerians resident in Chad who came to the airport to welcome Jonathan. The picture, he said, was taken at the airport and not at the presidential lodge.

    We all heaved a sigh of relief. We had thought that those heartless hackers and Internet fraudsters were at work again, that they had cranked up the scene, yanking off His Excellency’s picture from somewhere and merging it with Sheriff’s and Deby’s to reinforce the long peddled but yet unproven suspicion that there is an official collusion in Boko Haram and that the Presidency was paying lip service to the anti-terrorism war.

    Thankfully, Abati proved that the photograph was genuine; it was no fabrication. If you thought this would keep the attackers at bay, you were wrong, damn wrong. Does Sheriff live in N’djamena? Where in the picture are the other Nigerians who came to show their love for Jonathan? Why should the President allow Sheriff to sit so close to him? Is it normal for the host President and his guest to sit at the airport, taking photographs? Is Jonathan unaware of the grave allegation against Sheriff – that he is the capone of Boko Haram, which has murdered and kidnapped hundreds, including over 200 school girls?

    Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka joined the fray. He said he believed Australian Stephen Davis’ view on Sheriff – the latter had said some Boko Haram commanders told him that Sheriff was one of their financiers – and that he should return to shed more light on his assertions.

    Besides, said the fiery literary giant, Jonathan knows the Central Bank Of Nigeria(CBN) official Davis was referring to as the link between the sect and the financial world. His name is on Jonathan’s table, Soyinka said, adding that he would support rights activist lawyer Femi Falana’s plan to force the authorities to prosecute Sheriff.

    But, wait a minute, gentlemen. Does Jonathan not possess the right to choose his friends and associates? Isn’t this a private matter?

    A lawyer friend of mine, a Senior Advocate, whose wig’s coffee brown colour shows that he has seen ages in the Bar, after studying Jonathan’s predicament, has confided in me that he intends to take up a writ of mandamus to compel the Attorney-General to seek a legal pronouncement that the president, including Jonathan and whomsoever is so called, named, mentioned, cited, known and addressed, has the right to choose his friends.

    The SAN, a meticulous fellow, disclosed to me that he would be relying on such authorities as the legendary Lord Denning to show that a man reserves the right to choose his friends and acquaintances. Besides, says the lawyer gleefully, he will press into his argument the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, which is also known as the Banjul Charter. After this, if the critics remain unrepentant, as I suspect they will as their passion is driven by 2015 politics, my lawyer friend will also compel the Attorney-General to file an action at the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights.

    Sheriff was in Maiduguri on Tuesday with about 200 soldiers guarding his convoy of exotic vehicles. Those critics sprang up to their feet again. They cried that instead of probing the allegations against Sheriff, the government was pampering him. Like a baby? They recall that about two months ago, the government closed the Maiduguri airport, forcing the governor to travel by road to Kano for a flight to Abuja. But when Sheriff was to visit Maiduguri, the airport was opened for his plane to land and closed again as soon as it departed.

    The Department of State Security(DSS) has said that it is probing Sheriff; isn’t that enough? Will any responsible government  allow a VIP like Sheriff to go to Maiduguri without the best escort that our military can provide?

    The President has also been under attack for encouraging an amorphous group that goes by the duplicitous name, Transformation Ambassadors of Nigeria (TAN), which has been going from city to city, campaigning for his re-election in 2015.

    Who does not know that Jonathan has not told anybody, living or dead, that he is running. Yet they slander him for the obscenity that is TAN, a group that has diminished his achievements – in security (Boko Haram has been confined to the Northeast), power supply (we shall soon hit 5000 MW), roads (more are being revived to bring down the number of deaths from accidents to at least three digits as against the thousands we have now), education (schools are to run smoothly soon after months of forced break and, as for the mass failure in School Certificate, the government will address that at the appropriate time) and economy ( the gains of rebasing are already being felt by all). Not so?

    What will stop these idle fellows? I support Soyinka’s proposal: Let’s bring back Stephen Davis. We need to unravel this blood guzzling monster of a sect.

    The seized $9.3m cash

    WE may never know why two Nigerians and an Israeli decided to fly to South Africa, carrying $9.3 million in their luggage. Even by Nigeria’s weird standard whereby money has lost its name – the multi-billion oil subsidy fraud, the massive pension fraud and the hazy defence spending, among others – this looks strange.

    What kind of arms were they going to buy? Rifles?Bombs? Bullets? Anti-aircraft guns? We may never know. In June, we hauled $3.85 million to Brazil for our protesting Super Eagles. The government, in its befuddled state, may say security matters are not the stuff for public consumption.

    But the questions will never end. Who approved this massive cash movement? Was it actually meant for arms as the South Africans were told? Did the arms dealer ask for raw cash? Were the gentlemen going to pick the arms off the shelf like chocolate at Shoprite? What happened to the cashless policy?

    We may never know.

  • Tribute to Professor Ade-Ajayi

    When Professor Ade-Ajayi turned 85 recently, a book with the title of J.F Ade-Ajayi, His Life and Works was presented with pomp and pageantry at the new University of Ibadan Conference Centre to celebrate an iconic figure in the history of African academia.

    Professor Ajayi was born in Ikole, Ekiti State to a doting father and an enterprising mother. His father was a local post man and a counsellor in the palace of the Elekole. Even with his limited exposure to western education, his father knew that the key to a bright future for his young son was education. He therefore billeted the young Jacob in the house of a local teacher so that he could have a head-start among his colleagues. Later, he was sent to Ado-Ekiti where he also lived with a teacher and friend of his father while he was going to the Ekiti Central School that later metamorphosed into the famous Christ’s School, Ado-Ekiti. It was from Ado-Ekiti that at the age of 11 in 1940, Ajayi left for Lagos, the frontier of opportunity at that time and enrolled in Igbobi College for his secondary education.

    Igbobi College brought the young man into contact with other Nigerians. While in school, he never took the second position he also never played any games and rose to become as was expected school library prefect and from that time onwards, he and the world of books could not be separated. He was not only a bibliophile and a bookworm, he was also determined to go as far as his brain would take him. On leaving Igbobi College, he was too young to go to Fourah Bay College in Sierra Leone, the only university in West Africa affiliated with Durham University in England. He also did not have rich parents who could have sent him abroad. He contented himself with taking examination to the Yaba Higher College to read English, Latin and History.

    As providence will have it, University of Ibadan opened its gate in 1948 and Ade-Ajayi crossed over and was one of its first students. Three years later, he graduated with a general degree in English, Latin and History. He later went to Leicester University where he took a first class honours degree in History and he later went to the University of London for a PhD in History.

    He returned to Nigeria in 1958 and within five years of returning home, he had not only become a professor but one whose views were very much sought after at home but particularly abroad. With Professor Onwuka Dike, he blazed the trail of the study of African History and African Historiography generally. Before this time, Euro-American historians dismissed the idea of African history and asserted that Africa had no history and that if it had any, it must be the activities of the Europeans in Africa. One even famously said, Africa was a dark continent and darkness was not a subject of history. Ajayi and others both in Africa and some in Europe and America embarked on the diligent search and study of the African past. The absence of written documentation, they asserted did not mean the absence of history and that in any case, it is not the entire African continent that lacked written civilisation as can be evidenced by written materials on North Africa, the Horn of Africa, the Sudan belt of Africa, the eastern coast of Africa and the southern part of Africa where European and Arab accounts of the places provided substantial material for the study of the African past. Even where there were no documents, Ajayi and others led the world in the understanding of the usefulness of remembered accounts as contained in oriki, cognomen, oral poetry, kinglist, festival re-enactments of the past etc. Memorised history by griots and other professional historians in the courts of rulers who must remember their histories or lose their lives also provide materials for understanding the African past. Ajayi and others were able to unearth these golden materials for the purpose of elucidating the past of Africa and even foreshadowing the future. He and others taught Africa and the world, the fact that availability of written documents should not be equated with objectivity in history and that African history and other histories of other parts of the world should be studied from a multi-disciplinary approach from which even the sciences of archaeology, anthropology, botany, zoology, linguistics and the use of radio carbon-dating could be enlisted in unravelling the past of Africa.

    After Dike became the Vice Chancellor of the University of Ibadan and after he left in 1966 because of engulfing political problems in Nigeria, Ajayi became the torch-bearer of what later evolved into the Ibadan School of History. This school succeeded in establishing the fact and reality of African history and that it was a serious academic discipline worthy of pursuit. The impact of this school was in helping Africans and their leaders have confidence in themselves in the face of European denigration and psychological undermining. This led to the description of the Ibadan School as “a nationalist school of history” designed to challenge western orthodoxy that tended to see non-Europeans as inferior who had no history at all and that if they had any history at all, such history was not important.

    He was sought after and given generous grants to teach in American universities such as Stanford, Wisconsin, and North Western to mention a few as well as in British universities such as Birmingham, the School of African and Oriental studies of the University of London and even in Moscow. His reputation was so formidable that the Rockefeller Foundation generously endowed the University of Ibadan as Centre for African Studies. Ajayi’s scholarship carried him to the membership of the board of governors of the United Nations’ University in Tokyo of which he later became chairman. Ajayi did not just believe in the esoteric nature of scholarship, he applied his scholarship to give historical backing to the idea of the Lagos Plan of Action in 1970 arguing that African frontiers and boundaries were new phenomena associated with the ephemeral colonial phase of African development and that in the African past, African territories were open with no frontiers and that they meshed imperceptibly into one another. He was also one of those who set up the Association of African Universities (AAU) and he was active in the Association of Commonwealth Universities while he was Vice Chancellor of University of Lagos.

    Apart from helping to build the faculty of arts at the University of Ibadan and to help develop graduate studies in Ibadan, Ajayi was the one who built the University of Lagos from the ashes of ethnic rivalry to the pinnacle of a first class African university. Most of the physical landmarks existing in the University of Lagos today were built by Ajayi when he was Vice Chancellor.

    Ajayi’s life has touched the lives of several people in Nigeria and in the outside world. A grateful nation honoured him with the Officer of the Federal Republic (OFR) and he was also a winner of the academic laurel of the national merit (NNOM). He wrote several books and widely on several topics, just as mentored several students and he was a professor of professors because many of his former students have occupied and are occupying important academic positions in Nigeria and outside Nigeria today. Apart from being a seasoned academic, Ajayi was a thoroughly civilised man and a gentleman. A quiet worker not given to the loud noise of many of his compatriots and in his evening years, he devoted himself to the study of the Bible and the word of God. In all his endeavours, he was complimented by a virtuous and lively wife, Christine Ajayi who made the home environment so convivial for the flowering of the academic tree into which the academic mustard seed had grown. Ajayi’s life was also enriched by his four daughters and a son who are well grounded in their various academic and professional callings.

    Adieu our teacher, role model, inspirer and a great act to follow.

  • Travails of a war hero

    His name conjures fear. When many hear the name Benjamin Adekunle, they look behind their shoulders to see if he is coming. As the legend goes, Brig – Gen Benjamin Maja Adekunle aka Black Scorpion was a brave and ruthless soldier. Many heard the tales of his exploits during the 1967-70 civil war. Gen Adekunle’s fame grew during the war. As small as some of us were then, we heard how he handled the enemy and treated his soldiers who fell out of line.

    There was a myth surrounding Gen Adekunle. It was said that he could disappear and reappear to wreak havoc on enemy territory. Of course, many of the stories were embellished, but the people chose to believe them because they suited those times. People believed anything thrown at them so far the Nigerian side was winning the war. The Adekunle myth grew as he was said to be a soldier that the enemy could not touch because he wielded certain powers.

    The Adekunle myth followed him home after the war. Many wonder till today if he actually did all that people said he did during the war. The man is tough no doubt and he showed early in life that he is going to be a non-conformist. For a boy to run away from home at the age of nine to fend for himself is enough evidence that he will not allow people to trample upon him anyhow when he becomes an adult. This rebellious streak in him stalked him all the way. At military training schools in the United Kingdom (UK) and India; in the Nigerian Army; as aide-de- camp (ADC) to the former Eastern Region Premier, the late Sir Akanu Ibiam and at the war front, Gen Adekunle played by his own rules.

    But he could not be ignored by his bosses because, according to those who should know, he was a damn good soldier. The Black Scorpion fought the war as if his life depended on it. Those in his command remember him as a commander’s commander. Hear one of them, Brig – Gen Alabi Isama, who was Adekunle’s chief of staff during the war : ‘’What did these people (Adekunle and others) do wrong to the society? They went to the war and came back alive. But what did they get out of it? Nothing! Today, Adekunle is forgotten by the country. That is the hero of the civil war. He won all the battles…’’ Yes, as Gen Isama said, the Black Scorpion ‘’won all the battles but not the war’’.

    By that statement, Gen Isama was referring to the sorry state of Gen. Adekunle, who is lying critically ill at home. Should a person in such a condition be kept at home? The answer is no, but the Black Scorpion is being treated at home because an air ambulance is not readily available to fly him to Ghana. When I read his story in last Saturday’s edition of this paper, I shook my head in disbelief that a thing like this is happening to someone of Adekunle’s calibre. No matter what some may consider as his eccentricities then, Gen Adekunle does not deserve to be treated as a nobody in this country.

    Our country owes a lot to people like him for fighting to ‘’keep Nigeria one’’. If they did not make that sacrifice, we may not be where we are today. The war in which he played a leading role ended 43 years ago, but it seems some people are still holding that against him. What could he have done to warrant being treated like this at the ripe old, age of 77. He was 77 yesterday. Happy birthday sir. But the best birthday gift we can give him as a country is to assist his family in getting him to Ghana fast for further treatment. All the family needs to do that is an air ambulance. The family says it has written to the army to assist in that regard without success. The army worldwide does not abandon its own. It rallies round its operatives and does everything to protect them.

    Where they are ill or wounded in battle, the army ensures that they get the best of treatment. And here, we are talking of Adekunle. Does he have to beg before he gets his right? This is the tragedy of our country. We treat our heroes with contempt and give looters of the treasury red carpet treatment, thereby sending a wrong signal to those coming behind. The Adekunle family seems to be at its wit’s end in its bid to get the authorities to help in flying its patriarch out of the country. Hear Abiodun, son of Gen. Adekunle : ‘’He is very weak and not in control of his memory. It is more of memory problem. He is not able to recognise people around him or anything. But, at some other times, he recognises people. So, it is an on and off thing. I have tried very hard to get the Nigerian Army to come to his aid without luck. Here is a man who spent his youth fighting a war to keep the country one. In other organised societies, he would be treated as a hero. But unfortunately, here in Nigeria, he has been forgotten by all’’.

    Let those in authority listen, whatever is done for the Black Scorpion today cannot be too much. As they say, he has paid his dues. Many, if not all in Service today, are his juniors. Will they watch and allow their superior to die all because of his family’s inability to get an air ambulance to fly him to Ghana? It is Gen Adekunle that we are talking about today, we don’t know what may happen tomorrow to those still in office. God forbid, if they become seriously ill after leaving office and help is not forthcoming as in the case of Gen Adekunle, how will they feel about their country? In Gen Adekunle’s present position, he cannot be happy that a country he fought to preserve seems to have abandoned him at his hour of utmost need.

    To those in authority, I commend, Gen Isama’s remarks in this paper last Saturday. He said: ‘’Everybody is aware that he (Adekunle) is battling to stay alive. But, should we wait until he dies and then roll out the drums, shouting that he was a hero and start marching round the town? Every January 15, the whole country gathers to remember our fallen heroes. What about our living heroes?…As the Commander of the Third Marine Commando, he captured Calabar…he sent me to capture the whole place. We captured the whole of what is today known as Cross River State…So, Adekunle was our leader. But, unfortunately for him, he was not a thief like many of them. If he were a thief like many, his condition would not have been like this today. Can’t you see the others? Don’t you see where they live? Adekunle’s house was renovated by Ogbomoso people…Let this country rise and help this man to live a little longer in comfort because he has denied himself such comfort while fighting in the war. There was no commander of the Nigerian Army that is better than Adekunle. Why should he be the worse off today?’’

    Indeed, Adekunle or any other retired officer for that matter should not beg for bread. They should not be made to see their service to the country as a curse after retirement otherwise we may start breeding officers, who will be more interested in making money rather than serving the country.

    There is still room to make amends in Adekunle’s case; it is not too late to do that. The country awaits the Chief of Army Staff’s prompt response to this matter. Whatever he does, he should remember, he will be doing for a senior colleague and only God repays such a kind gesture.

     

    Footnote : This article was first published on June 27, 2013, when the Benjamin Adekunle family cried out for help  over its patriarch’s failing health. The much sought help never came. But since Gen Adekunle’s death last Saturday,  many, including his colleagues, have been shedding, what I call crocodile tears, and also singing his praise. Where were they when he needed them most?  What a world! Certain people don’t matter to us when they are alive, but they become saints when they die.