The Nation Newspaper

Category: Thursday

  • PDP treachery and APC betrayal

    Except for the lessons that can be drawn from some of the unwholesome activities of PDP leading lights, the party has never really come out with clear-cut agenda to define its vision of Nigeria. Obasanjo in 1999 talked of ‘a total transformation of Nigeria’ through urban development and privatization, stable power supply, roads and infrastructure and constitutional review, etc, all of which remained mere promises at the end of his presidency. Yar’Adua came up with his own unwieldy eight-point agenda which neither the party nor Jonathan paid attention to after his death. As a candidate, the closest to vision or mission statement by Jonathan was his less than insightful statement about “respect for law and order, sound economy and stabilizing power”. As president, his 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’, all of which to the unemployed youths, citizens of besieged north-east and other aggrieved Nigerians remain mere words.

    Asked recently about his strategy for his victory and what his agenda would be, Ayodele Fayose told reporters “If I enumerate my agenda, we would be here forever”. As for his strategy for winning without a party manifesto, he said, “Fayemi gave cooked rice, I gave uncooked rice. This is politics and you need everything to entice voters and rice was shared by me, almost two weeks before election. Are we saying that people should remain in hunger perpetually because we are providing infrastructure?” But far more important to him is how to empower his people through awards of contracts which he alleged the defeated governor gave to outsiders.

    In neighbouring Osun State, challenged to a television debate of his party agenda last week, Iyiola Omisore looked for an escape route. He wanted an assurance from the organizers that he would not be assaulted by a ‘less than ‘literate Governor Aregbesola’, who he said may not be able to control his anger when confronted with facts at his disposal. He did not say what the facts are about. But like Fayose, he also did not forget to tell the reporters he was terribly upset that Aregbesola awarded Osun State contracts “to godfathers, relations and party leaders, especially persons from outside the state”. He was particularly grief-stricken that the internationally acclaimed Osun State Opon Imo initiative which according to him was nothing but “an N8.4 billion scam” was allegedly handled by the governor’s siblings.

    For PDP, power is all about patronage. Close observers of PDP over the years and the pronouncement of some of its leading lights tend to confirm this fact. John Campbell, a former US envoy for instance described PDP during proceedings at a hearing on the topic “Nigeria in Turmoil” in the British House of Commons on March 19, 2010 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.’ Audu Ogbe, a former PDP chairman gave credence to Capmbell analysis when he said; “When I was chairman of PDP, my son never got involved in oil but two PDP national chairmen after me, their sons pocketed over N400 billion without supplying a tea cup of oil”. Dr Okupe was to later confirm sharing is all that takes place in PDP while admonishing his Yoruba people to join the PDP.  According to him: “In things that are not enough, when people sit down to share and take decisions, if there is nobody to speak for you, there is problem’’.

    Beneficiaries and other key actors have also given credence to this claim. Asari Dokubo, leader of a militant group in the Niger Delta, who along with other repentant Niger Delta militants got mouth-watering multi-billion dollar contracts according to Financial Times of London, for instance later told newspaper reporters that he secured bigger contracts under Obasanjo than he got under Jonathan, his kinsman. Nasir El ‘Rufai, former BPE Director General, also told a House of Representatives probe panel how blue chip companies were sold to privileged PDP members and their sympathisers at give away prices.

    And as if to confirm there is little governance going in Abuja outside the scramble to award contracts,  Obiageli Ezekwesili, a co-founder of Transparency International and former minister of ‘Due Process’, solid minerals and later education, all in Obasanjo’s PDP administration, recently  asked the National Assembly to ask the president why it has suddenly become his duty and that of the Federal Executive Council to hold meeting over award of contracts when there are statutory bodies responsible for such duties. But of course the National Assembly cannot ask such questions since as beneficiaries of N250m Constituency project contracts per senator, they cannot dissociate themselves from the Abuja contract scam.

    Our tragedy is that PDP has consistently demonstrated it doesn’t give a damn about Nigeria. Unlike other societies where those who hold hegemonic power protect their stakes in their nation by ensuring its survival, PDP members are ravaging our land while lying through their teeth declaring all is well. As 2015 approaches, they are spending taxpayer’s money like water on media campaigns to deceive the impoverished taxpayers. As Minister of Power and Energy, the late Olusegun Agagu claimed in 2002, the nation generated 4200MW of electricity. Twelve years later with an injection of between $24 billion and $50 billion into the energy sector, the nation generates less than 4500MW. Yet PDP and the president say they have solved the nation’s energy problems by selling all the generating companies built through the sweat and blood of taxpayers to government-favoured private investors  that have turned around to appeal to government to buy equity share in their newly acquired companies.

    Car accessories such as tyre, battery and break pad manufacturing companies inherited by PDP in 1999 have all collapsed due to energy crisis and stiff competition from sub-standard imported products brought into the country by companies that enjoy government waivers. Putting the cart before the horse, we celebrate the inauguration of another car assembly plant despite the fact that the country has derived no joy from those inaugurated in Kaduna, Enugu, Ibadan and Lagos, some 40 years ago. With virtual collapse of our iron and steel industry due to bare-faced stealing by NPN buccaneers and its PDP successors, except PDP and its World Bank economists who fraudulently tell our people that growth is synonymous with development, most right-thinking Nigerians know that for or every N3m car assembled in Nigeria, about N2.6m is repatriated.

    A large chunk of our territory has been made ungovernable by insurgents who ravage villages unchallenged killing innocent Nigerians at will and abducting women and young girls including the latest 300 Chibok girls, the cause of world outrage. In the midst of daily harvest of deaths from the trouble spots in the north of the country, we are daily assaulted with an on-going media campaign claiming President Jonathan ‘has fought insurgency to a halt’. Amidst the entertainment, a nation that fought a three year civil war without external borrowing  and which has spent about a trillion dollars, a quarter of her annual budget on defence  yearly in the last  three years, is seeking $1billion external loan ostensibly to fight insurgency.

    Just as PDP with its cluster of criminals has continued to demonstrate its lack of faith in our country, with the moles planted in the in APC by PDP now returning  back to base, with APC governors behaving like the lords of the Manor, lacking the spirit of compromise, with their party elders  behaving like warlords insisting it must be their way or nothing, and with the APC lacking the discipline of a political party to call everyone to other, I think it is time apathetic Nigerians who look up to the current crop of politicians for salvation should start thinking of how to take their county back from politicians of all hue. I honestly don’t know the methodology to achieve this beyond asking them to do what they know how to do best: prayer and more prayer, if only God will listen in view of our transgressions and impunity for which no one has been held accountable since independence.

  • Out in the COLD

    Out in the COLD

    A Saturday morning in July, 13 heads roused from sleep in an open space atop a two-storey building on Wimo Onatere Street in Marina, Lagos. Rising at 4.10 a.m., they constituted early-risers amid the coastal city’s mass of destitute residents. The Friday night before, they huddled atop the building swathed in cotton coverlets and blankets of polythene bags ingeniously sewn together. There, they struck familiar poses in extreme conditions.

    Watching the squatters from Room 702 of Beni Hotels, an inn adjacent to the building, it was unsettling to see a buxomly woman strip to her briefs and take her bath few metres from where she slept with fellow male squatters. Although she bathed with her bra and pants on, she left very little to the imagination of anyone interested enough to stare at her curvaceous body. After having her bath, she hurriedly threw on her clothes and sat on a stone ledge, silently waiting on dawn and perhaps a reenactment of the daily hustle that yet denies her the luxury of a decent shelter.

    The reporter’s effort to chat her up eventually yielded fruit eight days later and she described herself as Dorothy Agubuike, from Anambra State.

    Agubuike lives like a nomad, roaming the streets for menial jobs. She survives on the meagre wage she earns washing plates and fetching water for use at makeshift canteens that litter the boondocks of Lagos Marina. Even so, she scrounges from her paltry wage to pay for temporary boarding at several crude lodges on Lagos Island. She said she was only staying on the high rise building temporarily.

    Glancing up at the rooftop of her temporary dwelling, she said she hoped to leave the abode very soon because life on the rooftop was “too dangerous.” Indeed, there are no barricades to prevent fatal fall from the rooftop’s flat concrete expanse and, according to Agubuike, although there had been no report about anyone falling off the building till date, it is only a matter of time before such casualty would be recorded.

    Just recently, a squatter almost fell off the building while urinating at midnight. “He was very drunk…thank God for one of his friends who pulled him back by his shirt sleeve,” disclosed Agubuike.

    “Whenever it rains, some of us choose to sleep through the torrent, particularly if it’s a tired (slight) drizzle,” revealed the 28-year old. “We pay N200 for a spot in the open space on top of the two-storey building every night. When it rains heavily or the weather becomes too harsh, those that have the means amongst us pay N300 for a warmer spot on the house corridor. But there is hardly any difference really; it becomes too cold sleeping on the corridor sometimes. It is not advisable too as squatters are usually blamed for any theft or robbery that occurs inside the main building,” she said.

    “I am saving up to rent a one-room apartment,” said the southeast native who arrived in Lagos from Anambra in 2005 without surety of a dependable livelihood and dwelling. “I was brought here (Lagos) by a distant cousin. He paid my transit fare to Lagos,” she said.

    Few weeks after she arrived in Lagos, Agubuike was kicked out by her cousin from the uncompleted building in which she squatted with him. That was because she rebuffed his attempt to pawn her off to a local Madame and owner of a popular brothel off Adesina Street in Ikeja on Lagos mainland. “I refused and he kicked me out of his house. He said that I would never make it in Lagos, but I am determined to show him that I will make it,” she said.

    Few streets away, Dozie Matthew pay N200 for a spot on the cold, hard concrete sidewalk few metres from a United Bank of Africa (UBA) branch. According to the fruit hawker and former resident of demolished Badia East slum, he started sleeping on the streets after the house in which he squatted with his childhood friend was razed down by the state government. The wooden shack got trodden last February alongside several others as the state government demolished the slum to make way for over 1,000 one to two-bedroom apartments housing project.

    Under the flyover that veers off the route that leads to highbrow Ikoyi, squatters live in dehumanising conditions. Their squalid settlement severely contradicts the Lagos State government’s attempt at a public leisure park comprising a basket ball court and tended garden.

    Some of the dwellers there claimed to have been living in the place for a few years. “Many people have labelled us criminals just because we are forced by poverty and necessity to live under the bridge. We are not criminals. We are peace loving citizens forced to live and sleep in the cold because the society has abandoned us,” said an unemployed squatter who simply identified himself as Francis.

    Under the bridge, every square foot is claimed by a squatter for sleeping and there is almost no privacy. A young man reclining on a grass patch close to the basket ball court pointed to some concrete ledges three-feet above a garbage heap, saying, “These are beds.”

    Several kilometres away, the Third Mainland Bridge, a winding strip of concrete, snakes over deep-set docks, just above the Lagos Lagoon. The bridge winds past a floating shanty town comprising hundreds of wooden houses suspended on stilts and bobbing refuse. The houses, bearing rusty aluminum roofs wreathed in the haze by fumes from neighbouring sawmills and cooking fires, become the major eyesore along the bridge that descends into Lagos mainland and a bedlam of itinerant vendors hurtling through snarling traffic to hawk stale snacks, branded key-holders, handkerchiefs, bottled water, audio CDs and DVDs to commuters.

    Beyond the sawmills, the old harbor markets, shanty colonies, the bleak veneer of high-rise housing projects, and the deserted skyscrapers of downtown Lagos Island, the omelette of sunset ricocheted against the rickety ruin of a road bed illumining the pathway to a decrepit homestead under a fly-over at Ojodu-Berger.

    Like all tumble-downs in the area, it stands in near collapse. Within the makeshift apartment dwells Olayinka Ijaagba, 33, a widow and mother of three. With her eldest child, she inspected her dwelling, a construction of cardboard sheets, polyethylene bags, and withering plywood while she told this reporter that she was “better off where she was, at least for now.” The kindergarten teacher recounted how she was stripped of her valuables and thrown out of her husband’s house by his relatives three weeks after he died.

    “I sought refuge with a friend immediately after I got thrown out of the house with my kids but after he accommodated us for four months, his wife started to give us a hard time. You know how insecure we women could get; she thought I wanted to snatch her husband from her. Later I started sleeping in the school premises but when my boss got to know of it, she asked me to stop doing so or risk getting sacked. Ever since I have been living on the streets,” she said.

    At two popular eateries in Abule-Egba, Lagos, homeless men, women and children sneak to the premises at midnight every day. They offer the security guards posted to the establishments a fixed fee of N150 to secure a little space to lay their heads till 4.30 am the following day.

    “Oftentimes, you have to book for a spot two days earlier as there is usually limited space. And you dare not sleep with your eyes closed as some hoodlums have developed a knack for squatting with us. While everybody is asleep, they attempt to rob us of our valuables and at times rape the women and young girls among us and you can’t even shout or cry for help because that could make the guards refuse you entry the following day. But you can’t really blame them because any noise could attract undue attention and put them in trouble,” disclosed Peter Akinsola, a car accessory vendor.

     

    Why more people are becoming homeless in Lagos

    Homeless people like Matthew and Agubuike would readily blame the Lagos State Government for their plight, although reality reveals that apportioning such blame to the government might be tantamount to giving a dog a bad name. The Nation investigations revealed that several displaced or homeless persons arrive in Lagos as immigrants, usually with little support and dependent on a close or distant relative or contact whose assistance is often short-lived and dependent on his or her economic situation.

    For instance Colet, 16, was brought to Lagos by her paternal aunt who assured her of employment in highbrow Lekki as a housemaid. But upon arrival, Colet was forced to work in extreme conditions as a commercial sex worker in Agbado-Station, Iju-Ishaga, Lagos; working seven nights a week. With each customer paying her N3, 000 for a five-minute romp, she is struggling to pay off her debt as you read.

    Shades of the homeless abound in Lagos. There are those who arrive as immigrants without means of livelihood or decent shelter. Then there are residents who are forced to live on the streets, under the bridge and shanty colonies due to their inability to pay prohibitive rents.

    In Lagos, the homeless population grows at an alarming rate, thus making it one of the fastest growing cities, precisely the fifth fastest growing city in the world. Lagos compares only to China’s Beihai, which grows by 10.58 per cent of an annual growth in 2006.

    Recently, experts sounded the alarm that less than three per cent of planned housing projects are being delivered annually. The crisis was confirmed by Gimba Ya’u Kumo, Managing Director of the Federal Mortgage Bank of Nigeria, who said it would require N56 trillion to reverse the nation’s housing deficit of 18 million housing units. The situation reflects the dire housing crisis in the country which is further aggravated by the federal, state and local governments’ inability to confront the problem with the urgency it deserves thus leaving the Nigerian housing sector at the mercy of market forces. Currently, over 80 per cent of Nigerians reportedly live in rented housing compared to 19 per cent in South Africa and 22 per cent in Ghana.

     

    Root of the malaise

    According to Joachim Onyike, Head of the Department of Estate Management, Imo State University, Owerri, Imo State, “The situation is compounded by high incidence of corruption in all other relevant sectors of the Nigerian economy and the lack of adequate political will by the government to deal with the housing problem. There is also a conflict of objectives among the major actors in the housing industry namely, the funding institutions and the developers on one side and the consumers of housing on the other side. The profit maximization objective of the developers and funding institutions tends to conflict with the affordability of housing to the housing consumers, especially the low-income earners with the government standing by as a disinterested umpire.”

    Consequently, Nigeria suffers very huge and escalating housing deficit which stood at approximately eight million housing units in 1991 and 14 million housing units in 2007. A more recent estimate puts the figure even higher at 18 million housing units. Therefore, at an average cost of N3.12 million per housing unit, the nation would require N56 trillion to fund a housing deficit of 18 million housing units.

    Little wonder the country’s urban housing problems, Lagos Island’s for instance, manifest in overcrowding, slumming and the development of shanties in several parts of Nigerian cities. The housing problems vary from inadequate quantity and quality of housing to the attendant impact on the psychological, social, environmental and cultural aspects of housing.

    Housing is capital-intensive, no doubt. The cost of adequate housing is currently beyond the reach of most Nigerians. This thus brings in the financial dimension – the question of the affordability of housing. The challenge becomes not only to provide the houses but to make the houses affordable to the average Nigerian worker, according to Onyike.

     

    Houses for rent at prohibitive prices

    Prohibitive rents are charged by property developers and house owners across the country. The Nation investigation revealed that most residents of Lagos are groaning under the squeeze of estate agents managing the few available housing units. In Maplewood Estate, Oko-Oba, Agege, Lagos, currently, a detached house of four or five bedrooms in the estate, depending on aesthetic quality, sells between N50 million to N60 million. A block of four flats in the estate sells between N45 million and N50 million, while a wing of four or five bedroom duplex in the estate sells between N35 million and N40 million. These figures show a price rise of properties in the state by 20 to 25 per cent in the last two years.

    Three years ago, a detached house in the estate sold for between N40 million and N47 million, while a block of four flats and a wing of duplex sold between N30 and 34 million as well as N30 to 32 million respectively. Rent rates are also very high in the estate. A four or five-bedroom detached house in the estate goes for N800, 000 and N1, 000,000. A four-bedroom flat goes for N400, 000 and N500, 000 while a wing of duplex goes for between N700, 000 and N850, 000.

    Currently, a luxury three-bedroom flat at Omole Phase 2 is let out at N900, 000 and N1.2 million per annum. In nearby Ogba, it is between N400, 000 and N600, 000 per annum. At Magodo Government Reservation Area (GRA), the rent paid for a three-bedroom flat N1.1m and N1.2 million per annum. In parts of Ikeja, a three-bedroom flat leases between N950, 000 and N1.5 million annually. In Surulere, a three-bedroom flat goes for between N600, 000 and N800, 000 per annum. In Lekki, a three-bedroom flat at Agungi goes for N1.8m per annum, while a two-bedroom flat in the same area goes for N1.3 million. In Lekki Phase One, a two-bedroom flat attracts N2 million rent. In Ikoyi, a two-bedroom serviced flat goes for N3.5 million per annum with a service charge of N500, 000 per annum. A three-bedroom flat, however, goes for as much as N5m per annum.

    In some areas, rents are however, charged in dollars. For example, a four-bedroom serviced luxury flat at Happy Haven Estate, Banana Island, goes for $120,000 per annum, while a tastefully furnished, fully serviced luxury penthouse at Ocean Parade Towers, Banana Island goes for $250,000 per annum.

     

    A coastal city’s cash cow

    Alitheia Capital Real Estate reveals in a research note that the up-market areas of Lagos which is also widely known as Nigeria’s commercial capital, are overpriced by as much as 30 per cent. Consequently, to rent a property in Lagos, prospective tenants often have to pay two to three year-advance lease. This is besides the hefty annual fees for facilities and back-up services.

    According to Alitheia, construction costs in Nigeria are nearly 15 per cent higher than in South Africa for comparable developments. “This is driven by incessant increase in the cost of building materials (of which 70% is imported), the growing cost of labour, and payments to the Lagos State Government (LASG) on property transactions.”

    Renting is however, preferable to most residents than outright purchase because: “There are only a couple of mortgage products available and double digit interest rates (up to 20%) and short tenors (below 10 years) continue to inhibit growth,” according to Alitheia. Home ownership finance, therefore remains inaccessible and unaffordable to 80 per cent of Nigerians.

    The Alitheia study revealed that 90 per cent of the housing stock in Lagos is held by less than 10 per cent of the population. However, the State government seeks to redress the situation through its introduction of the new Tenancy Bill. The law seeks to regulate tenancy and rent administration while enhancing access to the current real estate stock by addressing the issue of escalating rent and property values.

    The management of land resources is considered to be the major cash cow of Lagos, noted Felix Morka, the executive director of the Social and Economic Rights Action Center (SERAC), which provides legal assistance to evicted slum residents. Lagos State Governor, Babatunde Fashola, whose second term expires after elections next year, however, seeks to create a workable city out of the congested coast and landmass that remains the smallest inland area, yet most densely populated of Nigeria’s 36 states. Seventy per cent of Lagosians live in slums, according to Amnesty International and the state government notes that Lagos needs about four million extra homes to close the deficit.

     

    ‘Not every house is a home’

    In Lagos, the vicious circle of prohibitive rents and homelessness closes daily around low-income earners or what is known in modern parlance as the bottom 99 per cent and past experience indeed, gives no cause for cheer. Since the second National Policy on Housing was announced in 1972 under which about five million housing units were to be delivered by the three tiers of government, less than 200,000 have actually been delivered till date. The Federal Housing Authority has delivered only 35,309 housing units nationwide since it was established in 1973. Alitheia says that in the Lagos Metropolitan Area alone, the number of housing units rose from 393,000 in the late 1970s to 700,000 by 1992 and 1.25 million units in 2012. For a population estimated at over 18 million, the state’s housing shortage is dire indeed and a minimum of 926,562 new units are needed immediately, according to experts.

    To Olabisi Iyiola, an architect, more purposeful mass-centred social housing schemes like LagosHOMS are needed. According to her, such schemes, unlike what exists currently, should be geared to assist majority of the low income earners. “Not every house you see around is a home, be it a government housing project or shanty residence. Several indices constituting a wholesome home are oftentimes left out of the equation due to financial and architectural lapses,” she said.

    To this end, Governor Fashola claimed he is fulfilling his promise of providing affordable housing through the delivery of homes to residents in the state. Courtesy his LagosHOMS initiative, he intends to alleviate the state’s housing crisis.

    “The homes are affordable because there are one, two, three-bedroom designed to fit different income brackets. They are affordable because residents can easily access them and they can pay for them conveniently within a minimum of 10 years,” he said.

    According to him, the state’s mortgage scheme is already a success story as 200 homes in estates across the state are allocated monthly to successful applicants. Fashola urged beneficiaries to help strengthen the scheme by fulfilling their obligations to the mortgage.

    He emphasised that it was when they serviced their mortgage as required that the government would be able to mobilise more resources to expand the scheme and provide access to more residents. He said the state mortgage board will retrieve the homes from defaulters and refund their contributions, explaining that he had put in place structures to ensure continuity of the programme. “This scheme has been designed to outlive me and continue for a long time,” he said.

    But despite the anticipated benefits of the scheme, displaced or homeless Lagosians scattered across the State will continue to nurture no lofty dreams about it. Exactly how grievous their disillusionment is resonate in the desolate cry of a homeless Lagosian like Agubuike: “It is not designed for poor people like me,” she said.

  • This dark time

    Today, the Nigerian youth becomes fleeting fracture of the towering immensity 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. Who cares though? It’s every man for himself; the ruling class and Nigeria’s senior citizenry 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 and environment 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 these.

    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 with 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 youth 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; that is why we remain perpetually exploitable – victims of what George Bernard Shaw, terms “the stupid system of violence and robbery which we call Law and Industry.”

    Despite our romanticized wish to abolish the status quo as the protests dragged, the eventual result was as usual, an opportunistic contract between the exploiters (the government) and a part of the exploited (labour leadership), at the expense of the rest of the exploited (you, me and everyone) – something Noel Ignatin would call “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. President Jonathan and company couldn’t be wrong for eventually dismissing us as essentially hopeless and misdirected, I reiterate.

    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 our host nation 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.

  • Nigeria: Way out

    These days, I am often profoundly puzzled whenever I look at Nigeria. From all significant indications, Nigeria is gradually deconstructing. Commonly, what held together fairly well only yesterday is today markedly disintegrating.

    And the most troubling part of it all is that nobody – no Nigerian of note – seems to be aware or care. The politicians go about their nebulous games of politics with their usual crookedness and vicious manipulations while the country they lead or hope to lead crumbles inexorably. These days, when one sees pictures of Nigerian leaders or rulers in any gathering, it is as if one is watching people in a funeral event.

    Nigeria is disintegrating. Our very best ploys at self-deception have become too fragile to hide that fact. This past Monday, July 14, TV stations worldwide carried scenes in which Boko Haram hoodlums – really looking like the worst of hoodlums – mocked the “Bring Back Our Girls” demonstrations by the rest of us Nigerians. Watching that sickening satyr, no self-respecting person would wish to be counted among Nigerians. A friend who watched the news in faraway California grabbed his telephone and called me and asked, “Listen, is there no government left in your country?”

    No, there is nothing substantial left in Nigeria, except, of course, the royalties and rents from the oil of the Niger Delta. Those fees are now the totality of what we call Nigeria. If they were to disappear, or even seriously diminish, Nigeria would vanish immediately. Participation in politics, all of governance, service on the judiciary, the police, the other regulatory agencies, and most of what we call business  – all are underpinned and motivated by the sharing of bounties and grafts from the oil revenues. A real country no longer exists here.

    About three months ago, we were elated when our president inaugurated a National Conference. Many of us hoped that a National Conference would sort out many of our deadlocks and tangles. It is not happening. Nothing so constructive is possible in Nigeria. After bruising its path through some decisions that seemed fairly valuable, the conference has now capped everything with an overwhelmingly disastrous decision – namely, the decision to increase the number of states in the Nigerian federation from 36 to 54. Yes, 54 states!

    For years now, there has been no doubt that having as many as 36 states has been hurting our country. It resulted in small weak states that the federal establishment has easily been able to roll over and subdue; states incapable of developing their resources or resisting poverty among their citizens. This has distorted out federation, increased poverty among our people, and generated widening insecurity and conflicts. In spite of these experiences, our National Conference has now decided to increase the number of states. And we all know why. Most of the persons gathered in the conference are politicians or aspiring politicians whose only serious desire is to create more opportunities for themselves to become state governors, deputy governors, commissioners, advisers, contractors, etc. It is about creating more outlets for sharing the oil money. Nigeria’s well-being is not a consideration – because, of course, Nigeria and the citizens of Nigeria do not exist as far as most of our politicians are concerned.

    Naturally, a lot of informed Nigerians are speaking out – and most of them are proposing that the mirage called Nigeria be terminated, in the interest of all concerned. Among such statements by prominent Nigerians, I am looking at a few right now.

    Some days ago, one of our most prominent citizens, former vice-chancellor of one of our leading universities, Professor Ango Abdullahi, granted a public interview. From his chosen angle in Nigeria’s political life, Professor Abdullahi has been undoubtedly one of our most successful politicians. But, in the bruising tensions and conflicts of the politics of a Nigeria that has no core of values, no generally accepted game rules, and no commonly shared goal, he is becoming exasperated. It is therefore not surprising that he is now saying that he would gladly accept the breaking up of Nigeria – in fact, that the Hausa-Fulani leadership of the Arewa North would gladly subscribe to the dissolution of Nigeria, if that is what others want.

    As things stand today, I don’t think that there is much doubt about the wish of Nigerians. If Nigerians were asked  today about their wish concerning Nigeria’s future, most are likely to agree that the failed experiment of Nigeria should now be given up (peacefully), and that the brutalized and suffering peoples of Nigeria should be given a chance to re-discover hope for themselves in smaller countries of their own. We have come that far.

    I also have before me a piece written by another Nigerian intellectual who writes: “It is high time we dissolved this big beast called a country”.  He adds that Chief Awolowo and his contemporaries “believed a big, strong and prosperous Nigeria like the emerging United States would take its rightful place on the world stage and be the pride of Africa and the black world. Instead ever since, Nigeria has stubbornly refused to be anything other than a global disgrace. Now is the time to split the country…We want a good-bye-to-all referendum now.  And the National Conference sitting in Abuja should make itself useful by setting a date for one.  Enough is enough”.

    However, there are two big questions about our parting. One concerns the sharing of the huge oil revenues; and the other concerns the fact that large numbers of citizens now live beyond their ethnic homelands. Professor Abdullahi touches upon the first, and his position is that the oil does not belong to any one section of Nigeria, but to Nigeria as a whole. Significant Northern leaders have said repeatedly that it was Nigerian money that developed the Delta oil industry, and that they will go to war rather than lose the oil.

    The bottom line to the oil situation, therefore, is that if we are to be able to part peacefully, we must find a generally acceptable solution to the sharing of the oil revenues. Two years ago, a Nigerian scientist resident in the United States offered a constructive solution to this problem. His proposal is that Nigeria’s parting settlement should include a clause providing for continued sharing of the oil revenues among the new countries for an agreed number of years (five or ten years) after the parting. Each new country would thus have an assured amount of oil revenue for a number of years as it strives to take off. For the implementation of this, an international commission, participated in by the United Nations, will be charged with the revenue receiving and sharing, for the agreed number of years. Among the pluses of this arrangement, it will bring peace to the Niger Delta oil industry – peace that it has lacked for decades.

    For the second question, the solution will have to be a cast-iron agreement for the protection of folks where they live and choose to remain in the new countries.  According to countless intellectuals who have explored this subject, no non-Yoruba folks have any reason to fear in the new Yoruba country. The other countries will need to follow suit.

     

  • Fiscal federalism at the National Conference

    Fiscal federalism at the National Conference

    This article by me on fiscal federalism was first published in this paper in May. It was a preview of the emerging controversy at the National Conference over resource control. There is now a complete deadlock at the conference between the North and the Southsouth delegations on the issue.

    As was widely expected, and as I observed in my column in this paper a few weeks ago, the issue of fiscal federalism is proving to be a hard nut to crack at the National Conference. It is still being debated at the committee level and it was reported that the committee had agreed tentatively on the reduction of the federal share of the national revenue by some 10 per cent to be distributed among the states and local governments. But there were press reports also last week that the northern delegation had circulated a 47-page position paper at the conference rejecting all claims to oil resources by the oil producing states, particularly in the Delta region. Specifically, the position paper is demanding that all minerals, including oil, should remain under the exclusive list of the Federal Government and that the previous dichotomy on offshore and onshore revenues be restored.

    In effect, the northern delegation is giving notice in advance that it will oppose the principle of derivation as the basis for sharing the national revenue, particularly the oil revenue, which accounts for over 80 per cent of the total national revenue. The North’s position is evidently an opening gambit in what is going to be a very contentious issue at the conference. After all, the oil-bearing states already receive 13 per cent of the oil revenue in partial recognition and acceptance of derivation as a principle that cannot be totally ignored in revenue sharing.

    There has so far been no official response from the oil-bearing states to this northern position paper. But it can be assumed that the oil-bearing states, particularly in the Niger Delta, will vehemently reject the North’s  position on the issue as totally unacceptable. They can expect support from the Southeast. But the position of the Southwest on this issue is not altogether clear. For reasons of political expediency, the Southwest delegation is refraining from taking a position openly. But it should, as a matter of principle, take a position, and not wait for the North and Southsouth delegations to slug it out between themselves. After all, the outcome of the dispute will have  financial consequences for the Southwest too. At the Obasanjo Reform Conference of 2005, the Southwest delegates were willing to support an increase of additional revenue for the oil states from 13 per cent to 19 per cent, but this modest increase was rejected out of hand by the delegation from the Southeast and Southsouth, which insisted on nothing less than 25 per cent of the total oil revenue. It was on that dispute that the 2005 Conference broke down completely.

    The irony of the present dispute over revenue sharing is that until 1966 when the military seized power, revenue sharing among the three regions was based on 50 per cent derivation. This was generally acceptable to all the parties concerned and was in conformity with the principle of revenue sharing in a truly federal system. But all this was before oil revenue became so dominant in the total national revenue. Before independence in 1960, the British colonial power took a great care to ensure that all frictions on revenue sharing were resolved. Between 1946 and 1958, the four commissions set up by the departing colonial power recommended that 50 per cent of total revenue be shared on the principle of derivation, that 35 per cent be shared by the regions, and only 15 per cent to the Federal Government.  In fact, in 1964, after independence, the Binn Commission reduced the allocation of the Federal Government from 20 per cent to 15 per cent. This was the basis of revenue sharing among the federal and regions before the military seized power in 1966.

    Under the military, the share of the Federal Government in total revenue was progressively increased. Oil had become a major factor in national revenue. The process of the erosion of the principle of derivation for revenue sharing began with the military Decree 13 of 1970, which reduced by 5 per cent the revenue shared on the basis of derivation. In addition, the decree transferred all the revenue from off shore oil wells to the Federal Government. Between 1976 and 1979, the military regime reduced by a further 20 per cent, the revenue distributable on the basis of derivation. In 1981, the Shagari regime made a further reduction of 20 per cent on revenue sharing on the basis of derivation. With this, revenue distributable on the basis of derivation fell from 50 per cent at independence to only 5 per cent. When the military returned to power in 1984, revenue sharing on the basis of the principle of derivation was further reduced to 1.5 per cent. It should also be noted that virtually all the leaders of the military regimes, except the Obasanjo regime, who undermined the principle of derivation as the basis for the sharing of the national revenue, were from the North. This further complicated the problem, as most of the oil is located in the Delta region. In 1992 the Babangida military regime decided that the share of the Federal Government in national revenue would be 48.5 per cent, the states 24 per cent, the local governments 20 per cent and the balance of 7.5 per cent was to be held by the Federal Government as special fund. In effect, the total share of the Federal Government in the national revenue, over 80 per cent of which is from oil exports, was 56 per cent.

    Now, this is a massive negation of the principle of derivation and of fiscal federalism. It is totally unacceptable and the oil-bearing states are right in demanding a drastic review of the existing formula on revenue allocation as it hurts the financial viability of the states (37) and local governments (774) very badly. While the Federal Government  gets over 56 per cent of the total revenue, the states get less than 1 per cent each and the local governments even less. The issue is not even about the financial profligacy, or massive corruption of the Federal Government, or its colossal financial mismanagement. The issue is that this imbalance in revenue sharing between the states and the Federal Government has been a persistent source of friction between them, as it places the other tiers of government in the federation in an invidious situation of having to rely on the Federal Government for financial bail outs. This runs counter to the principle of fiscal federalism, which should be based on the recognition that both the Federal Government and the federating states are co-ordinates, equal in all respects to one another.

    It is in the interest of the states for the Federal Government’s share of the national revenue to be reduced so that individually all the states, including the northern states, can get more from the total national revenue. The position of the northern delegation is obviously based on political expediency, on the expectation that power will revert to the North in 2015. If the situation was reversed, and most of the oil was located in the North, there is no doubt that the northern delegation would insist on the principle of derivation as the basis for revenue sharing.

    However, there is one issue on which the littoral oil-bearing states stand on a weak wicket. It is that of their claim to offshore oil as well as onshore oil. These states cannot legitimately claim exclusive ownership of offshore oil, the proceeds of which should be shared by both the states and the Federal Government. This position was affirmed at the UN Law of the Sea Conference of 1982 in which I participated when I was Ambassador at the UN and which the northern delegation referred to in their position paper. The littoral oil-bearing states cannot claim 50 per cent of the revenue accruing from offshore oil as offshore resources belong to the entire country and should be shared equally among them. Neither can the Federal Government claim exclusive ownership of revenue from offshore oil. After all, without the states there can be no Federal Government. There is no provision in the convention agreed at the UN Law of the Sea Conference vesting total ownership of offshore oil in the Federal Government.

    It should be possible for these huge differences over revenue sharing to be resolved at the conference. What is needed all round is compromise and a spirit of give and take on all sides in the overall interest of the nation.

     

  • Rambling thoughts

    Whatever happens to man is for his own good, says the Bible. Man is the creation of God and we are wonderfully made in His own image. Our purpose in life is to praise God and give him pleasure. If things are hard how can we give God pleasure? Yet in all things He says we should give Him thanks. If we are diligent in serving him, we will eat the fruit of the land. We cannot do anything outside God’s plan for our lives.

    Man is so totally insignificant in the cosmos made up of the sun, planets, moons, and stars both known and unknown. We sometimes think too much of ourselves and we forget that we can plough and sow and plant seeds but that it is God that waters our efforts. We sometimes get carried away by our earthly achievements and victories but we forget that life itself is transient, and short and that the life hereafter is what is eternal. We plan for tomorrow, for next year even for next decade forgetting that the Supreme Being to whom we owe our lives can at any time say our time is up. Some people are very optimistic about life and that is a good attribute to have but in our African environment, pessimism seems to be more rational way of perception. As religious people particularly as Christians, we know all will be well because in spite of all our problems as a people and as a nation we have an advocate with the Father, our Lord Jesus Christ who by the assumption of our sins and paying for them with his own life has become our final propitiation of our sins before Almighty God.

    I personally have so many reasons to thank God for all His blessings most of which I do not deserve. If God were to treat us men the way we treat others, no one would be left alive yet God gives us a long rope to pull. It is futile for us to assume that we are working of our salvation on our own. It is through His grace and through the sacrifice of our Lord Jesus Christ that salvation is available to the righteous and even to the unrighteous if he repents. Life itself is a mystery. Sometimes one asks why are we here? Why do we go through all the troubles after being born, sitting, crawling and walking, going to school, getting educated, getting a job, getting married and repeating the cycle of giving birth, marrying off our daughters and taking wives for our sons, getting old and infirm and then die. I suppose this is why General Charles De Gaulle said, “Old age is like a plague and it is bound to affect everybody”.

    This is perhaps why the epicureans or the sceptics in ancient Greece believed that man should create a private life for himself in which public interest had a small or even negative part and that a public career could even mean an actual misfortune. In other words, because of the futility of trying to change one’s society an individualistic life of “women, wine and song” would be preferable. But to live a riotous life because of the uncertainties of life and because death is a certainty for all mankind would negate the purpose of God for our lives. God has given all of us talents and there is no one that was born without a talent. It is left for us to find out what special gift God has deposited in us in order to try and exploit it for the good of mankind. And when God creates man, he always makes them in duplicates. If one man does not exercise his God-given talent, another would be called to replace him.

    To come to a pedestrian level, it is not all of us in Nigeria or the rest of the world who can benefit from higher education or who in fact needs it to get on in life especially in the materialistic environment of Nigeria where one does not need higher education or education at all to get on. I recently told a friend of mine that if his grandchildren are good in football, he should ensure that they are not discouraged because after all, our native born football coach is being promised N10 million every month as a salary which is higher than the legitimate salary of our president.

    Nobody earns this kind of salary except managing directors of multinational oil companies. In the late sixties, the Beatles, a musical group of young people of my age then had a hit record with the title of Money can’t buy me love. This may be true of English society but not necessarily true globally. I know for sure that money cannot buy happiness. May I take this opportunity of these rambling thoughts to appeal to all our leaders to commit themselves to a higher calling of doing something for our country and leaving the country better than how they met it?

    They should commit themselves to being lives’ changers rather than perpetuating evil and poverty in our land for after all, what gain would anybody have if he gains this whole world and loses eternity? All the three monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam clearly say that whatever we sow, we shall reap and that if after our lives our maker were to ask us, you saw me hungry you did not feed me, you saw me thirsty and you did not give me water to drink. And we shall ask, when did this happen? Then He would say as long as you saw your fellow human beings hungry and thirsty and you did not assuage their thirst and hunger, you did same to me and He God will visit us with retribution.

    Traditional African religions also subscribe to this credo. We Nigerians whenever we travel to the West, to America and Europe in particular, we are always smug and self-congratulatory about how religious we are compared to the western world that has lost its religious bearing. What we perhaps do not understand is that Christian ethics of being your brother’s keeper have been internalised in the western society unlike in our society where we go to churches and mosques and then treat our fellow human beings as trash. Our politicians and leaders are generally uncaring for the masses; rather they exploit the masses and do not plan for their future. Their reason of being in public life is their personal financial aggrandisement at the expense of the masses and generality of the people.

    Let me also reiterate the fact that we are here today but gone tomorrow. Where are our leaders of the first republic? Where are the rich people of yesteryears? They have gone to their makers and many of them are not remembered for anything today except those who by their deeds live in the hearts of those of us who are still alive. This same question will be asked of us in future, it will not matter who you are- the president, governor, professor or pastor. How would our epitaph be written?

    It will not matter how much money you made or stole, what will matter is how you changed the society. I pray that I and others who find ourselves in leadership positions would think not about how to rip off the society but what we can contribute to the society in the immortal words of J.F. Kennedy, “ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country” and in doing this, we will be laying up treasures in heaven where moth or other kinds of pest will not be able to destroy it. This is my appeal to all Nigerians particularly our leaders and those who for now find themselves controlling the reins of government. This is the only way our republic will endure not only after the elections of next year but till the end of life on this planet earth. A do or die politics of winning at all costs may sound attractive now but in years to come the futility of not building our national edifice on a rock will become apparent. Therefore a carefully designed architecture and an edifice built on proper engineering and moral ethics is what will endure.

  • Campaign of calumny

    IF the government has its way it would have decreed that the campaign  for the release of the abducted Chibok girls be stopped.  It tried to do something like that through the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) Commissioner of Police, Joseph Mbu, who it uses for such dirty jobs when the burgeoning czar banned the bring back our girls protest in Abuja.

    Their backdoor method of trying to stifle a lawful protest fell flat on its face when the nation rose as one to condemn the ban. The police through the Inspector-General,  Muhammed Abubakar,  promptly reversed the annoying order. Since then, Mbu has remained quiet, but that is not to say that we have heard the last of him.

    For sure, he has his uses and whenever the need arises, he will be tapped to do what he knows best to do. But, why is the government afraid of the bring back our girls campaigners? Are they doing anything wrong campaigning for the release of the abducted 217 Chibok schoolgirls, who are spending their 94th day in captivity today? Shouldn’t the government be encouraging the campaigners instead of being averse to what they are doing?

    Elsewhere government would encourage such campaigners by lending them a hand instead of distancing itself from what they are doing.  The reason for its action is obvious. It does not believe in what the group is doing because it never believed that the girls were abducted. Even when the news broke, the rescue of the girls was not its paramount concern. It was busy asking itself is it true (?) when it should have launched a rescue operation for the girls.

    Na lie don turn to na true and the government is looking for a scapegoat to hang its tardiness on. That is the way of our government. People’s life means  little or nothing to it. It is only interested in getting their votes during  elections after which they may go to hell for all it cares. There is nothing to show that the government cares about the fate that befell the Chibok girls and their families. The government is simply just not bothered.

    To the government, it is as if nothing happened in Chibok on April 14. So, it will not take it lightly with any one or group that tries to  remind it that something happened that day  in that remote community. This is why the government is bitter with the champions of  the rally. There should have been no need for such anger, if government has the interest of its citizens at heart. Nigerians love their government, but all they want is for the government to come clean with them.

    But, where government acts as if it has something to hide, it creates room for suspicion. By calling the campaigners name, is the government saying it is happy with what happened to the Chibok girls? If it does not want  the campaign, what else  can be done in its own view  to keep the girls’ abduction alive until they are rescued? We are asking these  questions  since it seems the government considers it a cardinal sin to  draw  attention  to the issue.

    Should the girls’ parents keep quiet and pretend that their children were not abducted? Isn’t it unfair that the government which should be consoling them is the one calling them names and trying to gag them from crying out over what  happened? I am sure that if the government has its way it would frame up the campaigners  and even the girls’ parents all in a bid to paint them black before the world.

    It has taken the first step towards that with the statement credited to the State Security Service (SSS), last week, that the bring back our girls campaigners are up to no good. According to its spokesperson, Mrs Marilyn Ogar, who I believe is also a mother, the campaign has become a franchise with different divisions into groups,  giving each other specific assignments.

    “If it is not a franchise but an ordinary movement seeking or acting to put more pressure on government and security operations to release these girls, there would be no need for the group to have tag, insisting that members must have a tag and be properly registered. We know that they have bank accounts and also know that they want to go to Asokoro Extension and simulate some force movement where they will have foreign media and say they are marching into Sambisa Forest and Chibok. We hope that genuinely you don’t go to hire people to come and claim to be the parent of the child you did not give birth to, so, it is a franchise…”

    The SSS is free to do its job, but in so doing, it should not use its privileged position to turn facts on their heads. Can the SSS prove its damaging  claim? If  it can, let it  make public the group’s bank details and put the campaigners to shame. If  it cannot,  it should withdraw the statement and apologise to the group. The SSS knows what to do if its claim is true and I know that if the allegation is true, it would have since descended on the group and show the campaigners to the whole world for what they truly are!

    But, in the circumstance, it cannot do that because its claim beggars belief. The group, to borrow the SSS’ word,  has the franchise to defend itself, so we will not do that here. Suffice it  to say that the group  has denied the allegation, shifting the burden of prove to the SSS.

    Dare @ 70 :Matters arising

    Whenever Dr Olatunji Dare writes under the above headline, you know that he has a wide range of issues to touch in short strokes. When I started reading him  in  The Guardian  many years ago, I never knew that one day I would  find myself in the same organisation with the  journalism legend. I do not know whether to call it a meeting because there was no opportunity to chat with the professor  and drink from his fountain of knowledge. It was at the Ikeja High Court premises shortly after his resignation from the The Guardian. His exit did not go down well  with the company’s management, which decided to deal with him.   The company ejected him from his quarters, but being  a firm believer in the rule of law, Dare went to court. As a court reporter,  I got wind of the case and my colleagues and I went to cover it.  We did not quite succeed in our mission because the lawyers had other plans. They wanted an amicable settlement of the matter  and so  covering it was out of the case  in order not to jeopardise the peace process. I have never told Dr Dare this; so he may be surprised reading it here today on his 70th birthday. Between that day in 1995 and now, I have come to know Dr Dare better.  In the about eight years of this  paper’s existence, he  and his fellow scholars, Prof Adebayo Williams, Prof Ropo Sekoni and Prof Moses Makinde, among others, have played a vital role in our short but rich history.  As Editorial Adviser, Dare goes through the paper with a fine tooth comb, pointing out errors and suggesting ideas on how we can stay ahead of the competition. Besides, his human relations is super. On several occasions, he has called to wish me well. That is Dr Dare for you.  About a month ago when he  arrived in the country on vacation  from his United States (U.S) base,  he, as usual called to say he is in town. ‘’Alhaji, eku ile’’, he said in his booming voice, and I answered, ‘’prof, eka bo sir’’.  Happy birthday, prof.

  • Democracy vs. our cherished values

    Democracy, the new god worshipped by most nations of the world has many variants. It ranges from its original 5th century Athenian mob rule of all free born male adult  to 1949 George Orwell’s 1984 imaginary world where citizens have only obligations without rights  as the state controls the citizens’ thoughts, the number of children they have, the type of education the children received, their daily movement and  when to die and where to be buried to today’s participatory democracy  which in spite of its celebrated attributes, is nothing but a rule of privileged group to protect the disproportionate privileges extracted from society.

    A nation’s variant of democracy is defined by actions of the leaders and the apathy of the led. Our 15 years democratic experiment has produced leaders such as Obasanjo and Jonathan, who are intolerant of opposition, the press and who instead of recourse to compromise would employ the awesome power of state to achieve their objectives which range between desperate bid to hold on to power through ‘do or die election’ to the protection of their group who have confiscated our common patrimony. The two leaders, along with other PDP elected leaders since 1999, have defined our own variant of democracy. Of the 23 PDP governors that emerged at the onset of the 4th republic in 1999. 17 were either in jail for corruption, on the run from justice or facing proceedings in court over abuse of office. Those who have served their terms and a few who still have criminal charges hanging on their necks have been accommodated  through presidential amnesty that has integrated them back into the system as elected senators, appointed ministers or members of the on-going Confab. Of course prominent in this list is Ayo Fayose whose recent victory in Ekiti governorship election in Ekiti came  through highly  induced  200,000 voters, out of a population of 1.7 million people, a development which  Femi Falana says has returned his Ekiti compatriots to  Egypt for the next four years.

    Tragically, all the nation has to show as dividends of our own variant of democracy is arrested development, infrastructural decay and massive corruption.  Those who had called attention to this in the past were dismissed as ‘an army of sponsored and self-appointed anarchists who criticize the president out of ignorance and abuse him out of mischief’. And now with 2015, in mind, the president has gone ahead to hire the best image makers money can buy to change reality through subliminal psychological warfare.  We have been told to accept the presidency’s war against his perceived enemies in the Yoruba land, in Adamawa, Nasarawa and Rivers as ‘driven by love of God and nation’; that the president has solved our energy crisis  despite the fact that many of the the 120 million Nigerians the minister of power said could not be supplied with electricity run their cheep Chinese-made generating sets on N95 per litre fuel. And that as the war by insurgents which has led to the abduction of helpless women, school girls and mindless killing of ordinary Nigerians become more vicious, we are told the president has fought the criminals to a ‘stand still’. Billions of naira that would have gone into developmental efforts has been deployed by the president’s unidentified promoters on prime-time television slots and other forms of media to change reality.

    Perhaps more threatening to our survival as a nation is the on-going desecration of the culture and values of our federating nationalities noticeable in recent times mostly in the South-west where those suspected to have criminal records have been imposed on the people as leaders without giving a damn about how the people feel. Cultural values are the pillars of society. This perhaps explains why the colonial masters that conquered us as different nations were sincere enough to have advocated the building of our own variant of democracy around the value systems that had sustained our different nationalities for centuries before the advent of the European fortune-seekers. For instance, Clifford in 1921pointedly told Nigerians that “real national self-government must be obtained through local tribal institutions and the indigenous forms of government…the natural experiences of their innate political genius”.

    Oliver Stanley in 1945 reiterated this when he said the objective of Nigeria federal arrangement was “to see the various territories develop themselves along the lines of their own national aptitude their own culture and their own tradition”.

    Their advocacy stemmed from their discovery that social organizations in many African societies were highly developed before the European fortune-seekers came to Africa in search of gold and glory. For instance among the Yoruba nation, the people didn’t need Robert Michels’ ‘sociological study of oligarchical tendencies of modern democracies’ to realize centuries ago that to prevent the king from becoming an oligarch because of the apathy of the people, the ‘Ogbonis’ secret society must serve as a counter-force to the power of the king. They did not need a resort to Machiavelli’s advise to the Prince to know that the king maker is the first victim of the new king if he wants a peaceful and uninterrupted reign. Centuries before “central values systems’  of Parson’s ‘structural functionalism’ or David Easton’s  input, output and feedback functions in his  ‘systems analysis’, Yoruba tells you  that enito jale lekan, to  daran bori, aso ole da bora {a once convicted thief attracted only contempt in Yoruba society}. And as a way of feedback, the sins of the fathers must be visited on the sons. It is this cultural, practice that aided Yoruba social organization which P.C Lloyd admitted was superior to that of Europe as at the time of their coming.

    This has come under serious erosion in recent years. It is today facing additional threat as President Goodluck Jonathan employs all forms of strategies including desecration of our values in his battle to capture the Yoruba nation in 2015. Even ex-President Obasanjo who has always prided himself as a Nigerian leader recently said he felt diminished as an indigene of Ogun State to have Buruji Kashamu, a man he claimed has criminal cases to face in the US, imposed by the president as PDP leader in the South-west. Kashamu and Fayose might have not been indicted by any court, but it is a fact recently confirmed by a senior US official that Kashamu still has a case to answer in the US courts, just as it is a fact that EFCC has dragged Fayose to court over billions allegedly spent on a non-existent poultry projects before his impeachment as governor of Ekiti State. That they have these cases are enough to disqualify both for position of leadership in Yorubaland. The same argument holds for the Minister of Police Affairs and Iyiola Omisore, current PDP governorship candidate in the coming Osun State governorship election. The former allegedly fled Nigeria following the brutal assassination of Chief Bola Ige in his house as Minister of Justice and Attorney General while the latter was in fact in police detention from where he was awarded a senate seat. Their celebration by the president and PDP as leaders along with offspring of those who for pot of gold betrayed the cause of the Yoruba in the past demonstrates the president’s disdain for the Yoruba and their cultural values.

  • Because we have ideals (1)

    Those who should make a difference will read this and understand me, I presume. “They can’t and they do not read,” some are probably interjecting this minute. “The Nigerian youth is not yet capable of such reasoning,” they would claim. I do not know whether to take such arrant cynicism as the truth.

    I write for the youth; although I would love to think that I write for everyone, my toilsome and often tiresome endeavor resonates in rousing cadences for the youth; I assume. By youth, I make no references to age; for a man at 21, wrought of defeatist reasoning could give up on life. On the flipside, a man at 70 could tirelessly evince ardour and indomitable vim characteristic of a 21-year-old. Crabbed age and inclination to dither, a graying yet towering sense of resignation forever beclouds the mind of the one to whom every fresh vestige of hope evokes inklings of an infernal eclipse.

    Shame, that we can look the sun in the face but cannot make our hay under the heat of its smoldering rays. Shame, that everybody loves to seek a hero but nobody wants to be a hero. And so we give to principled spinelessness even as we perpetuate a base and savage insensitivity in pursuit of everything and anything gilded with riches and shorn of the humane.

    Murderous hate disintegrates our fatherland; humaneness and love depreciate for the love of heartwarming riches. Honesty dies a gruesome death and diligence gives to the lure of gratifying deceit; and within the haze of such grotesqueness and vile, we seek a true hero, a Nigerian hero.

    How can we dream of having a hero without the crutch of a virtuous and enabling world? We do not need a hero but a nation fit for heroes; and having created such nation, we would be in no dire need of sacrificial idealists and pragmatists we love to call heroes. Let everybody be a hero. Falcons hunt for their young; crickets make their own music, and the untended herd determines the course of its own pasture; let you and I become our own heroes.

    Arrogance and contemptible naïveté makes our craven and insolent ruling class contend that we are incapable of such noble enterprise. Cowardliness and incurable servility goads us to uphold the ‘truth’ as they love to see it. Who would have thought that at this time and age, we would be caught in the tangled thickets of greed, self-centeredness, retrogression and deceit?

    Today’s youth like their forbears are given to bigotry…we perpetuate the worst kinds of ethnic chauvinism and idolatry you could ever think of. Driven by greed and inordinate lust for the good life, we seek the shortest possible bypass to riches. “Money talks, bullshit works,” becomes our hallowed creed; it leads us to revere criminals as our best of men even as it informs our tireless quest to circumvent the universe’s definite but slow, steady order.

    We are at war with ourselves and the future of our dreams thus in spite of our fervent and inexorable clamour for change and everlasting progress, our enthusiasm is borne of the perverse, and our advancements of exasperating duplicity; never had an entire generation being so treacherous and full of ill-will against itself as we have now.

    Goaded by platitudes and ideals that do very little to improve our circumstances and worth, we engage in a maddening march for the future of our dreams even as we become the cogs in our wheels of change; every time we get to the crossroads of change we could believe in, impotent will emasculates our zeal.

    There is something wrong with the Nigerian ideal; makes it difficult to chart our way out of the bedlam of the past, turmoil of the present and barrenness of the future. Let no man, as Schiller says, too querulously “measure by a scale of perfection the meagre product of reality” in this poor world of ours. Without doubt, Schiller envisioned the futility of such lofty expectations we have of ourselves even as we battle our inner demons. Any individual seeking such perfection shall in no way be deemed a wise man; he shall be deemed sickly, unrealistic and innately foolish.

    And yet, on the other hand, it is worth remembering that ideals do exist. Even the villainy perpetrated by our venal and dishonourable ruling class is perpetuated on the strength of ideals they hold very dear to their hearts. To every individual, his heartfelt ethic. There is no man without an ideal, however dormant or active it is, something drives an average man towards his choice of conduct as part of a human society.

    Truly, without the rampart of ideals, it would be impossible for our pioneer statesmen to fight for and attain the independence we so carelessly diminish today. Spurred by heartfelt ideals, officers of the Nigerian army staged the first military coup and subsequent ones. Incensed by ideals, the country plunged into a bloody civil war at the end of which over two million civilians and soldiers lay dead from starvation and “enemy” bullets.

    It was on the steep planes of ideals that the country was continually thrust through sporadic military and civilian experiments until 1993 when Nigeria’s last military head of state handed over to a civilian administration. And spurred by earnest ideals, the executive and legislative arms of government have led Nigeria from one sorry pass to another. Enter President Goodluck Jonathan, the man whom many amongst us deemed the “ideal” man for the job. Many thought because his name is “Goodluck,” he must have good luck which would automatically rub off on us immediately he attains power. Goodluck Jonathan is in power and what manner of good luck he brings has been felt by all.

    Like you and I, Mr. President is a man of ideals; thus it was from the moral ground of ideals that he budgeted about N1billion for presidential meals, removed fuel subsidy and allows a very “interesting” security situation on his watch. Being a man of ideals, Mr. President has surrounded himself with great men and women of ideals thus we have within his team, Reuben Abati, a very brilliant journalist who from a moral ground of ideals chose to abandon his calling to serve Mr. President, my bad, Nigeria; lest I forget Ngozi Okonjo Iweala, Allison-Madueke et al; men and women of presumed worth and intelligence who are currently ruling Nigeria because it is not yet idyllically expedient to serve Nigeria.

    And then we have you and me; human integers continually forced by the most expedient of ideals to endure such ruling class as we have now. It is on the strength of ideals that we evolve into what quality of youth we are now. Shall we begin to nurture such ideals that would trigger our oft hackneyed ‘revolution?’I speak of unimpeachable values and character that dwarfs our several cosmetic enterprises like our bungled “Occupy Nigeria” protest. There is little to cheer about such movement; the best we can do is to look back lustfully as shipwrecked mariners might at the disappearing shoreline while they are hurled and submerged beneath the fury of the surliest sea waves.

    •   To be continued…

     

  • 2015: A lexical analysis

    2015: A lexical analysis

    NEW things are always coming out of this beautiful country. Some of them inspire laughter. Others are strange and absurd, provoking tears.

    I am not talking about the doctors’ strike and its harvest of deaths that has kept morgue attendants busy. No. Neither am I talking about the Super Eagles’ strike in Brazil – I won’t rake over old coals – and its deleterious effect on our soccer image. No. It is not about Boko Haram either. Rather than let go of the Chibok girls, the evil sect has been taking more hostages and spilling blood in a manner that has shocked the world, including – shockingly- Nigerians.

    Politics hits the front burner today as Notebook takes lexicographical note of those words and phrases that may soon be forgotten if nobody attempts to document them as we go on with our daily struggle against the vicissitudes of these times. No Notebook worthy of its name will fail to record such words and phrases, lest its admirers accuse it of gross negligence or sheer irresponsibility, particularly now that the race to 2015 is taking an exciting turn.

    Of the lot, “on ground” stands out. This phrase is not actually new, but it remains as relevant and fresh as it was some four years ago when it made its debut in political discourse. A politician is said to be “on ground” when he has a huge support base. His rallies are usually packed like a pop star’s show. It matters little whether the mammoth crowds are shipped in from other states at a price. The point needs to be made that he is “on ground” as this will be the foundation of  other things to ensure his victory. Populism.

    But it is not enough for a candidate or an aspirant to be “on ground”; he must “connect”. In other words, he must convince the locals that he is one of them. A homeboy. The other day, I saw on Facebook Osun State Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) candidate in the August 9 governorship election Iyiola Omisore holding roasted corn in both hands, looking a bit troubled, as if he had problems sinking in his teeth and tearing away at the yellow stuff.

    To many, it was pure corn, cunning and banal. But those who understand the game knew the con on the cob was all in a bid to “connect”. When a candidate of  another party lost an election recently, one of his failings, according to the army of pollsters, pranksters and fraudsters analysing the upset of the poll was that he failed to “connect”. Omisore would rather eat corn on the street than lend himself to the accusation of giving room to a “disconnect somewhere”. Smart guy.

    The other day, he was photographed arriving at a rally atop a motorbike, otherwise known as okada. It is, no doubt, part of “connecting”. The PDP candidate in the recent election aforementioned is said to be a distinguished patron of commercial motorcyclists – a relationship that, some recall, began during his days as a city vehicle spare parts dealer. They voted massively for him, say the analysts, because they saw him as one of them. The thought of an okada man in the Government House thrilled them to no end, I was told.

    However, a pragmatic politician who is “on ground” need not be told that apart from being able to “connect”, he must assure the people that governance is not all about smooth roads, fine schools, security and good hospitals. There must be “stomach infrastructure”.

    The story is told of how a candidate in the recent election of which I had earlier spoken mounted the podium at a rally, brought out a white handkerchief and began to sob. “What is the matter, sir?” his anxious aides asked him, pleading with the fellow to take it easy. He then, I am told, raised up his head, surveyed the crowd, shook his head mournfully and said in a shaken voice: “Look at my people; they are hungry (sobs). Look at their faces; there is poverty (sobs). Don’t worry. As soon as I get to the Government House, I will uproot the gates and throw away the keys. There will be cooking everyday for you all my people to eat. We must banish hunger and poverty from this land.”

    Needless to say, the crowd replied with a thunderous applause.  What the candidate did was simply to tell the electorate that their “stomach infrastructure” was guaranteed.  He then followed up with the distribution of small bags of Thai rice and transport fares. All you needed to get a bag was to show your voter card.

    It worked like magic, our man’s aides say now with relish. The people, according to them, rose against the incumbent like the Israelites did against Moses, demanding to be taken back to Egypt because the road to Canaan was long and bumpy. Remember the story?

    And talking about magic, there is what some who voted at that election described as “idan” (magic, in English). They spoke of how they pressed their thumb on the space provided for the party of their preference, but the ink would not stay. The ballot, claimed the disgruntled voters, was unusually folded before being handed out to them and, upon opening, it activated a space they never pressed. Besides, said the distraught fellows, the ink dried off their thumb in minutes.

    “But, how about the talk that the people rejected your candidate, despite his sterling performance and unassailable integrity as against his opponent, who had so much baggage?”

    “Honestly, something happened. Some hi-tech fraud. Why will the people reject our candidate in such a spectacular manner?”

    Questions. The evaluators have an answer: “It’s the politics of Barnabas” playing out all over again. They alluded to the biblical story of Christ and Barnabas. When Pontius Pilate asked the crowd to choose who to release, they chorused “Barnabas!”.”What should I do to Jesus of Nazareth?” “Crucify him!,” they screamed.

    The same principle, say the analysts, made the African National Congress (ANC) to reject scholarly and suave Tom Mbeki, a gentleman. They chose the polygamist and Zulu war dance enthusiast Jacob Zuma. Politics.

    In fact, in the most recent Nigerian experience, the elite were crying that they would never agree that their “gold” should be exchanged for “iron”. What will they do now? Poor guys.

    The Osun election is about one month away. There is already the talk of a “bandwagon effect”, following the success of PDP in recent polls. “Bandwagon effect” is not new; the phrase is only making an effective comeback after it had been pressed into service so well by the National Party of Nigeria (NPN) in the Second Republic. The logic is simple. Once you win a state, you are likely to win others because, going by NPN’s warped logic, nobody would like to be in the opposition. “Mainstream” is it.

    NPN, for those who are not familiar with the politics of those days, was the forerunner of the PDP. Same parents. Same character. Same style.  It attracted so much odium for its strategy of seeing every election as a war. It hounded its opponents like a hunter after a game and cared little about governance and good conduct. It embraced corruption and abused people’s rights. It carried on like a drunken driver until the military pulled the brakes and stopped the nonsense.

    NPN chieftains were fond of handing cash to would-be voters on queue during elections, luring them to vote for their candidates. Today, that trick is called “see-and-buy”. However, it does not really work, unless you belong to the right party. Otherwise, a special squad of armed security operatives riding in buses carrying Presidency number plates may seize you on the eve of the election after accusing you of planning to do “see-and-buy”.

    This glossary, dear reader, is by no means comprehensive. More words and phrases will come up as we approach 2015. You will, as usual, be the first to know. I promise.

     

    An elegy for Brazil

    IT was a moving scene. Men lowered their heads in total exasperation. Women were all tears. Kids were crying as if some greedy old men had grabbed their lollipop. Soccer giant Brazil lost 1-7 to Germany in the last four of the World Cup. Incredible.

    I was touched by the emotion displayed by the Brazilians who all turned out in their team’s yellow jersey. They were united in grief. Can Nigerians ever be united in any situation? The Brazilians were shocked that their pride was deflated, but they didn’t leave the arena before the final whistle. They didn’t walk out on their team.  How many of our institutions are we proud of?

    The Super Eagles went on strike to force the government to pay them appearance fees. They crashed out of the tournament and now the officials are being asked to account for N2.591billion. Will they?

    There is no need for Brazilians to cry. They have given the world a good tournament. Besides, they have taught us a lesson in patriotism. Will Nigeria learn?