The Nation Newspaper

Category: Thursday

  • Ekiti must not die on day of destiny

    Agba o si ni ilu, ilu baje, bale le ku, ile da horo. Imado iba se bi elede a balu je, eru iba joba eeyan o bakukan.” These are two Yoruba proverbs that capture my feeling about the Ekiti forthcoming election. If there are no elders in Ekiti to speak the truth, our state will become a deserted state without a future. If we allow brutes to take over our government, then we cannot expect progress.If a slave becomes king, no free born person would remain.

    The Yoruba people are a culturally wise people and this is why we have gotten this far in our life’s journey. But at the right time in this journey, we have had to fall back on the wisdom of our ancestors as encapsulated in our proverbs and witticisms. As an academic, I have always had the problem on relating to the Nigerian political environment. In fact I always say that my western education has not prepared me well for the hustle and bustle of the Nigerian political environment.

    I have always had problems adjusting to understanding the nature of our politics. Yet I have practically lived my adolescent life in an intense political environment. How on earth, in the year of our Lord 2014 can anybody compare Kayode Fayemi, our incumbent governor with Ayodele Fayose, our former governor who we are trying very hard to forget that he ever ruled our state?

    How could a state whose citizens are tempered by education and the struggle against a harsh environment of the hilly topography of the Ekiti State find it acceptable to have a man who ran the state aground and down through bribery and corruption and who imposed himself on the generality of the people of the state including traditional rulers by brute force and coercion including roughing up people violently if necessary? How can he be running to rule the same state whose legislators impeached and removed him from office?

    This bad dream and nightmare has again come to haunt our people even while we are awake and it seems some people are even giving it a consideration when in fact it should have been rejected outright. On the other hand, we have a good commodity to sell in Fayemi.

    This is a man true to his conscience who for the past three and a half years has been tested and proven to be a round peg in a round hole and a governor who instead of shaming us has proved to be an object of pride to all Ekiti people at home and abroad. He is a sober man compared to a man acting like a drunken sailor while in office.

    Supporters of Fayose describe him as onijagidi jagan, a roughneck who should never have been governor in the first place. If we are a sensible people, and I think we are, we should not be faced with this choice but the choice is clear. There is no meeting point between darkness and light, between peace and war, between serenity and confusion, between murder and life, between development and underdevelopment, between progress and backwardness and between education and illiteracy.

    Fayemi is a vessel unto honour. He is not perfect, even our Lord Jesus Christ said no one is perfect. He has set his hands on the plough of Ekiti state’sprogress unless we pull him back, it is forward ever and backward never. As an elder, I cannot keep quiet and allow people to be misled, Fayose has no plan for Ekiti.

    If he does, he will not be talking about bringing up two new universities when the only one we have is not well funded because the state is not well endowed materially and I speak from experience.

    His people are going round telling lies in order to hoodwink our people but they will not succeed. One of them without shame told me that telling lies is what they call “political bomb” and that they are ready to use it against Fayemi. I challenge all Ekiti people in diaspora to send word home about this election. We will not allow uncircumcised people from outside to take our patrimony from us.

    Those who are planning to use extra electoral strategy to rule Ekiti state will not succeed because we will not allow them. I will not be a slave to anybody no matter how highly placed he or she may be and my children and my grandchildren and all Ekiti youth now and in future will not be slaves to outsiders.

    Our people should be allowed to make a choice and I believe they will make the right choice. Let the word go out that we Ekiti people are inheritors of an intrepid tradition of resistance and if need be, we will resist again, any imposition from outside. Threats have been issued about this election to be a do or die affair.

    Huge amount of money will be brought to Ekiti during this time to buy the voters. My advice to my people is to take the money and vote according to your conscience. The development in Ekiti in the last three and a half years provide opportunity for comparison and this is why this election is a referendum on good governance which has been the experience of Ekiti people during the Fayemi administration. We have the opportunity to build on this excellent performance and to lay the solid foundation of an industrialised state enjoying the application of the knowledge of our people for economic development.

    Peace is a desideratum for development. We have enjoyed this peace for over three years and we do not want to go back to Egypt. No country today can be developed without external support. The same scenario goes for our state. If we do not have a government headed appropriately by a far seeing person, we will not be able to attract economic development assistance because only the deep can speak to the deep. A governor who is known in and outside his state, who speaks the language of the world, a renaissance man and who is sought after by the haves and have-nots, by billionaires and plebeians for inspiration will be able to attract attention to our state for the economic upliftment of our people.

    Education means a lot to our people because since independence it has provided means of upward social mobility. We need somebody who knows and appreciates the meaning of sound education.

    You cannot give what you do not have. We grant Fayose kudos for lifting himself by his bootstrap but he should appreciate what God has done for him and not push his luck too far. He must not allow himself to be used by any external force for their own purpose. If Fayose loves Ekiti people, he himself will accept the fact there is a difference between knowledge and mere understanding, between wisdom and ignorance, between studentship and scholarship.

    Ekiti is too important for experimentation, we do not need a repeat of a failed poultry experiment that gobbled up N2 billion which could have built us a bright new Ekiti University Teaching Hospital. Fayose as a patriot must tell Ekiti people the truth that he cannot beat Fayemi in a fair contestation of ideas.

    If we do not monitor this election and allow evil to triumph over good, people will laugh last at us that we have so many PhDs but no sense and that we cannot even make a wise choice. We have to stand up and be counted. This is the time to speak out.

    At a time like this, silence is not golden. We need to seize the moment and march forward in development under the governorship of Fayemi but if we allow our state to be robbed of progressive rulership, may God forbid, but if we do, let the last man leaving the state shut the door and switch off the light.

  • The demons within

    (A long introspection cut short)

    No one could teach humanity to our callous clan. Nobody could teach reality to a land that dies of dreams of plunder. Who could teach direction to a land that thrives on monstrosities and misdirection? “This is another epoch…another order…another clime,” we enthuse – but if you look closely enough, you will find that we are still in that same epoch we swore to survive. You will find that we are still that great ship with no certain commitment to compass and outlast our course’s most hideous storms.

    This ‘new epoch’ of ours, every moment uncoils as that in which like starved greyhounds, we return to sup on yesterday’s vomit, still. Every minute passes as that in which seedlings fear the late, as crop-shoots, the early rainstorm.

    Our young expects too little, still; and our old still indulge in pleasurable reminiscences even as they discover no logic to justify that which they had forsaken and squandered. Come 2015, we have another chance at a ‘new dawn’ but in our ‘new dawn,’ will promises be broken? Will fear’s moonflower spread and attain full blossom till our proverbial dawn illumines as familiar dusk of compromise, as usual?

    Every ‘new dawn,’ we continue to pretend that we have answers to everything. As Nigeria ruins and stagnates like cocoyam sodden in a mud field, you and I continue to rant and articulate highfaluting remedies to the problems that persist and smother. We continue to bandy common sense and text book panacea to preventable cankers we frantically preserve and foster.

    Our pains are of substandard education, mass unemployment, sky-rocketing inflation, pervasive poverty, insecurity, crime, high infant and maternal mortality, sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) epidemic, cyber –fraud, institutional fraud, etc. To these, we have proffered countless solutions.

    We have suggested population control. We have suggested greater government support and presence in the Niger Delta claiming that since it is Nigeria’s only reliable source of national income, the federal government ought to devote greater time, money and other resources to the region.

    And more often than we could count, we have suggested that we paid greater attention to our ailing agricultural sector. We claim it would do us great good if we could revivify our dying cocoa industry, collapsed groundnut pyramids and struggling oil palm sector.

    Not to forget our persistent rant about our neglect of our tourist attractions. It’s amusing to see us mount the soap-box in fickle fits of contempt – in our liquor and rant-activated pubs, living-rooms, courtyards and pages of our sensational newsprints. We have perfected the art of lamentation, bandying angst and pitiful punch lines as we mourn our rudderless politics.

    What’s your poison? Nigeria’s leadership problem? Pervasive poverty? Endemic corruption? Religious upheavals cum perversion of faith? What is it that causes riotous incense to course through your brain? The abject rot of the Onyeama Coal Mine? The collapse of Ajaokuta Steel as well as other appendages to Nigeria’s steel sector? Our underperforming oil refineries and Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN)?

    What excites your grief? Our conduit-built and corruption-enabled civil service? Perhaps like the lot of us disgruntled citizenry, you also harbor all manners of discontent for our public officers’ outrageous attitude to governance.

    Bet you could recite by rote your ‘patriotic’ and ‘heartfelt’ panacea to every canker and vestige of inhumanity that has become the scourge of our portal of ruined stones. Perhaps like too many of our compatriots, you suggest a sovereign national conference or referendum which sole aim is to provide the forum by which we could redress the state of the union.

    What manner of redress do you seek? Many have suggested that we break-up. They claim we shall do better if we go our separate ways. Bet you have mooted such fantastic enterprise in more instances than you could count. Now picture the dissolution of our 54-year-old union; what plenitude could it bring? What manner of peace, justice and stability could we derive from a relapse to humanity’s often wildest and best-forgotten enterprise?

    What would be your role in the new order? Who will you be in your fantastic era? Funny, isn’t it that you seek to reinvent the millipede by calling it, ‘snake?’ Shall the lion cub become tomcat simply because we keep it as a house pet?

    We could reinvent ourselves as much as we like; we could secede by our terms as many times as we like; we could quote Nietzsche, Plato, Disreali et al and re-echo the idiosyncrasies of our favourite columnists for as long as it gets us to justify our cynicism and grief, nothing will change.

    Our lives shan’t get better. Nigeria won’t become the land of honey and milk we wish it would become nor it’s separated parts if we ever become foolish enough to go our separate ways; not in a trillion years. Until we change.

    It’s a fundamental nature of our society that we accept abnormality and debauchery as incontestable parts of our nature. Yet if we did not indulge in such abject perversions and pitiable evasions as our principle of moral agnosticism which imbues us to be tolerant of anything and everything, we could have matured enough in intellect and psyche to know how and why not to compromise between truth and falsehood, reason and irrationality.

    We could have attained such maturity that would enable us to understand that the values we project become the essence of our socio-politics and being – whether we like it or not.

    Every utterance we make, as our most humane and inhumane actions and reactions, intensify the simplicity or degeneracy of our individual perceptions as well as the rationality and otherwise of every human politic we choose to scorn or celebrate.

    It needn’t be so hard to be good. But it does – simply because for all our touted morality, wisdom and predilection to constitute a quintessential civilization of humans, we have lost direction.

    Knowingly, we scorn both our glaring and latent abilities to discern that proverbial path, conspicuous as it is, to the realization of the essence and undeniable benefits of being good. Thus our culture and our lives disintegrate for our lack of character.

    When we ennoble double speak and refrain from praising men’s virtues and condemning their vices, our fraudulence declares and we foster the corruption of our larger society. No practicable and highfaluting panacea could resolve our most hideous realities until we attain the essence of goodness without being self-righteous.

    Simply put, there can be no compromise, however exquisitely couched, between us and the depravity we tolerate. Aiding and abetting corruption in the spirit of socio-economic and political expediency is hardly a compromise but a cowardly surrender to the elements that disintegrates and makes bleak.

    Whether we like it or not, there can be no compromise or wanton sophistry acceptable on basic principles and fundamental issues. It’s time we desist from every conscious quest to improve the status quo from the deceitful springboard of compromise.

    The change we seek subsists in such random and premeditated acts of goodness that we have learnt to forsake: like a citizen’s resoluteness to respect the traffic light and a local government chairman’s immutable passion to improve life at the grassroots – particularly when the world and the press aren’t looking.

  • Remembering Amb. Gabriel Oyaletor Ijewere

    It is my great honour and privilege to pay the following tribute to Amb. Gabriel Oyaletor Ijewere, one of our departed former colleagues being remembered today, as always, with a profound sense of loss. Amb. Ijewere and I first became acquainted in 1965 when he entered the Foreign Service as a middle level officer, a counsellor. I had entered the Foreign Service the year before on graduating from the University College, Ibadan. Though he was a senior colleague, we soon developed a good personal relationship. He was one of the few senior colleagues in the Foreign Service for whom I had a great professional admiration and genuine respect. It was he who encouraged me to go to Oxford. After we had both left the Foreign Service several years later, we had more time to socialise, visiting each other at home, and became really good friends. We met often at the Lagos Lawn Tennis Club and dined regularly at the Metropolitan Club. We had a similar academic background and the wide range of social, professional and intellectual interests we shared drew us closer to each other. I found him to be a very engaging personality with a liberal world view.

    Amb. Ijewere was born on April 24, 1931, at Ubiaja, now in Edo State, and died in Lagos on 4th January, 2004. He was one of the finest and ablest career diplomats our country has ever produced. Until he retired in 1984 he served with distinction in various capacities, both in the Foreign Ministry and in some of our major diplomatic missions abroad. He started his public service career in the civil service of the old Western Region on graduating from Oxford University in 1959. He served there for three years as an Administrative Officer, and later as the Assistant Registrar (Academic) at the then University College, Ibadan, for two years.  It was from the university that he joined the Foreign Service.

    Amb. Ijewere entered the Foreign Service with a highly impressive academic background, certainly one of the most formidable among the senior diplomatic staff of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He had his secondary school education at the famous Abeokuta Grammar School from 1943 to 1948, where his principal was the legendary Revd. I.O. Ransome-Kuti. Of him Amb. Ijewere wrote several years later that the Revd. Ransome-Kuti taught accountability in the school by example. Amb. Ijewere left the school as head boy in 1948 at 17, remarkably young in those days, coming out with flying colours in his Cambridge School Certificate Examinations. Because of his brilliance, he was retained as a teacher in the school and studied privately for his GCE A levels. It was from Abeokuta that in 1953 he was admitted to the prestigious London School of Economics (LSE) to read Economics on the scholarship of the old Western Region government.

    After graduating from the LSE in 1956 at 25, he proceeded to St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, where he obtained the Oxford post-graduate degree of B. Litt. in 1959. Later, from 1961-62, while serving in the Western Region civil service, he went to Harvard for his MPA. Subsequently, Amb. Ijewere obtained a Ph.D by thesis from the University of London in Economics. Obviously, Amb. Ijewere had prepared himself for an academic career, but found himself instead in the diplomatic service which he grew to love and enjoy. He exemplified professional rectitude and integrity and embodied the best traditions of the old school of diplomacy.

    In the Foreign Service he held many sensitive and important positions. From 1965-66 he served as head of the Economic Division in the ministry and later, from 1970-72, as the Director of Africa Department. It was my distinct pleasure and privilege to have worked with him in both departments.  An outstanding public servant, Amb. Ijewere was one of the most versatile, professional, diligent, inspiring and committed officers it was my good fortune to have worked with in the ministry. His solid academic background was a tremendous asset to the departments in which he served in the ministry. He achieved much effortlessly. His analysis of foreign policy issues and international economic relations was very professional. His advice and recommendations to the government were consistently sound and in the best interest of the country. He had a great sense of duty and fully embraced the virtues of probity, honour, restraint, friendship, humility and generosity that are essential for a good diplomat.

    As the head of the International Economic Relations Department in the Foreign Ministry from 1978-1981, Amb. Ijewere played a major role in the development of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and its major economic institutions. Equally under his leadership, the Africa Department acquired a reputation as an outstanding department in the Foreign Ministry. He was head of the department soon after the civil war when, under General Yakubu Gowon, the country began redefining its African policy and strategic interests in Africa. Amb. Ijewere was at the centre of that review process. He worked very closely with General Gowon in the efforts to reassess and review Nigeria’s African policy. General Gowon once told me that he thought very highly of him as a fine and dedicated officer. In many ways, he was one of the unsung heroes of Nigeria’s new African policy. He took his official responsibilities very seriously.

    In the course of his diplomatic career, he served from 1967-68 as Counsellor and Head of Chancery in our Embassy in Washington and from 1968-70 in a similar capacity in our OAU Mission in Addis Ababa. From 1973-76 he was our High Commissioner in Ghana, and from 1976-78 he served as Ambassador to Belgium, Luxembourg and the EEC. His last diplomatic posting from 1981-84 was as Permanent Representative (PR) and Ambassador to our UN office in Geneva. In all these positions he stood out as one of Nigeria’s most accomplished diplomats. After his retirement in 1984 he was appointed a member of the National Electoral Commission and continued to work as a Consultant to several UN agencies where he was highly regarded and held in high esteem.

    In the Foreign Service he was friendly with all his colleagues, fair-minded, decent and righteous, without being self-righteous. He stood above the petty bureaucratic intrigues in the ministry. Though a brilliant officer, he was not intellectually snobbish. He had a hearty laughter which drew all his colleagues to him. Amb. Ijewere was not simply a great technocrat and an outstanding public servant. He was also a great patriot and scholar who cared deeply about Nigeria’s future as a united, democratic, stable and prosperous country. A few years before his death, he published in 1999 his seminal book on “Accountability, Politics and Development in Colonial and Post-Colonial Africa’, in which he made a strong case for public accountability, democracy and federalism in Sub-Saharan Africa. I had the privilege of reviewing the book and consider it as one of the most impressive studies on post-colonial African politics in recent years. It deserves better public attention.

    We, his former colleagues in the Foreign Service, will always remember him with great affection, admiration and respect for his great sense of humour, his sincere friendship and his immense contribution to the development of the Foreign Service and Nigeria’s foreign policy.

    Amb. Ijewere was a good and devoted family man. He gave all his children the best education possible in public schools in England.

    May his soul and those of our other departed colleagues continue to rest in perfect peace.

    A speech delivered by Amb. Fafowora at the Nigeria Institute of International Affairs (NIIA), Lagos, on May 28 at a memorial service for deceased members of the Association of Retired Ambassadors of Nigeria (ARAN).

  • Jacob’s voice, Esau’s hand

    FROM the outset, the Federal Government’s handling of the  abduction of the over 200 Chibok schoolgirls was suspect. Its initial reaction was that it could not be true. To the government, it looked absurd that any group, no matter how powerful, could just move into a school and go away with over 200 pupils. Well, it happened, but the government found it hard to believe.

    So, it did not lift a finger to help its citizens in distress when they  needed such support most.  Instead, the government turned everything into politics. A government that is worth that name would have since admitted its failure on this matter and apologised to the people. But not the Jonathan administration. Rather than apologise, it is accusing the opposition  of playing politics with the girls’ abduction. That is what beats me.

    How do you play politics with an  abduction such as this?  There are certain things you do not play politics with and this  abduction is one of them. The government is guilty of what it is accusing others of. It is the government that is playing politics with this matter  and not the opposition. Are we saying that because we are in a political dispensation, people should be deprived their right to speak out when evil is being perpetrated?

    What the government wanted was for people not to have cried out when those girls were abducted. Is that possible? Who will lose something and not cry out so that people will rush to his aid? In crying out when those girls were abducted, their parents, school and Borno State Government were looking for help from  the Jonathan administration in rescuing them. But, the government ignored their cry and accused them of raising false alarm. What will a man gain  by lying that his daughter has been abducted when nothing of the sort happened?

    Yes, the figure – 276 – is huge, but that is not enough reason to dismiss the story of the girls’ abduction when it first broke on April 14. It was a tactical blunder by the Jonathan administration from which it has not recovered  since. It keeps sinking deeper and deeper into the morass everyday because of its poor handling of the matter. The government finds it difficult to disabuse its mind that the abduction and the protests that followed it are politically motivated. Whenever the government or its agents speak, they spit venom on some individuals and parties as if they are responsible for the country’s problems.

    If not  for the belief of Jonathan and members of his cabinet that the opposition is responsible for the country’s woes, Federal Capital Territory (FCT) Commissioner of Police  Mbu Joseph Mbu would not have had  the audacity to issue a statement on Monday banning the ‘Bring Back Our Girls’ protests in Abuja.  To us, Mbu may have acted exuberantly, but to him, he was reacting to his master’s body language, which is that the president is not happy with the way the public is taking the girls’ abduction.

    The president would have been too happy if Nigerians behaved as if nothing happened in Chibok on April 14. He wanted his compatriots  to see evil and keep silent, but they chose to speak out. They incurred his wrath for so doing. During the Presidential Media Chat (PMC) last May 4, he was unsparing of those who said the government had not been doing anything to secure the girls’ release. He accused such people of mischief, saying they were out to bring down his government.

    As if on cue, Information Minister Labaran Maku, sang the same tune after the Federal Executive Council (FEC) meeting, last week.  He said those crusading for the  abducted girls’ release  were working towards bringing down the Jonathan administration, which he claimed had done more than enough to address insurgency in the Northeast. The government, he said, had spent a fortune on tackling the problem. ”Look at the entire money we are spending to maintain security in states controlled by the All Progressives Congress (APC). So, why do you come back and start playing politics? Ninety percent of those campaigning to bring back the Chibok girls are also members of that same party (APC)”.

    Are you still wondering why Mbu shot himself in the foot by issuing his statement banning the Bring Back Our Girls rallies in Abuja?  He was only acting on the belief that his masters will be happy with him  if he took such action after reading their body languages. But he forgot that this was not Port Harcourt, the Rivers State capital, where he turned himself into a tin god by riding roughshod over the people. He was banning rallies as he liked there and even took on Governor Rotimi Amaechi. Rather than being disciplined, he was brought to Abuja to be closer to his benefactors.

    See what shame he has brought to them with his ill-thought ban. Now, they are distancing themselves from him. But, I wonder if any police commissioner, no matter how connected he may be, can authorise such a ban without, as we say in the Nigerian parlance, ”order  from above”. With the Inspector – General (IG),  Alhaji Mohammed Abubakar, disowning him, it seems Mbu may have bitten more than he can chew. We wait to see if he will be disciplined  for overreaching himself.

    If nothing is done to him, we can only conclude that they are all in the know of the ban, but his bosses have since   retraced their steps on seeing that the action  would have global implications. Of course,  they left him to carry the short end of the stick. But, will Mbu learn anything from it all? Whether or not he learns from this, the way to treat him is to ignore his purported ban just as that fighter of a woman, Dr Oby Ezekwesili, advised in her posting on her twitter handle on Monday :

    ”No matter how direly they want to take our focus off our Chibok girls, we shall not permit them that luxury. All we are saying…!!! You can fill in the gap.

    Or did I hear you say, give us Chibok girls?

  • Ekiti’s destiny is at stake

    The emergence of Ayo Fayose as the candidate of the PDP for this month’s gubernatorial election in Ekiti has given our people two candidates of sharp contrast. The current governor, Dr. Kayode Fayemi is totally different from Ayo Fayose. I personally do not think there is a third candidate in this race. The candidate of the so-called Labour Party is part of the PDP and the Ekiti people are intelligent enough to know this. Even though the LP candidate in order to attract attention to himself keeps mentioning that some supporters from the APC are on his side. He is totally wrong and this Trojan horse of the PDP/LP will not deceive anybody. Ekiti people have a clear choice between Kayode Fayemi who is running on the APC platform and Ayo Fayose who is in the PDP/LP alliance. There is no third candidate and the choice before our people is clear.

    Since the advent of democratic politicsin1999, we have not had the political stability and economic development that we have had in the last three and half years under Fayemi. Any visit to Ekiti will make this clear even to doubting Thomases; there is hardly any town or village in Ekiti that is not connected to all season roads and the major towns especially the capital are being transformed under the Fayemi administration. Anybody who has not been to Ado-Ekiti in the past three years will not recognise the place because of the criss-crossing of the town by dual carriage ways. Ado-Ekiti has been turned into a construction centre with a city mall, a new general hospital, an expanded teaching hospital, a civic centre among buildings either being completed or under construction. We also have nearing completion, our own equivalent of Aburi gardens in the new government house overlooking the town. It takes a man of class, aesthetics, beauty and history to recognise the need for a physical symbol or monument of a state existence and future aspiration. This is what the new government house represents. It is not a house for Fayemi but for Ekiti people as a whole. When the white men came to Ekiti or any part of Nigeria, they always built houses of the Resident or District Officer on a green hill overlooking the town.They knew what they were doing and it is a pity that unlike Ghana and many other African countries, Nigeria doesn’t have the physical symbols of statehood. Ado-Ekiti is not the most beautiful capital in the country but can be made beautiful through careful planning. The topography may appear as an obstacle or a hindrance to its development but a visit to Stuttgart in Germany of the same kind of topography as Ado-Ekiti will show what is possible under Governor Fayemi.

    Education is key to human development and Fayemi has this. There is no doubt that education has redounded on his approach to governance, he approaches governance in Cartesian and logical way and not doing anything on the spur of the moment. Whatever decisions he takes are based on the best practice anywhere in the world. The difference between a renaissance man like Fayemi and any other running for the post of governor is clear. I do not want to engage in itemising the areas in which this governor has impacted the lives of our people. If as a scholar I only celebrate Fayemi as a scholar, it will be expected of me after all only the deep can appreciate the deep; but Fayemi is more than a scholar, he is an activist governor who in spite of his detached scholastic approach is nevertheless a man of action who allows his action to be determined by his long term vision of where he is taking Ekiti. The Ekiti of his dream is a highly developed society based on application of science and technology to our primary produce as well as a society rooted in its culture and green environment. Ekiti of his vision is a state deriving economic sustenance from service industries such as tourism, the light manufacturing and adding value to our agricultural produce.

    Three and half years is too short in the life of any state for all ideas to become practical reality but the difference betweena man of action rooted in ideas and somebody who does things on the spur of the moment is clear. This is my perception of Ayo Fayose. When Fayose was governor, he did a few things to ingratiate himself into the hearts of the hoipolloi he also left a few buildings in the town. He converted what was a first class hotel built by Governor Adebayo into the governor’s office and replaced it with series of bungalows named Fountain Hotel. He dualised the road from Ado-Ekiti to Ikere but the job was so poorly done that the first rainy season washed the road away and the road is now being redone in a much careful and professional fashion by Fayemi. The Ado-Ekiti-Ifaki dual carriage way that the regimes of Fayose and Oni abandoned has now been completed by Fayemi. This is a rather expensive road that perhaps from hindsight should not have been dualised without the written consent of the federal government which should pay for it. Billions of naira have been sunk into this road while people in Abuja have been dilly-dallying whether to pay for it or not. The approach to governance of Fayose was populist to the extreme; he freely distributed money and ate in the streets with roughnecks and ordinary street wise young people sometimes to the embarrassment of the elite in the society. His mode of governance also bordered on rough tactics of cowing down opposition including traditional rulers. These were things that were alien to our people but they had to suffer in silence because he was supported by Abuja and encouraged to continue his strong-arm tactics but thankfully, these last three and a half have shown Ekiti people what is possible under a democratic government. It has now been established that there can be peace and tranquillity in the state and everybody can go to sleep with their two eyes closed. Ekiti is not a rich state but it has intelligent people and this intelligent people can be cultivated for the progress of the state if the state is well led. The governor is the leader of the state and the state will be judged by the character and persona of the governor. If we have a roughneck as governor our reputation would go down with him, we cannot afford to go back to what we left behind. “Iwaju ni opa ebiti n re si”; our destiny is forward ever, backward never. If we must continue to make progress, the choice before us is clear and we have a commodity we can sell anywhere, Fayemi will sell anywhere in this country. And if God wills, after he must have finished a second term in Ekiti, his record and reputation will catapult him into a higher position in this country. What is necessary therefore is for us as a people to collectively decide that the election will be peaceful, and that there will be no fight or thuggery and that when the election is over, we will all unite as a family to develop our state.

    No outsider can love us more than ourselves so any threat from outside to cause trouble in our state should be collectively resisted. I know there are people outside our state who will want to turn our state into a battle ground. My sincere hope is that the powers that be will not allow themselves to be used to destabilise the most peaceful state in the country. Outsiders who may be planning evil should also learn something from the political history of Nigeria that if you put fire on the house of your neighbour, you may not be able to control it. This was what happened in post-independence Nigeria when the federal government ganged up against the dominant political party in the West and tried to destroy it but the result was that the entire democratic regime unravelled. I hope our people and leaders know the history of Nigeria and they will not allow history to repeat itself because when it does, it will either be a farce or a tragedy. Fayose and Fayemi are my junior brothers and in their own ways I have respect for both of them but if one wants to make a choice that will affect one’s future and those of one’s children and grandchildren, one should make a wise choice. Ekiti people are wise and will make a wise choice on who governs them when all the facts, attributes, comportment, learning, intellectual capability, exposure, calmness under pressure, track record, commitment, breeding, parental, background, psychological stability are put together the choice will be clear and Fayemi is that choice. I say this not to curry any favour, there is nothing I am looking for in life any more that would make me lie. I have achieved more than I expected, I have reached the summit of academic profession, and I have represented my country in places such as Canada, the USA and Germany and I continue to be relevant. And I have advised since 1999 all presidents of Nigeria especially on our country’s foreign policy. If I cannot speak the truth at my age, then I should be damned forever. If Fayose were better person than Fayemi I would have said so and I believe if Fayose is asked who is better of the two of them, he will say it’s Fayemi. Lest I forget there is the inconvenient issue of murder and fraud cases Fayose has to answer. Ekiti deserves a governor with clean hands!

  • Is Nigeria’s dissolution near?

    For Nigeria, breaking up has always been a probability. From day one in 1914, the composition of Nigeria was starkly unreasonable. The British ought to have taken cognizance of the fact that their own country, Great Britain, was not much larger than each of the Hausa-Fulani, Igbo and Yoruba nations in population – and in land area was only about the size of the Yoruba homeland in Nigeria, and less than half of the Hausa-Fulani homeland. How could they have decided that it made sense to strap together into one country these three largest nations of Black Africa? Separation hovered over the destiny of Nigeria from the very beginning.

    And virtually everything that has happened in Nigeria and to Nigeria since the beginning has carried the banner of ultimate separation. For over 40 years (until 1949), the British simply didn’t know how to make Nigeria a country. The Southern and Northern Protectorates went their separate ways in almost all things.

    But the separation was even deeper than the north-south dichotomy. Each of the three major peoples went their separate ways. The Yoruba, who had been living increasingly in towns and cities since about the 10th century, and who were therefore the owners of the only urban civilization in Black Africa, enjoyed, because of their towns and cities, a big head-start in attracting and absorbing the formative foreign influences that were dramatically changing the face of Africa from the mid-19th century on. Mission churches and schools were sprouting in the Yoruba towns by the 1850s. By the late 1860s, ambitious Yoruba families were sending their children for higher education abroad, and by the 1870s a Yoruba literate professional elite (of lawyers, doctors, engineers, architects, writers, journalists, teachers, pastors, merchants, etc) were emerging. The first newspaper (ambitiously written in the Yoruba language) started publishing in a Yoruba city in 1859, and others soon followed in various Yoruba towns and cities. By the time the British created their Nigeria in 1914, the Yoruba southwest was already far ahead of the rest of the new country in all facets of modernization.

    In the rest of Southern Nigeria, Western education did not begin to take off until the 1920s. The Igbo and Ibibio peoples, the first after the Yoruba to produce university graduates, did not do so until the mid-1930s.

    By and by, Christianity spread in all of Southern Nigeria. In Yorubaland, which had been a terminus of the ancient trade across the Sahara Desert from the Middle East for centuries, Islam had long had some presence, and it began to expand greatly in the course of the 19th century. By the 1880s, Christianity and Islam were locked in serious rivalry among Yoruba people. Happily, the traditional Yoruba religious tolerance and accommodation kicked in, and Yoruba folks of different religions lived on harmoniously, not only in Yoruba towns, but even in Yoruba households and families – thereby building what many observers now regard as perhaps the most religiously harmonious society in the world.

    In the large, sprawling, Northern Nigeria, Christianity and Western education trickled ininto the homelands of the small peoples of the Middle Belt. Some of the peoples here even became predominantly Christian. But further north, in the homeland of the large Hausa-Fulani nation, where a radical brand of Islam held sway under Fulani rulers whose forebears had carried out a successful jihad in the 19th century, Christianity had little chance, though some localities accepted Christianity. Moreover, the British officials made the situation worse here by urging that the Christian missions should limit their activities to the homelands of the “pagans” and leave the Islamized peoples alone. Both Christianity and Western education were thus mostly denied to the large Hausa-Fulani homeland.

    In short, though Nigeria was legally one “protectorate” ruled by the British, the most important developments had only reinforced the pre-British lines of cleavage. There was no direction towards, and no sense of, ONE COUNTRY. By 1946 when the British at last began to attend seriously to Nigeria, the logic of the realities of the situation pointed more towards separation into a number of different countries than towards the evolution of one country.

    Many prominent persons in the Nigerian situation of the time voiced out these truths. Chief Obafemi Awolowo, then a rising leader among the Yoruba people of the Southwest, wrote in 1947: “Nigeria is not a nation. It is a mere geographical expression. .. The word “Nigerian” is merely a distinctive appellation to distinguish those who live within the boundaries of Nigeria from those who do not”.

    In 1953, Sir Ahmadu Bello, leader of the Northern political elite, said: “Sixty years ago there was no country called Nigeria. What is now Nigeria consisted of a number of large and small communities all of which were different in their outlooks and beliefs. The advent of the British and of Western education has not materially altered the situation – – -”.

    Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, who was to be the first Prime Minister of Nigeria, said that “the southern tribes who are now pouring into the North in ever increasing numbers are not welcome…. We . . . look upon them as invaders. Since 1914 the British government has been trying to make Nigeria into one country, but the Nigerian people themselves are historically different in their backgrounds, in their religious beliefs and customs, and do not show themselves any sign of willingness to unite. So what it comes to is that Nigerian unity is only a British intention in the country.”

    Today, for good reasons, lots of Nigerians regret that the wisdom of these leading men of our race was ignored, and that the people in control of our corporate life went on to concoct a Nigeria for us. That that Nigeria has not worked is almost too trite to be repeated. But, the events of the past few years have brought the pains of Nigeria’s failure to levels of unbearable intensity. How can we get rid of the nagging pain and fear about the unknown fate of the Chibok school girls, or about the hundreds of other Nigerians who are being killed, maimed, and burnt alive, or about threats by Boko Haram that they will spread their terror to wherever we live, or about the total destruction of our country’s effectiveness by the crooked interplays of our differences?

    How can we feel confident or comfortable to be Nigerians when we now find, as we are finding from various writings, that prominent citizens among us are at the bottom of the terror outrage, some prominent citizens who armed and funded terrorist gangs and sent some youths abroad for terrorist training – for the purpose of hurting the rest of us Nigerians, all because they want to control the country we all call ours?

    Now, after learning of these horrendous breaches of confidence by men at the highest peaks of our country’s political life, how can the rest of us happily choose to continue to be citizens of this country? Surely, it does feel as if Nigeria’s dissolution is near.

  • PDP’s politicking and presidency’s subliminal campaign

    Boko Haram was a creation of PDP. General Owoye Azzazi, a first class military intelligence officer and one time National Security Adviser to President Jonathan was categorical. Boko Haram was the product of ‘PDP politics of exclusion”. It was for this reason his removal from office was orchestrated by PDP dealers and wheelers holding President Jonathan hostage With the intensity of politicking by PDP, in the last six months which has now dove-tailed to the president resorting to subliminal campaign messages targeted at our innermost fears and vulnerabilities, it is important to remind ourselves of this fact especially since it is often said Nigerians suffer from collective amnesia. It must also be noted that in Borno State, the epicenter of the insurgency, it is difficult to make a distinction between PDP and ANPP that has controlled the state since 1999. Both parties are controlled by a clique of friends with business and family ties. Both parties have equal strength, running neck to neck in all their past outings.

    For PDP everything is politics; the running of the economy, the management of the education sector, equipping our teaching hospitals, (doctors are currently on strike over government policy of addressing and paying heads of hospital supporting services as consultants), elections to pick our representatives – a routine exercise in many countries including Ghana and Malawi – has been reduced to “do or die’ endeavour by PDP and its leaders. Even ordinary traffic control efforts of a state government are politicized by PDP. (The Lagos State Commissioner of Police has directed that about 200 arrested stone-throwing members of FERMA, a body he has declared illegal be prosecuted.) Yet like a pot calling the kettle black, the PDP is always the first to accuse others of politicking.

    If we needed any evidence, the events leading to the Chibok national tragedy about five weeks ago and its aftermath provided that. We now, on daily basis witness PDP stalwarts coming out to make outlandish statements which is at variance with realities on the ground purportedly on behalf of a government that seems to be at war with everyone – Shettima, the embattled governor of Borno State, APC, the opposition party and even the grieving parents of the abducted girls who have now been banned from demonstrating on the streets of Abuja ostensibly for security reasons.

    No one has tried to address the claim of Danuma Mphur, the chairman of the Parent Teachers Association (PTA) of the Chibok Government Girls Secondary School or that of the local council chairman of the area, that the police and the military commander in Chibok were alerted four hours before the attack and Mphu’s claim that it took three days after the event before security people came to ask them questions. Similarly it took over two weeks of international pressure mounted by the social media to nudge the president to speak, because he, according to Obasanjo, initially did not see any abduction but the handiwork of his detractors bent on denting his record to forestall his re-election in 2015. The picture one gets is that of politicization of a tragic event by shameless PDP spokespersons. It was as if Chibok, a Nigerian town located in Borno, one of three north-eastern states under emergency had been ceded to Cameroon as Shettima became the issue. None of the PDP’s self-serving men engaged in the trial of Shettima on television told Nigerians what became of soldiers said to be based in all the local government areas of the state including Chibok. For the inquisition of Shettima for failing to provide security after an undertaking, officials of Federal Ministry of Education and WAEC were on hand to provide indicting evidence. Locating the children became secondary while the inquisition lasted.

    If we thought politicking and buck-passing would end with the offer of help from the international community, we were all wrong. Government’s response to “Bring Back Our Girls” group’s sing-song was a directive that their anger and plea should be directed at the insurgents who abducted their children. When the weeping parents remained adamant, government witchdoctors allegedly hired their own grieving parties to do their bidding. They were subsequently unleashed on the members of the Oby Ezekwesili-led ‘Bring Back Our Girls Campaign Group’ at the Unity Fountain, Abuja, breaking chairs, cameras and tripods of journalists covering the event and disrupting the group’s meeting. According to Ezekwesili, “the new group members, who came in a bus, had turned the Unity Fountain into a joke”.

    The joke was quickly followed up by a more hilarious one to make us laugh when we should be crying, (apology to Saro Wiwa), courtesy of Labaran Maku, the Minister of Information. Now, government has put the whole blame for insurgency and the abduction of our girls on the door step of APC. According to Maku, “90 per cent of all insurgency is in states controlled by APC party, and 90 per cent of those campaigning to bring back Chibok girls are members of that party”. He conveniently ignores the fact that former President Obasanjo recently told Nigerians that Boko Haram leaders he had a meeting with confessed they were in existence and active during his term, 1999 -2007. Maku the combative minister of information however did not say if APC equally mobilized Britain, USA, China and France that recently hosted a conference of Nigerians and her neighbours in France attended by his principal. He did not also say if it was APC that influenced the outrage expressed by people all over the world. But PDP is not a party to be easily discouraged. Another PDP stalwart, Senator Ita Enang has also opted to prolong our laughter. For him, “these APC politicians or sympathizers engineering these ceaseless rallies in some parts of the country” are politicizing the abduction of the Chibok girls”.

    While the president’s men are engaged in open politicking to trivialize a national tragedy, the president himself has embarked on subliminal campaign – a propaganda technique with messages to evoke fears targeted at our vulnerabilities. The problem however is not just that effectiveness of persuasion through subliminal messages is suspect; propaganda succeeds more at the level of subconscious. But the president’s inept men with a lot of money to waste have tried to leverage on the images of Mandela, Martin Luther Jnr and President Obama whose images are too real to obfuscate our consciousness? Except within PDP, I am not sure there are Nigerians who believe their president shares the charisma and passion for service of Mandela, Martin Luther and Obama.

    At a time of national emergency when the president needs a transparent and unambiguous message of appeal for support of his party and political adversaries, what is being dished out by shadowy groups such as “Alliance For Defence Of  Democracy and Protectors of Nigeria Posterity” are offensive,  foggy messages with  childish innuendo  capable of hardening the position of those who strongly feel a president that cannot guarantee the safety of life and properties of its citizens has lost legitimacy. How can a body that calls itself an alliance for the defence of democracy be asking his principal to’ carry on’ and alienate those who are against him if they truly have faith in democracy and believe democracy is a game of numbers? How can a group that calls itself protector of Nigeria posterity be counselling its principal to cultivate the ill-feelings of those who promised to make the country ungovernable for the president?

    How are we sure these incompetent promoters of President Jonathan who currently ignore the ethics that makes it mandatory for them to disclose their names and sources of their campaign funds are not the same loathsome men, who having frittered away about N12 billion on ex-President Obasanjo’s collapsed third-term agenda, re-emerged as key players in Jonathan’s government

  • Citizens’ prayer (2)

    Creator, we have come forth, when heaven lies at the tick of a bomb, when hell blazes in the spoken word. We come for hope and truth’s pure ray. We come to wish our strife away. Life is still not what we prayed for, under Goodluck Ebele Jonathan. It gets worse every hour.

    The boy who had no shoes has grown to snatch our dog-eared shoes from our feet. That self-confessed son of a poor fisherman has come to snatch the few fingerlings we have in our nets; when we protest, he dishes us tadpoles to eat and claims it’s “fish.”The one who we hoped will accord us a breath of fresh air has emerged to blow as another clean breath of fresh stench.

    Today, our grief is of fuel subsidy. Ebele baba has removed that mythical subsidy we barely enjoyed. Fuel we used to buy at N65 now sells at N97, N141, N150, and N160 nationwide. As a result, the price of everything has gone through the roof. A decent meal has become a luxury now: vegetables and tubers, palm oil and vegetable oil, kerosene and gas, now sell at abominable prices.

    But our almighty President, Minister of Finance, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Minister of Petroleum, Diezani Alison-Madueke incumbent governors and company would have us accept such heinous fate as the next best palliative to endemic poverty, unemployment, moribund refineries, electricity shortages, insecurity, administrative ineptitude and corruption among other monstrosities they impose on us.

    Ebele baba has forgotten his roots. He has declared war on us whose fates he swore to advance and protect. Like the proverbial alligator, he has chosen to wade deaf, against the storm and current of public opinion. Goaded by ballsy and mammoth Okonjo-Iweala, he decided to dole the most savage policies on to our battered souls. Prodded by his sleazy and disdainful cabinet, he has chosen to manifest as the corruption of every economic thought and the approximation of the shame that our ruling class has become.

    Recently, he invited professional predators from abroad to help crush their predatory variant, Boko Haram terrorist sect, which he and his cohorts in power foisted upon us at the home front. Hence as you read, the nucleus of evil has arrived in our land to dish out discordant tunes to our bigoted clans. Very soon, their drumbeats of war, hatred and dismemberment shall reverberate devastatingly across our battered land. And while we expect the worst like it happened in Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Egypt and Libya, Ebele baba and company are busy campaigning for second term.

    To stem the tide of those of us who love to pick faults in the ruling class, he has made casualties of those whose strength we hoped would rid us of their gruesome breed. We miss Reuben Abati; the knight who pawned his armour to become Ebele baba’s court jester. Thanks to him and a great many more amongst us, nobody respects the columnist these days; they think we are leprechauns fencing in knights’ armour.

    Do not be deceived by the furor of our hastily conceived citizens’ protests, “Bringbackourgirls’ hash-tags and strike actions, we shall tire of the novelty of revolutionary slogans and mass actions, very soon. Our backs shall remain against the wall and when Ebele baba and company push harder, we shall simply crawl into it like we’ve always done.

    Our revolutionaries, labour leaders and columnists of note shall quietly eat up their own words following crucial meetings with Ebele baba on the way forward. They shall come back to tell us to ditch the placards and save our chants till more auspicious hour. Whispers of currency shall smother our rant and the revolutionary cry. At the end, everything shall remain the same; our fates shall bend and break according to the whims of the ruling class.

    Thus we seek the comfort of your infinite mercies against the scourge of our merciless leaders. We pray that you repay our leaders back in their own kobo. Dear author and finisher of faith, please rewrite our pitiful fates as the Christians pray. And even though “the pen has been lifted” as the Muslims say, please rework our fates as you do to your most favoured faithful.

    But if our leaders are truly on the right path; if truly, they lead us honestly and with unpretentious fear of you in their hearts, treat them the way you would treat your most favoured among humankind. However, if they lead us with disdain and deceit in their hearts, treat them the way you treated Abu Ashram and the Abyssinians when they rose against Mecca.

    Afflict their mansions to tear down the comfort they build to our discomfort. Upset their bellies and purge them of the provisions they gorge like gluttons although it’s meant for the collective good. As we spend our finest moments in darkness, make their access to light a luxury of the past; reorder their fates that they too may go to bed and rise in darkness.

    Make their wives hiss and fret for want of fresh air. Make their children and grandchildren flail and choke in the grasp of unforgiving heatstroke. Bless them with noontime heat and bedtime heat even in the rains. And every time they seek from you the mercy they have refused to accord us, treat their prayers the way you would, the wantonness of the gluttonous and accursed. Make their prayer points and praise-worship trail off in confusion. Smite their patronizing prophets till they become not much in sight.

    They claim the N1.3 trillion they ‘saved’ by removing fuel subsidy shall be used to improve other sectors – like agriculture and health sectors; if they fail to live up to their words, make their kids expire to indecipherable sickness and malnutrition right before their eyes; like peasant kids dying in agrarian communities nationwide. Deny their trophy wives and newborns of oxygen and the best medical care overseas as they deny kids of poor folk breathing their last while their mothers are still pushing, in hospital labour rooms of death nationwide.

    Bless their children with gifts of patricide and mindless violence as they enable our jobless youth for political gains, every day. Turn their swimming pools to raging deeps to drown their progeny and trophy wives, like the Oke Afa canal that claimed our poor, beloved folk fleeing from death, to their death; during the Ikeja bomb blast.

    Subject their lives and those of their loved ones to the elements of bad roads as they do to us. Blind their pilots’ to the safest course every time they flee our land for overseas medical checkup; make their planes plummet to crash on humid rocks and plunge in the sea, as our beloveds’ in the throes of bird-strike, and our dreams in the face of stillbirth.

    Let them not enjoy the fruits of their labour; make their Princeton and Harvard educated wards the causes of their everlasting sadness; make them the bad harvest of their inordinate lust for wealth, at our expense. Despite their wealth, afflict them with the poverty of good health, peace and contentment. And for every one of them seeking our downfall, we pray: “Faja’anlahum ka’asufyn mma” kulyn” Amen.

  • Reflections on May 29

    Reflections on May 29

    TODAY is Democracy Day. Really? May 29 was so decreed in 1999 to mark the day the military returned to the barracks, having exhausted their big bag of intrigues in a complex power game among their leading lights.

    To the military, Nigeria – the envy of many and hope of the black man – was a conquered territory. And it was so run.  Attempts to call them to order were brutally suppressed.  Many patriots were jailed. But those were the lucky ones. The unlucky ones, such as the Ogoni Nine, got killed after a trial that mocked the very essence of justice and despite a global outcry.

    Now, Nigerians have realised that democracy is not just the absence of military rule, just as “good health is not just the absence of diseases”. The weird one, the late songster Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, saw it all a long time ago when he, in a remarkable pun, described the system as demoncrazy and its practice as demonstration of craze.

    Many derided May 29 as a caricature of June 12, 1993, the day the late Basorun Moshood Kasimawo Olawale Abiola won the presidential election that was hailed at home and abroad as Nigeria’s fairest and freest ever. That historic election was annulled by the Gen. Ibrahim Babangida regime for no sane reason. Abiola, frontline businessman, charismatic politician, exceptional philanthropist, newspaper baron and sport enthusiast of a rare kind, fought the battle of his life to get the election revalidated. He failed. In fact, he died in detention, fighting to reclaim his mandate. His wife, Kudirat, was shot on a Lagos street in broad daylight. She died.

    Chief Ernest Shonekan, an accomplished businessman, was cajoled into heading a hurriedly cobbled Interim National Government (ING), the one Yoruba broadcasters derided as Ijoba fidi he (a government that is perching on the seat as it is temporary). It all became a joke. As the government, hobbled and humbled by a debilitating credibility crisis, fumbled on, it became obvious that the joke would not last long. It all blew up in Shonekan’s face and the Egba chief had to return home.

    But the pantomime continued, with the late Gen. Sani Abacha seizing the reins after beguiling a naïve Abiola into believing that he would restore his mandate. He stood like a rock in the way of the sacred mandate that was freely given by 14 million Nigerians.

    It was not to last for long. Nature supervened in its mysterious ways to end the misery that was the country’s lot. Gen. Abacha died in strange circumstances, rumoured to have foamed from the mouth after jerking like a motor engine with adulterated fuel as he was being ministered to by some expatriate prostitutes flown in specially to quench his lasciviousness. Talk of bedlam in the bedroom. The dreaded General, obviously one of the world’s worst dictators and corrupt rulers who defiled the treasury with a bizarre rapacity, was said to be fond of Indian women.

    Gen. Abubakar Abdulsalami stepped in to stabilise the ship of state. He  conducted an election that produced Chief Olusegun Aremu Okikiolakan Obasanjo, who never saw Abiola as the hero of democracy. After running the show for eight years, he reluctantly yielded the seat to the late Umaru Yar’Adua (May 29, 2007 –May 6, 2010).

    When President Goodluck Jonathan stepped in, there was so much hope that all would be well. The goodwill was tremendous. Pentecostal giants were excited. So were all youths and members of the academic community. Now, the Jonathan presidency is struggling to set its hands on the plough, even as its tenure is fast running out.

    The age-long division among Nigerians has never been this pronounced since the civil war. Nigeria, in the view of many a student of history, is at the brink. To spiritualists, the cycle is rushing to a cataclysmic end. Political scientists are warning against a return to the days of the jackboot. I don’t see that happening. Nigerians will rise against that. My fear is anarchy, the type that will be forcing the world to ask: “Hey! Who’s in charge here?”

    But, let’s get it right. It is not that the Jonathan administration sowed the seed of discord. No. Neither is it the cause of all that troubles this beautiful country. No. The question is, has it done enough to stem a dangerous tide? What will it be remembered for?

    The middle class is struggling to return as the division between the rich and the poor keeps widening. The economy is all figures; no facts. We are regaled with data, empty data, to show that it is growing, yet the citizens do not feel good. Recently, a rebasing of the economy put Nigeria at the head of others in Africa, but many insist it is all voodoo.

    Textile manufacturing companies that used to provide thousands of jobs remain dead, their factories becoming entertainment centres. The cost of doing business keeps flying up, with energy expenditure bursting the books. Small scale businesses are dying, done in by a seemingly intractable power problem. The level of infrastructural decay is beyond belief, even by Nigeria’s strange standards. Hospitals – remember Gen. Abacha called them mere consulting clinics – are sick. Good doctors have fled a system that mocked their training and oath.

    After a long university teachers’ strike, polytechnic teachers launched theirs. For almost a year, students have remained at home. Education is in crises.

    Roads are bad, destroyed by years of neglect that is fuelled by corruption – an ailment that has brought many sectors to their knees. Pensioners are dying, their sweat stolen by evil officials who do not know when they have stolen more than enough in a desperate race to secure their own future.

    Add these to the wave of insecurity from which nobody is insulated. Suicide bombers are here, killing and maiming. Jungle justice is back as many lose confidence in the system. Armed robbers are getting more sophisticated. Boko Haram says it wants an Islamic enclave for itself. The pursuit of this mission, says the sect, is by jihad in which innocent people must be killed in their thousands. Military barracks and police stations are attacked at will.

    The police felt eliminating the sect’s leader, Mohammed Yusuf, would solve the problem. How wrong. His elimination sparked  the conflagration that is threatening to take away our humanity.

    Boko Haram has killed thousands. It has burnt down homes and businesses that represented many years of toiling and sweating. But the April 15 abduction of more than 200 schoolgirls in Chibok, Borno State, has got the world rushing down here to launch a rescue mission. Over one month after, the girls are yet to be found and reunited with their families.

    Suicide bombers have had bountiful harvests. Nyanya. Jos. Kaduna. Maiduguri. And many others.

    Our leaders have elevated politics above governance. Their dream is to “capture” power, not as a means to an end – service that will bring happiness to the majority of our people – but as an end in itself for the selfish interest of the holder and his henchmen.

    Despite the disenchantment and the disillusionment, Nigerians display an amazing sense of humour. Sardonic humour. They laugh when they are supposed to cry, perhaps because they are tired of crying. Consider this that once appeared on this page:

    “A man died and went to hell. There he finds that there are different hells for each country. He decides to go round and choose the least painful to spend his eternity.

    “He goes to the German hell and asks, ‘what do they do here?’ He is told, “first they put you in an electric chair for an hour, then lay you on a bed of nails for another hour. Then the German devil comes in and whips you for the rest of the day.’

    “The man does not like that at all. He moves on. He checks out the USA, UK, Russian hells and many more. He discovers that they are all similar to the German hell.

    “Then he comes to the Nigerian hell and finds a long queue of people waiting to get in. Amazed, he asks, ‘what do they do here?’ He is told, ‘First, they put you in an electric chair for an hour and then they lay you on a bed of nails for another hour. Then the Nigerian devil comes in and whips you for the rest of the day.’

    ‘But that is exactly the same as all the other hells; why are there so many people waiting to get in?’ asks the man. A fellow calls him aside and says, ‘because there is never stable electricity so the electric chair doesn’t work. The nails were paid for but were never supplied by the contractor, so the bed is comfortable to sleep on. And the Nigerian devil used to be a civil servant, so he comes in, signs his time sheet and leaves for his personal business.”

    It pays to be a Nigerian. And despite all its ailments, democracy – never to be confused with May 29 – is it.

  • No, Nigeria will not be preserved

    There is only one way to preserve Nigeria. If we follow that one way, we succeed. If we do not, we fail, sooner or later. And that one way is to be realistic – to accept the FACT of things as they are, and to make our nation-building steps strictly follow that fact.  Otherwise, we are just messing around. We have been messing around since independence in 1960 – and we have brought Nigeria not nearer to unity but very much farther away from unity. In fact we have brought Nigeria to the verge of breaking up.

    The fact, the indubitable fact, is that we Nigerians are not one people or one nation. We are many nations. We are many different nations – in most cases, very different nations. For thousands of years our different nations lived in their own separate homelands in this area of Africa before the British came, threw a boundary around us together and called us Nigeria.  Each had its own language and its own defining culture. Each organized and ruled its people in its own way. Each responded in its own way to external influences – such as long-distance trade, and contacts with foreign peoples and foreign religions. Each has its own way of responding to the many changes and influences of the modern world – such as Western education, science, technology, industrialization, etc. Each has its own way of responding to close relationships with other nations in the same country. Even though we have all lived in one country of Nigeria for a century, each of our nations has its own kind of desires, ambitions and expectations in that country. And each cherishes its own image of itself and its own pride. All these are true of every one of our nations, even though some nations are large and some are small. This is THE FACT OF THINGS AS THEY ARE in, and for, our country Nigeria.

    It is only by seriously accepting these facts as sovereign, by respecting them, and by working sincerely with them, by structuring Nigeria into a true federation, that we can build a stable and lasting Nigeria. In the last years of British rule, the British helped us to start correctly along these lines. The structure they helped us to create was rough and imperfect, no doubt. Unable and unwilling to do the detailed structuring that they knew we needed, they helped us to create three broad regions – each region appearing somewhat plausible. In spite of the anger and agitations of many of the nations in each region, the three regions succeeded quite well, and they brought considerable socio-economic progress into the lives of their citizens. Of course, there was no doubt that we needed to carry the system further, and the British left with the hope that we ourselves would do that.

    As we celebrated independence, there was a lot of hope among us that we would do it and make a success of it. It was fortunate, most observers thought, that the politicians – the Hausa-Fulani political leaders – who were dominant in the independence federal government, were known to be strong defenders of regional and local autonomy. In the years before independence, they had stood very stoutly for such principles; in fact, at some point, they had suggested that Nigeria should be constituted into three separate countries joined together by only a customs union. Now that our country was independent and they were in control, what doubt could there be that the federal principle, with strong regions managing most of their own affairs,  would go on to triumph?

    But it did not happen. Someday, some bright historian will reveal to the world the causes and details of this most unfortunate turn in Hausa-Fulani attitudes to the political development of Nigeria. Much of what we know is encapsulated in the statement credited to Sir Ahmadu Bello, the leader of the Hausa-Fulani political elite, only 11 days after the day of independence. “This new country called Nigeria,” he was reported to have said, “should be an extension of the empire of our great-grandfather Othman dan Fodio. We must ruthlessly prevent a change of government. We use the peoples of the Middle Belt as willing tools and the peoples of the South as conquered territory, and never let them rule over us, and never let them control their own future”.

    That is the path that Hausa-Fulani politics has pursued ruthlessly since then. The central piece of it is to hold the power of the federal government by all means, and to use it to subdue the other peoples of Nigeria, in order to mould Nigeria into a de facto Fulani empire – what some now call a “Sultanate”.

    The Hausa-Fulani agenda has succeeded wonderfully. But, unhappily, that success has brought a whole lot of disasters with it. Thirty-six small and essentially impotent states, created to ensure unrestrained federal power and control, sit over the progressive impoverishment of Nigerians.  At the fond wish of the controllers of federal power, all sections of Nigeria depend more and more on the revenue from oil, and abandon all efforts at developing local resources. Corruption becomes the soul of Nigeria’s public management and public life, and every election, because of crookedness and criminalities, becomes almost a war of all against all. The spirit of enterprise plunges everywhere, as most ambitious citizens become hustlers for some share of the oil money. Poverty escalates relentlessly, until the federal government itself acknowledges that 62% of Nigerians now live in “absolute poverty” – that is, subsisting on about one US dollar per day.

    Unemployment among Nigerian young adults is estimated at over 70%. Crimes, conflicts and insecurity grow exponentially, making Nigeria one of the most unsafe places in peace time in the world. Terrorism, veiled with cloaks of religion, subdues a whole region of Nigeria. Nigeria’s military and security establishments, heavily riddled with corruption, are in a shambles. Almost visibly daily, Nigeria stumbles towards disintegration or implosion.

    But this dubious success is not slowing down by any means. The news from the National Conference in Abuja is that the Hausa-Fulani leaders, greatly empowered by nearly 50 years of control of Nigeria, are succeeding yet again in defeating every attempt at change. The South-west, South-east and South-south delegations all went to the National Conference with proposals strongly demanding the restructuring of the Nigerian federation. But, talk with these delegates now, and you will find that very many have become ambivalent at best. Close observers believe that many delegates have been “settled”. South-east and South-south delegates are now commonly saying that their chief concern is that President Jonathan should win re-election in 2015 for a second term, or that the South-east should have one more state!

    In short, returning Nigeria to a true federal structure is not going to happen. But this can only be a pyrrhic victory for the champions of total federal power and control. When the National Conference has finished compiling its unrealistic and foolish decisions, the masses of Nigerians will still be faced with the awful and hopeless conditions that they have been living with. Then, the world will see what happens. It is becoming more and more unlikely that Nigeria will remain on the map.