The Nation Newspaper

Category: Thursday

  • A president in the dock

    Their relationship became frosty long ago, but they put up a face in public. They pretended as if all was well. It indeed looked well with them, at least, at the superficial level; but deep down, all was not well. They did not start like that, mind you. In the beginning, President Goodluck Jonathan and former President Olusegun Obasanjo were close; so close that they saw things from the same perspective. Jonathan was beholden to Baba, that is Obasanjo, because the former president was instrumental to his rise politically.

    From Bayelsa State, where Jonathan was initially deputy governor and later governor, to Abuja, where he now presides over the affairs of state, Obasanjo had a hand in his political fortunes. Obasanjo was the godfather and Jonathan the godson. As president between 1999 and 2007, Obasanjo always looked out for Jonathan, the political son in whom he was well pleased. Baba, an old war horse, knows how to pick his men. He goes for those who will be subservient to him.

    Jonathan was a natural choice because he looked like someone who will always obey orders; a man who can be trusted not to rock the boat unlike his worldly wise former boss, Diepreye Alamieyeseigha. Obasanjo may have been deceived by Jonathan’s meek and gentle nature. But he forgot what the bard, Shakespeare, said in his tragic play Macbeth that ”there is no art to find the mind’s construction in the0- face”. If only he could have read Jonathan’s mind on his face he would have known that our Ijaw irredentist of a leader is not one to do business with. That is not to say that Obasajo is a better customer.

    Obasanjo and Jonathan are two of a kind. They both look like people who cannot hurt a fly, but they can be extremely dangerous. Their colourless looks have helped to a great extent in getting them to where they are today. Obasanjo did nothing spectacular in helping Jonathan to become governor of Bayelsa State after his boss’ fell from grace because the Constitution is explicit on the matter, but the former president knew what he was doing by presenting it as if it was of his (Baba’s) making.

    He made it clear to Jonathan that he was backing him because he found him to be clean and untainted. After all, without saying it, he got Alamieyeseigha out of office because he could not stand corruption! Obasanjo paints himself as someone who is above board. Every Nigerian except him is a thief. Obasanjo does not see anything good in others except Obasanjo. That is Baba for you. You may not like Baba’s style but you cannot deny the fact that he can be hard hitting when it comes to criticising others.

    On such occasions, Obasanjo is unsparing, puffing and huffing as he takes his target to the cleaners. But do that to him, you will see his other side. Nigerians have come to take Obasanjo for who he is : a man who sees the mote in others’ eyes while a log is in his. Ask Shagari, ask Buhari, ask Babangida, ask the late Abacha, ask even Gowon, who was our leader before him, they will tell you what they went through in the hands of Obasanjo. He tore Shagari, Buhari, Babangida and the late Abacha, who all came to office after him, apart for allegedly bringing misery to the people. He only saw good in Abdulsalami Abubakar and that is because that one handed over to him in 1999.

    Obasanjo knows when to descend on these people. It is always at the time they are having problems with the public. He knows that whatever he says then, he would be hailed for being on the masses’ side. What a cunny, old man. However, this is not to say that we should dismiss him whenever he intervenes in critical national issues, just as he has done in his 18 – page letter to Jonathan titled : Before it is too late. In the letter, he analysed correctly recent happenings in the country, pointing out that the president should be blamed for some of them.

    He claimed that the president is nursing a second term ambition, contrary to what Jonathan told him in private. Obasanjo also accused Jonathan of anti – party activities, of secretly training snipers, equipping a killer squad and placing about 1000 people on ”political watch list”. It was no love letter; it was a letter dripping with venom and anger. It was full of bile and if you like vile. It was vintage Obasanjo, who is at his best sending a stinker to those who have offended him.

    Having gone through the Obasanjo letter, there may be the temptation to dismiss it as the rantings of a frustrated old man or better still a bad loser. Yes, a bad loser because he has lost out in the power game in the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in his home state of Ogun and at the national level. ”So, why won’t he write such a letter?” a colleague asked when we got wind of the letter in the newsroom last week. ”Of all his observations which one can he say he was not guilty of while in office?” the colleague further asked, throwing up a heated debate that night.

    Obasanjo may not be the saint he tried to portray himself in that letter, but that is not enough to dismiss what he is saying. We should look at the message and not the messenger. There are issues in that letter which the president should address. Since this is not a court case, the onus is on him to disprove Obasanjo’s claims. Is he secretly training snipers? Did he place about 1000 people on ‘political watch list’, whatever that means? Is he interested in a second term? He has since promised to let us know where he stands on that in 2014. But he should do so now in light of Obasanjo’s grave allegations against him.

    Is he equipping a killer squad ahead of the 2015 elections? Is he fighting or ”encouraging corruption through his body language?” As president, Jonathan wields enormous powers. People can disappear and not be seen again forever if he so wishes. This is why the hair raising allegations by Obasanjo cannot be dismissed by a wave of the hand. He has to respond to them and do so fast to allay our fears. Are we safe or not under him as our president? This is the long and short of the whole matter. So, we cannot afford to throw away the baby (letter) and the bath water (writer). The ball, as they say, is in the president’s court. He should speak up before it is too late!

     

    Sanusi and the oil cabal

    The figure is mind boggling. $49.8 billion is what is said to be missing from our oil account. It is hard to believe that such amount could be missing between January, last year and July, 2013, and we are just being told now. If the whistle blower had not been Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Governor Lamido Sanusi, I would have dismissed the allegation offhand. Coming from him, I cannot do so, considering the fact that state governors too have been shouting for some time now that the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) has not been transparent in its handling of our oil money. NNPC has since denied Sanusi’s claim, but the firm is not convincing enough. This is part of the ‘’haemorrhaging’’ Obasanjo was talking about. We should look deeper into this matter to save our country from the hands of oil goons. Thank God the Senate has initiated a probe. For better result, the probe should be expanded to become a joint National Assembly affair.

  • Elite scum and other abstractions

    Gold plated doors and sofas. Plastered walls and Venetian glass. Platinum pumps and home theatre. Spring locks, expensive cars and wine cellars. Trophy wives and concubines among other things epitomize the good life; in our fatherland.

    Civilization has been improving our houses and husks no doubt but it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. Great thanks to modernity, we have learnt to build castles even as we cannot yet create noblemen and scions to inhabit them.

    In our fatherland, the “civilized” citizen and elitist’s pursuits are no worthier than the savage’s. He spends the greater part of his life in pursuit and acquisition of basically gross necessities and luxuries that at the end, impoverishes him worse than the most contemptible barbarian.

    That has to be shocking given that in the prime of his life; at the apex of his growth and self-actualisation, he becomes a President, Governor, Industry titan, religious leader and “very successful” activist or media consultant to mention a few. Ultimately, he becomes “rich” fundamentally in societal terms.

    The Nigerian elite is “rich” and yet irrevocably poor. This poverty that I speak of connotes the poverty of his intellect and psyche. Insidiously weaned and self-propelled by a discontent that is at once insatiable and detrimental to his being, he engages in an eternal pursuit of luxuries and accoutrements that to him and his privileged peers indicates the “good life.”

    Basically, he is handicapped. And this handicap of his extends beyond the familiar trope of the human forelock or Intelligent Quotient (I.Q.) if you like. Like a canker, it eats into his psyche and ravages him till he becomes not much in constitution and expression.

    Thus the alarming desperation by which he strives as a constituent of the Nigerian society; hence his many vanities and vulnerabilities, particularly his inclination to engage in everything and anything in pursuit of money and attainment of the “good life.”

    The Nigerian elite perpetuate the irony of a contrived metaphor. Although by virtue of its purported civilization, it is expected to serve as an instrument of positivity and progress, it isn’t. Rather than facilitate the process of growth that till date, remains elusive to the Nigerian State, it terminates it; rather than ignite hope in their less privileged compatriots, it extinguishes it. Every day, the citizenry watches helplessly and in awe, the appalling recklessness with which it extinguishes their hope and profit from such enterprise.

    It would be overkill perhaps if I endeavour to relate Nigerians’ political hara-kiri at the recently concluded general elections to a treacherous and annoyingly insolent elite class. It could be akin to giving a skunk a bad name if I hereby blame Nigeria’s crushing woes on the highly selfish and hypocritical elite piloting her ship of state.

    This is neither to flay the elite for the villainy it perpetrates nor is it meant to castigate it for the eternal hopelessness it fosters. This is to commiserate with the nation’s elite class, middleclass, upper-middleclass, upper class, aristocracy or whatever highfaluting title appeals to their ego.

    A savage lust is basically its woe. Take for instance, the abject horror the nation’s government perpetuates in the name of providing decent shelter or “affordable and low-cost housing for all.” It would no doubt be deemed preposterous to allege that via such “citizenry-centred” and over-celebrated efforts, they brazenly embezzle public funds.

    So doing, it perpetrates a two-pronged atrocity with chain reactions: it defaults in its promise of “affordable, low-cost housing” and subjects the citizenry to untold hardship characterized by homelessness thus the burgeoning shanties and slum republics prevalent in our most high-profile cities.

    To this, I guess not a few elitists in government and their acolytes within and outside the corridors of power would argue that it is not the duty of the government to put food on everyone’s table. They would argue that the government couldn’t provide decent shelter for all even if it tried. Then they would seek refuge in the workings of capitalism which purportedly provides for every man to fend for himself, according to his means.

    Not a few elite would pertinently state that the persistent failures of their class to facilitate an acceptable human state of affairs in the country are hardly unforgivable failures. They would claim that they merely add up to their inability to fulfill their constitutional obligations due to the “Nigerian factor” and because doing so would impose avoidable inconveniences on them. They would aver that it would be basically inexpedient to fulfill their statutory responsibilities given the unstable and feral nature of Nigeria’s democracy.

    Simply put, it is the moral character that breaks down. How many Nigerians can afford to pay N7 million, N15 million or more cash-down or within a year, to acquire our elite-driven two and three-bedroom contraptions shamelessly dubbed “affordable and low-cost housing estates?

    Truth is, it’s the cronies and associates of serving public officers that are able to afford such conveniences at such ludicrous rates. Once they acquire them, they put them up for lease at rates that makes Shakespeare’s Shylock fundamentally, a saintly man.

    Even in the medieval era, every family owned a shelter sufficient for both its coarser and simplest wants. Today, in Nigeria’s towns and cities, where civilization supposedly prevails, the fraction of those who own houses is negligible. The rest pay an annual rent that basically renders them impoverished and barely able to feed and clothe, not to talk of owning a house.

    The Nigerian elite care less about such issues than about getting one of its own into power. Its members are loyal not to posterity and ideas but to the pursuit and attainment of wealth and power by any means.

    In an ostensibly capitalist country, these self-styled vanguards of capitalism espouse and brazenly perpetrate an oppressive social philosophy that upholds the existence of the average Nigerian as an imperceptible social organism—a view which implies that his needs are not valid instruments for perceiving social reality and improving it.

    So doing, they project themselves as the chosen few supposedly endowed with special insight and ability to direct others. This implies the existence of an elite foundation of knowledge and aristocracy; a socio-political arrangement inaccessible to logic and beneath the mind.

    Notwithstanding its astounding rise to relevance, the Nigerian elite will be toppled off its high horse sooner than it can ever imagine. This is unavoidable in spite of the citizenry’s seeming idiocy and duplicity.

    Preoccupied by pursuits antithetical to national development, the Nigerian elite obviously do not know that it has lost the weaponry that guaranteed its rise to eminence and made all of its conquests possible: idealism and morality. It had to lose them precisely at the height of its success, since its claim to both was a fraud; the evident realities of its politics demonstrate the brute illogicality and inhumanity of its social code and gospel of sacrifice.

    The Nigerian elite do not preach sacrifice as a temporary means to some desirable and lasting end. Sacrifice is its end—the sacrifice of the lives of others. It is the commoner’s independence, prosperity, and happiness that the elite wish to destroy. And it is succeeding in its plot.

     

  • Jonathan’s thoughts on Mandela’s apotheosis

    Jonathan’s thoughts on Mandela’s apotheosis

    They were expecting a moving elegy. Then the tears would come cascading down their chubby cheeks. They would cling to one another in a desperate search for temporary comfort and mumble those soothing words of reassurance that the darkness that had fallen upon the land would soon give way to a clear, sunny sky. After all, it was the funeral of a great man, a giant whose deification many would not contest.

    President Goodluck Jonathan disappointed them all. He chose the occasion of the funeral service for the late Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, anti-apartheid icon, lawyer and former South African President, to lash out last Sunday at his fellow politicians at the Aso Villa Chapel.

    Many were restless in their seats as His Excellency spoke strongly on the virtues of a good politician, particularly the ABC of communication. It was a long extemporaneous speech, dripping with bile and vile, drawing images from the holy book –”it will be easy for a politician to be great than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle” – and analysis of “greatness”. Vitriol? Not quite, but so close.

    The speech was delivered with the fury of a pentecostal preacher, the gesticulations and drama of a Nollywood star and the magisterial postulations of a judge. Who and what provoked such diatribe? In the audience were respected men and women, lawmakers and lawbreakers hiding under the umbrella – sorry, dear reader, no prize for guessing whose umbrella this is – contractors and detractors as well as palace jesters and pranksters.

    “If you listen to those of us who are politicians… some of us speak as if Nigeria is their personal bedrooms that they have control over,” Dr Jonathan said, adding: “Read the papers, listen to the radio… and see how politicians talk; we intimidate, we threaten, show force in our communication. This, definitely, is not the virtue of great men. They are certainly the vices of tiny men.”

    No. Not quite right sir. Politicians talk according to the dictates of the events in the polity. They also study the body language – how they love the phrase – of the leadership and comment accordingly. If elections are rigged, will politicians not deploy the foulest of language to condemn the malfeasance? They will.

    Besides, to me, what the President may have seen as bad communication may not really be. I, like many others, enjoy the creativity and oratory of some of our leaders. The repartee. The sardonic humour. They really know how to choose their words and use them to the fullest effect. Precision.

    The other day in Dutse, Jigawa State, when former Head of State Gen. Abdulsalami Abubakar came visiting, Governor Sule Lamido spoke on the crisis in the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). Party Chairman Bamanga Tukur “is worse than polio virus”, Lamido said. Can you beat that?

    I take it, dear reader, that you know what polio is, its devastating exploits in Nigeria, particularly in the North, and the seemingly endless controversial battle to stop the virus that cripples its victims right from birth.

    When five PDP governors quit the party to join the All Progressives Congress (APC), one of them, Adamawa’s Murtala Nyako, got a tumultuous welcome from his supporters. He reflected on his days in the ruling party and said: “We were like Israelites under the Pharaoh.” The similitude is so striking. It says a lot about the workings of the ruling party.

    After the defection of the five governors, the chairman of the New PDP, Alhaji Kawu Baraje, advised Jonathan to start writing his handover notes. That common expression, which is like a yellow card in soccer, sparked an uncommon debate about the import of the advice. What will such notes contain? Who will draft the all-important document, the cerebral Dr Reuben Abati or the garrulous Ahmed Gulak or the rumbustious Dr Doyin Okupe?

    What will such notes contain? The Under-17 World Cup victory? The Super Eagles triumph at the African Cup of Nations? Privatisation of the power sector? Free and fair elections, as in Ondo State and, most recently, in Anambra State? The well fought anti-corruption battle?

    A committee set up to probe the N255m cars scandal successfully did the job and submitted a report – a feat that would have been impossible if the Jonathan presidency had not vowed to keep its anti-graft war on track, against all odds. Another administration would have simply looked the other way. Not this. Now, the report is safe, filed away in the inner recess of the Villa where no saboteur can tamper with it.

    How about the fight against Boko Haram? If not for the government’s ingenuity, wouldn’t the sect have taken over more states? And SURE-P, the anti-poverty elixir that has become the toast of the country, especially among the multitudes who have been snatched away from the jaws of hunger and swept into eternal prosperity, which is well assured by their pepper grinding machines, okada motorcycles, Keke NAPEP tricycles and donkeys, the very symptoms of the disease that the programme set out to fight. Never mind those critics of the highly successful, but widely maligned programme who say some N500billion of its fortune is missing.

    The Anambra State governorship election sparked a big row. All attempts by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to patch it up ended in more cracks. Despite the popular outcry for the cancellation of the exercise, INEC Chairman Prof Attahiru Jega went on to conduct a supplementary election. In other words, rather than apologise, he repeated the offence. An angry politician remarked that with the Anambra election, Jega had become jagajaga – an onomatopoeic contraption of Jega’s name, signifying an irredeemable confusion. Isn’t that great?

    When the university lecturers’ strike defied all solutions, including an all-night meeting at the Villa, the President came up with a great idea – thanks to his fecund imagination. Why not brand the stubborn fellows with a terrible name and turn the table against them? He called them subversives.

    For long, Niger State Governor Babangida Aliyu shouted that Jonathan signed an agreement to spend one term in office. One term he must spend, he insisted. Asked to produce the agreement, he at first said he would not entertain any question on the matter. Later, he said the paper was with a Southsouth governor. Now Aliyu is no longer talking about that. Neither is he still threatening to defect to the APC – remember he was the leader of the G7, which gave birth to the G-5 after he and Lamido jumped ship. So much for shakara leadership.

    Jonathan, at the service aforementioned, recalled that Mandela refused to yield to pressure to go for a second term. A cheeky fellow, one of the ardent readers of this newspaper whose name I won’t mention so as not to expose him to charges of subversion or a more serious crime in these inventive days, remarked derisively: “See who is talking. Why don’t you, Jonathan, do one term, paint your name on the canvass of greatness and give us some peace? We all talk about 2015 with trepidation? C’mon, you too can be a Mandela.”

    Another fellow recalled that the last time a Nigerian leader was asked to follow Mandela’s example, he did not only reject the unsolicited advice, but he went after the bearer of such a treasonable idea, seized him by the throat and stifled him politically. He then went on to do a second term. He fought a do-or-die battle for a third term, but his well funded design was doomed to fail. It failed.

    Jonathan spoke about Mandela’s spirit of forgiveness. The disgruntled fellow who I had earlier referred to sniggered and said derisively: “Nowadays, we are wiser. We don’t let people commit offences and go through the painful act of forgiveness; we stop them so that when there is no offence, there is no need for forgiveness. Meetings, even of governors, are smashed up and anti-corruption seminars are invaded by the police.

    “And when people go to jail for corruption, we pardon them. So much for forgiveness.”

    Jonathan probably forgot to talk about Mandela’s humility, perhaps the most important of his virtues. From humility flows forgiveness and patience, courage and the kind of stoicism required to endure 27 years incarceration and come out of it all smiling.

    May God give us humble leaders.

    Obasanjo writes Jonathan

    Just as I was writing the last line of this article last night, I got a copy of former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s bitter letter to President Goodluck Jonathan. It is so far the most draconian picture of the Jonathan presidency, a knife driven deep into its heart.

    It will not be wrong to say this is why Jonathan launched into that diatribe on Sunday. He is said to be preparing his response to those huge allegations. I can’t wait to read it.

  • The Mandela years

    Everything he did he did forthrightly and he was always conscious of his place in history. Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was not just a man, he was a special being. His life was inspiring; a life that was full of ups and downs. He took things as they came, believing in his own conviction that at the appropriate time, he will be vindicated. History will surely vindicate this rare human being, who gave as much as he could take. ”The struggle is my life”, he said at the height of his travails in South Africa.

    It was a statement he lived up to in his lifetime. There was no time in his eventful life that he forgot this mantra. He never deviated from it, whether in prison or out of prison. That was what made the man; his associates and followers knew that they could take him for his words. He put others first and himself last. Just as Julius Caesar said in the Shakespeare work of the same title : ”What touches us most shall last be served”. No wonder, the late Madiba fell in love with the book when he read it in prison.

    Mandela was a legend, a hero and an icon all rolled into one. He came ahead of his time. Many may say he should not have been of this earth, but God knew what he was doing by placing him here. The Almighty, perhaps, wanted the world to see Him in Mandela and so sent him to earth and a country where he would be initially treated like a second class citizen before becoming the first citizen. There is a lot to learn from Mandela’s life. His life tells us that it is not over until it is all over. Even Mandela himself, while alive, would have been stunned by the turn of events in his life.

    When he was jailed for life in 1964, the apartheid regime in South Africa then did not mean well for him. The plan was to get him out of the way for life. It was not intended that he would come out of jail. He was meant to rot away there, with his carcasses probably thrown to the dogs after his death. Unknowing to them, Providence had other plans for him because as we have come to see Mandela was the apple of the Lord’s eyes. Like the biblical Joseph, he survived all human antics to achieve God’s purpose for his life. He was beaten, battered, brutalised and tortured, he survived it all to outlive many of his tormentors.

    Indeed, when God has plans for a person, there is no Jupiter on earth that can alter them, except if that person wishes to perish in his foolhardiness. Mandela was the beloved of the Lord, if he was not, he would not have spent 27 years in jail and come out to spend another 23 years in freedom before his death last Thursday. He fought to the end like the true activist that he was. For over one year, he engaged death face to face before succumbing to the master reaper on December 5. He was first hospitalised in December, last year, for lung infections. This recurring ailment saw him in and out of the hospital. The world never gave him a chance of coming out of the hospital alive.

    We had all given up on Madiba that if it was God’s time for him to go then, so be it. After all, he had done his beat. He had beaten a path for not only his compatriots in South Africa, but for the world to follow. Today, the global community is hailing this great citizen of the world because he was a moral compass. No doubt, he had his own foibles, who does not, but Mandela’s goodness and forbearance were out of this world. He was extraordinary human specie. God does not seem to create them like that anymore. How many of us in Mandela’s shoes would have acted the way he did after he regained his freedom from the Victor Verster Prison in 1990? Wouldn’t we have gone after all those that we perceived to be behind our predicament? On becoming president like he did four years after his freedom, wouldn’t we have perpetuated ourselves in office believing that the position is our birthright having ‘suffered’ in jail for 27 years?

    This man did not do that. He was focused on laying the foundation for a stronger South Africa led by blacks. He was an advocate for the young taking up the leadership of their countries in Africa. At the age of 76 when he became South Africa’s president, he felt he was too old for the office, but buckled under pressure to lead his country because the people considered him the natural choice for the exalted seat after all he went through during the apartheid years. South Africa may not have reached there yet, but considering what the country went through in recent memory can we say it has not tried for itself? Today, South Africa is, arguably, the leading country on the continent. The country has Mandela to thank for where it is today.

    Even though a tree does not make a forest, a man can make the difference in the affairs of his country, team or school and we have seen this in the role Mandela played in the struggle to free his people from the yoke of apartheid. The world mourns because he stood for peace, for which he jointly won the Nobel Peace Prize with F.W. de Klerk , respect for human rights and gender balance. It was hard to find fault with Mandela not because he was a saint but because he had this God given grace to win people to his side. His compatriots knew he had his faults but they tolerated him because he was a trusted leader. Whatever Mandela did, he considered his people first. If he had played Tom Quisling, Mandela may not have spent 27 years in jail, but today who will be remembering him?

    Nobody, he would have long been forgotten like other sell – outs in history. Because he had the courage of his conviction and stood to the end, Mandela did not only make history, he was history. Beyond all the outpouring of emotions, the essence of Mandela is best captured in this stanza of Henry Longfellow’s poem, A Psalm of Life : ”Lives of great men remind us we can make our lives sublime, and departing, leave behind us footprints on the sands of time”. If there ever was a great man, here was one. Our leaders have the life of Mandela to learn from so that on their death they can be praised as the late anti – apartheid is being eulogised worldwide today. Here was a Mandela! When comes such another?

  • Black Africa’s deadly curse – 2

    I ended this column last week with a promise to answer some questions today: “First, what is at the root of the Black man’s incapability to hold and properly manage the countries that European colonialists created and bequeathed to us? And second, what does the future hold in store for the Black man in Africa, and for these countries that we are messing around with?”

    Usually, we Black Africans attribute the political failure of our countries to the fact that each of the countries bequeathed to us by European colonialists is made up of many different nationalities. But when we say that, we should remember that inter-ethnic violence and horrendous blood-letting are not commonly characteristic of multi-nation countries in the rest of the world. The United Kingdom, Canada, Switzerland, and India (after the secession of the Islamic peoples of Pakistan and Bangladesh) are multi-nation countries – the United Kingdom since over 500 years, Canada nearly 300 years, Switzerland some 400 years, and India since about 1950 – and none of them is perpetually wracked by inter-ethnic tensions and conflicts.

    So why are our countries in Black Africa almost uniformly different? Why are our nationalities in each country more or less always hostile to one another? The answer is in our chosen method of managing the differences among our many nationalities in each country. That is where we should look. While most multi-nation countries in the rest of the world make it a point to pay due respect to their different nationalities, we in each Black African country try determinedly to suppress our nationalities – in the misguided belief that that is how we can build and unify our countries.

    In the United Kingdom in modern times (starting from about 1603), though the English nation has been the largest nationality, the policy and tradition have been to pay respect to all nationalities, especially the smaller nationalities (the Scotts, the Irish and the Welsh). In constitution making, that policy has gradually translated to granting more and more autonomy to each nationality. And when it became the worldwide trend, since about the beginning of the past century that nationalities wish to have separate countries of their own, the government of the United Kingdom responded in a sensibly respectful manner. First they let the Irish, who were the most eager to have their own country, go and found a Republic of Ireland. Then they granted separate national governments to the Scotts and Welsh in the United Kingdom. And when the Scotts decided that they would want to have a separate country of their own, the British government allowed the Scotts to go on and hold a referendum on the matter. That referendum is now scheduled for September 2014. Countless citizens of the United Kingdom live outside their own particular nation in the country, and do business and have investments where they live. Nobody is threatening or attacking anybody. The United Kingdom continues to run smoothly, and continues to be a great world power. The foundation of it all is the tradition and policy of respect for each nation in the context of the United Kingdom.

    The country of Switzerland frankly acknowledges, and proclaims, that it is not one nation but a country of many nations – many nations that “consent” to live together as a country. In everything – in constitution making, internal constitution and politics of each nation, composition of the federal government, allocation of resources, etc – Switzerland follows that principle diligently. Therefore, Switzerland is stable, peaceful, and prosperous. Virtually the same is true of Canada.

    In India (after the secession of the Islamic northern peoples of Pakistan and Bangladesh), the Indians entered into a big argument about how to organize their country, a country still comprising about 2000 nationalities. Finally, and fortunately, they agreed to pay respect to their nationalities in organizing their country. The large nations became states in the federation, and the small nations that were territorially contiguous were assisted to join and become states. This resulted in 28 states in all. Then the Indians agreed to limit the powers of their federal government to certain common duties, to give a lot of more powers over development and the economy to the states, and to give more to the states than the federal government in revenue allocations (now 85% to the states and 15% to the federal government). Incredibly, this huge country (the largest in territory and the second largest in population in the world) settled down, and began to grow and prosper.

    In contrast, how do we Black Africans try to build our countries? For us “nation building” means refusing to accept the fact that our nationalities are real. And that means creating constitutions, policies and traditions aimed at reducing, subduing and suppressing our nationalities. It means loading as much power as possible, and as much resources and revenue as possible, into the hands of our central governments. In some of our countries where there were federations at independence (such as Kenya), our leaders eliminated federations and established unitary governments. In countries where the nationalities began to demand a federation or some local autonomy after independence (as in Ghana, Uganda, etc), the governments forcibly stamped out the voices making such demands. In countries which are so large territorially and so diverse ethnically as to be impossible to govern from any one centre (such as Congo, Chad, Sudan, Central African Republic, etc), the governments over-ambitiously, recklessly, and foolishly, set out to control everything. The consequence, in nearly all our countries, has been inefficiency, corruption, poverty, failure, conflicts , pogroms, genocide, masses of displaced citizens, the largest and most wretched refugee camps in the world.

    In our country, Nigeria, it was obvious from the very day of independence that the people who controlled our federal government were not prepared to live with the amount of autonomy that our regions were enjoying. In particular, the hostility against the Western Region was immense – all because the Western Region was capable of developing strongly on its own. From the government benches in the Nigerian House of Representatives, threats against the Western Region were heard almost from day one of independence. Finally, the crusade to crush and subdue the Western Region was started in 1962. And since then, the resolute direction of Nigeria’s nation-building has been to pile all power and resources in the hands of the federal government, and to make all states and local governments impotent vassals of the federal government. The policy of breaking up the largest nations and creating more and more states was designed to make the peripheries impotent and the federal government all-powerful. We even reached a stage at which some of the ideologues of federal omnipotence began to preach that our nationalities are myths and that Nigeria, as represented by the federal government, is the only thing that is real.

    This policy of imposing the federal government over everything in our large and ethnically diverse Nigeria has resulted in all sorts of terrible evils –in serious weakness of our states and local governments, deepening poverty, terrible social malaise, crimes, inter-ethnic and religious conflicts, mass killings, foolish claims by some nationalities that they are conquering others, and now a strong possibility that our country will break up.

    If we refuse to learn a lesson from India, Switzerland, Britain, etc, we shall surely lose Nigeria – may be very soon. Some other Black African countries are heading the same way. The coming national conference offers us Nigerians a chance to change our country’s direction. Will we sincerely and sensibly grab that chance?

  • ASUU Vs. smart alecs in government

    That non implementation of an agreement government voluntarily signed with ASUU way back in 2009 following three years of negotiation has led to a strike action now in its fifth month only confirms the fears of most Nigerians- absence of governance and usurpation of power by smart alecs who in the opinion of our God-fearing president can do no wrong. This perhaps explains why the current ASUU crisis has defied solution in spite of intervention of the president, vice president, the federal executive council, the council of state, all of whom we were told had expressed sadness about the state of our university education and canvassed for a radical change.

    But opposed to change is a powerful group made up of the president’s confidants consisting of Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the all powerful minister of finance and the coordinating minister of the economy, secretary to government of the federation, (SGF) Anyim, Pius Anyim, Nyesom Wike, the president’s man Friday and leader of Niger Delta militants fighting the president’s war in Rivers who also doubles as supervising minister of education. We can also add Gabriel Suswam, the chairman of implementation committee of NEEDS Assessment Report.

    Before ASUU embarked on the ongoing strike on July 1, the body, according to Professor Festus Iyayi, late former ASUU president and a patriot, who unfortunately lost his life on his way to Kano in search of solution to the crisis, had written over 200 letters to government. There was also a warning strike in December 2011 which was apprehended by Anyim, who after a meeting in his office, dictated a Memorandum of Understanding to the effect that “instead of N1.5 trillion for the 24 federal universities that had been captured in the 2009 agreement, government will instead provide N1.3 trillion for 61 public universities, covering both federal and state universities.” The said Memorandum also indicated that N100 billion was immediately available, and that N400 billion will be provided for each of the three years beginning in 2013 and ending in 2015″.

    Iyayi also revealed during his last interview before his tragic end in the service of the nation that the NEEDS Assessment exercise was the brain child of the SGF. The report which confirmed how “students use kerosene stoves instead of Bunsen burners in their laboratories, how students excrete into polyethylene bags and throw them through the window, how students stand under trees to receive lectures, evidence of laboratories without water” was later presented to a crest-fallen federal executive council presided over by President Jonathan.

    Again, on the directive of the president, the same embarrassing report was also presented to the National Economic Council chaired by the Vice President, Namadi Sambo”. Arising from this, a technical committee set up with Governor Godswill Akpabio as chairman later presented its report to the Federal Executive Council and the recommendations were approved and then endorsed by the President who directed they should be implemented. That was in February of 2013. The presidential order was ignored by those he has delegated the running of the country to.

    When ASUU finally went on strike on July 1, the government set up a committee headed by Governor Suswam. Others members like the SGF and minister of finance were no strangers to the crisis. But these government officials demonstrated their lack of commitment to the future of our nation by frustrating all ASUU’s patriotic crusade to force government to start rebuilding the educational structure destroyed by the political class during the Babangida, Abacha and Obasanjo years. This self-serving mafia tries to demonise ASUU for pointing out that it is the primary responsibility of the ruling class to lay a solid foundation for education as it is in Europe since the 1600s and old Western Nigeria since the 1950s.

    But tragically, Suswam, Iyayi said was “trying to be a contractor instead of implementing the NEEDS Assessment Report”. Anyim, was said to have “ridiculed the memorandum of Understanding he dictated in his office” On her part, Okonjo-Iweala, the all powerful minister of finance, was reported to have said “I have cash; 30 billion naira cash, I am putting it on the table, take it or leave it. If you don’t take it you can be on strike for the next two or three years”. She talked down on patriotic ASUU leaders and refused to implement a directive fully endorsed by the FEC, the Council of State and the presidency.

    But it is on record that this is the same minister of finance who supervised the deployment of huge government resources to electricity generating firms that have since been sold to members of the political governing elite including leading light of PDP; who had no objection to government expenditure of about three trillions on bail-out of banks that were later sold to some of those who wrecked them; and who approved government expenditure of about 500 billion naira as bailout to the airlines as well as N100 billion for the textile industry, expenditures government recently admitted had gone down the drains.

    Four months into the ASUU strike, the president took time off his tight schedule of foreign trips and managing his PDP family’s vicious war over 2015 to once again intervene in the crisis. Curiously, the intervention led to a 13 hours meeting with ASUU. We will never know what the president discussed for 13 hours but it was obvious it could not have been about a new deal as what came out at the end was not different from existing ASUU 2009 codified agreement with government.

    But if Nigerians had expected the president to descend heavily on those who defied his directive, they were in for a surprise. It is ASUU got the raw end of the president’s anger for demanding proper documentation of the agreement arrived at during the 13 hours marathon meeting. Miffed that ASUU would not take him for his words, our angry president has decreed the university teachers call off the strike, resume work or count themselves sacked with effect from December 9.

    If the president momentarily forgot he is an elected president and not Jerry Rawlings of Ghana who he probably envies for shutting down his country universities for a year, or despicable dictator like Abacha who insisted his words must be law, one would have thought those paid through the public purse to prevent the president from becoming a threat to himself and the state, would come to his assistance. But sadly they are in fact the ones fuelling the crisis that was about to end.

    A Wike, acting minister of education, who as a round peg in a square hole is not expected to give what he has not got, predictably merely dusted up the strategy he had successfully used to mobilize ex-Niger Delta militants and workers of his dissolved LGA to prevent Governor Rotimi Amaechi, his former benefactor from ‘sleeping with his two eyes closed’. He is trying to adopt the same strategy to force university professors and their vice chancellors back to work. For good measure, he has been deploying the language of militants to get his message across. Had Wike been able to rise beyond being just the president’s ‘man Friday’, he would have shielded the president by allaying the fears of ASUU. His sole objective would have been getting ASUU to call off the strike.

    Then Dr Doyin Okupe was brought in to do what he knows how to do best, boasting, blowing hot and cold, and verbally assaulting the president’s perceived enemies with his caustic tongue. Were Okupe to be competent, sincere and not an accessory to federal government politics of subterfuge, his objective would have been getting the information he claimed to have to ASUU, leaving it with no choice but to call off the strike.

    And finally if we are still looking for evidence of absence of governance in our country, the president himself provided that. He woke up one morning and in one fell swoop sacked 10 ministers including that of education sector which remains the only key to our future. Three months down the line, the president carries on as if to confirm the fears of Nigerians that our nation is managed by a small group of conmen who have by their antecedents demonstrated they care for anyone but themselves.

     

  • New trends in higher education

    In October, I attended the centenary celebration of the Association of Commonwealth Universities in London, England and for four-days we were engaged in discussing current and future trends as well as problems of higher education. Everybody seemed to have agreed that a universal problem confronting higher education was adequate funding. If this is true of developed countries, one can imagine the problems in developing countries. It is common knowledge that the British and the American governments have been cutting back on funding of higher education in an attempt to balance their budget or reduce their deficits as the case may be. But most universities in the western world are almost self-financing without relying solely on government. In Great Britain, the grants committee still largely funds universities, but substantial amount of funding is derived from school fees and recently, from expensive tuition fees charged on foreign students.

    In the largely market driven economies of the United States and Canada, states’ intervention in funding even though substantial is not proportionately on the scale of that of Great Britain. Famous universities in the U.S like Harvard, Yale, MIT, Columbia, Cornell and the Californian University system, particularly, UCLA and Berkeley charge as much as $45,000-$60, 000 a year. Most famous universities in the Western world like Oxford, Cambridge and the American counterparts gets generous donations from Corporations, successful alumni and bequests from public-spirited capitalists. But in spite of these, many poor people still find it difficult sending their children to universities without bankrupting themselves and sometimes, young graduates have to spend years in payment of debts accumulated during their undergraduate days. In these days of global unemployment, this has become a serious challenge to young people as well as a cause for frustration. This led the Governors of Florida and Texas on two separate occasions to call on their university communities to reduce the cost of higher education to not more than $10,000 a year per student and they went ahead to suggest the way this can be done was by making many of the courses available on-line and that where necessary, students can then go in to write exams or do practicals at minimal cost at existing colleges. There is no doubt in my mind that the future of higher education lies in e-learning and the Americans are already showing the way for all others to follow. The challenge for us in the developing world would of course be infrastructure. We would need electricity and ICT infrastructure to do e-learning.

    This then takes me back to the conference in London where there was a presentation on this particular issue and we were told that within the next decade, there would only be a few mega-universities with famous brands from which most people in the world would want their degrees. It is obvious that most of these universities may be American universities and that present campuses of other universities all over the world may be turned into examination halls and laboratories for practical training necessary to earn the degrees of these mega-universities. We were told that most young people in the world if they have the opportunity would want to have the degrees of Harvard, Yale, Cambridge or Oxford. This does not seem so far-fetched because after all, up till 1963, students at the University College, Ibadan were earning London degrees with their papers being partly marked in Nigeria and London. If this were to happen, would this lead to a drastic reduction in the cost of higher education? Of course the answer is yes because many of the current overheads would be radically reduced, but I have a feeling, that if this were to happen, it would first happen in the developed world and it would take a few decades before it happens in Nigeria.

    One of the most startling revelations that I want to share with my reading public was what the former Minister of Higher Education in Pakistan told the Conference. He said that when President Pervez Musharraf invited him to his cabinet to take care of higher education, he asked him pointedly whether the President would give him a free hand, he said, the President said he has his word of honour to revolutionize higher education in Pakistan. He said the first thing he did was to look at the salary structure and recommended to the president that the salary of a professor should be five times the salary of a cabinet minister and the President agreed. With this kind of comfortable salary, he said the contribution of Pakistanis to higher education rose by geometric proportion and that the world this through recognises through the scientific publications and innovations of Pakistani academics.

    Those of us who are old enough know that what our colleague from Pakistan was saying was not unheard of even in Nigeria. At the time of my youth, Professors at the University of Ibadan were earning the same salary as federal ministers, which means that they were earning more money than regional ministers. Vice-Chancellors were in a different world and were administering Nigerian universities here at home and whenever they went on heir statutory three-month vacation in England, they had offices in London from where they administered Nigerian universities. Lecturers, even junior lecturers had opportunity to spend, apart from sabbatical leaves abroad, short study-leaves as well, all paid for by their universities. Those were the days. One cannot be too nostalgic about the past because the past is gone, but the present should be an improvement on the past. If conditions in Nigerian universities are bad today, we should ask ourselves why they should be so bad as to lead to the closure of Nigerian universities for five months. The reason for the bad situation may be connected to the attitude of our staff and students who want to cut corners and have money without working hard. It could also be due to the fact that there are too many universities and governments, both federal and states are not helping by the indiscriminate establishment of universities. Universities are now established as part of dividends of democracies and centres for development rather than need and national affordability.

    Perhaps in agreement with our London conference, we should be thinking of mega-universities in Nigeria offering courses online while the mushroom universities recently established become mere centres of examinations and laboratory practices. The time may have come for a summit on higher education in Nigeria in tandem with what is going on in many other parts of the world.

     

  • Another class story (2)

    There is a patience of the wild that holds motionless for endless hours the motorist at the police checkpoint, the kidnapper in his lair, the assassin in his ambuscade and the public officer in his perch – this patience belongs primarily to the predator while it hunts its prey.

    Oftentimes, it manifests in uncontrollable spasms that have seen us bury our best and elevate our worst in abject negation of the cycle of the universe and morality. But who needs morals in a nation where fair is foul and foul remains fair?

    A great majority of Nigerians of commonplace roots live through each day without ever contemplating or criticizing their living conditions. They find themselves born into dehumanizing squalor or somewhat indecent circumstances and they accept such sordidness as their fate – thus they exhibit no conscious effort to better their lot beyond what their immediate circumstances dictate.

    Almost as impulsively as the beasts of the wild, they seek the satisfaction of the needs of the moment, without much forethought and consideration that by sufficient endeavor, they just might improve their living conditions.

    However, a certain percentage – constituted by men and women of higher status among the nation’s working class – guided by personal ambition, consciously strive in thought and will to attain more privileged status that remains the exclusive preserve of more fortunate members of the society; but very few among these are concerned enough to secure for all, the advantages which they seek for themselves. This explains the number of self-centred and treacherous human rights activists, women’s rights activists, journalists and columnists parading our streets.

    Very few men are indeed capable of that kind of love that drives martyrs to persistently rebel against glaring social evils in the interest of less fortunate members of the society. But there exists a few however, that are truly bothered by the impoverishment of their fellow citizens occupying the lower rung of the societal ladder regardless of any risk or discomfort it might attract to them personally.

    These few, driven by compassion tirelessly seek, first in thought and then in action, for some way of escape; some new system of society by which life may become richer, more joyful and devoid of avertable evils that mars the present. But surprisingly, such men oftentimes, fail to curry the support of the very victims of the injustices they wish to remedy.

    More unfortunate sections of the Nigerian population are hopelessly ignorant, apathetic from excess of toil and disillusionment, apprehensive through the imminent danger of instantaneous chastisement by the holders of power, and morally defective owing to the loss of self-respect resulting from their degradation. To excite among such classes any conscious, deliberate effort in pursuit of general improvement of the status quo proves basically a hopeless task, as antecedents of such efforts have proven.

    Thus despite our claims to modernity, higher education, sophistication and relative rise in the standard of comfort among wage-earners in the country, the Nigerian society or working class to be precise, have failed woefully to achieve better living conditions and a better society even in the throes of rising demand for more radical intervention and reconstruction of the social order.

    It is no surprise however that the Nigerian working class has persistently proved a dismal failure. And the reasons are hardly far-fetched: Nigerians have a problem with differentiating between appropriate and inappropriate political behavior. That is why the nation’s democratic experiment like any other system of governance practicable by us was doomed from the start.

    What exactly has democracy offered? A 4-1-9 progressive plan that booms circumspectly like it had been doctored as part of a cold-war era propagandist scheme? But despite our self-righteousness and persistent cynicism with the current order, we really cannot explore a more worthy alternative than what we have now. The average Nigerian can’t bear to be led by a truly honest, visionary and accountable leadership. That explains why we opted for the incumbent leadership.

    It’s the way we are programmed to live. I’d say we possess an overwhelming and oft-convincing inclination to self-destruct, thus our lack of a coherent and defensible political ideology essential to the evolution of a progressive leadership and state.

    The average Nigerian is no more electable than the leadership he endures yet he loves to speak truth to power even as he functions simultaneously to smother his own voice in the riotous gabble of his exultation of the same ruling class whose end he claims to pursue. No matter who is elected, the demographic and economic realities of Nigeria will persist, and there is a very limited range of politically-viable solutions for dealing with them.

    No man; be he a distinguished columnist, lawyer, soldier, or public officer in any office can command the tides of history. The few that appear to have done so–the Napoleon’s, Caesar’s, Hitler’s–were really nothing more than the most capable at making it appear that they command the tides, when in fact they were simply skimming along with them.

    Thus the need for the Nigerian working class to consciously evolve in thought and will in pursuit of a more balanced social order. Such conscious evolution could only be achieved by a re-orientation in scholarship and purification of thought and action.

    The foundations of scholarship and knowledge must tirelessly reconstructed to guarantee more progressive responses to internal problems of social advance — problems of work and wages, of families and homes, of morals and the true value of life; and all these and other inevitable problems of civilization must be resolvable largely by an average member of the working class by reason of his exposure and constitution. This informs a greater need for study and thought and an appeal to the rich experience of past and current mistakes in the journey towards the avoidance and reduction to the barest minimum of future foibles.

    The answer to Nigeria’s widening income and social gap – which has so far manifested in preventable crises and persistent state of insecurity – is to found an educational process geared to steer successfully, the commonplace trains of thought away from the dilettante and the fool stereotype.

    It’s about time poor, struggling members of the nation’s working class learned to scorn the maxim that holds that if their stomachs be full, it matters little about their brains; the paths to stable peace and security winds between honest toil and dignified manhood. That proverbial better society that we seek calls for the guidance of skilled thinkers, the loving, reverent comradeship between the low income earners and ambitious middle class emancipated by training and culture.

    Such human elements would no doubt be conscious of the fact that not even the sustenance of oil subsidy, higher wages and a fairer economic system could protect its members from the usual handicaps and monstrosity constituted by the incumbent and predatory ruling class.

    Hence they would be able to understand that such social enterprise and gesture towards change must be mooted and achieved by the working class itself in further substantiation of the working class’ capacities to assimilate the culture and common sense of modern civilization, and to pass it on, to some extent at least, to posterity.

     

  • A tribute to Sir Michael Oladele Fafowora (1928-2013)

    I do not normally write public tributes, particularly to my own relations. I find doing so very painful, and I like to keep my private grief to myself. But I was shocked and saddened by the sudden and unexpected death on Sunday, September 1, in Maryland, USA, of Sir Michael Oladele Fafowora. He was my beloved paternal uncle, the youngest brother of my late father, Chief Olagunju Asaolu Fafowora. He was a man of the world, a well travelled and successful businessman. I had called and spoken to him in Maryland, in the USA, where he was on vacation, the day before he died. He seemed hail and hearty and told me two of his daughters, Jumoke and Tolu, a medical doctor, were getting married in the US, and that he was returning home soon, before Christmas, for their marriage engagements here in Ilesa. He died the next day. There was no inkling of his imminent death. Although he was 85, he had generally good health, and I believed he had many more useful years ahead of him. He will be buried at Ilesa on Saturday, December 14, after a funeral service at the Cathedral of the African Church.

    Uncle Dele, as he was fondly called in the family, was born on 31st March, 1928, in Ilesa, the youngest of the six sons of his father, my own grandfather, Pa Asaolu Fafowora, and the only son of his mother, Madam Dorcas Olateju Fafowora. He had an older sister, Mama Dokun, now deceased, and a younger sister, Auntie Lape, Mrs. Latinwo, who survives him. Of his siblings, she was the closest to him and was in Maryland with him when Uncle Dele passed on. Among his surviving cousins are Pa Adebayo Fafowora, an Architect and, at nearly 90, the head of the Fafowora family, Mr. Kayode Fafowora, a lawyer and former deputy Director General of the Nigerian Customs Services, Mr. Akinloye Fafowora, a Chartered Accountant, Mr. Suji Fafowora, a retired head of the FAO operations in the old Western Region of Nigeria, Mr. Sanya Fafowora, an Accountant, and Mr. Akinlolu Fafowora, a former Accountant in the Nigerian Foreign Service. His nephews and nieces include Mr. Gabriel Adesoji, a Chartered Accountant, Chief (Mrs.) Dupe Fafowora-Oseghale, a former Chairman of the Isolo Council, Hon. Folarin Fafowora, a member of the Osun State House of Assembly, and Femi Fafowora, a prominent lawyer in Ilesa. All of them held him in high esteem.

    Uncle Dele had a very good parental pedigree of which he was immensely proud. His father, late Pa Samuel Asaolu Fafowora, was a highly successful and wealthy business man in Ilesa in his time. In the 1920s, he already had a fleet of six lorries plying the Lagos, Ibadan, Benin route. His mother, Madam Dorcas Olateju Fafowora, hailed from the well known Ajayi Oromu family of Ilesa. Uncle Dele had a very privileged and happy childhood. Being the youngest and last son of his father, everyone in the family loved and doted on him. He lacked nothing. He grew up to be an independent, proud and immensely confident man. As a young lad, he had access to his father’s cars and stable of horses which he rode all over Ilesa to the admiration of every one in town. He was one of the finest horse riders that I knew and admired. Whenever I visited Ilesa from Lagos where I lived with my parents, he would place me on the horse and give me a ride all over Ilesa. I was thrilled and it was an experience I never forgot. Until recently, I had a photograph of the two of us on his father’s horse. That was how he and I first bonded.

    After his primary school education in Ilesa, he entered the Ilesa Grammar School where he completed his secondary school education in 1952. Thereafter, he worked as a clerk at the Ilesa Town Council. It was from there that in 1961 he proceeded to the Bolton Institute of Technology in England to study automobile engineering, which he successfully completed in 1966, on the sponsorship of the old Western Region government. It was from London that he was recruited into the Nigeria Police Force as a Vehicle Inspection Officer (VIO). In that capacity, he served all over the old Western Region and became well known. In 1977, after 10 years, he decided to retire from the Nigeria Police Force. He had become disenchanted with the Police and decided to go into business in which he was quite successful. He started by importing the British car, Chevy, for which he had a franchise, into Nigeria. He had inherited his father’s knack for business. His car business, Osue Motors, flourished and he diverted into other businesses in which he was equally successful.

    Uncle Dele was a good family man. He was blessed with many children and loved them dearly. He always wanted the best for his children who, in turn, requited his love and care for them. His expectations of them, particularly, Niyi, his eldest son, were quite high. He had many friends in Ilesa all of whom held him in high esteem. His maternal cousins include Justice Oluborode, former Chief Judge of Osun State, Chief Tunde Ibironke, now deceased, a former Director General of the Nigerian Law School, and late Mr. Ogun Ogundipe, a Permanent Secretary in Osun State. He was immensely focused in life and had no time for frivolities of any kind. He was taciturn, reticent, and deeply private man and never meddled in the affairs of others. He respected their privacy and usually kept his counsel to himself.

    He was a self-effacing man and disliked any kind of personal publicity, or humbug. I was surprised later when I discovered that he had been marginally engaged in politics. He was generally well informed about public affairs, and had been Senator Moji Akinfenwa’s deputy in the AD in Ilesa. He made an immense financial contribution to the Party in Ilesa, but he never sought an elective office, preferring to stay in the background instead. Chief Bisi Akande, the former AD Governor of Osun State, once told me of my uncle’s immense financial support for the AD in Osun State. Many crucial political meetings were held at his sprawling Ilesa GRA residence. Chief Bisi Akande told me he spent many nights in my uncle’s house usually after their late night meetings. He actually tried to get me involved in politics for a while, and almost succeeded.

    In later years, as he grew older, he became more devoted to his church, the African Cathedral Church, in Ilesa, where his own father, Asaolu, was converted to Christianity, and baptised in November, 1917, with his entire family. He made a lot of financial and moral contribution to the Church, in recognition of which he was knighted. For many years he donated one of his houses at Ilesa to the Bishop of the African Church there as his official residence. His brother, late Pa Olagunju Idowu Fafowora, my own father, was for nearly twenty years the Baba Ijo of the Church. Uncle Dele was very proud of the Fafowora family and had a prominent place in it. He has, by his death, left a big and yawning gap that will be difficult to fill. He was the bridge between the older generation in the family and the younger generation. He has left a good and inspiring legacy to his children and family of which we are all proud.

    Adieu, Uncle Dele. Sleep well in the bosom of God.

  • On the national conference

    The calling for a national conference by the President in his recent independence broadcast has generated a lot of comments. Some have wondered why the sudden conversion of the President and the president of Senate to the idea of a national conference when for the past three years he has resisted the idea. Critics of the President have suggested that this is a political move on his part to manipulate the politics of Nigeria towards his re-election in 2015. Some even see some sinister move on his part to grant resource control through the conference to the oil-producing South-south where he comes from. On the other hand, some have hailed the action of the President on the grounds that it is never too late to change. After all, Saul who was a persecutor of Christians later became Paul the Apostle. Those who have called for conference for many years to decide and determine the future of Nigeria have also hailed the President for acceding to their request. The situation unfortunately, has now been complicated by the APC’s decision to boycott the conference. I’m totally against this call for boycott. It is better to discuss our affairs and to try and find ways and solutions to complex political situations than bury our heads in the sand and think that the problems would go away. This may not be the intended purpose of the boycott but the result will tend to validate that intention.

    I personally believe that we must explore and exploit all ways and avenues to force the hands of government to change course in this country or we would all be consumed by the Fire Next Time. I believe a conference can develop its own internal dynamics just like any revolution and those with secret agenda would not be able to contain it. This should be the tactic all those who want something concrete from the conference should adopt. Of course, critics are right to say that whatever is decided should not go to the National Assembly whose members were largely rigged in, but that it should be subject to a national referendum and that whatever “we the people” decide should become the supreme law. The question of two sovereigns at the same time should not arise. Once the referendum has passed, the President through a presidential proclamation would bring the resolution into law and call for new elections into the various organs that the conference would have decided upon. If the APC sticks to its guns that it would not participate, what we would then have is a document produced not by the first eleven, but by people on the reserve seats. This would not be in the interest of the country. I think the APC should think all over it again and go to the conference determined to take control of the discussion rather than standing outside the conference and expecting things to go wrong.

    Beatrice and Sydney Webb of the famous Fabian school believed that “it is better for revolutionaries to permeate political bodies from within rather than to stand outside them shouting at the deaf”. I have always been guided by the Fabian theory and practice and I think all political animals should be guided by them. Our country can be a great country. The economic fundamentals of this country are solid. We’ve got the resources and the people. What is lacking is leadership and determination on the part of leadership to force our nation to realise its full potentialities. We should not wait until this house of Nigeria has fallen before we begin to salvage it. We now have an opportunity in the national conference and I believe we should seize the moment.

    Events in other parts of the world should show us that there is no point sitting on the fences. We should look at countries like Greece, Egypt, Pakistan, which are collapsing into irrelevance and chaos. We are just too many, 170 million of us for experimentation, because if our country were to collapse, where would 170 million people go as refugees? Prevention is better than cure. We have an opportunity to prevent sure political debacle and economic disintegration through this conference and deciding to take necessary precaution to avoid tragic end to the Nigerian project. This is not the time to play politics; it is the time for statesmanship. All Nigerians should support discussion at the national conference and taking positive decisions to change the course of our national development. If after we would have given our support, the political leaders in government today decides to subvert the wishes of the people, then the consequences and the blood of our people would be on their heads.

    Choosing those who would represent the people may be problematic, but I think we should use the current population to decide the representation of the states. Critical stakeholders like labour, universities, and even students should be represented by their leaders. Government in its wisdom may also want to select some leaders of the two main monotheistic religions of Christianity and Islam to represent special interest. This idea of people representing ethnic and tribal entities is totally unnecessary because after all whatever ethnic or tribal groups that Nigeria may have are already represented at state levels.

    One of the issues that this conference should be seized with would be the whole question of revenue allocation, fiscal federalism or resource control as it is popularly known. There should be discussion on consumption and value-added taxation. There should also be discussion on the system of government itself. It has become obvious to many Nigerians that the present presidential system of Nigeria is too expensive and concentrates too much power in the hands of government executives at local, state and federal levels. We should also raise the issue of devolution of power and resources from the federal to the states and local governments. We must also settle forever that it is the states coming together to form the federal government and not the federal government creating states. In other words, there can be no room for federal intervention in local government creation and financing. That should belong to the states’ jurisdiction. So the talk of three-tier system of government is an aberration. We can only have states and the federal government relating in a mutually beneficial way. We should also be discussing whether to go back to parliamentary system of government and cabinet government of collective responsibility and where members of the cabinet would also be members of the house and the President or Prime Minister would be the leader of the majority party in the house and would be subjected to routine questions and enquiry about reasons for government action by a virile opposition in the house. This is of course a cheaper system of government, and the disconnect which currently exists between the executives and the legislatures would be done away with.

    The present concentration of power on a presidential Poobah, which makes our president the most powerful of all presidents in the world would undergo radical transformation. The jurisdiction of each level of government would also be discussed and agreed upon to eliminate the anomaly of a federal Ministry of Agriculture when the federal government has no land of its own apart from Abuja. The starting point of the discussion should be the independence constitution of 1960 which was the only constitution that our political leaders agreed upon without guns pointing to their heads. These are the issues which must be discussed and agreed upon so that the energies of our people can be released for positive development of the sciences and the arts and so that we can stop talking about constitutions while other countries of the so called developing world are already sending probes to Mars.