The Nation Newspaper

Category: Thursday

  • When presidents fight

    When presidents fight

    Former President Olusegun Obasanjo has a way of dealing with his protégés when they fall out of line. He doesn’t call to talk to them, especially when the issue at stake is in the public domain; he rebukes them in the open, probably for the benefit of the people who he believes should know where he stands. No doubt these people would have preferred that he called them in private and say whatever he likes to them, but Baba doesn’t do things that way.

    Obasanjo seems to get a kick from ridiculing his ‘boys’ in public and I have tried to hazard a guess as to why he does this, without success. Could it be because they don’t listen to him when he advises them in camera? Could it be because he wants to be seen as pro-people? Obasanjo pro-people? It sounds somehow because he is not known to be a man who shows concern for the people, except it is politically motivated.

    Really, why does Obasanjo take delight in talking down to sitting presidents when he has unrestrained access to them? Assuming he was in those people’s shoes, how will he feel if he was at the receiving end? Knowing Obasanjo for who he is, he would never allow such attacks to go without a fight. Presidents are a cult of sorts. Whether serving or not, they bond together, meeting and conversing at forums exclusively meant for them. Such forums should provide a veritable ground for an ex to advise a sitting president and avail him of his own experience while in office.

    With his native intelligence, Obasanjo may think that such forums are not appropriate for the discussion of certain sensitive matters under which we can categorise his castigation of his one-time minions for perceived poor handling of the affairs of state.

    Ask former military president Ibrahim Babaginda; ask the late President Umar Yar’Adua and now President Goodluck Jonathan has got the length of Obasanjo’s tongue. In 1986, Obasanjo tore Babaginda apart over the military dictator’s Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP), which the gap-toothed general said had no alternative.

    SAP as an economic policy was harsh and Nigerians groaned under it. The late Chief Gani Fawehinmi (SAN), who in his characteristic manner , tried to provide an alternative through enlightened debate was arrested and kept in detention for long. Thus, other Nigerians were cowed from speaking out on the issue. Like a bolt out of the blue, Obasanjo descended on Babaginda and his SAP.‘’Any economic policy’’, he said, ‘’must have human face and milk of kindness’’.

    Any policy, which does not pass this test, is not worth it, he said matter of factly to the admiration of Nigerians. In the heat of the crisis caused by the illness of the late Yar’Adua, Obasanjo was on song again. Responding to criticisms that he foisted a sick man on the nation, Obasanjo absolved himself of blame. He said he could not be held responsible for the way the late Yar’Adua turned out in office.

    Taking a shot at the late Yar’Adua, who he went round the country campaigning for in 2009, Obasanjo said if someone is given a job to do and he knows that he is not fit to do that job, the best thing is to call it quits. Obasanjo said : ‘’If you take up an assignment, a job, elected, appointed; whatever it is, and then your health starts to fail and you will not be able to deliver to satisfy yourself and to satisfy the people you are supposed to serve, then there is a path of honour and the path of morality’’.

    It was an unkind cut because Obasanjo cannot feign ignorance about the late president’s health challenge, but that did not stop him from speaking out in public then. If Obasanjo could not be restrained from talking by the late Yar’Adua’s health challenge, how can President Jonathan, who has no such problem expect Obasanjo to keep quiet if he believes that things are not going on well in the country.

    Does the Obasanjo that Jonathan knows behave like that? No, he doesn’t. Obasanjo is known for calling a spade a spade, whether you like it or not. So, he was simply behaving true to type when he took Jonathan to the cleaners over his handling of the Boko Haram insurgency.Baba did not say anything new as we all know that Jonathan has been too soft in his handling of the delicate Boko Haram issue.

    The president is only being

    cautious in his approach,

    but do the group and its backers appreciate this? It is good to be meek and gentle, but it is not noble to allow that gentility to be taken for granted, at least not in this Boko Haram case.

    The group needs to be handled with iron hand and this is the message Obasanjo was trying to pass across by criticising the president. So far, Jonathan has taken it too easy with the group. Truly, going by his track record, if Obasanjo were to be in charge, things would not have been handled this way.Give it to Baba.

    With his military background, he would have taken some drastic actions, which by now, may have changed the course of events. It may not have necessarily ended the Boko Haram insurgency, but the point would have been made that no group can just wake up one day and resolve to wage war against the society for no just reason without paying the price.

    Of course, there would have been some collateral damage, but a message would have been sent across. What is the message that Jonathan is sending across with his handling of the group’s excesses? I’m sorry to say there is none whatsoever and that is the truth.Rather than see Obasanjo’s broadside as an attack on his administration, Jonathan should see it as a wake-up call to do something about this Boko Haram insurgency before things become worse than they are.

    There is no need for him to go to battle with Obasanjo over this issue. The group that he should do battle with is Boko Haram and the sooner he faces this enormous challenge the better for us all. Whether the Odi invasion was a failure or not, one thing is certain, we had a president who rose to the challenge of the time and did something.

    The question posterity will ask Jonathan is what did he do when his country was burning under the Boko Haram threat? Will he want to be remembered like Nero who fiddled while Rome was burning? It is not enough for Mr President to lament the invasion of the seat of power by Boko Haram elements; what the nation expects him to do is to fish out these people and bring them to justice.

    May God grant him the will to do this.

  • Islamic insurgency in the West African Sahel

    The Sahara desert has historically not been a hindrance to people’s movement from North to south and vice versa and from East to West. Events happening in one part of the Sahel (shore of the desert) eventually reverberate in other parts of the Sahel. The camel euphemistically called the ‘sheep of the desert’ has always provided means of transportation across the desert. Goods like gold and even slaves and kolanuts have usually found their ways into the Maghreb and beyond through Trans Saharan trade routes. Whilst goods made in the Maghreb and Europe and the Middle East have always found their way into the savannah and rain forest regions.

    By the 14th century or even before that time the Arabic script and its local variant, the ajami were widely used in Kano and Katsina, Goa and Timbuktu as a result of diffusion of arab and Islamic culture into these areas. Islamic civilization flourished in the savannah and the Sahel to the point that the Islamic centre of Sankore in Timbuktu provided a training school for the ulama of many cities in the savannah and Sahel. Many of the products sold in morocco for example, the famous Moroccan leather were actually goat skins from Gobir and Zamfara. The point being made is that modern international frontiers are relatively new in these parts of Africa. The people still move easily across national frontiers without realizing they are moving from one country to another. This is why the infiltration of West Africa by Al-Qaeda in the Maghreb, Al-shabab from Somalia into the Sahel and our own home grown boko haram with possible external links are now causes for worry.

    We now have a situation in Mali where the Toubou or taureg people have taken over the northern part of Mali and are destroying sacred burial grounds of the past Islamic leaders as a part of salafist opposition to the Islamic shrines which they see as anti-Islamic. The city of Timbuktu in particular is being destroyed as part of this salafist campaign and a part of the West African civilization is crumbling before our very eyes. But what is actually very dangerous is the division of Mali along ethnic and racial lines. The area being claimed by the secessionist group in Mali is not coterminous with racial divide between Tuareg and Blacks. In any case, the tuaregs are a wandering people without any particular homeland that can be said to be their original home. In which case, their new country in northern Mali will be a replication of Mauritania where blacks and moors live together in an unhappy marriage.

    The situation in the Sahel as a whole, not just northern Mali, has become a cause for worry for important players in the global community particularly the North Atlantic Powers. America and France in particular, have strategic interest in this part of the world. Since the collapse of Libya under NATO pressure, a lot of arms have found their ways into the hands of insurgents in the sahelian part of West Africa including our own part of the Sahel. This is why we have a community of interest with the countries in the west to impose a pax Africana on the Sahel. The UN Security Council is seized with the question of peace in northern Mali and the Sahel as a whole. If Al-Qaeda in the Maghreb is not stopped in Mali, then the same situation will repeat itself in Niger, our Northern neighbor and also in Chad in our North- East where there has been a history of rebellion by their Saharan tribes.

    What is to be done? ECOWAS is being prodded and goaded into sending troops into Mali so that the country can assert its sovereignty over its territory including the secessionist northern Mali. This will be in consonance with the Africa Charter of the AU which enjoins on all African Countries to respect their colonial boundaries. Once this principle of inviolability of international borders is breached, no one can predict where it will lead. It certainly could lead to irredentist wars in Africa because of the artificiality of our borders. This is why the secession in northern Mali is not in any body’s interest. It has also been suggested that drug traffickers are beginning to use this territory as transit camps to the Maghreb and southern Europe. The flow of arms into these areas can also destabilize the whole of West Africa and lead to the collapse of many states and consequential movement of huge population that can destabilize the entire world. The armed rebels in possession of hand carried missiles may pose threat to civil aviation across the Sahara desert.

    The US and France are apparently prepared to provide logistical support for military intervention in Mali. For this purpose, an ECOWAS force of 3000 soldiers is being assembled to which Nigeria would probably contribute some battalions. Exactly how many soldiers would be necessary to achieve success has not been fathomed out, but anybody with a sense of military history should know that the kind of force that would be needed is not going to be one or two brigades but perhaps a division or two. The area involved is larger than France even though sparsely populated. In other to effectively occupy the area and to uproot these ‘dessert rats’, one would need to defeat them in detail. After their defeat, there will be need for an effective occupation. It seems to me that the ECOWAS leaders have not grasped this. In the history of Chad that we know, France was never throughout its colonial days able to hold the area together. And since 1945 to the present day, the government has not been able to do this. This is simply because of the hostile environment which is comparable to Mali.

    It is hoped that the West African force when it goes into Mali, will receive massive French and American logistical assistance particularly the provision military helicopters and combat aircrafts so that what the ground troops will be used for will effectively be mop-up operations. Anything outside this is doomed to fail. ECOMOG was not able to defeat rebels in Liberia and Sierra-Leone without the support of the UN and the additional intervention of British forces in Sierra-Leone in particular. And this is an area much more militarily hospitable than the inhospitable environment of the desert where ECOWAS troops will be fighting much more formidable opponents with the knowledge of the environment and a foe also driven by the fervor of Islamic fanaticism.

    There is perhaps no option other than military intervention. ECOWAS cannot simply acquiesce with the dismemberment of a fellow member. But in intervening, it must aim at success because failure will not only expose the organization’s weakness, it will encourage either secessionist forces to rear up their ugly heads. But for me parroting General Colin Powell, no country or group of countries should embark on a military expedition until it has overwhelming power to compel success. A force of 3000 troops in a desert the size of Northern Mali is in my own estimation not overwhelming enough and it seems to me an invitation to failure or to a war of attrition lasting many years.

  • Kagame in Nigeria

    Kagame in Nigeria

    Rwandan President Paul Kagame was in Nigeria two weeks ago on a private visit at the invitation of a local Foundation. It was his first visit to Nigeria. The highlight of his short visit was the Spring Lecture on Public leadership of the Oxford and Cambridge Club of Nigeria, which he delivered at the Eko Hotel in Lagos.

    The Spring Lecture, an annual event, is a tradition shared by the two great British Universities. I was delighted to attend the lecture which was well attended by other Oxbridge graduates and their guests. I have visited the country before and I was eager to hear directly from President Kagame a personal account of recent developments in Rwanda, and how it emerged successfully from the tragic event of the genocide there a decade ago.

    President Kagame spoke enthusiastically and with justifiable pride and passion about the phenomenal economic and political progress achieved since he took over power in Rwanda, after the horrifying genocide that virtually destroyed the country. Rwanda is no longer a pariah state. Under his watch, the country is ostensibly more stable now. There is a general sense of normalcy there, though tribal violence and conflict remain a potent threat to its future stability. Rwanda appears to have put its ugly and dark past behind it. Some of the major economic transformation in Rwanda in recent years is being highlighted in the global media as a good example of sound economic management. Its growth rate in recent years has averaged eight per cent. This is striking as President Kagame came to power in the most inauspicious circumstances, after nearly a decade of civil war and genocide in Rwanda, in which nearly one million Tutsis, the minority tribe, were slaughtered by the Hutus, the majority tribe. The violence was a revenge for the 1972 slaughter by the Tutsi of some 200,000 Hutus, an event that attracted little global attention at the time. This time, the Tutsi genocide stirred the conscience of the world. Its primitive and horrifying savagery was incredible, even by African standards. It was worse than the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. It was the worst in Africa’s long history of bloody civil conflicts. But, like the recovery of Nigeria after its bloody civil war, Rwanda’s recovery from the tragic event and the deep seated tribal hatred that caused the genocide has been hailed and admired widely all over the world. Africans tend to forgive and forget more readily than other races.

    In general, poor people tend to forgive and forget more easily, since their means of vengeance is limited. But as Chinua Achebe’s recent controversial book, ‘There was once a Country, and the response to it have shown, the victims of violence do not forgive and forget completely. They simply wait for the right moment for vengeance.

    Rwanda has had a chequered political history of serial and tribal violence. With its undulating features and terraced farming, it is a beautiful, small, but landlocked country in Central Africa. Until its independence in 1962, it was one of the three Belgian colonies in Africa, the others being Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Rwanda and the neighbouring Burundi were so small that Belgium governed them as one territory, Rwanda-Burundi, to reduce the cost of colonial administration. Neither was considered by the Belgians as really viable economically on its own. Because of its poor resources, the Belgians did not care much for the colony. Unlike the Congo, described as a geological scandal, Rwanda and Burundi were very poor countries, the poorest in Africa actually. At independence, the two countries had the lowest per capita income and GDP in Africa. They had little or no natural resources and were almost totally inaccessible to outsiders.

    Even now very little is known about Rwanda. It remains one of the most obscure countries in Africa. There are no foreign correspondents in Kigali. The few in South Africa hardly ever go there. It was brought into global attention by the tragic events that occurred during the genocide.

    In 1973, I had the privilege of visiting Kigali, the capital city of Rwanda and found its natural beauty breath taking. I was serving then as Nigeria’s acting High Commissioner in Uganda, from where we were concurrently accredited to Rwanda. I actually drove there myself with my wife and our two young children, through Uganda, which shares its borders with both the Congo and Rwanda. It was a hazardous journey, but it was the easiest way to get to Kigali from Kampala. The alternative route would have been to fly to Kigali through Nairobi, Kinshasa, and from there to Kigali. There were no regular commercial flights. Most people going to Kigali from Kampala went by road. Our journey took us through frightening hair spin roads, up on the beautiful hills of Rwanda. It took us some six hours to get to Kigali from the Ugandan border where we had spent the night before very comfortably.

    At the time, Kigali was a small, sleepy, and unpretentious town, with only a few tarred roads and one major tourist hotel. Even though Rwanda is recorded as one of the most densely populated countries in Africa, but with a total population of only five million, Kigali itself was probably not more than two million in population then. The future of the country looked really bleak, so bleak that nearly half of its population had emigrated to the neighbouring countries of Uganda, Kenya, and the Congo, in search of employment and better economic opportunities. It was the only way to escape the crushing poverty in Rwanda.

    At its independence, the Belgians left a terrible colonial legacy in Rwanda which eventually led to its long civil war and genocide. In both Rwanda and Burundi, the Belgians yoked together, under one colonial administration, two different and mutually hostile ethnic groups. The Hutus, a Bantu ethnic group, are the majority tribe, with 85 per cent of the population, while the Tutsis, of Nilotic racial stock, are the minority. But in both countries the Belgians contrived to hand over power to the Tutsi minority, which formed the back bone of the Army before and after independence. The Tutsis ran the country as badly as the Belgians. Under their rule, tribal colonialism replaced foreign colonialism. In Burundi where the Belgians handed over power to the Tutsi monarchy, it was overthrown by the Tutsi dominated Army, which embarked on ethnic cleansing against the Hutu majority. In 1993, a Hutu, Melchoir Ndabaye, won the general election, but was assassinated in 1994 by the Tutsi minority which assumed power again. In Rwanda, a Hutu-dominated government was overthrown by a Tutsi militia which installed a Tutsi government. In retaliation, the Hutus struck back by embarking on genocide against the Tutsi minority. That is the origin of the genocide in the country about which there was despair globally.

    Now, President Paul Kagame, a Tutsi, has had some success in ending the despair in Rwanda. He has brought back some hope to the country. Under his rule, the country has recovered from the ravages of its long civil war, and has, by all accounts, made astonishing economic progress. Economic liberalisation has brought in substantial foreign investment in the tourism and service industries. Its FDI per capita is one of the highest in Africa. Kigali, its capital, once a sleepy town, is beginning to look like a modern city, with relatively good infrastructure. Rwanda’s per capita income has increased significantly. President Kagame could boast in his lecture that Rwanda is now 94 per cent literate, and that 90 percent of its population is covered by health insurance. He has tackled public corruption in Rwanda vigorously. The scope and range of Kagame’s reforms and the economic transformation of Rwanda are confirmed by nearly all the reporting multilateral financial and economic institutions, including the WB and the IMF. But unemployment is still rife in the country. For all this, President Kagame deserves credit and commendation.

    But there are still some leadership challenges in Rwanda that President Kagame has to face squarely. He is being denounced increasingly at home and abroad as a despot. These critics argue that he does not tolerate any domestic dissent and that the two elections he won over the years by over 95 per cent in a country with a tribal structure such as Rwanda’s were a sham. Many of his domestic critics have fled abroad to European capitals for their own safety. Some of these media criticism may be exaggerated as claimed by President Kagame, who dismissed them at the lecture as biased. But when I brought this issue up with him after his lecture, he appeared rattled and uncomfortable. He defended his regime angrily. He did not appear keen or willing to discuss the issue, or to introduce the necessary political reforms in Rwanda to complement his impressive economic reforms.

    Like in most African states, tribal colonialism has replaced foreign colonialism in Rwanda, with the Tutsi minority holding the reins of power and subjugating the Hutu majority. There is no easy answer to this complex African political problem. But the tensions generated by tribal politics in Africa can be substantially reduced by allowing all the ethnic groups greater participation in the political process. The democratic process must be free and fair. A greater accountability at all levels of government will also help. Regrettably, this does not appear to be the case in Rwanda now. It is unlikely that its economic transformation under President Kagame can be sustained without the Hutus, the majority tribe, being given a fair share of the political power in Rwanda, now held predominantly by the Tutsi minority. This is the great test that President Kagame now faces. Failure to address this problem will undermine his impressive economic record. Worse still, it may lead again to the horrendous cycle of violent tribal conflict that almost destroyed the country a decade ago.

  • The fearful evil oracle and his god son

    If I were an adviser to President Jonathan, I would have counseled self restraint in taking up issues with Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, over his recent public rebuke. Tragically, the president’s outburst about the success or failure of the ‘Odi treatment’ is not the answer to crisis of leadership raised by Obasanjo.

    But more than this, the president more than anyone else knows his acclaimed god father is a leader who is generally regarded as an evil oracle with goodwill towards neither friends nor foes, a leader who thrives more amidst political intrigue and above all, a godfather who according to his daughter, senator Iyabo Obasanjo Bello, neither forgets nor forgives. No past leader is known to have ever survived a battle of intrigue with the ‘ebora’ of Owu.

    I am sure the president is also aware Obasnjo who has publicly admitted nothing embarrasses him is not in a hurry to change people’s perception of him as a man who strikes against those who regard him as friend when they least expected. He ate pounded yam with Ahmadu Alli in the afternoon and master minded his ouster as PDP chairman in the evening. He joined the people against embattled IBB during the last days of his fraudulent transition. Abacha, who he had dismissed as the main beneficiary of Babangida ‘transition without end’, did not take chances. He roped him into a phantom coup and put him on death row.

    But he survived Abacha to emerge a two term president. He single handedly enthroned ailing Musa Yar Adua president but turned around to denounce him. He did everything including denying the zoning policy enshrined in PDP constitution to enthrone Dr.Goodluck Jonathan as president. Now, he says Jonathan is a weak president. He is holding him responsible for the monumental corruption that has come to characterize government these past years.

    As a creation of Obasanjo, one would have expected the president to be conscious of Obasanjo’s well documented periodic interventions in the affairs of the nation; an intervention which most often tragically ended as a tale of doom foretold for past successive deaf leaders. President Jonathan ought to have known from experience that Obasanjo would at the end exploit these interventions to position himself on the side of the people, as he had successfully done in the past when the nation came under the assault of its elected, self or god father imposed leaders.

    But as it is always the case, what Obasanjo has just told the president was a rehash of what others who are genuinely worried about the health of our nation have said. Muhammadu Buhari, Bola Tinubu and other patriotic Nigerians have called attention to the president’s inability to confront his corrupt PDP buccaneers who do not give a damn about the health of the nation. The only difference today is that because it was Obasanjo who raised these issues, the self serving presidential aides, paid by the tax payers to help the president in his decision making process cannot demonise Obasanjo or accuse him of ’insulting the president’. They simply abandoned the president to fight his own war with a god father who neither ‘sleeps nor forgives’.

    But since government, as the president knows, is a trust, I think the reprimand by Obasanjo, should help him to deeply reflect on what informed the general atmosphere of mistrust by millions of Nigerians who massively elected a God fearing leader about 18 months ago, but today allege his government is behind the massive looting going on in the country just as they accuse him of inept handling of the Boko Haram insurgency. For the purpose of this inner reflection, let us do a quick recap of some unnerving actions of “a Jonathan we don’t know”

    Towards the end of last year, it was President Jonathan who alerted his fellow Nigerians about the existence of ‘oil cartel’ that was sabotaging the nation’s economy. What Nigerians got in place of presidential decisive punitive action was a New Year gift of over 300% increase in the pump price of fuel. The president appealed for support claiming the economy would collapse without such an action. Critics who maintained government action was a mere strategy to raise fuel tax to satisfy the greed of government parasites became targets of government intimidation and harassment.

    Not long after, it became a public knowledge that the president men and women deliberately sat on the KPMG audit report that revealed monumental stealing in NNPC. To discredit the message, government officials and political office holders decided to turn the searchlight on the personalities behind KPMG-the largest professional services company in the world.

    On the eve of the presentation of the Farouk Lawal House Committee report that exposed the theft of over N2 trillion from the nations treasury, Otedola the rumored friend of the president and a confirmed PDP fund raiser was aided by the state to video tape Farouk Laval while receiving $620 of $3m agreed bribe to ensure the name of Otedola’s company is expunged from the list of defrauding firms.

    The focus changed from the contents of the report to the leadership of the lower House after PDP leading light had watched a preview of the video. The report of the Aig Imokhuede presidential technical committee was also a damning verdict of soiled hands of some leading members of the ruling party involved in shady oil deals. Instead of the president tendering an apology to millions of his face book admirers he had let down, what we have seen so far is ‘motion without movement.’

    The ongoing devious maneuvering to discredit the report of a committee headed by Nuhu Ribadu, known for his integrity by government appointees is perhaps what has finally forced Obasanjo to take side with frustrated erstwhile president Jonathan admirers.

    On Boko Haram, besides Obasnajo the dreaded evil oracle , others not as gifted have equally argued the war on Boko Haram could have produced a different result if the president , known for protecting his friends with might and means had deplored half of the energy used in protecting his friends to wade off political foes , in Balyesa, Edo and recently in Ondo, to Borno and Yobe. During the last Ondo state governorship election, borders were closed days to the election with the IG in direct control. The share number of soldiers and policemen deployed to the state while the election lasted ensured miscreants and trouble makers were put on the run.

    Since the rest of the country is at peace, the president’s frustrated admirers wondered why their Commander in Chief has been unable to direct the IG to shift his base to Borno or Yobe, swarm the area with soldiers as he did in Ondo leaving behind a handful of men in uniform to curtail the activities of ‘Okada’ law breakers in Lagos, overzealous south south militants who have hijacked our president, after securing mouth watering contracts and Igbo professional kidnappers on the trail of prominent and not so prominent Igbo citizens that stray home from their safe havens of Lagos and Abuja.?

    The rest of the souths west, the president can handover to OPC, best equipped to hand out justice to petty thieves and ritual killers. Let us ignore the evil oracle. Who says the spate of killing of innocent Nigerians by those the government even with its control of awesome apparatus of state power claim are led by ‘ghosts’ does not deserve desperate action.

  • Twenty-first century slaves

    Today, complaint is often made of what we call the failure of the Nigerian dream. Today, we lament how monstrously many forces of society fulfill and fail to fulfill their work; how the ruling class is perpetually functioning in profligate, chaotic, and altogether, insensitive manner. But today, as usual, we fail to look inwards, probably because we know if we endeavour to do so long enough, we shall find in you and me, the summary of all other failures and disorganizations—a sort of heart, from which, and to which all other confusion and monstrosity gravitates in our fatherland.

    Complaint is often made that our problems persist because we refuse to convene a Sovereign National Conference (SNC). I wish to believe that there is depth and a semblance of truth in such frivolous mindset even as it becomes more glaring daily that a trillion SNCs will not save Nigeria. For any consensus or practicable solutions arrived at the conference would be the result of self-serving efforts of generations of louts, hired assassins, ex-convicts, treasury looters, armed robbers, advance fee fraudsters, decadent clerics and bloodthirsty political godfathers to mention a few. What manner of surplus could result from a gathering of crows?

    That we undermine ourselves and underestimate our self-worth are old stories told. Now that we have failed us, we pursue the comfort of cheap consolations. Nigeria hasn’t failed us. Mr. President hasn’t failed us. Our politicians haven’t failed us. You and I have failed us. You and I are the thorny thickets shielding our shoots from the sunny spokes of daylight.

    Who connived with foreigners and the ruling class to plunder Ajaokuta and pilfer NITEL? Who bursts our pipelines to steal our gas for export? Tell me, who steals at night to strip our streets of floodlights? Is it Mr. President, his deputy, perhaps the Senate President? They couldn’t achieve such bestiality on their own even if they tried, could they?

    We are the hoodlums causing chaos at random, according to the whims of our cowardly godfathers. We are the policemen mounting road blocks at random to fleece hardworking compatriots of the little they manage to scrounge, everyday.

    We are the bankers pilfering the lifesavings of poor and struggling compatriots after we deny them the benefits of patronizing us. We are the bank chiefs stripping Peter to pay Paul and robbing the downtrodden to feed our wantonness and greed.

    We are wives to the thieving governor, and councilor, gigolo to the rogue bank chief. We are the journalists pandering to the whims of predators we have learnt to endure on our power plinths. We are the practitioners who sold out, the watchdog who became lapdogs and then, dung-dogs.

    We are the Lagos big boys and drama queens desperate for groove and splendour in the midst of too much rancour, and squalor. We are the armed robbers and thieves. We are the foolish according to the leadership of the sick and imbecilic.

    We are the activists exploiting the pains of the trodden to perpetuate our grand schemes of wantonness and greed.

    We are the clerics selling salvation to monsters we adorn with power, unquestioningly. We are the prophets of doom and eternal damnation. We are the critics capable of nothing but unsubstantiated claims and clamour. We are the ones who see nothing good in anything.

    And even I who write this epitomize the grandest of all evils, your high and mighty columnist and intellectual terrorist as nothing distinguishes me from the errant breed selling truth to the consistent bidder piece-meal and wholesomely, every time.

    Now there are as many truths as our vanities. We whose job is to salvage by truth and candour have joined the prodigal breed in calling our motherland a failed state. What is a failed state? A failed state is a nation peopled by you and me. There is fundamental evil in our souls hence the vileness of our norms and culture. What evils should we set out to abolish in our modern society? To this, I bet very many well-meaning people would answer poverty, though they ought to answer slavery.

    Face to face every day with the shameful contrasts of riches and destitution, high dividends and low wages, and painfully conscious of the futility of trying to adjust the balance by means of charity, private or public, they would answer unhesitatingly that they stand for the abolition of poverty.

    But poverty is merely a symptom, slavery is the disease. The extremes of riches and destitution follow inevitably upon the extremes of leadership and bondage. We are not enslaved because we are poor; we are poor because we are enslaved.

    Yet we have all too often fixed our eyes upon the material misery of the poor without realizing that it rests upon their deliberate degradation into slavery. The evils of power in the present system are greater than is necessary no doubt and to imagine that they might be immeasurably diminished by a more suitable form of democracy, federalism or whatever political contraption catches our fancy amounts to an exercise in futility.

    Like class scum perpetually enslaved to the villainous benevolence of their feudal lords, we have learnt to condone all manners of irregularities in leadership and industry. Every day, we are compelled to work so hard in pursuit of everything and nothing in particular. And almost all who work have no voice in the direction of their work; throughout the hours of labor we are mere machines carrying out the will of a master.

    Work is usually done under disagreeable conditions, involving pain and physical hardship. The only motive to work is wages: the very idea that work might be a joy, like the work of the artist, is usually scouted as utterly Utopian.

    But by far the greater part of these evils are wholly unnecessary. Just like Russell said, if we all could be induced to desire our own happiness more than another’s pain, if we could be induced to work constructively for improvements which we could share with all the world rather than destructively to prevent other classes or nations from gaining an inch above us, the whole system by which the world’s work is done might be reformed root and branch within a generation.

    From the point of view of liberty, what system would be the best? In what direction should we wish the forces of progress to move? Should we continue to place our destinies in the hands of dinosaurs desperate to take with them to their grave, all that’s promising and true of our great nation?

    Should we continue to serve as muscles to the attainment of dreams of creatures of cruelty we have learnt to condone on our power plinths? Desperate times call for desperate measures; except that it is never some desperate measure to seize our destiny from savages doling unequal laws unto our clueless race. It is hardly some desperate measure to pay heed to the riotous yearnings of every human reserve within our battered State as our ability to identify and unite with them in partisanship and ache, inures them time and over again, against the temptations of leadership we loathe and grieve over.

    • To be continued…

  • Intrigues, rage in high places

    Intrigues, rage in high places

    Nuhu Ribadu seems so unlucky.

    When the former Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) chief was asked to head the Petroleum Revenue Special Task Force, he was obviously excited – not in anticipation of any material reward; it was all in his remarkable passion for fighting corruption. He did the job with all his heart, but now he must be feeling awful, ruing the day he signed up for it. The assignment has become a subject of bitter acrimony between the committee and the government on one hand and between Ribadu and some members of the team on the other.

    I do not remember the last time such a seemingly simple job turned into an open show of recriminations. It was shameful watching Steve Oronsaye and Mallam Ribadu exchange verbal blows right in front of television cameras-like kindergarten pupils brawling over a cup of ice cream. On Oronsaye’s side was Ben Otti, who joined the former Head of Service to pillory the report as if it was all rubbish that was not worthy of the paper on which it was written.

    Was the government and its troubled baby, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), expecting a clean bill of health from the Ribadu Panel? Would the Presidency have come so hard on the panel, if its report had read like a romantic poem written by a love-struck man to the woman of his dream, despite the hard facts and figures? If Oronsaye and Otti disagreed with the process, how about the content? Where is their own report, the one with a flawless process? What protocol allowed Oronsaye to publicly disagree with the chairman in so theatrical a manner and right in the presence of the President? Did somebody have prior notice of the drama? If Oronsaye did not participate in the committee’s work – he said he was away overseas – on what basis was he attacking the report in such a blistering manner? Ego? Just playing the spoilsport? I doubt whether the respected former civil servant will do that. But then, why?

    The committee submitted a “final report” to Petroleum Resources Minister Diezani Alison-Madueke. She said it was no final report because another committee had to look at it and get the government’s input before it could be said to be the final report. What is that? Does that obliterate the existence of those scary facts and figures?

    Consider these: 47 oil companies owing the Federal Government royalties; $5,830,261 recovered; $3.027billion outstanding; N86.6billion underpayment to the government’s purse in 10 years and more. Add these to the blazing N382billion petrol subsidy scam. Shouldn’t we be ashamed of our impetuosity? Or is it all part of the barefaced official robbery that has kept Nigeria toddling and bleeding since 1960?

    Dr Doyin Okupe did more harm than good when he followed the Oronsaye line to lampoon the report and its authors. But, why leave the message to go after the messenger? Whose story sounds more believable? Does the Okupe railing, coming days after the President had promised to consider the report because, according to him, the government has nothing to hide signify a change of mind? I hope not; the implication will be, to put it mildly, bad for the administration.

    Seen Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala recently? A crowd of policemen, secret service agents and others has woven a security ring around her. It is alleged that the Co-ordinating Minister for the Economy and Finance Minister’s life is under threat from oil barons who feel threatened by the probe of the multi-billion naira subsidy scam that has thrown up a long line of suspects, including the sons of the rich and the powerful. The matter is said to have caused some resentment in the cabinet, with some members believing that the government should not go all the way to punish those indicted and others insisting on justice. We are watching.

    It is not only the oil sector that has got Nigerians wondering: where lies our hope? The other day in Abuja, the swearing in of Court of Appeal justices – a simple ceremony, ordinarily – became a complex anti-climax when Justice Ifeoma Jombo-Ofo was denied her turn to take the oath. Chief Justice Aloma Mukhtar would not allow her because of her state of origin. She is, by marriage, from Abia and by birth from Anambra. The CJN was mindful of the Federal Character principle. Good.

    For how long are we going to carry on this way, killing talents in the name of a federal policy that is all controversy and no character? I do not blame Justice Mukhtar for playing it by the book. But, shouldn’t somebody have told Justice Jombo-Ofo to stay away from the ceremony? If she has worked in Abia for 14 years, isn’t she eminently qualified to be in the Court of Appeal on account of that? If the state government, which has expressed some anger over the development, says she is its nominee, shouldn’t that be enough? Would anybody have questioned her elevation based on state of origin? I doubt it.

    I am sure our lawmakers have seen this discomfiture and will do something about it. That is why the battle for true federalism and all its corollary of fairness, justice and equity will keep raging. Any system that fails to recognise skills and talents because of the origin of the person endowed with such will surely collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. Well, the Constitution Review Committee has its work cut out for it.

    In Sokoto State, it was a different kind of anger; executive anger. For some time, Wamakko, the village from where Governor Aliyu Magatarkada Wamakko hails, had been in darkness following a long power failure. The Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN) manager, Moses Osigwe, was summoned to the Government House where His Excellency whipped out a horse tail (koboko) and dealt the poor man some hot lashes. He then handed him to riot policemen who descended on him like hungry wolves. They turned him into a punching bag, hitting him hard, until the man collapsed.

    Not satisfied, His Excellency summoned two more officials of the company. They got the same treatment as their senior colleague.

    To Wamakko’s aide Sani Umar, it was all in a day’s job at the Government House; nothing to worry about. Nothing unusual. He said the governor’s village had suffered power outage for over one year. Wammako, according to him, gave PHCN N17million for a new transformer but the equipment was not supplied. His Excellency was furious. Right. But why did he take the law into his own hands? Why the jungle justice and utter lack of decorum that goes with his office? Is it legal for PHCN to collect cash for transformers? Why did His Excellency encourage the officials to collect the money – if, indeed, he handed them the cash? What kind of transformer was he paying N17million for? A golden one?

    Osigwe should go to court to demand compensation for this reprehensible abuse of his person. If Wammako can’t be sued because of his immunity, his accomplices should be made to face the law. Being a governor’s guard is no licence for savagery; is it?

    The local Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) has demanded a public apology, threatening to teach His Excellency and his henchmen how to relate to fellow human beings. It should get it. Otherwise, those in whom power has been vested will continue to abuse it, taking us all back to the jungle. Should we allow them? Never!

    Abubakar Olusola Saraki (1933-2012)

    Ilorin, the Kwara State capital, was throbbing with dignitaries yesterday. They came to witness the end of an era in the state’s politics. It was the funeral of Dr Abubakar Olusola Saraki, former Senate Leader and godfather of Kwara politics, who passed on yesterday in Lagos.

    The elite outside his camp may not like his politics – that isn’t strange – and his confidence – some call it bravado – but one fact remains incontestable: Dr Saraki was in control of Kwara politics for more than 35 years. No break. He loved his people. His people loved him. Oloye (the chief), as he was fondly called, understood their aspirations. Many made the hajj on his ticket. He wanted to be president, but never made it. Even then, his political stature did not shrink.

    From the first day till the end, the late Saraki never lost touch with the grassroots. He built a solid political structure. He was consistent and loyal to his people. That is the lesson of the Saraki school of politics.

     

  • Opposition party politics in Lagos State

    Opposition plays a vital role in the democratic process. It does not just proffer alternative view on the ruling party policy thrust, it helps the ruling party to periodically review or consolidate what it had initially considered an unassailable position. Because it gives hope to the party in waiting and reminds the ruling party of its vulnerability, opposition guarantees stability in a democracy. We saw the beauty of opposition party politics in the recently concluded American presidential election.

    The divisive issue in that election was taxation. President Barack Obama’s party favoured tax cuts for the middle class. His republican opponent favoured tax cut for the wealthy employers of labour. The Republican Party did not attempt to invalidate the Democratic Party’s thesis that the middle class is the salt of life that guarantees development of societies all through the ages, but instead tried to impress it on the over 10% unemployed Americans that they and they alone could create jobs. Rather than dissipate energy over self evident facts, Obama focused on the twin evil of capitalism- greed and individualism which make the wealthy live on the sweat and blood of the overwhelming poor – his core supporters. Obama won through the Electoral College while Americans are evenly divided as shown by the result of the popular votes. That is the beauty of opposition in party politics in a democracy.

    Unfortunately, as against application of intellect in the battle over the minds of the electorate, what we have seen in Lagos since the beginning of the fourth republic has been opposition bereft of ideas, an opposition that strives to alienate the electorate by its acts of open hostility to those it aspires to govern and an opposition that has consistently demonstrated at every point its lack of faith in the electoral process.

    In 1999, one of the major problems facing Lagos was traffic gridlock, made worse by indiscipline of commercial bus drivers. It was claimed Bola Tinubu, supported by his young intellectual Turks, after a thorough study of the problem decided to organise and empower the transport unions as stakeholders in his planned Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) project. The new administration then introduced Lagos State Traffic Management Authority (LASTMA) to control the unruly behaviour of other would-be traffic offenders.

    Instead of coming up with idea that could improve the state government’s initiative, the response of Lagos Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) opposition under the leadership of, Bode George and Ogunnewe, the then transport minister, was to unleash newly recruited and uniformed federal thugs on LASTMA men, bringing more chaos to an already chaotic situation.

    When the Tinubu administration initiated the ENRON electricity project to improve the electricity supply needs of Lagos, the nation’s economic capital, President Olusegun Obasanjo was quoted to have jokingly quipped during the inauguration that Lagos would soon be like London. The project, designed to take three months dragged on for three years because of bureaucratic impediments erected by federal authorities under the then President Obasanjo.

    Lagos State PDP opposition and its federal backers were not done. The state government created development centres to ensure even development. Claiming creation of local government was on the Exclusive List, an assertion which had nothing to do with the state government’s commendable initiative; the opposition prevailed on the Federal Government to withhold the local government statutory allocations. Even after a judicial pronouncement as to the illegality of such vindictive action, President Obasanjo, under pleasure from Lagos PDP, did not budge, stalling in the process development efforts such as the then ongoing construction of General Hospitals in all the Local Government areas.

    Now, the National Conscience Party (NCP) has taken over from where PDP left off after its leading light had been consumed by its own war of attrition over sharing of federal patronage. Like PDP, the party has embarked on peddling lies, and the use of blackmail instead of providing alternative policy thrust as government-in-waiting.

    Early in the year, it pitched a battle against Governor Babatunde Fashola over his resolve to reclaim the Makoko water front from illegal squatters who had turned it into a slum. NCP at the time reduced the argument to the protection of the poor and under-privileged fishermen without telling us what their alternative policy on immigrants who erect illegal structures on Lagos water fronts would be.

    And in the past two weeks, Governor Fashola has been under severe strains because of his resolve to put an end to the okada menace in the city. When months after the state assembly’s passage of the Lagos State traffic law, many more months of education and sensitisation of stakeholders, the okada riders chose to defy the law and visit violence on law-abiding Lagosians in search of their daily meals, the Lagos State Chapter of the NCP claimed ‘the restriction of motorbike operators on highways and major roads was a confirmation that the ACN administration of Governor Fashola lacked any serious plan to solve the chaotic transport issues in the state’.

    For Mr. Tunde Agunbiade, the state party chairman, Lagos State Government is to be blamed for not providing employment for those who are defying the laws of Lagos. For him, the state governor should do nothing as thousands of non-Nigerians shipped to Lagos by Lagos greedy businessmen who care only for their pockets kill, maim and create anarchy on Lagos major arteries. Agunbiade probably having little value to add to the debate further accused Governor Fashola of ‘imposing an anti-people law without consulting with stakeholders’, when every resident of the state knows this to be untrue.

    Mr. Akele, the party’s governorship candidate in the state during the 2011 election also wants the traffic law abrogated. He crudely described Mr. Fashola as ‘a pathological liar”, who used loot from the state treasury to buy and lure voters for his second term in office. He and his NCP, he said, are now set to ‘mobilise other political parties, civil society organisations, international human rights outfits as well as Amnesty International and other relevant masses-oriented organisations at home and abroad to intervene’ in what he said was a ‘genocidal policy against the people’.

    Lagosians who massively voted for Fashola will feel insulted by Mr. Akele’s unguarded outbursts and half truths. His efforts along with those of other civil rights groups in ending military rule in Nigeria no doubt deserve our commendation. But beyond this, I think it is equally appropriate to suggest he restricts himself to his area of core competence – civil right activities, where he can best serve the nation. It was obvious during his debate with Fashola and other governorship candidates in the run-up to last year election that his passion for civil right activities left him little time to adequately equip himself for party politics and the intellectual challenges of modern governance. During that public debate, Mr. Akele did not know the number of schools or projected number of teachers needed by the state he had wanted to govern.

    And since Fashola, the elected governor of the state who is in possession of records of those killed, maimed, robbed and raped has sworn to implement the traffic law as enacted by his state house of assembly, Akele and his party, in the absence of fresh ideas, should join the governor in advising those who cannot comply to go back to their villages where they will learn the hard way that even there in the village, they cannot pollute the environment, drive against traffic, molest innocent people or because of claim of poverty put up structure on a land not approved by the Village Head.

  • The Presidency and Ribadu-phobia

    Not many who watched the drama on television that night will forget it in a hurry. It was a show not fit for the hallowed grounds of the Presidential Villa, but there it happened right under the nose of President Goodluck Jonathan and some of his key aides. Channels Television transported millions of Nigerians to the scene with its brilliant coverage of the debacle. But for the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA), it was its usual style of drab and pedestrian reporting, which told viewers nothing about the drama which overshadowed the main event.

    As it is wont to do, NTA left the meat of the story, which was the exchange between former anti-graft czar Nuhu Ribadu and former Head of Service (HOS) Steve Oronsaye. Ribadu and Oronsaye were at the Villa to submit the report of the Petroleum Revenue Special Task Force of which they were chairman and deputy chairman. By now, almost every Nigerian knows what happened that Friday, November 2, when the duo threw brickbats over the authenticity or otherwise of the report. Ribadu stood for the report, but Oronsaye was against it because as he claimed the process adopted is flawed.

    With a bold face, Oronsaye not only condemned, but also bore down on the president with his uncouth language. That is what normally happens when people allow anger to becloud their reasoning. ‘’What I’m saying is that the president has said come and submit the report, so what? If we are not ready, we are not ready’’. Coming from a former HOS, who should be an exemplar in public conduct and decorum, that was too harsh a statement and the president deserves a public apology for it.

    How can Oronsaye address the president like that in public? With those words, he showed no respect for the high office of the president. As expected, neither the president nor his aides saw anything wrong in what Oronsaye did because they were more interested in his rubbishing of the panel’s report. They wanted something with which to discredit the report and they seemed to have found one in Oronsaye’s statement. Did Oronsaye play into their hands? Or was the former HOS acting a script? It is not unlikely considering how his excesses were overlooked on that occasion.

    Could Oronsaye have looked former President Olusegun Obasanjo, who he served as HOS, in the face and say to him, ‘’the president has said come and submit the report, so what?’’ We all know that he could not have done that to Obasanjo without the former president given it back to him in kind. Unfortunately, rather than rebuke him, those who should complain are not doing so. Why? The reason is as clear as daylight; they are happy with the tearing of the Ribadu report by no less a person than the deputy chairman of the panel. They don’t come bigger than that, do they?

    Contrary to what the Presidency wants the people to believe, nothing will satisfy it more than to get a pole on which to hang the Ribadu report. It seemed to have found that pole in Oronsaye’s statement. Will the Ribadu report be accepted and implemented by the government? The answer is no and I will show you why presently. Shortly after he received the report, the president, who sat through the exchange between Ribadu and Oronsaye, invited the former HOS to write a minority report, if he so desired. Must it take the prompting of the president for an aggrieved person to state his case?

    Oronsaye is not a dimwit; he knows what to do if he is aggrieved. For him and his ilk, who are not happy with the report, not to have written a a minority report, shows one thing : they don’t have their hearts where their mouths are. If they do, they don’t need to be goaded before they make their case in the approved manner. What Oronsaye should have done was to have come to the event with his and Ben Oti’s minority report, stating the areas where they disagree with the Ribadu report. They didn’t do that, but chose to come and make noise at that ceremony.

    Now, the government is trying to assist Oronsaye and Oti to finish the job. From the look of things, it is the government which instigated the theft that is shouting ‘’thief, thief…’’ in order to catch the culprit after the act. But Nigerians are wiser than that. If the Presidency is not happy with the recommendations of the Ribadu report, it should just dump it instead of looking for excuses, where there are none in order to rubbish the work done by the panel.

    If the government has no hidden agenda, why will it appoint Oronsaye and Oti members of the board of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) after it had saddled them with the task of auditing the corporation and others in that category. The government acted in bad faith. It knew what it was doing by bringing Oronsaye and Oti to the NNPC board; it was preparing for a day like this and it knew that when the day comes it can fall back on these men, just as it is doing now.

    The president was not so tact

    ful in his handling of the is

    sue; if he had been, we would not have seen through his failed attempt to use some members of the Ribadu panel against the larger house. Hear him : ‘’Of course, government will take the majority and minority reports, but in this case, there is no clear minority report. The issue is that there are some lapses in the processes, probably not everybody agreed on some of the conclusions’’. Mr President sir, the truth of the matter is that there was no minority report submitted to you on November 2. At best, what you got that day was a verbal complaint by Oronsaye.

    Can that pass as a minority report? No, it cannot. What Oronsaye intended to do was to rubbish the Ribadu report publicly in order to render it valueless and become unacceptable by government. He never knew that he had to write a minority report to make the government’s job of rejecting the report easy. Now, the government is in a dilemma over how to reject the report and make it look as if it did in the best interest of the people. The job that Oronsaye and Oti started but could not finish, is now being taken up by a presidential aide, Doyin Okupe. Who else but him?

    In his characteristic manner, Okupe opened wide his mouth to vomit rubbish about the report. The report, he says, is incomplete and not capable of indicting anyone. What about the panel’s finding that over N800 billion oil revenue cannot be accounted for by the NNPC? Is that not indicting? Are there no people in NNPC ,who can be held responsible for the missing oil money? Okupe is his master’s voice. He is telling us what the Presidency expected Oronsaye and Oti to have highlighted if they had written a minority report.

    Albeit in the absence of such report, the Presidency seems to believe that a disclaimer by a loose cannon like Okupe will do the trick. That is where the government is wrong. The people have seen many of the likes of Okupe and have come to know them for who they are. Okupe falls in the category of those Nigerians will not like to wake up and see. To wake up and see them is a bad omen. Nobody prays for that whenever the day breaks.

    The government should save us from the antics of people like Okupe and be honest with us on what it wants to do with the Ribadu report. Does it want to accept or reject the report? The Presidency should answer this question in a straight forward manner and stop speaking from both sides of the mouth the way it has been doing in the past 13 days.

  • Nigeria of my dreams

    My children who have had to leave Nigeria largely because of unfulfilled expectations and are now living in white man’s countries, where they are settled and doing materially well for themselves, but largely lack psychological fulfilment have always asked me what I thought was Nigeria’s main achievement since independence in 1960 apart from the fact that we have remained a country in spite of the various fissiparous tendencies that have been pulling us apart and culminating in a civil war between 1967 and 1970. The euphoria over independence in 1960 now seems to have been misplaced and for many of us, it is a distant dream that has now become a nightmare.

    In 1960, I was a strapling teenage boy in class 5 at Christ School Ado-Ekiti, arguably one of the best boys schools in Nigeria. Every time I write about Christ School, I’m always full of emotions. When I tell my children about Christ school, they always think of an idyllic environment until they get to the place to find out that Christ School is not out of this world. Christ School remains for me the source of my inspiration and the reason for whatever success I have in life. I remain eternally grateful to our teachers especially to the young Britons who left the comfort of their homes to come to Ado-Ekiti where there was neither pipe-borne water nor electricity in those days. Our school had a giant generator that worked between 6:30pm and 10:00pm in the evening, during which time we had evening prep and evening devotion before light out. It is a matter of joy that even up till today, through the efforts of the old students and the government of Ekiti State, Christ School has maintained its reputation, distinction and its environmental uniqueness in its location at the Agidimo Hills. How I wish Nigeria had made as much progress as Christ School has made since 1960.

    In 1960, we celebrated independence with joy and dancing and we were feted to a sumptuous dinner while female students from Anglican Girls Secondary School, Ado-Ekiti were invited. To us boys, this was the icing on the cake, because many of us were too shy to look girls in the face, not to talk of talking to them. But on that day, some of us learnt how to talk to girls. When I tell my children this story, they always marvelled at our innocence in those days. But that was the truth. I remember that we always felt that students who had so-called girlfriends were doomed to failure so instead of wasting valuable time on poppy love and letter writing, we were advised to spend our time in reading books. Our strict upbringing then reflected positively later on individual and collective achievements of Christ School Boys all over the country. Our discipline was also rooted in the love of Christ and the struggle for righteousness which when attained, made us excellent citizens. Our people would not steal; tell lies, compromise with evil. Some people have suggested that this is why there are not many rich Ekiti people, which is probably true, but I believe we are a contented lot, because of our peasant integrity we are able to speak truth to power and if possible suffer the consequences without flinching.

    I do not want to sound arrogant and to think that there were no other schools that were operating at the same wave length with us. I’m sure there were. The various Government Colleges in Ibadan, Umuahia, Ugheli, Benin, Barewa, Keffi and their female counterparts were also operating on the same wave length. There were also sectarian colleges like Dennis Memorial Grammar School, Onitsha; St. John’s Secondary, Kaduna; Holy Ghost College, Owerri; Loyola College, Ibadan; St. Patrick’s College, Asaba; Stella Maris, Port Harcourt; St. Gregory’s, Lagos; were all involved in training future leaders of our country and bringing them all in the ways of the Lord. The point that I’m making is that if we had followed the slow and steady way of doing things before the so called oil boom era, when we were overwhelmed by the corruption and the curse of oil, Nigeria would have been a better country than what it is today.

    In my youth, we could travel from Lagos to Kaduna, Kano Enugu and Port Harcourt and Kaura Namoda and Maiduguri by train. Admitted that the pace was usually slow, but one was sure to get there in one piece. There were even what we called passenger and goods trains. Road haulage was almost unheard of then. The roads were safe and there were no armed brigands and robbers waylaying people on the roads. In fact, people who had cars preferred driving in the nights and many times when I was involved in this as a child I used to wonder why we had to do that. We were told it was safer because the oncoming automobiles or trucks would have seen the headlights and therefore slowed down. There was no fear whatsoever of being waylaid. The Electricity Corporation of Nigeria (ECN) provided lights in the cities. Each city or district had its own generating plants. Unlike the behemoth that we have today where everything is concentrated in one centre and once the centre fails, the whole country is plunged into total darkness. As a young lecturer in the University of Ibadan, Jos Campus in 1972, I still enjoyed regular supply of power generated by the private English company in Jos that provided power for the Plateau before it was taken over and run down by the National Electricity Power Authority (NEPA). Schools in those days provided excellent education. The standards were very high and our A levels that is, Advanced levels and Higher School Certificates which were pre-requisites apart from concessional entrance examinations to entering university, were of high standards and probably the equivalent of first degrees nowadays. So what happened to this idyllic picture?

    We used to have five years development plans at Federal and Regional level and even at the University of Ibadan our Vice-Chancellor, Kenneth Onwuka Dike also ran quiquennial plans which means that there was planned development and this was measurable in those days unlike what we have now, where there are no plans at all or in the words of the military “rolling plans”. We are daily told about contracts being awarded but which were usually abandoned unfinished. The result is the growth without development that we have now in this country.

    A lady colleague of mine and an excellent medical scientist tearfully told me of the unbelievably high incidence of sickle cell anaemia in Nigeria. This she said can be prevented through education and counselling. We have the data; we know that millions of Nigerians, probably one out of every two carry the sickle cell traits and are blindly going into marriage without advice and bearing sicklers who would become permanent sources of worry, if not sorrow to the couples involved. In a caring and civilised society, there would be policies to tackle this, but not in Nigeria.

    As individuals, there are brilliant and brainy Nigerians who can match their equals anywhere in the world. A Dutch friend of mine said years ago that some of the most brilliant individuals he has ever met are Nigerians but as a collectivity, Nigerians are also the most stupid people that he has ever met. We are like a country of the blind being led by the blind. We all celebrate Obama’s victory and delegations upon delegations of Nigerian officials troop to China yearly in search of so called foreign investment. Yet some of the same officials cart our money to deposit in Chinese, Lebanese, British and American banks. We are a country of importers, but hardly would you find exporters. Our industry lies in selling other people’s goods and not in production. We make cheap money as commission agents and brag about it. We build palaces and even some copy palaces they’ve seen abroad and wear gaudy dresses and make attires from damask and laces that are ordinarily used for window blinds and chairs in civilised climes of the world.

    We need to change course. We need to go back to planning. We need to go back to God. We need to confess our sins and ask for forgiveness from our children. If we don’t do these, in the words of James Baldwin, it would be the fire next time. Our mono economy that is totally depended on hydro-carbons would soon crash and chicken would come home to roost when either hydro-carbons become environmentally unfashionable or America and even China, and India become energy self-sufficient. This may sound alarmist, but these three countries that I have just mentioned are working seriously to solve their energy problems as quickly as possible. This would leave us high and dry because after 56years of hydro-carbons production and refusal to diversify our economy and to industrialize while totally neglecting the agricultural sector, we would find out that we have nothing to fall back on.

    If we were a serious country and have invested hugely on education as was done in places like Japan, Germany and the USA, then we would have been able to tap our people’s grey matter and harness this for production. But as in everything, our policies of neglect, abandonment of what is good and needful would haunt us for a long time to come.

  • Revolutionary rascals (2)

    The gecko thinks if it quits the roof to live in the forest long enough, it will become an alligator. Will practice make the cat’s meow boom like a lion’s roar? Let us accord our leaders their rights to everlasting madness, Nigeria shall soon be rid of them. Until then, we will get the quality of leadership that we deserve.

    I have seen all sorts of revolutionary marches and I’ve come to the conclusion that the Nigerian revolutionary is an incurable idiot. It doesn’t make a darn bit of difference what his causes are. It’s worse if he’s in his youth –because then he fully immerses into the backwardness into which he has been born…evolving quite brazenly like a barbarian, badgering onto the stage for acclaim through the trap-door.

    The conscientious and the just, the honorable, gracious and humane; the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a movement—but soon it slips from their grasp turning them from leaders of the revolution into victims of the revolt; thus their seemingly desperate inclinations to distance themselves from every revolutionary march.

    However, the Nigerian youth believes himself staggeringly capable of revolt, although he does not know how to revolt. In his desperate bid to rebel against the established and much dreaded order, he propagates the contradiction of that lifestyle which cultivates sincerity and at once frustrates it. Thus the Nigerian youth remains his own greatest enemy and the most inimitable adversary to the Nigerian dream.

    No revolution can be successful if the human elements serving as its force of change are wholly incapacitated to see to the fruitful end, the ideals of the insurrection; which brings me to the quality of youth mooting the revolt.

    Revolution is never the rebellion against a pre-existing order, but the setting-up of a new order contradictory to the traditional one. How different could an order anchored by the current crop of Nigerian youth be? They are not yet the patriots they are meant to become. This citizenship business confounds them. They have learnt too little and they have too little to pass on, save quackery, insolence, incompetence and greed.

    In the daily lives of our youth, fear plays a greater part than hope: they are more filled with the thoughts of possessions they may acquire and that others may take from them. Russell would say “It is not so that life should be lived”but the Nigerian youth could not be bothered even if they knew that much.

    Many whose lives ought to be fruitful to them, to their friends, and to the world in entirety are hardly inspired by hope and sustained by joy; they seek in imagination the vanities that might be and the way in which they are to be brought into existence. Ultimately they choose the path of decadence. In their private relations they are pre-occupied with the vacuous lest they should lose such affection and respect as they receive; they are engaged in giving affection and respect at a price and the reward often comes by their desperate quests. In their work they are haunted by jealousy of competitors, and are least concerned with the actual task that has to be done. In politics, they spend time and passion defending unjust privileges of their benefactors, godfathers, class or ethnicity, even as they make their world less happy, less compassionate, less peaceful, more full of greed and compatriots whose growth is perpetually dwarfed and stunted by oppression.

    A spectre is haunting the Nigerian youth. Knowingly and unabashedly, they have entered an unholy alliance with the ruling class. They do not constitute formidable opposition to keep the ruling class on its toes neither do they offer invaluable support to keep our leaders on track.

    Their approach to politics complicates the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is splitting up more and more into two great hostile camps, the ruling class and the working class; the proverbial middle class got lost somewhere at the crossroads where the bourgeoisie swallows up the proletariat.

    Though youth does not really have the means to stop the economy, the ruling class dreads the youth, as was discernible when a wave of panic seized the Nigerian government by the jugular in the wake of the Occupy Nigeria protests. What do they fear? It’s without doubt the frequency and the potentials of youth mobilizations. Massive youth mobilizations were taking place across the globe and with often grievous and far-reaching consequences in the affected nations; the Nigerian leadership no doubt dreaded a Nigerian manifestation of the Arab Spring.

    The fear of the Nigerian leadership was however hardly far-fetched given the radicalism of the Occupy Nigeria movement. In a violent society that has no future to offer them, the Nigerian youth have very little to lose; thus their lack of hesitancy in confronting the State. The wish to abolish status quo was widespread among the nation’s youth as they romanticized the idea of a revolution as the protests dragged.

    In spite of the youth’s passionate struggle against the incumbent leadership’s utter insensitivity and cluelessness, the eventual result was basically, an opportunistic contract between the exploiters (the government) and a part of the exploited (labour leadership), at the expense of the rest of the exploited (you, me and everyone) – something Noel Ignatin would call “the original sweetheart agreement.”

    Says a lot of the Nigerian youth’s revolutionary potential. Eventually, the nation’s youth were written off and their grievances dismissed as the crazed rant of a pathetic mass of revolutionary impostors. The youth were eventually dismissed as essentially hopeless and misdirected. Despite the fervor of the Occupy Nigeria movement, the youth remain exploited and perpetually exploitable –victims of what George Bernard Shaw, terms “the stupid system of violence and robbery which we call Law and Industry.”

    Most of the time, youth mobilizations and revolutionary movements attract sympathy from the workers and the population, as if the youth were saying loudly what the majority couldn’t afford to say. Thus, in many instances, youth mobilizations restore to the social camp the confidence in the masses’ ability to resist; and in some cases other working sectors engage in mobilization, following the youth. The Nigerian youth however, presents a contradiction to the benefits of such relationship of trust.

    He is accustomed to keep his head down like one eternally doomed to be adept in all the arts of the beggar. He even presumes a little upon the possession of talents which, as he ought to know, can never compete with cringing mediocrity; in the long run he comes to recognize the inferiority of those who are placed over his head, and when they inflict greater hurt upon him, he becomes refractory and shy, turning round to crawl into the wall when he is backed against it. This is hardly the way to get on in the world but very few Nigerian youths are conversant with the words of Voltaire: “We have only two days to live; it is not worth our while to spend them in cringing to contemptible rascals.” But what if”contemptible rascals” also qualifies a greater percentage of the nation’s youth?

    • To be continued…