The Nation Newspaper

Category: Thursday

  • The glitter and the rubble

    The glitter and the rubble

    In Voltaire’s Bastards, J.R. Saul analyses how a mortal hankering to stifle divinity and demote the Creator inspired an earthly race for dubious renown via image commodification.

    The enthrallment with celebrity has led us to a whole new state of mindlessness as seen in Lisha Dachor’s bid to set a Guinness World Record (GWR) for the longest period an individual has painted artificial nails. Thus she embarked on a three-day nail painting marathon in Jos, Plateau State.

    Such a frantic quest for renown, sometimes, assumes a perilous turn as seen in the case of Tembu Ebere aka Town Cryer. Last year, the comedian became ‘partially blind’ for 45 minutes, after he experienced a lingering headache, puffy eyes, and a swollen face, during his attempt to cry for 100 hours and set a Guinness World Record (GWR) for the longest crying marathon (cry-a-thon) by an individual.

    The Lagos-based Cameroonian skit maker announced his quest in the wake of Hilda Bassey’s successful outing as the cooking marathon champion, after dethroning Indian chef, Tata Landon. Bassey later lost the title to Irish chef, Alan Fisher, who clocked in a time of 119 hours 57 minutes, at his restaurant in Japan thus beating Bassey’s previous record by 24 hours.

    Ebere is simply one of the curious characters that crawled through the womb-wall of Nigeria’s vanity complex, in the wake of Bassey’s renown. A curious thing happened before the GWR vetted Bassey’s record; Damilola Adeparusi aka Chef Dammy entered the kitchen in Oye-Ekiti, Ekiti State to best Bassey’s record by cooking for 120 hours. Dammy did 120 hours but the GWR invalidated her record because she failed to apply first.

    In Ekiti, another curious character, called Sugartee, proposed a 72-hour kissing marathon which he called “kiss-a-thon.” He looked good to go until the state government banned the event dismissing it as “unhealthy, absurd and an attempt to denigrate the image of Ekiti State.”

    Joyce Ijeoma fainted around 1 am and had to be resuscitated while trying to set a 125-hour record for body massaging. And in neighbouring Cameroon, Danny Zara, apparently infected by Nigeria’s GWR bug invited “strong men” for a 200-hour free sex marathon (sex-a-thon).

    Nigeria has since experienced an astronomical rise in attempts to set frivolous world records, from the longest kissing hours (kiss-a-thon) and massage sessions to the longest crying marathon (cry-a-thon) among others.

    Amid the hustle, the nagging question persists: “To what end?” Yet more youths commit their imagination and passion to extreme and featherbrained quests.

    Everybody is a sucker for celebrity; everybody wants to be “high society.” The youthful enchantment with instant fame has assumed a worrisome dimension as too much passion is squandered in pursuit of too little substance.

    The hankering for renown spirals across social platforms and pervades the public arena, insignificant as the spores of the toadstool yet impinging on the surface of the Nigerian mind, trashing it.

    Superfluity meets superfluity; when our lives cease to be inward and contemplative, dreams manifest as perversions, interaction degenerates to mere tittle-tattle and society relapses to the filthiest of averages.

    It’s about time we enlightened our youths that stardom and the obsessions it ignites are merely fleeting distractions from our social and individual afflictions.

    The youths should rather prioritise honest labour, education, integrity, empathy, and critical thinking above fleeting fame and fortune.

    We must return to grassroots empowerment and mobilisation around constructive industry as an antidote to societal decay. This requires fostering a culture of accountability, decency and social responsibility.

    For the youths, this also includes resisting the commodification of their identities by social media platforms and rejecting the false promises of instant celebrity and influencer capitalism, more youths can pave the way for a brighter future.

    The interaction between the public arena and the celebrity hopeful channels primal fantasy even as it skirts the borders of a business transaction. The result ultimately manifests in transient celebrity or the flipside of renown.

    Nonetheless, the proverbial 15 minutes of fame thrive by the same artifice, the same choreographed ruse, the endless exploitation of lust by fame junkies that never seem to peter out.

    Everyone is part of the con as celebrity hustlers and their audience jointly perpetuate a public pantomime of ambition, and a fervent yearning to get one up the system perceived to have denied them so much.

    Any story of an individual breakthrough is welcome as a hard-earned retaliation against the system. The jazzy, sensational backstory of each emergent celebrity is what drives the mob to a frenzy amid the dreary narrative of bankruptcy and impoverishment of a desperate, abused working class by a heartless business and political class.

    Through the burning banality of it all, many immerse in the illusions of the arena, embracing whatever delusions make it easier to endure reality or pervert it to their whims.

    The endgame is Nirvana. Living in a world of words and images, Nigerians have evolved from people who used words and painted images to depict reality to folk who deploy images to deny and escape reality.

    Even our children interact in varnished dialects; amid the racket of voiced imaging and painted words, a pagan illusion triumphs over our moral eye and mind. Thus heathen idolatry subsists in the absence of national heroes and heroines.

    In Nigeria, our gods are celebrities thus religious belief and practice, business, economy, advocacy and politics, are modelled around the idolisation of personages.

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    In contrast, China prospers by native intelligence despite her love of celebrities. Likewise, Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia, India, and Korea. These countries’ socioeconomic and technological progress were built on a sturdy foundation of autochthonous intelligence and wisdom.

    And even our so-called superstars have learnt to profit albeit fraudulently from society’s perverse curiosities about their affairs. From Chaucer’s early poem, “The House of Fame,” whose hero-poet wrestles with the fame bestowed on him by society to Martin Scorcese’s film, King of Comedy, in which an amateur comedian jokes to a national television audience that it is “better to be king for a night, than schmuck for a lifetime!” celebrity worship continues to fester.

    Even amid skyrocketing inflation, financial ruin, and insecurity, the obsession with celebrity thrives by the junkie’s smirking depravity and the sudden melting of inhibitions of the Nigerian public. It’s like the holocaust and the apocalypse.

    Society stands at ground zero, incinerated by external and internal invaders. The press, on its part, plays a pimping pawn; by constantly lending its platforms as channels to solicit secondary pawns comprising celebrity hopefuls cum fortune hunters, eager to do anything to achieve renown.

    Such characters simply cheat themselves of a learning experience; they circumvent a slow, steady, educative path to acclaim, to self-intoxicate in accidental celebrity. Unknown to them, the instant fame and opportunities in which they luxuriate are merely flash currents in the electric moment before lightning strikes, and they are reduced to rubble: celebs, glitter and all.

    A glance behind the glitter usually reveals something more than a colourful paradise. It invalidates the deceptions of fame and instant wealth. It is akin to what Saul Bellow likened to picking up a dangerous wire fatal to ordinary folk or rattlesnakes handled by hillbillies in a state of religious exaltation, in his novel, Humboldt’s Gift.

    Many who grasped these super-charged wires and serpents have been found to incandescence in acclaim for a little while, and then they wink out, which leads to a more profound suspicion of celebrity.

  • Fuel crisis: No rhyme and reason

    Fuel crisis: No rhyme and reason

    When it started in Abuja a few weeks ago, I knew that it was just a matter of time before it got to Lagos and other parts of the Southwest. The fear really was for Lagos because of the grave economic implications of petrol scarcity on the mega metropolis. If the state, the commercial nerve centre of the country, is grounded by petrol scarcity, the tottering economy was bound to suffer more.

    This is already happening. Lagos has been under the throes of a biting petrol shortage for over a week now. It may linger as every promise to redeem the situation has failed. What really is the cause of the scarcity, which should be a thing of the past with the removal of petrol subsidy a year ago, this month? The belief was and still is, with the removal of subsidy, petrol will be flowing like water. Is water even flowing anywhere?

    It is erroneous to have compared the potential steady availability of petrol with the free-flow of water, when indeed it is something hard to come by in any part of the country. The removal of subsidy was to be a game-changer, so to say, as petrol will sell at market price, without any need to hoard the product by sellers. One year after, nothing has changed under a much-vaunted game-changing policy.

      With the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL) still solely in charge of petrol importation because of the non-functioning of our four refineries, the steady availability of the product, at all times, could not be guaranteed, but this important factor was overlooked for the inherent gain of the policy. Reality is now dawning on everybody. NNPCL is constrained in the discharge of its onerous duty as the sole importer servicing all the other marketers.

    It has been one complaint or the other against the NNPCL by other marketers, the majors especially, which feel that they have been made to hold the short end of the stick under an arrangement which did not consider their own capacity to discharge that function too.

    The prevailing scarcity has disrupted many things just as the ‘logistics disruptions’ which NNPCL blames for the shortage. Logistic is logistic. There are no two words for it, even though it is an amorphous term always employed by individuals and organisations that have something to hide. What kind of logistics is NNPCL talking about here?

    The public has been made to know, from other sources, that it has to do with the discharge of product from the mother vessel to the daughter vessel. The mother vessel brings in the imported product, which is discharged into the daughter vessel before being transported to the depots. This is not the first time we are hearing about this mother-daughter vessels’ thing, but should it be a problem too hard to solve that it will be recurring to disrupt supply? The answer is NO.

    NNPCL’s excuse for this scarcity is untenable. It said the issue will be resolved within five days. Those five days have since passed without respite for motorists, many of who now sleep at filling stations in order to get petrol, which is being sold at cutthroat prices by some independent marketers. On Sunday morning, I unknowingly bought at N800 per litre at an outlet in Lagos.

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    Unknowingly because I had already paid with my debit card before I looked up at the meter and found that it was computed at N800 per litre. I asked and the attendant said it was N800 per litre, an amount which was not displayed on the outlet’s price board at its entrance. In fact, the board was blank. I was caught unawares, like many other motorists who would not have patronised the outlet if they knew the price beforehand.

    This is no time to tell motorists and other users to follow strictly the dictum: buyer beware (caveat emptor) before heading into any outlet to get petrol when the product is not readily available, despite again, NNPCL’s assurance that it has enough stock to last 30 days. Where is the product, if I may ask. Motorists are wasting precious manhours at filling stations queuing for petrol which they are not sure to get.

    In some outlets, the product now sells for as high as N1000 per litre – in an unwilling buyer, but willing seller market. The suffering is too much. Independent marketers have said it would take two weeks for the queues to disappear. Why then did NNPCL tell us five days? It is disheartening that petrol scarcity is still the nation’s lot despite the removal of subsidy which is supposed to ensure a steady and sustainable availability of the product all-year round.

    We are in May, the fifth month of the year in which we returned to democracy in 1999 on its 29th day. It is sad that we are going to mark the first year of both this administration and the removal of petrol subsidy, this way, in the month.

  • In defence of Yahaya Bello

    In defence of Yahaya Bello

    Nigeria is a nation of many nationalities who although are at different levels of cultural development but none the less share so many parallels. Among her three dominant groups who always ensure no one else gets what any of them cannot get, mischief is a common trait. Speaking of his Yoruba people, the late Herbert Ogunde, a foremost Nigerian performing artist, describes them as a people who would invite a thief to come and steal and also invite the owner of the farm to catch him. (Yoruba pe ole ko wa ja, o tun pe oloko ko wa mu) With Igbira of Kogi, their distant cousins, it is worse. From the travails of Yaya Bello this past one week, we can see how easy it is for yesterday’s saint to become today’s Satan.  In just one week, Yahaya Bello, the white lion of Kogi, who secured the governorship seat on a platter of gold transited from   an angel to a haunted evil spirit.

    Yahaya Bello was a resourceful and successful business man with a lot of drive. In him the people of Kogi found no flaw. It was on account of all this, that Nigeria ruling hegemonic class that decides who rules and  who does not rule in Nigeria in collaboration with leading light of Kogi foisted him as a governor.

    It is on record that it was the joint ticket of Abubakar Audu and James Faleke that won the 2015 election. Audu however died mysteriously before he could be crowned, while James Faleke declared himself governor-elect. Many observers of Kogi politics had expected Faleke to step into Audu’s shoes, but Kogi kingmakers settled for Yahaya Bello, an outsider who was literarily dragged from his ‘kata kara”(buying and selling business) to the governor’s seat of power after the battle had been fought and won.

    As a governor, Yahaya Bello was true to himself. He did what he knew how to do best – trading.  This is why I think Bello does not owe detractors today accusing him of trading with Kogi State’s money instead of paying workers’ salaries or addressing infrastructural decay in Kogi State apologies. Those who had expected Bello to give what he did not have only lived in fool’s paradise. It is said that a man cannot suddenly become a left handed man at the middle age. If you ask me, I will say Yahaya Bello was a victim of those who had dressed him in borrowed robes to spite James Faleke, the rejected corner stone.

    Now, what are the charges against Yahaya Bello by EFCC and his other detractors?

    EFCC chief Ola Olukoyede, who vowed to prosecute Bello or resign, alleged that the embattled ex-governor withdrew $720,000 from the state’s accounts to pay his children school fees in advance just before he left office on January 27, 2024. But as it turned out, the sum of $845,852 said to have been paid to American International School, Abuja (AISA) between September 2021 and October 2022 as advanced school fees for Yahaya Bello’s five children was not paid by Yayaha Bello but by Alli Bello, his generous nephew.

    Intimidated by EFCC, the American International School, Abuja, was forced to pay the sum of $760,910 to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) as refund for an advanced school fees paid to the school. But upset by the development, Yahaya Bello’s generous nephew took American International School Abuja to court for breach of contract and he won. His victory was all Yahaya Bello’s supporters needed to support the claim their principal is being unfairly persecuted because he has a generous nephew.

    But Yahaya Bello’s traducers have done more to allow Yahaya Bello’s sympathisers consolidate their otherwise unassailable position. They have continued to slander him. They are even now claiming albeit without proof that Alli Bello, his generous nephew, was a son he fathered while in secondary school and raised by his sister. They tried to link Yaya Bello to the arraignment of Alli Bello on 18 count charges of money laundering and misappropriation of $3b by EFCC, claiming again without proof that it was Yahaya Bello who paid N550m to secure the release Alli Bello from EFCC’s incarceration. And as if Usman Dodo, the new sheriff in town did not have a mind of his own, they have also alleged, Yahaya Bello, influenced the emergence of Alli Bello as his chief of staff.

    But if one may ask, when has it become a crime for a generous nephew to pay the school fees for his uncle’s children or for an uncle to use his position to secure appointment for his generous nephew?

    Indeed, if you ask me, I will say Yahaya Bello who as a Muslim is entitled to four wives but chose to settle for only three with just five children for now, is a very modest man. We have witnessed lawmakers who came to the National Assembly floor to show off their four wives and twenty children. We have seen other politicians celebrated the graduation of their wards from foreign universities on the social media. I am not aware anyone has asked how much governors, lawmakers and other politicians who celebrated the graduation of their children from foreign universities on the pages of newspapers spent on their children.

    Other mischief makers have wondered why the close to $1m dollar Yahaya Bello’s nephew paid to AISA as school fees for  his uncle’s children was not deployed towards building a similar school for the children of the poor in Kogi State. Again, I am not aware of any governor including those who earn from the federation account in one month what Kogi state earns in a year that has built such a legacy school for the children of the poor in their states.

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    Perhaps mischief makers and Bello traducers needed to be reminded that our current military-baked new-breed politicians are different from the likes of Obafemi Awolowo, then premier of western Nigeria, whose daughter, Tokunbo Awolowo was seen on the queue along with the children of ordinary Nigerians including Hausa children from Sabon Gari quarters of Ibadan marching to their classes under Awolowo free and compulsory primary school in the 1950s.

    My advice to Yahaya Bello, however is to ignore his detractors, those taunting him on the pages of newspapers and those who weep louder than the bereaved including some People’s Democratic Party (PDP) chieftain who linked his current political travails and that  of Nasir El-Rufai the former Governor of Kaduna State, to President Tinubu. He should  hearken to the immediate-past governor of Benue State, Samuel Ortom’s call, to come out of his hiding and answer the N80 billion money laundering case the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission filed against him.

    He will survive his current travails like many of his predecessors including Ayo Fayose, Alamieyeseigha who was chased from France to London where he had ‘accumulated properties, bank accounts, investments and cash exceeding £10m in value’, Danjuma Goje (Gombe), Jolly Nyame (Taraba), Joshua Dariye (Plateau), Orji Uzor Kalu (Abia), Saminu Turaki (Jigawa), the late Audu Abubakar (Kogi), Timipreye Sylva (Bayelsa), Murtala Nyako (Adamawa), Sule Lamido (Jigawa), Adebayo  Alao-Akala (Oyo), Rashidi Ladoja (Oyo), Chimaroke Nnamani (Enugu), Gbenga Daniel (Ogun), Aliyu Akwe Doma (Nasarawa), Attahiru Bafarawa (Sokoto), Abdullahi Adamu (Nasarawa).

    Just as the white lion of Kogi has vowed not to be intimidated by any amount of blackmail, one basic fact is that in an empire of maggots, (apologies to Nuru Ribadu) a part cannot claim to be holier than the whole.

  • Your child incarnal theatre

    Your child incarnal theatre

    There is a trending video of a scantily clad girl. The latter, while being interviewed, cheekily discloses that she had sex with her father’s younger brother and proceeded to have sex with her father’s older brother the next day.

    “Aiye n se iru e (It’s no big deal),” she said, stressing that she got paid for her services.

    Afterwards, her excited male interviewer coaxed her to twerk for the camera and she did with gusto.

    In yet another trending video, a girl in a mask revealed during a podcast session, how a male client paid to have anal sex with her. Despite the excruciating pain she experienced during the intercourse, the most painful aspect of her ordeal was discovering that her “client” sent her a fake alert.

    All through the two girls’ narratives, their interviewers egged them on with patronising smirks and gestures thus validating each girl’s escapade as some form of rare and appreciable feat.

    There is no gainsaying the lust for applause and cheap renown is the common grave of internet natives. This minute, it finds fertile tracts in the psyche of the Nigerian wilding on TikTok, Facebook, X, and Instagram.

    Sex and nudity are profitable in cyberspace. Thus you would understand why a struggling actress would sleep with a man and pay him to leak the sex tape subsequently. She took her cue from a music diva who did the same.

    It becomes worrisome when such creepy creatures emerge as popular role models for the young. Inspired by their theatrics, the Nigerian child resurfaces in the public arena in garish cruciforms: the girl child is no longer meek and innocent. She has grown from the temperate virgin without tarnish into the intemperate vixen with animal taint.

    The boychild needs saving but he is repeatedly ignored. Growing up is never easy on both. Puberty is their savage space. They get destroyed in real time by the jarring depravity of popular culture.

    Neither religion nor moral strictures could disrupt their induction into carnal space; the ritual riddance of their innocence takes place as you read. It is active and latent in our language, music, imagery and thought.

    Like the proverbial moral castrates, we have turned ritual orgy into a street carnival, feting the degenerate and debauched, while we consign the virtuous and pure to permanent ill repute.

    Little wonder many approach life as a pagan theatre. To survive, they embrace the brazen pomp of bestial personae. This perhaps explains why a teenage girl would rant and rave, accusing a popular TikToker of plagiarism, or rather, performance theft of her sex video.

    You just might understand too, why frantic TikToker, Veegoddess’ resorted to bestial hustle. If you ask her, she would tell you her grin is “expensive.” For the right price, it will slink into a sneer, while she receives pounding from a dog. The youngster went viral after claiming she slept with a dog for N1.7million. Scared by the backlash, she recanted, claiming she was simply “cruising” (fooling around).

    Through Erica and Veegoddess’ cocksure demeanour, their silent shrieks crash through the social space, like a broken scream, rattling the social space.

    The impact is chilling. It resonates in Lagos sex vixen, Angela Jika’s carnal roar. “I can act anything,” she told me, stressing that she would submit to restraints and take a beating from a dominant male or dominatrix. For N50,000, she would spread out and make a flora bed for the studio.

    Money teases off her inhibitions. Hard drugs too. Angela’s role models in the porn industry are Ajibola Elizabeth aka Maami Igbagbo and Tobiloba Jolaoso, popularly known as Kingtblakhoc. It would be recalled that Jolaoso was arrested for allegedly recording a pornographic movie at the Osun Osogbo sacred grove on the outskirts of Osogbo, the Osun state capital, and a UN-designated World Heritage Site.

    From Jolaoso’s desecration of the sacred grove to his teeming fans’ celebration of his “feat,” a generational conflict resounds with an instructive peal. It highlights the widening cultural chasms between the older generation and the young channeling degenerate impulses in defiance of Puritan values.

    As pop culture elevates morbid idolatry as fascism of the Nigerian psyche, every ravenous, roving eye will be served, with or without the consent of conscience.

    Popular culture is the new Babylon, where defiant art and intellect thrive. Think of it as our imperial sex theatre, the supreme temple of the Western eye elevated as the Nigerian psyche. We live in the age of idols. Every child wants to be a star. And there is a downside to the scourge.

    If Veegoddess and the infamous Lekki girls’ alleged commercial sex with dogs, constituted our reality check, the Chrisland School underage sex scandal offers more frightful glimpses into our infernal core.

    Greater tragedy subsists in the adult public’s morbid fascination with the underage students’ sex video. On the pretext of condemning their sexual misadventure, several adults enthusiastically shared the video, drooling over the sordid imagery of a 10-year-old girl reportedly performing a sex act on her 13-year-old mate.

    Sadism manifests in the wanton sexualisation of Nigerian society. The sadistic voyeurism triggered by the Chrisland school scandal is a consequence of society’s broken moral compass and a manifest descent of amusement fare.

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    The kids are casualties of the corruption of societal values fostered by the mainstream media, unregulated cyberspace, and institutionalisation of perverse entertainment like the Big Brother Naija (BBN) reality show, among others. Disguised as modern entertainment, the show subsists as a rebuke to moral nature, an escape from the province of responsibility with its restraining womb walls and bowels.

    The show’s broadcaster via the digital satellite television feeds an amoral miasma, creating a world of fluid caprices, amid its carnage of incarnations.

    But while it’s starkly convenient to arbitrarily blame the BBN producers for normalising filth as media fare, it must be acknowledged that greater fault lies with Nigerian parents who manifestly fail their wards through poor parenting.

    Aside from the BBN filth, social media is rife with pornography; time and over again, teenagers and minors are persistently exposed to scandalous videos of revenge porn.

    There is no one to protect such minors from the aggressive cues and wild decadence insinuated into their psyches by the highly sexualised content to which they are exposed.

    Entertainers use porn to groom society, and youngsters, in particular, are dealt a gruesome form of psychological conditioning that leaves too many among them stirred, shaken, and receptive to dross.

    Porn has become pop culture, cutting through swathes of conservative norms and social correctness. As it knifes through the country, cyberspace becomes a garish, raunchy boulevard; a theatre of libertine delight, fetishes, and rendezvous for voyeurs and porn stars.

    It also offers a negotiation point for the addicted desiring real physical action. The social space thus unfurls as an esplanade of taboos and fetishes that expand and contract to temptation and patronage.

    In Nigeria, porn has won the culture war by fusing with the commercial mainstream. Modern fashion takes its cues from porn. Music videos and comedy skits mime porn scenes, presenting females as porn rats and video vixens. Everybody exploits porn for shock and commercial value.

    All these sever the exposed minors’ mental connection with moral roots. The leaders of tomorrow are thus lured backwards, away from menarche into the womb of regression.

    The solution, sadly, lies in proper parenting. But have we proper parents?

  • Holy anger

    Holy anger

    Holing up in your bedroom or toilet to evade arrest by law enforcement agencies is not new in this political dispensation. It is not the copyright of former Kogi State Governor Yahaya Bello aka White Lion whose face-off with operatives of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) in Abuja last week shook the federal capital.

    The patent belongs to the late Senator Buruji Kashamu, who hid in his toilet for five days in 2015 in his Lekki, Lagos home to evade arrest by officials of the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA). We thought we had seen the last of such dramas until Bello’s theatrics last Thursday in Abuja. Benghazi Street, Wuse Zone 4, where he lives was for the better part of the day a no-go area.

    The EFCC men laid siege to House 9, the White Lion’s den, daring him to come out. He refused and remained indoors until help came from his boy and successor, Usman Ododo, who abused the powers of his office as a sitting governor to help a suspect evade arrest. Ododo will sooner than later realise the gravity of his action.

    By ferrying Bello to safety, with his official clout, the governor obstructed the EFCC men in the course of duty, thereby making him an accessory-to-the-fact. It was a needless show by Bello. His recourse to hiding and running from pillar to post will not help him. Since fleeing his Abuja home with his tail between his legs, he has found solace in Lokoja where he held sway for eight years.

    Now, come and give account of your stewardship, you are running all over the place. Why? Does it imply that he has something to hide? Bello’s action leaves much to be desired. There is nothing wrong in any person being invited for questioning by security agents on any matter. Bello can resort to this kind of action because he has what it takes to do so. How many poor people can try this?

    But, what is the White Lion afraid of? If his hands are clean, he should answer EFCC’s summons and let the case begin. The nation cannot wait to see the matter start. Often times, political giants see themselves to be above the law. This is the card Bello is playing. He wants to dictate his terms of engagement with EFCC.

    How is that possible? Going by what EFCC Chair Ola Olukoyede said on Tuesday, the agency bent backwards to accommodate Bello, something which it does not normally do, but the White Lion rejected the kind gesture. Instead of coming and passing through the chairman’s gate unnoticed, he asked that EFCC men should come and quiz him in his village! His request has no basis in law, the same law which he is waving in the face of EFCC that it cannot arrest and charge him to court.

    The court order that Bello is quoting never said so. It okayed his request to enforce his fundamental rights with a caveat. According to the Lokoja High Court, EFCC can only arrest and charge Bello with an offence based on the order of the Federal High Court. EFCC has since obtained a valid Federal High Court order to arrest and prosecute Bello, but with the aid of his lawyers he wants to play the big man who can defy the law.

    No matter how long it takes, Bello will have his day in court. Let him be running up and down, the long arms of the law will catch up with him. He should perish the thought of never being arraigned in court to account for his acts of omission and commission while in office. If he had done well, he would not be afraid of stepping out for his trial. What lion, whether in human or in whichever form, cowers in the face of prosecution? A White Lion like Bello should have the courage of his name and conviction.

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    So far, Olukoyede has discharged his duty dispassionately. Thus, I will urge him not to allow the Bello case to get to him. It is human for him to be annoyed with Bello’s antics, but he should restrain himself from descending into the arena. He should allow the EFCC prosecutors and witnesses to do their job in court. What should interest Olukoyede is getting justice. He can get it without saying too much about the case in public. He should keep his gunpowder dry for when he really needs it.

    Right now, no matter what he says in public about the case, the evidence that he produces in court is what matters most. If Olukoyede cannot convince the court, no matter how strong EFCC’s case may be in the bar of public opinion, he won’t get Bello convicted and sentenced accordingly. It is as simple as that. He knows this too as a lawyer. I rest my case.

  • Falae and our crisis of nation building

    Falae and our crisis of nation building

    “What we mean by restructuring is going back to the Independence Constitution which our leaders negotiated with the British between 1957 and 1959. It was on that basis that the three regions agreed to go to Independence as one united country. When the military came in 1966 and threw away the constitution, they did not only throw away the constitution but a political consensus negotiated and agreed by our leaders of the three regions. The regions used to be federating units, but in today’s Nigeria, they would now be called federal regions because states have been created in the regions. So, we are saying let us go back to that arrangement which all of us agreed at independence and not what Abacha imposed on us, which is very partial, unfair and one-sided. That is the meaning of restructuring; it is to restructure unfairness and give semi-autonomy to the federating units.”

    That was Chief Olu Falae, a former Secretary to Babangida’s military government, giving historical context to our current crisis of nation building during a last week Arise TV programme in order to educate our uninformed youths and elders described by Senator Adams Oshiomhole as “mischief makers who are trying to twist, manipulate and politicize a patriotic request borne out of altruistic motivation” by pretending not to know the meaning of restructuring.

    But Chief Olu Falae is not alone. For his fellow crusading patriots, the answer to our unresolved national question is a return to our 1954 structure, negotiated by our founding fathers ‘to promote the unity of Nigeria and protect the interest of diverse elements that make up the country’. Some of these credible voices include former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, who has called for ‘less centralized, less suffocating and less dictatorial’ central government; the late Alhaji Balarabe Musa, former governor of Kaduna State who had called for ‘a return to regional arrangement, where each region can create states they can cater for, which would certainly reduce injustice and inequality among the people;’ and Emeka Anyaoku, the former Commonwealth Secretary-General who has also renewed his call for ‘a return to the regional structure practiced in the First Republic, with the country’s six regions forming the federating units.’ And for Gen. Alani Akinrinade, “anyone that wishes Nigeria well and wants our states to develop will join in the growing agitation to restructure the country;” while for Wole Soyinka, regarded by many as the conscience of the nation, “the basis of our association needed to be renegotiated if we are to prevent a disastrous disintegration.”

    Our founding fathers, confronted with the challenges of a multinational Nigeria state, described by Obafemi Awolowo in 1947 as ‘a geographical expression’ and as ‘a British intension’ by Tafawa Balewa in 1948, resolved to make Nigeria home to every nationality within the greater Nigerian nation. Thus, when Action Group was formed in Owo April 25, 1951, the party’s motto was “United through federation, freedom for all, and life more abundant;” while the manifesto of NPC, inaugurated in Kaduna by Balewa, Ahmadu Bello and others in September 1951, focused on “regional autonomy within a united Nigeria ‘with “one north, one people, irrespective of region ethnic and religion”, as its slogan. Each dominant ethnic group managed its own affairs

    They knew they didn’t have to invent the wheel since it had long been established that crisis of nation building in most multi-ethnic nations of the world is best addressed through a federal arrangement. Europe itself had after two devastating world wars resolved their crisis of nationhood by embracing federalism. And working in our founding fathers’ favour was the fact that despite the 1914 amalgamation designed for ease of administration, the long-term policy thrust of Britain was a Nigerian nation with a federal system where every group can develop at its own pace without interference from others.

    The colonial powers challenged those who live in denial, claiming that “our cultural differences had been exaggerated by accident of colonial rule,” to look at themselves in the mirror to confirm if there were parallels “between the Hausa of Zaria and the Bantus people of the Benue Valley,’ the 200,000 Ogonis who escaped the tyranny of South African Chaka the Zulu, ‘the cannibals of the mama hill, the unsocial Mumuyes of Muri Province and of naked warriors of the inner eastern tropics,” all of who were at different levels of cultural development.

    To underscore Britain’s commitment to her policy thrust, Hugh Clifford, the then Governor General of Nigeria in an address to the Nigerian Council on December 29 1920, asserted that the British policy was to support ‘the local tribal institutions and the indigenous forms of government based on the ‘social institutions which have been evolved for it by wisdom and by the accumulated experiences of generations of its forbearers,’ adding that “if suddenly the impossible were feasible’, that those separated by difference of history, traditions, social, political and religious barriers were indeed capable of being welded into a single homogenous nation’, it would be a disservice to the concept of national government which secures to each separate people the right to maintain its identity, its individuality and its nationality.”

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    But rather than prove Oliver Stanley  who  while speaking before foreign policy association in New York City on January 19, 1945 had said that “it is the British presence alone which prevents a disastrous disintegration and British withdrawal today would mean for millions a descent from nascent nationhood into the turmoil of warring sects” wrong,  the new inheritors of power confirmed his fears when they threw the West into a political turmoil with its attendant violence, deaths and loss of properties” following their imposition of  a leader on the west in breach of the constitution in 1962.  And ‘to cut Awolowo to size’, according to Trevor Richard, they created Mid-west out of West while suppressing the self-actualization quest of 11 national groups made up of 3.2 million Efik/Ibibio/Annang, 700,000 strong Ijaws, 220,000 Ogonis and 8.000 Ngenis and others totaling 5.3 million (1963 census) in the COR areas of the Eastern Region.

    Ironically, Nigerians got better deal from the colonial masters than the successive military regimes who have since 1966 done everything including plunging the nation into an avoidable civil war except addressing the core issue of crisis of nationhood- which is about how our multiethnic, multi-cultural and multi religious society can live together in harmony. Their efforts like those of their ‘new breed’ politicians to resolve the national question through constitutional negotiations like statesmen turned out to have been driven by greed and intrigue.

    General Ironsi’s 21st Feb 1966 Study Group on Constitutional Review was sabotaged by his own unitary Decree 34 of 24th May 1966, just as Gowon’s Ad-hoc Group to work on Constitutional Proposal was overtaken by outbreak of riot in the north. Murtala Muhammed’s Constitution Drafting Committee’s report (CDC) of 18th October, 1975 into which Obasanjo added 17 different items, was according to Rotimi Williams and Nwabueze, who regretted their role in building a federal “leviathan” inferred they merely did the bidding of the military.

    The 1999 constitution known as Abdulsalami Abubakar’s ‘Decree 24’, never debated by anyone was the sum total of Babangida’s 1989 and the largely boycotted Abacha’s 1995 constitutional conference. While Obasanjo’s own National Political Reform Conference (NPRC) of February 2005 was marred ‘tenure-elongation’ concerns, Jonathan’s 2014 CONFAB was thought to be an after-thought to seek support of Southwest, the region that was in the forefront of the struggle for restructuring.

    For Olu Falae and other concerned Nigerian stakeholders, our journey to nationhood must start with enthronement of justice, which is best assured with restructuring of the country in line with the dreams of our founding fathers and the 1920 British stated policy thrust.

  • Some of the socio economic problems of Nigeria

    Some of the socio economic problems of Nigeria

    In recent times, our problems in this country, to use a religious terminology, are legion. Where does one start  in the enumeration of Nigerian socioeconomic problems and what are the possible solutions, or perhaps there are no solutions? People like me because of our advancing age should even thank our maker that we are still surviving in the hellish heat of Nigeria, where until a day ago those of us living in  the boiling bowl of humid  muggy Lagos area had given up on our expectations of cooling African tropical rains. Lagos, Sokoto and Yola share in common this unhealthy mugginess of their weather, but the overpopulation of Lagos makes the situation overwhelming. If we were a normal country, it would have been possible to enlist the help of electricity and technology to alleviate our suffering by either using electric fan or air conditioning. Just at the time of this heat wave, our electricity has collapsed.

    The minister in charge  of this important sector churlishly blamed the consumers of indiscipline in their use of electricity. He incredibly said we leave our  Frigidaire  and freezers on even when what we kept there are already frozen or cold. We sometimes hear people in Europe being told to conserve  power by switching off lights in rooms and empty spaces, but not from their freezers and refrigerators. The minister should not have been rubbing salt into our wounds for the non-availability of electricity. Lack of electricity is fundamental to our underdevelopment. Without electricity we cannot preserve agricultural products including dairy, meat, fish and poultry. Without the success of the electricity sector we really cannot tackle the problem of food insecurity. The same electricity problem affects education generally. Medicine and the medical sector like hospitals and various health institutions are seriously challenged. No country can progress without technological  innovation and industrialisation and these have to be driven by electric power availability. Without industrial growth and expansion , jobs will be scarce as they are in Nigeria. The deindustrialization phenomenon we have witnessed in recent years is tied to the unsustainable power generation in which individuals have to generate their own electricity using expensive diesel fuel and gas. I honestly do not know why gas should be expensive in Nigeria because we are busy flaring gas associated with oil production in the Niger Delta and heating up the environment and making the lives of people miserable, apart from killing the fishes and the soil by acid rain caused by precipitation after the flaring of gas.

    Lack of  electricity creates lack of jobs which fuels the rampaging unemployment and violence in society eroding democratic governance. It should be clear to any sensible person that all our plans are in vain unless we solve the problem of electricity. Since the First Republic, we have been trying to address what has now become a knotty  and recurring problem  for succeeding governments without success. It is either we are applying the same solution to the problem without changing our approach and expecting  different results which is the height of madness. The Obasanjo and Jonathan administrations built new power generating plants and adopted the business idea of privatization without success. This was  because they focused on distribution but not generation  and transmission of power and it stands to reason that there cannot be efficiency unless those who generate also transmit the power. To me a layman in this case, we should sell the generating stations to the states where  they are located and the business of  transmission and distribution should be sold to the states or business groups in the area  which generate the power. The present situation where power is generated and the distribution is centralised like in all our public institutions is not working.  In advanced countries power is not centralised, in fact if there is failure or collapse in one region another region can lend a hand until power is restored . By the way, what happened to the protocols on power entered into by Muhammadu Buhari and Angela Merkel of Germany by which the German  power company,  Siemens AG., was allegedly tasked with the power of overhauling our power infrastructure for the better performance like it did in Egypt? It cannot be that the agreement has been quietly terminated because of our non-performance and meeting our own side of the agreement. I hope our government understands the fundamental place of electricity in development. If we don’t understand this we will continue to witness the ongoing phenomenon of de-industrialisation whereby industrial giants continue to sell their storage facilities to church organisations and moving out of the country.

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    I have no problem with church growth hand in hand with industrialization. I cannot deprecate this because I am myself an elder in the RCCG and a confirmed communicant of the Anglican Communion. The church in Nigeria has proved itself. They have established schools, hospitals, universities and cities that work efficiently with water and electricity made available to those who live there and ready to pay . The church has been able to mobilise people and I believe they can do more if challenged.  Each of the big missions should be allocated huge hectares of land in each state of the federation to establish integrated agricultural settlements, growing food and tree crops for feeding their members and others and exporting surplus. By this they will be part of the solution of the problem of scarcity of food, unemployment, financial  and currency instability and insecurity. The same invitation to churches should be extended to Muslim organisations and believers in African religions . In this way, the government will be seeking positive contributions of religious groups who have proved themselves as agents of development.

    The socioeconomic problems of this country are so many that we must have a multifaceted approach to solving them . This is not the time to say one area is for government and the other is for the people and public or private sectors. If we are to survive ,all sectors of society must cooperate.

    In this regard the sub-national governments  must be challenged to show what they are doing with their federal allocations and internally generated revenues. Gone are the days when people should accept donations of motor cycles, sewing machines and a few roads here and there as so-called “evidence of democratic governance.” The states must be made to show what they have done to better the lives of their people from year to year. It is just ridiculous to go to states in the Niger-Delta and find no evidence of the additional 13% derivation they collect  on top of their federal allocation. It is no use everybody pointing accusing fingers at Abuja. Of course, the money going to Abuja is fuelling corruption at the center and this is why some of us have always called for structural reforms including revisit of revenue allocation. We should as a young country accept that continuing tampering with the constitution until we get it right is not to be deprecated . It is in fact evidence of our awareness that we have problems which are crying for solutions. Eventually we will get  to where we want to be . Those who argue otherwise are benefiting from the imperfections of the present  wretched constitutional grundnorm. Nigeria is not an old democracy like Britain or the United States. Even in these  two countries there are constitutional additions or fundamental judicial decisions which become parts of their constitutions .The unitary form of government in the United Kingdom has yielded to demands for some devolution  of power to Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland, with each nation having its own government while the Westminster government supervises all the regional governments. I believe I have made my point that the system of government is an organism that has to be watched and nurtured regularly until it is near perfect as a human creation.

    At the beginning of this write up I said our problems are legion . Yes they are. I haven’t mentioned the issue of potable water which are a given provision in many countries but no longer in our own and yet when we were growing up urban water supply was the norm rather than an exception. There is no end to the various problems we have in this country. I have only focused on a few pressing ones . Perhaps this present government without necessarily abandoning its duty in other areas  will just focus on the electricity problem and find a permanent solution to it .

  • Between Matawalle and Northern Elders Forum

    Between Matawalle and Northern Elders Forum

    Minister of State for Defence, Bello Mohammed Matawalle, is at war with the Northern Elders Forum, a group he last week dismissed as “people seeking political relevance to overburden the system and create political disunity among Nigerians.”

    The cause of Matawalle’s righteous indignation was Abdul-Azeez Suleiman, the forum’s spokesman, who had in an interview said “the North regretted voting President Bola Tinubu.” That, to him amounts to the forum dressing itself in borrowed robes as Tinubu was never the forum’s candidate.

    Atiku Abubakar who had appealed to the North to vote for one of their own was. Matawalle was therefore miffed because Northern Elders Forum “is seeking to erode other people’s rights to be recognised or made relevant in the scheme of things despite the failure of their sponsored candidates in the 2023 general elections.”

    Playing on the ethnic and religion fears of the masses of northern poor was a weapon the northern ruling hegemonic class used very effectively in the run up to independence.

    Labelling a political opponent as a threat to the culture and religion of the masses of the North as was done when Akintola’s attempt to mobilise support of Kano voters for his AG party in 1953 which led to the massacre of about 43 southerners was enough to create social dislocation.

    However, exploiting innermost fears of voters to win election has become less potent because of 25 percent of two-third of all the states constitutional requirement for a candidate to emerge president.

    This was what aided the emergence of Buhari in 2015 after three heroic failures despite scoring over 12 million votes in the North, and Tinubu in 2023 despite securing a little over 8m votes as against about 14m of his three opponents – none of who met the twelve two-third threshold.

    But it must be admitted that besides the Northern Elders Forum, other ethnic nationality groups including Afenifere, Ohaneze, Middle Belt Forum and the Pan Niger Delta Forum (PANDEF) have lost their iron cast control over the masses on whose back they once rode to power.

    Leadership in Yoruba is often earned. Until desecration of Yoruba tradition by misguided governors, Obas were never imposed. They often emerged as the choice of the people through Ifa. Obas in Yoruba land were therefore answerable to their subjects. And Yoruba never had leaders they could not handle, not even the fearful tyrannical Sango, Samuel Akintola, alias “Akintola Taku” (Akintola refuses to step down) or Bola Ige, the well-beloved Yoruba leader who in a moment of anger joined Obasanjo to spite his fellow Afenifere members. All the above powerful leaders literarily committed suicide.

    Afenifere foisted Obasanjo on Yoruba in 2003. Obasanjo went on to rig out all Afenifere’s six AD progressive governors except Lagos State’s Ahmed Tinubu who abandoned Pa Ayo Adebanjo to form Afenifere Renewal Group with the likes of Wale Oshun and Pa Akande. If Ayo Adebanjo did not realise that he was dancing alone when his ‘vote Jonathan’ order was rejected in 2015 just as it was in 2019 when he tried to impose Atiku Abubakr on Yoruba, he must have realised he was dancing alone and naked in 2023 when his attempt to impose Peter Obi on Yoruba was roundly rejected.

    One of the major objectives of Ohanaeze, which claims to speak for Ibo in Abia, Anambra, Ebonyi. Enugu, Imo Rivers and Delta, “is to foster unity among its members in order to more effectively represent the political interest of the Igbo in Nigeria.” Unfortunately, IPOB that has held the East hostage since the loss of President Jonathan in 2015 seems to be more influential among the people of the East. Perhaps for fear of IPOB, Ohanaeze seems to share the former’s anti-Nigerian sentiments, according to Lauretta Onochie who has also dismissed “the current Ohanaeze as a trading organisation that sells hatred, religious bigotry and ethnic bias…”

    The Pan Niger Delta Forum (PANDEF) coordinated by Chief Edwin Clark was formed to enable various Niger Delta groups negotiate with one voice with the Federal Government. PANDEF unfortunately has not behaved differently from other splinter groups. Edwin Clark as President Jonathan’s godfather, instead of delivering prosperity to the people of the Niger Delta, cornered it for himself. As Chief Osita

    Okechukwu, the Director-General of the Voice of Nigeria, put it, “Chief Clark started building a university, married a new wife and was enjoying himself without showing seriousness in matters affecting the region (Niger Delta) and its people.”

    The Middle Belt Forum (MBF) is a regional socio-political group in Nigeria that promotes the interests of the people of the Middle Belt region. The forum, a successor to the United Middle Belt Congress led by Joseph Tarka, serves as a voice for minority groups of the Middle Belt.

    But after Tarka, prominent leaders of the area from Generals Gowon to Danjuma, Abdullahi Shelleng and David Mark, blinded by their personal ambition, allowed themselves to be humored by their enslavers as “patriotic, supportive and selfless Nigerians who have sacrificed much more than the people of other regions in holding this country together.”

    Now back to Matawalle’s war. While it may be convenient to accuse him of fighting his principal’s war like a slave, I think there is merit in interrogating some of his sweeping claims such as “The NEF is more of a political burden to Northerners” and that “in spite of their overbearing attitude on issues that affect political unity and cohesion, they cannot offer any positive idea or thought about the future of Northern Nigeria or, indeed, of Nigeria and its unity and togetherness.”

    If indeed NEF cares about the North and Nigeria, the body would have “deemed it fit to seek an audience with Mr. President to discuss issues affecting the Northern region despite the numerous challenges facing the North as rightly highlighted by the President and being addressed by him” or “visit any of the ministers dealing with issues of security, agriculture, water resources, police affairs, education, health, budget, foreign affairs, or any head of security agencies in the country for first-hand knowledge of government programs and actions.”

    For him, NEF’s failure to do any of the above is but a confirmation that “the North, until now has been teleguided by Northern Elders Forum who had fed fat in the past on the North’s resources and opportunities which had retarded development in the region and nation due to their selfishness.”

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    Why for instance did the same northern elite that ignored Awolowo’s warning of consequences of not sending children of the poor to school send their own children to the best schools in the world?

    Was it not apparent that Boko Haram terrorists’ 2013 declaration of Islamic caliphate and opposition to western-style modern education in Borno State where less than 33 percent of youths go to school was taken out of the play book of northern elders that have always opposed the education of children of the poor?

    Was it not mum from northern elders when on the night of 14–15 April 2014, 276 female Chibok students which according to Amnesty International 2015 estimate, “are only a small percentage of the total number at least 2,000 women and girls that had been abducted by the group” were kidnapped?

    Except Lamido Sanusi who appealed to northern privileged individuals to build schools, especially for girls instead of mosques, which member of NEF criticised the obnoxious ‘quota system’ that killed meritocracy and frustrated youths outside the North?

    While desperate efforts were made by Buhari’s loyal gate keepers to export terrorist to reserved forests in the south in the guise of open grazing, why did NEF members feign ignorance about ungoverned Konduga area of the Sambisa Forest, a former nature reserve covering 60,000 km?

    Now that the battle line is drawn, I think the only thing that will satisfy Matawalle will be NEF’s answers to the above questions

  • To nurse minds, not social cannibals

    To nurse minds, not social cannibals

    Nigerians are a curious breed. Think of us as the proverbial coastal dwellers dying of thirst. We complain of parched tongues, but every day, we defecate in our fresh springs and struggle to slake our thirst with poisonous waters from abroad.

    Beyond metaphor, Nigeria must be rescued from cognitive dissonance; the mental racket that triggers the Nigerian lust to relocate abroad and sustains it.

    Ultimately, it poisons our wellsprings of civilisation and knowledge: culture, family and academia. This corruptive mentality pervades the country’s educational and cultural institutions, aggravating the brain drain that robs Nigeria of the allegiance and contributions of promising citizenry.

    The multiple failures that beset the country, from the bungled economy to our subversive partisanship, to our lack of universal health care, to protracted terrorism, and the neocolonialist afflictions of our politics and media, can be adduced to the institutions that produce and sustain our political elite.

    Our local schools and even the elite schools most Nigerians throng abroad, hardly teach students to question and think. They focus instead on creating legions of effective systems managers via standardised tests and passive submission to authority.

    Eventually, when the systems fail the managers, they scurry out of the country in search of greener pastures abroad. When the going gets tough, they simply pack up and leave.

    The responsibility for the collapse of the Nigerian economy runs from the corridors of power, through the media soapbox to the lecture theatres of the academia; it pervades our banking halls, the comatose industry and the random trade zones of municipal sidewalks.

    Scholarship is crucial to the rejuvenation of our comatose state thus Nigeria must furnish an educational system that facilitates fearless intellectual inquiry; one that is constructively critical of authority, fiercely independent, and selfless.

    We must quit organising learning around minutely specialised disciplines, tapered solutions, and rigid structures designed to produce predetermined answers. As the government fixates on science education, it must equally furnish our arts and humanities.

    Nigeria must rejig her cultural foundations and ethical complex – and this is achievable through a partnership between the government and the arts & humanities. The result of such an endeavour would excite a social re-engineering built on character mending and economic restoration in consonance with our peculiar strengths and weaknesses.

    Restoring our cultural dominance would facilitate easier salvage of our society, particularly the engine wheels of our industrial complex. China, Japan, Germany, Indonesia, Sweden, among others, attained progress by founding their governance on a cultural experience indigenous to them.

    The wild pursuit of materialism renders large segments of our business and political elite addicted to mindless acquisition of ill-gotten wealth. Thus the ceaseless cases of corruption in public office. The lives of several culprits are funded by stolen money and beastly monopolies facilitated by heinous social and political contracts.

    On the flip side of the equation, the working class diminishes and struggles to maintain membership in the informal social caste imposed upon it by a raptorial ruling class.

    The general run of the masses supposedly dissents but many do so without any real awareness of the actuality of forms that define their existence. Plato’s allegory of the cave was meant to explain this. In the allegory, he likens people untutored in the Theory of Forms to prisoners chained in a cave, unable to turn their heads. Plato’s allegory speaks to our individual and collective fate as a nation.

    For Socrates, all virtues were forms of knowledge thus to train someone to manage a business account for Price Water Cooper, for instance, is to educate him or her in skill. To train them to debate the ethics of a business venture is to educate them on values and morals. A culture that disregards the vital interplay between morality and power, writes Hedges, condemns itself to death.

    Such existential truths are scorned by the modern fortune hunter. And the disconnect subsists across professions, government, and academia. Nigerian economists, for instance, chant elaborate theoretical models yet know little of how their fancy, soulless economics impact rural poetry and suburban lives.

    Our educational and social systems must quit churning out such products of a cultural void, casualties of a system that produces graduates who have been taught to cheat the system and applaud theft as a shrewd corporate strategy.

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    The true purpose of education must be to make minds, not social cannibals. Education must furnish us with patriots capable of leading Nigeria’s charge back to rebirth.

    A recourse to educational foundations, in the light of Arnold’s 1869 treatise, could be in Nigeria’s best interest. This is attainable by conscious endeavour. President Bola Tinubu could lay the foundation for such a monument by increasing Nigeria’s education budget to 18 per cent or thereabouts, from the disgraceful fraction – usually less than seven per cent – budgeted over the years.

    The foundations of scholarship and knowledge must be reconstructed to guarantee more progressive responses to internal problems of social advancement: problems of work and wages, of families and homes, of morals and the true value of life.

    Our quest for effective public governance can only be realised through the guidance of skilled thinkers, and a synergy between a public service that works and a humane corporate business sector.

    Nigeria could take a cue from Finland’s educational system. The transformation of the Finnish education system began some 40 years ago as the key propellent of the country’s economic recovery plan. Educators had little idea it was so successful until 2000, when the first results from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a standardised test given to 15-year-olds in more than 40 global venues, revealed Finnish youth to be the best young readers in the world.

    Three years later, they led in math. By 2006, Finland was first out of 57 countries (and a few cities) in science. In the 2009 PISA scores released last year, the nation came in second in science, third in reading and sixth in math among nearly half a million students worldwide.

    There are no mandated standardised tests in Finland, apart from one exam at the end of students’ senior year in high school. There are no rankings, no comparisons or competition between students, schools or regions. Finland’s schools are publicly funded. School managers at all levels are educators, not businessmen or politicians. Every school has the same national goals and draws from the same pool of university-trained educators.

    The result is that a Finnish child has a good shot at getting the same quality education irrespective of his or her descent. The differences between the weakest and strongest students in Finland are the smallest in the world, according to the most recent survey by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

    True knowledge essentially translates to being an emissary of truth, hope, superior culture and progress. It is never simply to teach bread-winning, furnish teachers for the public schools or vocation for the unemployed. It should above all, be an appendage of that fine adjustment between what Du Bois calls reality and the flourishing knowledge of life. An improvement of civilisation and solution to its seemingly intractable problems.

    The end product of such an educational process would be less likely to abscond in the face of odds because he or she must have learnt to courageously vie for truth and progress, not for vulgar repute or profit.

  • Gathering storm of major blow-up in the Middle East

    Gathering storm of major blow-up in the Middle East

    It is generally known to observers of the situation in the Middle East that there are two armed camps watching each other and ready for war if their interests are threatened. One group is allied around Israel, and the other around the Islamic republic of Iran. Israel and Iran are directly involved, while others from a distance can afford to prevaricate while Israel and Iran do not have the privilege of distant observation or armchair strategic  analysis and planning. This fact makes the place dangerous for big power confrontation, with the tendency of being dragged into a conflict without proper consultation and consideration  The issues around which a state of belligerency can be declared is the threat to the existence of Israel on one hand, and on the other hand an existential threat to the Shia regime in Iran . This was not always the case until Iran became a Shia theocracy  in 1979, justifying its own raison detre as the destruction of Israel .

    The issues of religion is fundamental to the proper appreciation of the situation of the Middle East. It is home to the three monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, each laying claim sometimes to the same shrine – of course, with different interpretations. The  economic, strategic and religious importance of the Middle East and the place of Israel in protecting the interests of America and the West generally is intertwined with the defense of Israel  by America and the West, which feels obliged to do so as an obligation to it because of the West’s feeling of  vicarious responsibility for the holocaust during the Second World War. Iran enjoys  support either incipiently or openly  because of its  economic and strategic importance   and relevance  to countries like  Russia, China, Pakistan; and increasingly to India and the Muslim countries of the far east like Indonesia and Malaysia that are increasingly trying to challenge the western political and economic hegemony in the world .The Middle East is a keg of gun powder ready to explode at any time and every war there brings the world near  to a general conflagration because of the various interests ranging from  access to oil, gas military bases,  and because of religious and historical  considerations and aspirations.

    What happened on Saturday 13th of April, 2024  when Iran sent 300 waves of drones, cruise missiles and inter-ballistic missiles into Israel has its justification in the Israeli attack on an Iranian consulate building in Damascus  on April 1, leading to the death of important military officers, some of the rank of brigadier-general. This  Israeli attack on a diplomatic building was  in violation of international diplomatic protocol, which sees embassy buildings as sovereign territory of the sending country – in this case, Iran. Up till now Israel has not openly claimed that it was responsible for the attack, presumably because of the embarrassment of violating international law. Israel can, of course, justify the attack on the grounds that Iran military officers and personnel were in Damascus to direct Hezbollah in Lebanon to attack northern Israel in its mutual war against Lebanon, which has led to hundreds of thousands of Lebanese and Israelis fleeing their homes for safety in other parts of their country.

    Whether legitimate or not, this was the immediate casus belli for the state of belligerency which the Iranian regime declared that it would retaliate.  In similar situation when the American military killed the Iranian General Soleimani in a targeted drone strike on 3rd January, 2020 in Baghdad, Iran  in retaliation launched missiles against US military bases in Iraq, wounding 110 American troops. In the same vein, It became a matter of honour for Iran to take the step it took in sending the waves of  missiles and drones into Israel.  It appears Iran warned Israel of what was coming at it, so that the damage could be minimised. The arsenals were apparently shut down by a combination of Israeli, American, French, British – and  incredibly, Jordanian forces  for Iranian violation of its airspace – thus leading to no serious damage in Israel, which made President Joe Biden to phone the Israeli Prime Minister Bilhaminu Netanyahu not to embark on military retaliatory action because the United States apparently felt Iran’s attack was for the country’s internal propagandist purpose and not something to seriously hurt Israel. This reading of the Iranian action sounds reasonable, but Israel may not buy the American logic. The fact that the attack on Israel came directly from Iran, from Hezbollah-controlled southern Lebanon and Shia-controlled Iraq, and  from Houthis-controlled Yemen,  and Syria – all Iranian protégés – makes Israel position of being surrounded by enemies on all fronts makes Israeli decision to strike back understandable.

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    The confrontations between Iran  and Israel before now was through Iranian-sponsored allies and not by Iran itself. On the other hand, Israel had previously carried the war to Iran by assassinations in Iran  and elsewhere of scientists and military personnel involved in the development of Iranian nuclear program on the grounds that there is no nicety in the war that posed the question of life or death  to Israel, because it justly believes that the Iranian nuclear program was directed at making nuclear weapons aimed at the destruction of Israel. The  prime minister  of Israel has openly declared it that Israel will never allow Iran to make nuclear weapons. How he hopes to do this without a general war in the Middle East or universal nuclear disarmament remains to be seen. This is where we are at the time I am writing this article, but it is clear to me ,that we are at the cusp of a dangerous period in global history because if Israel attacks Iran frontally, Iran has promised to hit back.

    Unfortunately, the situation in the Middle East  has deteriorated to this level at a time of elections in the United States. The Jewish lobby in the US is so powerful that it can determine who wins or loses a presidential election. Both the Republican and the Democratic parties are beholden to the Israeli interests who have manipulated, whether rightly or wrongly, to present Israeli interests as those of the US. There are considerable American investments in Israeli economy, but particularly in its scientifically efficient research in medicine and military science and innovation from which the American military industrial complex benefits. It is this complex relationship between Israeli and American education, the military,  banking, finance, Artificial intelligence – the whole gamut  of futuristic development – that elevates the American-Israeli relationship to a situation where the Israeli tail wags the American dog. I think  President Biden did well to warn Israel that America will not join Netanyahu in waging an holy war against Iran, and what America says will be echoed by the leaders of the G-7. Israel may go on a tit-for-tat with assassinating Iranian scientists and military men in and outside Iran, and Iran would reply accordingly.

    What this Iranian attack  means is telling Israel  that it is reachable directly from Iran. This introduces a new element to the equation and this will be factored into Israeli determination not to allow Iran to become a nuclear weapons state.  One of the results of the situation now in the Middle East is that it frees Israel from any restraint in  its war in Gaza, and the Palestinians would bear the consequence of the whole world being seized with  preventing an Israeli – Iranian war rather than being concerned with what happens to the Palestinians in Raffah where the Israeli  military will mercilessly deal with them with no protest from the rest of the world. If the tragedy in Gaza leads to an Israeli agreement to a two-state solution, the case and cause for war between the Arab states and Israel may be removed for ever and Iran would have been isolated, because it would be a case of being more Catholic than the Pope.