The Nation Newspaper

Category: Thursday

  • Why America’s politics is global politics

    Why America’s politics is global politics

    Some people especially in the so-called third world say we should worry more about what goes on in our countries rather than be bothered by the political wrangling in the United States. There is some sense in this statement but nobody, not even the Russians and Chinese can afford to ignore happenings in the USA. This is simply because America and Russia have enough nuclear weapons to bury the world five times over. The Chinese are not far behind them in their ability to end all our lives.  There are signs that the three of them are planning to resume underground nuclear tests which they have not done for decades. The American dollar is the reserve currency of the world, the printing of which only America has control over.  The movement of the BRICS nations to have another reserve currency is inchoate and lies in the future and not in the next decade. Much work needs to be done as to what currency that would be among those of Russia, China or India whose interests are not and will not always be the same.  Or perhaps BRICS is working on a brand new currency which will take time to work out the details.

    It took the first and the second world wars to put America at the military and economic pre-eminence it is today and the whim  or strategies of a few countries will not remove it from there until the world is convinced that there is concrete and safe alternative.  The recent invitation to economically insignificant state like Ethiopia and bankrupt country like Argentina to join BRICS in 2024 casts a shadow of doubt on the intention and seriousness of the organization. The power of the American dollar is backed by America’s production of strategic and critical goods and the overwhelming power of the American military and not just the fact and ability of manufacturing consumer goods.

    In other words, America’s ability to project power globally is a critical part of what the world has reluctantly accepted as a reason for the ‘dollar imperialism’ at least for now. The fact that most of the major countries of the world have Diasporas in America is another reason for global interest in what goes on in America. If people sneeze in Washington DC, the rest of the world catches cold still remains true as it was before. If America tears itself apart, one may not be sure of which faction will have its hands on the nuclear button.

    Sometimes last week,  Joe Biden the president of the United States in an emotional lecture entitled “The legacy of Senator John McCain and the work we must do together to strengthen our Democracy” delivered at the opening of Senator John McCain’s library at the University of Arizona in Phoenix said America was about to lose its freedom and democracy if it allowed  undemocratic MAGA extremism in the Republican Party to dominate not only the Republican Party but the country as a whole. This was at a time of dysfunctional propensity seen in the Republican threat to shut down the government by its members in Congress who are in the majority. President Biden said former President Trump was playing to the dark side of the American soul which he said was antithetical to American idealism of equality and freedom. He harked back to the idealism of the American Declaration of Independence in 1776 about “the self-evident nature that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” and that all Americans must rise to secure those rights together without allowing any man or movement to abridge those rights. Although he tried very hard not to mention Trump by name, but everyone knew who he was talking about. The divide and differences in the American population are too glaring not to notice. This divide was what Trump was implicitly exploiting under the rubric of MAGA (Make America Great Again). Trump and the right wing of the Republican Party were cleverly exploiting the various elements of diversity and divide in America ranging from race, gender, sexual preferences, divide between the poor and the rich, the educated and not too educated, management and Labour, Christian and Jew, Pentecostal and orthodox, citizens and immigrants (whether legal or illegal), southerners and northerners, urban and sub urban communities and country bumpkins and urban residents.

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    In short, between liberals and conservatives, between gun lovers at home and those who would use guns to bruise the noses of those opposed to America abroad and between isolationism and a globally engaged America. There is much in the United States for any populist politician to use to divide the country. These were the points made by the American president and that Americans must stand up firm and not allow its institutions and the constitution to be destroyed. He continued to mention the fact that the American constitution is the only one or at least the first one based on idealism of equality even if it had not always measured  up to its founding principles. He brought the memory of John McCain to bear on the point of working together despite the divide of politics and ideology.

    He said Trump was  always denigrating America and calling the most powerful military power in the world weak while at the same time insulting the memories of fallen soldiers  including the president’s own son who contracted disease while serving as a Major in Iraq  and  also serving officers at the highest level of the military. Trump called General Mark Milley, retired chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, America’s highest ranking officer, a traitor for assuring his Chinese counterpart at a time of tension between China and the USA during the Trump presidency that America was not interested in war or about to attack China.

    The contact between the top military commanders of the super powers was routine to avoid miscalculation or wrong judgment. The seriousness of this incident led to special military arrangements made to protect the General who accused Trump of wanting to be a dictator. Trump had during his presidency ignored the routine payment of respect to Allied soldiers in the vast military cemetery in France and had once said he had no respect for captured soldiers like McCain who spent five years in Vietnam captivity. It can easily be dismissed that President Joe Biden was campaigning for re-election in 2024 and that there is no apparent threat to democracy. But one would be missing the point. Misunderstanding the power of the president as absolute, refusal to accept the results of elections and goading one’s supporters to almost militarily invade Congress and refusal to transfer power in orderly fashion after a concluded election constitute a threat to democracy and a blow struck against democracy and the American ideal and example to the whole world. America would lose the symbol of being the light at the end of the tunnel for a troubled world would have been lost for ever if the republican extremism was allowed to prevail.

    Listening with attention to this particular lecture of President Biden in Phoenix Arizona brought back to memory of the Republican candidate for president in 1964 in the same Arizona the heart of Republican extremism. Senator Barry Goldwater scared the whole world by saying “Extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue” especially at the time when the world was just getting out of the Cuban crisis which almost turned the Cold War into a hot war of thermonuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union. Happily, President Lyndon Johnson defeated Barry Goldwater who like Trump was determined to exploit the anger and uncertainty about socio-political changes in America into politics of confrontation to the discomfiture of the whole world.

    Let’s hope America would again rise as a body to reset the course of American history as a bastion of democracy.

  • The Diezani makeover

    The Diezani makeover

    People like her always make news. Whether in good or bad health, there is always a story on them. It is in their nature for activities to be created around them. She left office since 2015, but she has not left public eye. All eyes have been on her since she fled home for London where she has been staying for some years now.

    To avert this public scrutiny, her minders came up with an ingenious plan, which some will describe as evil. What was this plan? They came up with the story that she has cancer. Cancer? Yes, cancer of the breast. She also confirmed it at a time, describing it as “the most aggressive form of breast cancer”. She gave its name as “Triple Negative Cancer”, adding that it started towards the end of President Goodluck Jonathan’s tenure in 2015. Does Diezani Alison-Madueke really have cancer? Perhaps, the poser should now be: did she have cancer?

    The latter may be appropriate because the Diezani her compatriots saw on television on Monday as she appeared before the Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London did not look like a cancer patient. Better put: she did not look like the scarecrow her countrymen and women saw back home in 2015 in the picture that illustrated her cancer story then. In the photograph, she was not anywhere near the Diezani we all know.

    She cut a sorry picture, with her bald head and a scarf thrown around her shoulders. She looked pathetic, but she got no sympathy. Nigerians could not care less, if she had cancer or not. They were more interested in the recovery of the loot she is believed to have stashed abroad. They saw her, though a woman, as the Man Friday of her principal, then President Jonathan under who she served as transport minister and petroleum resources minister.

    Diezani was a powerful member of the Jonathan cabinet and she rose to great heights as petroleum minister, becoming the first woman president of the Oil Producing Exporting Countries (OPEC) in a male-dominated cartel. The cancer story did not fly. Instead of prayers, it earned her curses. The people’s bitterness showed through at a moment she thought she could get some sympathy from them.

    “Did she sympathise with us when she was in government?” “What did she do to ameliorate our sufferings?” Cancer ko, cancer ni! Many said, without feeling as they reacted to the story. In the story anchored by a well known publisher some of whose actions in the past strengthened the unbelievability of the report, he wrote inter alia:

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    “The Diezani before me was not the ebullient woman I used to see on television and in newspapers. Her head had become a Sahara Desert of sorts almost totally bald with a sprinkle of freshly growing hair, all grey. She requested to sit on a classroom chair as her back was hurting badly and she could not sit so low. Wow, what a terrible time she must be having, I almost screamed out but cautioned myself. Sitting across from me was a woman who was a shadow of herself, almost like an apparition or ghost”.

    “Awon Journalists sha! Someone blurted out after reading what he perceived as an image laundering job, wondering the need for the story at a time she was wanted back home to answer some questions relating to her enormous wealth. She is still wanted and some of her properties found to be proceeds from crime have been forfeited to the government. She is being tried in London for receiving bribe by Britain’s National Crime Agency (NCA).

    Bribery and corruption are the bane of our public service. People go into public service not to serve but to enrich themselves and when the bubble bursts, they blame it all on pressures from family members, friends and peers. Diezani has been named in serial allegations back home for which she is wanted for trial. These allegations are not different from those now levelled against her in London.

    What she is running away from at home has caught up with her abroad. It is just a matter of time before she is repatriated home to also stand trial for the myriad allegations against her. Eventually, justice will be done to the satisfaction of the people, the state and the defendant herself, whether or not she has cancer. But her cancer appears to be in remission considering the way she was looking gay and bright when she appeared in court on Monday.

    Lucky Diezani, she is getting well from her ‘cancer’, but Nigeria is not that lucky. The country is still bleeding from its years of pillage by public servants like her. There can be nothing more cancerous than the blind theft of a nation’s commonwealth by those in charge of its affairs.

  • Nigeria @ 63: Break from pursuit of elusive vision

    Nigeria @ 63: Break from pursuit of elusive vision

    Nigeria, a product of compromise by our founding fathers who as representatives of the dominant groups in a nation of some 300-odd nationalities at different levels of cultural development, envisioned a nation where even though “tribes and tongues may differ, will grow in brotherhood”. Unfortunately this was replaced by our soldiers’ blurred “vision of a good society which became more elusive, the closer they came towards it” (Robin Luckman).

    For close to 60 years after the collapse of the first republic, we have done everything except retracing our steps back to where the rain started to beat us. Our successive leaders have never been short of lamentations during our independence anniversaries about missed opportunities, unfulfilled promises, abuse of rule of law, disrespect for human lives and mindless savagery by those who infiltrated through our borders and of course  corruption and economic strangulation.

     As a mark of departure, President Tinubu during this year’s anniversary, five days back, spoke of his commitment to “public sector reforms to stabilize the economy, direct fiscal and monetary policy to fight inflation, encourage production, ensure the security of lives and property and lend more support to the poor and the vulnerable”. His goal which is not markedly different from the unfulfilled hopes of his predecessors is a nation “where the abundance and fruits of the nation are fairly shared among all, not hoarded by a select and greedy few and a Nigeria where hunger, poverty and hardship are pushed into the shadows of an ever fading past”. Unfortunately his invocations like the lamentations of his predecessors are all but symptoms of our crisis of nation building.

    But once again, the occasion of our 63rd independence anniversary provides another unique opportunity to interrogate where we are coming from. This has become imperative since over 70% of our people including political actors, journalists, partisan youths masquerading as EndSARS crusaders visiting violence on public properties in Lagos and the self-styled ‘Obidients’, a euphemism for unthinking and intolerant mob who see only what they want to see.

     Nigeria, prior to the imposition of the British colonial rule and carving of it into a conglomeration of states, had over 300  ethnic groups with each of the ethnic groups maintaining a different and independent system of administration.

    The British, who according to Pa Ayo Adebanjo during his last Saturday interview by Channels TV conquered Nigeria as different groups; amalgamated the north and the south in 1914 and for ease of administration, institutionalised a unitary system. The West through its leader, Chief Obafemi Awolowo had raised an objection on the ground that Nigeria is “a mere geographical expression and not a nation in the sense of the Welsh, the British or the French. And because by nature, the Yoruba of the West are federalists, he had canvassed for a federal system where each group would develop at its own pace without interference from others. The northern hegemonic power wanted a confederal or a federal system they could control, perhaps to enable them create a home for fellow stateless Fulani across West Africa or as feudal lords, sustain their strangle-hold on the middle belt minorities that served as mercenaries during Uthman Dan Fodio’s conquest of the Hausa states. The East wanted a unitary system where landlocked Igbo nation that like the Jews thrive in other peoples land would operate without restriction.

    The British who believed it was their presence that had prevented a disastrous descent into a turmoil of warring groups, consolidated federalism through various constitutional engineering starting with Sir Hugh Clifford 1922 Constitution which abolished and replaced Lugard’s Nigerian Council with a new Legislative Council and an Executive Council; 1946 Richards Constitution which entrenched principle of regionalism by formally recognizing three regions as building blocks for a federal system; McPherson Constitution which created central House of Representatives with 68 members from the north and 34 each from the east and west; the 1954 Lyttleton Constitution which marked the beginning of direct elections to both the federal and regional legislatures in Nigeria and the Independence Constitution which consolidated a federal system with a Prime Minister and a Governor General representing the Queen of England.

    The 1963 Republican Constitution was a wholly Nigerian affair without the supervision of big brother Britain and it turned out to be the beginning of our nightmare. The constitution stripped the judiciary of its independence while the government granted itself power to declare state of emergency.

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    This was to be used to a devastating effect in 1962 when the federal government, to nail Awolowo, the opposition leader, declared state of emergency in the West where a few lawmakers were throwing chairs while there was no declaration of emergency in the north where the Tiv Middle Belt popular uprising had to be suppressed by the military or in the East where Isaac Boro-led insurrection was also suppressed by the military.

    The Sardauna had nothing but disdain for Awolowo who he believed was trying to undermine his authority in the north while Zik had an axe to grind with him for his role in derailing Zik’s ambition to rule the West in 1952.

    But for Zik, Awo’s incarceration was a pyrrhic victory as the crises over the 1962/63 disputed census, the constitutional crisis that followed the massively rigged 1964 election proved beyond any doubt that Nigeria was a “mere geographical expression”.

    It has since become part of our history that the January 1966 military coup which substituted our federal system with a unitary system was masterminded by Zik’s sympathisers in the military while the July 1966 counter coup was a vengeance coup by young northern military officers protesting the selective killing of their political leaders and senior northern military officers. The northern military officers and their civilian surrogates that have been in power for the greater part of our post-independence years midwifed the 1979 and 1999 constitutions, federal only in name but unitary in reality with 68 items in the exclusive list and without a residual list.

    As we celebrate our 63rd Independence anniversary, President Tinubu has expressed his commitment “to stabilizing the economy, fighting inflation, encouraging production and ensuring the security of lives and property as well as lending more support to the poor and the vulnerable”. All these can hardly be achieved under a blurred vision that has remained elusive even as his predecessors played the ostrich in the last 53 years.

    If we don’t know where we are going, we should at least remember where we are coming from.  As Punch editorial of October 1 warned: “Nigeria should stop its precarious existence and take the right choice of restructuring into a true federation with the 36 states as federating units. US think – tank, Brookings Institution, put it strongly: “Sometimes, nations face a stark choice; allow regions to federate and govern themselves, or risk national dissolution.”

  • Sinning and expecting grace to abide?

    It is generally known that Nigerians go regularly to places of worship whether mosques or churches in millions. This regular congregation in the places of worship is an external manifestation of our religiosity but only God can judge who true believers are. Whatever the case may be, the topic of my discussion is very well understood by our people. Grace is not earned and it is freely given by God to whom He wills but at the same time it is everyone’s belief or assumption that divine grace is only available to those who are righteous before God and for me righteousness means in layman’s word doing the right thing before man and God.ÿþ The question is – are we doing the right things now that our economy has virtually collapsed to indicate we are eager for economic revival?

    When President Bola Ahmed Tinubu was elected president, most of us expected a sea change in appointments and administration. This is based on the fact that Tinubu is not Buhari and by education and professional backgrounds, they are different from one another. Tinubu is a professional accountant and a full time politician. Buhari is an accidental politician but a professional soldier trained in the art of soldiery expecting orders to be obeyed without question.  Buhari is used to military hierarchy in which orders radiate from the top to the other ranks and questions are never asked unless one possesses superior force to countermand the existing order of things. Even though Buhari ruled the country for eight years answering no questions, he still thought he had transformed himself from a military leader to a politician. If he thought so, most of us did not think so. He however ruled the country as a weak and old soldier who allowed his inner circle of friends and relatives to do whatever they liked with power and the country’s patrimony.

    Buhari appeared to have been following Obasanjo’s record of wanting not only to be a military head of state but also a democratically elected politician. Obasanjo as military leader was not like Buhari. Once Obasanjo’s transformation from military into politics took place, he had to rapidly learn the art of politics. Some will argue that Obasanjo never really lived down the military nature in him which had almost become innate to him despite his transformation as a politician. But he remained a strong leader till he left office almost micromanaging the country in spite of having a cabinet of ministers and advisers. Obasanjo publicly told the nation that whatever number of advisers he had, he was not compelled to take their advice.  He distinguished himself by his strong leadership and the national spread of his appointments sometimes to the detriment of his own region and ethnicity.

    I remember a highly distinguished female academic pointing out that in all the years of Obasanjo in government, he never found any Yoruba woman good enough to be in his cabinet but rather preferred women from other parts of the country who were light years behind their Yoruba compatriots in education. Obasanjo used to say since his Yoruba people did not vote for him, he was not obliged to favour them. Whether this was a wise thing to do or not the answer is blowing in the wind!  He remains in my estimation, the best president we have ever had. He was the exact opposite of Buhari who appeared bereft of ideas and just left his ministers to get on with the job the way they knew it. Because his political and circle of friends were limited, he was constrained to pack his administration with ethnic and religious cohorts.

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    This is not the way a genuine politician like Tinubu should go because he has to maintain equilibrium of forces within his party while at the same time breaking new ground and charting a new path to separate and differentiate himself from his predecessor. I hope he can do this and be seen to be doing it!

    There are far too many appointments a president makes under our strange presidential constitution perhaps higher than in any other country. This is why some of us have pleaded in the past for a proper federal or confederal constitutional arrangement permitting the division of power and consequent division of appointing powers. Tinubu has made just a few appointments and people are already accusing him of nepotism and ethnic favouritism without allowing the full picture to be on the canvas before jumping at him.

    I sympathize with Tinubu who is faced with the task of rebuilding the shattered economy of a country, from the doldrums of which his predecessor has left it. The seriousness of our economic predicament is so bad that our total foreign receipts are not sufficient to pay interests on our foreign debts not to talk about its amortization. The Buhari government not only borrowed money for infrastructure and consumption  in terms of salaries and allowances but also committed future regimes to continuing payments of debts  in years to come as seen in his printing of N22  trillion without assets to back this huge amount which means we are condemned now and in the future to almost double domestic production and exports to keep the Naira afloat. For those crying about the falling Naira, the action of the previous government has foredoomed us to this parlous situation. This I believe is the reason why the present government is out there searching for experienced and steady hands to rebuild the economy. In doing so there is the temptation to be insular and the government must guide against this.

    There are great and knowledgeable people all over Nigeria and genius is not regionally and ethnically or religiously located. This should be the credo of the government. This government must not limit its critical recruitment to those who voted for it alone like Obasanjo and Buhari, two pseudo democrats who refused to see politics as difference of opinions and ideas but as a question of loyalty. In fact, it makes political sense to recruit substantially from areas that did not vote for one than concentrate appointments on areas that voted for one. This will broaden the base of support for the government that everybody knows is doing a yeoman job of rescuing the economy from total collapse.

    I want to remind my readers to a point Oluremi Tinubu, the First Lady, made solemnly in the Aso Rock chapel after the swearing in of her husband. She said her husband has come to help fix Nigeria and not in government for personal financial aggrandizement. All those who are pushing the government in any other direction contrary to what the First Lady publicly declared in the house of God should be shown out of government so that the president can see the trees rather than just the dark forest.

    I hate to see this government make the same mistake as the previous government thus opening itself to accusations of being ethnically or religiously driven. I know politics is a matter of spreading the spoils of office and rewarding supporters but this is not a normal time in Nigeria and we must rise above mundane and pedestrian politics of the belly.

    Even though we run a federal constitution in which the states are technically co -equal with the federal government, but this is on paper. How many states can do without the federal government under our extant constitution? Although ideally each state should generate its own revenue and make agreed contributions to the centre in a normal federal regime but in our own constitution of inverse federation, most of the revenue goes to the centre which then distributes revenue based on agreed formula. In other words, we have one of the most unitary federation which amounts to contradiction in terms. Under this constitutional arrangement, the federal government ought to be able to show the light, as Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, our first president would have said and the people will follow. As things are, the state governments are behaving as if we are not in a situation of economic emergency. How can we justify the multitude of political appointments at state and federal levels all of them having to be paid and accommodated at state expense at a period of economic emergency? The people need to see that their leaders are genuinely making sacrifices by cutting down perquisites of office and reducing the number of political appointments to the barest minimum. Why should a governor going to commission a project be followed by a retinue of 40 cars, ambulances and a press bus all led by screaming motorcycle outriders. What cannot be justified at the state level should be disallowed at the federal level and the instruction must be passed down the political hierarchy. We just cannot continue like this while our people are living in squalor and the world everywhere is passing us by. For how long can we in Africa bewail our backwardness and underdevelopment and blame colonialism? Nobody is going to give us our rights in this world unless we fight and demand for them. But we cannot fight for our rights if at home we run down our country in grinding poverty while our rulers live in absolute and abundant wealth as has been made public in the series of coups happening in west and central Africa and in the regimes of sit tight rulers and their foreign backers who have simply captured the states. The successful outing of President Tinubu at UNGA would mean nothing if Africa simply goes home and does nothing while foreign mining interests and the national governments continue their exploitation as before without any change in the lives of the suffering humanity living in our countries and justifying the sobriquet of Africa being the dark content even now in the 21st century.

  • A tale of two deputies

    These are not the best of times for the deputy givermors of Edo and Ondo states, Philip Shaibu and Lucky Aiyedatiwa. Both of them are fighting the political battles of their lives. The duo were well favoured by their principals before things went awry. When the going was good, the deputies enjoyed their governors’ confidence.

    There was nothing Governors Godwin Obaseki and Rotimi Akeredolu did that their deputies did not know about. They wined, dined, played and fought their perceived enemies together. They were always on the same page so much so that no political godfather could come between them, as was witnessed during Obaseki’s 2020 reelection bid.

    Obaseki was singlehandedly made governor by his predecessor, the now Senator Adams Oshiomhole, in 2016. Before Obaseki completed his first term of four years in 2020, they had fallen out. Getting a second term seemed bleak in that circumstance, but Obaseki, with the support of Shaibu, who stood by him as a loyal deputy, overcame the Oshiomhole threat. They won without Oshiomhole’s support.

    It was a roforofo fight into which they threw everything. The pair fired barbs at Oshiomhole, but the dimunitive senator is a man that cannot be corked, notwithstanding his petit size. Obaseki and Shaibu saw Oshiomhole as their common enemy and in the past three years of their administration, they have kept him at arm’s length. As they popularised the song pepper dem o, oya, oya, pepper dem, with which they mocked Oshiomhole, their own relationship blossomed. But, not anymore.

    Aiyedatiwa was the deputy in who Akeredolu was well pleased after his bitter experience with Agboola Ajayi. Ajayi was a thorn in Akeredolu’s flesh. He almost ran the governor out of office because of his strong political connections which he used to ‘pepper’ Akeredolu, who tried to no avail to get him impeached. Akeredolu’s search for a loyal deputy for his second term led him to Aiyedatiwa. The party is now over.

    Why is it that governors and their deputies in most cases fight before the end of their tenure? There is no straight forward answer to this question. The response differs depending on which side you are. The governors will accuse their deputies of disloyalty, while the deputies will allege that their governors treat them with disdain. This was not the intention of drafters of the Constitution. The Constitution envisages that governors and their deputies will work together, not at cross purposes.

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    The Constitution joins them together as Siamese twins. A governorship candidate cannot contest election without nominating someone as his running mate who will hold office as deputy governor, if the candidate wins. The candidate is the one running as governor. Does that make his running mate his appendage?

    The Constitution does not say so. It also does not provide specific functions for the deputy, thereby leavng him at the whims and caprice of the governor. Is this what governors have been exploiting to treat their deputies as spare tyres as someone once described them. The Constitution does not say that they are spare tyres. It may not have accorded them specific roles too, but it treats them as alternate governors. Going by the Constitution, without one, there cannot be the other.

    But, as in every human relationship, the governor has the upper hand because of the powers conferred on his office by the Constitution. Everything revolves around the governor. He is the be-all and end-all. Whatever he says upheld by all. The deputy governor either takes it or leaves it. Many deputies, who realise this fact early, know how to navigate the waters to avoid being thrown to the sharks. But Shaibu and Aiyedatiwa seemed to have learnt nothing from their closeness to power.

    Power is a game of chance. They should have known from their closeness to their governors how to play their cards in order to get what they want. They want to succeed their principals. But the governors have other plans. Did the deputies sound out their governors first on their ambitions? If their relationships were cordial, the issue would have been treated as a family matter. It would not have reached public domain, with the parties going for one another’s throat.

    There is nothing bad in a deputy seeking to succeed his governor, but it should not resort to brawling, if the matter is properly handled. The frequent fights between governors and their deputies over the issue of succession are an ill-wind that blows no good. They only overheat the polity and halt governance in states in dire need of development long before the tenure of the outgoing administration lapses.

    As for Shaibu, why did he start a fight that he could not finish? Now, he is begging after the governor sent him to Siberia! I thought he was made of sterner stuff. Edo does not need such a political paper weight as governor. Aiyedatiwa is in court challenging his planned impeachment by the House of Assembly. He has won the first round, with the court putting the process on hold for now. Is that how far he will go?

    The likely end of the matter is well known. In impeachment matters, the assembly and not the court has the last say, as long as the laid down constitutional procedure is followed. Aiyedatiwa may yet survive if he can reenact the Ajayi magic which saw him frustrate the assembly’s impeachment plan some four years ago. Can he do that?

  • The travails of the naira

    The naira is what 95% of Nigerians need to carry out their daily shores including putting food on their table and sending their children to school. Unfortunately, parasites waging war against our naira, their collaborating crooks in government and in the media and our foreign detractors often make us feel that without the almighty dollar which without any objective criteria they claim today exchanges for N1,000 to $1, Nigeria is doomed. But in truth, the naira in terms of its purchasing power is in high demand by our toiling but short-changed farmers in Nigerian rural communities in spite of the hysteria of parasites in the urban centres.

    It is on record that our naira, until a coordinated assault by crooks, parasites and their foreign sponsors, competed favourably with both the dollar and British pound sterling. I remember when I travelled to London for three weeks’ vacation as a young employee of the Guardian in 1983, my Personal Travel Allowance (PTA) was N500. But the real story was that when I finished spending the value of my travellers’ cheque, I went to Liverpool Street where those Indian traders accepted naira without any hesitation.

    Assault on naira started in 1986 with Babangida’s Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) which sounded the death-knell of our budding industries, the backbone of our naira. Olu Falae and Kalu Idika Kalu and other agents of our creditors who claimed there was no alternative to Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) spoke of ‘inevitable large scale programme of devaluation’ despite warning by professors Ricardo Fari of John Hopkins University and Sam Aluko of the University of Ife who insisted there was alternative to even death which he said was life.

    In November 13, 1986, the first-tier rate put the exchange rate at N2.80 to $1. By November 13, it has depreciated to N3.45 to $1 and by November 1990, it was N10.75 to $1. By July 1991 it was N11.32 to $1 forcing Augustus Aikhomu, Babangida’s military vice president to warn the CBN that “the value of the naira cannot be left absolutely to the whims and caprices of market forces”.

    Babangida went on to institutionalise corruption through the foreign exchange policies that allowed military men and their fronts to amass so much wealth with which they embarked on a wholesale importation of the labour of other societies.

    The parasites adopting Obasanjo, as their arrow head, took over power in 1999. With their privatization programme which according to a National Assembly probe, was nothing but a ploy to sell to themselves Nigeria’s total investment of about $100b  for a paltry $1.5b,  it was obvious, his administration merely continued the war against the naira from where Babangida stopped.

    The assault on the naira continued under Jonathan with his administration’s extension of tax waivers to parasitic car importers.  Our leaders continued to play the ostrich even as Michelin, Dunlop and some pharmaceutical firms relocated, ostensibly because of poor power supply to Ghana which ironically depends on Nigeria for her energy needs. We all played the ostrich pretending not to know that their relocation was due to uncontrolled importation of substandard tyres from China and expired tyres from Europe by dangerous and desperate parasites with the help of crooks in government.

    But no one puts this better than Audu Ogbe, former Minister of Agriculture in a speech he gave back in 2018 titled ‘the problem of importation’ where he concluded that “a ship load of rice translates to a ship load of unemployment.”

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    According to him “the tragedy of Nigeria began with SAP in 1986 when we  became importers of everything including milk, sugar, pencil, handkerchief and champagne, consumed more by Nigerian than any nation on planet earth according to Jacques Champagne  de Labriolle, the  French ambassador to Nigeria; and toothpaste and tomato paste which cost Nigeria $18m and $400m respectively annually.”

    Hitting the nail on its head, he had submitted that “someone is making sure you fail when you want to produce at home. These are people who can kill if they have a chance… these guys have seized this country’s economy; they have taken us a hostage and have no intention of giving up because this is a huge market… and they have taken control”.

    He did not forget to call attention of Nigerians to the unpatriotic role of (some crooks in the media), working for their principals, who with their publications try to demoralize Nigeria local farmers in the case of rice local production. For him: “To cure Nigeria malady will take a while and will take a strong government”.

    He was right. Both late Obafemi Awolowo and Dora Akunyuli had the foretaste of how vicious these desperate groups could be.  The former, for saying he would stop importation of second hand clothes if he won the 1959 election, had his helicopter stoned in Onitsha while the latter had a close shave with death when her car was sprayed with bullets in Onitsha because of her war against importation of substandard and fake drugs into the country.

     But Tinubu who has said we should not sympathise with him has his job well cut out. He already has the answer to the question of contribution of importers of the labour of other societies to our economy in our army of unemployed youths in Nigeria and thousands of others that have migrated to Britain and Canada where many of them do menial jobs.

    As to the source of the parasites’ foreign exchange, he like other Nigerians already know it is CBN which was converted into an ATM without a password under President Jonathan and Emefiele. It only got worse under Buhari and Emefiele.

    We also now know that some of those who secured CBN foreign exchange allocation for importation of raw materials often end up using such to import substandard products with the active support of crooks in government and cover up by crooks in the media.

    If you are in doubt, ask yourself how the prime suspect in the case of banned imported crusader medicated soap and Mekado soap which (contained mercury which can damage skin,  eyes, ears, brain, kidney and the nervous system”) with a street value of N1b who according to Professor Adeyeye,  NAFDAC boss, has not produced a bar of the soap in Nigeria since 2013, secured foreign exchange to import the soap seven times in 2021 alone with each consignment not less than three containers?(Guardian Sept 16, 2023).

     The battle to protect our naira must start with starving of parasitic importers of labour of other societies of foreign exchange. The president must also devise a means of protecting our local industries.

     Our own Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala the WTO  chair,  during a recent chat with CNN’s Richard Quest pointed out that that both the US and China, the world biggest economies have accused each other of protectionism. The truth is that the West that claims we are all equal in a globalised world subsidizes each head of cow owned by those in animal husbandry industry by $2 dollars. And going by World Bank claim that 70% of Africans live below two dollars a day, that would mean the life of a cow in the West is worth much more than that of a man in Africa.

    Our rural farmers that need the naira most can also be empowered by state governments buying off their farm produce just as government of rice-producing states in Asia do before exporting same to Nigeria several years later. Some of the savings made by withholding foreign exchange from parasites that bring only misery to Nigerian youths can be used to help the states set up cottage industries.

  • From Japa to Japada: Greening the Nigerian pasture (4)

    From Japa to Japada: Greening the Nigerian pasture (4)

    There is no wisdom in appointing Nigerians who have Japa to man sensitive public offices in Nigeria. This is akin to luring the proverbial skunk from its forest grove into our royal bed chamber, if it doesn’t sully the quilted sheet with its faeces, it will ruin the palace with its stench.

    Those who would Japa to escape the hell Nigeria has become should never  be allowed to superintend our healing, ultimately because they lack the character and competence, native intelligence and maturity, selflessness and integrity, patience and sense of responsibility required to manage our healing process.

    It was disheartening to see a Governor’s recent appointee scoff at his fortune, stressing that he never needed the appointment – even though he barely survived as a canned fruit hawker and cab driver who squatted with friends in the United Kingdom.

    If we must invite a Nigerian from the Diaspora to serve as the country’s Petroleum Minister, for instance, one primary requirement should be his previous employment in a similar capacity. The same logic requires that only a seasoned General can become Nigeria’s Chief of Army Staff (COAS). 

    That said, it is often ill-advised to appoint an overseas cab driver, who is contemptuous of Nigeria, as a federal minister or director of a public agency. When Nigeria needs cab drivers with international experience, we may recruit such individuals. Our public offices are best reserved for patriots who keep faith in the Nigerian enterprise. It’s about time we stopped appointing leeches into public office. When the going gets tough, they simply pack up and leave. Nigeria’s public office is not a rehabilitation camp for fair-weather patriots.

    This is not to forestall, however, the likely benefits of appointing Nigerian expatriates, who have a lot to contribute to the rejuvenation of public governance and accountability. But where do we draw the line?

    We have seen governors appoint internet fraudsters and human traffickers as cabinet commissioners. We have also seen supposedly first-rate technocrats flaunting Ivy-League certificates earned abroad, sully our public offices. So, it’s not by the class of degree or the school that produced them, an individual’s academic or professional honours hardly translate to excellence in public governance if he is corrupted by arrogance and greed.

    Yet we have Nigerians doing well back home, despite the odds. They are the type that stay the course when the going gets tough. They do not bend and sway to every favourable draft neither do they pack up and leave at the onset of a storm. They stay back and withstand its flurry, surviving with tact, perseverance, faith, goodwill and native intelligence. They understand that only by salvaging what we have and who we are can we achieve our Nigerian dream. These are the ones deserving of public office.

    Still, it’s everyone’s prerogative to either stay or flee from perceived hostility in our homeland. But hostile politics and economies aren’t caused by phantoms or poltergeists. They are the result of our lack of humaneness and frantic avarice.

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    The looters prowling our streets and corridors of power did not fall from outer space. They are the fruits of our mother’s wombs, sired with seeds from our fathers’ loins. They are the monsters we raised in our families.

    Modern Nigeria is a product of the joint efforts and inactions of our families, schools, worship houses, the streets and the media.

    Japa nomads taking the education or scholarship route, eventually find that their admission into elite schools overseas was purely a business decision by the schools and their host countries. The benefits are ploughed back into their host society.

    By the time they graduate, they are superbly conditioned for the drudgery of second or third-rate employment overseas. Some occasionally secure first-rate employment. But the very smart ones among them relocate back home to seek employment with Nigerian or multinational firms who prefer their foreign certificates.

    Many return to Nigeria as agents of metacolonialism. Hence the preponderance of journalists, writers, teachers, economists, social workers, engineers, and health workers, to mention a few, who function as glorified stooges of the so-called developed nations of the world.

    The faithlessness and moral corruption that makes Japa possible is similar to the one that drove African enablers of the transatlantic slave trade. This degeneracy remains largely unchallenged.

    To prevent its recurrence, we must hinder the social mechanisms that render people capable of such. And this can only be achieved through education. The Nigerian school must begin to impart more than money-making soundbites and status-conferring skills.

    Our schools must begin to teach values and history with a didactic bent. If they do not, another transatlantic slave trade is possible; we have seen it happen in Libya, where Europe-bound Nigerian youths were bound and gagged, raped and murdered by African slave drivers cum human traffickers; it happens every day to thousands of Nigerians crossing to Europe through irregular migration routes from Agadez through Tripoli to the Mediterranean bight.

    President Bola Tinubu must understand that it is not enough to seek foreign investment and cooperation from abroad; such initiative, while appreciable, could be doomed by a lack of quality personnel and citizenship required to nourish whatever benefits accrue from his nation-building enterprise.

    If Nigeria truly seeks sustainable socio-economic growth in the long run, we must groom generations of men and women capable of nourishing and preserving the Greater Nigeria enterprise.

    Nigeria needs patriots amply groomed to understand that the most important achievements aren’t measurable by a title or figures. The true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers, and as Deresiewicz writes, only a small minority have seen their education as part of a larger intellectual journey or have approached the work of the mind with a pilgrim soul. 

    Nigeria must furnish an educational system driven by the sweat and exploits of such pilgrim souls. The country’s education curricula must be overhauled to impart a Nigeria-centred educational experience that could resonate with the progressive social re-engineering of the country.

    It doesn’t matter what quality of degrees are acquired if the recipients are furnished to operate like mindless robots, praise junkies, fortune hunters and crowd pleasers.

    William Hazlitt noted at the beginning of the 19th century that men do not become what by nature they are meant to be, but what society makes them. European society, according to Hazlitt, violently wrenches and amputates her citizenry thus making them unfit for intercourse with the world, something in the manner that beggars maim and mutilate their children, to make them fit for their future pigeonhole in life.

    This imagery of beggars maiming and mutilating children is discernible in the fate of the Nigerian kids birthed abroad; some are shipped overseas as regular or illegitimate migrants purportedly to grant them access to a better life.

    The lure of Japa validates Bulhan’s theory of metacolonism. The Japa syndrome has taken so much away from us, including our loyalty, language, history, and the cultural values that bound our community together.

    All that is left is our sense of attachment and moral responsibility borne of nostalgia. Yet Japa has corrupted even that.

    These days, I look at my children and wonder how much of Nigeria and their culture they will get to keep. How much of their Nigerianness will matter in the long run?

  • From Japa to Japada: Greening the Nigerian pasture (3)

    From Japa to Japada: Greening the Nigerian pasture (3)

    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 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 for Japa 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 fixate on science education, it must equally furnish our arts and humanities.

    Nigeria must rejig her cultural foundations and moral 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 dissent 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.

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    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.

    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 actually 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 Japa because he or she must have learned to think for truth and progress astride pecuniary gains, not for vulgar repute or profit. 

  • On the world stage

    On the world stage

    It was late in the night of Tuesday, September 19, in Nigeria. But in New York, United States (US), the sun was just setting. Inside the United Nations (UN) Headquarters, where the 78th General Assembly (GA) was taking place, the audience was gathering in ones, twos and threes. It was a significant date on the calendar for Nigeria.

    President Bola Tinubu was among the distinguished participants at the the 78th UNGA. It was his maiden outing. He was billed to speak on the occasion around 7p.m., New York time, which was around midnight local time. Tinubu did not disappoint as he faced the world in the plush settings of the UN Headquarters.

    There was pin-drop silence as he began to read his 46-point address. It was vintage Tinubu on display. The President was in his elements as he spoke in measured tones. The speech was well written and well delivered. His delivery brought out the message succinctly. In a calm and composed manner, he spoke in a hard way, without hurting feelings.

    He spoke about Nigeria and the kind of relationship that his country seeks with others, especially the developed nations of the world. He did not forget Africa, his continent which resources he noted had been exploited for centuries by the developed world. He was in virtual pains as he noted that Africa’s natural resourcess were pillaged, leaving it in poverty and penury.

    If Africa is backward today, the developed nations are liable. How Europe underdeveloped Africa, a book written by Walter Rodney, remains a rich text on the witting exploitation of the continent’s endowments by its colonial masters. Africa has not recoverd from that wicked act and may never do because it still goes on till today in one form or the other in some parts of the region.

    Tinubu’s call for an end to the pillaging of the continent’s wealth echoes the inaugural address of former U.S. President J.F Kennedy, who in 1961 called on “citizens of the world to come together and see what we can do for the freedom of man”. Africa has since been free from the shackles of colonialism, but its growth and development remain stunted because some colonial masters have refused to let go in countries where they still mindlessly mine mineral resources, treat the citizens as slaves and reptriate the profit back home.

    What kind of freedom is that when most people in those parts of the continent are still in servitude? Tinubu hit the nail on the head when he spoke of how blessed the continent is, but yet sufferings suffuse the land. “In fundamental ways, nature has been kind to Africa, giving abundant land, resources and creative and industrious people. Yet, man has too often been unkind to his fellow man and this sad tendency has brought sustained hardship to Africa’s doorstep.

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    “To keep faith with the tenets of this world body (peace, security, human rights and development) and the theme of this year’s Assembly (Rebuilding trust and reigniting global solidarity…), the poverty of nations must end; the pillage of one nation’s resources by the overreach of firms and people of stronger nations must end. The will of the people must be respected. This beautiful, generous and forgiving planet must be protected. As for Africa, we seek to be neither appendage nor patron. We do not wish to replace old shackles with new ones”, Tinubu said.

    He was not done. Like the late JFK, Tinubu extended a hand of fellowship to all: “To the rest of the world, I say walk with us as true friends and partners. Africa is not a problem to be avoided nor is it to be pitied. Africa is nothing less than the key to the world’s future”. It was a great speech which resonated long after he finished speaking. With the speech, he heralded his entry into the UN Hall of Leaders, creating a name and place for himself and Nigeria in the hearts of other world leaders.

    Tinubu did not disappount his compatriots watching him at home. “Nigeria”, he said, “welcomes partnership with those who do not mind seeing Nigeria and Africa assume larger roles in the global community… Nigeria is open for business. The question is how much of the world is truly open to doing business with  Nigeria and Africa in an equally, mutually beneficial manner”.

    Yes, we were created equal and have inalienable rights, which one side, no matter how strong, should deprive the weaker party of.

  • Tinubu’s northern exploits and the Igbo challenge

    Tinubu’s northern exploits and the Igbo challenge

    No one can replace Papa Anthony Enahoro and Awo but we can inculcate their ideas, their beliefs, their feelings, their irrevocable commitment, to humanity, to human progress and the development of our country”.

    This was Bola Tinubu celebrating chiefs Anthony Enahoro and Obafemi Awolowo, as   celebrated Nigerian visionaries who left their footprint in the sand of time. They served as role models and guiding star during his war with Obasanjo and the predatory buccaneers that held the old southwest hostage. Tinubu celebrated his victory over Obasanjo with the return the old West from Edo to Lagos to its old glory of a pacesetter administered in the main by men of ideas who understand that their own wellbeing is contingent on the wellbeing of their neighbours.

    Tinubu incidentally was not one of those that Pa Awo and Enahoro heavily invested on to carry on the battle. But his principled stand on divisive issues of Nigerian politics such as fiscal federalism, devolution of power, revenue allocation, credible census exercise, free and fair election naturally positioned him as the one to continue his father’s unfinished battle. Today, his illustrious fathers who in spite of their heroic efforts, could not spread their epistle to the critical segments of Nigerian society, will be proud of Tinubu’s exploits from their graves for winning over many of the  descendant of those who once persecuted them for spreading the light. The struggle for liberation from colonial rule and institutionalization of an egalitarian society might have sounded attractive; most northern leaders of the period were probably put off by Awo, Enahoro and their other members’ abrasiveness.

    Thus Enahoro’s March 31, 1953 motion for independence in 1956 left a permanent scar between the west and the north. Professor Banji Akintoye, not too long ago told a story of how a prominent northern leader accused the Yoruba of arrogance for trying to preach the epistle of ‘free education’ to the northern masses. “Who by the way told the Yoruba that the north wanted free education?”, the northern leader was quoted as asking not without a touch of some cynicism. Incitement of northern masses by their leaders against Akintola, the chief evangelist of free education to Kano led to the 1953 Kano riot with about 46 people dead. In Sokoto, Awo’s helicopter would not be allowed to land. A Sokoto convert who cleared his groundnut farm where Awo’s helicopter eventually landed paid the supreme price. Hawking his fathers’ same old wares during the 2023 election, Tinubu secured the bulk of the 2.7m votes that came from the northwest. The epistle was the same. What was different was Tinubu’s marketing skill.

    The Old West evangelists had underestimated the role of culture. They had thought the value of free education and other social policies will be so self-evident to be resisted by the north which they also believe will have no choice but embrace federalism because of the heterogeneity of the north where some state with 24 LGAs speak as many as 48 languages. They forgot that free education succeeded in the West because it is part of their culture and federalism because by nature, Yoruba are federalists.

    In spite of Tinubu’s gains in the north, he lost the critical voice of the Igbo without which Nigeria can make progress. History tells us that Nigeria is doomed without the critical voice of the Igbo. It was obvious from the outcome of 1959 election that the three dominant groups, Hausa/Fulani, Igbo and Yoruba have diametrically opposing world views. We can today see the hypocrisy in Dr. Azikiwe “with this giant step, Nigeria is no more a geographical expression” claim during the independence night cross-over celebration  at the Tafawa Balewa square on independence day in 1960. It was obvious by 1963 that “Nigeria was not a geographical expression’ only when the Igbo is inside.

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    Igbo response to the loss of influence during the 1964 constitutional confrontation between Zik and Balewa was no less duplicitous just as the method of taking control in January 1966 was disingenuous. And very little has changed in Igbo strategy during their reaction to PDP betrayal in 2023. It is perhaps only Igbo that would believe Obi their adopted candidate would win Nigerian presidency by fighting his former benefactors while also waging an open war against the west and its candidate.

     But if we need one more evidence that Nigeria is still a geographical expression, it was Igbo’s violent opposition to Tinubu’s candidacy in the 2023 election and continued questioning of his legitimacy by majority of Igbo in spite of judiciary’s verdict.

    Tinubu was roundly rejected in the east which gave Obi 95% of their to vote to Obi whose support spread among all segment of Igbo society, from the unquestioning ‘Obidients’, to elder-statesmen like Chukwuemeka Ezeife, accomplished intellectuals like Prof Pat Utomi who stepped down for him as Labour’s presidential candidate, to Igbo world acclaimed writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Except for the Igbo, most Nigerians understand why Obi couldn’t have won an election in which his party fractured into three on the eve of election in which ethnic and religious sentiments were placed in the front burner by major actors. 

    Igbo leaders have generally owned up to their control of commerce in the country. And since in commerce, profit is the driving force, cutting corners is a model. And this may include importation of substandard manufactured goods which has in recent years led to the collapse of our pharmaceutical, ceramics, automobile accessories, textile, batteries, electronics or their relocation outside the country. That this has become a threat to our survival as a nation underscore the need for us to ensure Igbo remains inside.

    The challenge before Tinubu is politics. It is not running abroad to seek foreign investors who at the end will be frustrated out of forced to relocate to Ghana by those who control commerce. And Tinubu’s job has been well cut out for him since we know what the Igbo want is a wholesale importation of everything even when they are given license to manufacture locally as was the case with a company that, according to Prof. Mojisola Adeyeye, the Director General of the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC), “has not manufactured one bar of the soap in Nigeria since the its registration in 2013”. Instead the banned soap ‘was imported seven times in 2021 alone and each consignment is not less than three containers with 4,500 cartons of the soap’.

    Instead of playing the ostrich, it is time to return to restructuring. Nnewi can become Dubai of Nigeria and destination for all those who want substandard imported goods including medicines. That will save those who control commerce the trouble of having to ask their customers for their preference between fake and original. With the pioneering work of Aminu Masari, Nasir el-Rufai and Abdullahi Ganduje, northwest naturally becomes the zone for animal husbandry. Of course the Middle Belt will remain the food basket of Nigeria. President Tinubu only needs a fraction of billions of naira frittered away under Buhari on fighting herdsmen sponsored and armed by those who hide under his government to serve other tendencies.