Category: Thursday

The recently concluded Nigerian Institute of Public Relations (NIPR) Citizens Summit on National Integration, aimed at fostering national integration, rebuilding peace and strengthening security, was a welcome development. The summit held in collaboration with over 70 organisations was rounded off with a two-day conference designed “to bridge the widening trust gap between the leaders and the citizens, as well as amongst the citizens, through promotion of national integration and enhancement of cross-country peaceful co-existence.”

With social dislocations which find expression in Boko Haram operations in the north east, herdsmen, bandits and kidnappers controlling the northwest and middle belt, IPOB terrorising its own people in the east in its campaign for a sovereign state of Biafra, and with the 2023 election increasingly taking the form of an ethnic war among social media savvy youths without a sense of history, I think the summit couldn’t have come at a better time.

The intervention was also timely because of recent experiences across the world where crises of national integration have led to the disintegration of nations like the old USSR, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, responsible for the current uneasy relationship between Britain, Spain and their ethnic groups, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh that seceded from it, and the ongoing ethnic wars in Sudan, Chad and Zaire etc.

But the problem of national integration particularly poses a greater threat to stability in Nigeria as well as the rest of Africa because of the nature and texture of the colonial state where diverse groups at different levels of cultural development were merged without consultations just to satisfy the economic interest of the metropolitan powers.

To make matters worse, African new inheritors of power who in the absence of a capitalist hegemonic class discovered they could easily fill the vacuum since access to political power meant access to economic power, were determined to retain the colonial state as inherited.

In a few areas, including Nigeria, where efforts were made to mitigate ethnic rivalry through the creation of a federal framework in which regions representing the interest of ethnic nationalities formed the building block, our new inheritors of power, desperate to retain the state as a dominant force for exploitation as it was under colonial rule, destroyed the regions,  replacing them with the current unwieldy 36 states and the federal government arbitrarily created 774 local government areas.

In other words, just as the colonial state as a dominant force of exploitation for solving social problems of the metropolitan government, our successive inheritors of power, whether under the military or civilian, in the names of NPN, PDP and APC, rape the country to satisfy their own greed.

However, the first republic stood out because of national integration or the cohesiveness within regional social groups. Because of this they were able to serve the interest of their people without prejudice to the development of interpersonal and intergroup cohesion and feelings among Nigerians. As Awolowo once observed, you cannot be a good Nigerian if you are not first a good representative of your people.

While regional leaders like Awolowo and his group implemented a free education programme, set up the University of Ife, established housing and industrial estates, the first television in Africa, the first skyscraper, the cocoa house and liberty stadium etc. self-proclaimed Nigerian leaders like Obasanjo, who detested being called a Yoruba leader, and Atiku Abubakar as president and vice president while still in office, established privately owned fee-paying schools, including universities, built a private presidential library while the national library they started remains an abandoned project.

Similarly, the cohesiveness of the ruling northern political elite of the first republic led to the establishment of the biggest business conglomerate in Africa by Ahmadu Bello, Ahmadu Bello University, and sending of brilliant northern youths, be they Christians or Muslims, to the best universities in the world.

Unfortunately, today the enduring legacies of the hypocritical northern political elite serving Nigeria instead of their people on whose back they rode to power, include the north east under Boko Haram siege, north west and the middle belt region made ungovernable by herdsmen terrorists, bandits and kidnappers.

Of course, unlike the first republic when the Igbo leaders served their own people, what we today have are Igbo Nigerian politicians eating with ten fingers in Abuja while the east is abandoned to IPOB who in the name of quest for self-actualisation wages war against the people it pretends to liberate.

Unfortunately, the intervention of NIPR, despite its good intentions, addressed only the symptoms of our crisis of nation building instead of the fundamental issues. One clear evidence of this was the attention of notable keynote speakers at the presentation of reports of the Zonal Dialogue Series, plenary, syndicate sessions and other activities on our army of angry and frustrated youths, failure of leadership, ethnic stereotyping and profiling, corruption and unacceptable behaviour of Nigerians.

The problem with our self-serving political ruling elite is their readiness to play the ostrich if only that allows them to avoid the bitter truth. They outrightly rejected demands by victims of Niger Delta oil pollution for special attention just as they rejected the demand by many Nigerians that revenue allocation be based on derivation as was the case in the first republic.  Ex-President Jonathan under whose government Soludo, a former CBN governor, declared that “Our public finance is hemorrhaging to the point that estimated over N30tn is missing, or stolen, or unaccounted for, or simply mismanaged,” said, ‘stealing government money is not corruption.’

And despite Okonjo Iweala’s 2013 admission, in an interview with Bloomberg in Abuja, that “We estimate total loss at over 300,000 barrels per day,” the London Economist’s 2016 damning report that “no one knows how much oil Nigeria produces. If there were an authoritative figure, the truly horrifying scope of corruption would be exposed,” and the Nigerian Upstream Regulatory Petroleum Commission’s (NURPC) claim that Nigeria may have lost about 200 million barrels to organised theft in the first 11 months of 2021, prominent indigenes of Niger Delta insist that the federal government is the thief and not the people of Niger Delta.

Last week, as if to vindicate various wild claims, the federal government awarded a N48b pipeline surveillance contract to Government Ekpemupolo, a former leader of one of the Niger Delta militant groups fingered as being behind vandalisation of pipelines and placed on a government wanted list for about four years.

It is on record that under regionalism, ethnic leaders served their tribes without prejudice to an awareness of a common identity among Nigerians. Back then, the phrase “tribes and tongues may differ” in our national anthem was a true admission of our diversity at a time when an unaccompanied 12-year-old could take a train from Iddo, Lagos to Kaduna or Kano. Today under President Buhari, a hero of the war to keep Nigeria one and, Obasanjo, who claims to be Mr. Nigeria, adults, especially Christians, are afraid to travel to Kano by road.

Ethnicity, religion and other primordial tendencies are not antithetical to national integration. Our political elite that exploits them for easy access to political and economic power are the architects of disharmony and discord. And if for a moment they forgot where we derailed on our path to Nigeria’s greatness, they will at least remember that multi-ethnic societies like India, Canada and Britain which they periodically visit to seek medical attention, or have adopted as second homes, were built on the recognition of ‘cultural and ideological congruity and harmony among different groups.’

Suddenly, the 2023 election has become a tripartite tribal war between three Nigerian dominant ethnic groups. With the last-minute defection of Peter Obi from PDP to Labour Party, he was to become a rallying point for disillusioned Igbos, betrayed by PDP they had faithfully served for 22 years. To spite Igbos, PDP, in breach of its constitution, settled for Atiku Abubakar, notorious for shopping for presidential tickets from any party during every election season.

With prominent Igbo stalwarts of APGA and PDP defecting to join Obi, with millions of otherwise indifferent urban-based Igbo youths coming out for voter’s card registration across the nation, including Lagos where they unilaterally shut down Alaba market, and with Obi now hijacked by his obedient supporters, Obi has become the messiah Igbo had waited for since 1999.

That the PDP sacrificed the interests of the south-east and south-south that have always provided the winning votes for it, sometimes with the blood of their people, as Prof. Ise Sagay once said of Rivers, it was obvious Atiku is the adopted candidate of the ‘owners of Nigeria.’

The combination of events leading to the sudden emergence of Obi and Atiku as representatives of two of Nigerian dominant ethnic groups has inadvertently brought a change of fortune for Tinubu.

Here was a leader humiliated for seven years by the government he helped to install, bore scars of misplaced aggression of frustrated Nigerians who saw him as enabler and promoter of Buhari’s candidacy, with philosophical equanimity (with apologies to Ray Ekpu), and survived the evil intrigues of Buhari’s ‘loyal gate keepers’ and APC oligarchy by the fortuitous intervention of rebellion of 11 northern governors that placed the nation first during APC Abuja convention night of many knives.

If all this, including Tinubu’s audacity of ‘Yoruba lokan” (it is the turn of Yoruba), did not earn Tinubu the support of his hypocritical Yoruba fathers, who often observe their ‘Afenifere’ creed (love your neighbour as yourself) in reverse, the antisocial behavior of Obi’s obedient supporters, who unfortunately cannot articulate the nature of Nigeria’s problem, must have finally convinced other Yoruba sitting on the fence that since a part cannot be holier than the whole, it is impossible to impose their culture on the rest of the country.

From this stage, the narrative seems to change for Tinubu. First was the distorted history of Lagos by Igbo Area TV claiming, among other falsehoods, that Lagos is no man’s land, that Igbo has the highest population in Lagos and contribute 60% of its IGR, and that the next governor of Lagos must come from Anambra or Delta.

This was followed by a trending video of 89-year-old Tunde Oduwole, of ‘Project Nigeria,’ appealing to Ndigbo leaders to control their unruly youths, who after allegedly warning Tinubu not to campaign in the east, threaten to lynch anyone coming to campaign in Alaba market wearing Tinubu’s campaign vest. His declaration that Yoruba will not tolerate in their region ‘the nonsense going on in the south-east’ where elected governors shiver when IPOB militants cough was, of course, an appeal to Yoruba patriotism.

But, dear compatriots, there is nothing sinister about tribes being the building block for modern society. By nature, we are individuals and groups. And tribalism is the behaviours and attitudes that stem from strong loyalty to one’s own tribe or social group.

Europe, after two devastating tribal wars they falsely called world wars, discovered the nation state as well as modern democracy were inhibiting the freedom of individual and group identity. In response, they settled for a federal arrangement which ‘formally recognises groups’ identities as legitimate and autonomous participants in the political process.’

In Spain, we have the Basque, Galician, Castilian and Catalan. British 25 tribes coalesce into Northern Ireland, Wales, England and Scotland. Elsewhere in the world, Japan, China, and India celebrate their various tribes. The Jews and their Arab step brothers, bequeathed to the world the Abrahamic religion, science, arts and terrorism.

This was why the British vision for Nigeria, according to Oliver Stanley in 1920, was a “national self-government that secure to each separate people the right to maintain its identity, its individuality and its nationality, its own chosen form of government, which had been evolved for it by the wisdom and accumulated experiences of generation of its forbearers.” In line with this British vision, regionalism was put in place by Richards 1947 constitution while the 1954 Lyttleton ensured each tribe or group of tribes had powers over law and order, education, economic development etc. while Macpherson 1957 constitution consolidated everything.

But as the struggle for power became intensified by representatives of the dominant ethnic nationalities, tribes became instruments for political manipulation of the largely illiterate electorate in whose name the politicians falsely swear.

Ibibio State Union was formed in 1928, while Igbo State Union over which Zik presided as National President was formed in 1930. But when Egbe Omo Oduduwa was formed in London in 1943 by Awo and others, Zik saw a tribal association that must “be fought up hill and down dale’ all over Nigeria.” In the 1951 election to the western region house, Awolowo’s AG won by 45 seats to Zik’s NCNC’s 35. Awolowo was labelled by Zik and his supporters as a tribal leader who prevented him from becoming premier of West in 1952. They had nothing to say about the result in the east where Zik’s NCNC won by 64 seats to UNP’s 4.

In the 1954 federal election, AG in its Yoruba land won by 23 to NCNC’s 18, while in the same election, in the east, NCNC won its base by 32 to 3. Yet Igbo leaders did not see the beam in their own eyes.

The feeding of uninformed Igbo youths with falsehood is responsible for the mutual suspicion between ordinary Igbos and their Yoruba compatriots. This was why Awolowo, whose helicopter was stoned in Aba in 1998, scored just about 0.8% of Igbo votes, and why MKO Abiola won only one Igbo during his pan-Nigeria landslide victory, later annulled by Babangida, aided by leading Igbo politicians including Arthur Nzeribe, Chukwumerije, Walter Ofonagoro and Apamgbo.

Between 1999 and 2015, Igbo leaders, just as they did during the first and second republics, ate with their ten fingers under Obasanjo and Jonathan. Contracts for the second Niger bridge, dredging of River Niger, East-West Road, among others, were awarded but never executed.

In 2015, Tinubu mobilised the Yoruba for the victory of Buhari, who has remained overwhelmed by Nigeria’s challenges of nation building. But unlike Igbo leaders who pulled down the first and second republic governments over sharing of positions, Tinubu, who never participated in government or sought contract, patiently waited for his time.

But as soon as Tinubu declared interest in the 2023 presidential contest, he was labelled a traitor and tribal leader by Igbo leaders who wanted to reap where they did not sow. That was the impetus needed for Obi’s supporters to unleash a vicious attack on a leader who laid the foundation for the development of Lagos, where they today take refuge from the anarchy that has taken over the whole of the south-east, including Obi’s Anambra.

Now the die is cast. Exhibition of antisocial behaviour, which finds expression in abuse, intimidation, threat to use violence and utter disregard for the feelings and right of others by Obi’s obedient supporters, can only drive the Yoruba who are social, celebrate companionship, respect the feelings and protect the rights of others, towards making an informed choice between Obi and Tinubu in 2023.

The ongoing war, now six months, between the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) and the government remains intractable because of the incompetence of the warring parties. The duo of Ngige and Adamu are round pegs in square holes. ASUU, on the other hand, because its cause is right, thinks it can give what it does not have.

The primary role of egg heads is the preservation of civilisation. And this they do with their physical scientists caged in laboratories searching for what they have not lost, an endeavour that has yielded great dividends for humanity in forms of various inventions in engineering and medicine. Their counterparts in Social Sciences perform the same role by providing philosophical justification for religion, the opium of the poor, and economic model such as slavery, which also goes by other elegant names as capitalism and globalisation.

Finding itself in an unfamiliar territory, ASUU could not advance a good argument to support its just cause beyond bellyaching about lawmakers’ humongous salaries, President Buhari’s misapplication of funds, and massive corruption in the bureaucracy, all of which have no bearing on the underfunding of education.

Suddenly they want to be politicians without politicians’ temperament. I am not sure ASUU members can undress and engage in a brawl inside the market as recommended by Lamidi Adedibu, the late garrison commander of Ibadan politics. Given an opportunity to fix their own salaries, it is most unlikely university dons will corner 25 percent of the national budget. Above all, with all the bravado inside their campuses, I am not sure they will order the execution of their best friend over power struggle.

But ASUU, which hardly listens to other peoples’ views outside the conclave of eggheads, must be reminded that closing down universities for six months is a betrayal of erudition. Strike is a reality for 30 years. It is lazy to say there cannot be a new reality. Besides, it is inconceivable that a group of workers will shut down Lever Brothers, Cadbury, Shell Petroleum for one month and expect employers’ applause. Parents are not amused with ASUU’s undertaking to carry a six-month backlog of work with their new semester work. Under the market economy model we operate, it is evidence of a bloated work force that calls for downsizing by as much as 60 percent.

Sadly, even with our restless youths pleading to be allowed to return to schools, some ASUU zonal coordinators who are not yet battle-fatigued are threatening to prolong the nightmare of students and their parents. They are questioning why government jettisoned the 2009 collective bargaining (Stanley Ogoun, Port Harcourt), threatening “No retreat, no surrender” (Dr Gbolahan Bolarin, Minna), while Dr Ashiru of Lagos was expressing irritation about “Government insensitivity and disrespect for scholars.”

But I think it is time for ASUU elders to come in and ensure our children return to school. Buhari has a mindset that he is doing what is best for Nigeria without necessarily asking Nigerians. He listens only to himself and his ‘‘loyal gate keepers,” This is a leader who has no apologies for failing to deal decisively with Fulani terrorists as advised by Obasanjo, Soyinka, Ortom, Masari and El-Rufai, even now that the north has become ungovernable. He freely frittered away the goodwill of those who hailed him as a messiah in 2015. He undermined his own political party. Rather than change after seven years, he has continued to shoot himself in the foot. Scholars should understand that going to war with such a leader would amount to an exercise in futility.

But ASUU must also stop misleading Nigerians with the false claim that its opposition to payment of school fees by university students was driven by a desire to protect the children of the poor. How many children of the poor can secure admission to our federal Universities? As Prof.  Hakeem Olaniyan of the Faculty of Law, University of Lagos, recently submitted “Take a census of the children we are teaching, they are not children of the poor. They can afford to pay fees.”

From experience, half of students’ intake into the University of Lagos are sourced from the diploma class where prospective undergraduates paid as much as N450,000 school fees and an additional half a million for private hostel accommodation outside the school for the one-year preparatory class. The other half comes from students who did exceedingly well, with distinctions at WAEC and must have scored over 200. The only people that fit into this category are children of the rich that attended expensive fee-paying secondary schools with school fees ranging from N500,000 to N3m.

These along with the diploma students, by ASUU’s argument, suddenly become children of the poor who would not be able to afford to pay anything above N20,000 for tuition and N16,000 for hostel. ASUU’s battle, I think, should be for provision of scholarships for children of the poor, reinstatement of the federal government loan scheme supported by state bursaries as obtained in the seventies. That is what sustained children of the poor who could not afford even the N90 tuition and hostel fees. When ASUU romanticises the past when university students ate chicken, they ignore the fact that the majority of admitted students of the period were the children of middle class, professors, lawyers, doctors and successful business men.

At Ife, I still remember some of our poor friends who are today successful lawyers in Lagos who could afford neither the N70 hostel fees nor the 20 kobo per plate food. They often slept in class pretending to be doing overnight-reading, coming early in the morning to take their bath in their friend’s hostel before stopping at the cafeteria to fill their flask with free coffee enroute to the “bukateriat’ where they could buy 5k bread.

I think ASUU should also show interest in wastefulness, mismanagement, and corruption, which today define many of our federal institutions. ASUU must also look inwards to see how to check their members who hide under academic freedom to visit horror on students.

President Buhari might have not met the expectations of Nigerians but ASUU, as part of a whole, cannot claim to be holier than the whole. Leading ASUU members contributed to the nation’s current travails. It is on record that it was a University of Lagos ASUU member that drafted Ironsi’s unitary decree 34 of 1966 that destroyed our federal system. The take-over of the most widely read newspaper in Africa south of Sarara, the Daily Times, and its sister Sunday Times, by Obasanjo, was spearheaded by University of Lagos dons.

Those responsible for an aberration, the federal government created and funded local governments, included University of Lagos dons. Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP), which destroyed our budding industries, our naira, turned our country into an importer of labour from other societies was the brain wave of some dons. Landslide and sea slide victories in the opposition stronghold’s fake theory that led to the collapse of the Second Republic was by a Unilag don. The fraud called military ‘decreed political parties,’ was from the fertile imagination of a University of Benin don. Bank consolidation that consolidated wealth in the hands of a few that today pay slave wages of between N50,000 and N75,000 to university graduates employed as contract staff was postulated by a Nsukka don.

ASUU that provided intellectual support for the political, economic and military elites that have held our country hostage since 1966 cannot now play the victim.