The Nation Newspaper

Category: Thursday

Creeping insecurity in Southwest

It is no longer news that our greatest problem in Nigeria is insecurity. Unfortunately this problem has given rise to other problems such as the lack of foreign investment and consequent unemployment. It has also led to food insecurity because farmers are afraid to go to their farms. Construction of roads and railways are hampered by fear of kidnapping of expatriate foreign supervisors thus hampering infrastructural development and economic development because without infrastructure, there can be no physical development necessary to move goods and people around the country.

These are the obvious negative and observable effects of these problems caused by insecurity but there are other problems of social and psychological nature which unless critically examined, one may not see the bearing of general insecurity on them. Insecurity creates fear, sorrow and doubts about the human condition and general unhappiness about life which could lead to psychological problems and mental breakdown of many young people who do not see a good future under the prevailing insecurity in the country. Many of these young people are taking the insane steps of going to Europe by the Sahara desert and the Mediterranean Sea and getting killed and drowned in the process. The reasons for this insecurity are many and of various dimensions. The fundamental reason is underdevelopment causing massive youth unemployment.

Underdevelopment itself is caused by a variety of things such as corruption, political instability, poor educational system and absence of the rule of law both of which constitute what the World Bank calls “intangible capital” critical to development. Absence of this manifests in poor planning and there is also the problem of absence of technical know-how which leads to absence of innovation which is critical in creating small and medium sized enterprises which are critical in solving the problem of unemployment as has been demonstrated in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

Insecurity also feeds into the problem of low foreign direct investment because it is only where investments friendly environment is present that foreign investment goes. The only way therefore to break the vicious circle of unemployment feeding into insecurity and insecurity causing unemployment is to frontally tackle the issue of insecurity.

The problem of insecurity has been with us for a while but it has been exacerbated by the unwillingness of the present administration to tackle this problem when it began with herders killing farmers first in the middle belt of the country before it spread all over the country. For ethnic, religious and reasons of common consanguinity, herders who are Fulani were allowed to get away with murder and crimes of ethnic cleansing. Land owners were asked to love their attackers or to choose between keeping their lands and losing their lives. The victims are now naturally fighting back thus creating chaos all over the country. Criminals who now see profit in kidnapping for money have joined in the general commotion and have even abandoned their previous jobs as farmers, herders and even some criminally-minded students have abandoned their education to become highway robbers and kidnappers seizing young students and men and women of means and demanding they be ransomed for money or else be brutally wasted.

The local Fulani terrorists have been joined by foreign ones in ethnic solidarity. Local criminals are also in the field sometimes parading themselves as Fulanis. In this endeavor, religion plays little role since Muslim Fulanis are killing Muslim Hausa and Muslim Yoruba and Ibo terrorists are killing fellow Ibo Christians to cite a few examples. It is a war of all against all.

Read Also: Southwest and metamorphosis of insecurity

The spread of this madness to the Lagos-Ibadan expressway is a matter of time. Even though the Southwest zone of the country has somehow been spared from the total chaos of the Northern and Eastern part of the country, but it had also witnessed substantial amount of violence, armed robbery, banditry and herders on farmer violence and kidnapping for ransom originally imported there but it has now developed a life of its own. The road construction on the Lagos – Ibadan road and the heavy traffic on the road had before now made kidnapping a bit hazardous for bandits but as construction progresses, the finished part of the road without the usual traffic snarl has attracted kidnappers especially from the north. The northern kidnappers after selling their cows and handing the proceeds to the owners of the cows sometimes take to kidnapping which has proved more lucrative than herding cows. Sometimes local boys who are unemployed join them or provide local intelligence for those coming from outside the area.

The Ijebu stretch of the Lagos – Ibadan express road is more notorious than any other section of the road. Some have suggested that the bandits operating on the road are probably harbored by northern people in the highway settlement in Iperu/Sapade area and I think the police should keep their eyes on the people of this area. There is need for Lagos, Ogun and Oyo states police commands to mount joint patrols on the road. Ogun State police must remain permanently vigilant on the ground to make the government’s investments on road construction and rehabilitation worth its while. There is the need for highway patrols by the police to be brought back as was the case in the 1970s. Perhaps the Federal Roads Safety Corps need to be armed to confront these highway kidnappers and robbers.

The easiest way to kill the economy of this country is to make the roads unsafe. There is no need for anyone to exaggerate the importance of the Lagos – Ibadan expressway to the economic well-being of the country. It connects the port of Lagos with the hinterland of the Southwest and the northern, South-south and south-eastern states. The fragile Nigerian economy will collapse with the insecurity on this road. Whatever it will cost the states and federal governments to secure the road must be expended. The much ballyhooed Amotekun must justify government’s support for it by getting engaged on this road. Arms must be provided for it to do the job. If Aminu Masari, the governor of Katsina State is providing guns for local people to secure their lives and property, our governors must not shy away from their responsibility. Perhaps we need to raise the issue of local policing and restructuring of the security architecture of this benighted country again before the situation gets to a point where we do not have a country again.

It is not Lagos- Ibadan road alone that is not safe. Even Abuja – Kaduna expressway with all the presence of the military, police, Department of State Security and the federal government and diplomatic missions is not safe. I don’t know when last I have gone home to Okemesi in Ekiti State because all roads leading there are infested by marauders, kidnappers and gun toting herders of Fulani ethnicity. In this kind of pervasive insecurity and fear, who is going to come and invest in our country?

Our own local people are not even investing in our country not to talk of foreigners because no one can guarantee the future stability of the country. My son-in-law who is from Ghana told me he is building some flats in Accra for the future of his family. I congratulated him for this and I immediately felt that I will be the last to ask my son to bring his American loan to invest in Nigeria for a future that is at best dicey and uncertain. This is the situation the problem of insecurity has brought to Nigeria. It is not just Islamic attacks of the Boko Haram and ISWAP type and the Fulani terrorism of the northwest and north central that are destroying Nigeria, the general insecurity caused and occasioned by them and the general absence of the rule of law and certainty of punishment for crime is ruining the country and destroying its future.

The president keeps saying he will not leave the problem of insecurity to his successor and that he has ordered his security forces to destroy the various terrorists disturbing Nigeria. I say amen to the president’s promise but cynics will say this is the eighth year of President Buhari’s presidency and argue that morning shows the day as childhood shows manhood.

My reply is that it is never too late. Perhaps a miracle can happen in the evening months of the Buhari’s presidency. We have no choice than to believe that President Buhari will deliver a secure land to his successor. That will be a legacy worth summoning the last energy of his being.

February 3, 2022
PMB’s tepid war against budget padding and corruption

The three major campaign promises of Buhari in 2015 centred on security, economy and anti-corruption. Despite several setbacks in his war against insurgency, history may not be too harsh on Buhari because outright defeat of insurgency whether in North Africa and the Maghreb or in the Sahel region of West Africa, is said to be impossible. Although Nigeria’s stakeholders including Obasanjo, who had warned the president not to treat killer herdsmen with kid gloves but as terrorists at a period the president listened only to ‘loyal gatekeepers’ who had embarked on unscrupulous assault on victims and those who resisted infiltration of killer herdsmen to their reserved forests, will insist he mishandled the herdsmen war.

To an unbiased observer, President Buhari inherited a wobbling economy compounded by the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala , President Jonathan’s Minister of Finance admitted in May 2015 that the nation was borrowing money to pay salaries as a result of governors’ refusal to save for the rainy day. In her own words: “As a result of the 50% decline in oil revenue …the government has borrowed N473 billion ($2.2b) to meet up with recurrent expenditure”. In fact Chukwuma Soludo, former CBN governor predicted whoever won the 2015 election after PDP’s 16 years of the locust, would be haunted by the ongoing economic crisis. According to him “probably more than N30 trillion has either been stolen or lost or unaccounted for or simply mismanaged …while some faceless ‘thieves’ were pocketing over $40 million per day from oil alone” (Premium Times Feb 1, 2015.)

Again, some will also argue it was on account of this Nigerians traded Jonathan for Buhari in the hope he would end the hemorrhage by refurbishing our refineries and by retrieving our common patrimony from those who sold to themselves the nation’s total investment of over $100b for less than $1.5b so that our teaming youths could secure employments.

I am however not sure President Buhari has a hiding place over his mishandling of his anti-corruption war which according to an APC member, he wages against opposition party using insecticide but deodorant when it involves his supporters. But perhaps more damaging is the fact that for six years, Buhari could not stop budget padding, the source of massive corruption, in the National Assembly controlled by his party.

While Obasanjo between 1999 and 2003 dragged about 17 governors to court over corruption and dismissed his PDP-dominated National Assembly as “pen robbers’, as late as December 31, last year, during his signing of the 2022 Appropriation Bill, all we got from Buhari was the same periodic tepid complaint about budget padding. Lamenting about the padding of the budget by N735.85b billion as if he forgot the buck stops at his table, he had said “Provisions made for as many as 10,733 projects were reduced while 6,576 new projects were introduced into the budget by the National Assembly”.

From the birth of the Fourth Republic in 1999, Nigerian lawmakers who publicly declared that, having sold houses to contest the 1999 election, part of their mission was to recoup their expenses, have never held any pretense to serving the nation. They first cornered about 25% of the national budget for themselves. They then created artificial fuel scarcity to justify expanding number of fuel importers from about four to over hundred, set up Pipeline and Product Marketing Company (PPPMC) through which their children later forged documents to swindle the nation of over N1.7 trillion.

Nigerians first heard of budget padding following President Obasanjo’s stand-off with them in 2000 when they jerked up that year’s N667.51 billion and their own assembly’s N22.7 billion budget by N2 billion.

Many at the period had thought the problem was with Obasanjo’s appointment of inexperienced Dr Bukola Saraki, fresh from medical school in Great Britain as budget adviser. However, his successors were confronted with the same problem.

In her book –Fighting Corruption is Dangerous: The Story Behind the Headlines, Okonjo-Iweala confirmed the National Assembly increased the 2015 budget by N17b which she said “the executive had to accept as a price to pay to move on”, but insisted ‘the country must clear up and clarify its budget process for the future to improve”.

Read Also: Nigeria loses position in corruption rating, ranks 154 globally

And because the N17b padding by NASS was suspected to have been inserted as election expenses, The Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP) sent a letter in which they threatened to institute legal proceeding to compel Buhari’s ‘government of change’ to act in public interest.

Then, a Civic Technology Organisation – BudgIT produced a report for ‘the new sheriff in town’ on N350 billion appropriated by the National Assembly in respect of about 2,516 projects spread across the country over a period of five years which never took off even after full payment had been made.

On July 17, 2016, The Nation in a report titled “Constituency Projects – a ritual of monumental waste” summarized the result of a survey of 436 projects spread across 16 states of the federation by BudgIT. It listed projects such as water boreholes, rural electricity and road projects and primary health centres designed to alleviate the suffering of the poor but abandoned across 16 states of the federation. We have no evidence Buhari and his ‘government of change’ did anything.

Instead, the eighth assembly dominated by his APC men went on to become ‘a house of dealmakers’, “probably the worst we have ever had since the return to civilian rule”, according to Prof. Itse Sagay (SAN), a ‘predatory legislature’ according to Biodun Jeyifo, responsible for the most unjust and lopsided pay structure in the world’, according to the influential The Economist’.

As if to confirm the baleful legacies of the National Assembly dominated by APC, when Abdul Mumini Jubrin was removed as chairman of the appropriation committee over allegation he ‘unilaterally padded the 2016 budget to the tune of N4.1 billion to his Kiru/Bebeji federal constituency in Kano State’, he spilled the beans and attributed his travails to his inability “to admit into the budget almost N30 billion personal requests from Mr. Speaker and the three other principal officers”.

The APC dominated ‘house of deal’ was soon to be haunted by more scandals. On January 11, 2017, the Nigerian Customs “ had intercepted and impounded a Range Rover SUV which carried documents that claimed its chassis number was “SALGV3TF3EA190243”, valued at N298 million, with an alleged fake documents presented by the driver showing payment of N8m as against expected customs duty of N74 million. Investigation later confirmed the Range Rover belonged to the senate president.

Then Col Kangiwa Umar, a highly principled former administrator of Kaduna State spoke of an influential senator, who used his company to import 1,200 metric tons of rice in 30 40-foot containers, fraudulently declared as yeast to evade payment of appropriate duties. The importer went free while “the leader of the Senate Committee on Customs, Excise & Tariff” put the blame on the clearing agent.

The same senator was also said to own a company that secured a contract to dredge the Calabar Channel which the Bureau of Public Procurement condemned as violating all due processes. The senator “demanded and got a whopping $12.5million upfront payment from the NPA and even asked for a purported balance of $22million”despite the fact that there was no evidence the contract was ever executed

“Charity begins at home is the voice of the world: yet is every man his greatest enemy. (Thomas Browne 1642)

LAST WEEK ERROR: The correct title of the book Lamido Sanusi Lamido reacted to was ‘Africa’s Failed Asset?”

February 3, 2022
Power is not dished a la carte

There is the temptation to make the tragic sense of things the touchstone of Nigerian politics. This desire to daub life dire, has for a long while, defined the tide of political partisanship and the transience of hope as a national ideal.

In the fracas of faith and filth, the negligible attains significance while the essential gets consigned to the fringes of awareness.

Had I the garb and lyricism of Sam Omatseye or the suave, gentle reproach of Segun Ayobolu, I’d school the situational activists and dubious ethicists chanting toxic rant about which candidate should contest or not.

But the tantrums of social media cynics and “attack dogs” hardly determine the fate of any candidate or the outcome of an election. Most of them don’t get to vote. They are passion herdsmen and activists of dubious intent.

There is no gainsaying many have joyously committed to the carnage of truth in pursuit of their selfish interests. In the fray, we experience the blooming of fishy equivocation and crass sentimentality.

This tragic sense of things, is a response to the Nigerian experience. This manifests in the electorate’s detachment from patriotic endeavour. Most guilty is the Nigerian in his youth, who samples dissent but will not commit to progressive intent. Rustling ‘wokeness’ out of tired bromides, his sterile passion stifles patriotic fervour.

It was the reflex of youth resistance to and misapprehension of political nature, that led most EndSARS activists to shun more constructive engagement in politics and thus rigged themselves out of the ongoing transition process. Many of them won’t get to vote because they do not have a voter’s card.

Even so, they hurl the label, old cargo, at the country’s oligarchs. This writer too, had severally dismissed the latter as the predatory bunch in whose vice grip Nigeria asphyxiates and suffers a carnage of growth.

Sadly, the youths have done too little to merit the upset they seek. Political power is never dished out a la carte. It is not something you request and receive on a silver platter in some fancy restaurant.

It is a few months to the 2023 general elections and Nigeria pulses with partisan spirit. Rather than validate the shenanigans of the herd, the electorate should focus on the crucial questions.

Of the prospective candidates, whose politics echo our heartbeats? To what do they owe our reverence of them? By their citizenship, do they furnish pathways to empower disillusioned, jobless youths of Umukegwu, Akokwa, Urualla, Borno, Apongbon, Idumota, Agege, Agbor, Sango Ota, Sankwala, to mention a few?

Do they teach the youth to abhor greed, selfishness, god complex? Do they impress that, in the end, only Nigerians get to choose what becomes of Nigeria, not a coalition of shady friends from abroad and black ops-activated humanitarian agencies?

The answer resonates in each candidate’s utterances and deeds. Transcendent moments and deeds are manifestations of an exalted intelligence. Who among the candidates possesses the loftiest acumen? Whose antecedents in private or public office – or both – elicits the passionate tribute of a cheer? Whose past and present exploits incite the passing tribute of a sigh?

Despite the youths’ dissatisfaction with the status quo, do they project the moral character, strength, political literacy and intelligence required to make the right choice?

The ongoing jostle for political spoils is incantatory of Nigerian mind and nature. It is overtly ritualistic. Duplicitous analysts and oligarchs, comprising governors, lawmakers, and members of the presidential cabinet relentlessly pursue their selfish interests amid widespread suffering and bloodshed.

Even the self-appointed progressives have shunned the lilies and languors of virtue for the raptures and roses of vice, as Dolores would say. Amid our suffering, they reconstruct Nigeria into a narrow commune, beholden to their selfish interpretations of power and political office.

Their virtues are short, and their vices extensive and implacable. Their lips, full of lust and laughter, attach to the country’s bosom like curled serpents that are fed from the breast. Every dispensation, they press with fanged lips where their reptilian predecessors have suckled.

Nigeria thus becomes the doomed Cleopatra giving suck to their asps. When kicked out of office, they grudgingly recoil – but never quitting the corridors of power – to accord Nigeria the affliction of deadlier asps in the successive administration.

It hardly matters whether we denounce them on the pages of newspapers, in the studios of popular TV, or the highly virulent comment threads of online media, Nigeria would never be rid of them until we set our grief’s needlepoint astride the prick of pain en route to the 2023 general elections.

Of the candidates, I see a true progressive, a patriot, and misunderstood titan. I see men enslaved to power and god complex. I see voyagers hampered by baggage from a past and present that would forever haunt them. Even the ‘new kids on the block’ come forged as minnows and bathetic ogres.

I see a colossus whose handlers paint a ravishing portrait of him even as critics dismiss him as yet another genome of leadership, dastardly and base like the Casanova lost in the folds of the bearded meat.

I see an electorate wrought of two extremes: cynical and apathetic. Very few candidates excite passion and hope, save the dangerous fits thrown by their pawns and puppets on the social media.

It’s about time we identified the contender jostling to handle our heartfelt yearnings as his tuberous burden. The one who would cradle our dreams like eggs hatched by a tired fowl in the throes of twilight.

Who among the candidates is best suited to handle and resolve the issues that embitter you and I? Who could tackle convincingly, beyond theory, the fundamental issues he would eventually grapple with as President?

Many Nigerians are probably living through one of the worst decade of their lives. They read of bloody genocides at dawn, poverty and strife in the next city – many more live through such. And as usual, an economy patched with foreign loans, exaggerated growth and duplicity.

It took a perfect gathering of bad leadership to get to this moment. It would take an imperfect cannonball of a man to brave through and survive it. Who, among the candidates is wrought of such fibre?

What we should be interested in is a President-Elect capable of fostering the type of education and skilled force Nigeria needs to power her industry. We have no need of a big and egocentric President in hard times; what we need is a humble man of great depth.

We need a President who would be forever indebted to Nigerians, for giving him the opportunity to serve. We need one now as today is spitting out monsters and tomorrow portends the birth of a thousand trolls.

We are done believing in the dignified duplicity of treacherous men. We need a President who acknowledges that today, everything is broken, and that the very system that produced him needs to be fixed in a way that wouldn’t make deity of him and sacrificial lambs of the Nigerian people.

We need a President capable of speaking gently and intelligently too. A President who listens. Nigeria deserves a man who internalises the citizenry’s griefs in order to end them.

We may identify such a leader by his antecedents and present conduct.

Let us seek the candidate who would become the blank screen, on which Nigerians of vastly different stripes may rally and project their agonies and wants. And he wouldn’t lose his head.

January 27, 2022
Haunted by fear of the truth

Where did Nigeria take the wrong turn and what is the root of its problems? These were questions Justice Chukwudifu Oputa in chapter one of his report threw open to Nigerians of good conscience. This I believe was the challenge Chief Olanihun Ajayi wanted to address with his This House of Oduduwa Must not Fall which traced the root cause of our problem to the conspiracy of Britain who in an effort to protect her neo-colonial interest in Nigeria, encouraged and actively aided our northern ruling elite to commit treachery in terms of election rigging, census figure manipulation, subjugation of the people of southern Nigeria especially the Yoruba and cornering of disproportionate share of the nation’s revenue. He presented facts to support his central thesis.

Lord Lugard didn’t need to pretend he was in Nigeria to protect British interest. As he explained: “my African friends often say to me when we are discussing the past acts of Britain, I always tell them ‘yes’, but it was all done in the interest of Britain not of Africa”. Ahmadu Bello rather than deny Britain aided the north to hold the nation hostage, explained on page 33 of his book, My Life: The Sadauna of Sokoto that “The British were the instrument of destiny and were fulfilling the will of God in the way they did it all”.

Driven only by her selfish interest, Britain acceded to the north’s 1951 three-point demand: 50% of membership of the Legislative Council as against 25 for each of the regions, revenue allocation based on per capita and retaining the boundaries especially between the north and west, thus making those who took backstage in the decolonization battle and did not participate in the administration of Nigeria until 1947 ‘winners takes all’.

Although most of census figures up till 1951 were based on assumptions, but the battle was drawn with both north and south attempting to influence the outcome of the 1962 census exercise. With the rejection of the 1962 figures by northern leaders, a new census held in 1963 discovered additional 8.5 million people in the north bringing the northern population to 31m.

What we therefore had at independence was “a federation of three regions where initiative, according to Robin Luckman, author of The Nigerian Military, ‘lies with one of the regions’ because the British government believed it would protect its own future interest in Nigeria”.

To support the claim that the 1959 election was rigged in favour of the north, Ajayi refers us to the testimony of Harold Smith, one of the young Oxford graduates recruited from England in 1955 who attributed his dismissal to his confrontation with the Governor-General over the role of senior British bureaucrats mandated to support some parties during the election.

To Ajayi, Robertson’s decision to call on Balewa to form the government on December 15, 1959 with voting returns showing that NPC was trailing the two other parties by 116 to 150, a decision that rendered the final result of NPC 150 seats to the other two parties’ 162 seats and independent 8, that came later on December 19, just ‘a force majeure’.

To support his claim of conspiracy against the West, Ajayi cited the April 1961 meeting attended by Akintola, where Sardauna, Balewa and Okpara mooted the idea of a preventive detention system in the country. This became handy on May 29, 1962 when Balewa declared state of emergency in the West, went on to illegally inaugurate the Coker Commission of Inquiry to look into the operations of Western Region corporations. In case that failed, Balewa also inaugurated treasonable felony probe which later jailed Awo and his supporters. If Ajayi needed further evidence to support his hypothesis, Trevor Clark’s claims that “Ahmadu Bello saw an opportunity to do in Awolowo, while the NCNC saw an opportunity to destroy AG and Western Region” provided that. (seeTrevor Clark: Balewa the Right Honourable Man, pages (550-554).

Ajayi argued that the June 12, 1993 debacle during which Babangida annulled the election won by MKO Abiola by 8,342,309 to Tofa’s 5,952,087, was part of the grand design by the north to hold on to power or impose their minions in power as they had done from Balewa to Babangida.

In this regard, Shehu Shagari’s arrogant response when MKO Abiola who had worked against the interest of the West to please the north went to ask for his blessing over his presidential ambition was instructive.

“Well, chief you know it is all in the natural order of things. A country is just like a farm where everyone has his functions. Allah has willed that someone must hold the cow by the horns while another does the milking”.

Ajayi also called our attention to Babangida’s claim that he annulled the election because of northern emirs’ opposition to Abiola; Omo Omoruyi’s claim that northern leaders brought in Britain, the US and the UN to persuade Abiola to forgo his mandate to no avail and finally Omoruyi’s encounter with British Sir Christopher Macrae who spoke of his efforts to persuade northern emirs to accept results of the election even though the preference of Britain would have been a northerner and not MKO Abiola in whom less was known.

Unable to confront facts as presented by Ajayi, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, the immediate past emir of Kano, queried the type of love, Britain whose official policy was to deny education to northerners to prevent incubating ‘progressive Muslim intellectuals of the type we have in Egypt’ had for the north.

Haunted by the truth, Lamido Sanusi accused Ajayi of speaking the language of 1959 in 2009, adding that his grandfather was a northerner while he is a Nigerian. But Sanusi knows that Nigeria was built on fraud in 1951, as Ajayi has pointed out, and watered by injustice through military decrees foisted on the nation as the constitution is obviously not working for federating nationalities currently campaigning for self-actualization in absence of restructuring or a return to the 1963 constitution.

Still playing the ostrich, Sanusi said we should stop talking of rigged 1959 election because Obasanjo also rigged election of 2003. He conveniently ignored Obasanjo was an imposition of ‘the owners of Nigeria’ who by his actions demonstrated he was on a mission to destroy the remaining legacies put in place by Yoruba visionaries of the First Republic which survived his centralization policies of 1975-79.

He undermined the credibility of our leaders whose quest for restructuring he exploited, marginalized Yoruba for eight years by abandoning Lagos-Ibadan, Apapa-Oshodi , Lagos- Abeokuta and Lagos-Badagry expressways as well as the international road to the airport. On the political front, he replaced progressive AD governors with touts who traded college of medicine for poultry farms, physically assaulted judges and lawmakers whose legislative chambers were put under lock and key in Ekiti and Ogun states. Lagos that resisted his take-over attempt had its LGA federal allocations withheld.

I think ostrich-playing Sanusi is haunted by fear of the truth. To return to the “path to Nigerian freedom” never taken, we must be ready to confront a past that begets Sanusi’s contemporary Nigeria that works only for her designers and their offspring, those integrated into the hegemonic ruling class, through politics and therefore served other tendencies while in power; through business connections such as the oil-well allocation beneficiaries and through marriages especially among the conquered Hausas.

If tomorrow is but a summation of today and yesterday, Ajayi’s book is but a call to redesign ours just as other tribes in Europe did after the Second World War and India after the exit of Britain.

January 27, 2022
Russia, NATO and the Ukraine crisis

For weeks there has been tension in relations between the NATO and the Russian federation over the future of Ukraine, a former constituent part of the USSR (Union of Socialist Soviet Republic) in which Russia was the dominant part. After the collapse of the Soviet Union into independent 15 republics, Ukraine became apart from Russia, the most important republic of the former Soviet Union. It also had nuclear weapons which it gave up with international guarantee in 1991. The country was for some time struggling economically under series of corrupt leaders who shared national resources among a few oligarchs under the western-inspired privatization scheme as was the case in Russia itself under Boris Yeltsin.

The country for future development chose to gravitate towards the European Union and for security towards NATO. The latter scenario has not gone down well with Russia which under its pugnacious president, Vladimir Putin began to follow a policy of what it called protection of “Russia abroad” which meant taking serious and extra-territorial interest in Russians scattered in the successor states of the former Soviet Union.

Some of these countries like the Baltic states of Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia, for preservation of national sovereignty had joined NATO. These states are bordered to the south and east by Russia and Belarus, a close ally of the Kremlin which means the borders of NATO has moved eastwards since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Furthermore, a state like Georgia had also indicated it wanted to join NATO. The impression gotten by the Kremlin was that the Western military alliance was determined to encircle the Russian federation. President Putin in a widely read article has said he believed Russia and Ukraine are the same country tied together by history and blood and that many Russians have Ukrainian blood running in them. Of course, history has proved that Ukraine would like an independent existence. Adolph Hitler created an “Independent Ukraine” during the Nazi campaign in Russia and thousands of Ukrainians fought in German armies in Russia. This is the crux of the problem. Ukraine is backed by the West certainly for geo-strategic reasons and feels Russia should allow Ukraine like any other country to enjoy the same rights granted it by the fact of its sovereignty.

Since 2014, Russia has been aggressively following a policy of dismemberment of the country. It engineered a revolt and a referendum in the Crimea on the Black Sea asking for Russia to accept it as part of the Russian federation. Russia quickly agreed and President Putin made a triumphant visit to the Crimea almost immediately after the so-called referendum and followed it up by Russia building a long bridge to link Crimea peninsula with the Russian home land. As part of his policy of apparently recovering territories lost by Russia to the successor states, he intervened in Georgia and Moldova to protect the Russian-leaning minorities in those countries by stationing Russian troops there. He also began to demand that NATO should not station short-range missiles apparently pointing at Russia in states of the former Warsaw Pact like Romania, Poland, Bulgaria and Slovakia as well as states like Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania which were formerly member states of the Soviet Union but are now members of NATO. Furthermore, Putin wants a written guarantee that Ukraine would never be allowed to join the NATO alliance. He argued that since NATO was formed to combat the spread of communism, he did not see any reason for the continued existence of the alliance after the collapse of communism and its continued expansion eastwards towards Russia.

Under Putin Russia has been following a global policy of expansion in places like the Middle East and even in Africa and coordinating Russia’s policy of challenge to western and American interest with resurgent China. The West believes Russia has to be stopped or else there will be no end to Russian aggression. Looking back to the past of dictators, the West believes too much concessions to them in the past have not augured well for world peace. As for NATO expansion, the alliance says it will not be dictated to by Russia and it rued the fact that it did not challenge Russia in 2014 annexation of Ukraine. The West is apparently prepared to delay Ukrainian membership of NATO to a future when democracy and constitutional rule have firmly taken root in Ukraine but it will be difficult for the alliance to put this in concrete legally binding form as President Putin is demanding.

President Putin apparently to force the hand of the western alliance began in the last three weeks, troops’ mobilization on the boundaries of Ukraine to the East and North and joint military maneuver with Belarus. This has elicited response by the West particularly the United States and Great Britain which began airlift of lethal defensive weapons like anti-tank and air defence systems. NATO has not mobilized troops in Europe believing that doing such may trigger a war the end of which no one knows. The fear of nuclear Armageddon has led to several diplomatic talks between American and Russian diplomats including their foreign secretaries and even Presidents Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin but there does not seem to be any break through yet. One wonders what the end game will be because while engaged in saber rattling, President Putin keeps saying he is not preparing to invade Ukraine. In the meantime, the Russian Duma (parliament) has recognized two Russian speaking republics in the Russian minority areas of Ukraine. Western observers feel that any attempt by Ukrainian government to assert its authority over its secessionist eastern provinces will be met by Russian military opposition. If this were to happen then a general conflagration may follow.

The West is threatening to impose the most severe economic sanctions on Russia that may include freezing of Russian assets in the West particularly the assets of Putin who is claimed to be the richest man in the world and the assets of the cabals around him. It is also being suggested that it will be made virtually impossible for Russia to trade with the West and the alternative gas pipeline running through the Black Sea to Germany and Europe would be blocked and this will be a great blow to Russia that in the last decade spent considerable amount of its national resources on the pipeline that was built to by-pass the existing one that runs through Ukraine. The Russian economy is quite weak and is reputed to have collapsed over the years and is just about two-thirds of the Italian economy and if pressure is put on it, Russia would have to retreat from its pretensions of being a global power.

It is a moot question whether Germany would agree to cancellation of the gas pipeline running from Russia to Germany because it depends on Russian gas to power its industrial complexes and to heat the homes of its people especially in winter. Of course, the alternative sources of gas may be found in the Middle East and the United States and Africa in Algeria, Libya and Nigeria. One begins to wonder if Europe is on the same page with the United States on how far Europe will go on economic sanctions on Russia. The leaders of France and Germany have scheduled a meeting, as I write, with Russia to find a peaceful solution of the crisis created by Putin over Ukraine.

One wonders while the rest of the world is not involved in any mediation over the crisis. What has happened to the Non-Aligned Movement? It was because of such a situation that it was created at the height of the Cold War. It seems the movement is moribund. It was because of this sort of thing that our former foreign minister, Professor Bolaji Akinyemi was talking about a concert of medium powers which unfortunately did not get much traction in the international community. If we have a dynamic foreign policy, we can initiate a movement from African and Asian countries to intervene in the ongoing crisis because if war breaks out in Europe, it has a tendency of spreading to the whole world as was our experience in 1914 –1918, and 1939-1945, during the first and second world wars leading to loss of close to 100 million souls as a result of direct combat and collateral damage and the influenza pandemic of 1919. The world as a whole cannot afford to keep quiet because if war breaks out in the current nuclear weapons age, there will be no victor or vanquished and in the words of President JF Kennedy the “living will envy the dead”.

January 27, 2022
Hanifa: Slain in her prime

WHEN five-year-old Hanifa Abubakar was abducted last December, her teacher was the last person on earth anyone would suspect of being the abductor. Reason: teachers are known to be above board, modest and reasonable. They educate pupils and build their character along the way. Their pupils’ parents love for them knows no bounds because of this virtue of a strong and reliable person that they have. In our days (hmmm, how time flies), parents could swear by teachers..

Those days, many parents gave their children, especially the stubborn ones, to teachers to train. Those parents never regretted their actions. So also are their children, who today owe whatever they have become to their teachers. They remember those days with nostalgia and refer to their teachers as God sent, praising them to high heavens for guiding them.

Those were the days when teachers were teachers. They did not discriminate between their own biological children and others living with them. They treated everyone equally. How they did this and still retained the love of their immediate families has never ceased to amaze me. I marvel whenever I relive those days with friends. We laugh and laugh as we remember the teachers who instilled discipline in us and made us to appreciate the value of education.

We recall their caning skills, without which we would have gone astray. They would cane us and our parents would side with them and implore them to give us more strokes of the cane. This was the image of teachers that my generation grew up to know. Teachers who were our parents and loved us as their own children. All that is gone now. Teachers are no longer made like that. Teachers have become traders looking for quick money. We used to hear of teachers’ reward being in heaven! Tell a teacher that today and he would look at you from a corner of his eye, wondering why you are cursing him.

Through the misconduct of some, teachers have lost their respect and standing in society today. They are no longer feared by pupils, who have the audacity to offer them money for mark. If they are not trading, they are busy chasing their female pupils for sex. Teaching, to them, is secondary. What matters most is what they can get from it and they are ready to do anything for money. The pursuit of money and anything in skirt is fast turning teaching into a cursed profession.

A teacher is the guardian of his pupils. If anyone of them goes missing, he must go out of his way to look for that child. Sadly, when this happens these days, the teacher is usually the first suspect. How sad! The horrific killing of Hanifa by her teacher shows how low some teachers have sunk. A teacher, a kidnapper? And a killer to boot? What kind of teacher is Abdulmalik Mohammed Tanko, 30? What kind of money was he looking for that he held Hanifa for weeks and then killed her after collecting ransom from her parents?

Teachers like Tanko are misfits in any society. He is a beast of a teacher. A wolf in human skin, who should be tied to a stake and publicly executed without recourse to the court. But society should not behave like the animal that he is. He will have his day in court so that he can tell the whole world why he fed Hanifa with rat poison after subjecting her to physical torture for weeks. This is one abduction and killing too many. It is more so because a teacher, who should appreciate the sanctity of life, the life of a kid that could be his daughter, is involved.

If Hanifa were to be Tanko’s daughter, how will he feel? He should put himself in the girl’s parents’ shoes and imagine how he would have reacted to this tragedy. Unfortunately, he has no such compassion. If he did, he won’t have kidnapped and killed the girl in the first place. Tanko must pay the price for his action. Hanifa’s father, Abubakar Abdulsalam’s plaintive cry of “Kill this bastard now. Please, do not spare him; please, I beg you in the name of Allah”, when the suspect was paraded at the Kano State Police Command Headquarters last Saturday, rings in every ear around the world.

Tanko has murdered sleep and he should sleep no more. His trial should be swift. It should not be allowed to drag to avoid subjecting the girl’s parents to the psychological trauma that may kill them. Some are wont to say it is an open-and-close case since the suspect has confessed to the crime. It is not as easy as that. The suspect still has to go through the legal process to determine his guilt. I must confess, though that I am biased too.

Tanko deserves the harshest of punishment so as to deter others like him. You may never know, there could still be other Tankos out there waiting to strike. They must be stopped before they pounce. How did someone like Tanko get his Noble Kids Comprehensive School registered in the first place? What a name! We can all see the nobility of his action!!

The Kano government has its own share of the blame too. Like other states, they register schools without digging into the backgrounds of the owners. Something can still be done to avert a recurrence. The government should, without delay, audit all private schools and sift the wheat from the chaff in public interest.

Hanifa has paid the supreme price. For her death not to be in vain, Kano schools must be cleansed to ensure that they no more harbour killer teachers and proprietors. My heart goes out to Hanifa’s parents. May she find rest in the Lord’s bosom.

January 27, 2022
Between Dele Momodu and Victor Atta

Let us start by acknowledging the resourcefulness of Dele Momodu, one of our 2023 aspiring presidential candidates. Dele Momodu publishes the Ovation newsmagazine that operates at the level of society and therefore mirrors society by celebrating human vanity in its true colour. Publishing this genre of popular newsmagazine has brought him great fortunes. It is not impossible that Mark Zuckerberg, the promoter of Facebook and photo-sharing Instagram he acquired for $1b in 2012 but today contributes about $20b to Facebook annual revenue, copied one or two things from our own resourceful Dele Momodu.

Having made friends with ‘the owners of society’ and other men of ‘timber and calibre’ whose vanity he has over the years exploited to build up great fortunes, the pursuit of political power becomes a natural urge. In 2011 he had offered himself for service as president on the platform of National Conscience Party of Nigeria (NCP). According to him, he has spent the last 12 years since his last disastrous outing perfecting a new strategy before throwing his hat in the ring two Mondays ago.

To launch himself to the consciousness of other Nigerians not covered by his social media network, he chose Arise Television Morning Ride, a less hostile territory owned by a ThisDay Group and whose anchor, Reuben Abati he admitted has always been his friend. But it will appear such long nurtured relationship did not stop Reuben Abati who ‘jolificates’ even while addressing serious issues and ever combative Rufai Oseni, who carries cynicism on his face like an armour whenever people cannot see what he thinks he sees, and Tundun Abiola who keeps the balance, from throwing some tepid punches that surprisingly knocked out Dele Momodu.

What was he going to do differently from his failed 2011 outing and how did he hope to outwit PDP juggernauts eyeing the same position? He would demonstrate to the party that he could win the election. His proof: millions of his foot soldiers that his intra-party opponents can cross-check on his phone. These youths who according to him, ‘earnestly want Momodu’ want old politicians to go and rest having done their best like Buhari.

What is the most important problem facing Nigeria today – he was asked? For him, it is absence of unity. And the cure: bringing joy and hope to the people. As someone with an Edo father and Osun mother, a former Private Secretary at 23 to Akin Omoboriowo, (who escaped in a booth of a car from Ondo State over alleged election rigging), as a former Private Secretary to the late Ooni of Ife at 26, and as the chief promoter of Olu Falae (of no alternative to SAP fame) at 30, thinks he is now ready to face the challenges of managing a nation as complex as Nigeria.

Beyond rhetoric, what specific policies will he deploy to engender national unity bearing in mind the current experience of President Biden of US who despite spending 35 years in the US Senate and eight years as vice president has been unable to change the minds of far right-wing elements in the US? For him, that is very simple because he has studied Abiola’s 1993 successful outing. It is going to be a wholesale adoption of his 1993 ‘hope’ mantra. ‘When people have hope, they will make sacrifices’.

Asked for his specific policies on the economy since hope will not reverse 18% inflation rate, more than 40% unemployment rate and high debt service rate; he insisted the first thing is hope. The atmosphere in Nigeria, he says, is fouled up with investors trying to take their money away. Beside hope, he will have a star-studded cabinet composed of our brightest brains.

Read Also: Dele Momodu joins 2023 presidential race

Rufai didn’t bother to remind him that Babangida’s star-studded cabinet with IMF egg-heads from World Bank school ended up with the ‘sapping’ of our strong naira under Chu Okongwu and Olu Falae. Obasanjo also carried out the same experiment with World Bank and IMF star-studded experts of Breton-Wood institution. Alas their leading light, Professor Chukwuma Soludo, today remembered more for his crusade for mega banks that concentrated wealth in the hand of a few parasitic bankers and Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, an apostle of ‘tax waivers’ for imported goods, have spent considerable time after leaving office trying to convince Nigerians how each of them, by their wrong-headed policies set the stage for the nation’s current economic travails.

On his shifting loyalty between Buhari’s APC and Atiku’s PDP, he said, in a democracy, we cannot predict the colour of a new government taking over from the old. Nigerians, according to him, thought they had seen the worst in Jonathan and PDP until Buhari and his APC came.

Momodu was given an opportunity to articulate the problem of Nigeria and proffer solutions. From the apparent vacant expressions on the faces of Momodu’s unfriendly family members at the end of the interview, it was difficult to know their verdict on the level of Momodu’s preparedness for the task ahead.

However, as if to reassure us of their neutrality, they provided some relief with their choice of ex- governor of Akwa- Ibom State Obong Victor Atta, speaking immediately after Momodu’s self-promotion on the issue of resource control following exchange of letters between ex-President Olusegun Obasanjo and elder statesman Chief Edwin Clark.

Victor Atta started his clinical dissection of Nigerian problem by pointing out the reasons why the so-called owners of Nigeria especially Obasanjo should get off our back. For him, Obasanjo is a dictator with total disdain for democracy and federalism. He accused him of sitting on Lagos State LGA funds in spite of judicial pronouncements; assembling few state legislators in Abuja to impeach properly elected state governors, changing senate presidents at will and taking the oil wells that rightly belonged to Akwa- Ibom State and distributing them to Rivers and Cross Rivers states.

The way forward: After messing up Nigerian for 66 years, Nigeria can undo the evil the self-serving owners of Nigeria including Gowon, Obasanjo, Babangida, Theophilus Danjuma, Aliyu Gusau and Abdul Salami Abubakar did by reverting back to Nigerian republican constitution of 1963 and modify it to suit the present circumstances.

The lesson from Victor Atta’s intervention is that our angry youths who have become captives of smart social media manipulators and war lords must take time to read and understand the nature of our problem instead of using today’s hostile environment as an excuse. Awolowo, who wrote his masterpiece ‘The Path to Nigeria Freedom’ never had money to finish primary school or acquire formal secondary school education. Tony Enahoro who had a secondary school education as a son of a secondary school teacher went on to become an editor of a national newspaper at 22 and ended up as one of the best parliamentarians Nigeria has ever produced. The environment during the imperial reign when these pathfinders and their colleagues worked hard to lay solid foundation for a more egalitarian society was not any less toxic or unfriendly then than today.

Obong Victor Atta has just demonstrated the limit of social media. It is therefore worth reminding our youths who read neither newspaper nor books that they cannot give what they don’t have.

If I were therefore to make a choice between Dele Momodu who speaks only the language of his millions of social media foot soldiers and EndSARS Lekki warriors and Obong Victor Atta, who insisted sovereignty is by subscription, I will settle for the latter.

January 20, 2022
The monsters we made (3)

Manhood is the new fiend. Hence most societal problems are attributed to degenerate maleness. For instance, the manifestation of the boychild money ritualists, from the Bayelsa trio (all 15-year-olds) and Owolabi Adeeko who killed his 22-year-old girlfriend, Favour Daley-Oladele, for money-making ritual, have been blamed on poverty and the lack of a positive male role model in their lives.

Adeeko told the police in Ogun State how he killed Daley-Oladele, a final year Theatre Arts student of the Lagos State University, by using a pestle to crush her head. Thereafter, her organs were harvested for a ‘get-rich-quick’ money-making concoction by his accomplice pastor, Segun Philip. The deceased’s trunk was opened up to remove her heart, which was cooked for her boyfriend, Adeeko, and his mother to eat, as part of the money-making ritual.

From teenage boys and young men’s frantic lunge for sudden wealth via money rituals, to their complicity in terrorism, gender based violence, armed robbery, kidnap for ransom, Nigeria careens to the shove of dissembling manhood. By the latter’s flaws, we experience a fatal forming of maleness and society.

Popular culture’s celebration of grotesque and increasingly infantilised versions of masculinity aggravates the malady- from Nollywood’s neurotic man-boys to the bestial and slacker dudes of feminist-misandrist literature.

Partnership and parenthood, responsibility and security, are projected as stultifying rather than instrumental to adult blooming. The gender wars aggravate this trend, thriving on the insecurities that drive the sexes apart.

The stakes are too high to ignore. If we care about our society,we must pay equal attention to both girls and boys, women and men. The ruckus of degenerate manhood, misandry and toxic feminism, however, furnish a popular culture that offers young boys a dumbed-down version of manhood and a rhetoric around fatherhood largely predicated on the father’s dispensability and his absence.

Fatherhood is redefined in the public mind as an experience of failure rather than success; absence rather than involvement. In the same breadth masculinity gets redefined as being embarrassingly brutish, effeminate, homosexual, brash, and incurably dumb.

Boys are in trouble; due to the lack of positive male role models in their lives, they get what they can from the streets, television, anti-male movies, and video games. All they need is someone whose exemplary footsteps they could follow but the society provides them only men they could dumb down to. A recent analysis of 2, 000 mass media portrayals of men and male identities, found that men were depicted mostly as villains, aggressors, perverts, and philanderers. From this stock-pile of anti-heroes, the boy-child is expected to navigate for a good male identity.

Promoting the image of men as juvenile, mean, and stupid is cynical and exploitative, which makes the tide of inverse sexism that has swamped out television screens and the pages of literature even more appalling.

In modern Nigeria, boys and young men suffer a dire lack of role models, especially if they are raised in a single-parent home. The situation is worsened by the lack of positive role models in extended family and government, and the perpetuation of overwhelmingly negative images of men by the media and feminist scholarly research.

Ultimately such portrayals lead to negative social costs for society in areas such as male health, rising suicide rates, and family disintegration. This is a precarious age for the boychild. He is taught to repudiate positive patriarchal notions of manhood and imbibe virulence as the cornerstone of his becoming.

The college gender gap is another worrisome development; it must be acknowledged that while Nigerian males are projected to hold statistical edge over females in school enrollment rates, they do not hold a productive edge over females. There are more females contributing more meaningfully at work. More females are graduating Masters and Ph.Ds. A cursory look through postgraduate statistics and LinkedIn is instructive.

The academia shies from the issue, bound by the gag of gender politics and the politically-correct notion that males enjoy higher school enrolment, are more financially stable, and better placed in business and politics. Consequently, several boys are denied push from high school to college.

I have seen more boys drop out of school to become internet scammers (Yahoo Boys) disguised as bitcoin traders, forex specialists, I.T gurus, to mention a few. Many of them are casualties of dysfunctional families and the changing dynamics of the new global economy.

The economy has become less friendly to men. This is a global problem, however. Jacqueline King, of the American Council on Education in her group’s study of lower-income adults in college, discovered that men had a harder time committing to school. They tended to start out behind academically, and many felt intimidated by the schoolwork. They reported feeling isolated and were much worse at seeking out fellow students, study groups, or counselors to help them adjust. Mothers going back to school, however, described themselves as good role models for their children. Fathers worried that they were abrogating their responsibilities as breadwinner, explained Hanna Rosin.

At the backdrop of these realities, the “protector” and “provider” theories of manhood and fatherhood are continually dismissed as credulous and crude, in a modern world where conservative ideals of masculinity are maligned and fiercely rebuffed.

On the flipside, the matriarchy enjoys patronage in crusader art and pedagogy. This slanted social complex has been adduced to a toxic leftist orientation.

The situation is aggravated by lack of adequate attention to the Nigerian male at the policy level. Responding to my query on the issue, a staff of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) told me recently, that his organisation ignores Nigerian boys and adult males in its intervention programmes because the government has failed to make provisions for them at the policy level.

“There are no provisions for funding male-oriented intervention programmes because the Nigerian government and local NGOs do not consider boys and men worthy recipients of any form of intervention,” he said.

It is pleasing to see girls and young women flourish and succeed. But it is wrong to neglect boys, leaving them to grow up embittered and miseducated. This is surely recipe for disaster, the kind that is happening in real time.

Aside from the teen boy and young adult male’s fancy for quick money via money ritual, a tragic manifestation presents via Boko Haram and armed bandits’ replenishment of their ranks with a steady stream of boy combatants, moving child abductees cum stone-cold killers through neighbourhoods and forests, using military trucks and passenger vans to boot camps holding more than 1,000 boys on the watch of adolescent trainers.

There is a reason the “money ritual,” and Boko Haram and armed bandits’ creed of diabolism and violence is resonant among misled and brainwashed minors. The exasperating nature of their lusts, the grievances articulated, dysfunctional families and pervasiveness of poverty amplify the boys’ rationale for embracing a creed of cruelty and carnage.

A history of corruption and neglect at the federal, state, and local levels of government, among others, is a major source of widespread dissatisfaction towards politicians, the legal system, and law enforcement.

More worrisome is the teenage cult, Awawa’s incursion into primary schools. Just recently, 12 pupils of the Egan Community School, between the ages of 6 and 16, were reportedly initiated into Awawa, in Alimoso area of Lagos.

These days, in the far north, it is normal to see 10-year-old boys romanticise raiding villages, killing traditional chiefs and taking over their wives and daughters.

This is how fragile the situation is.

January 20, 2022
It’s a free world

Since Asiwaju Bola Tinubu declared his presidential bid, the political scene has been abuzz. You will think that he committed a crime by throwing his hat in the ring. Politics is a game, but in Nigeria, it is more like a war. If you wish to know your family’s history, right from the first generation, just go into politics, those who know about such matters will tell you.

Once you enter politics, people, including your friends and family members will say and write all sorts of things about you. Someone, somewhere will suddenly remember that there is something that ails them in your family that does not qualify you to run for office. The unkindest cut of all will come from the one you love most.

That cut is the most painful of all because it comes from an unexpected source. It kills faster than any other thing. You can bear whatever it is from others, but not your loved ones. The famed Julius Caesar in Shakespeare’s tragic play, Julius Caesar, fell to the sword of his beloved Brutus. Mark Antony, the orator, put it succinctly in a rousing speech: For Brutus, as you know, was Caesar’s angel… For when the noble Caesar saw him stab, ingratitude, more strong than traitors’ arms, quite vanguished him.

It is only human for Tinubu to feel betrayed by goings-on around him, which did not start today. The opposition against him was initiated long ago by his angels, to borrow Mark Antony’s word, who feel that they had served and paid him back whatever they owed him. What they failed to realise is that you can never finish paying political debts. They are lifelong debts for which you should be forever grateful to your benefactor not as his slave but as a beneficiary who appreciates the value of kindness. People should never forget where they are coming from, if they wish to go far. To be kind is a human virtue which many lack. The few who have it, dispense it with caution because of the fear of being betrayed.

Some will today be sniggering behind Tinubu’s back that it serves him right. We told him, but he did not listen, they will rub it in as they watch his so-called friends one after the other take him to the cleaners because of his presidential ambition. No matter what anybody says, we cannot turn back the hands of the clock. Tinubu cannot stop being himself because of the fear of betrayal. No. He is not the first benefactor to be betrayed by his beneficiaries. And, he will, certainly, not be the last.

Read Also: Ex-Lagos council chairmen, others mobilise for Tinubu

He is just witnessing what he never thought could happen to him. As a stoic person and a fighter of no mean repute, those who know him know that he is not bothered by this development. These things had happened before when he was pushing the candidacy of people who have the abilities to deliver on the job. Some of his close aides opposed him then and interestingly those candidates of yesterday who he fought for are today in the same camp with their antagonists. That is politics for you.

But it should be played as a game and not a war. Friends do and should disagree in politics and in other areas of life whenever the need arises. What is offensive is telling tales about your benefactor after you disagree with him, just to tar him. He meant the world to you when you were down and in the same camp, but became a bad person after you switched camps. This is the kind of dirty politics we play that drive good people away from it. Such people cannot stomach the chicanery that goes on in the name of politics. Not many of them are as strong as Tinubu even though they have his kind of goodness in them too.

They are ready to help and lift others in every area of life, but are afraid of doing the good thay are capable of because their beneficiaries may turn against them in future. Some people give politics a bad name the way they do things. They want to forever be the only beloved of their benefactor. Once, the benefactor discovers a new talent, they go to war with him. They want every position reserved for them and their ilk. They forget that life is not like that. They fail to realise that the discovery of a new talent is not the end of their own political career. Rather than see it as the blooming of their poltical family, they take a myopic view of it as the beginning of their own end.

These are political charlatans who hang around their benefactors just for the spoils of political office. The coming of a fresh talent is a threat to them because they perceive it as the end to their manipulation of their benefactor to get whatever they want from him. The hoi poloi are tired of that kind of politics of self. They want the politics of service and sacrifice by people who will appreciate the age-long sufferings of their compatriots.

If their parting of ways with Tinubu will lead to that much desired Eldorado, so be it. After all, it is a free world where anyone can make the choice that suits him or her. But it should not be at the expense of running down the benefactor, who only just yesterday, was the water with which those beneficiaries, who are now running their mouths all over the place, grew their maize.

January 20, 2022
The unfinished Ibadan’s Obafemi Awolowo rail station

I don’t want to be a killjoy but I am afraid this piece will appear as a denigration of the railway exploits of Rotimi Amaechi, the minister of transportation in the Muhammadu Buhari government. A year ago after reading the propaganda in the newspapers about Nigeria’s railway age coming more than two centuries after the first steam locomotive engines hauled a train along the tramway in an ironworks in South Wales precisely on February 21, 1804, I decided to go and see with my own eyes the coming of the golden era in rail transportation in modern Nigeria.

By the way, we were not just seeing railways in Nigeria for the first time. In fact, the first railway was built in 1898 to connect Lagos with Abeokuta before it was extended gradually to northern Nigeria terminating in Kano. Thanks to Sir Percy Girouard, the French-Canadian governor of Northern Nigeria between 1908 and 1909 and whose main interest was railway construction rather than being obsessed with Indirect Rule ideology of the Lugardian era. Why we are celebrating the new railway age is because it is replacing the narrow gauge of 3feet 6 inches (1,067 millimetres) with the standard gauge of 4feet 8.5 inches (1420mm).

Railway transportation was pioneered by an English engineer, George Stephenson (1781-1848) and this was one of the most important technological inventions of the 19th century and was a key component of the industrial revolution in England and the rest of Europe. If we are just entering our own railway age, it follows then that we have a long way to go in our industrial revolution trajectory and unless we industrialize we will remain hewers of wood and drawers of water to the rest of the world.

Out of curiosity I went last week to the railway station in Moniya, at the outskirts of Ibadan on the road to Iseyin. It is some kind of terminus of the Lagos-Ibadan railway before it commences its northern journey to Kano perhaps in the next decades when many of us would have joined our ancestors! The station is named appropriately after Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the father of the old Western Nigeria. It is a modern station but it is not connected to any road except a bush path leading out of the station. Anyone not familiar with its location will reach Iseyin before turning back to Moniya in search of the elusive station. This was my experience recently. There is a signboard somewhere on a grassy knoll pointing to the direction of the station. After I was directed by the local people to the location of the station I was amazed that such a station is sitting in the bush all by itself except a park that could take a few vehicles. This is probably an unfinished project even though it has been commissioned by the president and there have been pages upon pages congratulating the minister of transportation for his stellar achievement! Many of those doing this probably have not bothered to visit the stations along the route and the major terminus at least for now in Ibadan. It seems the Chinese builders of the railway must have said we have delivered a rail project and the station and how you get to the station is none of our business!

How does one build a station without road to link it with the road connecting it to the city it is supposed to serve? Will the Chinese do this in their country or in any other country but Nigeria where anything goes! I think the minister should order the contractor to go back to site and build a well tarred and lit double carriage road bringing in and taking people out of the so-called modern station. Anything short of this is an insult to all right thinking Nigerians. This project is being done with borrowed money from China and paid to Chinese contractors. I believe it is our right to tell them to do a proper job while we still have our voice. They can wait to bully us and seize our property in future if and when we fail to pay our debt to them. The customer is after all always right.

If the Chinese fail to do the job properly, the governor of Oyo State should complain to the president and then embark on linking the station with a well laid out road and with appropriate lighting to reduce insecurity. Any forward looking administration whether at state or federal levels should realize that anywhere in the world the land around a major railway station is prime land. Even though the land surrounding the Obafemi Awolowo station is still bush, it will become prime land in future. The land should be immediately acquired by the railway corporation or by Oyo State so that there is no encroachment on the land or continuation of current unplanned development. The place is presently being taken over by shanties and all kinds of huts selling food as if we are still in the 19th century. If this is not done, we will in a decade or two find this modern station surrounded by the usual urban filth and squalor typical of tropical African cities.

Read Also: Cross River to become net supplier of processed chicken, says Ayade

Perhaps the Oyo State government should designate special busses to carry people to and from the railway station from 5am to 9pm when the last train arrives Ibadan. This should be a profitable route to clean city buses and we should not wait for the unruly “danfos”to make a mess of the transportation business around the railway station.

What I am saying is not rocket science or neuroscience, it is just common sense. We should all in this country get engaged with the process of governance so that nobody pulls wool over our eyes, so to say. If money is being borrowed supposedly to build us modern infrastructure, we owe it to ourselves but particularly to our children and grand-children who will pay these debts to cry out when shoddy jobs are done in the name of this benighted country.

The railway station in Ebute -Meta in Lagos happily sits on already developed road and one had come to expect that accessibility to other stations along the same new railway will and should not be the subject of criticism which would not have been necessary if there had been proper supervision of this particular project. Or are we to wait until the University of Transportation in Daura takes off before the right thing is done?

While on railway development, can one ask when the East -West railway will be built? Why are will fixated on North-South railway development when we know that the East-West railway will be more viable and more profitable. Any loan borrowed to develop such a route will be easily repayable because of the volume of trade and number of people likely to use the railway rather than building railway lines traversing huge spans of the land that is thinly populated. If the decision is made strictly on economic viability, the Lagos – Calabar/Port Harcourt line with stops in Benin and Warri would have made more economic sense than the Ibadan – Abuja line to link up with the Abuja- Kano line because this southern line would have linked the port of Lagos with the hydrocarbon-producing part of Nigeria and whatever revenue generated there can then been available for railways built for political considerations. This is the way borrowing money for infrastructural development makes sense. The idea of borrowing money for development is that such projects would be a catalyst for further development at maximum rate because speed is the essence of development in the modern world.

We need to tap existing hydrocarbons resources before these resources lose value in the next three decades because of our commitment to join the rest of the world to reverse the industrial use of greenhouse gases that are damaging the environment. The upshot of what I am saying is that there is a need for a holistic assessment of the railway projects and also making sure we get value for money being spent.

I am not suggesting that there is no plan at all. Whatever plan there is cannot be all that new. Since the 1980s, such plan has existed. I remember the late Navy Captain Mike Akhigbe as governor of Lagos laying out the Lagos- Calabar/Port Harcourt railway plan which according to him would open the immediate coastal area south of the line for rapid development. This plan which must have been done at considerable cost probably lies somewhere in the government archives as with other plans for the physical and constitutional development of our country. We must learn to build on the past so that the present can have a meaning and the future can make sense. All civilizations stand on the shoulders of previous generations and future civilizations build on the present in a dynamic developmental continuum. This is the way to go whether in the new railway age or in any development planning. We do not have to begin every planning on a tabula rasa!

January 20, 2022