Category: Thursday

On Thursday, November 18, in Lagos, precisely at Ikeja, I stopped to buy some yams from some Hausa maidoya as Hausa people call yam sellers.  I put on my Hausa language cap to facilitate easy communication and to ensure what we call in Nigeria ”good market” that is, favourable price. I asked to buy six tubers of yams. The maidoya was quite nice to me especially when I spoke his mother tongue. He asked me to pay N15,000. I told him I was in a hurry. This was because in Hausa market culture what he did was permissible. You normally begin from the top and walk your way downwards. But I was in a hurry so I said “Nawon gaskia?” That is, what is the last price? He then started putting the yams in my car and swearing “Wallahi  Maigida, it is N8,500”. At that point against my best judgment, I gave him N6000 for the five yams thinking I was being generous. He refused bluntly and took his yams from me without calling me back when I slowly began to move away from his makeshift stall.

On my way home, I began to ask my driver whether yams had become that expensive for everyone because I thought being in a car may have led the maidoya to mistake me for a rich man who  had too much money but little sense!  As a widower, I am familiar with what is going on with prices in the market. I then told my driver that if yams are now too expensive, I would shift to eating bread. My driver asked me to perish the thought because a big loaf of sliced bread now sells between N700 and N800. I am not keen on bread anyway.

Cooking gas has moved rapidly from about N3000 to N9500. The galloping price of gas is global. I was in Britain recently and everyone was complaining about cooking and heating gas. This was during the recently concluded COP26 when people were pledging to cut greenhouse gasses emissions to zero within 50 years so as to bring global warming to 1.5 Celsius above preindustrial global temperature. While saying this, countries like China and India were saying they could not do this without damaging their economies. Britain and even the USA were still warming their homes with heat from coal. Where I was staying was so cold that I complained every day while the landlord claimed he had just installed environmentally correct heater which he had not fully mastered. Needless to say I was happy to return to good old hot Nigeria despite our problems.

Back to the issue of Nigeria and galloping inflation. A cylinder of gas is now selling at N9500 and yet we are a gas-producing and exporting country. Of course I know we can’t breach our contract with our customers without losing market share in these days of immense competition especially when hydrocarbons use is under serious challenge by the green economy. We are of course still foolishly flaring our natural gas which we have been doing since 1956 because of our lack of know how in spite of our hundreds of petroleum engineers!

A bag of rice has moved from N8000 to between N26000 to N32,000 depending on which type you want. The price of guinea fowl which I was eating without my friends knowing they were cheaper than chicken has also doubled from N2500 to N5000. I told my son that I was no longer able to eat Akara because the lady who prepares it says the price of vegetable oil has hit the roof. She now makes me moi–moi and ekuru which I actually like not because they are cheap but because ekuru is solid Yoruba food and very few people apart from rural folks know how to eat and enjoy it! But there is a snag: beans have doubled in price. What about gari? That one too is not for the poor! Its price has doubled! What about elubo from which amala/oka is made? That one too has developed K-legs. The one made from cassava called laafu I am told is available. I honestly don’t like that because of the possibility of cyanide poisoning according to researches of Professor Kayode Osuntokun my late brother. The elubo from yam is very expensive because the cost of yams has gone up astronomically. The elubo made from green plantains is even more expensive since some researchers said green plantains are good for people suffering from diabetes.

Growing up in Ekiti in the 1950s and seeing trucks of plantains being ferried to Lagos confused us children. We used to tell ourselves that there must be many goats in Lagos that needed to be fed with plantains because in Ekiti of my youth, plantains were used to feed goats! I eat dodo (fried ripe plantains) once in a while but not like young Nigerians who can’t eat rice unless it is accompanied with dodo. Now I am told that even though this is plantains season the stuff is not readily available. You ask why? The answer is that the herders and their cattle have eaten them in the farms. Furthermore, farmers have to run for their lives because of the fear of herders who also kill and rape.

Don’t mention the price of fruits, bananas, oranges, tangerines, pawpaw, name them; their prices have gone beyond the roof. The reason for the high cost of local fruits is that everybody is now eating them because the price of imported fruits is tied to the rapidly-diminishing Naira.  If I feel this way, how will my driver survive? Gone are the days of huge pounded yams and bush meat!  Chicken seems to have come home to roost with insecurity breeding food scarcity and impending famine. Onions, tomatoes and peppers without which an African cannot eat has gone beyond the reach of an average housewife. When you ask the women in the market the reason for this inflation, you are likely to be told that the Naira has fallen and you then ask against what currency and our illiterate market women, who may not have seen the dollar before, will chorus the Naira has fallen in relation to the dollar. One is tempted to say what has the dollar got to do with peppers, tomatoes and onions? Of course the foreign imported fertilizers, transportation cost and other farm inputs and what the farmers eat and take like drugs to stay well are all denominated in dollars.

Now we come to imports. Pump price of petrol is going up everywhere including Nigeria. Americans and Europeans and Asians are all complaining about the price of petrol/ gasoline. While our government may be happy because of the revenue coming into its coffers as a result of the recent high price for crude petroleum, the rest of the world is jerking up the prices of the drugs, machinery and automobiles we buy from them. In our unique situation of inability to add value to our raw materials from cocoa to crude petroleum, we are importing expensive petrol from refineries in Europe and passing same to our consumers. If not because of the fear of people’s revolt against the soaring price of things, the price of imported petrol should be selling at double their current prices.

I bought a litre of diesel for over N300 in Ibadan last week. Imagine! We have no electricity and we cannot afford to buy diesel. Two weeks ago I slotted a card of N10,000 into my meter in Ibadan on a Saturday and by the following Wednesday, it was gone. I was shocked. What about other things that we need to stay alive like drugs? Well one has to buy what will keep one well. When I was sharing my story of woes with a much younger friend, he said he couldn’t afford sardines and eggs for his children. It was then I glorified the name of the Lord that I have left worrying about such things to my children who have to minister to their children.

We have serious political problems in Nigeria. The Yoruba people usually say that once the poverty of food is removed, one can at least face more serious problems. But what we have is food insecurity compounding general insecurity in the country. We have serious unemployment problems in the country. Young people cannot find jobs. Men who should be married and raising their own children are still living at home with their parents creating a situation of depression and melancholy all around. A cynic once said recession is when your friend loses his job but depression is when one loses his own job. It seems we are in a depression in Nigeria with an economy that is not growing while the population, particularly of the jobless youth, keeps exploding.

I shudder what will happen during the coming Christmas and new year festivities when young men without money will be looking for money by all means necessary. This is not a good time to be a Nigerian!

I do not know what the government can do to alleviate the situation. Perhaps a 50% cut in salaries of political office holders and running costs of government at all levels. The extravagant padding of budgets of ministries, departments and parastatals as revealed in the recent defence of budgets in parliament revealed that those running the affairs of government are totally disconnected from the economic reality of Nigerians. If we can find a way of reducing costs of government, it may be possible to do some kind of social welfare package that would help the young poor so that we old people can sleep with our two eyes closed.

Professor Oluwatoyin Falola is being conferred this week the Doctorate of Literature degree, (D. Litt.) the highest academic laurel one can win in the Humanities by the University of Ibadan. I don’t know of any Nigerian or foreigner who has been conferred this highest academic degree of the University of Ibadan by consideration and assessment of his select publications as Falola. He therefore deserves our congratulations and celebration.

Falola had his undergraduate and graduate education in history at the University of Ile- Ife now Obafemi Awolowo University. To have gone this far is a testament to how excellent the University of Ife was in its golden years.  Falola previously held the Frances Higginbotham Nelle Centennial chair in History at the prestigious University of Texas at Austin. Professor Toyin Falola is currently a world celebrated professor of History and African Studies at the same university. He is Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker chair in the Humanities and University Teaching Professor at the same university. He has held visiting professorships in some American, Japanese, British and South African universities. He has attracted generous research funds from several academic foundations including the US library of Congress. His scholarship has received recognition all over the world and the breadth and profundity of his publications are simply amazing.

I do not know any historian anywhere in the world who can beat Toyin Falola’s written fecundity. As a budding historian during my youth, I used to marvel at the scholarship of British historians like A. J. P. Taylor and Allan Bullock who were respectively Regius professors of modern history at Cambridge and Oxford universities in the 1960s. The importance of being a Regius professor is that one derives one’s emoluments by a special endowment of the Crown and it is the highest academic recognition in the UK. It was generally known that the two of them did not like each other and sometimes belittled each other’s scholarship through savage reviews of each other’s publications.

Allan Bullock was known and appreciated for his biography of Adolf Hitler. His book Hitler: “A Study in Tyranny “ attracted worldwide attention while Professor A. J. P. Taylor’s book “The Origins of the Second World War “ was a masterpiece which tended to blame the rise of  Hitler on the unfairness of the Versailles Peace Treaty of 1919.  These two had other publications in their sterling careers which included as public intellectuals through their writings in the Sunday Times and London Observer. Other historians that I admired were Fritz Fischer, the professor of history at the University of Hamburg whose book “Germany’s War Aims in the First World War” which is my field was a classic. S. T Bindoff’s “Tudor England” was a must read. The American historian, William Langer’s books on Imperialism were compulsory reading for any student of imperialism of the 19th and 20th centuries. Now in my old age, Toyin Falola has made the achievements of my academic heroes almost pedestrian not to talk about those of my teachers and myself. It is not easy for me to say the like of Toyin Falola is not likely to bestride this land again. I have read many of Falola’s publications; I cannot put a number on his books but they are not less than 40 and some read like literature, after all there is an old fashion school of history which believed that good historical writing is literature. If it were not so, Winston Churchill would not have won the Nobel Prize in 1953 for his history of the English-speaking people. Professor Falola is not just an historian, he represents the best traditions of social science. In many parts of the world including some parts of the United States’ history belongs to the social sciences. If there is any argument about the place of History in the Social Sciences, Falola’s scholarship provides a bridge between the Humanities and the Social Sciences. History is to the Social Sciences what Mathematics is to the Physical Sciences and Engineering.

Professor Toyin Falola is presenting his latest work “Understanding Modern Nigeria: Democracy and Development” published by Cambridge University Press on November 17 to apparently celebrate his conferment of the D.Litt. (not Honoris Causa), this time but by academic assessment. He already has loads of honorary doctorates, 12 at the last count, from foreign and African universities including state and private universities and recently by the Federal University of Lokoja. In his latest work which covers 690 pages, Professor Falola takes his readers on a promenade on post-colonial Nigerian politics and society covering such themes as ethnicity, democracy and development. This book although likely to overawe if not overwhelm its readers by its voluminous length of 690 pages, will definitely mark a turning point in the study of Nigerian modern history and politics for the foreseeable future.

Professor Falola is not just an historian, he has sometimes participated in events of epochal importance and significance such as the “Agbekoya” peasants rebellion in Western Nigeria in the 1960s. His recall and research into this episode of Nigerian social and economic history is captured in his book  ”Counting the Tigers Teeth: An African Teenagers Story” in which  he narrates his recollection  and research of the peasant revolts and his witness to history  and “A Mouth Sweeter than Salt”  is a biography of Ibadan and his own autobiography woven together in a beautiful fashion in which the historian grows with his subject and is an observer of the growth of one of the most authentic African cities. These two books were published some years ago and attracted many prizes and world-wide acclamation.

He has published so many books and edited many more that I will be doing injustice to his efforts if I begin to single out a few. But permit me my readers to mention a few I have enjoyed reading and from which I have gained knowledge and wisdom. These books about 20 or more  include such titles as “Colonialism and Violence in Nigeria”, Ibadan: Foundation, Growth and Change 1830 – 1966″, “ Violence in Nigeria: The crisis of Religious Politics and Secular Ideologies “, “ The Power of African Cultures”, “Nationalism and African Intellectuals”, “ The African Diaspora: Slavery, Modernity and Globalization”, “Economic Reforms and Modernization in Nigeria 1945 to 1965”,

“Development Planning and Decolonization in Nigeria”, “Praise of Greatness: The Poetics of African Adulation”, Cultural Modernity in a colonized world: The writings of Chief Isaac Oluwole Delano”, “ Understanding Ogbu Kalu”  with Aribidesi Usman, “The Yoruba from prehistory to the present”, “ Yoruba Gurus: Indigenous production of knowledge in Africa” with Ann Genova, “ The politics of the Global oil industry “, and “The Humanities in Africa, knowledge production, Universities and Knowledge transformation of society”. Perhaps because of his lack of Arabic knowledge he has not made more than cursory look at Northern Nigerian history in his historical curiosity.

What Falola has achieved in academic scholarship is just beyond human understanding. Falola in his youth dabbled with socialism. I remember reading his first books before he left for the United States. He used to employ Marxist analysis to interpret Nigerian history. I was not surprised because I also and other colleagues began our academic lives mouthing socialist slogans. My older brothers actually refused me accepting Russian scholarship in 1966 after leaving the University of Ibadan for fear of socialist radicalization. Of course Falola has gone beyond socialist fascination to his present realism of taking the world as it is.

Among those of my teachers who have gotten the national merit award for historical scholarship included the late professors J.F. Ade. Ajayi, Emmanuel Adiele Afigbo and the Izon historian, E. Alagoa  who is very much alive. I do not know why Professor Emmanuel Ayankanmi Ayandele who blazed the trail for prodigiousity in research, scholarship and publications which Falola is following was not given the national merit award which those of us his students and colleagues believed he deserved before he passed on into eternity.  I am also not sure why up till now, Falola has not received the National Merit award but I can guess. I think the volume of his work is usually found to be so overwhelming that decision makers, not the assessors, are intimidated. But whatever the reasons may be, Toyin Falola on all counts deserves consideration for an award. Apart from his scholarship, Falola has mentored several young academics and students through his Toyin Falola conferences held periodically in several African universities. Toyin Falola’s recorded interviews of contemporary leaders in academia, culture, traditional and modern politics provide rich oral history for the present and the future. I hope he can use his considerable resources to interrogate why Africa despite the thousands of professors in the sciences and engineering has not made any headway in adaptation of science for Africa’s development.

The Glasgow Scotland’s Conference of Parties (COP) to the United Nations Convention on Climate Change UNCCC) is the 26th in the series since COP 1 which met in Berlin 1995. It has taken the world this long to arrive at what the British prime minister,  Boris Johnson in his usually colourful words described as the midnight hour for the world to take decisive actions to reverse its perilous path towards global self-destruction. This destruction would come because of continuing dependence  for industrial processes and other needs of mankind on hydrocarbon energy sources which produce greenhouse gasses heating up the global environment to well over 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial global temperature.

I have two personal stories to share with readers. I was Nigeria’s ambassador to the Federal Republic of Germany (Bundesrepublik Deutschland) when the first Conference of Parties to the UN Convention on Climate Change was held in Berlin. My experience captures the dilemma facing many countries. Our delegation was made up the Director General of Nigeria’s Environmental Protection Agency which was a new government department created after some Italians dumped toxic and hazardous wastes on our coast, especially on Koko in the Niger Delta. The supervising ministry of works of the agency was represented by its permanent secretary, and as ambassador, I represented our foreign ministry while the present secretary general of OPEC, Muhammad Barkindo represented the ministry of petroleum.

I had thought we had a blank cheque to follow wherever the scientific community said was the right path. This was also the belief of our environment experts but the people in petroleum were briefed not to yield grounds to any demand to cut hydrocarbons usage. This is understandable for a country whose foreign exchange came mainly from sale of crude petroleum and LNG. The director general and the permanent secretary soon left the conference for London after the formal opening and left me as leader of delegation. Before the meeting, we had gotten a representation from the German government that we should suggest Bonn as headquarters of the proposed UNCCC because of the generous availability of facilities in Bonn after the movement to Berlin of the German government. I had recommended that our government accede to the German request. I had the privilege of nominating Bonn which when the vote was taken beat cities like Geneva among others for the seat of the Convention on Climate Change. Secondly, I was a member of the Nigerian delegation to the COP 15 in Copenhagen Denmark in 2009. I was a member then of a six member Presidential Advisory Council (PAC) on International Relations. It was at this conference that a decision was taken to create a Climate Adaptation Fund of $100 billion to assist developing countries to be contributed by developed countries based on what was usually described as “polluter pays” principle. The conference had been deadlocked on this issue after almost two weeks before President Barack Obama came in and after calling in China and a few key countries, broke the deadlock and the figure of $100 billion was adopted .This sum has become a recurring decimal since that time.

This landmark agreement was followed in 2015 by the meeting in Paris of COP21 in which leaders of the world finally signed the Paris Protocol or Agreement on Climate Change. The essence of the Paris Agreement was that it was an international treaty to seriously tackle the issue of climate change by radically cutting back on generating power from coal and moving gradually to renewable sources of energy like wind, thermal, solar, hydro, tidal, nuclear and new technologies to drive all industrial processes and the automobiles of the world. President Obama was very active in the negotiations resulting in the United States accession to the treaty.

Everything seemed settled until there was a change of government in the United States and President Donald J. Trump became the new president in 2016. The new president decided to withdraw the United States from the Paris Accord. His grounds for doing this were that the United States bore too much economic burden of the agreement. The pledge to abandon fossil fuels, he argued, will weaken the United States.  He said China and India two of the greatest polluters got home scot free.

Read Also: The COP26 climate test 

Any agreement without the tacit agreement and acquiescence of the United States, one of the greatest polluters will be meaningless. In other words, President Trump ruined the global effort to take abatement measures to reverse the degradation of the global environment and reverse climate change. This was part of his effort and apparently supported by members of his Republican Party to weaken multilateralism as a way of dealing with global issues and his preference for bilateralism as a better strategy. President Trump seemed to have had some angst against the United Nations as an institution. He withdrew the US from UNESCO and some other UN Agencies and cut US assessed contributions to the UN and its specialized agencies.

However the unseasonable rainfalls, coastal flooding, bush fires, droughts and general unpredictability of the weather world-wide in recent times seemed to have convinced all those who doubted the scientificity  of climate change  to have a rethink. The coming of the Joseph R. Biden administration in the United States which promptly re-joined the Paris Protocol brought added momentum and impetus to the COP 26 Glasgow meeting.

Initially British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was pessimistic about the success of the Glasgow conference in a world overwhelmingly concerned with surviving the coronavirus pandemic being called upon to shoulder more burdens. But from this initial pessimism, there seems to be coming out signs of the world’s determination to forge on with tentative measures to save our planet. There seems to be a commitment on becoming carbon neutral in 2050 or 2060 as a target date. Nigeria without apparent preparation committed itself to zero carbon emissions by the year 2060. I suppose most of us will not be here then to be held accountable!

The decade between now and 2030 is projected to see the abandonment of petrol-driven automobiles for electric cars and trucks or at worst gas driven vehicles. There is also a commitment to begin innovation towards using liquid hydrogen in some of the transportation systems including aviation now dependent on hydrocarbons. There is also a commitment towards revolutionizing agricultural processes to reduce methane emissions by 30 percent within a decade. Beef eaters including Nigerians and their love for Methane belching cows should be on notice! Perhaps the commitment to re-afforestation and providing global funds for this is also a step in the right direction. The issue of preserving the forests of the world has the support of Brazil, Russia, The Congos, Indonesia and the United States. This is an area in which Nigeria can play its card because we also have rain forest and we can embark of afforestation in our tropical forest which had suffered from uncontrolled tree felling in the past which we can regrow again to prevent the southward drift of desertification in our country and in other African countries.

I hope our representatives at the conference did indicate our readiness to join in the effort at reforestation if we get funds. What is more heartening is the embrace of the struggle for climate salvation by the hundreds of businesses, banks and thousands of cities irrespective of their national governments which have committed themselves to environmental enhancement. We now paradoxically have the situation where big oil producing companies have decided to be part of the transition to clean energy.

There is no dispute about the $100 billion commitment. But the problem is that action is needed and the United States commitment of about $20 billion is grossly inadequate. There is also a need for the European Union to match the Americans dollar for dollar. Even though Russia wants to be seen as a poor country, it must also show its hands. China can no longer pretend to be a developing country; it also has to pay some amount. The Arab oil producers must cough out huge amount to save their countries reverting to deserts which they were once before even in recent past before petrol dollars transformed their countries into what they are today.

We cannot leave the United States to carry the burden alone after all, industrial pollution first started in Europe before spreading all over the world and as a matter of fairness, justice and equity, those countries that have developed using hydrocarbons and methane producing processes and emissions of other greenhouses gasses must help the rest of the world to reverse global warming to not more than 1.5 degrees above pre industrial global temperatures. Our lives literally depend on this global joint effort which COP 26 in Glasgow represents.