The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olatunji Dare

  • May 29: Not yet “Democracy Day”

    May 29: Not yet “Democracy Day”

    Like October 1, Nigeria’s independence anniversary, May 29, the so-called “Democracy Day”, has become a sombre, almost funereal event on the national calendar.

    With rare exceptions, the former has become, 53 years on, an occasion to lament the road not taken and to bemoan missed opportunities, the unfulfilled and constantly retreating promise       of independence.  The latter has run out of steam and even symbolism after little more than a decade, and those who foisted it on a skeptical public seem now to have grown weary of according it even the perfunctory celebration of yesteryears.

    That is just as well, for “Democracy Day” was never fundamentally about democracy.  It was the day an exhausted and discredited military hurriedly transferred power to civilians following rushed elections based on a Constitution the public played no part in making, and the provisions of which those succeeding to power knew little.

    Trappings of “democracy” had figured in the process leading to the final transfer of power. Political parties had been organised and had, after a fashion, chosen their candidates; elections had been held, and it was clear that there would be no fundamental departure from the architecture of what would have been Nigeria’s Third Republic if General Ibrahim Babangida had not, with help from hegemonic forces in and out of uniform, annulled the 1993 presidential election that was supposed to inaugurate it.

    But nobody outside the General Abdulsalam Abubakar’s inner circle knew the letter of the Constitution – what powers it grants, to whom, and with what limits.  But those waiting in the wings cared not in the least. Collect the baton, move on and govern happily thereafter.

    It is a measure of how defective the military decree parlayed into the 1999 Constitution has turned out to be in operation that as many as 54 amendments to it have been proposed.  And yet, it is the foundation of what has been designated “Democracy Day”.

    Little has been done since then to strengthen this weak foundation in the letter or spirit. Elections that are no elections continue to be staged with ritual regularity, and it is often                   left to the courts, invoking abstruse technicalities subversive of the letter and spirit of the Constitution, to determine who actually won.

    This process often takes so long and costs so much that it is a mockery of the plebiscitary principle itself.

    The challenge to Delta State Governor Emmanuel Uduaghan’s second-term election ran its course only a week ago, with his victory affirmed.  If it had been reversed, he would have served three years in an office to which he was never elected, exercising the powers of that office unlawfully as Olagunsoye Oyinlola had done in Osun State and as Professor Oserheimen Osunbor had done in Edo and Segun Oni in Ekiti, though for shorter periods in the case of the last two.

    In a democracy, the welfare of the people ought to be the supreme law. That is what “government of the people, by the people, for the people” means at bottom.  In our system, the people rarely figure in this calculus. The welfare of the Legislative and Executive branches is the supreme law. Only in that sense can membership of the legislature be regarded as a hardship warranting special compensation.

    By the time the Exchequer is done indulging the fancies of the Executive and Legislative branches, there is little left to address the needs of the people in whose name they claim to govern.

    Nor have the statistically impressive figures of growth proclaimed across the economy before and after rebasing translated into real development.  Fully 50 per cent of young men and women able and willing to work cannot fine meaningful employment.  Earned pensions, the closest thing to a safety net, go unpaid for months; in many instances, they are not paid at all.

    Despite all the brave talk of transformation, what is more evident is shadow-chasing.  It is delusional to embark on a project to build “Nigerian” cars for a discriminating export market without fixing the problems that doomed previous efforts.

    It is self-defeating to raise tariffs to discourage importation of used cars that bridge at more affordable prices the huge gap between local production and demand, even when production is optimal. For, as with the ban on rice imports, since revised, and the embargo on wheat imports, higher tariffs on used car imports will only profit syndicate smugglers.  The national treasury will be the poorer for the measure, for you cannot collect custom duties on contraband.

    Political party alignment and realignment is driven more by opportunist calculations than by conviction or ideology. When they are not running their jurisdictions and constituencies like their personal estates, many political officials carry on in the manner of military prefects.

    Recruitment into the political leadership cadre follows no known rules.  The result is the acute crisis of leadership besetting the country, most poignantly at the centre. This leadership deficit is revealed starkly every passing day in Abuja’s acts and omissions relating to Boko Haram and its maniacal campaign of murder and mayhem.

    One day, we are told that President Goodluck Jonathan is at long last set to visit Chibok, scene of the abduction of more than 200 school girls whose plight has dominated front pages and headlines across the world for more than a month; the next day, we are told that Dr Jonathan was not going to Chibok and had never said he was going there.

    As the multinational effort to locate the girls gather pace, the Chief of Defence Staff, Air Marshal Alex Badeh, announces sensationally that his men know where the girls are, in the process squandering the element of surprise so vital to successful military operations, assuming that his claim is true.  Since then, Boko Haram must have moved the girls to different locations.

    One day, Abuja says it is willing to negotiate. The next, it says it will not.  Rather than engage the parents and concerned Nigerians staging peaceful demonstrations to demand action to bring the girls home, it sets rented crowds against them and seeks to undermine them in other ways.

    One day, Abuja is reported to be prepared to offer an amnesty to Boko Haram elements who renounce their murderous ways; the next day, it stoutly denies that such an offer was ever made.

    In Abuja, it has been one long amateur stretch, and not just on Chibok.

    The rule of law that is supposed to undergird democracy has in Nigeria been supplan3ted by the rule of immunity and impunity.  Consequently, among the political class and the well-connected, crime and grave misconduct are more likely to be rewarded than punished.

    Democracy, it has been said, is a journey, not a destination. That is true.  More fundamentally, however, democracy is a plant that has to be cultivated, tended, and nurtured. By that measure, the journey has hardly begun

    So, the verdict on May 29 has to be:  Not yet “Democracy Day.”

     

  • Matters miscellaneous

    Matters miscellaneous

    As long-time followers of this column know, “Matters miscellaneous” is the rubric under which it tries in short takes and with broad strokes to catch up on the glut of occurrences, lest some people feel ignored.

    I was mightily relieved that President Goodluck Jonathan chose not to go to Ado-Ekiti to help  rouse the PDP faithful and mobilise them behind their candidate in next month’s governorship election.  If the President who could not visit Chibok on a mission of sympathy and solidarity with  the parents and relations of the more than 200 abducted school girls and communities in the area traumatised by Boko Haram terror were to headline a political rally in Ado-Ekiti, he would have brought upon his own head something far worse than the domestic and international sandbagging he has already suffered – nothing less, to be sure, than maledictions of the blood-curdling kind.

    Dr Jonathan and his advisers got it right this time.

    Fayose is putting a bright face on it, but I hear that, deep down, he is sorely disappointed.  There will not be, at least for now, an infusion of the Federal Might, plus the planeload of cash that he was counting on to animate his ho-hum campaign.

    Many Ekiti residents are distressed too, I gather. They had been counting on Dr Jonathan to demonstrate up-close, for their benefit, the intricate azonto dance steps he had performed so splendidly in Kano the other day at a rally to welcome back under the PDP umbrella some prodigals who had migrated to the opposition All Progressives Congress (APC).  Residents of Ekiti will now have to wait for another opportunity.

    There were also those who were expecting that First Lady Dame Patience would also be on hand to enliven proceedings with the captivating routine that has endeared her like nothing else these past weeks to the global television and social audiences.

    I have bad news for Ekiti residents who might still be looking forward to a re-enactment of the bullying and the wailing seen and heard across the world:  It won’t happen. Herself the Dame  doesn’t do re-enactments.  She is always striving for something different, fresh, more riveting.

    But there is no guarantee that the première will be staged in Ekiti.

    In light of the Jonathan administration’s exceedingly maladroit handling of the international fallout from the Chibok abductions, I found myself wondering whether Nigeria has a foreign minister.  Surely there must be such an official, I reasoned.  But I found I could not put a name to the title.

    So, I looked it up.

    And sure enough, there is indeed such an official, and he is by no means an obscure personage.  He is Aminu Wali.  He is more politician than career diplomat, but having served as Nigeria’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations and before then as the country’s ambassador to China, he surely must have along the way garnered considerable skill in international crisis management.

    So, how come he was allowed to go missing in the handling of the Chibok fallout?

    Why also was the much-accomplished Professor Viola Onwuliri, Minister of State (1) for Foreign Affairs, shut out of the matter?  And where was Minister of Foreign Affairs (II) Dr Nurudeen Mohammed while all the fumbling was going on?

    Why was the entire Ministry of Foreign Affairs missing in action while Nigeria and its leadership were being savaged daily in news networks across the world?

    It was left to Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala to fill in the gap, as if her double-barelled designation as Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister for the Economy, to say nothing of her playing host at the on-going Abuja World Economic Forum on Africa, was not enough burden.  It has to be said to her  credit that she did a commendable job under the circumstances.

    When it mattered most, the Minister of Information, Labaran Maku, also went missing.  First, he agreed to be interviewed by CNN’s Christiane Amanpour.  Then, he did not show up.  Did he duck, or was he held up by more pressing matters of state?

    In whatever case, he must have learned from his few encounters with the international news media that mouthing slogans and throwing tantrums at high decibels is not the best way of conducting government business or winning friends for one’s course.

    Within several hours of a crisis breaking in the United States, the President appears before the nation on television, flanked by the officials charged with handling the matter. He makes a brief statement, then yields the podium to the officials to brief the public about what is developing and what is  being done.  The President and the officials take a few questions, and then depart to face the crisis at hand.  Periodic updates follow.

    If the Chibok abductions had happened in the United States, President Barack Obama would most certainly nave appeared on national television flanked by the Defence Secretary, the FBI Director, the National Security Adviser and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in full military regalia.

    That spectacle communicates strength and resolve, if not control.  It reassures the American people that even if the authorities are not “on top of the situation,” to employ a locution that has become highly discredited in these parts, they are grappling with it hands-on.

    It may well be that the Minister of Defence and the National Security Adviser and the military top brass were at work behind the scenes devising strategies for freeing the Chibok abductees from their diabolical captors, without the benefit of television cameras.  But in this age of what the Americans call “optics,” it is not enough to be doing something; one must be seen doing it.

    In the event, it was as if they too went missing when it mattered most that they be seen in action.

    Finally, some self-indictment, at least in so far as it relates to my constituency and my calling:  the Nigerian news media.

    Chibok, and indeed Boko Haram’s mindless campaign of murder and mayhem, was a domestic story, our story.  And yet some of the most insightful reporting across the print and electronic media, and the best film footage, have come from the foreign media.  They should have been quoting us as sources and for background.  Instead, we have been quoting them, sometimes without the nice sense of discrimination the situation calls for.

    In a sense, therefore, it can be said that the Nigerian news media largely went missing over Chibok.

  • Between columnist and reader on JEG

    Between columnist and reader on JEG

    My last column “GEJ:  No second term” (May 13, 2014) drew some 90 sms text responses, the third largest since I started writing At Home Abroad.

    A casual textual analysis suggests that some of them were written by the same person under different names or no names at all. A friend in my line of business tells me that an army of retainers, funded by shadowy organisations fronting for the Presidency, is on permanent alert to manufacture responses to articles critical of that institution.

    The responses break down roughly into 55 per cent for President Goodluck Jonathan, and his undeclared but undisguised second-term bid, and 45 per cent for the column’s position­ that he should not seek re-election.

    What follows is a representative sample, edited where necessary for clarity and good taste.

    I am not sure that the authors are who they say they are, and I do not wish to attribute to any person even inadvertently  a view he or she may not hold and may not have expressed.  So, I  have omitted the names.

    The tenacious Lai Ashadele, who never lets a column in The NATION pass without comment even if the comment is often grounded on a complete misapprehension, will no doubt recognise his comment even without his name.  So will other correspondents represented in this selection,

    For GEJ:

    I am not surprised you must write what you write to be in the good book of Bola Tinubu your pay master. Jonathan will contest.  Please allow the voters decide who they want.

    No 2nd term for JEG is your wish/personal opinion or that of your paymasters? I don’t know your faith but the Bible let me know that God is the maker of kings and rulers! Beware, you may be cursing one of God’s anointed! O God, forgive us all for we know not what we do, Amen.

    Your comment is too abusive and aggressive. You need to respect that office . Security of a nation should not be left to the President alone. What of the governors, (local government) chairmen and individuals for information?  Even you journalists.  Let us be constructive and make positive suggestions.

    As Jonathan is not qualified, you can declare your intent to contest in your party APC.  I have it on good authority that you are a heavy drinker so when you become APC President you can drink till day break.

    Whether you and your paymasters the sponsors of Boko Haram like it or not, Goodluck Ebele Jonathan will win landslide in next year. If your paymasters like, let them turn Northern Nigeria to another Somalia.  By the way who is the APC presidential candidate or are you people planning to adopt President Jonathan? Well that should be your best move in order to avoid humiliation.

    What you should do as a card carrying member of APC is to defect to PDP and vote against President Jonathan during d PDP primaries.

    Who in Nigeria is unaware that Jonathan’s problems are brewed by people whom God taunted to declare their plans against him before his ascent to presidency? Even his most virulent foe is now opting to team up with him to quell a device he designed to frustrate Jonathan which backfired at him. Whoever plans to undo God’s deed calls for His wrath upon him. Such a one is in condemnation on earth and beyond. Shettima had an opportunity to save the Chibok girls when WAEC advised him to shift base of their examination to a safer haven. He never provided security as Chief Security Officer of the state. Steer clear of God’s wrath. Be fair in judgment.

    I want to draw your attention to some facts about President Jonathan.  He rose from university lecturer to deputy governor to Vice President to Acting President to President and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Nigeria. All these positions, almost effortlessly, when Zik, Awo, Abiola and other prominent Nigerians worked hard and even died to be the President of Nigeria.  God’s hand must be in this project – Jonathan.

    Are you and other NATION newspaper columnists not tired of your vendetta against Jonathan? Jonathan will seek re-election and win by a landslide. He is doing well. You are not blind to transformation in the agric and power sectors, the massive airport, road and rail rehabilitation. Try to be objective.

    It is quite a shame that people like you find yourself in chop-chop journalism. You leave out the main issue at stake in the country, and talk politics, shame to you and your sponsors.  You were once a good and respected journalist, but you have lost touch and respect of journalism.

    You are a Yoruba man going by your name and an unrepentant member of APC.  Can you if made the President of Nigeria do better?  Let’s agree that your kinsman the former President Olusegun Obasanjo was the best thing that happened to Nigeria.  GEJ will at the appropriate time declare his interest. After all, God has always been on his side.

    Even if you like, fill the whole pages of Tuesday in The NATION with flimsy and irrelevant reasons why Mr President shouldn’t contest for a second term, it makes no difference because no one cares for your opinion.  If he (president) is a Yoruba man will you publish that rubbish? You are a tribalist and the likes of you are not good for our great nation (Nigeria).

    Is the presidency of this nation Nigeria the preserve of the Hausa’s and Yoruba’s only?

    Against GEJ:

    Bless you for today’s column “JEG: No second Term”. Regrettably the man has even stepped further into more infamy by ordering the arrest of anybody who protests his failure. Sometimes I wonder if he really earned the Ph.D. he parades. Most regrettably the PDP is Nigeria’s worst enemy but we don’t seem to be tired of this govt’s cluelessness. They think that governance is the same as mere grandstanding. A pity.

    Your today’s article as usual is fantastic and I entirely agree with what you said.  Please continue the excellent work you are known for.

    JEG should pack and go in 2015. All the religious, traditional leaders supporting him will be disgraced because of all evils perpetrated by this administration through corruption and bad leadership. Looking at JEG, one can see that he is unserious.

    Do you know that you have spoken the heart of Nigerians?  Mr President has disappointed Nigerians. He should leave in 2015.

    Your column is a scientific assessment of an inept, corrupt and visionless government that came on board by accident and I am afraid if the political mess foisted by a cabal will not also be uprooted by a bloody accident.  JEG is not prepared to quit.

    For once you’ve abandoned satire for reality. And you are angry. Good. But what the SA told you, I had already shared with my officers that the man should go for councillorship or a junior pastor. Thank God for little mercies, you’ve seen the light but where did u get the name “FAKA” for the DAME? Keep angry, please.

    Thank you for JEG: No second term. There is nothing anybody can add to what you have written. Indeed, Nigeria deserves much, much better.

    I have never been afraid for Nigeria and Nigerians as in the last three weeks. We are saddled with a leader who seems not to have the strength nor words to bring out the best in us. I salute your courage for speaking the truth.

    I have said it times without number that GEJ is not supposed to lead Nigeria.  Look at the mess he and PDP have put us into.  It is time Igbos take over the government and progress and peace will reign.

    I have been following you for years. Just finished reading your article…No second term. Wish we all had your guts. Think seriously about seeking a public post. You will have my vote.

    Hmm, where did you get the courage to write these truths! I dey fear for your life o!

    Your article “JEG:  No second term” is reflective and blunt.  It is straight to the point and a masterpiece. Please expect visitors from Aso Rock and the PDP.

  • JEG: No second term

    JEG: No second term

    It is just as well that President Goodluck Jonathan has not formally announced that he will be seeking re-election next year.

    He should not. In fact, he should go one step further and declare, today, in the manner of former U.S. President William Sherman, that he will not be a candidate for the 2015 presidential election; that if nominated, he will decline, and that if elected, he will refuse to serve.

    More than any other incident in his accidental presidency, his shambolic handling of the abduction of more than 200 girls from the Government Secondary School, Chibok, in Borno State by elements of the nihilistic terrorist organisation Boko Haram, has called into serious question  his fitness for the job

    It is not that he had shown the mental alertness and sure-footedness his office demands in handling many crises that have rocked his administration. But the Chibok abduction and his manner of dealing with it has exposed his inadequacies as never before, and not just to his compatriots who always had their doubts.  Now, the whole world has a good idea of the leader of Africa’s most populous country and largest economy, home to the largest aggregation of black humanity.

    Several days after the abduction, a spokesperson for the Nigerian Army, of which Dr Jonathan is commander-in-chief, announced to the relief of a traumatised nation that the girls had been freed. Only when challenged a few days later did the spokesperson take back the claim. The army, he said without remorse and without shame, has been “misled.”

    The spokesperson is still at his post.  So, for that matter, is Abba Moro, the cabinet minister responsible for a recruitment test in which 16 job-seekers were trampled to death and scores suffered significant injury. So also is Diezani Allison-Madueke, who presides over the scandal-infested Ministry of Petroleum Resources. But that is another matter.

    From the time the military said it had been misled, it has been one miscue after egregious miscue for the Jonathan administration.

    For three weeks, Dr Jonathan could not rouse himself to make a national broadcast or even hold a news conference.  He did not meet with the distraught parents of the abducted girls to offer solace.

    Instead, administration officials went into clumsy denial. They questioned whether the girls were actually abducted.  They sought to pin responsibility on the school’s authorities and the governor of Borno State.

    When the President finally bestirred himself to address the public on the issue, it was through a staged Presidential Chat, with four handpicked journalists doing the questioning. The outing was a fresh disappointment.

    Dr Jonathan said nothing that the public did not already know; no insights, only bland assurances that the government was doing “everything” to secure the release of the girls. The assurances rang hollow, especially when he admitted that the government had no idea where the girls were being held, nor indeed how many of them were in Boko Haram’s infernal custody.

    So did subsequent claims that the government was “on top of the situation.”  How can you be on top of the situation when you are, by your own admission, utterly clueless as to what is going on?

    It was Dr Jonathan’s opportunity to speak directly to the parents and relations of the girls, to empathise with them, to play comforter-in-chief.

    He blew it big-time, before the attentive global audience.  He kept appealing to the parents to “co-operate” with the government in its effort to secure the release of their children. It was as if the parents somehow stood in the way of the effort.

    Jide Ajani’s excellent reporting on the recent Presidential Chat and the atmosphere in which it was held (Vanguard, May 11) could not have reassured anyone looking for evidence that Dr Jonathan is indeed up to the task.  It shows a president overwhelmed by the office, disengaged, and tentative, not exactly basking in the fawning adulation and saccharine glorification of his retinue of court jesters, but not averse to it either.

    It is an alarming portraiture.  It provides some understanding of the abject incoherence of  the Jonathan administration’s response to the atrocity that reverberated around the world.

    And it confirms what a senior adviser to Dr Jonathan told me shortly after Dr Jonathan took office as acting president.  Was Dr Jonathan up to the task, I had asked the adviser, a discreet man not given to rash judgment or hyperbole.

    “Without hesitation, No,” he had responded.

    Dr Jonathan, he told me, would come to meetings without having mastered his briefing papers, and would sometimes doze off.

    One of the worst-kept secrets in Abuja is that Dr Jonathan’s quarters in the Villa is a den, where he and a coterie of revelers carouse far into the night. This kind of routine leaves little time for serious reflection on issues of state, and for cultivating the mind and the intellect, and may well account for the detachment, the lethargy, that is the hallmark of his style.

    Nor has his meddlesome wife, Dame Patience Faka, helped matters.  She staged a “public inquisition,” as a retired ambassador who brought the video of the event to my attention called it, during which she harassed and bullied officials and others in her inimitable way to blame everyone except her husband’s administration.

    No matter how this crisis is resolved, Dr Jonathan is unlikely to emerge as a president who can be trusted to lead Nigeria through the challenges that lie ahead. To be fair, he never sought the position; he knew his limitations. It is not entirely his fault that he has proved unequal to the task.

    But it would be selfish and unpatriotic of him to seek to continue to preside over the destiny of Nigeria when his term ends next year.  If the ruling PDP loves and cares about Nigeria, it should urge Dr Jonathan not to seek another term.  If he refuses, it should reject him decisively.

    Nigeria deserves better.

  • Economic summitry: Getting back to basics

    Economic summitry: Getting back to basics

    If conferences ever developed a continent or helped solve its most pressing problems, Africa would be one of the most developed continents and its problems would long have been solved.

    At bilateral, multi-lateral, regional and continental levels, one conference or another is being  staged at any given moment, with some of the most knowledgeable experts and policy-makers participating.

    They are staging yet another conference, the  World Economic Forum on Africa, in Abuja this week, from Wednesday through Friday, with the bombed-out remains of Nyanya  still smouldering and a full accounting of the casualties yet to be rendered.  They are staging  while the authorities are yet to summon the will and the resolve to locate, to say nothing of rescuing, more than 100 female students abducted from the Government Secondary School, Chibok, in Borno State.

    They have not disclosed the cost of the conference, but it won’t be cheap. They are shutting down Abuja for three days, not on account of what the elusive Boko Haram might do, they say, but to ensure that the visiting political officials and, most especially, all those irritable and disobliging investors, would not be incommoded in the least by the gridlock that often paralyses vehicular traffic in the city.

    There is no need to worry about the loss to productivity during the shutdown.  The new rebased economy that will be a major talking point in President Goodluck Jonathan’s opening address and a theme that Finance Minister and Coordinating Minister for the Economy Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala will insinuate into every aspect of the proceedings can easily absorb it.

    A communiqué bristling with diplomatic gobbledygook will be issued at the end of the conference. Grand intentions will be proclaimed and affirmed, and ringing resolutions will be passed. Another Plan of Action will be formulated to replace previous plans of action.

    But the problems will remain, and in some cases grow more intractable. Rarely are the agreements reached at these conferences followed up and followed through.  Several years later, the same officials and experts convene at another venue to make the same proclamations and pass the same resolutions.

    I was reminded of this unproductive summitry the other day when I stumbled upon the notes  I had taken at the Conference on Africa on the Eve of the 21st Century held in Maputo, Mozambique, from September 9-11, which had in attendance some 65 senior political figures, policy-makers and academics from 31 African countries.

    The deliberations were prefaced by a background paper detailing where Africa stood in the scheme of things on the eve of a new millennium. The profile was sobering, grim even.

    One-half of the continent’s estimated population of 720 million subsisted on less than one U.S. dollar a day. Africa’s children were the most likely, in comparison with children in other parts of the world, to die before age 5, and its adults least likely to live beyond age 50.

    On the average, Africans were more malnourished, less educated and more likely to succumb to fatal diseases.  Of the 24 countries at the bottom of the United Nations Development Programmes Human Development Index – the so-called Misery Index – 22 were to be found in Africa.

    Africa had the highest population growth rate in the world; at an annual rate of 2.61 per cent, it was set to reach 1.05 billion by 2010 and double 25 years later.  But in most African countries, economic growth lagged behind population growth. More than 50 per cent of African youths under age 30 were unemployed.  Where physical infrastructure existed, it                was in disrepair.

    In the face of the growing population, agricultural production was declining as a result of wars and conflict which made farming hazardous, if not impossible, and also as a result of environmental degradation.

    Africa accounted for 12 per cent of the world’s population but only 2.4 per cent of global GNP, and more than one-half of this figure was contributed by South Africa and Nigeria. Africa continued to be almost entirely an exporter of raw materials.  It also accounted for only two per cent of global telephone density.

    In the health sector, the picture was just as grim. Malaria continued to send some 2.7 million Africans to premature deaths every year. Some 14 million Africans, constituting more than 50 per cent of the total number of HIV- positive persons, most of them children, were to be found in Africa. One in 13 women in Africa died during pregnancy or childbirth, compared to one in 3,200 in Europe and one in 35 in Asia.  More than 60 per cent of drugs sold across the counter in Africa were fake and quite possibly harmful.

    Despite all the talk about economic cooperation and regional integration, intra-African trade accounted for only 7.5 per cent of the continent’s total. Capital accumulation and saving rates stood at less than one half of Asia’s 30 per cent and fell considerably short of the level required to attain and sustain a rate of growth that would have any significant impact on the economy.

    And all his was happening as the flow of private capital into emerging markets had almost entire bypassed Africa.

    The commitment to regional integration was weak. With the exception of Senegal, no African country could boast of having a ministry of regional integration or a designated agency with sufficient authority to deal with the subject.

    African heads of government – and their wives — were well integrated, but not the people, not the infrastructure, not the economic operators and not the markets.

    Very little seems to have changed in the 14 years that have passed since the Maputo Conference. Inter-regional trade has ticked up, accounting for between 10 and 13 per cent of Africa’s trade. This figure probably does not take into account trade in the informal sector which, judging from the commercial traffic from Nigeria to ECOWAS countries as well as Cameroun and going so far south as Zaire, is considerable. Still, it is puny compared with comparable figures in Europe, Asia and Latin America.

    Africa’s telephone density has grown dramatically since the introduction of GSM phones. The continent’s emerging markets are being touted as hot destinations for foreign capital, but that is more hype than actuality.

    During his first term, President Olusegun Obasanjo appointed to his cabinet a minister for regional integration. I can claim some responsibility for that appointment. Drawing on the Maputo Conference, I had sent him a memo urging him to give practical effect to his well-known commitment to regional integration by making it the subject of a cabinet-level appointment.  To rule myself out of contention, I recommended that the appointee should be bilingual in English and French.

    Unfortunately, the position – and the appointee — did not survive Obasanjo’s first term.

    One of the key resolutions of the Maputo Conference bears re-stating. The time had come,  it said, to try a new approach to tackling the problems of the continent.  That approach would emphasise the integration of production and infrastructure and include business and economic operators as well as social formations, not just heads of state and their wives and top officials.

    A good starting point, the Conference said, would be to streamline and rationalise some 40 existing intergovernmental organisations performing tasks related to integration.

    More than two decades after the Beninois statesman and former Minister of Information, Professor Albert Tévoédjrè proposed un jour sans frontières(a day without borders) as a first step toward giving concrete expression to the movement of goods and persons in the ECOWAS region, it has remained that: a proposal.

    The World Economic Forum on Africa will most likely take a global perspective on the African condition.  But it will do well to consider the internal dimensions as well and urge a return to basics.

  • Ekiti: The PDP’s morbid obsession

    Ekiti: The PDP’s morbid obsession

    When Vice President Namadi Sambo the other day declared Ekiti and Osun “war fronts” in which   the PDP was set to do full battle to win back power in the looming gubernatorial elections, the attentive audience might well have dismissed the vow as delusional, and the metaphor as over-wrought.

    This, after all is the silly season, the time for political hot air.

    To react in that manner would be dangerous, however.  For it fails to take into account the PDP’s morbid obsession with the two states, especially Ekiti, of which Sambo’s declaration was merely   the latest expression.

    Against all indications to the contrary, spokesperson after spokesperson in the PDP has claimed Ekiti not merely as a state in which it has a respectable following but as their stronghold, a “PDP state” in their phrasing.

    Vincent Ogbulafor, the former PDP chairman now standing trial for criminal breach of trust, said so.  His successor Okwesilieze Nwodo, who was dismissed from the post well before his tenure was up, said so.  Bamanga Tukur, who succeeded him and ran the party like an overbearing school principal, said so before he was deposed and dispatched to use his management skills to whip the railways into the mid-20th century.

    Ekiti was PDP territory until four years ago when the gubernatorial elections in that state and Osun were stolen from the PDP through judicial legerdemain, Namadi Sambo and company have been saying, and that recovering those offices in the forthcoming elections, come what may, was the PDP’s firm resolve.

    Whatever it may be, Ekiti has never been a “PDP state.”

    In the 1999 general elections that terminated military rule, Ekiti elected a State Assembly in which the Alliance for Democracy (AD) enjoyed a controlling majority, and a governor on that party’s platform.  More tellingly, it rejected in overwhelming numbers the presidential candidate of the PDP.

    Four years later, a general election that local and international observers said was far and away the most fraudulent they had witnessed  anywhere, literally buried the ACN in Southwestern Nigeria bar Lagos, where the canny Governor Bola Tinubu who honed his political skills in the toughest streets of Chicago had correctly anticipated and foiled the grand design of the fixers.

    That monumental heist delivered the PDP to Ekiti, with a political nonentity, all flash and no substance as governor, and a razor-thin majority in the State Assembly.

    Ayo Fayose’s time in office is largely remembered as an encounter of the unprepared with the unforeseen.  Ekiti lurched from one crisis to another as he amused himself flying over its compact territory in an executive helicopter.  Not for him the cratered roads crying out for repairs. He conceived no scheme more sophisticated than a so-called integrated poultry project that gulped billions of Naira without producing a single egg.

    He became a liability even to the PDP that had steamrolled him into office and was impeached.  The EFCC sandbagged him with a charge sheet so comprehensive that, if convicted, he would need several lifetimes to complete the cumulative sentence.

    But the PDP was determined to hold on to its stolen trophy.  It rigged its candidate Segun Oni into office at the election that followed.  Instead of voiding the entire poll, the courts ordered a re-run in those constituencies where it had been marred by violence and irregularities.  The PDP repeated the offence with brassiness on a scale almost beyond belief, leading the Returning Officer to declare that she could not in her Christian conscience announce the results handed to her.

    Several days later, without formally renouncing her faith, she put aside her Christian conscience, dutifully read the confected returns, and urged those who felt aggrieved to go to court.

    The ACN pursued the matter all the way to the Appeal Court, which declared that its candidate, Dr Kayode Fayemi, had been duly elected governor of Ekiti State.

    In those towns where Fayose and Oni were not frankly despised, including the state capital, Ado-Ekiti, they were accorded only a tepid welcome.  But even with Federal Might and “Africa’s biggest political party” behind them, they spent so much of their time and the state’s resources trying to shore up their insecure hold on power that they had little left to pursue meaningful development.

    Since Dr Fayemi took office, Ekiti State has been a different place.  He has reached out to the state’s legion of learned men and women whom Fayose and Oni alienated to generate ideas and programmes of development.  He restored education to the centrality it has always enjoyed in the life of the people.

    He has completed the roads Fayose and Oni abandoned, and constructed new ones.   He inaugurated a social safety net that provides monthly stipend for older residents, the first in Ekiti and one of the first nationwide. For the first time since its establishment, the Ikogosi Warm Springs can now be called a resort, and a tourist destination.

    Dr Fayemi has accomplished all this and much more quietly and almost unobtrusively, without the histrionics that marked Fayose’s era or the smug vindictiveness of Oni’s time.  Ekiti is thriving in ways it has never known. There, “transformation” is not a slogan; it is a lived reality.

    That is also the case in the state of Osun, where the scope and the frenetic pace of development cannot but astonish those who knew what the place was like under PDP Governor Olagunsoye Oyinlola and what it is now under Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola, who was elected on the platform of the ACN.

    Now the PDP wants to put an end to all that.  It has not phrased its quest as starkly as I have done here, but it cannot complain that I have misjudged its intent.

    Only such an intent, plus overweening contempt for the Ekiti people, can explain why it drew Fayose out of his den and with scant regard for due process pressed him into service as its candidate in the gubernatorial election scheduled for June.  That the process which produced the ticket was supervised by a hugely discredited former PDP governor the courts said the police must never arrest merely underscores the PDP’s desperation.

    But that desperation is rooted in a morbid obsession, a consuming craving that knows no bounds and no restraints for what one cannot have.

    It is a dangerous affliction.  In the end, it drives its victim to destroy the object of his or her desire that refuses to be possessed.  That is the psychology of morbid obsession.

    Those who have been warning that the PDP will resort to blatant rigging to conscript Ekiti State into its fold, unmindful of the chaos that is sure to follow, cannot therefore be dismissed as idle alarmists.

    Unless it is too far gone in its delusion, the PDP must know that it cannot win a free and fair election in Ekiti, much less with a candidate who has nothing to offer, and that if it turns Ekiti and Osun into “war fronts” for the forthcoming elections, it will have to do battle with their newly empowered residents.

  • What is Boko Haram?

    What is Boko Haram?

    This is not a good time to be an expatriate Nigerian.

    No, I take that back; this is a particularly bad time to be an expatriate Nigerian, given the steady flow of bad news, bad news and more bad news out of the country. Even the rebasing that has catapulted Nigeria from the doldrums to the world’s 26th largest economy overnight has not translated into equanimity for the expatriate Nigerian.

    Our political and diplomatic strategists will have to take a cue from the economic strategists to rebase the national image.

    The latter drew on Nigeria’s burgeoning home video industry Nollywood to boost the Gross Domestic Product by a full percentage point and some. The former will have to factor in Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, JP Clarke, Christopher Okigbo, Niyi Osundare, Femi Osofisan, John Cardinal Onaiyekan, the Super Eagles, Ben Nwabueze, Kenneth Dike, JF Ade Ajayi, Claude Ake, Yusuf Grillo, Bruce Onobrakpeya, Demas Nwoko. Simeon Adebo, Jerome Udoji, Peter Lassa, Ali Akilu, Afigbo Adiele, Bala Usman, Gani Fawehinmi, Ben Enwonwu, the Brothers Ransome-Kuti, Abubakar Imam, Ayodele Awojobi, DO Fagunwa,Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Cyprian Ekwensi, Mokwugo Okoye, Jelani Aliyu, and others too numerous to list, in rebasing the national image.

    Surely, the country that produced these luminaries and others too numerous to name here deserves a better appellation than the land of Boko Haram and rampaging “Fulani herdsmen.” “Rebranding” was the name Dr Dora Akunyili’s gave this heroic but ultimately futile undertaking when she was Minister of Information. That was then.

    Now, in keeping with the times, the effort will have to be re-launched, the goal being to rebase Nigeria’s foreign image, the image that follows them wherever they go, defines them and often haunts them, an image they can never shed nor escape from.

    Their green passports or the line in their foreign passports naming Nigeria as their country of birth literally proclaims that image at foreign ports, assuming they survive the indignities that come with applying for a travel visa. From then on, the passport holder is put through the formidable challenge of proving that he or she is not guilty of the crimes and misdemeanours now associated with being a Nigerian.

    To this discomfiting experience we must now add the prospect of being regarded as a national of a country infested by terrorism, and of quite possibly being perceived as a covert sympathiser or enabler of bomb-throwing Islamists and throat-cutting “Fulani herdsmen” or a close relation of theirs.

    Each time I enter the coffee room or a class, I hold my breath, hoping fervently that my faculty colleagues and students will not bring up the latest bulletin on Boko Haram’s and Fulani herdsmen’s running orgy of bestial violence, however obliquely.

    Even the most basic question on the matter would stump me, namely, what is Boko Haram?

    More than three years after Boko Haram hit the front pages and the headlines, I still cannot claim with confidence that I know what it is. If pressed on the matter, I can only say that it is a malignant, nihilistic affliction on the body politic. But that is describing the manifestation rather than defining the essence.

    Only its masterminds and its denizens know what Boko Haram is. The security agencies do not know, and neither does President Goodluck Jonathan. He is on record as having admitted that much and adding, as if to deepen the mystery, that for all he knew, some members of his cabinet and advisers who met and dined and wined with him every day could well be members of Boko Haram.

    Whatever Boko Haram may be, it is not a monolith as is generally supposed, according to a source I cannot identify. There is the political Boko Haram, which carries out large-scale operations like blowing up churches and motor parks and police stations and prisons and other public facilities – the one whose masked operatives toting Kalashnikov rifles and rocket-propelled grenades race in Hillux vans through desert shrubbery to distant outposts, their grisly errands to perform.

    Then there is the mafia-like Boko Haram, which specialises in criminal extortion and is not above being hired by aggrieved persons to settle scores. If the twain are related, it is not clear what the relationship consists in, my source tells me.

    In the North, nobody talks about the one or the other, for fear of murderous reprisal. It is as if the subject is haram, forbidden. The fear of Boko Haram is the beginning of wisdom – and survival.

    If I don’t know what Boko Haram is, I can hardly be expected to know what it wants. I don’t. Nobody knows for sure what Boko Haram wants. Is their goal the islamisation of Nigeria through terror, as some commentators have claimed? If that is the case, why is it that they do not spare fellow Muslims in their murderous rampage?

    Is it to make Nigeria ungovernable? They certainly have made a swathe of North-eastern Nigeria ungovernable, but reducing the entire country to that condition seems a goal too far. Even if that goal is attainable, what purpose would it serve?

    To provoke the military into taking over, perhaps, and thus terminate Dr Jonathan’s effete administration?

    Which military? The one that can’t even protect its own facilities and personnel against the insurgents? The one that claimed to have rescued more than 100 girls abducted by Boko Haram from a secondary school in Chibok, Borno State, only to declare without fear and without shame when it was challenged that it had been “misled”?

    “Misled” by whom? On how many other crucial issues has it been “misled,” and with what consequences?

    The military in which a unit can be suborned by a junior cabinet minister, a minor politician with no following, to halt by force of arms a housing construction project being lawfully undertaken by the government of his state, and in which the same minister can deploy soldiers to subvert the electoral process in another state?

    Again, if pressed by those seeking to learn more about the phenomenon known as Boko Haram, I cannot explain why none of its stalwarts has been brought to justice. At the scene of every Boko Haram outrage, President Jonathan vows solemnly that the perpetrators would not go unpunished. The next week brings another outrage, which draws another solemn vow from the President. And then the next.

    Nor can I explain why President Jonathan, the nation’s comforter-in-chief, headed to Kano while the public was still trying to grasp the full measure of the carnage at Nyanya Motor Park in Abuja for a ceremony to welcome a defector back to the PDP.

    Since this was a party affair, could it not have been postponed as a mark of respect to those who were still counting the dead? If the rally must hold, could the PDP national chair not have been dispatched as the featured guest?

    Did he have to trade abuse on the occasion with Kano State Governor Rabiu Kwankwaso who belongs in the political opposition? Such pusillanimity, it is necessary to insist, ill becomes the person and the office of the President. Entertaining the party faithful to a jig while Nyanya was still smouldering made Dr Jonathan come across as unfeeling.

    Even his trip to Ibadan the same day to attend ceremonies marking the Olubadan’s 100th birthday was at bottom a re-election ploy inexcusable under the circumstances.

    If Dr Jonathan cannot rise to the high office of President of the Republic, must he cut it down to fit his own modest profile?

  • Insights from a rebased economy

    Insights from a rebased economy

    It is amazing what great transformation a little recalibration – beg your pardon, rebasing – has wrought on the profile of the Nigerian economy.

    For two full decades, we tormented ourselves with guilt that the economy was underperforming, what with a GDP that stood at a piddling $283 billion. Following the re-basing, we now know that the GDP actually stands at a roaring $510 billion, pushing South Africa to a distant second in Africa in that department and sending powerful warning signals to the world that the Nigerian juggernaut has finally arrived.

    Our consuming desire, which seemed more an exorbitant declaration intent than a remote possibility, was to enter the ranks of the world’s largest economies, the so-called G20, by the year 2020. Every indication now is that Nigeria will hit that milestone several years ahead of projection. Our planners will now have to rebase Vision 20/20:20 itself.

    Several decades ago, the per capita GDP was a paltry $1,500, which placed Nigeria in the same unproductive bracket as India and Ghana. As if that was not bad enough, some misguided Nigerians developed the pernicious habit of holding up the economies of those two countries as models of growth and stability.

    Now we know that Nigeria’s per capital GDP stands at $2,989, places it well outside their league. The acronym BRIC once designated the rising global economic bloc comprising Brazil, Russia, India and China. Then, it was enlarged to BRICS, to accommodate South Africa and, it would now seem in retrospect, to spite Nigeria.

    With the galloping profile of Nigeria’s economy as revealed by the recent rebasing, global leaders of economic thought are set to drop South Africa from that league and replace it with Nigeria, which they consider more worthy of the distinction. With that change, and in the interest of euphony, I gather from the best authorities that the league will henceforth be known as BRINC.

    Good riddance, then, to South Africa, the upstart that was always thumbing its ungrateful post-apartheid nose at the Big Benefactor up North. Living well, it has been said, is the best revenge. So out with BRICS, and in with BRINC.

    For decades, the conventional wisdom was that the manufacturing sector in Nigeria was in great distress if not positively doomed, and that some industries were relocating to Ghana where the business climate was allegedly more friendly. Everyone blamed the epileptic power supply for the poor state of manufacturing

    The rebasing shows indeed that manufacturing has suffered a decline, but not to the extent of validating the conventional wisdom that the power supply, especially electricity, is a cardinal factor in the calculus of economic growth and development. .

    In the United States where power supply is guaranteed round the clock except in the face of the direst disasters, Wall Street erupts in champagne-drenched celebration and the stock market index rises sharply if the economy manages to record a 2 percent growth.

    But in Nigeria where power is severely rationed if and when it is available, the economy has been growing at a pace more than three time faster than that of the United States. And whereas manufacturing is in precipitous decline in the United States, in Nigeria it has taken only a 50 percent tumble.

    Meanwhile, following the rebasing, it has come to light not merely that the economy has all the while been growing at a dizzying, superheated 7 percent a year.

    It follows, then, that the importance of electricity has been vastly exaggerated.The question must now be asked: Who needs a steady power supply when the economy is growing at such a furious gallop?

    Conventional wisdom has also been upended in many other areas of the economy, following the rebasing. The rate of employment used to be considered an indication of the health of the economy. Employment increased as the economy grew, they said. But the Nigerian example shows conclusively that jobless rate can actually increase sharply or stay stagnant even as economy expands.

    So, why make a fetish of job creation? Why take up all that trouble and expend so much imagination cooking numbers reflecting progress in job creation when the economy is doing just fine without it? Why the national lament that more than half a million persons subjected themselves to accidental death crippling exertions to fill 4,000 advertised positions – why bemoan this when the economy is growing at such a breath-taking pace?

    Again, they used to claim that you cannot build a strong economy without a good road network and sound transportation system. But our rebased economy has just debunked that claim by building the world’s 26th largest economy without freight trains and without anything that can be called water transportation, propelled only by express passenger trains that take a whole day to travel the roughly 240km from Lagos to Ilorin?

    Who really needs all that infrastructure? Certainly not the economy.

    Consider yet another factor that economists are always trumpeting as indispensable to growth and development: stability. As far as I know, nobody has ever accused Nigeria of pursuing, much less attaining, stability. Everywhere you turn – in the neighbourhoods, on the highways, in the professions, in the universities, in the policy establishments, in the motor parks, in police stations and army barracks and even in the precincts of the Presidential Villa, instability reigns.

    To cite practical examples from the policy establishment: One day they are banning rice imports to conserve foreign exchange and encourage local industry. The next day, they undo the ban, saying that only big-time smugglers are profiting from it.

    Again, one day they ban wheat imports and declare that cassava bread will replace wheat bread as the favourite item on the nation’s breakfast table; the next day, they launch a national wheat-production programme.

    But the really exciting thing is that, far from acting as a brake on economic growth, instability has actually been a spur.

    There is no other way to explain the robust expansion the rebased economy has witnessed in two decades of acute instability. It will come as no surprises if it turned out on further rebasing that the North-east and the Plateau-Bauchi axis constitute the fastest-growing and most productive regions in Nigeria.

    In light of these profound insights that rebasing the economy has yielded and many others that I cannot do justice to in this piece, economists will have to rework – beg your pardon one more time — rebase, recalibrate, readjust or re-whatever their old theories and revise the standard texts.

     

    From Himself the Igodomigodo

    “My Own Big Brother,

    “I called your line yesterday to show my cornucopious appreciation to you for your munificent words and the very nice things you said of me in your hebdomadal pantagruelian and yet dialectical didactic (pardon my alliteration) column (“To Patrick Obahagbon, from a kindred soul,” April 7, 2014).

    “The panegyrics coming from a literary avatar and a sui generis lollapalloza that I have admired his inimitable, intrepid and polyvalent style for a period of aeon was an anodyne for me.

    “I thank you for everything and may your utilitarian pen never suffer any hiatus or atrophy.

    “Thanks my Senior Brother. I will keep in touch.”

    Say it for the Hon Patrick Obahiagbon. He never disappoints.

  • To Patrick Obahiagbon, from a kindred soul

    To Patrick Obahiagbon, from a kindred soul

    This correspondence has long been in contemplation.

    Taxonomically, we cannot be classified as ornithological specimens. But you and I nevertheless share an identity of plumage in the sense that we have an abiding passion for the word, whether scripted or merely verbalized. This shared identity inclines us ineluctably, as the saying goes, to congregate in the same proximity.

    I take the opportunity of this long-delayed correspondence, then, to impart the intelligence that I have long been captivated by the lexical dexterity, the hyperpolysyllabicsesquipedalian magniloquence that distinguished your orations on the floor of the House of Representatives in Abuja and other platforms.

    The National Assembly building, vaguely evocative of the architecture of Augustan Rome, was supposed to radiate the aura of that epoch and capture something of the oratory for which it was justly celebrated. But that was for the most part a forlorn expectation.

    You were the singular exception. In oration after oration, you mesmerized not just the House but the entire nation with your penetrating insights on a catholic range of issues, employing locutions that at once delighted, befuddled, entertained, instructed, and titillated.

    Imagine, therefore, my discombobulation when, as a result of one of the perversities often thrown up by the process that is the preoccupation of psephologists, we found ourselves bereft of your perorations from that hallowed Assembly.

    Since that lamentable discontinuity, nary a lexical spark to has been uttered on the floor or in committee to animate proceedings or galvanize the Assembly to rousing ratiocinations on the issues convulsing the polity. I harbor not the slightest doubt that a tracking poll would have registered a precipitous fall in public interest in the proceedings of the House from the moment it was deprived of your inspired and inspiring contributions on account of the perversity aforementioned.

    Since then, you have only fleetingly and all too rarely favoured us with those breath-taking flights of oratorical virtuosity that distinguished you from your pathetically earth-bound contemporaries in and outside the Legislative Branch.

    Drawing only on my personal recollection, I would say that you have rendered us very few such favours since the January 2012 public uprising against a phantom oil subsidy the Jonathan Administration, laboring under a misapprehension and hobbled by its overweening profligacy, asserted that it was going to eliminate.

    Such gratuitous provocation surely warranted a comprehensive deployment of the biggest artillery pieces in your lexical depository, and you delivered magnificently in a spirited intervention that transported one right back to those halcyon days in the House.

    “I have read with acatalectic disgust, governments asinine and puerile ratiocinations attempting to justiceate the proposed removal of subsidies from petroleum products,” you declared. “It has asseverated that its intentions are guided by the need to checkmate the odoriferous excesses of a Machiavellian and Mephistophelean cabal and I have said to myself, what a shame? What a self- indicting admittal of the failure of governance? What a hocus pocus? What an anathematous disdain for its citizenry?”

    Exactly my own cogitations on that vexatious issue.

    Those who cannot disentangle the rich layers of this lexical package to savour its even richer content can only excoriate themselves for committing their time and leisure to less ennobling pursuits than total and sustained immersion in a standard dictionary of the English language.

    Such people deserve no commiseration whatsoever. Let them make the dictionary their inseparable accoutrement as is your custom if they want to be worthy of your attention.

    There was also your posthumous disquisition of like vintage on the transition of the novelist, human rights crusader and stalwart of the university lecturers’ union ASUU.

    “The grand initiation of Professor Festus Iyayi is a lancinating loss of another stentorian voice, against retrograde and prebendal forces of primitive mercantilism. That he passed through transition on matters pro bono publico, bears eloquent testimony to our state of dystopia. Such is the evanescence of life. It’s all vanitas vanitatum.”

    No amplification is required here; res ipsa locutur.

    Between the misconceived effort to eliminate a phantom oil subsidy and the demise of Iyayi, a glut of occurrences, a concatenation that is all too emblematic of the Nigerian condition, eventuated. But the public could not avail itself of your profound insights, your unique summative skills and the forensic proclivities that would have illuminated the occurrences to the point of incandescence.

    To take as a point of departure the wanton provocation of attempting to eliminate a bogus subsidy: You will recall that, to assuage public denunciation of the galactic expenditure on the president’s foreign travel, Dr Goodluck Jonathan had solemnly covenanted to curtail his peregrinations.

    That has gone down as another vacuous vow. Since then, he has grown exponentially more peripatetic, to the point that the 10 executive jets in his fleet — Air Jonathan, as some call it — can no longer accommodate his wanderlust. How did we land ourselves with another walkabout president?

    Only a perspicacious commentator gifted with your formidable lexical and forensic skills can do justice to this executive restiveness and its attendant consequences.

    Then there is the case of the minister, since defenestrated in a cabinet shuffle, and the armoured limousines she corralled agencies under her supervision to buy for her private use. Sustained demands for her dismissal fell on Aso Rock’s insentient tympanum, despite all its orchestrated ululation about fighting corruption.

    Something tells me that your forceful intervention, delivered in locution that can move mountains, would have compelled the minister aforementioned to resign soon after the scandal broke, or driven Dr Jonathan to such high dudgeon that he would have convened a world press conference to personally announce her dismissal.

    You would have denounced in the most stirring anti-colonial, anti-neocolonial, anti- imperialist language that Kwame Nkrumah would have been proud to claim as his own the very thought of celebrating the centenary of the dysfunctional polity Lord Lugard’s mistress christened Nigeria. On Boko Haram, you would have exhausted the vocabulary on nihilism.

    On the Forest of Horrors recently uncovered near the Ibadan, just across from Nigeria’s busiest highway, and I suspect you would have dug deep to disinter from your repertory imprecations that would make those in the Old Testament sound like benedictions..

    Which brings me, finally to the on-going confabulation in Abuja that is now called, not from an excess of admiration, I hasten to asseverate, the Jonathan National Conference (JNC for short). What do you make of its omnivorous inclusiveness, its inchoate agenda, and the obscene financial recompense pressed on the participants, many of whom pass their time sleeping or bickering over free food?

    What is your construction on the “consensus” that is supposed to undergird decision-making at the confab? One commentator obviously lacking your analytical rigour and lexical acuity has called it “programmed gridlock.” I am sure you will have exploded, as only you can, the inanity of the whole thing and pointed out that if a consensus existed or could be fabricated on the key issues of national existence, there would have been no need for a conference

    It is deeply to be regretted that your on-going exertions as Chief of Staff to His Excellency the Comrade Governor of Edo State Adams Oshiomhole have bequeathed you scant amplitude to share with the public your reflections on the issues of the moment.

    Personally, I take consolation from the intelligence that you are keeping a private journal with your characteristic verve and lucidity, and that it will be made available to the attentive public as soon as you can extricate yourself from the labyrinthine bureaucracy of Edo State.

    Meanwhile, Igodomigodo, fraternal felicitations. Fraternal regards to the Comrade Governor.

     

  • The making of a boondoggle

    The making of a boondoggle

    Nigeria is set to launch another bid to enter the ranks of the world’s wheat-producing states. Even before the effort gets underway, the Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Dr Adewumi Adesina has projected that it would boost farm earnings by $42 million and create one million jobs

    The venture, he explained, is designed to curb the alarming rate and huge cost of wheat imports, currently 4 million metric tonnes a year and growing by 5 percent each year. If nothing was done, Nigeria would be spending $10 billion a year on importing the golden grain.

    To reach the projected target, production would be boosted 500 percent from the current 300 metric tonnes a year to 1.5 million tonnes over the next three years. Farmers would enjoy price supports, access to processing equipment, and protection against competition from imported wheat.

    “This is not a mirage,” Dr Adesina, easily the most focused of President Goodluck Jonathan’s cabinet-rank appointees, said three weeks ago at the Wheat Farmers Field Day in Kadawa, in Kano State. “A silent revolution is happening on farms across northern Nigeria. We have begun the massive distribution of hybrid wheat seeds which gives five to six tonnes per hectare to our farmers through the Growth Enhancement Support and the e-Wallet system.”

    With all due respect to Dr Adesina, the scheme is not new, much less revolutionary. A similar scheme undertaken for the same reason and given similar backing by the administration of military president Ibrahim Babangida some three decades ago was a disastrous failure.

    What follows is my epitaph, “The wheat game is up” (The Guardian, September 22, 1992) to that boondoggle.

    ***

    When the President stopped launching the wheat planting and harvesting seasons and the military governors stopped calling news conferences to proclaim yet another bumper harvest, I knew that the game was up. Confirmation came the other day when the Minister of Agriculture, Alhaji Abubakar Hashidu, hinted that the ban on the importation of wheat would be lifted. It was a game that should never have been started.

    On paper, the National Accelerated Wheat Production Programme looked great. That, remember, was the era when every product had to be “locally sourced,” in the spirit of “self-reliance.” The wheat import was costing $3oo million a year in scarce foreign exchange, and was catering to the degenerate taste of a parasitic elite who, instead of eating yams or beans or taking ogi for breakfast, or even doing away altogether with that repast in the spirit of belt-tightening, remorselessly stuffed themselves with bread and cake and assorted pastries.

    Away with the subversive grain and the pernicious taste it has fostered. Back to maize and cassava, our own versatile crops which we possess in superabundance, and from which bread can be manufactured for those who cannot live without it. Their addiction is vehemently to be deplored, of course, but even the degenerate are entitled to fundamental human rights that a compassionate government cannot ignore.

    The Federal Institute of Industrial Research at Oshodi came up with scientific proof that bread made from maize or cassava flour was in every respect superior to bread made from wheat flour, especially wheat flour of the imported variety. Moving rapidly from research to production, they manufactured a 100 percent locally -sourced loaf so delicious that the Armed Forces Ruling Council adopted it as an official snack.

    No less a connoisseur than Major-General Oladipo Diya, then a brigadier, endorsed it on national television on behalf of the AFRC. Another breakthrough had been achieved. My own specimen was as brittle as glass and tasted like sawdust, but no matter.

    The nation’s flour mills quickly modified their plants to produce flour from maize and cassava and from any other local source that our food scientists might discover.

    This costly exercise was in progress when the Federal Government announced that it had taken on the historic challenge of producing wheat for the domestic and export market, under the National Accelerated Wheat Production Programme.

    Where what was already being grown, as in Kano, Bauchi and Borno, production would be increased exponentially. And wherever it was demonstrated that wheat could be grown, production would be aided with generous financing.

    Suddenly, every state became a wheat producer. From the desiccated Sahel to the mangrove swamps of the coastal regions, every inch of territory was identified as exceptionally suited for growing wheat.

    Vast acres were cleared for wheat, dormant irrigation schemes were activated, abandoned grain silos were rehabilitated and combine harvesters procured, all in readiness for this new national challenge, and production began in earnest.

    At the end of the very first season, a bumper harvest was proclaimed. Who could doubt it, given the interminable wheat fields that Nigerians saw night after night on national television?

    The more forward-looking states invited President Babangida to come launch the harvest in person. Performed by a lesser person the launch would amount to a vulgar trivialization of an epochal achievement.

    And when the President obliged, what an inspiring event it was! In one state where he was kept away from the launch by pressing national duties, the military governor presided over the proceedings. As a giant combine harvester whirred and whooshed into action, the awe-struck governor was overheard saying, “Wallahi, this is historic.” And so it seemed, indeed.

    Going by the figures issuing from state capitals, Nigeria stood a good chance of being ranked with the United Stated, Canada and Australia as the world’s leading producers of wheat if only the level of production could be sustained for another year or so.

    In newspapers across the country, reporting on what was fast growing into a journalistic speacialism. Reporters covering the beat had begun organizing to launch a Wheat Correspondents Association. On the supply front and in the official news media, it was good news, good new and more good news.

    The only problem was that the flour millers who had meanwhile re-configured their plants to process wheat could hardly find any wheat to buy. Every year, the authorities proclaimed a bumper harvest much larger than the previous year’s bumper harvest. Yet, every bumper harvest resulted only in a more severe drought at the flour mills.

    Meanwhile, the country was awash in smuggled wheat flour, thus reducing the ban on the product to something worse than a legal fiction: a pathetic joke. The more imaginative of our compatriots simply set up bakeries on the border with Benin Republic and ferried bread loaves by the truckload into Lagos and environs daily, since the law did not prohibit the importation of bread. But bread became so expensive that even the parasitic elite could no longer sustain its degenerate preference for that alien product.

    Everyone except the smugglers and those who had cornered the wheat grants has been the poorer from what must now be seen as a very costly miscalculation. Self-reliance is good, but only up to a point. You cannot abolish the law of comparative advantage by decree, much less by slogans.

    When the final accounting is done, it will be found that the wheat game was a colossal blunder that drained the treasury, robbed the government of vital revenue you cannot collect duty on (contraband), filled a few well-protected pockets, enriched smugglers, and brought grief upon everyone else.

    ***

    This of course is not 1992 when the foregoing was written, and the scheme Dr Adesina has outlined is different from that of the Babangida era. But something tells me that the nation may be embarking on another boondoggle. The forces that warranted the recent policy somersault on rice are alive and well.