The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tuesday

  • Christian dealers

    What do you make of the “Islamization” claim by the Nigerian Christian Elders Forum (NCEF)?  Mischief, alarmism or just arrant blackmail?

    That forum alleged rock-hard “Islamization”.  But it tendered fur-soft evidence.

    Why, the NCEF (or in any case its media confederates) even flaunted its “Christian” retired army generals, to underscore its “warning”!  What was that — intimidation?

    What if the Muslim lobby were to react in kind, and flaunt their own retired “Muslim” generals to back their threat?  What then?

    The country would then quake, with a putative religious war, simply because some eminent Nigerians abuse their access to media space?

    But lo!  The so-called “Christian” and “Muslim” generals share a common nativity in the Nigerian Army.  The Nigerian military itself, which many of these “generals” have mugged and raped, en route to easy wealth, bear more guilt than any single body, for the Nigerian debacle.

    So, if crass opportunism united the generals, why would political cant, which the NCEF pushed as faith solidarity, separate them?

    Meanwhile, what’s NCEF’s proof, that rogue “Islamists” are turning the Federal Republic into a Mullah’s theocracy?

    That security appointments, under President Muhammadu Buhari, is skewed in favour of northern Muslims.  A fair charge, to be sure; and to be decried.  But then, every regime has always appointed people it could work with.

    President Goodluck Jonathan appointed an Igbo Christian as his chief of army staff.  Another southern minority Christian was his DSS chief.  By those, was he trying to “Christianize” Nigeria?  If Buhari followed largely the same principle, how can the charge to Islamize Nigeria logically hold?

    But even that was morning yet, on NCEF’s day of illogic.  More scandalous reasoning would follow, in its quixotic claim!

    In its own words: “The objective of the Islamists [again, note the reckless name-calling] is to supplant the Constitution of Nigeria with Sharia ideology as the source of legislation in the nation.  The conflict between democracy as national ideology and Sharia as a usurping ideology is responsible for the crisis unfolding in Nigeria.”

    Proof?  An alleged political “Taqiyya”!  ”Taqiyya” is a Muslim doctrine that permits the faithful to lie or deceive, just to get out of danger.  In its purest form, it is strictly self-preservatory, though like any other doctrine, it can be abused.

    So, by NCEF’s alleged political Tayiyya, the Buhari “Islamists” were pressing, into service, Boko Haram and Fulani herdsmen as lethal ammo, for “stealth/civilization Jihad”!

    Boko Haram killed far and wide under Jonathan.  Was it, back then, Jonathan’s stealth weapon to Christianize Nigeria?  Everyone knew it was a terror machine against all.

    So, how can a degraded Boko Haram, largely limited to suicide bombing, in mostly Muslim areas, become a lethal weapon to Islamize — and Islamize by first wiping out the Muslim population?

    Then, Fulani herdsmen.  That some criminals, in the ranks of herdsmen, have committed and continue to commit atrocious crimes, is utterly condemnable.

    But also true: these crimes, in the last two years in the southern media, have been slanted as though they had the backing of the Buhari government.

    Yet until killings, either by herdsmen or any other group, are treated as strictly crimes, they would continue, no matter who occupies the Presidency.

    By its tone, NCEF’s barely concealed antipathy towards fellow Nigerians, simply because they are “Hausa-Fulani”, was glaring.

    Or how do you interpret its ringing jeremiad, over the so-called grazing reserves, because it thinks the “Fulani herdsmen” were the prime, if not sole, beneficiaries?

    Clearly preferring ranching — a good alternative, to be sure — it pilloried governors amenable to grazing reserves, designed to stem clashes between farmers and herdsmen; and dismissed them as Judases  eager to trade off “ancestral lands”.

    But what if the fallow land could earn rent from the would-be grazers?  Would that be a bad idea?

    By the way, after all the anti-Fulani raving and railing, has this immaculate Christian lobby banished, from its immaculate table, the herdsman’s products of beef and milk?

    Besides, NCEF went on and on about the killings by Fulani herdsmen — hardly illegitimate. But mum it was, on the sad fate of a defenceless Fulani community, almost wiped out by some gunmen in a Taraba village.

    Nor was anything mentioned about the Southern Kaduna 54, which the local Fulani communities, of Adara in Kajuru local government, claimed were massacred earlier this July.  On these, the southern media saw no evil, felt no evil!

    Maybe in NCEF’s holy books — and those of its media confederates — some lives are more precious than others?  That’s the ditch you bury yourself, when you mix faith with politics!

    About the rest of NCEF’s vaunted “Islamization” claim is based on old wives’ tales, arising from power struggles and sundry tensions that come with the power territory.

    The Nigerian Presidency has always rippled with power plays.  President Olusegun Obasanjo and Vice President Atiku Abubakar literarily exchanged executive punches during their second term (2003 – 2007), with a polarized media fanning the embers to drive copy sales.

    Baba Gana Kingibe was prematurely sacked, as secretary to government of the federation (SGF), under  President Umaru Yar’Adua, because of such alleged power plays. Later, a “Katsina cabal” tried to stonewall Vice President Jonathan from gaining the presidency, even when the president was fatally ill.

    Right now, there are tales, many probably real, others merely apocryphal, of reported attempts to undermine Acting President Yemi Osinbajo’s authority.  But even NCEF would admit President Buhari never loses an opportunity to openly back his deputy.

    So, if these past  internal struggles were no proof of “Islamization” or “Christianization”, how can they now be proof of that explosive charge?  Because a Fulani is president, NCEF has lain the charge, and an uncritical media can howl free bigotry?

    NCEF, like its parent body, the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), has failed to leverage its Christlike tenets to partner with the Buhari Presidency to fight corruption — Nigeria’s prime life-threatening problem.

    Little wonder then, both CAN and NCEF have condemned themselves to chasing shadows, after freely barring themselves from the substance of fixing the moral ruin, left behind by “Christian Brother” Jonathan.

    After all the howling and thunder, however, NCEF’s sensational allegations could well be the latest in a well-calibrated distraction agenda.

    The first was Niger Delta Avengers’ bombing campaign.  The second was Nnamdi Kanu’s IPOB crusade of hot hate and bigotry.  And now, Phase 3? A “Christian” lobby screaming wolf when there appears none!

    That all of these manoeuvres come from camps that lost out in 2015, pushes a dangerous precedent: a democratic right to sabotage, not to accept, an election result.  That would come back to plague the polity.

    Christian leaders should live the tenet of their faith, or risk becoming mere dealers in mischief — and a blight on their faith.

     

  • Paris Club blues and other matters

    From being one of the most rewarding jobs a few years back, the office of the governor in Nigeria has suddenly become the most vilified if not the most hazardous job, possibly in the universe. Across the federation, the story, with only few exceptions, is a familiar one: state executives being openly derided for lack of imagination in the face of the problems currently plaguing the states under them; others have all manners of expletives hurled at them almost on daily basis for sundry – even if unproven – crimes of heist. There cannot be a worse time to be a governor.

    If the announcement last week of release of the sum of N243.79bn second tranche of the Paris Club was designed to calm troubled waters, it has merely ushered in a new wave of restiveness.  In some states, workers and pensioners, many of them owed several months of salaries and pensions have since declared war on their governors whom they accuse of embezzlement even when the funds were yet to hit the accounts!  Whereas the rumblings fit into the pattern of the general disenchantment in which the governors continue to present as soft targets, what the latest development has done is open a new chapter in which legion of angry, frustrated civil servants have moved beyond dinghy prayer rooms to taking their cases to the streets.

    As they say, we have moved full circle. From the fruitless supplications of the past years, the angry horde, now pressed to the barricades, seems poised to challenge the gubernatorial fiefdoms of our excellences over the fiscal direction, if not discretion of their states. Deploying an adroit combination of misinformation, propaganda, blackmail and crude intimidation as weapons of choice, there is, for now, no stopping the agitators in their new found power. Clearly, if the unfolding developments are any measure of the anger and discontent in the land – a rage which although is driven largely by the failure of most states to meet up with their wages and pensions obligations, is actually a reflection of the rising frustrations over the general state of the economy – the portents must be deemed as frightening as they come.

    Talk of a new day and season – a period ruled by rage and unreason. If it comes to our Excellencies as the dawn of a new, albeit rude awakening, it seems increasingly clear that cold rational arguments matched by unassailable facts and figures would hardly suffice to calm the nerves of the angry throng. As many governors are sooner finding out, the current season brooks no such luxury. Not even the publication of the amount due to each state in the latest bailout expected to temper the expectations of the citizens across the states has done the trick; instead, it has merely caused a fresh burst of unrestrained adrenalin.  How could anyone have imagined the governors so terribly boxed in between the rage of the rabble and the feigned righteousness of their emergency, latter day saviours – standing any chance? That is how serious things have become.

    No one cares – or appears to be – about the fiscal anomaly of the so-called Paris Club ‘overpayment’ in a supposedly constitutional environment; or even the criminally flawed book-keeping and fiscal practices that brought the funds about. Or where the piggy bank has been all these while and who held charge. It is sufficient that the billions, warehoused in some opaque, possibly dormant account now pressed into service, are working magic in what is deemed as heroic act. Permanently foreclosed is the debate about the refunds whose provenance best emblematizes the egregious absurdity in our public finance!

    We can, for the moment, forgo the hard discussions on the future of the economy; the structural distortions under which some 30 out of 36 states have practically turned leeches; the question of how the leviathan comes to take a disproportionate chunk of the pie which it neither needs nor could wisely gobble down. As to worries about the sustainability of a political economy hung on bailouts, all of these would come later. It is simply taken that a share of the magic potion, no matter how small, would be just fine, if not in the treatment but at least in the management of the endemic, structural disease!

    But then, as we would be finding out – sooner than later – that whereas an obsession with placebo might have some therapeutic value, it means pretty little if the ailment is not attacked at the roots. For no matter how much we laud the Santa Claus federal government for coming to the aid of the states in their hour of distress, an early relapse of the ailment, as it seems inevitable in this matter, will in the final count leave everything undone.

    Secondly, the governors might be guilty as hell of the charges against them and so deserving of the scorn being daily heaped on them by the angry folks; they are as much the rest of us victims of the warped structure which allows the central government to draw 52 percent of the pie leaving the crumbs for the 36 states to share. A picture of how unwieldly the federal government has become is the report only last week of how some unnamed agencies managed to withhold $793,200,000 (about N249.7 billion) of public funds in clear breach of the Treasury Single Account (TSA) policy. We are here talking about a fund that is a little more than the payout on the second tranche of the Paris Club refunds being allegedly shuffled around by unscrupulous bankers in collusion with corrupt government officials!

    Let’s face it: the country is in for a long dark night. This is where I hate to disappoint the angry throng. For pray as they might, the possibility of oil prices hitting the roof sometimes soon seems for now, far-fetched; not even the modest pace of recovery can be guaranteed in the context of the tenuous peace pervading in the Niger Delta. So they had better brace up for life after Paris Club.  The prospect of a life tempered by realism must be somewhat frightening from the look of things. But even worse is the alternative – a life of unrealizable expectations. It is a tough one that is.

    But then, who says all hopes are lost? Is the saying no longer true that labour creates the wealth? How about getting on with the job?

  • Our game-changer in global trade

    Our game-changer in global trade

    Call me “commissariat-minded” if you like, but I have been thinking about the edible yam lately.

    Not merely on account of its central place in our dietary habits and the domestic economy, but in the larger culture of most Nigerian communities.  No betrothal, no wedding, no burial, no occasion that calls for celebration, is complete without yam or its derivative as the piéce de résistance. Withal, it is an object of veneration.

    It is a measure of its centrality in our culture that the yam harvest was the trigger for recent violent clashes between the Iloffa and Odo Owa communities in Kwara State.  At issue was which of them was vested with primacy to sell in the open market the crop harvested from the farms of their traditional rulers.

    By the time Governor Abdulfatah Ahmed declared a dusk-to-dawn curfew in the area, four residents lay dead, many homes had been razed, and dozens of families had been displaced.  The two communities must be wishing they had remained in their accustomed quiescence instead of being thrust into the news focus in that manner.

    This discontinuity is much to be lamented, for rarely has yam been an object of strife.  On the contrary, it has stood from time immemorial as an emblem of peace and rejoicing and solidarity on the cultural level, and a great culinary delight withal.

    But like many other items in our cultural apparatus, the yam is no longer what it used to be.  Its shelf life has always been relatively short – three months at best for the hardiest variety.  But if you sliced it or diced it within several weeks of harvesting, you had no reason to expect anything but a chunk of snow-white, cream or yellow consistency.  No black patches, no rotted section that has to be hived off to save what is left. You got a wholesome yam, worth every kobo you paid for it.

    And if you cooked only a portion of the yam, you could keep what was left, confident that it would stay wholesome until you returned to it.

    Not anymore.

    There was a time when families deliberately prepared far more pounded yam than they could consume         at dinner.  The next morning they would flatten and re-heat the left-over, topped with a judicious layer             of the house soup, in an earthenware pot or skillet and, bon appétit.  The crust formed in the process is especially prized, and has been known to be an object of serious contestation during family meals.

    That finger-licking delicacy too is gone.

    Keep a bowl of pounded yam overnight, and you will find it in the morning caked with black mould. You cannot salvage a morsel from it even with the supple fingers of a masseuse.

    They say that it is all the fault of the chemical fertilisers used today in growing yams.

    Happily, big-time relief is coming to the beleaguered yam, on the global stage no less.

    The Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Mr Audu Ogbeh, a cultivator on an industrial scale, has found in one brilliant flash of insight that yam now holds the key to Nigeria’s crippling foreign-exchange crisis, and more importantly, to the much-postponed end of the recession.

    Forget all the crops that were at one time or another supposed to play that liberating role after the traditional cash crops of cocoa and groundnut and cotton and palm kernel and palm oil and rubber and cotton went bust.  Forget wheat, and cassava, their much-touted replacements   Forget even such old reliables like oil and gas. Move over, perennial prospects like steel and solid minerals and cashew.  Forget Nollywood.

    Make way for yams, set to become the hottest and most-prized commodity in international trade.

    The Minister, well known for his hands-on approach to project execution, personally flagged off the other  day the shipment of the first consignment of the commodity, a modest 72 metric tons, at Apapa Wharf in three containers, each with a holding capacity of 24 metric tons, one destined for the United Kingdom, and the other two headed for the United States.

    Nothing has been left to chance.  Some four months earlier, a high-powered Task Force had been set up to fast-track the acquisition of warehouses at the receiving destinations in Europe and North America. Yam farmers and exporters have been receiving tutorial in classroom settings and online on the best practices in the business, with special emphasis on production, storage, preservation and packaging, to meet the highest international standard.  And that is just for starters.

    That is how it should be, for the stakes are very high.  Whereas Nigeria accounts for 61 per cent of global yam output, according to the best authorities, it is Ghana and some Caribbean countries that have been dominating the market.  Nigerian yams are not to be found in the global market.

    Patriotic Nigerians must find this discomfiting.

    But the matter cuts deeper. Ghana’s dominance in the international yam market is only   the latest in a long line of challenges to our national sovereignty from that uppity country.  As if that is not provocation enough,           it is targeting $4 billion from yam exports over the next three or four years, in effect undermining, beg your pardon, sabotaging our international marketing potential and the benefits that should flow from it.

    Whatever happened to their bauxite and cocoa and gold?  Why are they muscling into our field of comparative advantage?  Is there no clause in the ECOWAS Treaty we can invoke to punish such rascality?

    In whatever case, Ghana is going to learn soon that it does not belong in our league.

    We have Audu Ogbe’s assurance that the ills that have been plaguing the Nigerian yam crop are close to being conquered, using the latest technology.  Solar coolers will be installed in markets and yam producing areas and export cargo vessels — already being built to order in European shipyards, according to an informed source – to keep yams at a constant temperature of 14 degrees Celsius.

    That way, the yams will stay fresh and crisp for two, maybe three years. So that anyone who buys Nigerian yams in Europe and North America will know that they are getting the real stuff, produced  under stringent supervision to meet the highest international standard and to tickle agreeably the  palate of the most discriminating consumers.

    Like this writer, who loves his yam steamed and served with a delicious eggplant sauce he developed and perfected over the years.  Upon request, he will be glad to mail the recipe to devoted followers of  this column.

    As was to be expected, the usual peddlers of negativity, whom we shall always have among us to our misfortune, went straight for Ogbeh’s scalp, saying, without research and without civility, that the whole scheme is misconceived and that the $10 billion projected to flow from it yearly when fully operational is a pipedream.

    Why such a hasty verdict when the scheme is only at the pilot stage?

    Others who cannot see beyond their stomachs are griping that the scheme will lead to scarcity, raise  prices, and keep yams out of the reach of the ordinary consumer.

    There is little to add to what the best authorities have said:  Yes, prices will go up, but only in the short term.  As production increases for the export market, prices will come down. So, there is no cause for worry.

    And as has been pointed out, when Nigeria attains self-sufficiency in rice production in December, a mere five months away, those who cannot afford yams can eat all the rice they want.

    To think that this game-changer in global trade has been hiding in plain sight for ages!  Thank you, Honourable  Minister, for unmasking it.  

  • Osun going Ekiti way?

    Osun going Ekiti way?

    In Osun West, the hurly burly is done.  The battle is lost and won.

    So, you can understand the taunts, from the victorious camp, heckling Governor Rauf Aregbesola to fall on his sword.

    Why, even the comatose Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) is taking its chances at some political resurrection!

    Still, why this emphatic defeat?

    For starters, it’s all about pork.  Aregbesola paid a hefty price for pressing a pork-starved army into battle.  The rebellious, brimming with outrage, simply joined forces with the enemy.  The loyal, but demotivated, just rolled over to be slaughtered.  No marks for guessing right: it was a rout.

    Then, the explosive question of salaries.  A piqued body of civil servants roared its anger over “half-salary”.

    The PDP opposition, like the tribunes in Shakespeare’s tragic play Coriolanus,  goaded them against the Aregbesola order.  “Half-salary, half-vote!” mocked the victorious shriek.

    But has Osun West taken a wiser decision than the old Roman rabble of Coriolanus?  That is doubtful.

    After the malevolent tribunes baited them to shoo off Coriolanus, the plebs condemned themselves to rolling in the dust before the same Coriolanus, now leading the invading Volscians, in an even more passionate plea to save their city.   Pathetic!

    Indeed, there are haunting parallels from the past, following the 2003 electoral ouster of Governor Bisi Akande.

    Governor Akande (1999-2003) was a victim of irrational voting.  Teachers, growling over salary matters and job losses — hardly illegitimate demands — poisoned the Osun electorate, en route to an electoral slaughter.

    But the bigger and sharper knife lay waiting for the voters, merrily vengeful. For the next eight years or so, the state became a stagnant pool, breeding only king-size mosquitoes and parasites, consuming all!   Again, hardly an illegitimate result, from vengeful voting!

    Also, empty sound bites, crafted to whip up emotion and deaden reason, have re-surfaced.

    In 2005, as the Oranmiyan movement raced against time to reclaim Osun’s soul, it was Tekobo (Lagos arriviste).

    Now, it is Ajele (viceroy), to the Osun emotive rabble; by those bent on sending Osun the wide and merry way.  That led to perdition in the past.  It may yet do so again.

    Yet, between Tekobo and Ajele, Osun had benefited from rare developmental governance these past seven years, unmatched in its history, even with the brutal economic downturn.

    Contrast that to those who beggared Osun in times of boom, and you’d probably see why the Osun opposition preen and strut, as grandmasters of deceit!

    Still, even if 2003 was so far away, what of the Ekiti experience of 2014?

    Three years ago, Ayo Fayose won an improbable victory, over Governor Kayode Fayemi.  Yes, Fayemi’s politics was soulless; and part of his problems too was a pork-starved army.  But there was no question about his policies — a developmental paradigm to rouse Ekiti from the death of Fayose’s first coming.

    Well, Fayose won and crowed.  But what has he done with his win, aside from yakking inanities, as undisputed though unfazed gubernatorial nuisance, to the chagrin of his electors?  Now, Ekiti is enduring its choice, perhaps as living example of crass electoral ingratitude to a government that wished it nothing but the very developmental best.

    Back to the Osun debacle — and it is a debacle on many fronts.

    The Adeleke victory signposts terrible omens for a new Osun Aregbesola is trying to reconstruct, from the post-Bisi Akande ruins. (See “Osun: threat to a new order,” 27 June 2017).

    Behold: the crowing victors are the old nemesis that, like locusts, gobbled up the land!

    Iyiola Omisore was there from the very beginning.  As deputy to Governor Akande, he was the progressives-contradiction-in-the-house.  After the Akande debacle, he was there, strutting, all through the Osun PDP years of the locusts.

    Take a good look at Omisore’s political persona, and what do you see?  A mirage of vanishing nothingness!  He is, indeed, fitting metaphor for the Osun lobby, committed to the democratic right to stake nothingness.  Unfortunately for Osun, they triumphed on July 8.

    Ademola Adeleke, the new senator, inherited a solid family name, for Senator Ayoola Adeleke, the paterfamilias, was a solid Awoist.  But Ademola’s sudden political emergence signposts a not-so-sudden corroding of the Adeleke progressive DNA.

    Isiaka, the late Serubawon, inherited his father’s progressive goodwill. But not the Awo developmental élan. For all his street verve, it is doubtful if he ever became governor again, as he had planned, he would have mustered the rigour needed to nurse Osun back to full developmental health, after the Aregbesola years.

    Ademola, the new senator, would appear even more neither-nor, given the optics he has beamed so far.  To hurtle from APC aspirant to PDP candidate portrays nothing but crass opportunism.

    And the soukous victory dance!  Not unlike excited King David gyrating before the Ark of the Covenant, earning the rebuke of his ill-fated wife, Michal.  But Senator-elect Adeleke appeared dancing before the mammon of treacherous politics, showing how an excellent private hobby could terribly go wrong in the public space.

    Then, the metamorphosis: from Jackson to election-time Nurudeen, then after, back to senior apostle!

    These are perfectly explainable complexities of the senator’s birth.  But in an Osun milieu that often ripples with empty symbolism, designed to confuse and confound, he freely defined himself among the unfazed orchestra of empty din.  He would swim or sink with that identity.

    Should Osun go the Ekiti way, the grand losers: public school children enjoying free school meals; the caterers and food vendors for whom the exercise is daily economic reflation; the crop and poultry farmers enjoying a near-captive market for their produce.  Indeed, the vulnerable –the proverbial “everyday people” of Osun.

    Of course, the futuristic infrastructure: schools, roads and bridges, crucial poles to vault Osun from a dreary civil service state and broaden internally generated revenue, would progressively crumble. With Ekiti, Osun would make its peace with a future Stone Age!

    Still, any lesson from history?  Yes, legacy.

    How many remember the great Obafemi Awolowo lost the first election, after embarking on his epochal free primary education programme, no thanks the NCNC’s scalding demonization, built on high tax and vanishing farm hands?  Now, in Osun, it is half-salary!

    But today, history and legacy have shut up the Awo electoral traducers.

    Like Awo, legacy and history may yet silence Aregbe’s traducers.

    But these Osun “everyday people” had better snap out of their reverie before, like Ekiti, embracing a second avoidable death, in a spade of 15 years.

  • Yam and a minister’s dated quest

    Yam and a minister’s dated quest

    If there is one minister who can’t be accused of nursing a tall dream among the Buhari team, that fellow will be Audu Ogbe, the man currently heading the agriculture ministry. In a team of disparate players so utterly lacking in the fire for the kind of emergency that the nation has found itself – his’ is probably one of the more pragmatic voices seen to be striving to pull the country from the doldrums in the Buhari lacklustre cabinet. Never mind what his army of critics say of his initiative on grass importation – which he contends, seeks to replace the archaic practice of nomadism and roaming of animals with intensive and better organised system of keeping animals in paddocks and feedlot; or his equally controversial push to have Moroccan fertilizer (?) delivered at the price he thinks the Nigerian farmer can afford, there is a lot to be said of the minister’s crusading zeal as providing a boost to the nation’s effort to reduce its food import bill.

    It is however his initiative on yam that takes the cake. On June 29, the minister finally flagged of his long advertised pet programme on yam export under which 72 tonnes of yam were crated to the United Kingdom. Some two weeks earlier, a batch had, according to reports arrived New York. Of course, if you picture the tonnes of cash already poured into the agricultural sector by Godwin Emefiele’s apex bank – the scale of which should ordinarily have drowned the sorrows of a sector that has long turned to be the nation’s Achilles heels – it should not be difficult to understand the basis of the minister’s tall dreams – the latest of which seeks to make the local yam the next best forex earner – with an initial target of princely US$8 billion earnings annually.

    As an agricultural practitioner of note, the minister no doubt understands the economics of the yam trade than many of his critics would give him credit for. Three kilogrammes of yam, he says, cost 15 dollars in the United States, which is equivalent to about N5, 000. “In London, a carton of yam, this contains three tubers, costs 30 pounds, bringing the average cost per tuber to 10 pounds. “At that price, it is more sensible to export to earn more money for our economy”.

    How about that?

    The minister would also have his critics know that Nigeria accounts for 61 per cent of the world output of yam; that we have 60 varieties of yam of which 30 percent get rotten because we don’t have facilities to preserve them. And, in apparent answer to his hordes of critics who insist that Nigeria feed its army of hungry first before venturing into foreign shores, he says – “There has never been shortage of yam in the country. Prices might be high toward the end of the season, but new yam is already in the market”.

    So what could be wrong with carting a huge chunk of our local yam to Europe and the Americas to boost the nation’s piggy bank?

    The answer is simple and straightforward – nothing – except the attempt by the minister to put the cart before the proverbial horse!

    To start with, it is not a question of being doable or not. Fact is that yam export is already a thriving business. In case anyone is in doubt as to whether or not the Nigerian entrepreneur is already light years ahead of the latest brainwave by the agriculture ministry, yours truly can avail a directory of where to purchase ‘fresh’ tubers of yam in Durban and Cape Town – both in South Africa; in Raleigh, North Carolina and New York in the United States; and Winnipeg in Canada – to anyone desirous of a visit to those locations –for a modest fee!

    The problem, as it appears, is that the minister may actually be barking  up a wrong tree. Truth is – the pressure which drives the craze for forex at a time the nation’s capacity to finance its exports is severely constrained, though understandable, would seem utterly misplaced. Talking of export, to whose benefit? The hapless farmer in Oturkpo whose primary concern is to get his product to the market at a price he has absolutely no control over or the middleman trader who enjoys the dual advantage of setting the price and raking forex? The same farmer forced to put up with 30 percent post-harvest losses just because the government is yet to come up with initiatives to address his problems becoming government’s overnight bride all for the love of forex? And this in a nation with a supposedly world-class research institute – the 47 year-old National Root Crops Research Institute (NRCRI) Umudike, Abia State?

    Will the yam export initiative also address the infrastructure challenge without which the farmer is perennially left at the mercy of the elements?

    In any case, what makes the yam export business – an initiative better handled by the chambers of commerce in liaison with state governments – the federal government’s business? Why not the federal government limit its role to providing policy and institutional support given that it owns no single plot of agricultural land?  How about reviving and strengthening a number of its moribund agencies – chief of which is the Federal Produce Inspection Service (FPIS), an important agency of the Federal Ministry of Trade and Commerce to address issues of grading of agricultural products? Should that be the business of Standards Organisation of Nigeria (SON) as the minister appears to suggest?

    It is possible that Nigeria produces 61 per cent of the global output of yam; however, the suggestion that the world is waiting for our Dioscorea spp. can only be part of the Nigerian fantasy. The world knows us better than to wait for any phantom promise.

    I close. Consider a summary of findings by The Punch in January on the status of the country’s other export products. The newspaper, quoting a data from the European Commission Rapid Alert System, reported that 42 Nigerian food imports were refused entry into EU countries in 2015 and another 25 in 2016. The rejected food items include brown and white beans, melon seeds, palm oil, mushrooms, bitter leaf, ugu leaves, shelled groundnut, smoked catfish and crayfish. Others are live snails, prawns, ginger, melon seeds, sesame seeds, peanut chips, dried meat and fish. The problem: the products did not meet the prescribed regulations and quality standards specified by the receiving countries. In fact, in June 2015, the EU banned all Nigerian dry bean imports due to the presence of high levels of pesticide considered dangerous to human health in them.

    We are talking here of something as basic as packaging our exports. If our country had aeons to apply itself to the rigid requirements of Uncle Sam’s Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) and yet failed the muster, the lesson must be one of a nation lacking the most rudimentary knowledge of what it means to engage in the fiercely competitive international trade.

    So, what will be different this time?  Pretty little, I dare say. In other words – as it was in the beginning, so shall it be…

  • The martyr they won’t honour

    The martyr they won’t honour

    Moshood Kashimawo Olawale Abiola, winner of Nigeria’s presidential election held on June 12, 1993, died 19 years ago last Friday, on the cusp of his widely anticipated release from the brutal detention into which he had been clamped in 1994 by the regime of the loathsome dictator Sani Abacha, for proclaiming himself President of Nigeria after the election was capriciously annulled.

    Abacha’s death some four weeks earlier, reportedly in an orgy of concupiscence, had given “June 12” a new life and a heightened salience.  It gave a new urgency to the status and the future of Abiola, and to the unresolved issue of “June 12.”  All of them had to be addressed immediately,

    The military authorities faced a daunting choice.  Remain in power, though  exhausted and hugely discredited, hoping to muddle through somehow, or release the President-elect from detention with the expectation that Abiola will have some role in negotiations to end the political debacle but unsure of how he would proceed.

    Suddenly, Abiola, who had for four years been denied access to his family, his attorneys, and only grudgingly allowed occasional visits by his personal physician, became the man of the moment, the political prisoner whom the leading Western nations and the international institutions wanted their representatives to meet.  Yet these were for the most part the very bodies that had been loath to  come down heavily on Nigeria for the election annulment and the gross human rights violations that had followed it.

    With the sudden departure from the scene of “a beacon of brutality” as The New York Times called Abacha in an editorial, they were more concerned to get Abiola to renounce his claim to being president-elect than to help secure his freedom and ensure at the very least that he would have a prominent seat at a table where Nigeria’s immediate future would be discussed.

    The UK Government dispatched Foreign Office Minister Tony Lloyd to Abuja, where he met with the Head of State who knew that he was at best a caretaker, but not with Abiola.  The Commonwealth followed with its Secretary-General, our own Chief Emeka Anyaoku.

    In notes of the meeting smuggled out of prison, and in which Abiola had named me among others as addressee, Abiola said Anyaoku told him that, counting from June 1993, the four-year term Abiola would have served  had expired and that, consequently, Abiola could no longer lay claim to any mandate.  Whitehall’s imprimatur was stamped all over Anyaoku’s visit.

    Abiola said he rejected the proposition on the threshold.

    United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan turned up in Abuja to meet with Abiola, with the same perverse end in mind as Anyaoku, if not the same argument.  It was not clear then, nor is it any clearer today, whose interest Annan was serving.

    Certainly not that of the United Nations in its fullest sense.  Nor could it have been at the behest of the UN Security Council, since the situation in Nigeria had not been declared to constitute a threat to global peace, in which case Chapter VII of the UN Charter would have been invoked.

    It is a measure of the cruel and inhuman conditions under which Abiola had been held that when Annan introduced himself as the UN Secretary-General, Abiola was puzzled and asked about “the Egyptian”, a reference to Dr Boutros Boutros Ghali, who had held that position until 1996.

    Such, indeed, were the pressures piled on Abiola by Abdulsalami Abubakar, and by the UK and the United States acting directly or through proxies that The Times (London), no admirer of the populist tendencies that were stamped all over Abiola’s political behavior, felt obliged to weigh in.

    Abiola, it said in its June 29, 1998, leading article, possessed a quality rare in Nigerian politics, “undoubted legitimacy,” derived from the 1993 election and from his conduct in captivity – specifically, refusing Abacha’s offer of freedom in return for retracting his claim to a mandate and retreating from politics “when all indications were that ill-health and further imprisonment would kill him.”

    “It would be shabby of the international community to press him to accept such an offer now,” The Times continued. “His stand for democracy has given him the aura of statesmanship, a quality not evident in 1993.  The form of administration he might head – transitional, national reconciliation, or conventional – is a matter for negotiation.  But he cannot negotiate as a prisoner. . . Only if he is released forthwith, and without conditions, should sanctions be lifted.”

    This flurry was the context in which members of Abiola’s immediate family who had been allowed to see him only fleetingly, at long intervals, and always in the presence of security minders, were cleared without fuss to visit him, on July 7, 1998.

    The party comprised two of his wives, Bisi and Doyinsola, and his eldest child Lola Edewor.  Abiola’s senior wife Kudirat, an unyielding protagonist of the June 12 mandate, had been murdered by Abacha’s goon squad three years earlier, in 1996.

    Four years in solitary confinement, they found, had taken a heavy toll on Abiola’s health.  But he was upbeat and looking forward to being reunited with them as a free man, confident that his release was imminent.

    As the party headed to Abuja airport to return to Lagos, Bisi and Doyinsola had just two things on their minds:  getting Abiola’s sprawling mansion in Opebi spruced up for his return, and catering to the multitudes that would throng the neighbourhood when Abiola returned.

    They were halfway to the airport when Doyinsola’s phone rang.  The caller asked them to head back to Abuja, to the Presidential Villa.

    Could it be that the authorities had decided to release Abiola so that he and his family could fly to Lagos together?   Having lived through so many disappointments and heartbreaks, they suppressed the thought.  But they saw the summons back to Abuja as a good sign.

    What confronted them when they were ushered into the Clinic at the Presidential Villa was Abiola’s lifeless body on a stretcher, nostrils stuffed with cotton balls.  Not four hours had passed since they saw him hearty, if not hale.

    Abiola had slumped and died, literally across the coffee table from a United States delegation comprising   Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Susan Rice, special envoy Thomas Pickering, and United States Ambassador to Nigeria William Twaddell, in Abuja with the specific goal of persuading Abiola to renounce his claim to a presidential mandate, hard on the heels of Anyaoku and Annan.

    With a peremptoriness that would have been considered flagrantly indecent in the United States and indeed in any country claiming to subscribe to higher ideals, Twaddell declared literally on the spot that Abiola appeared to have died from “natural causes.”  That declaration seemed suspiciously tailored to foreclose questions about the tea Abiola had been served just before his sudden terminal collapse.

    An international autopsy failed to establish the cause of Abiola’s death definitively.  But suspicion lingers powerfully to this day it resulted from some substance with which they had laced the tea, a final solution of sorts, to “the problem of June 12.”

    To the end, Abiola resisted every pressure, discounted every threat and spurned every blandishment the military regime and its local and foreign proxies contrived.  His tenacity surprised the vast majority of Nigerians who did not know him well or knew him only in caricature.  They thought that, faced with the prospect  of being subjected to the slightest inconvenience, to say nothing of losing his freedom, his vast business empire and his life, he would cut a deal, put the best face on it, and move on.

    “June 12” and Abiola’s martyrdom made May 29 — the day officially celebrated in Nigeria as “Democracy Day” — inevitable.

    Perhaps one day, the feckless beneficiaries of the struggle that had cost Abiola his life will rouse themselves to accord him posthumous recognition as President-elect, with all the rights and privileges of that position going back to 1993.

    Therein lies the path of honour.

  • Senatorial jeremiad

    “They call you a thief; yet you caper with newly stolen kids” — Yoruba saying, decrying unfazed notoriety

    The other day, the Senate rippled with jeremiad, built on self-pity.  But you could guess where everything was headed: crass blackmail.

    This eighth National Assembly,  clearly the worst, since the return to democracy in 1999, should know: right-thinking Nigerians would not triumph over tragic military rule, only to succumb to comic parliamentary stunts, that nevertheless essay fascism.

    Besides, why should electors suffer such tomfoolery gladly — or what do you call a conclave that attained high republican status and privilege by the vote, but profane that hallowed chamber with the outlawry of threats and intimidation, against the same citizenry that put them there?

    And why should the law be blind to parliamentary coup-making — or do they think parliamentary privileges cover acts likely to bring down the democratic order?

    How else does one classify the Eyinnaya Abaribe drama of “nominating” Bukola Saraki as “acting president”, when Acting President Yemi Osinbajo is not only in place, but well in the country when that senatorial rascality was brewing?

    And the voter contempt!  Isn’t that tantamount to that Igbo proverb, popularized by Chinua Achebe’s works, of the fellow deluded enough to challenge his chi (personal god) to a wrestling bout?

    Or again, how would you categorize the House of Representatives’ threat and muscle-flexing, over the Works, Housing and Power Minister, Babatunde Fashola’s exposure of their scandalous cannibalization of the budget, diverting scarce money, from crucial federal highways and bridges, to pitiable boreholes?

    What a pair!  The Senate is fixated with bringing down Ibrahim Magu, the fiery face of anti-corruption.

    But the senatorial cheer leaders are comics who have a lot to hide; and are so  desperate they won’t mind tormenting their voters as unfazed corruption ambassadors, baring their fangs from the highest legislative chamber.

    And the House of Representatives?  So reckless it could only throw tantrums and issue threats, when faced with solid allegations of wilfully moving the people’s money from solid gold to buying mere tinsel — a monumental betrayal of trust.

    Why, even in venality, there ought to be some class!  How did Nigeria come about such a notoriously anti-people conclave?  What tragic paradox!

    Still, in the senatorial sound and fury, only one voice was startling.  That of Sola Adeyeye, the hardy senator from Osun central.

    Prof. Adeyeye had built a solid reputation as the quintessential Yoruba Omoluabi, boasting nobility and good breeding of the finest crust.  Needless to say, his rigorous and acute mind seems eternally in tune with the yearnings of his people.

    But the same Adeyeye that spoke so passionately in defence of the Senate, over its ignoble war against Magu, seemed to have capitulated to peer emotions — sad!

    Indeed, it was a classic study in reputation suicide — with all due respect to the senator’s democratic rights and parliamentary privileges — for the Senate he waxed so poetic on, could hardly be trusted to do anything without base motives.

    This wrong-headed war against Magu is prime evidence, for those most vociferous against the EFCC chair would appear stained elements, having not a few things to hide.

    Dino Melaye?  Without malice to his private reputation, the Ajekuniya exponent is a classic of how not to be a senator — and his current recall process is again prime evidence.

    Ay, the Kogi senator insists it is all targeted at giving a dog a bad name to hang it.  Maybe.  But how many would dispute that bad name was self-inflicted?  Not the acting president, who at another polite company good-naturedly jabbed at his Ajekuniya video, condemning his audience to a quake of laughter!

    George Sekibo talks of the imperative for senatorial integrity.  But could he, in all good conscience, vouch for the integrity of his own election, having just been sacked by the electoral tribunal in Port Harcourt?

    Abaribe was a victim of a vile executive plot, in a vicious power-play that ousted him as deputy governor to Orji Uzor Kalu in Abia.  But the pitied victim of yesterday won’t even bristle from broaching what appeared the testing of waters for a vile parliamentary coup against the president and the acting president — an attempt so vile it set the Senate against itself!

    In the chamber of Abaribe and company, therefore, the health of a fellow Nigerian, nay the president, is fair game for power gaming!  Tragic.

    You could, of course, say the senatorial trio of Melaye, Sekibo and Abaribe have been sacked with stacked cards, well outside the immediate subject of discourse.  Maybe.

    But that was the same tactic they pushed in their dire threats, posturing on alleged need for institution building, senatorial integrity and inviolability of the law — all noble concepts recruited as sop for base emotional blackmail.

    At the end, the Senate of Bukola Saraki, by its threat to boycott its job, radically declared to retain its plum privileges, but shun the dutiful responsibilities that should earn that gravy.  Predictable!

    But lest we forget: the Magu affair has absolutely nothing to do with the sanctity of the law or the robustness of democratic institutions.  Rather, it is one bad faith cancelling out another.

    A concert of the corrupt found a willing ally in the 8th Senate.  In their panic, they attempted base parliamentary muscling to throw off the Magu nightmare — and fob off their looming nemesis.

    The executive, by sighting a constitutional lacuna, pulled the rug off the feet of this plot.  So, a sleight of hand to champion corruption is cancelled out by another sleight of hand to crush it.  But sensing they might be licked, the senatorial lobby resorts to juvenile threats, unbecoming of the apex legislative chamber of the Federal Republic.

    Still, that would appear only the surface of a multi-layered plot.

    With the Fashola budget challenge, the National Assembly may not be averse to a sterile controversy, to divert public attention from their monumental breach of trust: pushing scarce funds from vital projects like the second Niger Bridge and Lagos-Ibadan Expressway to erecting boreholes and rural health centres — their distinguished sweetheart projects!

    Now, who does that?

    Dr. Saraki clearly defined himself by selling his party to gain the Senate presidency.   You could say that was politics and politicking, soulless or sincere.

    But what is beyond pardon is erecting a senatorial fort for corruption, in a regime whose chief campaign push was total war against corruption.  That is an anti-people sin and monumental betrayal beyond pardon.

    Saraki and co remind the literary-minded of John Milton’s Lucifer in Paradise Lost.  Better to reign in hell, he growled at the acme of his hubris, than serve in heaven.  Not a few angels fell for the subversive beam of the Brightest Son of the Morning.  But they all ended in dank hell!

    Another election is less than two years.  Those who love Nigeria should, with vengeance, vote out these Luciferian senators, who would rather reign in political hell, than serve in political paradise.

  • Let the recipient beware

    Let the recipient beware

    There was a time, not too long ago, when newspapering was a profitable business.  Not quite “a licence to print money” as the British newspaper baron Lord Thomson of Fleet once said of television, but a profitable business all the same – if run on sound principles and managed well.

    In the age of the Internet, newspapers all over the world, even those run on the soundest principles, have become an endangered species, what with spiralling production and distributing costs, plummeting advertisement revenues, and declining paid subscriptions and street sales. Increasingly, the survival of the newspaper now turns not on its ability to generate a surplus but on its capacity to absorb continual loss.

    Subsidies by proprietors known and hidden, bank overdrafts, and funds generated through ancillary ventures are what keep the average newspaper afloat, plus, more crucially, especially in Nigeria, leveraging the media’s singular power to confer status.  I will return to this latter point presently.

    Each of these survival strategies usually carries a price.

    To cite just one instance:  In the 1980s, one newspaper once published a scathing profile of a well-known Lagos socialite who was chair of a major commercial bank,  to which the newspaper was heavily indebted.  The bank immediately called up the loan, which had long matured.  As atonement, the newspaper published a much more approving profile several weeks later, by the writer of the earlier piece.

    The survival strategy of choice of the Nigerian media these days lies, as I was saying, in their unrivalled power to confer status on individuals, groups and institutions. In a society where status counts for a great deal, that is no trifling power.  Just consider how the media transformed Nnamdi Kanu from obscurity to celebrity almost overnight.

    That power may well be the traditional media’s greatest asset today.  It was always there, but the way they are exploiting it these days, one might be led to think that they have just discovered it.  Hardly a day passes without one media organisation or another conferring an award, prize or other recognition, at a widely publicised and lavishly staged ceremony, on prominent individuals, groups or institutions, for achievements ranging from the barely substantive to the frankly contrived.

    These awards rarely go to individuals, groups or institutions on the fringe of society, no matter how substantive their contribution to the national well-being, or to those who cannot be trusted to reciprocate the gesture with hard cash or bounteous patronage.

    Naturally, the recipients are for the most part state governors, officials of the federal and state legislatures, chairpersons of local government areas, well-heeled traditional rulers, banks, oil companies, high net-worth persons, the better corporate institutions, and their senior executives.

    The process begins with an announcement of a date for staging the year’s presentation of the highly competitive and much-coveted awards, or in the case of an organisation just getting into the lucrative act, a prefatory declaration of intent of the high-minded kind.

    From the media organisations that have built a reputation on this kind of thing, a declaration that the recipients will in the final analysis be selected by their highly revered “Board of Editors” and that the awards will be presented by international statesmen and women – former presidents and prime ministers and their spouses, and we are not talking of some Fourth World nations, please — is usually enough to dilute whatever misgivings the attentive audience may harbour about the whole thing.   Live performances by recording artistes and entertainers of global stature remove all doubt.

    Naturally, media organisations just getting into the act adopt a more cautious approach.  They lay out the award categories, and actually invite nominations from the attentive audience. After toting the returns, they travel round the country, camera crew in tow, to inform those who have been nominated of their good fortune.

    The lucky nominees in turn congratulate the media organisation and its readership on their sound judgment and patriotism and matchless contribution to the peace and unity and progress of the nation.

    Having come this far to getting their status proclaimed or affirmed, few persons, groups or institution due to receive awards will balk at purchasing a table or tables for ten guests and multiples thereof for  at a five or six-figure price tag.  After all, they must know, the ceremony may well be once-in-a-lifetime outing, for which no price can be too high.

    The awards gala finally takes place in all its tinselled glamour, with recipients getting awards matching their financial investment in the ceremony.  Cash prizes are announced, but redemption may not be guaranteed.  Baubles and other tokens of recognition are handed out.

    Everyone involved is a winner.

    The media organisation consolidates or establishes its power to confer status; the recipients go home  buoyed that their status has been affirmed or confirmed.  And in grateful appreciation, they buy acres of media space to congratulate the media organisation on its sense of duty and propriety; their friends, clients, partners and admirers buy even more media space to “felicitate” with them on the epochal achievement.

    The Daily Times, once a generic name for newspapers but now a faded and tarnished memory, sought early last month to stamp on the public consciousness an identity as the online offshoot of a “legacy newspaper” eminently qualified to honour those it deems worthy.

    Even in its present online form, a work in progress at best, it can hardly lay any claim to distinction.  Yet, it chose the 91st (ha!) anniversary of its forebear to confer all manner of awards on 91 Nigerians who, by its light, “have impacted society positively,” according to Fidelis Anosike, identified by the organisers as chairman of Folio Publications, publisher of the journal.

    The Times Heroes Awards, as the organisers portentously called them, spanned five categories: Leadership, Politician of the Decade, Woman of the Decade, Company of the Decade, Governance, Life Impact, and Public Service Impact.  Recipients include the quick and the dead.

    It is a mark of the thoroughness of the selection and the nice sense of discrimination of the Awards Committee that Yahaya Bello, the beleaguered governor of my home state, Kogi, who was thrust into that position by spite and sanctified by judicial legerdemain of the most transparent kind  and can hardly point to any substantive achievement, nevertheless took home a Times Heroes Award, ranked with Lagos State Governor Akinwunmi Ambode,  among others, as “one of the most performing governors in Nigeria.”

    Under the circumstances, it must be accounted a sad and grievous omission that they did not name his enabler-turned-nemesis, Senator Dino Melaye (APC Kogi West), “Lawmaker of the Century.”   Melaye,                I gather, is set to present a draft resolution before the Senate at its next plenary session urging it to void the Bello award, retroactive to the date of its purported conferment. My sources tell me that the Delinquent, beg your pardon, Distinguished Senator, will settle for nothing less than a unanimous vote.

    The Time Heroes Award gala held all right at the International Conference Centre Abuja,  but under  the ominous cloud of a page-long advertisement in several newspapers the preceding day declaring the event “illegal and criminal.”

    Issued under the hand of “The Board of Directors of the Daily Times of Nigeria plc,” the advertisement stated that the organisers of the award were not officers of the Daily Times in any guise or disguise, and had no authority from the company to transact any business on its behalf.

    Any person, group or organisation “participating in the ceremony in any manner whatsoever,” the advertisement warned darkly, “will be complicit in a criminal conspiracy.”

    So, one can be presumed complicit in a criminal conspiracy and visited with the appropriate penalties for merely receiving an award, even a fake one?

    Even in Nigeria, that is a new one.  Beware, recipient.

  • See what they have done to our children?

    Nigeria is said to be a nation of multiple pathologies. Yet, the story of the 12-year-old boy expelled from one of Lagos’ highbrow schools for putting acid in a female classmate’s water bottle stands apart among the more malignant mutations of its many degenerative diseases.

    I guess you have read the story. If you haven’t, it is the story of a poor lad, who in apparent bid to rid himself from the ignominy of being routed for the third time having been beaten to second position during the first and second term examinations by her 11-year old female classmate, opted for a desperate measure: He headed for the school laboratory from where he took a vial of sulphuric acid and ethanol, mixed them together and put them in the young girls’ water bottle. Unknown to him, two male students saw him commit the act, and so promptly alerted the girl and the school authorities before she could come to harm.

    If anyone was still in doubts about our children catching up with our mindless quest for success without scruples, the incident obviously leaves no shred of doubts about the arrival of the digital generation on the blocks. Our children may have finally arrived – if I may paraphrase the words of a book with similar title by the revered Eze (Prof) Vincent Ike; having long played the coy mistress, they may have come into their own in deviousness. It is the dawn of a new reality!

    A week hence, just about everyone with data on their digital device have been casting the proverbial first stone. The school authorities have shown the young fellow the red card. Parents, elders and minders who would ordinarily be expected to be more restrained have literally been hurling stones at the minor whose sin would appear to be one of acting out his heroes either in the wee-hour television series or in the ever boisterous but decadent political space!  The government, unable to grasp the essence of the budding pathology has been typically mum.

    At the moment, only a negligible few, if at all, imagine that the young fellow may well be a victim of the forces unleashed by the same society hypocritically seeking to hang him dry! And so while it does not appear that the anger of many would be assuaged anytime soon, particularly those of the vocal tribe of netizens who obviously think that the minor deserves a fate worse than ostracism, many have in fact stopped short of labelling him a budding ‘terrorist’ who should be locked away and the key thrown away into the Atlantic!

    It seems one of those moments in the blinkered moral universe of many that they would choose not to behold the mirror staring right in from of them as revealing of one of the same kind!

    Let’s be clear on this: Those who view the Wednesday event as an isolated one are entitled to their denial.  As an adult who has been in the business of parenting for a little over two decades, I can confirm that while the so-called outrage merely exposes our collective hypocrisy – part of the orgy of creative denial which the country has become infamous – it is the way our educational system is currently wired! It is like a journey through the nine circles of Dante’s Hell.

    I love to cite an example which I was a participant-observer. I had taken my ward for the common entrance examinations into the so-called unity schools only to be greeted by a sea of heads as one would see at a football match venue. If I was shocked on approach to the exam venue that the number of parents and minders actually outnumbered the pupils meant to take the examinations, no words could capture the resort to brazen criminal delinquency by these minders with their insistence on sitting with their wards in the examination rooms! The officials, clearly overwhelmed at some point had to bring in the security agencies, who no sooner than the exam started, quickly organized their own version of the racket to subvert the same process! We are here talking of an entrance examination into Junior Secondary Schools! That was some 15 years ago. Yet, it would not be far-fetched to imagine a member of the class among those currently daring to cast the stone at Boy Anonymous.

    What we do know is that things have gotten much worse in the organised chaos that education at all levels has become and in the free-fall regression suffered by the larger society.  Today, the story is routinely told of parents seeking to live out their childhood fantasises in their children often at great psychological costs to them; of parents going to unimaginable lengths to secure places for their children in higher institutions of learning; and of children that are light years ahead when it comes to beating the system. Today, the correlates are to be found in the school system which emphasises fierce competitiveness in lieu of learning, proper education and character; of homes where superficiality and ephemeral achievements are celebrated over and above hard work and due diligence; and in the rabid, putrefying theology which harps on the primacy of product (ends) as against process (means).

    As the cyber lingo goes – what you see is what you get.  Denying that the rich diet of delinquency of which Boy Anonymous is only its latest symptom as anything but inevitable in the circumstance would seem to me like challenging the law of gravity.  Now, why would a 12-year contemplate what could in fact pass for an attempted murder were the same act to be committed by an adult? The position being pushed is that the boy did it to save face having been beaten by the girl to second position.  In other words, the boy is supposed to love the glamour of success minus the rigour of hard and competitive labour; that such is the craving for outward acceptance that no means is too foul to contemplate to achieve this! By the way, did anyone ever tell him that about the dreary place called the jailhouse? For a seventh (or is it eighth) grader, the word penitentiary shouldn’t be too big for his young, active mind to comprehend.

    Does anybody recognise the mortal danger when they see one?  These are supposed to be children, our future. And to imagine that these are the kind of monstrosities routinely churned out by our ever under pressure society?

    I close. The boy, like the school that expelled him needs help. For the lad, a shrink wouldn’t exactly be a bad idea. The educational system which promotes such fierce competitiveness could do with total overhaul – in fact a salvage job – like taking it apart, brick by brick as one would a run down edifice.

    As for the society, can we just leave that in God’s hands?

     

  • Restructuring buzz

    It’s a “restructuring” buzz out there.  But it’s not unlike blind folks feeling different parts of an elephant.

    Is “restructuring” like this elephant — a simple case of different perspectives?

    Or a deliberate, sinister couching of differing motives, under a reigning political buzz word?

    To be fair, restructuring “franchise holders”, the Afenifere segment of the Yoruba political mainstream, have been consistent; since the very beginning.

    It started with a Benin Republic-like Sovereign National Conference (SNC), of the pre-June 12, 1993 annulment era; when Gen. Ibrahim Babangida’s political transition programme was transiting nowhere, beyond a deliberate cul-de-sac.  Remember the late Alao Aka-Basorun and his braves?

    After Babangida’s rash annulment of June 12, that clamour flared into an impassioned crusade over the “national question”, all through the  no-war-no-peace era of Gen. Sani Abacha.

    Even after the return to democracy in 1999, with (apologies to Fela) the Army Arrangement that thrust Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo into the presidential chair, the Afenifere — indeed, all of the Yoruba political mainstream — still pushed for SNC (if they wanted to be politically irritating) or “restructuring” (if they wanted to be nuanced or coded).

    If indeed restructuring is “a national appeal whose time has come”, according to IBB, an arch-opponent now turned swooning proponent, then the Afenifere grandees are entitled to their prize.

    But while pristine “restructuring” was clear — at least to the Afenifere camp: remaking Nigeria along ethnic lines to form some cultural federalism, the latest strain, even within the camp, is not so clear. “True federalism”? Confederation? Or only the last station before a final push towards Oduduwa Republic?

    Given the sabre-rattling among some Yoruba ultra-nationalists, the atavistic romanticization of Yoruba mores and ethos and the impassioned ethnic hate from a section still very bitter at the election loss of 2015, it is not easy to say.

    One thing is clear though: the South West’s strain of “restructuring” would appear the most thought-out — not because the people there are smarter than the rest, but because they had been in the “true federalism” trenches, longer than any other.

    South East’s “restructuring” is even hazier, when placed side by side, with the neo-Biafra campaign.

    Until the northern counter-expulsion threat, neo-Biafra had assumed outright secession — a rather grim encore of the 1967-1970 Civil War debacle, with nevertheless a hoped-for different result.

    IPOB and MASSOB may well be romantics, whose street ardour could be far-removed from reality.  But to borrow Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis, they would appear the Ndigbo id — that raw, unrestrained and untamed innermost craving, about a people’s political bitterness, against Nigeria as constituted.

    But the IPOB wild caper was morphing into a reckless tempo, prompting an irritated “northern youths” to issue a no less irritating fatwa.  Thus, Ohanaeze Ndigbo, the South East civil face, had to step in.

    The political schizophrenia, in the South East’s “restructuring” was clear from the latest statement of John Nwodo, the Ohanaeze president.  He admitted a section of Ndigbo wanted secession; another section wanted a restructured Nigeria.

    The trouble is: Ohanaeze and IPOB/MASSOB epitomize the split in the Igbo political persona.

    The elite Ohanaeze represents the political aristocrats, who had been part and parcel of the gravy since 1960; and after the Civil War — faithful collaborators with the Northern power elite, which IPOB now lampoons.

    This Igbo elite had contributed their own fair share to the Nigerian debacle.  The music only changed after the loss of 2015 — the first time the Igbo elite would back a wrong horse, and the appointments and other gravy dried up.

    IPOB/MASSOB, on the other hand, belong to the bitter and angry rabble, who nevertheless see their nemesis not in their own ethnic collaborators with the soulless pan-Nigeria power machine, but in some hated Hausa-Fulani and Yoruba.

    Until the dissonance between these two Igbo faces are harmonized, South East’s “restructuring” would be hazy indeed.

    Beyond the threat to “make Nigeria ungovernable” should Goodluck Jonathan lose, and the vicious walking-the-talk with the Avengers’ creek bombing campaigns, the South-South has been largely quiet in articulating its own “restructuring.”

    O, Ann Kio Briggs, the Ijaw rights stormy petrel of the creeks, was reported to have declared Nigeria should break; and every part should go its way.  But her fiery voice lacks the scalding credibility of old.  If it was muted all through the Jonathan misrule, it can’t gather any plausible ring when her Niger Delta kin is out, beyond the democratic right to be bellicose.

    Like the Niger Delta, the North’s Middle Belt has been largely quiet too, beyond repudiating presumptive “capture”, in the neo-Biafra map.  It would be nice to hear from these denizens, who often prided themselves the glue that kept Nigeria together, even at great human costs.

    But about the most sensational new converts to “restructuring” are two political survivalists: IBB and former Vice President Atiku Abubakar.  The one would wish his past humongous contribution to ruining Nigeria would fade away.  The other would declare himself open to any cause that could keep burning his presidential lamp.

    Surprisingly, IBB appears very radical in his “restructuring”: a Federal Government with powers over just foreign policy, defence, and the economy, eerily close to the confederal arrangement the Emeka Ojukwu-led Eastern Region called for in 1967.

    Atiku too appears more radical, at least in the context of the normal present-structure-or-nothing stance of the core North, pushing for present states arranged as provinces under new federating units: the present six geo-political zones, even while the core North, as a group, keeps its official thinking very close to its chest.

    The big question, however: when the chips are down, can this duo hold firm, with their public perception of being as slippery as an eel?

    At the end, restructuring would appear an economic issue, couched  in politics.  Indeed, it would make no sense if the present sharing of the central but poisoned pork, didn’t give way to regions baking own wholesome meals, and feeding the centre.  Any other way would appear hot air.

    Still, one final but uncomfortable truth: what has climaxed as present “restructuring”, started as wilful refusal to accept the result of a democratic election, by political blocs that lost.  That was the trigger in the South East, South-South and in the Afenifere camp of the South West.

    What started as wilful distraction is ending up as the ultimate political blackmail.  That explains the toting of the Jonathan National Conference, by the lobby that attended it, as the wonder elixir to totally cure Nigeria of its political pathologies.  Some Trojan horse!

    But if you gang up against an “Hausa-Fulani” president, would you need another round of “restructuring” crusades to prevent the Hausa-Fulani too from ganging up against you, when you yourself become president?

    Just think about that!