The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tuesday

  • Race, politics and economics in America

    Race, politics and economics in America

    Here, quoted at considerable length, is the lead story in The New York Times (Late Edition) for November 25, 2008, titled RACIAL BARRIER FALLS IN DECISIVE VICTORY.

    “Barrack Hussein Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States on Tuesday, sweeping away the last racial barrier in American politics with ease as the country chose him as its first black chief executive.

    “The election of Mr Obama amounted to a national catharsis – a repudiation of a historically unpopular Republican president and his economic and foreign policies, and an embrace of Mr Obama’s call for a change in the direction and tone of the country.

    “But it was just as much a strikingly symbolic moment in the evolution of the nation’s fraught racial history that would have seemed unthinkable just two years ago.”

    In his victory speech the previous night, in Grant Park, Chicago, President-elect Obama was            no less expansive.

    “If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy,’’ he said, “tonight is your answer.”

    “It has been a long time coming,” he added, “but tonight, because of what we did on this date in this election at this defining moment, change has come to America.”

    Three months later, on the night of Obama’s Inauguration, some 20 House Republicans gathered      at a steakhouse across from the US Capitol to lick their wounds – they had also lost control of the House and the Senate – and, more to the point, to plot how to ensure that the Obama presidency would fail.

    They came out of the working dinner vowing to fight Obama on every issue, to be united and unyielding in their opposition; in short, to “take back the country” – their country – at the earliest opportunity.

    Far from sweeping away the last racial barrier in American politics” as The New York Times had declared, the election of Barak Obama entrenched it, consecrated it, and invested it with the kind respectability Jim Crow could not muster even at its most benign. Far from taking great pride in Obama’s oft-repeated assertion that only in America is his story possible, they are ruing how it  came about and saying, never again.

    The election upturned what white, middle-aged Americans without a college education had always regarded, and profited disproportionately from, as the natural order of things.  This is the group that globalisation and technological innovations left behind, the group that once thrived on high-paying jobs that have disappeared and will never return.

    Middle-aged white Americans without a college education live for the most part amidst sad reminders of halcyon days, in decaying towns piled with rutted heaps of abandoned mills and manufacturing plants.  The average family now has to work two jobs just to keep afloat. Access to credit, more than anything else, is what sustains the average American in the illusion of well-being

    Although the economy has made a significant recovery during Obama’s tenure – more than nine million jobs have been added since he took office — the really significant gains have gone to  speculators in the casino economy, many of whom go home with $10 million in bonuses alone at the end of each year.

    And now as reported recently by the Princeton economists Angus Deaton, recipient of the 2015 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science, and Anne Case, “something startling” is happening to middle-aged white Americans, the foot soldiers of the Republican Party, the constituency of the TEA Party and Donald Trump.

    Unlike every other age group, unlike every other racial and ethnic group, and unlike their counterparts in other rich countries, death rates in this group have been rising, driven by an epidemic of suicides and afflictions stemming from substance abuse.

    In contrast, the death rate for middle-aged blacks and Hispanics continued to decline during the same period, as did death rates for younger and older people of all races and ethnic groups.

    Middle-aged blacks still have a higher mortality rate than whites — 581 per 100,000, compared with 415 for whites — but the gap is closing, and the rate for middle-aged Hispanics is far lower than for middle-aged whites at 262 per 100,000.

    The least educated also had the most financial distress.  In the period examined by Dr. Deaton and Dr. Case, the inflation-adjusted income for households headed by a high school graduate fell by 19 per cent.

    In 2014, according to another analysis, among 25- to 54-year-olds without college degrees, blacks and Hispanics were much more positive than whites: 67 per cent of African-Americans and 68 per cent of Hispanics responded “much better” or “somewhat better,” compared with 47 per cent of whites.

    Those figures represent a reversal from 2000, when whites were more positive than blacks, 64 per cent to 60 per cent. (Hispanics were the most positive in nearly all years

    What used to be considered the peculiar pathology of black society in America has now caught up with the white underclass.  The resentment of that class is what Donald Trump has been exploiting.  It has served him well, at least to the extent that it has helped consolidate his base.

    Given the foregoing you can expect a hardening, not a softening of the racial rhetoric, especially on the right.  The world glimpsed something of this on live television and raw video last week showing the gruesome killings of two black men by police officers during more or less routine encounters — one in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and the other in Falcon Heights, Minnesota.

    There was yet another in which a black man shot and killed five officers in an ambush and wounded nine more people at a peaceful demonstration by whites and blacks against the Lousiana and Minnesota killings.

    Hundreds of blacks have died at the hands of white police officers during routine traffic stops over the years, and in situations that posed no grave danger to the public or to the officers.  In almost every case, juries have absolved the police, saying they acted in reasonable fear for their lives, even when the police team had the lonely suspect on his back or belly, fully restrained.

    You do not have to act suspiciously or be in the “wrong” place to warrant the brutal attention of law and order.  The tennis star James Blake, a gentleman of the first class who would make an outstanding diplomat, was waiting in a hotel lounge in downtown Manhattan last year, for a cab to convey him to Flushing Meadows, venue of the U.S. Open Tennis Championships.

    Suddenly, two cops jumped him, guns drawn, pinned him down on his back and handcuffed him.  They said he matched the description of someone who had been reported snatching cell phones, or whatever.  The whole thing could have ended fatally.

    Couldn’t they have called him to a corner and interviewed him? He is, by the way, bi-racial, with a black father and a white mother, like Obama.

    The movement Black Lives Matter was launched to call attention to the casualness with which the police take black lives.  Its goal was to remind the police and a generally complaisant public that black lives need to be protected with no less vigour than white lives and Asian lives and Hispanic lives.

    Now, in a reversal not unusual here (remember, “Affirmative action” is “racist”), they are   calling the movement and its anthem racist.  Leading the pack is former New York Mayor Rudi Guiliani, he of the hyena snarl, who had condoned the racist excesses of New York Police officers in the bestial degradation of Abou Louima, a Haitian immigrant, and other serious misconduct.

    Of course, all lives matter.  That much is implied in the name and agenda of the movement.   But the police continually act as if they believe that some lives are more expendable than others.

    That is the issue. That is why it is necessary to remind them and those who think and act like them that Black Lives Matter.

  • A president’s dilemma

    A president’s dilemma

    With Niger Delta’s avenging groups now nearing a dozen, it ought to be obvious to everyone that the nightmare of a nation hung on hydrocarbons is not about to end anytime soon.At least not with the number of groups sworn to bring the  oil industry and by extension, the nation to its knees growing day by day; and certainly not with each new group claiming to hold the franchise to the latest enterprise in town – the quest for wealth without work.Nigerians are obviously in for a long dark night.

    Today, the signs are unmistakable. Our gas turbines cannot run because there is no gas to power no thanks to the ability of the avengers to put thevital artery carrying gas outof business. The result: a nation that peaked at 5,000 MW in distributed power barely a year ago currently struggles to share 2,000MW or less. Our crude exports, the main source of foreign exchange,fare no better. With 2.2 million barrels crude production projected for the 2016 budget, the nation currently struggles to get 1.6 million barrels into what is itself a depressed global oil market. And this at a time some 27 states depend on handouts from the federal government.

    You canunderstand the basis of the metamorphosis of a President who only a while agoin a fit of righteous angerpromised to give those behind the mindless savaging of the nation’s vital infrastructures the Boko haram treatment.The President has merely opted to count the opportunity costs of extracting the crude to the market!

    To be sure, the success or otherwise of a military expedition could mean just about everything. We know that means; it could be the surest route to Gbaramatu 11 and perhaps Amnesty 11. That routeobviously discounts the possibility of failure against the disparate groups whose mastery of the creeksappears unrivalled at least compared with our fighting men;a group whose capacity for mindless destruction seems beyond comprehension.

    Does anyone still wonderwhy thePresident now seeks rather desperately to engage the amorphous groups going as far asinvoking God to touch the heart of those‘wayward children’?And the militants that continue to raise the stakes which each passing day?

    It is all about economics – the economy of a federal government threatened by bankruptcy and that of the free-wheeling militants currently under the threat of obliteration by the federal government. Both are desperately seeking accommodation and possibly a bailout!

    That is why I am amused by the current talks about war. War for what – when there is so much to lose and very little to gain? Forget all the show of force and the sabre rattling on either side; both parties certainly recognise that the war is unwinnable.

    Not for a federal government hung on Niger Delta’s oil; war at this time, apart from unsettling everything that the Buhariadministration has put in place will most certainly prolong the agonies of Nigerians yearning for improvements in their socio-economic conditions. With the economy in tatters and the infrastructures in dire straits, the pressure on the federal government to perform obviously leaves little room for the costlydistractionof a long drawn war.

    In any case, why would anyone declare a war whose outcome is as uncertain as it is unpredictable? Why not put some settlement ideas on the table to buy the peace even if tends to proverbially kicking the problem down the road?

    The militants are a different kettle altogether. Never mind their opportunistic posturing; they have even more reasons to loathe any war.True, they have tasted blood and have in some way acquired an awesome sense of power. Yes, they know the Niger Delta terrain so well and so can teach the biggest military on the continent a lesson or two about creek combat. But then, to what purpose? By the way, since when did those pricey SUVs, which they love to show off to lesser mortals in the region begin to run the dangerous creeks?

    A Niger Delta republic – minus the Itshekiri, Urhobo, Ikwere, Anang, Ibibio and the Efik?

    Trust me; the avengers know better than risk lives and limbs for such high ideals; not even such ideals as justice or equity – social or environmental. Guess if they knew, they would think twice about sacrificing their home and hearth through mindless destruction of pipelines for the joy of some assumed short term gratification. As for examples, they have Government Tompolos, the Asari Dokubos and their erstwhile comrades in arms to point at; dealers or traders who have made good on the militancy while their region suffered further pillaging and retrogression.

    Where do go from here? President Muhammadu Buhari obviously means well. No doubt, he wants to do good by the people of the Niger Delta. In the 2016 budget for instance, he wants a brand new Lagos to Calabar railways, a project, which if implemented, will open the vast region to accelerated development. Hopefully too, the East-West road will also come into fruition. Whereas the path to development can be sometimes tortuous and slow, he pleads again and again that the people should give him time. I understand that the people of Niger Delta, like their counterparts in other parts of the country, not only desire the good life but want it so fast.While that is bothreasonable and legitimate, the problem has always been the kind of good life as understood by the militants – a life defined by hedonism.

    That is where the president and by extension, the nation’s dilemma derive.

    Can the President afford not to given in to demands of the militants and by so doing risk further pains for the already impoverished but increasingly impatient Nigerians? Will giving in to the demands of the militants not occasion the emergence of more splinter groups? What about the ordinary Niger Delta folk, far removed from the animosities, who want to live his life in peace and desire a better future for his children and future generations?

    And what about Nigeria – a nation forced to endure the pain of humiliation and blackmail in the hands of these outlaws?And when will this end?

    It is a tough choice for the President.

  • Restructuring and elite consensus

    Restructuring and elite consensus

    Saturday evening, July 2.  Rendezvous: Jazzhole, upscale culture mart, in upscale Ikoyi, Lagos.

    Wale Adebanwi, en route to a new professorial chair at Oxford University, England, had gathered a lean but powerful assemblage, for a select reading of his new book, The Nation as Grand Narrative: The Nigerian Press and the Politics of Meaning (NY, USA: University of Rochester Press, 2016).

    That gathering was minute.  But it was well and truly distinguished.

    Kunle Ajibade, the convener, Prof. Niyi Osundare, ace poet and public commentator, Prof. Adigun Agbaje, famed professor of political science, Basorun J.K. Randle, the grand old man of numbers and letters, Erelu Bisi Fayemi, critical voice in gender and development studies, and Nike Ransome-Kuti, she of the great Ransome-Kuti clan.

    Also in-house were Jimi Agbaje, charming, urbane and avuncular, Yinka Odumakin, young Afenifere warrior, Tunde Fagbenle, until very recently, a columnist with The Punch, Funke Awolowo — and son — daughter of Segun Awolowo I, and eldest granddaughter of the great Chief Obafemi Awolowo, Laolu Akande, from the Presidency and delectable spouse, and a certain Fafa Princewill, a bearded gentleman who somewhat, and with relish, regaled the house with his brand of Ijaw-centric history, in the context of Nigeria’s troubled nationhood.

    After tributes to Adebanwi’s scholarly genius, focus and fecundity, the house moved into the business of the evening.

    Prof. Osundare, serenaded journalism — one of at least three areas of study that tickle Prof. Adebanwi’s genius, the other two being political science and anthropology —  pronouncing it “superior to history”.  Whereas history mops up the past, he reasoned, journalism laps up the present, in preparation for the future, which history dutifully records as the past!

    Going back to the era of the Tatler and Spectator, of David Steele and Joseph Addison, pioneers of British journalism (18th century), which by the way shaped journalism as we know it today, he insisted that journalism — news, features and even the column — constituted invaluable sources to the historian, as (s)he thrives to capture the true spirit of the epoch.

    Tributes fully paid, Adebanwi proceeded, reading from his book, the media recording of critical junctures of Nigeria’s political evolution: the 1953 media excitement after Anthony Enahoro, on 22 July 1953, in the House of Representatives, had raised the self-government motion by 1956; the June 12, 1993 presidential election annulment, and the  follow-up media crisis of infidelity to truth and principle, and, of course, the 1999 transition to civil rule election, which presidency Olusegun Obasanjo won.

    At these critical junctures, Adebanwi noted, citing notorious facts of history as his research revealed, the Nigerian press was no sole bastion of perceived common truth, or principle or even felt ideology.

    Rather, they were captives to interests — group interests — which regrettably, the author grimly noted, was fast morphing into individual interests, with the collapse of ideological politics (no thanks of Ibrahim Babangida’s experimentation with new breed politics, of the late 1980s and early 1990s).

    Adebanwi’s unflattering verdict?  From the 1950s to the present, the Nigerian newspaper press has declined from being captives to group interests to now, captives to individual interests!

    By some freak of history though, the Nigerian newspaper appears heading exactly where it started.

    Great owner-editors of the Lagos (and therefore, Nigerian) early press, John Payne Jackson, and successor-son, Thomas Horatio Jackson of the Lagos Weekly Record, James Bright Davies, the brave soul who owned and edited Times of Nigeria, and even Herbert Macaulay, of the Lagos Daily News, pushed legitimate personal interests, even if those interests, according to Fred Omu in his Press and Politics in Nigeria, 1880-1937, commingled with perceived collective good, particularly regarding the economic domination by the European merchants of their day.

    Even the so-called ‘wrap around’ adverts, which many a journalism purist still regards as editorial heresy — completely pawning your prime news pages for crass commerce — had some echoes from the past.  Back then, the convention was to devote the front page to adverts, shipping and other commercial news, in the early Nigerian newspapers in Lagos.

    There appears a big difference, though.  Whereas the old masters could lay some claim to nobility of purpose, at that crucial juncture of Nigerian press history, it would appear a cynic’s haven for the present players: the advertiser that slams his message in your face because he has the cash to splash, the newspaper investor that projects nothing but brazen self-interest, just because again he has the cash to drive the business, and of course, the ethnic pressure group that, through the media, screams injustice! — not when that ‘injustice’ favours it, but only when it hurts its interest!

    That, of course, brings the discourse to “elite consensus”, which at once animated the gathering.  But how can that be, in a people who seldom agree on any basics?

    In the glory days of regionalism, which nolstagia is firing the present clamour for restructuring, the Sardauna’s government named key projects after the northern premier: Ahmadu Bello University, Ahmadu Bello Stadium.

    But could Awo, in the West, have named the University of Ife and Liberty Stadium (both which ironically now bear his name) without the West convulsing with an earthquake of “nepotism and cronyism”?  Or, for that matter, Zik, in the East?

    In the waste years of military rule, Sani Abacha’s grand thievery was settled.  Yet, to this day, landmarks named for him still stand.  It’s doubtful if such could hold in the South West.

    Even in the present corruption hurly-burly, not many Yoruba would rationalize Baba Olu Falae’s alleged obtainment.  Yet, a good number of Igbo would jump out demonstrating that “our brothers”, Olisa Metuh and Ike Ekweremadu, are being “persecuted”, even in a case before a court of law!

    How can you secure elite consensus, under such violently differing fundamentals?

    Although Adebanwi submitted that was still possible, citing the Awo era elite consensus of persuading parents to free farm hands to enjoy free primary education, in a basic agrarian society, Ripples insisted that, for Nigeria, that might just be a bridge too far.

    Yorubaland is like the Brits.  Though the English, the Scots and the Welsh may have differences, they are all tribesmen in the British nation.

    But Nigeria?  Not unlike putting Poles, Russians, the French, the Iberians, the Slavs, etc, in the same geographical enclave.  The natural elixir for that, it would appear, is federalism.

    Though Prof. Agbaje would play the purist, “complexifying” (in his own very words) the subject; and insisting Nigeria was technically no federation as Ripples had maintained, that hardly vitiates the point that the ideal, for a country like Nigeria, is federalism.

    At the end, however, even that little gathering could not agree on a consensus on elite consensus!  That, as it were, showed how complex the Nigerian situation is!

    Still, there are settled virtues, that make humanity thrive: honesty, diligence, fair play, equity, justice, empathy, etc.  If only the Nigerian elite are settled on these fundamentals, Nigeria’s so-called complexity may, open sesame, just disappear!

  • To each system its dress code

    To each system its dress code

    There was a time in Nigeria, not very long ago, where one’s religion hardly mattered in the scheme of things.  It was neither a bar nor a boon to social, political or career advancement.  It was not the prism through which the content and intent of public policy was endlessly refracted and diffracted, nor was it the template for judging the motivations of policy-makers.

    During the First Republic, the Northern premier Sir Ahmadu Bello, Sardauna of Sokoto, who traced his lineage directly from Umanu Dan Fodiyo, founder of the Sokoto Caliphate and in a way, the spearhead of an epic, sub-continental coup, the reverberations of which are still felt across the Sahel today, had around him Russell Dikko, Michael Audu Buba, Jolly Tanko Yusuf, Sunday Awoniyi, the Zakaris and the Donlis and many Christians who played key roles in his administration.

    Yakubu Gowon and Ishaya Audu and Yakubu Danjuma and the Miller brothers and sisters felt perfectly at home and in the walled city and in their places of worship.

    In the West, Chief Awolowo built a first-rate civil service in which neither religion, nor political affiliation for that matter, played any part.  Even if you did not belong to the ruling Action Group, As Sam, later Professor Aluko, did not, you got a scholarship if you qualified for one.  You were being educated to serve the Region and its people, not the ruling party.

    And although he was by faith a Christian, he established a (Muslim) Pilgrims Welfare Board,  the first of its kind in Nigeria, to cater to the interests of Muslims performing the hajj.  There were no complaints of “marginalization” from the Muslim community which made up roughly one-half the population.

    In the East, there were no contending faiths, only healthy competition among various Christian denominations to provide education through institutions subsidized by theRegional Government led by Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe.

    In theSecond Republic, Lagosians did not care that Governor Lateef Jakande and his deputy, the late Rafiu Jafojo, were Muslims.  The people were content to judge them by their performance, which was in many respects outstanding.

    In the President Shehu Shagari’s time, it was said that one of his close personal aides, Michael Prest, felt so alienated from the tight Muslim circle surrounding his principalthat he converted to Islam and changed his first name to Mikhail – or was it Mukaila?  But such instances were rare.

    At his first coming in 1984, no one cared that Muhammadu Buhari and his deputy, Tunde Idiagbon, belonged to the same Muslimfaith; their dourness – I named them the Dour Duo, and the label stuck — was what made them remarkable, not their faith.

    The Muslim-Muslim ticket of Bashorun Moshood Abiola and Babagana Kingibe, we now know indissolubly, won the 1993 presidential election. In the national convulsion that followed the annulment, the Christian community stood up much more robustly than the Muslim community for the validation of the poll.

    It was not until some five weeks into the debacle that the Sultan of Sokoto and titular head of      the he Muslim community in Nigeria finally roused himself to urge military president Ibrahim Babangida todo the right thing and uphold the election.

    Some two weeks later, Dasuki disavowed the statement, claiming that it had beenissued by his secretary without authorization, and further that Abiola had urged the international community to levy war on Nigeria, which no true Muslim would do.

    Abiola had done no such thing.

    Most recently in Lagos, who, in Lagos, who, apart from some desperate attention-seekers beholden to the hugely discredited Bode George, cared about what faith Governor Bola Tinubu and his successor, Babatunde Raji Fashola, practised?

    That was then.

    Today, religion has acquired higher salience in every aspect of national life  and I am not just talking about the industrial scale it has assumed, the vast stretches of highway that serve as camps of dedication and revival, the shop fronts that formerly catered to the fancies of well-heeled clients in tony neighbourhoods now converted to healing and miracle centres,  and once- bustling factories and warehouses that now serve as thriving mega-churches, or high clergy serving as bag men for corrupt public officials.

    Announce apublic appointment today, and the first thing some people will want to know is where the person comes from, followed closely whether he is a Christian or a Muslim, not how well qualified for the job he or she is. Announce the arrest of a perpetrator, and there is immediate speculation about his or her ethnicity or religious affiliation, as if they are correlated.

    I exaggerate here, but not by much.

    Wherever you turn, there is religion, or religiosity; you find itbeing manipulated to serve all kinds of ends, mostly ignoble and profane No wonder there is such great dysfunction in society,  and so little conformity with the value system as we knew it.

    So much religion, so little righteousness.

    And in the face of this crisis, what is the solution most frequently prescribed?

    More religion.  Intensify and widen religious instruction the schools.  Hand back to their rightful owners the schools that various governments seized from voluntary agencies and turned into the godless institutions that breed the anomie and chaos that are all around us.

    The foregoing, pardon its long-windedness, is my point of entry into the crisis roiling the State of Osun over the dress code in public schools —those schools established and funded by the state and administered by agents of the state, as distinct from parochial institutions established by religious bodies to advance their creed or to achieve a particular set of objectives recognized               by the state.

    The state is proprietorof the public school and at the same time stands in loco parentis to the students.  It is responsible for setting standards of conduct and behavior, and for maintaining discipline. The school uniform is a crucial instrument in attaining these goals.  It identifies the person wearing it as a bona fide member of that particular community, subject to its rules and regulations and fully deserving of is protection. Its ordinariness – no frills and no frippery – secures no personal advantage for anyone but guarantees broad equality of treatment for all.

    It is also an instrument of control.  The school is not obliged to admit into its premises anyone not wearing the prescribed uniform.  If it once had religious symbolism, the school uniform in public schools now has only a functional value.

    When students turn report to school in all manner of clothing like masquerades, contrary to what the authorities stipulate, they undermine discipline and control and create distraction that undermines teaching and learning.

    The school uniform serves basically the same purposes in parochial schools, though the religious symbolism is stronger.  It is a constant reminder of their faith, of their being set apart from adherents of other faiths; in short, of their specialness in the eyes of the deity they worship.

    That is their prerogative, and the modern state not only respects but guarantees it.  However, you cannot voluntarily enroll in such schools and then turn round to complain that the dress code violates your rights or offends your sensibilities.

    No legal issues arise here; so long as the dress code and other rules are not inconsistent with the fundamental human rights consecrated in the Constitution, and with what ordinary decency enjoins, they should not be open not to challenge.

    The same reasoning should apply, mutatis mutandis, to the dress code in public institutions. No one is compelled to attend a public school.  Those who choose to do so should wear the prescribed uniform or go seek an education elsewhere.

    To each system, then, its dress code.

    A final thought.

    Let all creeds and faiths and sects agree, in the spirit of ecumenism, to replace Islamic Religious Knowledge and Christian Religious Knowledge as currently taught in our schools with Comparative Religion.

  • Osun: Another pseudo-storm

    Osun: Another pseudo-storm

    Leaders Beware: Christian or Muslim, you may find this piece irreverent, since Ripples does not particularly care about Hijab or any religious frock.

    These wears are a cultural imposition that came with these foreign faiths.

    But Ripples is adamant on fairness and equity — and so should any fair mind — particularly when it concerns structural injustice.  That looks “fair” just because it had “been there” for so long!

    That alone drove this intervention in the current Osun Hijab pseudo-storm.

    What was the basis of “secular” uniforms in Nigerian schools? Lagos of the 19th Century, as captured by Prof. Michael Echeruo in his book, Victorian Lagos, may well offer a glimpse.

    “Lagos remained almost thoroughly a ‘Christian’ community,” quipped the Revd. Mojola Agbebi, a radical Christian cleric, in Victorian Lagos.  “Its government was British and so, Christian; its elite was educated and so also Christian.  The mass of the people were, however, ‘uneducated’ and pagan (read African traditional worship).”

    “In between,” he continued, “came the Muslim community, but, for a long time, it had neither the political nor economic power to enforce an appropriate position for itself in Lagos life.”

    Meanwhile, the Lagos official census, by 1891, was: 10, 269 Christians, 21, 103 Muslims and 54, 230 pagans (again, read African Traditional worshippers), according to Victorian Lagos (page 82).

    Still pushing the Agbebi analogy, the Lagos government was British — and Christian.  So, its mode of operations, routine work and rest days, public holidays, as well as its education policy — and school administration — was Christian.

    If the school administration was Christian, then it logically follows the uniform prescribed for the schools would be Christian.  So, the uniforms were as “secular” as their British (read Christian) origin allowed.

    Indeed, it wasn’t until February 1899 that the Lagos government — thanks to the efforts of Liberian Edward Blyden, who worked in the Lagos service as Political Agent for Native Affairs, but resigned in 1898 — that the Lagos government introduced a government-sponsored Lagos Muslim School.  Dr. Blyden, though himself a Christian, was champion of Muslim education.

    To Dr. Blyden’s memory, from grateful Lagos, is the Edward Blyden Memorial Primary School, Lafiaji, Lagos — which, as kids on Lagos Island in the early 1970s, we used to mock as “Edo Foro”, somewhat punning Edward for Edo (Yoruba for liver).

    But even that school, like other public schools back then, was run as a “secular” school, hinged on Euro-Christian tradition!

    Why that disproportionate domination?  Simple.  Christianity (back then, less than 100 years in Africa) came with colonial empire building.  Islam (which, quoting Agbebi again, had been around for 1003 years) came with trans-Africa Arab trade.  But both were foreign doctrines.

    While trade might cohabit with local culture, if the cash is right, imperialism imposes its own.  But aside from a Christian-led government, Christian missionaries pioneered running schools.  So, even when Muslim missions later followed suit, the European concept of the school uniform was well-neigh settled.

    So long for the much vaunted secularity!

    As it was with Lagos, then the British colonial capital, it is with Federal Nigeria.

    On the balance, even with the Muslim lobby’s Arabic scrawl on Nigeria’s currency and their gamely push to brand their faith as the religion of power of independent Nigeria, British colonization has ensured much of the country’s so-called “secularity” had Euro-Christian roots.

    Yet, Nigeria has a huge Muslim population.  In the name of equity, don’t Muslims too have rights, of self-expression, under the law?

    That tucks the matter back to the Osun Hijab controversy.

    Since an Osogbo high court ruled that Muslim girls could wear the Hijab as accessory to their uniforms in public schools, an emotive army has been screaming : it’s secularity or nothing! But whose secularity?

    On this score, some newspapers have written editorials, exhibiting the disturbing penchant, of the Nigerian contemporary press, to brandish specious analysis as the zenith of rigour!  They also leave themselves open to not unfair accusations of anti-Muslim bias.

    The Punch editorial was predictable: arrogant, bigoted, total and sweeping!  It was an unabashed beatification of its well-executed agenda of editorial mischief, nay diktat, against Aregbesola and his Osun government.

    You doubt?  Check how the newspaper always slants its Osun stories, towards its favorite cauldron of religious Armageddon!

    In a buzz of self-praise over a self-fulfilling prophecy, the newspaper even growled at the Osun government to junk its education reforms, simply because the chaffing, all-mighty Punch balks!

    But the Osun government need not be dismayed.  If you search the literatures enough, many a newspaper would have roared at Chief Obafemi Awolowo that he was wasting time and resources, executing his epochal free primary education programme.  But history is a wiser judge!

    But perhaps The Punch suffers some structural defects?  How many of its Editorial Board members are Muslims, for instance?

    And how many there, are imbued with enough sensitivity to delicately approach this debate?  Or even the scholarly humility to research the root of Muslim rights in a so-called secular Nigeria, beyond the baying rage of an all-knowing and all-wise crusader!

    The Nation too wrote an editorial on the matter, on which Ripples also disagrees.

    After all the excitement, however, a court has passed a verdict many feel is controversial.  But when a party disagrees with a judgment, due process demands appeal, not resort to self-help.  To endorse self-help under any guise, particularly when the so-called secularity of school uniforms is founded on smoke, is indeed tragic.

    But the conceptual mischief — if not outright and wilful confusion — in the brouhaha beggars belief!  The huffing Osun Christian elements scrambled their children and wards to school with a pot-pourri of Christian worship cloaks: soutanes, surplices, choir robes!

    But can all these be defended as the  normal, everyday wear for Christian girls, the way the Hijab is a Muslim girl’s, 24 hours-a-day?

    And now, parting shots — from Christian voices of Victorian Lagos.

    First Bishop James Johnson, “Holy Johnson” in Lagos church history and moderate cleric.  He was Saro with Ijebu roots.  But he talked of the Ijebu contempt, for 19th century local Christians’ British affectations — “long trousers, shoes and socks, and … umbrellas,” English customs that came with the gospel.

    And the iconoclastic Mojola Agbebi: “… the white man’s names, the white man’s dress, are so many non-essentials, so many props and crutches affecting the religious manhood of the Christian African”

    That about captures Ripples’ attitude to zealots on both sides of the divide: you can still practice your faith without becoming either a western or Arab caricature.  Still, everyone has a right to express themselves, their own way.

    The Hijab controversy is, therefore, a mere symptom.  The real disease is the skewing of Nigeria’s official public life against Muslims, no thanks to the British  (read Christian) imperial legacy.

    Nigeria’s so-called secularity is a near-farce, being Christian-driven.  So, Muslims too have a right to be integrated into that “secularity”.

    That is the tale of the Osun Hijab — and the Nigerian state should listen; and make amends.

    That is what is fair and equitable to all.

     

  • Matters miscellaneous

    Matters miscellaneous

    Can you for a moment imagine what Nigeria would be going through now if Dr Goodluck Jonathan had not gone down to defeat in last year’s Presidential election – defeat so heavy that he could not refuse to concede?

    For one thing, the massive looting of public resources that we must now regard as a fundamental objective and directive principle of state policy in his time would never have come to light, or would have done so when it no longer mattered.  Or again, it would have been portrayed as the contrivance of the usual detractors too far gone in their malevolence or envy to perceive, much less appreciate, the great transformation occurring all round them.

    But even his most unyielding detractor will have to concede that Dr Jonathan, whom no one has  ever accused of possessing a fine sense of discrimination despite his advanced training in ichthyology, was right on this one. What took place was stealing pure and simple, unworthy of being dignified as corruption, even though in Dr Jonathan’s book, the latter was the greater crime, the former apparently rating no higher than third-degree malfeasance.

    Just when you think you have heard the ultimate revelation, the next day brings forth disclosures that make the totality of what had been reported stolen earlier seem benign, almost edifying even. By some conservative reckoning, as much as one half of the GDP may have been stolen during each year Dr Jonathan held office.

    But you cannot blame Dr Jonathan for that.

    “My approach to corruption,” (read “stealing”) “was don’t make any money available to anyone to touch,” he told Bloomberg TV New York, after a speech at Bloomberg Studios in London and reported in The Guardian (Lagos).

    There you have it.

    Jonathan fought corruption by simply refusing to make money “available to anyone to touch,” persuaded that if you can’t touch it, you can’t steal it.  In the digital age, it is indeed true that a great deal of stealing occurs in cyberspace, with the touch of a button on a computer keypad or the swiping of an electronic card.

    But much of the thieving that occurred under Jonathan’s administration was of the old-fashioned kind, like officials presenting handwritten notes at the Central Bank and driving off with billions of dollars stashed in cartons, or having one-half of the payroll for an entire agency delivered to their homes every month for several years, or burying millions of dollars in make-believe septic tanks in their homes.

    According to the best authorities, if Dr Jonathan had not pursued the tight-money policy that made money unavailable for touching, Nigeria’s entire GDP, plus some, will have been stolen each year he was in office.

    And there would have been nothing left to execute his Transformation Agenda, the fruits of which are all around us, not least the glut in food production and the millions of new farm jobs he talked about in the Bloomberg interview, thanks to the electronic wallet scheme that delivered fertilisers directly to farmers even in the most remote villages, cutting out the massive corruption that had paralysed the distribution chain.

    I am in a position to announce that, in the years ahead, Dr Jonathan will be giving the world the benefit of his unique approach to fighting corruption  — just don’t make money available for anyone to touch – by way of a Distinguished Lecture Series he has graciously agreed to teach online, under the auspices of The Goodluck Ebele Azikiwe Jonathan School of Public Management and Finance at the Federal University of Otuoke, where he is set to be named the Dame Patience Faka Jonathan Distinguished Professor of Public Service.

    Be sure to tell prospective enrollees that you first learned about the programme from this column.

    Prime Minster David Cameron must be ruing the day he promised to organise a referendum to determine, once and for all, whether the UK should remain in the European Union or quit.  He didn’t do it on a whim; he calculated that a “yes” vote would silence all the sniping on the Tory back bench and unite the party behind him.

    In the event, the Brexiteers won a narrow victory – a plurality of less than 2 percent, with 30 million subjects or roughly 70 percent of the population voting.  But it is a victory with likely consequences so far-reaching that we can only glimpse their hazy out lines now.  It may well go down as the day when everything changed for the residents of those sceptred isles.

    A week later, the “United Kingdom” seems anything but united and not much of a kingdom. Those who “won” seem only slightly less confused than those who “lost.”  There is no great rejoicing in the streets.  It is almost as if the people had sleepwalked through the whole thing

    But trust the Brits.  They will muddle through this one, as they have always done.  It is not for nothing that they invented the science of muddling through.

    Every major development elsewhere has a way of turning Nigerians into more than detached observers and leading them to draw parallels with their homeland.  The Brexit referendum was   no exception.

    A Nigerian election or referendum in which winner and loser are separated by less than two percentage points would most certainly have been declared “inconclusive.”  Even a poll won by a far higher margin would still have been declared inconclusive if the authorities chose not to proclaim the results.  And there would have been no shortage of arguments to support the claim that it was incurably inconclusive.

    I am reminded again of the June 12, 1993 presidential election in which the Social Democratic Party (SDP) and the National Republican Convention (NRC) were the contestants.  The winner of the poll, so said       a front-page editorial in the New Nigerian, the fully-funded official mouthpiece of the Northern Establishment and whichever among its factions was running the country, was Arthur Nzeribe’s misbegotten Association for a Better Nigeria (ABN), which was not even a party to the election.

    How so?

    Because, said the New Nigerian, ABN’s phantom registered membership of 25 million which had stayed home on Election Day as instructed by Nzeribe, outnumbered almost 2:1 those registered electors who had voted for the SDP and the NRC.

    And that was by no means the most trifling argument that led a large swathe of the public to accept that the election was indeed inconclusive.

    Finally, at the risk of sounding boorish, I have to ask again whether Senate President Bukola Saraki cares about anybody or anything other than Saraki, and whether he knows the difference between statesmanship and careerism.

    That he has been standing trial charged with perjury is scandal enough.  Now, based on a police report, he has been charged with complicity in the forgery of documents that created the path through which he and Deputy Senate President Ike Ekweremadu carried out their hostile takeover of the institution.

    Saraki is praying the court to stand the letter proceedings down, on the ground that simultaneous prosecution will imperil his right to a fair trial and the performance of his constitutional duties.

    Our laws presume .an individual innocent until he or she is proven guilty.  But in other climes whose traditions and usages Saraki claims to embrace, that presumption always yields to the far higher principle of noblesse oblige.

    Saraki can still earn himself an honourable place in Nigeria’s history by bowing to this hallowed principle instead of clinging desperately to his career – such as it is – through employing the tawdriest contrivances e’er devised by the best lawyers that money can buy.

  • Moment of truth

    Moment of truth

    For now, Nigerians can at least heave a sigh of relief that the long-running but rather unproductive debate about the value of the naira has finally come to an end. Just imagine; while the debate lasted, everything –from ordinary household decisions to weightier matters of the macro-economy- was kept on hold. It was like the budget circus all over again. Overnight, everything and everyone became endangered: the hordes of student-migrants in Europe and Americas who suddenly discovered that they could no longer process the so-called ‘Form A’ for their tuitions; the manufacturer who, after completing the rites of filling the ‘Form M’ and shelling out millions of naira to the bargain found that they had no forex  to buy; not least the trader caught in the trap of the 41 items declared ‘no go’ by Emefiele’s CBN; the latter stood no chance in the world of getting the scarce commodity from authorized sources.

    Yes, while it lasted, there were enough alibis for different actors to manufacture. Nigeria’s world, we are told, was falling apart. As one might imagine, there was enough blame to go round: the CBN for not making forex available; the government for being clueless in the face of unprecedented meltdown; manufacturers for being hung on forex while doing pretty little about backward integration. Lest I forget – our students, forced to travel abroad for obvious reasons of limited opportunities and poor standards – were told to return home. Never mind that an estimated two million sat for barely six hundred thousand spaces in our entire tertiary institutions. Yes, they can come back home to farm!

    Mercifully, all of that is now over. Thanks to Emefiele’s Pauline conversion, the naira is on the float. With an average of N285, you can you have the United States dollars to your heart’s content. For the time being, we can conveniently dispense with the mathematics of forex’s slowing accretion. With$26 billion in the reserves, an amount sufficient to cover five months of imports gravy, CBN Governor Emefiele reckons that the country will do just fine – considering that the global threshold is three months. That is supposed to be some consolation. Nigerians can enjoy the respite while it lasts!

    As we would soon be finding out, there is more than enough to worry about. Indeed, the mathematics of forex accretion, as many will soon find out, is everything. To the extent that the current course depends on the ebb of the petro-dollar, we have merely postponed the evil day. Today, we know how much of petro-dollars we can count upon. Pray as we might for quick recovery of oil prices, it seems unlikely that the supplication will be answered anytime in the near term. But that is not even near the potion of affliction waiting to be served by Niger Delta’s rampaging youths sworn to teach Nigeria the final lesson.

    The other worry is of course the so-called real sector. Like I noted last week, it is probably chic to pretend that the problem of the sector started yesterday – that it began and ended forex. How convenient!

    Sometimes, I am tempted to ask if we have anything that could be described as the real sector. Yes, we have dozens of so-called manufacturers, supposedly big time players. Unfortunately, only in moments like this are they revealed for who they are: packaging outfits or assembly lines! Yes, they need forex for machineries and spares. But that’s not the only reason they need forex: to transfer capital!Yes, they are a group – weaned on government largesse hence not known to be creative or think outside the box!

    Pity the small and medium scale industries; in an environment marked by infrastructural inadequacy and institutional indifference, they stand no chance.  Sorry.

    None unfortunately, compares with the pathetic federal government. Yes, the federal government is the chief culprit. It has not only betrayed a terrible understanding of the challenge but has proven increasingly at sea on how to go about the job of fixing the economy. Describing the current charadeas a rod ofaffliction, in the circumstance,is an understatement.

    Of course, we are in a dire emergency. Only the Buhari administration, with its snail-pace governance style, pretends otherwise. Today, we know for a fact that four out every youth is either unemployed or under-unemployed. Electricity supply is today a rarity; our roads belong in the 19th century or worse; it is certainly no exaggeration to say that the country has since abandoned any pretensions to aspiring to modernity.

    Moments like this make comparison compelling. One recalls that the mediocre Shagari administration in the 1980’s had the good sense to come up with an Economic Stabilisation Act when trouble loomed.At least that was some psychological motion! The late President Umaru Yar’Adua even threatened to declare an emergency on the power sector. That at least was borne of the understanding of the moment.

    What do we have today? Plenty of motions without any real movement. As it appears, none of the economic indices seems sufficient to stoke the panic button. It is, as they say in popular lingo: It’s all correct!Not the economy that contracted by four percent in the first quarter; not the spate of factory closures; the soar-away inflation that have bowled households over; not the hybrid of youth restiveness  described as militancy; not even the curtain of darkness thrown on the nation by the inept power utility firms seems sufficient enough to jolt the administration to action.

    It’s like things can go on like this forever.

    In case this federal government forgot: Nigerians didn’t elect them to find excuses; they were elected to fix the problems. Today, if the administration has any grand ideas about solving the nation’s multifarious problems, it is yet to avail Nigerians of them. As Nigerians are wont ask: if it takes a thousand years to prepare for an inevitable madness, how many years will the lunacy last?

    From the budget circus and now to the farcical forex play; where do we go next? Where?

  • Finally, the naira floats

    Finally, the naira floats

    Poor Godwin Emefiele. Last Wednesday, he finally caved in to the strident demands to let go of the apex bank’s hold on the foreign exchange market. The CBN document, ‘’Framework for Re-introduction of Managed Float Exchange Rate System” finally puts closure on the long-drawn debate on what the value of the naira should be and what role the apex bank should play in determining its value vis-à-vis major international currencies.  By that, the 16-month-long “managed” exchange rate under which our currency, the naira traded at N197 to the US dollar came to what is perhaps a long-expected end.

    Given the forces arrayed against Emefiele’s Central Bank of Nigeria, the odds that the bank could have held out came to one in a million. If the apex bank had thought that the threat of imminent depletion of the nation’s store-house of foreign currency called for understanding, or some drastic measures of sorts given thedire economic circumstances, that view was obviously not shared.

    The story, as sold, is familiar: the market worked best when allowed to allocate the resources. Never mind that the resource is forex whose inflow had come under intense strain as a result of falling oil prices and a vastly reduced output. Never mind that the Nigerians’ appetite for forex as indeed for all manners of imports havegone on the hyper mode – and this inexplicably. For our hordes of portfolio investors, the club of flight by night investors, the throng of airline operators who insist on being on first line charge on the increasingly limited reserves, the gospel must be – relax all controls on forex market to enable operators repatriate their remittance or their capital as the case might be!

    Trust our arm chair analysts noted for their preference to turn logic on its head, the argument went on and on that the restrictive monetary policies of the apex bank were behind the economy’s slowdown; that because the apex bank refused to throw the naira to the hounds was why nothing worked – or is working. For the manufacturers who had all these years to integrate their operations backward to gain long term strategic advantage but chose to be hung on imported raw materials, the problem was Emefiele. The sundry importers who traded in the 41-odd items declared ineligible by Emefiele’s CBN, surely, the man was insufferable!

    In the end, it was sufficient to pretend that the problem started yesterday; or that business could go on as usual;that the stock of the reserves which tumbled from $60 billion eight years ago to $48.174 billion five years after and which is currently down to barely $27 billion would somehow self-adjust.

    In the circumstance, the otherplausible argument that the current forex restriction was borne of an exigency – didn’t matter.From the delinquent Broad Street actors to dwellers of the nation’s decapitated industrial alleys, not forgetting the agents of foreign capital for whom the extant forex regime was sweet poison – all egged on by the meddlesome undertaker, the International Monetary Fund; the chorus was the same: the extant forex regime had to go after which all things are supposed to return tonormalcy!  The marketers, as they say in parliamentary lingo, have it!

    My bet: we have the coming weeks to find out who is right or damn right myopic!

    Now, let’s be clear – there is nothing mystical, or if you like, esoteric in the value of a nation’s currency.The conventional position is that it reflects acountry’s economic base particularly its ability to export and hence earn foreign exchange.But then, such position also flies in the face of other strategic considerations known to influence the direction of currency movements.

    On the first, it is not hard to explain that Nigeria did well in the past only because the good fortune of oil smiled on her: at a roaring oil price of $100-plus per barrel for years during which the nation’s foreign reserves threatened to burst it seam, the naira could hold steady whether or not the so-called non-oil sector performed.  As for the second, ask the Chinese;the Americans and the Asiatic; these countries know better than waste productive time debating whethermarket or policy underlies their interminable currency wars! They have been taught to not just to recognise the forces of national interests at work or playbut to be ahead of competition no matter what!

    What’s wrong with the extant restrictive regime? Nothing – if you ask me – except that the Buhari administration treated it as an end in itself. In other words, those who accuse the administration and by extension, the CBN of being needlessly obdurate in resisting the earlier call to let the naira float are right only to the extent that it became a stand-alone policy.  Don’t forget the problem: forex was scarce and supplyincreasingly finite; and what was available was under the threat of depletion.

    That takes us to the latest measures by the CBN. To begin with, I find the whole exertions on the value of the naira highlydiversionary. Again, if you ask me, I’ll say that the debate stems from a fundamental misdiagnosis of the problem. Far from what appears to be the current obsession with forex management, the problem, more fundamental touches on the ability of the economy to renew itself. As this column is wont to say, the problem comes down to the tragedy of a nation that relies on a single commodity for all its forex; one that spends a disproportionate chunk of its forex on imports.

    As far as I know, there are two legs to solving the current problem. The first part which is the easier part isto curb the imports. That, apparently was what the CBN attempted to do when it precluded 41 items from accessing forex through the official window. Unfortunately, in the absence of a coherent programme of import substitution either in the short, medium or long term, the nation’s expectation of self-reliance soon turned to waiting for Godot!

    The lesson: Import restriction does not automatically translate to a nation’s capacity to produce the goods!

    The other leg – which is the harder part – is to produce for export. That obviously requires a broad strategy – something far beyond the pale of the current regime of naira’s floatation.

    As for the winners of the latest CBN measures, there is no prize for guesing: the club of importers, currency speculators, portfolio investors – of course, the airlines whose equivalent of $500 million dollars cannot be transferred under the extant regime; they will surely be be happy. Dont’s ask me where it will lead!

    By the way, where in the world did the idea come that a relaxation of forex rules will bring the nation’s moribund factories to life?

  • So long, MKO?

    So long, MKO?

    So long, MKO.

    that appears the not-so-veiled message, from Basorun Moshood Kashimawo Olawale (MKO) Abiola’s native South West, on his June 12, 1993 presidential election annulment heroism — 23 years after the rest of Nigeria had moved on.

    To start with, the Eastern-most reaches of Yorubaland are too trapped in reaction to remember such a tragic epoch, which nevertheless secured the current democratic order.

    In Ondo, Olusegun Mimiko has flirted with progressivism, frolicked with conservatism and made his final, blissful peace with reaction.

    It is no surprise he wouldn’t be bothered by June 12, and whatever its political symbolism is.

    In Ekiti, noisy Ayodele Fayose, gubernatorial equivalent of the empty barrel that makes most noise, is so deafened by his own grating he won’t even “hear” the wind of June 12 whistle past him.

    In central Yorubaland, of Oyo and Osun, however, came some ironic reassurance.  Ironic, because here, political conservatism is strongest in the  South West; and political reactionaries are in no short supply.  Many of these reactionaries openly nailed MKO’s mandate, even while it was still hot!

    Yet, it was this seeming bastion of conservatism — not to talk of reaction — that kept faith with MKO’s memory and supreme sacrifice, by declaring  the next day work-free, after June 12 fell on a Sunday.

    That fidelity comes with extra sweetness: Oyo, with Ibadan, its capital, is the culture and political capital of Yorubaland.

    And Osun, despite its lean purse and the plain mischief of negative branding on the religious front, approximates most, by its developmental policies and programmes, the Awo exemplar of a welfare state, as well as how MKO’s presidency could have panned out, in people-centred social democracy.

    Lagos, the South West super mart, made wonderful foxtrots on the day — June 12.

    But on Monday?  Alas!  Lagos was back at its frenetic hustle.  As they say, “L’ojo Monday, Eko o ni gbagba ku gba!” (On Mondays, Lagos brooks no nonsense).  Eko hustle is no respecter of June 12!

    But it was in MKO’s native Ogun that the June 12 no-show was most galling.  Aside from a low-key procession on the day, there was no work-free day.

    But maybe that June 12 quiet, on the Ogun front, was no surprise —  after all, Abeokuta, of MKO’s nativity, produced two personalities that helped to foil Abiola’s mandate; and to sustain the annulment.

    Olusegun Obasanjo worked more for setting up the Interim National Government (ING) Trojan horse, than revalidating the election; and Ernest Shonekan, another Egba son, assumed subversive duty as “Interim Head of State”, on account of that contraption, that a court later declared illegal.

    Yet, it is such exhibition of near-zero institutional memory, as Ogun crassly showed, that condemns contemporary Nigeria to repeating avoidable mistakes!

    Well, if Nigeria appears done with MKO — supreme sacrifice be damned! — is MKO done with Nigeria?

    Hardly!  And the unfolding political developments are grave indicators.

    In 1993, Abiola, a Yoruba man, won a clean pan-Nigeria mandate — the cleanest in Nigerian history.

    But the rest of Nigeria banded with some military renegades, led by Gen. Ibrahim Babangida, to annul that election and sustain that crime; using ethnic slurs to tar the South West rally for justice.

    Not a few believed it was a northern plot.  But the North countered IBB and co represented nobody but their power-crazed selves.

    Still, that belief set off a chain of events that though led to the restoration of democracy, forced the North to steer clear of the Presidency.

    That process would climax with the willy-nilly coronation of Goodluck Jonathan as Nigeria’s first minority president, but not without opposition from some treasonable northern elements, in the last days of President Umaru Yar’Adua.

    In 2015, Muhammadu Buhari, a Fulani northerner, won another epochal mandate.  For the first time in Nigeria, the opposition routed the ruling order for federal power.

    But a minority from the South-South (witness the so-called Niger Delta Avengers), with not-so-veiled sympathy from the South East, is launching armed economic sabotage to frustrate, if not scuttle outright, that free mandate.

    It’s a classic but tragic retardation, only a Nigeria could muster!

    By the June 12 plot, a majority power clique, nay criminals, suborned the rest of Nigeria to thwart an election globally hailed as very clean; and levy a war of intimidation against Abiola and his native South West.

    But by 2016, that rascality had morphed into a minority plot — by sore election losers from the Niger Delta — inducing the fond among the majority South East, against the rest of Nigeria.

    This extant plot wagers, rather stupidly, that by bombing soft oil installations, and melting into the swamps, it could bend the rest of Nigeria to its sinister will!

    In Nigeria’s rotten cosmos of equal-opportunity injustice, impunity is going ga-ga!

    South West won a mandate but the rest of Nigeria clobbered it into surrendering it.  Now, South-South lost a mandate, but it fancies it could clobber the rest of Nigeria to, willy-nilly, reverse that loss.

    The moral?  Impunity is bad, no matter its source: majority or minority.

    Besides, there is a bit of karma creeping in here.

    You don’t throw a man into the can (from which he didn’t come out alive), kill his wife by state-sponsored terror, ruin his multi-billion Naira business and throw his family into disarray — just because he won a free election.

    Yet, that is Nigeria’s crime against MKO.  Only the most tragically deluded would, therefore, assume Nigeria, without doing right by the man, would live happily ever after!

    That takes the matter right back to MKO and a putative South West retreat, over the grave injustice done the man.

    But why might the South West retreat over the Abiola matter?  Because they have a bit of federal power?  That would be both asinine and ungrateful — and the Yoruba pristine world belies both.

    That is why the South West must press for Abiola’s right, even if posthumously, now that it has a rare influence at the centre.

    Though MKO didn’t consummate his presidency, the Nigerian state must work out some apology, followed by official recognition of his foiled tenure — and the South West must unapologetically lead that push.

    By that, Nigeria would officially repudiate the grave injustice of June 12.

    And to the spiritual: also appease the raging ghost of MKO, which continues to hover over the polity.

  • A nuclear scientist at the crossroads

    A nuclear scientist at the crossroads

    At the height of its power and fame and fortune, the PDP never let a bragging right pass it by.  So, it came as no surprise when, without fear, without research and without evidence of any kind, it proclaimed itself Africa’s biggest political party.

    I suspect that it arrived at that conclusion by a species of deductive reason that runs somewhat like this:  The PDP is the biggest political party in Nigeria.  Nigeria is the biggest country in Africa.  It must follow, that the PDP is the biggest party in Africa.

    So, when during one of its accustomed upheavals the PDP landed a nuclear scientist as its national secretary, one expected the appointment to be announced with, at the very least, the kind of publicity that would introduce to the world stage a new Secretary- General of the United Nations, more so since that organisation has never succeeded in attracting a nuclear scientist to that post.

    But the announcement was muted.  It merely named the new chap in Wadata Plaza as Professor Wale Oladipo.  It was totally silent on what he professes.  For all the reader knew, Oladipo could have been a professor of Chinese history or a professor of lunar exploration.  Nothing in it suggested, however remotely, that he is a nuclear scientist.

    Not your usual home-grown bruiser, veteran of dozens of wars of intrigue, with the scars and stripes to prove that he is more than equal to the task, but a fresh-faced scientist steeped in the mores and best practices of the academy, a professor of Nuclear Analytical Techniques, no less.

    If they thought he was going to be a pushover, they soon knew better.  He stood his ground against the previous holder of the office, Prince Olagunsoye Oyinlola, who by sundry tactics tried to prevent him from settling in at Wadata Plaza.   But he must have been hugely relieved when Oyinlola said good riddance to the folks over there, or was it the other way around?

    Thereafter, little was heard of, or from Oladipo, until he dismissed General Muhammadu Buhari, then presidential candidate of the APC as a “semi-literate jackboot.”  Not exactly the kind of language you would expect from a nuclear scientist, even one who has taken a break from analysing with clinical detachment and utmost precision the most elusive particles in the cosmos; you do not expect him to get down and dirty in the waters murky world of politics.

    Then, attention shifted to Oladipo.  Who is he, really, and where is he coming from?  What positions has he held in the nuclear science establishment?  What books or scientific papers has he published?  Does he by any chance hold a patent?  If so,   for what product or process?

    His formal designation is professor of Nuclear Analytical Techniques, and his last known workplace address is the Centre for Energy Research and Development (CERD), at the Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ife. CERD would therefore seem to be the appropriate starting point for learning more about Professor Oladipo.

    At this writing, he does not figure on CERD’s web site.  I sent an email to CERD asking for information about him.  No luck.  I followed up with a phone call; no luck.  Perhaps it is CERD’s policy not to give out any information about their faculty and staff, for security reasons.  And CERD is nothing if not a national security facility.

    My Internet search turned out more information about Oladipo as PDP national secretary than about his scholarship in the arcane field of particle physics.  It also yielded more information about his time in prison custody with Iyiola Omisore in the investigation of the murder of the former Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, Chief Bola Ige, than about his scientific work.

    Even his home page, such as it is, says nothing about his education and the universities he attended.  There is no picture showing him at a nuclear facility, or at his study surrounded by books and scientific papers; no picture showing him with colleagues at a conference; none showing him in any scientific context whatsoever.

    The only picture of Oladipo that keeps bobbing up shows him attired in a nondescript tunic made from fabric stamped with the PDP’s colours.

    But this conspicuous absence proves nothing.

    Perhaps Oladipo is not the type who blows his own trumpet.   If his bibliography is not out there, it may be because of the sensitive nature of his scholarship, not because there is no bibliography to publish. Some breakthroughs are so sensitive that they are placed under the national security classification system.  In addition, all those who came up with the breakthrough are enjoined to secrecy.

    I will not be surprised that Professor Oladipo’s work belongs in that category.

    At any rate, he did not appear to miss his nuclear research lab.  He seemed perfectly at home in Wadata Plaza even after the PDP’s disastrous loss in the last general election.  Having boasted that it would rule for 60 unbroken years in the first instance, it held power for only16 years, remembered now as an era of excess, drift, and corruption on a scale beyond belief.

    When the PDP fell on hard times, unable to pay headquarters staff and carry out other functions without the hefty government handouts that had sustained it, staffers who could bale out did so.  Not Oladipo.  He dutifully found a way out.  One-half the employees got dismissal notices. The other half would have to put up with a 50 percent pay cut.

    He had not weathered the resulting storm when the PDP went into disarray.  It broke up into  two factions, each claiming to be the authentic one, and each with its own “national chairman” and a retinue of national officers.

    Last week, a rented crowd of one of the factions invaded Wadata Plaza and flushed out its occupants.  Among those chased out, according to media reports, was Professor Oladipo.   He was reported to be “visibly shaken” as he pleaded with the mob to allow him go get his car he had parked a discreet distance away from his office.

    But he has dismissed the report as a fabrication.  And he insists that as far as he is concerned, he remains a loyal member and supporter of the PDP.  Brave, loyal soul.  In this age of turncoats, there is a great deal to be said for loyalty.

    But his friends must tell Professor Oladipo that, by fighting to keep an identity as national secretary of the PDP – even if it is still the largest political party in Africa  — when he may well belong up there with Ernest Rutherford and Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg and Max Planck, he is carrying coyness too far.

    They should urge him to de-classify his bibliography, if only to awe the scoffers and turn them into admirers, to dust off his files and notebooks and start from where he took a break about a decade ago.  A great deal has happened in the field since then. They have nailed the Higgs boson, the holy grail of particle physics.  But there is still so much out there to discover and analyse in our expanding universe.

    The nuclear establishment, I gather, is eagerly awaiting the return to its fold of one of its crackerjack analysts.