The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tuesday

  • A new online media scourge

    A new online media scourge

    In the attentive media audience, passive readers and listeners abound.  But they are passive because they choose to be passive.  Those who are not so inclined can react to media fare almost instantly, react to other reactions, and generally keep going a public conversation the type that the German sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas drew on to conceptualise what he called the public sphere.

    In the analogue era, one would have had to write a letter to the editor of a newspaper for that purpose.  And of the dozens, sometimes hundreds of letters that arrive in the editor’s mailbag, only a handful gets published.  Not infrequently, what gets published is not exactly what the writer had in mind.  The submission is vetted for grammar, factualness and good taste, then  cut to fit into the available space

    In the digital era, the era of interactive media, anyone who can work an electronic mouse can post a response to a news story, feature, editorial, photo or article.  Space is not a constraint. It helps, but there is no obligation to be factual or courteous or even decent.  Out there, it is an unregulated, anarchic world, in which the writer has almost full control of his or her material.

    Much of the feedback is valuable.  Factual errors are pointed out, as are faulty reasoning; counter-arguments are laid out, other perspectives are explored, gaps are filled and language use is questioned, for the most part in an ameliorative spirit.  There is even the occasional commendation for fine execution.

    But a good deal of the feedback is often perverse and petulant.  Columnists and other commentators are excoriated for not doing what they had not set out to do.  Their academic and professional qualifications are called into question. Their looks are derided.  Their antecedents up to three generations back are vilified.  Name-calling, coarse and vulgar abuse and ethnic baiting are standard fare.

    Some writers are urged earnestly to go do something violent to themselves, like hugging  an electric transformer, getting crushed by Goodluck Jonathan’s transformation trains, or something even more lethal, all for the heinous crime of saying something that someone disagrees with, or for criticising a public figure from the respondent’s ethnic group.

    You know when the mail is the product of an organizsed effort.  There is a dreary sameness about the language.  Change a singular noun to the plural, transpose a phrase here and there,  throw in an advert elsewhere, and despite the various points of origin, which are for all practical purposes contrived, it is clear that some rented individuals are doing the writing at someone’s behest.

    The package usually comes spiced with maledictions of the blood-curdling kind. You need a strong stomach and shock-resistant sensibilities to attend to that kind of stuff for long.   Little about it is social; yet, this is the kind of thing one encounters daily on “social media” sites frequented by Nigerians.

    Please add that term to your repertoire of oxymorons.

    For, instead of serving as the digital-era equivalent of Habermas’s public sphere, it is often a hate-filled platform for trading insult and abuse and perpetuating prejudice.

    In his time, Goodluck Jonathan kept a battalion of writers of that kind of stuff, pollutants of the fountains of public discourse who, for want of any other distinction, usually styled themselves “public affairs commentators” or “public affairs analysts.”  Invariably they were based in Abuja.  I hear they have since been disbanded and have found no new patrons yet.

    But I digress.

    Now, a new scourge has descended upon the feedback loop of our online newspapers.

    When I go to my column online and find that as many as 10 readers have bothered to respond (most of the responses come as sms text messages) I feel gratified that the effort that went into writing it has not been wasted.

    But to my dismay, not one of the reactions is actually about the column.  If the authors of the so-called reactions read it at all, it made no impression on them.  What they are doing is pivoting in the column to advertise all manner of merchandise for sale.

    Here, by way of “response” to my last column, is Udom Mike, offering Dangote Cement at a “promo price of N1,100 per bag, and N4,000 for a bag or rice, directly from the factory.  No middlemen or middlewomen.  Minimum purchase of 100 bags of each commodity, please. And to facilitate purchase and delivery, Mike supplies the name and phone number of the contact person.

    Chief Awosoga Awoniyi warns readers “not to die in silence” when all their problems can be solved by Ifa.  Then he lists every disease known and unknown to medical science and promises to cure them with “instant results.”  He also promises to ensure that your pocket never dries, that you never ask without receiving, and that you get quick promotion at work, on a job so secure that you can swear by it.

    Awoniyi is no itinerant herbalist.  He runs a Healing Home (telephone number supplied) that you can visit for consultation.  Better to do that than to “die in silence”, you hear?

    Adebowale (Big Boss) Adeyi is offering Dangote 3X cement for N1, 100 per bag, ex factory, minimum purchase of 200 bags.  Consignment will be delivered within one day of requisition. Name and address of contact person supplied.

    Precious Balogun is offering different brands of rice — Royal Stallion, Royal Umbrella, Mama Africa,  Mama Gold, Ade Brazil, Rising Sun, Super Eagle — at a cheap rate, to be delivered anywhere in Nigeria.  Hurry up; prices quoted are valid for three months only from date of post, because of price instability. Tomato puree of various brands also available.

    Ambruce Tamunosiki, for Nigerian Customs Service, announces that the auctioning of impounded cars has commenced at the Nigerian Customs Border Head Office Command Zone 2, Owode Ewekoro/Custom House Border (phone number supplied).  Come take your pick, at the quoted prices among Toyota and Peugeot brands.

    Abdullahi Momammed is also offering cars impounded by Customs for sale, together with laptops, at cheap and affordable prices.  Marketing Zonal Officer Abdullahi Mohammed (retired) is standing by to help.  Phone number supplied.

    Enyi Enyi says to call Mr Bello Adams, the officer in charge, if you would like to own a choice vehicle at minimal cost.  The Nigerian Government, no less, is using the medium to bring to it to your notice that Tokunbo vehicles in its custody are being sold off.

    Abdullahi Aisha, who says he is advertising manager with the Nigerian Customs Service, is also putting on the auction block a large inventory of Customs-impounded cars.  Interested buyers please consult a Mr Bankole Adeyemi (phone number supplied.

    Paul Okoro is offering Dangote Cement direct from Obajana and Ibese factories for the promo price of just N1,000 per bag for purchases of 100 bags or more to individuals and distributors alike.  Nationwide delivery available; names and phone numbers of contact persons supplied.

    These crude and possibly fraudulent sales pitches are a gross perversion of the loop that is designed to provide useful feedback on media content.  You encounter these irritants on the sites of most of the online Nigerian newspapers and journals. Even if they were advertisements duly paid for, they would be no less irritating.  But they are nothing of the sort, just tawdry,  opportunistic stunts.

    Is there no way of ending this scourge?

     

  • To you, Biafra romantic

    To you, Biafra romantic

    From the communiqué’s chilly symbolism, of date and place of issue, it was clear: history was about repeating itself, but this time as grand farce.

    On 15 January 1970, the Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970) formally ended, though actual fighting did on January 13.  In Port Harcourt, to this day, the vexed issue of Civil War Igbo “abandoned property” remains a sore point.  Yet, from the same Port Harcourt came, on 15 January 2012, the communiqué.

    A nationwide Occupy Nigeria protest, over oil subsidy removal, had paralysed the country.   But from Annkio Briggs, a Niger Delta environmental activist who signed in as president, Agape Birthrights and convener, Niger Delta Occupy Niger Delta Resources (NDONDR), came the ringing declaration.

    It was a clear defiance of, if not outright cynical pun on, the Occupy Nigeria demonstrations.

    “We call on all our Niger Delta peoples, for the sake of our future,” it read in part, “to look to our nearest neighbours, the Igbos, for immediate and strong alliance to enable the Niger Delta nations and the Igbo nation to face the obvious change that will come to Nigeria, in strength, justice, brotherhood and truth.”

    And the rather sinister threat: “If Jonathan, a Niger Delta son is not good enough to govern Nigeria, the oil in his Niger Delta is not good enough for Nigeria.”

    It was the beginning of the end, though most did not see it then.  A newly elected president just lost his legitimacy.  A pan-Nigeria mandate, barely nine months from the 16 April 2011 presidential election, just doomed itself with fatal ethnic posturing.  Some three years later, after the full plot had played out, a president finally lost his presidency.

    On 15 January 2012 (42 years exactly after the Civil War ended), Ms. Briggs’s new presumption was baiting an old one.

    In 1967, Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu and other Eastern war-time leaders presumed an Igbo secession from Nigeria was sure to resonate with the other Eastern minorities.  That appeared to have driven the old Biafra campaign — after all, a strip of sea, off the Eastern Nigeria coast, is called Bight of Biafra.

    In 2012, it came reversed: NDONDR’s communiqué presumed a putative Niger Delta (read Ms Briggs’s Ijaw) secession should be a sure hit with the majority Igbo!  And the sabre-rattling from a section of the Ijaw, threatening war and destruction should Goodluck Jonathan fail re-election, nicely keyed into that gung ho  narrative, which certainly was not without sympathy in the South East.

    With Jonathan’s loss, is that driving the new Biafra campaign?  Are a section of the Ndigbo, electoral confederates at the 2015 presidential defeat, harkening the call of Ms Briggs to firm up some political confederacy, that might just ruffle some Nigeria feathers?

    Will it work this time round?  Or would it be yet another costly — and fatal — presumption?

    Over the old and new Biafra campaigns, the sound bites bear eerie similarities.

    No power in Africa, boasted Ojukwu at the height of the mass hysteria in 1966/1967, could vanquish Biafra.

    In Ireland alone, Nnamdi Kanu brags in 2016, Biafra scientists in the Diaspora could forge enough war heads, much more lethal than the crude Ogbunigwe that gave the Nigerians a bloody nose in the last ill-fated campaign, even as his Radio Biafra belt out bigoted and hate messages.

    No wonder then: as the excitable, if not the outright gullible, back then serenaded Ojukwu and his leadership, a mob on Biafra streets is swooning to Kanu’s message of hate and boast.

    So, why would two generations of a people, with less than 50 years interval, approach a failed gambit anew, almost exactly the way they had approached the original?  Wasn’t any lesson learned down the age?

    But Ripples must enter this caveat.  The Yoruba, Hausa, Tiv or Igbo have a right to choose where they want to belong.  That is trite in law and in human rights.

    Besides Nigeria, though a legal territory, is no god that must, willy-nilly, be worshipped.  To earn legitimacy, it must deliver justice and equity to everyone within its confines.

    Still, there is a clear difference between agitating for legal rights — of association and determination — and baiting war.  The flock of demonstrators in some South East and South-South cities, who call themselves the Indigenous Peoples of Biafra (IPOB), would insist theirs are peaceful rallies. That is not untrue.

    But what of Kanu’s explosively emotive broadcasts?  Are they peaceful rallies too?  Yet, both have a common nexus: Biafra, with one feeding the other.  Should push get to shove, and things do turn messy, are both set of actors ready for the grim consequences?

    By the way, did Kanu ever hear of Rwanda’s Radio-Television Libre des Mille Collines (RTLMC), the Hutu hate organ that led Rwanda to perdition, on the genocide road to Kigali?  If his hate radio leads the romantic Biafra to stark misery, Kanu would have his day in the International Criminal Court (ICC), just as the Rwanda RTLMC sponsors.

    But isn’t it high time Igbo elders, particularly the class that saw war in 1967-1970, intervened and pulled their people back, from needless demagoguery courting avoidable tragedy?

    Back in 1970, a boy called Azubike joined some other boys in primary five, at St. David’s Anglican Primary School, Okesuna, in the Lafiaji area of Lagos Island.  Azubike’s eyes shot out like a frog’s — and always riveted at some imaginary but constant objects.  It was a grim and telling testimony: this boy had seen the horrors of war!

    And still talking war: if the old Biafrans felt justified to war because of the pogroms in the North, resulting from the first coup of 15 January 1966, what would they say is driving this present excitement: that their favoured lost in an election?

    Nigeria, as Ripples knows, is a canvass for equal-opportunity injustice, where no one can claim any modicum of innocence.  Indeed, often component parts band together to force down brazen injustice on the extant victim.

    1966/67: the northern pogroms and the resulting war.  Yet, every other part, even the Biafra minorities, banded together to unhorse the Igbo secessionists.  The emotive war cry: to keep Nigeria one is a task that must be done!

    1993: MKO Abiola, a Yoruba by birth but pan-Nigerian by temper, won the freest ever pan-Nigeria presidential mandate.  Yet, when the IBB junta annulled it, about everyone else conspired to sustain that criminality — not the least the Igbo political elite.  Why, the late Odumegwu-Ojukwu, Eze gburugburu Ndigbo, even openly boasted his Abacha-era constitutional conference “mandate”, was superior to Abiola’s!

    2011: Despite Umaru Yar’Adua’s death in office, and Jonathan succession, via a doctrine of necessity, the North by the PDP zoning arrangement, should have produced a candidate to complete its zoned quota of eight years.  Yet, “zoning is undemocratic” and allied cant rented the air — and the South East was not especially quiet in the row.  Even former President Olusegun Obasanjo, first beneficiary of zoning, was loudest in declaiming that political reality.

    Nigeria is a huge canvass of injustice.  What it needs is robust determination to end these injustices; not some romantic escapism into Biafra, which itself forebodes needless danger.

  • My own anniversary

    My own anniversary

    This column was five years old last week, but you could never have guessed it.

    Not the vaguest hint of the event was to be found anywhere.  There were no newspaper supplements, not advertised, or for that matter unadvertised – congratulatory messages by committees of friends and former schoolmates, no goodwill messages, no solidarity rallies, no special ecumenical service and no Merit Award.

    Even at Rutam House, it was business as usual.

    A friend to whom I complained was not in the least impressed.  “What makes you think that you are such a hot shot?” he queried.  “After all, as far as I know, you have never been arrested, given the Television Treatment (like Tai Solarin) or letter-bombed (like Dele Giwa).  And if you were to be dismissed, retired or disengaged today, I am sure that you will never (like Admiral Augustus Aikhomu) earn a promotion thereafter.”

    He is right, of course.  And he could have added that no policy or programme has been started, modified or terminated on account of anything that has appeared in this column since its debut on October 6. 1985.  Nor has any public officer been removed, rebuked or otherwise disciplined  for any act or utterance that has earned the censure of the column, however indecorous the act.

    Still, if my mail and my usually unreliable sources are any indication, the column is read and even preserved not only by those who treasure the newspaper as a marketplace of ideas and as a forum for the exchange of comment and criticism, but also by the agents of law and order and national security.

    My social interactions point in that direction, too.  From time to time, I meet people who tell me how much the column has meant to them.  At a reception outside Lagos the other day, a gentleman I was meeting for the first time seized my hand and said that I must meet his wife, an adoring fan.

    She was adoring indeed.  She fussed over me so much that if her husband had not been secure in his affection, he would have seized her by her necklace and dragged her out of the room under a torrent of foul abuse.

    I have no illusion that I will always be received in the manner the woman received me.  Thus whenever someone accosts me and says, “So you are the Olatunji Dare?” I measure the distance between us and watch his arms and his legs and quickly figure out how I would block, deflect or sidestep a punch to the nose or a kick to the groin.

    So far, no such attack has occurred.  I do not even think such a thing is warranted.  But you never can tell.

    Of course, in a situation of clear and present danger, I can always take a cue from Paul the Apostle and stoutly deny my identity.  That should be quite easy, since The Guardian does          not publish pictures of its contributors.  The African Guardian for which I do an occasional column does publish my picture, but it is a poor guide, having been taken well before large  grey patches appeared on my head and my hairline commenced a furious retreat

    I seize every opportunity to declare that I am only a commentator, not a critic.  Just being a journalist is dangerous enough.

    On the intellectual front, the column has, to my greatest astonishment, attracted some scholarly attention and even critical acclaim.  I do it primarily to earn a living, but some discerning minds have invested it with fine attributes that I never thought I possessed.

    A young woman at the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, is completing a Master’s thesis on the column.  English majors at the University of Ilorin have written term papers on it for a class taught by Dr Olu Obafemi.  It was the subject of a learned essay by Dr Taiwo Oloruntoba-Oju of the same university for The Guardian Literary Series.

    At the University of Ibadan, I gather that the column has figured in a course on something called Stylistics.  A publisher has even urged me to put together some of the better installments  for a book.  I told him I was not sure of its success, but he said I should leave him to do he worrying.

    It is all very flattering, indeed.  I do the column, I insist, primarily to earn a living. Under my terms of employment.  I am required to produce 1,000 words every Tuesday, all things being equal, to fill a space reserved for that purpose on his page.  The whole thing is journalism pure and simple.  To regard it as art or literature is to engage in unnecessary dignification.

    Once in a while, however, the attention does get into one’s head.  But not for long.  Every other day or so, my SAP relief snack of epa and guguru or boli comes wrapped in a recent installment of the column.  I think of all the effort that went into composing it, shake my head and sigh.  Surely, this cannot be art or literature?

    And every other week or so, I am humbled when I find chunks of the column in Sunday Concord as excellent examples of errors in English usage, courtesy of the estimable Bayo Oguntuase.

    In the five years that it has been a staple of this page on Tuesdays, the column has been concerned with everything under the sun and even beyond,  Politics, economics, religion, education, sport, language, sex, justice the men and women and institutions in the news – the entire spectrum of human activity has been its purview.

    Its mood has swayed between the serious and the satirical, and its tone has ranged from the caustic to the compassionate, from the combative to the conciliatory, and from incandescent rage to clinical detachment.  Its judgments have sometimes proved hasty or even mistaken, and it has been known to contain an occasional error of fact.

    If it is one day counted among the many voices that helped shape the standards of sense and sensibility in a turbulent era, I would of course be flattered.  But I would contend that it achieved the distinction more by default than by design.

     

    • First published in “The Guardian” on August 13, 1992, and subsequently in 1993 collection, Matters Arising.

     

  • Hell’s own highway

    Hell’s own highway

    If you suffered the harrowing experience of a 40 minutes drive that turned into nearly seven hours of sheer nightmare, it seems highly unlikely that you’ll be taken in by the extravagant photo-op session staged by Governor Ibikunle Amosun at the Warewa end of the Lagos-Ibadan expressway in the wee hours of Wednesday last week. Yes, I can report that the journey which began around 9 pm  – somewhere in Mushin and which at the very worst would take an hour and half to make, ended at 3.15 am the next day! And the reason? Canyon-sized craters that have taken residence at the Warewa end of the long bridge on the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway!

    To the hordes of motorists – including yours truly – pinned down by the forces that spoke more to our pervasive institutional failure (certainly not some acts of nature or citizens’ famed indiscipline), puzzling would be an understatement to describe the ‘sympathy visit’ by the governor and a team which included his wife to that failed portion of the highway at the ungodly hour as widely reported.

    So much for the well-publicised visit, I can testify that the giant craters said to be the chief cause of the problem have not disappeared, nearly a week after. As for the heavy equipment deployed, they may have remained visible at the site, they are actively on the ‘sleep mode’ right up till the time of writing this as many a passers-by will readily testify. Yes, a giant, on-site billboard proclaims the ‘mercy intervention’ by the Ogun State Ministry of Works and Infrastructure, but then, there is really nothing to show for any activity. And to imagine that the entire paraphernalia of administration in Ogun State had only last week relocated to that very spot supposedly to ‘facilitate’ a routine task that a more public service-minded councillor in charge of works in Obafemi-Owode Local Government would have undertaken without the accompanying fuss!

    By the way – if it came to any real relief, the very next day after the highly publicized visit, it took yours truly more three hours to cover the same barely five kilometres stretch of the long bridge stretching from Berger to the journalists’ estate at Arepo! This time, the problem was a minor accident involving two trailers. With little space left for other motorists to manoeuvre, it soon became a familiar return to bedlam – no thanks to the legendary impotence of the men of the Federal Road Safety Commission (FRSC) – who could only ‘stand and stare’ in the absence of tools to work with! This time however, I was relatively luckier to have made it home in one piece at 1.30 am the next day! I know a lady who was stabbed in the arm after her handbag was seized by hoodlums who feigned to be helpers when her car broke down!

    The story of the Lagos-Ibadan expressway obviously mirrors the dysfunctions at the heart of the nation’s crisis of development. It explains why the job meant for everybody never gets done by anybody. That was the moral behind the suggestion last week by Governor Amosun that the state government was moved out of pity than duty to act! Of course, the governor is right!

    It explains why the country would expend billions on projects without as much as a thought to keeping it running. In the days of yore, we had the Public Works Department with their ubiquitous gangs that fixed manholes before they develop into killer-craters. I recall the road camps where those men congregated before the day’s job only to converge after a hard day’s job.  Today, what do we have? An Abuja headquartered Federal Road Maintenance Agency (FERMA)  that rather than fix roads –would rather be found recruiting militias for politicians to rig elections – an agency that has lost its rationale!

    No less can be said of the Federal Road Safety Commission (FRSC) – that ubiquitous agency that has become a nuisance on the road than anything else. Today, not only is the FRSC ineffective as a road safety agency in any true sense, it is operationally incapacitated to undertake the most routine of safety maintenance on the highways. For lack of the basic equipment in search and rescue, our own one-time elite paramilitary commission now finds itself veering into non-operational issues ranging from checking vehicle particulars to drivers’ licensing to manufacture of licence plates – occasionally spending time on the chaotic highways to while away time!

    Are we not in trouble? At this time, the question that should bother everyone –is why a country so vast and so endowed and which aspires to move men into space cannot even begin the elementary task of taking care of little things? Everywhere you go across the federation, the story of our roads is the same. It is the story of neglect and abandonment. The other day, it was Senator Barnabas Gemade and his committee lamenting the state of the roads in the South-east. Yours truly on a visit to Jos, the Plateau State capital last week  could not imagine the state of the road from the airport to town! At a point, I thought I was in Mogadishu or some far-flung country in a state of war! It was, to put it mildly, terrible. The same adjectives, I guess, would describe the Jos-Abuja highway! I once wrote about the death corridor called Ilorin- Kabba highway where bands of Fulani marauders operate at will simply because the roads have become impassable.

    What we have at the moment is a national emergency. The challenge is as simple as finding a sustainable framework for road maintenance. Without that, all our efforts to transform the economy would come to naught. That is why other nations take road maintenance seriously! This is one thing that the Buhari administration would need to take seriously. And if I may suggest, there is no use pretending that the current framework which has failed would ever work. New thinking is what is required.

    As a final point, what would it take FERMA to work effectively? Is it that the nation is lacking in manpower? What special skills are needed to fix a broken road? Or is it that the nation does not have sufficient bitumen to fix the roads? Isn’t bitumen one of the derivatives of oil?  Or funds? What about the billions annually voted for that? Does anyone know? And does anyone care?

  • Ambode, history beckons

    Ambode, history beckons

    Governor Akinwunmi Ambode, now harried to perform or bounce, may well ponder the gubernatorial history of Lagos.

    Two cases, one ending in peril; the other in glory, but both boasting no sparkling starts, should capture the governor’s attention, as he navigates this teething stage of his governorship.

    The one, Governor Michael Otedola, of blessed memory.  The other, Governor Bola Tinubu.

    Sir Michael Otedola, ever before his gubernatorial years, was an Epe folk hero of profound community value.  He was the quintessential entrepreneur, who swarmed his immediate community with scholarships and allied philanthropy.

    Even when the Lagos progressives, in 1991, feuded to the death, and could not agree on a common candidate, an aggrieved faction trusted Sir Michael enough to invest in him their grand plan: punish the uppity Dapo Sarumi faction of the then Social Democratic Party (SDP); but also make a progressive proxy of Otedola’s conservative National Republican Convention (NRC) government.

    For Otedola, it was a prescient name come true: “Ote” (intrigue) among the bickering progressives, had “dola”: become sheer fortune, for this lucky conservative!  But all too soon, it became a damp squib.  Though his electioneering war cry was That Lagos May Excel, Lagos instead grinded to a near-standstill under the luckless Sir Michael.

    True, the June 12 protests badly distracted the Otedola government, Lagos being the epicentre of the mass 1993 presidential election annulment dissent.  Still, when Gen. Sani Abacha, in a November 1993 coup, ended the still-birth Third Republic, Sir Michael’s had become among the worst gubernatorial tenures in Lagos history.

    Governor Tinubu’s debut was no radically different.  Asiwaju Tinubu came six years after Sir Michael.  The misfiring military had, in utter disgrace, exhausted their self-imposed historic role.  But everyone still lay in the ruins they left behind.

    So, Governor Tinubu took over a Lagos in sheer paralysis.  True, Col. Buba Marwa, the last military governor of Lagos, had made his own mark, a giant of a sort, among the military Lilliputians.  His Operation Sweep anti-crime squad had elicited copy from neighbouring Oyo, which named its own squad Operation Gbale (“sweep” is “gbale” in Yoruba).

    Indeed, it was in this politics of perception that the Tinubu government made its first public gaffe, renaming Marwa’s Operation Sweep as Rapid Response Force — before someone, somewhere remembered you couldn’t possibly have a force within a force!  So, the name was changed to Rapid Response Squad.

    But the crime crisis was just one among the many crippling challenges.  All over Lagos were mountains of refuse.  Even the waste-management public-private-participation (PPP) model, which eventually solved the problem, became the butt of cynical media jokes, as newspapers mocked the harassed government with choice pictures of bagged refuse, by road medians, awaiting clearance. “Tinubu’s bouquets”, they dubbed these ugly and smelly polythene bags!

    Meanwhile, Lagos roads were in a complete shambles.  Though Governor Marwa somewhat weaned himself from the “no bitumen” of the Governor Olagunsoye Oyinlola era, the approach was still artificial patching, when an overhaul and complete reconstruction would do.

    Then, the Lagos Bar Beach overflow!  That became so consistent and persistent that the most brilliant idea of the Federal Government, under President Olusegun Obasanjo and Works Minister Tony Anenih, was sand-filling.  So, contractors ended up sandbagging their own country, but with the problem unsolved.  The Lagos environmental problem was complete and daunting.

    In the midst of all of these, the ever-impatient people and media went to town, dismissing the new Tinubu government as long in slogans but tragically short in substance.  That prevailed for no less than two years, during which the Tinubu government perfected its tactics and strategies.

    By the time the government took off in its third year, however, the next six years, in the two terms of eight years, would climax in glory.  Though Tinubu started rather slow, he ended rather well, even if the state was still a vast work-in-progress junkyard, since the bus rapid transit (BRT) corridors were under construction.

    This long historic tieback is imperative to emphasise that the present agony of Governor Ambode — an impatient and bad-tempered citizenry, goading him to perform or get the  hell out of the way — is not novel.

    Otedola went through it and wilted; though his four-year term was truncated after only 21 months — less than half way.  But Tinubu went through it and triumphed.  But again, he enjoyed two democratic terms of eight years.

    The question: which path would Ambode tow?  That is where history beckons.

    In “Ambode and King Solomon’s complex” (June 9), Ripples somewhat set a putative agenda for the new Lagos governor.  But he warned that the governor’s tenure would enjoy neither the restless drama of Tinubu’s entry and exit; nor the sheer excitement of Fashola’s entry and exit.  Lagos, that piece noted, was now much more settled; and less prone to drama and titillation.

    In order words, Ambode must creatively manage the humbug of his entry to somewhat make it sparkle; and give the ever excitable Lagos, backed by an often mischievous media, something to chew.

    So far, little of that has happened, though there is little proof the governor has been idling away.  Still, clearly the Ambode governorship would appear nowhere near where Ambode wants it to be.

    What to do?  Don’t panic or get distracted.  Don’t even get prickly.  Queries and comments, rational or irrational, come with the territory.  Governance, after all, is service, not over-lordship.

    Then, no unnecessary comparison and contrast with the Fashola tenure.  That would be sterile, and frankly, unproductive.  Ambode doesn’t need to wear Fashola’s shoes anymore than Fashola needed to wear Tinubu’s.

    Yet, when the history of post-Tinubu Lagos is written, Tinubu would pass as perhaps the most visionary, since he started the Lagos modernising project — after the no less heroic contributions of a previous two, of different eras: Alhaji Lateef Jakande (first elected governor) and Brig. Mobolaji Johnson (first-ever governor).

    Fashola, on the other hand, would pass as perhaps the most clinical and efficient in policy execution; earning national and global plaudits along the way.

    In this long continuum of exemplary Lagos governorships, Ambode has ample space to create his own niche, and make his own mark.  That is why he should, in the short run, focus on the very basics: roads, crime and traffic.  On roads, the governor is doing some work.  Witness: Ikotun-Egbe-Okota axis.

    But on crime and traffic, the report is not too cheery: umpteenth reckless Danfo and even BRT drivers; and lawless Okada riders invading major highways where they are barred by law, are turning Lagos into some Hobbesian jungle.  The governor needs to be uncompromisingly tough on these road outlaws.  Add the trailer/tanker drivers’ menace, and you can feel a splitting gubernatorial migraine!

    It is a teething stage in the Ambode governorship; and the way angry Lagosians react isn’t pretty.  But that is hardly unexpected.

    That is why Governor Ambode must dig deep to make his mark.  Governor Tinubu turned round his own early setbacks.  So can Governor Ambode.

    And Sir Michael?  That is no option.  Governor Ambode can and should scale his teething challenges; and ultimately get it right.

  • What happened to Dele Giwa?

    What happened to Dele Giwa?

    October 19 marked the 29th anniversary the assassination of Dele Giwa, crusading journalist and founding chief executive of the magazine Newswatch, in what remains one of the most horrific acts of preternatural malevolence ever carried out in Nigeria.

    Because of the passage of time and the twists and turns on the political landscape, the anniversary generated less attention and fewer reminiscences than in previous years.  But      three weeks later, the circumstances of Giwa’s death leapt onto the front pages and headlines, propelled by a crack-brained theory resurrected by Chris Omeben, the since-retired deputy inspector- general of police who had supervised the investigations.

    But first, some background.

    Just two days before that heinous murder, a senior official of the Directorate of Military Intelligence had accused Giwa of illegally importing and stockpiling arms and ammunition for the purpose of staging a socialist revolution in Nigeria.

    The charge was preposterous. Giwa had nothing but contempt for socialism.  He was a shinning advertisement for capitalism and the market economy.  But he had, in a widely discussed column, warned that if the structural adjustment programme on which the government was pinning all its hopes for economic recovery failed, the authorities would be stoned in the streets.

    Alarmed at the charge, Giwa quickly briefed his attorney, the late and much lamented Gani Fawehinmi, and asked him to pursue the matter at law.

    The following day, military intelligence chief, Colonel Halilu Akilu, called to reassure Giwa that the accusation had resulted from a misunderstanding; that the matter had been cleared, and that Giwa should think nothing to it.  He asked for directions to Giwa’s home so he could, as a demonstration of his good faith, stop by on his way to Ikeja airport to board a flight to Kano.

    Akilu then went on to intimate that a parcel from the commander-in-chief, most likely an invitation to some official event, was on its way to Giwa’s home.

    Several hours later, an emissary showed up.  Giwas’s son, Billy, collected the parcel and handed it to his father who was seated at the dining table, in company of Kayode Soyinka, the London correspondent of Newswatch visiting from the UK.  The envelope, which bore the seal of the Presidency, was marked “To be opened by addressee only.”

    “This must be from the Presidency,” Giwa said as he collected the package from his son.

    Those were the last words he would speak in calm repose.

    He placed it on his laps, and as he opened it, the package exploded, pulverizing his pelvis, setting a section of the house on fire and reducing the cars in the garage to smouldering heaps of mangled metal.

    Giwa died as he was being rushed to a nearby hospital.  Miraculously, Soyinka survived, and  so did Giwa’s wife and baby daughter, who were at the time in another section of the house.

    If they had all been killed, the investigating authorities would have passed off the blast as an accident waiting to happen.  After all, they had publicly accused Giwa of illegally importing and stockpiling arms and ammunition; the ordinance had exploded, killing its procurer, they would have said.  There would have been no witnesses to suggest anything to the contrary, and a perfect murder would have been committed.

    Soyinka, the visiting Newswatch correspondent who had witnessed the incident, came to be named the suspect.  If he was not complicit in the crime, senior state security officials and the police hierarchy said, how come he had survived it when his host seated across from him had perished?

    It was to this infantile theory, unworthy of a village talebearer, that Omeben had recourse recently, the same threadbare and wildly implausible theory that Col. Ajibola Togun and his military intelligence colleagues had been peddling about the murder.

    My brother Herbert Tunde Dare, a senior police officer with the Special Branch, had been assigned to the investigation. Soon after he began work with his accustomed energy and commitment – failure was not in his dictionary — he was transferred from Lagos to Kaduna, but kept on the case.

    Concerning his work, he was as secretive as an oyster.  Taking advantage of the relaxed atmosphere of yuletide, I asked him in late December 1987 how the investigation was  shaping up.

    “Oba,” he replied, using the name we reserved for each other, “they are not serious.”  By “they,” he meant the authorities.  He went on to add that he was not even allowed to ask the basic questions on which a proper investigation must be grounded.

    Some two months later, he was summoned to Lagos to file a preliminary report on his investigations.  He had planned to return to Kaduna the same way he had travelled to Lagos:  by air.  But at the last minute, the police authorities came up with an assignment that warranted his returning by road.

    Somewhere between Jebba, in Kwara State, and Mokwa, in Niger State, in the dead of night,  he was killed in a curious accident.

    Announcing his death, the police said he had lost control of his car while trying to overtake another vehicle and crashed it. He had died instantly. The wreck of the car he was allegedly driving was never produced. The police said a driver and an aide assigned to him, both un-identified, were injured in the accident but had been treated at an unidentified hospital and discharged.

    The announcement, his one-time boss in the Special Branch told me, could only have been designed to pre-empt an inquiry into his death.

    In a panegyric marking military president Ibrahim Babangida’s 70th birthday, the columnist Mohammed Haruna cited Fawehinmi’s unsuccessful efforts to enter a private prosecution in the Giwa murder — unsuccessful because he was blockaded on every front – as proof that the fiery attorney was pursuing the wrong persons.

    Haruna went on to add that the murder might have resulted from marital conflict.  The guard at the Giwa residence, he claimed, had positively identified the driver of Giwas’s former wife,  Florence Ita, as the bearer of the parcel-bomb that killed Giwa.  And, by way of further insight, he added that a flour magnate whose shady business deals Newswatch had uncovered might also have had a hand in the murder.

    If these were viable or even plausible leads, why were they not pursued diligently?  Why were Omeben and Togun and company so fixated on Kayode Soyinka?

    Babangida for his part has consistently blamed everyone except his Administration for the failure to investigate Giwa’s murder forthrightly and bring the perpetrators to justice.

    Hear him in his own words, in this interview with Karl Maier, as reported by Maier in his book This House Has Fallen:  Midnight in Nigeria.

     “It was emotive.  There was a lot of passion.  I think one of the problems  was that the people, or more or less the media … up to now nobody seemed to say okay let’s look at these things   dispassionately.  But from the word go, the government did it.  That’s the first reaction. The media, his friends, and most important, the lawyers, the crusaders in this thing.  Then anybody who would want to say something different from the popularly held belief, you were seen as part of it.  So they succeeded in getting only one side of the story dished up.

    “But we carried out investigations,” Babangida continued.   “We had leads.  There were questions we asked but nobody went into this thing about the so-called questions that we asked. But the circumstantial aspect of it.  Akilu spoke to him twenty-four hours before.  But somebody had to talk to somebody.   That’s the harsh reality of life.  But unfortunately nobody wanted to listen. I suspect the media, whatever human rights groups, if they tried to look at this dispassionately, like normal intelligent people would, we may have gone (sic) somewhere.   But people have already made up their minds. That government is guilty, period.  The report, they are not interested.”

    This Joycean outpouring was Babangida’s answer to the question, “What happened to Dele Giwa?”

    These people who were so powerful that they could prevent a military government and the police from bringing to justice the perpetrators of one of the most dastardly murders of our time:   Who are they?  Why were they not prosecuted for interfering with the course of justice?

    And a final question:  Where is the “report” Babangida talked about?

    Portions of this article first appeared in the October 18, 2011, edition of The NATION.

     

     

     

  • Pate’s pains

    Pate’s pains

    It was meant as high praise but it rubbed rather raw on Ripples.

    Lai Muraino Oso, the birthday commemorative lecturer enthused, was  a “highly detribalised Nigerian”.

    It was October 9 in Ikeja, Lagos.  Prof. Oso, Mass Communication teacher and scholar at the Lagos State University School of Communication, was 60; and the drone of small talks, at times causing an intrusive buzz that earned the lecturer’s sharp rebuke, was proof of a packed hall.

    Prof. Umaru A. Pate, Kaigamma Adamawa, and professor of Mass Communication at Bayero University, Kano, was at the lectern.  The lecture title: “Issues in Media and National Integration in Nigeria.”

    An expert in communication, to be sure.  Still, Ripples thought Prof. Pate fell prey to one of those great Nigerian clichés, even if his praise of the celebrator was well earned; and, given the diamond boy’s impressive bona fide, truly genuine.

    But detribalised Nigerian?

    “What does that mean?”  Ripples turned to a co-guest and table mate.

    “Someone,” the other volunteered, “unburdened by tribal and ethnic baggage or bigotry; and is nationalistic in his thinking.  Former President Olusegun Obasanjo,” he enthused, “is the most detribalised of all Nigeria’s past leaders.”

    “I see,” Ripples grunted.  “But how is someone ‘detribalised’ — cease being Yoruba, as in Obasanjo’s case, so you could be Nigerian?”

    That would appear contemporary Nigeria’s conventional wisdom.  That appears to have shaped Prof. Pate’s high praise.

    Still, must “tribe” be a bad thing?  Hardly.  “Tribe” is only an ethnic classification.  Just as in Britain, the English, Scot, Welsh, and Irish are tribes; in Nigeria, the Igbo, Hausa, Tiv and Yoruba are.

    Indeed, Chief Anthony Enahoro (God bless his soul), in his political memoirs, Fugitive Defender, recalled a virtual “tribal war” among the British expatriate teachers of the King’s College, Lagos, of his day — the English with his assumed superiority complex; and the Scot vigorously rejecting his perceived inferiority complex.

    Yet, the British overlords, beyond these cold wars, never hinted these tribes were sinister or subversive of the British national interest.  They couldn’t have been: for without the English, the Scot and the Welsh, there certainly would not have been the Brits.

    But the rules would appear reversed, with the Nigerian equivalent.  Nigerian “tribes” were sinister and subversive of Nigeria; though just like British tribes, they endure, among themselves, some tension.  Still, those British tribes are supportive of British integration as Nigerian tribes are subversive of Nigeria’s!

    It’s the same mindset of language politics that refers to English as English, but African languages as “vernacular”, suggestive of some phantom inferiority!

    But strictly, the Brits were a colonising power.  So, they would plot any stratagem to cement their imperialism.

    But Nigerians must see through it all; and avoid passing the negative prejudices down the ages, under the romance of “national unity and integration”, as Prof. Pate, with all due respect to his scholastic rigour,  would appear to have done, all through his commemorative lecture.

    Pray, how can you integrate Nigeria, when you start from the premise that the “tribes” making up a federal Nigeria, as far as the integrative process goes, are evil and subversive?

    And how can Nigeria be, without the intrinsic qualities of the Yoruba, Hausa, Itsekiri, Ijaw, Fulani, Tiv, Idoma and others that make up that geographical territory?

    So long for “detribalisation”!

    To be sure, making a patriotic fetish of “unity and integration” is an age-old Nigerian pastime.  But that pastime has also shown the futility of dreaming “unity” without rigorously working through the basic challenges: accepting that the 396 Nigerian ethnics (by the professor’s own statistics) are basically different peoples, in a federal Nigeria.

    These differences cannot be wished away.  But we can accept them and work through them to find common fronts.  Any other way is sweet but barren patriotic preachment.

    Take the media.  To insist on a Nigerian “national” media is sweet emptiness.  This is because as Nigeria is a federal state, its media would differ from one end of the country to another, depending on different attitudes, bents and cultures — without prejudice, of course, to common humanity, without which even a federal state, of differing peoples, cannot survive.

    That much was proved all through Nigeria’s media history.  Iwe Irohin  (Nigeria’s first newspaper, founded 1859)  was a missionary medium hinged on Egba and Yoruba cultural plank.  It couldn’t have survived otherwise.  The Anglo-African, Lagos’ first newspaper, wilted and died because of its cultural barrenness.

    The most successful early newspapers, Lagos Weekly Record, Lagos Standard and perhaps Times of Nigeria were published by Anglo-Africans, who had little affinity with the native Eko community.  Indeed, the Saro (freed former slaves from Sierra-Leone), the natives openly mocked as dual “parasites” — who feasted on the Eko natives “for trade”; and on the British colonisers “for culture”.

    But both LWR and LS cut a niche as bastions of African nationalism, which often even fired the imagination and awe of the Eko aborigines, especially when newspapers like Herbert Macaulay’s Lagos Daily News, the town’s first daily newspaper, fought community crusades, over land and water issues, against the British, to roaring cheer from the appreciative community.

    The long-and-short of all that is that the media have symbiotic relationship with their communities.  If therefore the Nigerian media now tend to stress local differences more than “national unity”, it is simply because too many issues are yet unsettled — most of these issues bordering on basic justice, fairness and equity.

    So, what media worth their name would leave those fundamental issues, and start parroting a hoped-for “unity” and “integration” that are, at best, some future Utopia — very sweet to covet, but hardly at hand?

    Ironically, by his very examples, Prof. Pate projected his own different outlook, even from fellow academics, from other parts of Nigeria.

    He dismissed 1st Republic federalism as “unitary regional structure”, what his counterpart from South West Nigeria would glorify as “true and regional federalism”, on which plank Nigeria should be “restructured”.

    On the other hand, he romanticises territorial fissures that Gen. Yakubu Gowon started, as a “process of national integration and cohesion”, which nevertheless folks elsewhere would lampoon as military era “unitary federalism”, which Gowon started with 12 states but which, at the last count, was 36.  That has progressively atomised the states, and made the centre too powerful and irresponsible, having great socio-economic implications in mass poverty and citizen alienation.

    Still, neither Prof. Pate nor the opposite school is wrong.  They are simply right from their own perspectives.  Yet, all are Nigerians claiming the best for their country!  That is Nigeria’s complexity at a simple glance.  You won’t achieve “unity”, if you didn’t appreciate and factor in that diversity.

    But Prof. Pate, clearly a Nigeria unity-centric, did well to beam light on these issues.  But equal-opportunity rigour demands Nigeria unity-sceptics too clinically cut-and-thrust with him, without risking the toga of being branded “sectional” in their thinking.

    It is even more meet that it’s all happening in commemoration of Prof. Oso at 60, that pan-Nigerian academic and scholar, one of the few braves that haven’t given up on the troubled Nigerian university system.

    But the good scholar need not be “detribalised” to consummate his “Nigerian-ness”!

  • NCC versus MTN

    NCC versus MTN

    I know a few Nigerians who would declare that the regulatory hammer which fell on MTN was overkill. That would be perfectly understandable in an environment where regulators are permanently on sleep mode and where those who are paid to protect us from the routine infractions by service providers have just about enough reasons to look the other way while we are being mugged. That would also partly explain the shock – and perhaps the bewilderment –expressed by many at what they considered as an “impossible” fine slammed by the telecoms regulator on the telecommunications firm last week.

    Coming in the wake of a similar punitive fine on two of the nation’s leading banks – First Bank and UBA – both of which were slammed with N4.6 billion by the apex bank for running foul of the directive on the Treasury Single Account (TSA) – a new dawn for regulation may well be here already.

    By the standards of our much abused and devalued naira, the N1.04 trillion $5.2bn) involved is certainly a lot of money. Even if the environment were to be less inclement, a punitive fine of nearly a quarter of the entire federal budget would come close to the proverbial pound of flesh. I therefore appreciate some of the feelings being expressed on the matter – particularly the context in a clime where regulations have come to mean nothing. After all, MTN isn’t a small fry, but a prolific goose that not only spins off revenue into the national treasury by way of taxes by the second, a major source of livelihood to hundreds of thousands of Nigerians.  And so Nigeria, a country sorely in dire need of cash – particularly from Foreign Direct Investment cannot be seen to adopt such measures that would be perceived as “disincentive”!

    The saga reminds of the old African folklore about the tortoise and his in-law. You know the story of the tortoise’s in-law who tied him to a tree by the market square on the discovery that he stole a family ornament? Passers-by who saw him tied to the stake early in the morning gleefully chanted that it served him right. By evening, the same passers-by on their homeward journey – on seeing the tortoise still tied up – were no longer persuaded that the punishment was fair.  An in-law, they later reasoned, deserved better!

    The lesson here is that nothing – more so in our shifting terrain of morality – is given; today’s much maligned sinner – can in different set of circumstances – become the sinned against – all things being permanently unequal!

    In the case under reference, the hefty fine is supposed to be the big thing. Several questions – most of them merely variants of the same question – have done nothing else than to decry the regulatory action: ‘Where in the world is the telecom giant expected to raise that kind of money at this time?’ ‘Instead of the crippling fine, would it not better serve the public cause to ask them to deploy the fund to upgrade services?’

    Even otherwise highly informed commentators have recommended punishments considered less disruptive – or more bearable – this ostensibly flowing from the assumption that the regulatory action was arbitrary – a case of killing an ant with a sledge-hammer!

    It was as if no infractions took place! Or was it a case of witch-hunt?

    Let me confess that yours truly was also alarmed when I first heard the amount involved. The challenge for me however, was not so much about the sum involved, but whether NCC was acting in a manner as to suggest arbitrariness. The inability to give the regulator the benefit of the doubt seems to me the point where most of the commentators missed it. A quick check by yours truly would reveal the premises of the regulatory action: It is located in Section 19 of the SIM Registration Regulations 2011. That section, to be clear, specifies a fine of N200,000 per unregistered SIM; and with 5.2million MTN SIM found to be in breach of the regulation, it was simply a question of doing the tally! Yes, the sentencing not only fitted snugly with the violation, it was at sync with the regulation!

    So where is the ground for the so-called heavy-handedness?

    The heavy regulatory action, we are told by the NCC did not even come out of the blues.  On September 4, the chief of staff to the President reportedly hosted a high level meeting of telecom chief executives, the heads of the main security agencies – Office of the National Security Adviser (ONSA), the Department of State Security (DSS), Directorate of Military Intelligence, (DMI) and the NCC where the issue was exhaustively discussed. The context was the current security challenges particularly the issues of terrorism and kidnapping. There, the operators were duly informed that continued non-compliance with the directive to deactivate unregistered SIM cards would lead to the imposition of penalties or possible revocation of licences. They were to immediately reconcile the records of their deactivations against the list of invalid registrations earlier shared with operators by the NCC by September 7.

    Question therefore is – would MTN disagree that it was in breach of the regulation? More worrisome however is that the NCC insists that the latest incident, rather than being an isolated case, is merely one out of a generalised “pattern of non-compliance with regulatory directives”.

    I understand the temptation to bring extraneous issues into what is ordinarily a regulatory issue – particularly at this time when established law-breakers have been known to take shelter behind technicalities to escape the sanctions prescribed by law. We certainly know of the penchant by smart operators to mock our institutions given their traditionally tepid, weak-kneed approaches to enforcing regulations.

    If I may be clear: my problem is finding accommodation for an out-of-control operator without risking irreparable damage to our national interest. For while the finding of guilt may or may not matter to MTN, the issues, to the extent that they touch on the business of our national security is hardly one can be trifled with.

    So what to do? Ask MTN to go and sin no more? Would this not smack of an endorsement of blatant outlawry simply because big business is involved? How about procuring a lesser penalty to keep the golden goose alive as suggested by some? Would that not also be tantamount to arbitrariness?

    Whichever the matter is resolved – it seems clear to me that the telecoms sector will never remain the same again.

     

     

     

  • On a personal note

    On a personal note

    All journalism is autobiography, at least to the extent that, consciously or unconsciously, the writer always reveals something of himself or herself.  Just how much to reveal, what to put out and what to omit, what to highlight and what to play down:  These considerations are never far from a columnist’s reckoning.

    Today, pardon my indulgence, reader; this column comes freighted with more autobiographical baggage than it usually carries. My intention is not so much to dwell on a singularity as it is to invoke personal circumstance as a point of entry in calling attention to a spiraling health issue that has far-reaching implications for public policy.

    *

    My son Gbolahan was diagnosed with autism in 1980, shortly after I commenced doctoral studies at Indiana University, on leave from the University of Lagos, where I was a journalism instructor. He was two years old at the time. One week of tests at the Children’s Hospital, Indianapolis, confirmed the diagnosis.

    He fretted and fidgeted; he was withdrawn and self absorbed; he shunned physical contact, engaged in repetitive behaviour, and could no longer communicate through speech.  He was not always like that.  Some malignant force seemed to have halted his mental development, and to have then sent it on the path of regression.

    What was the cause? The doctors said that, on account of some chemical imbalance, the signals reaching the brain from the central nervous system were too weak for the brain to interpret.

    Could the signals be amplified?

    Not in the present state of medical knowledge, they said.

    I was shattered.

    One day, I was terrified that I might do something terrible to myself if I did not seek counselling. Something — call it instinct or the spirit – directed me to my faculty adviser, a genial, courtly gentleman with whom I had struck a rapport at our very first conference.

    His door was shut, but I knocked all the same.  “Olatunji, you have something on your mind,” he said as he invited me to sit down.

    I told him about my son, adding that under the circumstances, I could not continue my doctoral studies and must return to Nigeria.

    “Do you believe in God?” he asked, after a long, reflective pause.

    “I can no longer say for sure,” I told him.  Why would God visit this affliction on my son?

    He was in deep meditation at the time I knocked on his office door. The Bible lay open on his table.  It was 10 years to the day his wife died after a long struggle with cancer, he told me. And like me , he had just enrolled for doctoral studies at American University, in Washington, DC, with two young children to look after, in addition to running the Washington Programme of the University of Missouri’s famous School of Journalism.

    “Ed,” his wife had told him moments before her eyes closed, “I know what this programme means much to you.  Please, do not use my death or the fact that you have to raise two children alone as an excuse for not pursuing or attaining the goals you have set for yourself.”

    Placing his hand over mine to comfort me, he said that was all he could tell me, for whatever it was worth. “Love your son.  Give him all the care he needs.  But do not use him as an excuse for not pursuing your goals.”

    It was a priceless counsel. It pulled me back from the brink. I forged ahead and with the support of a loving wife completed the doctorate in three years and returned to Nigeria. I have never looked back since then.

    *

    Eleven years later, on assignment for The Guardian to interview OAU Secretary-General Dr Salim Ahmed Salim and senior officials of Ethiopia’s ruling Dergue regime, Emeka Izeze and I  were treated to a sumptuous luncheon by senior Nigerian diplomat accredited to the OAU.

    Two other Nigerians, one a senior diplomat with the Nigerian mission in Addis Ababa and a distinguished international public servant visiting from Rome where he was Nigeria’s envoy at a global agency, made up our party of five.

    I cannot now recall what sequence of events steered the conversation to autism, of all things, certainly not the most glamorous subject in that atmosphere of haute cuisine washed down with the choicest wines.

    We discovered that four of us had autistic children.

    The odds against such an occurrence – of  four people under the same roof, all of them Nigerians, and three of them meeting each other for the first time – the odds of all four having autistic children are galactic.

    I realised then that autism was more widespread than was generally supposed. And since then, I have found cases upon cases of the condition, and bewildered parents unable to fathom the present and fearful of the future.

    *

    At a ceremony in July 2014 marking my 70th birthday, I pledged that after one more year on my faculty job at Bradley University, I would devote the rest of my days to raising awareness of autism and use the standing that I have earned through my professional work in classrooms and newsrooms at home and abroad to help raise funds to look after the needs of the autistic in Nigerian society.

    As if to confirm that autism is far more widespread in Nigeria than is generally supposed, four people walked up to me at the end of the ceremony that they had autistic children.  I have since learned of a young family that has two children, both autistic.

    *

    There are different, often overlapping forms of autism. The wide variation in symptoms among children with autism has led to the concept of autism spectrum disorder, or ASD. And the severity varies considerably.  At one end are those who cannot perform the most basic functions; at the other are those, the so-called idiot-savants who can perform the most astonishing feats of memory or execution but can do nothing else.

    Between these extremes lie gradations of autism in its many guises and disguises.

    At the time of my son’s diagnosis some 35 years ago, autism was a rare disorder, afflicting one male child out of 100,000.   For female children, the odds were even higher.

    Last year, the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention reported that one in 68 U.S. children has an autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a 30 per cent increase from one in 88 in just two years. Children with autism continue to be overwhelmingly male. According to the report, one in 42 boys has autism, 4.5 times as many as girls.

    Whether the huge increase resulted from genetic or environmental factors or from improved diagnostic techniques is unclear. What is clear, according to a statement issued this past August by the Mortality and Morbidity Weekly Report, is that “there is a growing sense that something is going horribly wrong and no one knows why.”

    The situation in Nigeria may be just as dire.

    *

    The inventory I have been compiling shows no lack of awareness in Nigeria of autism and its depredations. Many agencies – banks, NGOs, schools, vocational training centres and medical institutions, have established intervention mechanisms of one kind or another. Their endeavour is to be commended, but it would be much more effective if coordinated and focused.

    My goal is to assist the organisations already on the ground to help raise the level of awareness of autism and situate it in the national policy dialogue, culminating in a National Summit on Autism in 2016;  in short, to help build a national constituency for the autistic in Nigeria.

    This column signals the start of that project.

    To that end, I would be grateful if organisations in the field or individuals interested in this project could send me at their earliest convenience a  conspectus of their work where applicable, as well as their contact information.

    My mailing address is c/o Vintage Press Ltd, 27B Fatai Atere Way, Matori, Lagos, PMB 1025,  Oshodi, Lagos.

    I can also be reached by email at this address:  <ohdee@fsmail.bradley.edu>

  • Wike’s wake

    Wike’s wake

    To be thus is nothing, but to be safely thus

    Our fears in Banquo stick deep,

    And in his royalty of nature

    Reigns that which would be feared — Macbeth, Act 3, Scene 1,   Shakespeare’s Macbeth          

    Given this opening quote, there appears an eerie parallel between the historical tragedy of the Scottish impostor king, Macbeth (as dramatically captured by William Shakespeare); and the looming gubernatorial tragedy of Nyesom Wike, the embattled Rivers “governor”, whose “election” was judicially annulled on October 24.

    Put the quote in contemporary Nigeria.  Put the words in the mouth of Patience Jonathan, the pesky, tempestuous spouse of former President, Goodluck Jonathan.  Drop “Banquo” for “Amaechi” — and this is what you get: Patience, the godmother, to Wike, the godson:

    “To be thus is nothing, but to be safely thus/Our fears in Amaechi stick deep,/And in his royalty of nature/Reigns that which would be feared“!

    Ay, in the original, the impostor Macbeth, spoke in painful soliloquy, after he had killed King Duncan, his benefactor; after being goaded into regicide by the puffy promises of the three witches; and loads of satanic prompting from his no less evil wife.

    At the end of the day, however, it took more than slaying Duncan to sit pretty on the Scottish throne.

    Still, the Nigerian adaptation isn’t totally out of place.

    Politically slaying Rotimi Amaechi, former Rivers governor, was central to the egregious Rivers election rigging, which the Rivers State Election Tribunal, sitting in Abuja, just confirmed.

    Patience Jonathan would appear the grand dame of that anti-Amaechi plot.  Between Amaechi and the former first lady, there was no love lost.

    Her husband, President Jonathan, the naive but no less opportunistic, “Macbeth”, who hoped to greatly profit from Amaechi’s political liquidation, by subtle appeal to base South-South sentiments; while the less subtle Dame went on overdrive, the “home girl” exploiting explosive Okrika (read Rivers) base appeal.  Okrika is her hometown.

    Wike, of course, then as Jonathan’s education minister of state, was the not-so-legit viceroy (just as Macbeth was the legit Thane of Cawdor) assured to become outright illegitimate governor (just as Macbeth committed regicide) — but only if he could pay the price!

    The tragic result was a wanton and gory harvest of lives and limbs in the name of election — perhaps the bloodiest in all of the 2015 general elections.

    Even before the Tribunal verdict of October 24, international observers had dismissed the “election” as free slaughter; just as local observers concurred it was “war”.  Yet, “Governor” Wike and his fatally deluded agents of impunity kid themselves they had a “mandate”!  Some mandate!

    Wike’s gubernatorial meltdown is, therefore, a sweet testimony to the futility of impunity — not only during electioneering and elections, but also in day-to-day governance.

    This is particularly so in a federal setting, where a president abandons extant rules; and essays presidential imperialism, as Presidents Olusegun Obasanjo and Jonathan clearly did during their tenure.

    Recall: the crush-Amaechi-at-all-cost campaign created political anomie in Rivers, well ahead of the elections.

    Remember the illicit pressing into service of Mbu Joseph Mbu, who as Rivers Police commissioner, attained notoriety for gross subordination.  He claimed that as a “lion” he had tamed the “leopard” Governor Amaechi — perhaps to muted applause from Jonathan’s Aso Rock!

    While Mbu was busy playing the partisan, if not outright lawless, policeman, Wike was the proud Abuja viceroy in Port Harcourt, in whom Aso Rock was well pleased!  And the two, unfazed poster boys of untrammelled impunity, made quite a tag-team!

    Despite a paralysing Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) strike, which fell under his purview as education minister of state, Wike would rather growl and talk wike, wike on the rough and tumble of Rivers politics — again, to apparent Aso Rock cheer!

    This then was the heart-rending situation, from which Rivers pre-election anomie sunk into the abyss of election-time anarchy; all premised on brazen “federal might”, the Nigerian contemporary political equivalent of the three witches’ gaseous promise to Macbeth.

    But just as the witches’ pledges evaporated fast, like the morning dew melting at the first touch of the sun, Wike’s assured cover of “federal might” (no thanks to Jonathan’s parlous loss) has exploded with an iridescent pop — leaving the tragic “governor” to grope at mocking emptiness!

    And yet, he and his deluded ensemble crow: we hold — and will never surrender — a mandate freely given!  But by who — one is tempted to ask?

    A whole family wiped out just because they had the ill luck of insisting on their democratic right to associate and vote in an election?

    A whole community sacked, and who became election-time refugees in the bush, simply because the Wike Army of Brutal Election Enforcement were on the prowl?

    Or yet tens and hundreds of the fatally traumatized aged, condemned to untimely deaths, just because their youths had the audacity to exercise their democratic rights?

    After all the legal and forensic grandstanding, even up to the Supreme Court on appeal; and the emotive and atavistic play in the streets, towards a patently evil cause of electoral banditry, judicially proven: will all the waters of the Atlantic wash the marauders’ hands clean of blood and blot?

    The evil Lady Macbeth, at the end of her tether, in troubled sleep-walking, answered that question — in resounding negative!

    To be thus is nothing, but to be safely thus!

    Nyesom Wike’s gubernatorial wake (never mind the Peoples Democratic Party’s hysterical bluff and bluster) should be a wake-up call to all: never again must Nigeria tolerate flagrant electoral banditry, routine in some parts of the country.

    But relieving Wike of his gubernatorial loot should only be the first step.  The next logical step is trying and gaoling every INEC official implicated in this grand and ultra-violent electoral heist.  That should send the right message.

    Though about everyone seems to have partisan inclinations, true democrats should bother less about partisan electoral winners and losers, though victory is sweet and defeat painful.  Rather, they should ensure the process wins, by making elections free, fair, transparent and credible.

    If this is achieved in the Rivers re-run, the process would have won; and everyone — winners or losers — with it.

     

    Quote: “Wike’s gubernatorial wake should be a wake-up call to all: never again must Nigeria tolerate flagrant electoral banditry, routine in some parts of the country”