The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tuesday

  • Sanusi’s ‘valedictory’ letter

    Sanusi’s ‘valedictory’ letter

    It seems unlikely that majority of number-numbed Nigerians cared a hoot about the weighty allegations contained in the September 25 letter to President Goodluck Jonathan by the Central Bank of Nigeria Governor, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, let alone his embarrassing recant at the House of Representatives last week. If the letter was a bomb, the subsequent recant had all the elements of a shove-it-in-your-face Sanusi anti-climax!

    The sum total of the letter is an alleged under-remittance by the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC of a whopping $49.804 billion into the federation account. The allegation, has naturally, spawned strident denial by the corporation.

    If you live in a clime where multiples of billions of public funds routinely take a walk from the public vaults, ordinary citizen ought to be forgiven for seemingly passing off yet another invitation to the join in the elaborate farce of a mock trial and – as it always ends – the spectacle of the post mortem that yields nothing.

    Now, in just under two weeks, the wheel has turned full circle for the CBN governor. If the initial intention was to put NNPC in the dock, it is in fact Sanusi that is in the dock! From his self-assigned role of prosecutor-in-chief, Sanusi now has the burden that he actually knows his onions to discharge – aside the scare-mongering for which he is now infamous. Nigeria may have been described as a country of anything goes, even at that, the astounding revelation of the nation’s chief of treasury, banker to the federal government, member of the economic management team, and statutory adviser to the President being caught flat-footed on a matter as straight-forward as the accounting of the accruals into the federation account obviously takes our officials’ fangled dalliance with mediocrity to record low levels.

    You guessed right: the duel between the NNPC and the CBN is only another window into the chaos that our public finance has become. But then, it also reveals a disturbing character trait in our public officers: their inability to admit when they go wrong – not to talk of offering apologies to fellow citizens they misled! Sanusi of course would wear a placid face – like a piece of stone statue while the charade lasted; his nemeses in the finance, petroleum ministries and the NNPC would in equal measure be content to gloat after the technical knock-out – leaving the rest of us to wonder whether the entire proceeding wasn’t indeed a circus!

    Now, what do we know? Only a little more than we knew before. The riddle of course continues; the riddle of how the nation continues to pump more and more crude and sell at record high prices, and yet has far little to share in the piggy bank. By the way, there is a new phrase in the industry’s lexicon – ‘industrial scale’ used to describe the menace of oil theft. Meanwhile, the books of the NNPC remain inaccessible; just as the state governments as joint beneficiaries from the distributable pool continue to shout themselves hoarse over charges that the corporation remits only what it deems fit into the federation account. The NNPC meanwhile carries on, completely impervious to entreaties from any quarters save the presidency.

    That is where informed interjections by individuals like Sanusi ought to have made the difference. The kind of difference expected obviously goes beyond the wild and generalised claims about the shady activities going on. Which explains the pain when he blew the chance!

    Shouldn’t Sanusi, for instance, have known that only 24 percent of the revenue in question goes through the NNPC to the federation account?

    Was it deliberate – or is it simply a case of ignorance – that Sanusi did not bother to fit the payment by the NNPC into the remittance by other agencies in the oil sector to see how they fit into the matrix of the oil industry accounting before forming his conclusion about the scale of theft?

    And then to imagine in another breadth that the same Sanusi would actually seek – through the letter – to prod the President to act on recommendations whose premises are patently flawed?

    Clearly, the mere suggestion that the nation’s number one banker is ignorant of this elementary dictate of the oil sector accounting – something that goes to the heart of how the accruals are determined – must be considered as deeply troubling. Or is there something in the structure of the industry that prevents the government banker from knowing what is going on?

    Considering that he has barely six months left of his tenure, it may well be Sanusi’s valedictory letter. No doubt, the letter has done some good. For one, it should rest the controversies surrounding the $49 billion un-remitted funds. Moreover, if it is any consolation, the nation is at least spared the wild goose chase that leads to nowhere. At least, we now know that the custodial agencies responsible for remitting the balance into the federation account are the DPR and the FIRS. There should be ample time to chase the $10 or is it the $12 billion yet to be reconciled. One other good is that is to make the demand for a thorough overhaul of the corporation, urgent.

    On a final note, the twist in the NNPC under-remittance tale should cause a reflection on the Sanusi odyssey at the apex bank even as the debate on the character of his successor ramps up. While I do not belong to the lynch mob that would describe Sanusi’s tenure as a disaster, a lot can be said about his temperament, his judgment calls, not least his frequent outspokenness on just about anything that calls into question the wisdom of those who drafted him into the top job five years ago. While I may agree that a case can be made for activists like Sanusi in public service, it is hardly in the conservative chamber of the apex bank where a minor slip can sent the financial markets reeling. It shouldn’t be too early to wish Dan-Majen Kano luck in his next assignment. Considering his relatively young age, he would need it in the years ahead.

     

    Merry Christmas to my readers

    To those of you my readers who have kept faith with this page without fail in the past years, here is my simple prayer for you at Christmas: You will witness many more Christmas in good health and prosperity. The year 2014 and beyond will be better for you and all that is yours. Once again, Merry Christmas!

  • Omoluabi!

    Omoluabi!

    Omoluabi — the Yoruba ethos of good breeding, nobility, robust conscience, selflessness and integrity — has been the consuming passion of an artiste; and the equally zestful crusade of a governor.

    The paradox was most striking: it was no free gig, yet the gates were wide open!

    That was Beautiful Nubia’s September 22 show, at the artiste’s EniObanke Cultural Centre, GRA, Ikeja, in Lagos.

    How could a show not be free and yet the gates were wide open?

    The patrons, to be sure, were not a mighty crowd. They were, rather, a select few; the deep that could call to the deep: the few that could connect with the umpteenth musical campaign, by Beautiful Nubia and The Roots Renaissance Band, for a culture-driven ethical reformation, to fix a rotting country; and give the society a glorious rebirth.

    In Biblical parlance, it was those who had ears and could still hear!

    So, as the Beautiful Nubia faithful trooped into the unpretentious yard, dominated by a lawn, and on the fringes, a tree or two, a car park, a bungalow at the far north-eastern end that serves as office and artistes changing rooms, with its adjoining male and female conveniences, it was clear that the paradox of wide open gates and ticket sales appealed to some core values of yore.

    Indeed, as the patrons took their seats, facing the mat-decorated stage at the south-western end of the yard, and its adjoining tree or two, and without any fuss paid for their tickets, even if they had gained the concert venue, the whole exercise spoke of immaculate integrity of the Yoruba traditional market.

    That market need not be manned. The stock was there. And the number of cowries, beside each good, was the price tag. So, all the buyer needed do was to pick what he wanted and deposit the price. Though no one was watching, woe betide that rogue who bought something without paying! It was pristine honesty before the advent of urban moral pollution.

    Beautiful, as Nubia (real name, Segun Akinlolu, hitherto based in Canada) calls himself, is appalled at the moral sewer of contemporary Nigeria; and would appear determined to, by his music, do something drastic about it.

    The laudable obsession dominated his display that early Sunday evening as he sang, and danced with his musical acolytes: life, he declared, was simply too vital to be ruled by the politics of the belly! But that is the tragedy of contemporary Nigeria, with its mass turpitude and venality.

    In Irinajo, his 2009 album, Beautiful Nubia feasted on this theme of moral regeneration, when in the track, “Kurunmi”, he juxtaposed the current leadership fakery with the solid gold of the tragic Kurunmi, who fell in battle in 1861.

    Kurunmi, old Ijaye warlord and tragic hero of the Ijaye-Ibadan War (1859-1861), lost his five sons in that war, triggered by his refusal to recognise the new Alaafin of Oyo in Aremo Adelu. But till the bitterest end, he stood true to his principle.

    To Nubia, the spotless Kurunmi spirit, like some metaphorical crusading angel, is the elixir to clear the present moral rot. He sings in that track:

    “Here comes the fire-eating guy/My Lord with arrows in his eyes and burning anger/Let no one stand in his way/This life will never be the same again, yeah/Here comes the fire-splitting guy/Aare Kurunmi is on his way with his sword of justice/Call all the liars and pretenders/The day of reckoning is here, beware!”

    For Nubia, only the rectitude of the Omoluabi (and its equivalent in other cultures in a federal Nigeria) will save the polity from assured self-destruction.

    Nubia appears to have a comrade-in-arm in moral crusading in Rauf Aregbesola, the Osun governor, who has launched similar campaigns in two projects: Osuwon Omoluabi and Omoluabi Boys and Girls Clubs, both aimed at building the infrastructure of the mind, and strengthening the people’s moral fibre.

    Osuwon Omoluabi is standardised scales, by the Osun market folk, to infuse honesty and transparency in trading, dissuade them from the easy temptation to resort to cheating to make the quick buck and sell the markets in Osun, to other Nigerian traders, on the sheer strength of integrity, hoping that such a positive branding would help to grow the market and transform into legitimate profit for the market folk.

    How this campaign would pan out is in the belly of time, for it is not easy to part with profitable greed! Why, even the Miller, a character in The Canterbury Tales of Englishman, Geoffery Chaucer (1342-1400), crowed about how his golden thumb — turned golden from stealing clients’ grains — had catapulted him to wealth, showing greed is as old as the ages! But there is no doubt: that is the direction to go.

    But the more exciting project, it would appear, are the Omoluabi Boys and Girls Clubs, in Osun communities and schools, which the governor launched to mark his third year in office.

    Again, by this move, the governor appears to have been swayed by a fragment of the Beautiful Nubia lyrics in “Kurunmi”: “Children you will learn and you must never forget/The past is full of heroes from who we can learn/And real lessons to guide us today/Many, many stories to make us proud too.”

    In other words, the grand paradox: to fix a troubled future, you must resort to a glorious past!

    Boys Brigade (founded by Scot, Sir William Alexander Smith, 1854-1914), an interdenominational Christian youth organisation, formed to blend drill and fun with Christian values, Boys Scout (founded by English, Robert Baden-Powell, 1857-1941) and its female follow-up, Girl Guides (first under the direction of Agnes Baden-Powell, 1858-1945), younger sister of Baron Baden-Powell), to develop character, citizenship and personal fitness, were all western concepts, with the consequent cultural imperialism, no matter how latent or benign.

    The Omoluabi clubs, therefore, are exciting because they will do all the age-old western variants have been doing, in patriotism, propriety, character building and allied traits. But their guardian heroes would be authentic African heroes and heroines.

    In a globalised world, skewed against Africa and Africans, character building, anchored on pristine African mores, could well be the elixir the country needs to get out of its current morass. That’s the Omoluabi spirit!

    For the modern African, it is also the needed cultural anchor to compete in a globalised but westernised globe.

    At Christmas then, it is good news from Osun and from Beautiful Nubia, with their collective gospel of Omoluabi! To recapture our country’s soul from leadership fakery and allied power banditry, other governors and artistes should follow the example of the duo.

    Merry Christmas: to all you esteemed readers of Republican Ripples!

  • The Mandela files (3): Encounters

    The Mandela files (3): Encounters

    Of the four encounters I was privileged to have with Nelson Mandela, the second was the most revelatory.

    Many of his defining attributes that the entire world has been remarking and celebrating since his death three weeks shone through splendidly in that encounter – his graciousness, the deep emotional reserve he guarded tenaciously the way he must have guarded his face in the boxing ring, and his resoluteness..

    But first, some background.

    General Olusegun Obasanjo had served as co-chair of the Commonwealth Eminent Persons Group that had recommended economic sanctions and other measures that, together with the altered international environment – glasnost, perestroika, and all that – and the black insurrection in South Africa, moved the ruling regime to abandon petty apartheid and to begin seriously to contemplate a future without that pernicious doctrine.

    During the EPG mission, in 1986, he had struck a relationship with Nelson Mandela, then languishing in prison. He had strengthened the relationship when he hosted Mandela and his wife Winnie to a rousing reception at his farm in Otta when they visited Nigeria in May 1990. Some three months later, Obasanjo was headed for South Africa, on a mission “to listen, learn and encourage” the transition then slowly unfolding.

    I had asked to company him on the trip to get the kind of access that an earlier visit did not provide. Also on the trip were his friend and confidant, the engineer and industrialist Obafemi Olopade, Dr Yusuf Maiangwa, since deceased, director of the Africa Leadership Forum, and former Nigerian High Commissioner to Canada, on leave from Ahmadu Bello University, where he was a professor of French, and two security aides.

    The visit could not have started on a less promising note.

    Within an hour of our landing at Jan Smuts International Airport in Johannesburg, on July 25, 1990, well before General Obasanjo could brief Nelson Mandela and the ANC leadership of his mission, state radio had broadcast the news. Something told me that Mandela would at the very least regard this as a misstep, and would not take kindly to it.

    Early on July 26, 1990, the first full day of our visit, official state radio announced that a plot by the South African Communist Party and some elements of the African National Congress to overthrow the government by force had been uncovered. Specifically, it reported that Mac Maharaj, a member of the ANC National Executive, had been arrested in the investigation of the plot.

    To underscore the gravity of the situation, the government had detailed its intelligence chief, the intense and precise Dr Neil Barnard, to brief Obasanjo and his team on their arrival in Pretoria to meet with senior government officials.

    Barnard and other spokespersons were careful to point out that Mandela was not personally involved in the plot, which they characterised as a “betrayal of trust” that could undermine the peace process “before any significant milestone” was reached and, perhaps more ominously, “threaten the fragile peace in the sub-region.”

    As a condition for restoring trust, they demanded that Maharaj and Joe Slovo, leader of the SACP, be dropped from the ANC’s negotiating team.

    This was the unpromising backdrop to our meeting with Mandela at the ANC’s headquarters in downtown Johannesburg later that day – a day on which state radio announced repeatedly and to the ANC’s consternation, that Obasanjo had arrived to listen, learn and encourage.

    We were ushered into Mandela’s cluttered office as senior members of the ANC were dispersing after concluding a strategy meeting at which they issued a defiant rebuttal to the government ‘s claim that the SACP and ANC were plotting to overthrow it

    Preliminaries were less strained than I had expected. Half-way through, a young woman with a battery of cameras entered the room, and as she tip-toed round the conference table to go into an adjoining room, Mandela accosted her.

    “Mandissa, where have you been?” he said. “I haven’t seen you in quite a while.”

    The young woman, a photographer for the ANC, replied that she had been away on an official assignment.

    “I wanted to give you a copy of my new book,” he said. Grabbing a copy of No Easy Walk to Freedom from a desk, he autographed it and handed it to her.

    That was the essential Mandela, the person who always looked out for those who did the grunt work but on whom the klieg lights rarely shone and who never made the headlines and the front pages.

    Then, Mandela turned to Obasanjo and asked him to introduce his team. At the mention of Olopade’s first name, Obafemi, Mandela instantly made a connection with the more famous bearer of that name, Chief Awolowo, who had died some three years earlier. Twenty-seven years in prison, without access to the news media, had not dulled his memory.

    Mandela would debrief Obasanjo and his team several hours later in the house that Winnie built, in the West Orlando neighbourhood of Soweto, while he was in prison – an elegant affair but by no means the most elegant there, and far from opulent.

    “Whom have you been talking with?” he began, notepad before him and pen in hand.

    As Obasanjo told him about what had transpired in our earlier appointments, you saw Mandela the patient listener, the meticulous note-taker and the skilled interrogator all rolled into one.

    When we met him in the Cabinet Room in the Union Buildings in Pretoria — he had jokingly remarked that I was sitting in the chair usually occupied by the Defence Minister, General Magnus Malan — I had asked President Frederik de Klerk to sketch a time frame for the transition.

    Pulling out my notebook, I relayed his response to Mandela.

    “Difficult,” de Klerk had said. That year -1990 – and the next would be crucial and dynamic. “Certainly, no new election would be held under the present (apartheid) constitution. We are in a hurry. We are not playing games. We are not looking at ten or even five years from now . . .”

    “No new election will be held under the present constitution?” Mandela repeated slowly and deliberately.

    “Exactly what he said, sir,” I replied, looking toward Obasanjo for confirmation.

    Obasanjo confirmed that I had correctly reported de Klerk.

    All this was news to Mandela. He had never been told that much by de Klerk, who kept his cards fairly close to his chest, and may indeed have used our visit to telegraph to Mandela and the ANC that he was s person with whom they could do serious business.

    If Mandela was in the least excited by this development that had the markings of a game-changer in South Africa’s tortuous history, he did not show it. The deep, emotional reserve that had been his armour had supervened.

    But the fighter in Mandela broke through the emotional dam when Obasanjo informed him that, because South African Airways was grounded by a strike, he had offered the leader of the rival, hard-line Pan Africanist Congress, Zeph Mothopeng, a ride to Lagos the following day on the Falcon 600 executive jet that military president Ibrahim Babangida had provided for our trip.

    “Ólù,” he said, looking Obasanjo in the face and wagging the index finger of his right hand, “don’t have anything to do with that chap. If you do, you will lose all your friends here in South Africa.”

    He was firm, resolute. He expected no buts and no ifs, and he got none.

    General Obasanjo would call later to tell Mothopeng that his travel plans had changed, as indeed they had. He would not be flying to Lagos the next day after all. Instead, he would fly to Ulundi, in KwaZulu-Natal, for a meeting with the leader of the Inkatha Freedom Party, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, who was seething with resentment that he had been marginalised in the on-going negotiations.

    From there, he would proceed to the Zambian capital Lusaka to brief President Kenneth Kaunda, chair of the Frontline States, on his mission, and the team would spend the night there as Kaunda’s guests.

     

    *Third and final installment of a retrospective on Nelson Mandela. Some of the material here first appeared in my reporting for The Guardian Sunday Magazine (August 5, 1990), titled “Tracking Apartheid’s Changing Face”.

     

     

  • The Mandela files (2): Mandela in America

    The Mandela files (2): Mandela in America

    In the age of television and instant mass communication, we ought perhaps to revise Ralph Waldo Emerson’s quip and insist that every hero becomes a bore not merely at last but very soon, maybe after only two or three television interviews.

    To do so, however, would be to reckon without the phenomenon that is Nelson Mandela.

    If one week is a long time in politics as a British statesman once remarked, the six months that have passed since Mandela was released from prison and has been the focus of media attention constitute nothing less than an eternity in the murky world of international politics.

    And yet, his stature has continued to grow, and his admirers to multiply. Everywhere he speaks, his message gains in urgency. He has been winning friends for the African National Congress and the liberation struggle of which he is the foremost symbol.

    After scores of television appearances, innumerable newspaper interviews and speeches, he is still displaying an intriguing knack for saying the right thing in the right place at the right time in the right way.

    At 72, Mandela maintains a schedule that would have fazed many a man half his age. But rarely has he shown the irritability that usually flows from weariness that not even a person of his singular energies and willpower can conceal. To admirers and opponents alike, he has shown uncommon civility and a graciousness that is all the more remarkable for being so totally natural.

    In America, the land of the anti-hero, where the news interview is an inquisition by another name, it was widely expected that he would be cut down to human size at last. He had set out on a14-nation, six-week trip only four days after undergoing surgery. The calculation in some quarters was that by the time he reached the United States, signs of exhaustion would be so manifest in his conduct, his temperament would have become brittle, and he would not be able to stand up to the tough questioning for which the American news media are reputed.

    Mandela’s well-known favourable disposition towards some of the bêtes noires of the American Establishment – Cuba’s president Fidel Castro, Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi and PLO leader Yasser Arafat – was sure to render him vulnerable to the sniping of the jingoistic right-wing press and the powerful Jewish interests, of which the United States policy-making is hostage.

    But in America, Mandela was at his brilliant and most engaging best. More than one million people in New York lined his route to honour him in a ticker-tape parade. The city’s first African American mayor, David Dinkins, gave him the keys of the Big Apple. At the United Nations, accredited representatives of all nations of the world rose in a prolonged ovation even before he began to speak.

    He told America that that its enemies were not necessarily the enemies of the ANC; he praised Castro and Gaddafi and Arafat for their contributions to the liberation struggle in South Africa. He spelled out without hatred or bitterness what apartheid means in human terms, insisted on the imperative of the armed struggle, and declared that nothing had happened in his country to warrant the lifting of sanctions.

    In Washington, DC, he drew rapturous applause at various points in his address before the United States Congress, the first by a black foreign leader who holds no executive authority.

    In television and newspaper interviews and speeches across the United States, he reiterated his position on various issues calmly and with the grave, measured dignity that is his hallmark.

    Predictably, a few rumbles were heard here and there. The Jewish lobby was aghast that Mandela did not denounce Yasser Arafat as a terrorist chieftain and the PLO as a terrorist organisation. Under pressure from the large Cuban exile community, Miami scaled down the reception that had been planned for Mandela.

    The New York Times in an editorial hailed him as an authentic hero, a manifestation of man’s unconquerable spirit, but remarked that if the United States were to employ Mandela’s standards and judge individuals and organisations by their attitudes toward it and not on the basis of other people’s prejudices, it would never have imposed economic sanctions against the South Africa.

    A.M. Rosenthal, the rabidly pro-Jewish columnist for the paper, wrote approvingly of Mandela but deplored as “amoral” his standards in choosing friends. So did other Times columnist Flora Lewis, whose liberal credentials are unimpeachable on all matters except those that have any bearing on Israel, however tangentially.

    All of them conveniently forget that the United States is only a recent convert to the view that economic sanctions can force Pretoria to reconsider its iniquitous policies’

    Was it not the U.S. that invented the opportunistic and amoral policy of “constructive engagement”? Was it not former Secretary of State, George Schultz, who declared that the U.S. could not impose economic sanctions against South Africa because American women would by that measure be deprived of a source of diamonds? Had the U.S. not always stood in the way of UN draft resolutions condemning the barbarities of apartheid?

    Mandela knows all this but is too gracious, too civil, to dwell on them. He had his own message to put across and was not going to be dragged into sterile controversy.

    *Second installment of a three-part retrospective on Mandela. The article was first published in The African Guardian (September 23, 1990).

    *

    Twenty-three years later, well before Mandela’s lifeless body had turned cold, the right-wing media in the United States resumed its campaign of framing Mandela according to its soulless measure of goodness and greatness.

    Yes, Mandela preached love and forgiveness and may even have practised same. But, you see, he was a Kha.mew.nist (read Communist). A Kha.mew.nist, you understand? He was the leader of a terrorist organisation that murdered thousands of innocent people in Africa and elsewhere, many of them women and children.

    You doubt it?

    Recently declassified material in the British archives, they said triumphantly, shows irrefutably that Mandela was not merely leader of an organisation of which the South African Communist Party was an ally, he was, horror of horrors, an actual, card-carrying, dues-paying member of that party.

    Such labelling is a familiar weapon of the American Right, reserved especially for outstanding black men whose complaisance could not be taken for granted – Paul Robeson, Patrice Lumumba, Kwame Nkrumah, and Martin Luther King, Jr., to name just a few.

    Mandela had denied his alleged Communist affiliation again and again. But does it matter whether he was a Communist or not? If it is indeed proven that he was once an active, card-carrying, dues-paying member of the SACP, would that take anything away from his stature as one of the greatest men of our age and any age?

    Apartheid, the pernicious ideology that undergirded the machinery of government in South Africa, was justly condemned by the United Nations as a crime against humanity. To some of the loudest elements of the American Right, however, Communism is a far greater evil apartheid.

    Better a crime against humanity – especially black humanity — than a doctrine that challenges the foundations of market capitalism.

  • Before it is too late?

    Before it is too late?

    Hate him or love him, there is something about the Olusegun Obasanjo persona that manages to evoke mixed passions both in the polity and in every one of us. A classic study in ethical and moral abdication, his story, emblematises the ugly face of the nation’s leadership regression. For a man whose entire public life had the ever tending hands of benevolent gods doing the cracking of his proverbial palm kernels for him, those who endlessly accuse him of opportunism merely acknowledge the gracelessness that has dogged his entire life.

    So much for the naked dance of the self-appointed diviner of fate!

    The issue of course is the ex-President’s inelegantly worded 18-page ‘advisory’ to the estranged godson dated December 2 – that is few days before the December 5 passing of the great Nelson Mandela. Although it seems highly improbable that the timing of its ‘leakage’ had anything to do with an attempt to burnish the shrunken stature of a man who once rubbed shoulders with global statesmen as a member of Commonwealth Eminent Persons Group, even at that, there are those who would swear that Obasanjo actually chose the timing of the release of the ‘satanic verses’ as his own revenge on a world that has long expunged his name from its roll of statesmen!

    I must say that one of the difficult, unenviable choices of being a Nigerian is being called upon to pick between the graceless, unforgiving, hypocritical and the outright lawless godfather and his utterly incompetent, vacillating and corrupt clone!

    I have been asked the question nearly a dozen times – what do I make of Obasanjo’s letter to President Goodluck Jonathan?

    My ready answer is –it is vintage Obasanjo with its signature self-serving patriotic pretensions and alarming prognostications. Simply because he created Jonathan in his image and after his likeness, he seeks to remain the jealous god to whom the man must defer whether in the running of the party or the conduct of his government! It’s part of living in the illusion of being the ultimate shuttle diplomat – consulted by Presidents and kings – to do what he does best – dousing the fires created by the many marionettes on the continent!

    Such make-believe larger than life image of Obasanjo obviously plays to type. It is part of the myth woven round the man now pejoratively call Baba. Recently, I watched Baba spar with ex-CNN man, the Kenyan-born Jeff Koinage on You-Tube. I struggled to reconcile the image of a once celebrated professional with the practiced actor fawning before our own OBJ at some downtown conference in East Africa! And how the man loved the comical spectacle!

    Why is OBJ angry with GEJ? Is it for surpassing his administration’s records in serial abuses of our laws and institutions? And talk of fidelity to party; didn’t Obasanjo blaze the trail in party infidelity when he supported Ikedi Ohakim, the PPA candidate against Ararume, the candidate of his party? What about the serial impunities in Ekiti, Plateau and Bayelsa? And the corruption? The third term subversion, etc.

    Nigerians, it must be said truly know who their troubler-in-chief is.

    Now, let’s turn to the sanctimonious Jonathan presidency. I wish there was something left of that intangible called ‘sympathy’ for an administration that has done all in its power to mismanage virtually all aspects of our lives in a little over three years since it took charge. From a broad pan-Nigerian mandate of 2011, what we have now is a presidency diminished both in moral authority and in grandeur. In this, Obasanjo was neither original nor expressed anything outside what other Nigerians have come to perceive as the gracelessness of our Ijaw brothers in appropriating this Presidency as theirs. And how they rub it in!

    Under Obasanjo, at least you knew who was in charge; today what we have is a laissez faire presidency – a party of all comers. Imagine an administration presiding over the daily theft of 20 percent of its main revenue source – crude oil? It would hardly be uncharitable to qualify it as an administration only in name.

    In saner climes, that is a cause for war! What do we have instead? Brigands calling the shots leaving state actors to squabble over the dregs in the pot. And this is supposed to be a country with a standing army, navy and air force. Welcome to GEJ’s gangland republic.

    That was what Obasanjo inferred with his allegory of the thief being invited to guard the house. Only the presidency can afford to pretend not to know who the thieves are; or the house being ravaged. We know. We know what the supposed minders have done with our lives. It’s etched on the faces of the ordinary man on the Main Street.

    It is of course that graft in high places of course stinks to high heavens. The scale of impunity beggars believe. Ever heard of corruption-complaint administration? There is putrefaction everywhere; the NNPC is an island unto itself; or so it has always been. The accounts, we are told by those who should know, are for their eyes only. Only in Nigeria would the variation on existing contract quadruple the initial contract sum. If in doubt, ask Works Ministry; the smart operators in the powerful ministry have just enough tools to convince, confuse and confound anyone!

    I need to talk about the little matter of the aviation ministry. Yes, Stella Oduah of the Stellagate fame is still in charge. You ask; how come? Our President of course thinks corruption is overblown; that it is more of a perception thing.

    Now, we have since learnt how easy it is to purchase two bullet-proof vehicles outside the strictures of appropriation process in clear violation of the procurement laws; that is of course permissible so long as you have the ears of the President. Never mind that those who should approve the expenditure have long denied that they gave no approval for anything of the sort. With the chief of state settling for an administrative panel rather than haul the alleged felons before the courts, the case appears closed.

    I don’t think Nigerians can suffer the indulgence of ignoring Saint Obasanjo. That would be fatal. An erstwhile commander-in-chief obviously knows the implication of raising hell over the 1000 names said to be on political watch list and an alleged recruitment of hit squads for whatever agenda. It goes beyond wishing that the worst would not happen. It calls for action on the part of the National Assembly as the elected representatives of the people. As the Yorubas would say – the log that poses a threat to the eye is better taken off from a safe distance. Hardly a time to cast lots between godfather and godson.

  • So long a letter

    So long a letter

    The Senegalese, Mariama Ba (1929-1981), wrote So Long A Letter, a semi-autobiographical novella, that chronicled the plight of the African woman, under the combined pressure of African and Islamic cultures.

    The male chauvinists that dominate both worlds would scoff at the late Madame Ba’s “ranting” against the marital status quo, so violently skewed against the woman in both cultures. But her 1980 classic has provided gender rights activists, determined to right these age-old wrongs, an evocative literary tool.

    On December 12, former President Olusegun Obasanjo made public his own long letter, not for any overriding public good, but a litany of woes against his estranged protégé, President Goodluck Jonathan. Obasanjo played his usual grandstand as some self-appointed overseer of Nigeria; and postured without end as the all-consuming patriot.

    Yet, it was nothing but another unabashed glorification of the Obasanjo self — that ever intrusive persona that, on the balance of fair evidence, can’t even pass the muster of the model citizen.

    Like most of Obasanjo’s hyper-reported public interventions, it was another grand show of a show-actor craving a stage and cheap applause — cynical applause at the expense of some political foe. The former military head of state (1976-1979), two-term elected president (1999-2007) and fundament of the Nigerian problem is crying wolf!

    Yes, there is indeed some “wolf”. But Obasanjo himself was its author and finisher: Goodluck Jonathan, after all, was Obasanjo’s political creation. But the creator would rather Jonathan was some tabula rasa — on which he could write and erase at will — which the protégé has resisted.

    Godson cannot, therefore, hear the godfather. Things have fallen apart, so mere anarchy, to paraphrase the Irish poet, William Butler Yeats, is loosed upon their once cosy world! But how is that a problem of Nigeria and Nigerians as Obasanjo now trumpets?

    Indeed, Yeats in his poem, “The Second Coming”, somewhat echoes the loud but empty Obasanjo interventions: “The best lack all convictions, while the worst are full of passionate intensity!”

    That brings the discourse to Obasanjo’s “permission” to share the Jonathan letter with the quad of Generals Theophilus Danjuma, Ibrahim Babangida, Abdulsalami Abubakar and 2nd Republic Vice President, Alex Ekwueme — to earn some high profile sympathy? Ah!

    But which of these, aside from Abubakar, has not tasted Obasanjo’s rather crude tongue, in his endless playing to the gallery?

    Is it Danjuma who, not long ago in a fit of media anger, dismissed Obasanjo as “Aremu of Ota”?

    Or Babangida, who earlier as self-proclaimed “military president”, endured the Jonathan treatment, the same grand hypocrisy the grim Sani Abacha could not stand and, before the infernal theatrics started, despatched the grand dramatist to gaol on phantom coup charges?

    Or is it Ekwueme that Obasanjo muscled into silence while, as president, he started destroying the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), the logical conclusion of which he now, ironically, accuses and ridicules the luckless Jonathan, though his name be Goodluck?

    If Jonathan has his Bamanga Tukur, didn’t Obasanjo have his own Garrison Commander, Ahmadu Ali, both relentless presidential puppets that smashed the ruling party so a bully president could stand tall, like some Gulliver in Lilliput?

    Yet, no tears for President Jonathan. He plunged his knife into a dead hippo, fallen by the pool; and he richly deserves his running diarrhoea. There is always a stiff price for crass opportunism!

    Besides, despite being the first Nigerian president to bear the academic prefix of PhD, Jonathan’s actions have no rigour, no grace, no gravitas, just plain humdrum! Indeed, by his actions and inactions he has, perhaps more than any other, afflicted his presidency with a rare pull him down (PHD) complex.

    His is a grand study in wilful conspiracy against self; and the resultant harsh wages of promotion beyond competence. His presidency is therefore a grand let-down, right from the beginning — and there appears no redeeming factor.

    Indeed, as one contemplates the Jonathan Presidency, with its welter of terrible constitutional infractions and heinous allegations, and the man at the vortex of it all feigning none the wiser, the disturbing image of the Biblical wolf in sheep’s skin floods the mind.

    But even as the president sweats under the crushing weight of his elephantine troubles, his feet, in fatal distraction, appear still foraging for needless troubles with ants.

    The induced Rivers crisis is an abiding case in point, with the Police not even hiding their hideous partisanship; and rogue legislators, backed by rogue “federal might”, threatening to plunge that state into anarchy.

    Then there are opposition allegations of Jonathan turning the Ecological Fund into some crony gravy — allegedly rewarding friends, punishing foes.

    Of course, there is also the abiding allegation, supported by CBN Governor, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, that the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) is undercutting the country and the president doesn’t appear to have a clue about it all.

    That these allegations are made at all show the near-hopeless depth the Nigerian presidency has plumbed under Jonathan. That is unfortunate. But even more grievous is Obasanjo’s allegation that Jonathan is arming snipers to despatch political foes.

    Though the now crusading Obasanjo had more than a fair share of unresolved politically motivated killings during his presidency, this is one allegation Jonathan must deal with, if only to clear his presidency’s sagging reputation.

    But aside from this alleged killer squad, most of Obasanjo’s charges, in his long epistle of lamentation, were pure gas. There was nothing Obasanjo accused Jonathan of that he himself did not do during his best-forgotten presidency.

    NNPC is opaque. But how open was it during Obasanjo’s term, even when he was his own oil minister?

    On corruption — what has Obasanjo to teach, after his Obasanjo Presidential Library’s bared-faced extortion? If Jonathan responded with a contractor building his village a marvel of a church, it is evidence that Jonathan is master of his political father’s rotten tactics, corruption be damned!

    Jonathan wants to run for second term — and so what? Didn’t Obasanjo do two legal terms and was plotting an illegal third? Fortunately, Jonathan is doing more than enough to be guillotined at the polls. So, let the people decide his fate.

    Therefore, to now grandstand at some ogre, hinting at some non-democratic change, under some pseudo-messianic complex, is not only cheap but outright subversive. But it is another cynical drama, for Obasanjo knows that he too would vanish without trace, should Jonathan meet his electoral waterloo. So, would his and Jonathan’s credo of power without responsibility; and lollies without service.

    Obasanjo and Jonathan are an inglorious past and ignoble present that must be electorally swept away, from polluting the future. The Ebora Owu’s long letter of tumbling adjectives, and buzz words like honour and credibility that, from Obasanjo’s own conduct in office hardly meant anything, is his way of buying time and shopping for new puppets.

    He fails — except, of course, with the gullible and the excitable!

  • The Mandela files (1): The legend lives

    The Mandela files (1): The legend lives

    As rumours of the imminent release of Nelson Mandela gained ground, several nagging questions must have assailed even his most ardent admirers.

    What if the man turned out to be but a shadow of the legend? What if he emerged stooped and walked with tentative steps and a shuffling gait after 27 years in prison, most of them in the unspeakably inhospitable conditions on Robben Island? What if his shoulders drooped and his clothes hung on him as if on a peg?

    What if his speech was slurred and he could not give the rousing orations to the crowds that were sure to gather wherever he stopped? What if his memory no longer served him well? What if he was wizened and could not even withstand the strain of a brief address to the teeming crowd of chanting admirers? What if he had to be helped up and down the dais?

    His remarkable strength of character and indomitable will are of course well known. But what if prison had sapped his will, his vigour and his spirit, and there was no fight left in him? And surely, he is not superior to the laws of biology?

    Questions, questions, and more questions.

    True, the Commonwealth Eminent Persons Group, of which our own General Olusegun Obasanjo was co-chairman, had reported some four years earlier that they found him in remarkably good physical shape, in full possession of his faculties and enormously well-informed. But anything could have happened since then to a person of Mandela’s age.

    Besides, sheer surprise at finding that the man was not so derelict as they had expected might have led them to exaggerate his condition. And, in any case, did they interact with him long enough to be able to make valid judgments about his physical and mental condition?

    Doubts, doubts, and more doubts.

    But the answers to the questions and the doubts came when he stepped out of the Victor Verster Prison, near Paarl, in the Western Cape, on February 11, 1990.

    Age and the prison regimen had taken their toll. The robust frame that once belonged to South Africa’s leading amateur middleweight boxer, the tireless people’s lawyer and guerrilla chieftain had yielded to a spare body. The cherubic face of the heydays of the resistance was now deeply lined. The hair was freckled with grey.

    But the gait was erect. His steps were measured, firm. His voice resonated with authority. He read from prepared texts with the unaided eye. The fighting spirit that had led his associates and admirers to call him the Black Pimpernel had not waned.

    Apartheid had got to go. The state of emergency must be lifted. The armed struggle would continue until conditions for meaningful negotiations were created. All political prisoners, including most of those whom the apartheid regime was holding on trumped-up charges, must be released. Sanctions must be sustained. Far too many people had died in communal violence. The killings must stop. Students should go back to their school; workers to their mines and factories

    White domination must end, but it would not be replaced by black domination. South Africa would be a home to all who want to live in a democratic, just, non-racial society.

    By one account, Mandela gave in a single day nine interviews to television crews from across the world. Nobody could have judged from his performance that he had never until a month or two before, seen a television camera. Without the slightest trace of unease, he responded calmly and confidently to questions that ranged from the personal to the public, and from the past to the future.

    Whether he was sitting in front of television cameras or addressing a huge crowd or receiving endless streams of visitors that poured into his Soweto home, he displaced, according to The New York Times, “the measured dignity” that the ancient Romans called “gravitas.” In a perceptive essay for The Observer, South Africa’s eminent journalist Allister Sparks described him as a “patriarch.”

    Even The Economist, that consummate master of the elegant putdown, especially of persons and institutions that do not regard capitalism in its rawest form as something divinely ordained, allowed that Mandela “turned out a finer man than South Africa” – by which it probably meant the racists “had a right to expect,”

    Mandela is an authentic martyr who chooses not to come across as one. He is the symbol of the struggle of justice and freedom in South Africa and without question its most authentic spokesman, but he insists that he is only a member of the African National Congress.

    Even when the rusty Iron Lady was again putting to ridicule whatever pretensions Britain still makes to greatness by calling for an end to sanctions, Mandela said he would have to clear with the ANC before answering her.

    Mandela’s travel plans also reflect a deliberate sunning of the limelight. His first port of call will be Liusaka, Zambia, to renew ties with ANC leadership and cadres. From there, he will proceed to Sweden to greet Oliver Tambo, his comrade-in-arms, who is recovering from stroke. While Mandela was in jail, it was Tambo who animated and kept the struggle alive from outside.

    Then, on to India and Canada, perhaps the two most unyielding protagonists of sanctions.

    A lesser man would have headed straight to Britain and the United States, for sumptuous banquets under glittering lights; he would have jumped at the opportunity to be photographed with those we have been conditioned to regard as the high and the mighty.

    Not Mandela.

    By now Mandela has shattered all the stereotypes, the fears, the greed, and all the ignorance that have sustained for almost half a century one of the most inhuman systems of government the world has ever known.

    I hope, for the sake of the apartheid regime that South African television has been presenting a faithful portrait of the man. The disciples of apartheid should study and understand and appreciate him. For, as matters now stand, he is probably the only person who can liberate them from the incomparable prison that is apartheid.

    First published in The Guardian (Lagos) on February 27, 1990, this is the first installment of a three-part retrospective on Nelson Mandela.

     

    Thumbs up for our GEJ

    Remembering especially his dismal performance in an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour and other unflattering outings, many Nigerians must have fretted when the BBC announced that President Goodluck Jonathan was going to favour its global audience with his reflections on Nelson Mandela’s legacy.

    They need not have worried.

    It was a lexical triumph for Dr Jonathan.  He delivered himself with semantic and syntactic aplomb, even taking a dig at those leaders who, instead of voluntarily relinquishing office like Mandela, sit tight and plunge their countries into chaos – no need for him to name them, said Dr Jonathan; you know them — and those leaders who leave office but continually lurk in the corridors of power.

    Is this perchance an indication that he intends to “play Mandela” by seeking neither a second term nor an elongation of his current term?

    In whatever case, I hope he is not scheduled to be in the same room anytime soon with Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe.  I can assure him that Mugabe, one of the most gifted polemicists in Africa and indeed anywhere, will respond in kind at the earliest opportunity,  and most likely with compound interest.

    When it came to naming an example of those who, according to Jonathan, vacated office but carry on as if they are still in power, I was stuck.  Can you help?

  • Mandela: Life walk to legend

    Mandela: Life walk to legend

    Long Walk to Freedom, that is the title of Nelson Mandela’s definitive autobiography that captures his life odyssey: a classic of exceptional suffering that cleared the Mandela essence of any dross of bitterness; and left only the purity of exceptional grace and magnanimity.

    Was Mandela human or divine? Were it to be the medieval ages in Europe, this question would have earned the asker a charge of apostasy, and probably a one-way ticket to damnation.

    Indeed, were Mandela to be native of the Yoruba nation in Nigeria, instead of his Thembu nation in South Africa, his deification would only be a matter of time.

    He would therefore be in the class of Ogun, Oya and Sango – phenomenal humans deified after their death for their great deeds, as distinct from Olodumare, the Yoruba Supreme Being, Obatala, god of creation and Orunmila, god of divinity: godheads, according to Yoruba cosmogony, that existed with Olodumare from the beginning; and Olokun, Osun, Olumo rock, Idanre hills etc, awesome natural phenomena that provide their communities with spring of life and security.

    Indeed, such is the infectious beauty of greatness that, at Mandela’s passage on December 5, the Nigerian ruling elite have joined, with their empty rhetoric, the band wagon to share in the matter of the moment.

    Doyin Okupe, the peculiar master of Okupe-istic cant, has swiftly canonised his boss, President Goodluck Jonathan as “Nigeria’s Mandela”! Even for the un-rigorous Jonathan presidency, that claim sounded particularly comical.

    And their Baba, former President Olusegun Obasanjo, weighed in with stunning self-indictment. He had gone to Mandela, he read out a statement with graveness and piety peculiarly Obasanjo’s, and urged him to go for second term.

    But Mandela had told him “Olu” [pronounced with distinctly un-Yoruba accent], “have you ever seen a nation where an 80-year ran the show?” – or something to that effect. Yet, Obasanjo did two terms and was plotting an illegal third, before political realities stripped him of the costly illusion! Of course, he denied the third term gambit. But he should tell that to Nasir El-Rufai, the no-nonsense, all-conquering hero of The Accidental Public Servant!

    Okupe’s roguish canonisation of his boss and Obasanjo’s holy self-indictment just prove one point: greatness is sweet. But only a few are willing and ready to pay the price.

    The Mandela-Obasanjo parallel is a classic study in greatness and non-greatness.

    The one went to jail for 27 years, under apartheid, perhaps the most evil political system ever imposed on any people, yet as president, after helping to kill that system with rare grace, he felt he owed his nation!

    The other went to jail, for a few years, despatched by the same post-12 June 1993 presidential election political contraption of convenience he helped to erect, but as president after, felt his country owed him!

    The one endured the harshest of cruelties to, with near-divine grace, forgive and forget. The other never lets pass a slight, with his graceless vindictiveness.

    As for Okupe and his laughable canonisation, it is the same story of court zealots leading their principals down the road of perdition. In the Nigerian power cosmos, so was it at the beginning, so is it now and so it ever shall be, except of course some drastic change happens. If Nigerian leaders cannot pay the price for greatness, how can they lead their country to greatness?

    Nelson Mandela never bothered about the trappings or gravy of power, the Genesis to Revelation for our leaders here. All he went for were fundaments of common humanity: irrespective of race, creed or colour. And that he did it as the most globally acclaimed victim of a hideous system that dignified or criminalised strictly on the basis of one’s colour, without betraying any bitterness, was the stuff of which legends are made.

    Mandela was such a force for universal good in the 20th century and beyond simply because he shattered the ingrained Western racial bigotry of the Joseph Conrad school: Africans were savages and Europeans were the guiding angels divined to bring — by cruel force, if necessary — Africans and other Black peoples of the world out of their savagery.

    Though the Afrikaner overlords of Apartheid South Africa would later develop Afrikaner Calvinism, a rogue theological ideology on the pedestal of the Dutch Reformed Church to justify their evil, anti-Black racial discrimination would appear to stem from sentiments from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which bigotry Chinua Achebe, in his famous 1977 essay, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” took apart.

    Though racism predated Conrad’s 1899 work, Heart of Darkness would come as noxious understanding, if not outright justification of the evil, with the matter-of-fact rendition style of a not altogether unsympathetic narrative voice.

    But even with all of these, Mandela’s sheer humanity and political sagacity came across with two principal statements, among others. He declared, in his post-Robben Island prison years, that never in South Africa would one race oppress the other. He also declared that what he fought for was not majority, but democratic rule.

    The race-neuter quality of the first statement was not lost on many, for it insisted on equity and mutual respect for all races, in South Africa’s rainbow coalition, which Mandela would inspire from 1990, after apartheid as state policy since 1948.

    The equity and justice of the second statement is even more telling. Majority rule would have consigned South Africa to reverse apartheid: perpetual Black rule, which nevertheless would not be undemocratic, for democracy, in its most cynical form, is a game of numbers.

    Still, Mandela’s stress on democratic rule, as against majority rule, is a muted promise that one day, even a white South African, hopeless minority though he might be, could rule the rainbow nation, so long as he gets the go-ahead of the Black majority.

    No wonder then that while other African leaders would virtually invest anything to get photo-ops with American, European and other global leaders, it was the other way with Mandela, as who was who in the world happily scrambled to land a photo-op with him.

    The African, hitherto a savage in the bigoted White eyes, had in Mandela turned a global icon, without whose aura none of these world figures was complete! An armada of these leaders would also be at his funeral on December 15.

    Nigerian leaders that fatally distract themselves with the dross of office, instead of seeking greatness, have the Mandela story to seek redemption and change their ruinous ways. But perhaps they are beyond redemption?

    In that case, Nigerians must seize the moment and stop suffering fools gladly, by ending the relay of selfish, arrogant and incompetent leaders.

    Meanwhile, Madiba’s was a glorious life walk to legend — and you could feel that the way common South Africans trooped to Mandela’s Johannesburg home, at the announcement of his passage, to celebrate his life. How many Nigerian leaders would enjoy such privilege after their passage?

    Adieu Madiba. When comes another?

  • Averting the fire next time

    Had last week’s go-back-to-work-or-face-a-sack order handed to the striking university teachers by the federal government not grated sufficient nerves to the point of rage, we should ordinarily be savouring the prospects of an engaging conversation on the future of our ivory towers in the global academe, and the crisis of our education in general. For not only has the latest but most unfortunate tango that has left public universities in utter paralysis for five months running rendered the conversation urgent, it is now such that the nation can only postpone the exercise at its peril.

    Now, there are those who believe that our nightmare is about ending – barring of course the threat by the unimaginative federal government to dislodge ‘recalcitrant’ teachers should they fail to report at their duty posts at the expiration of yesterday’s ultimatum. They have a good reason to be: with N200 billion in the kitty and the promise of naira rain totalling N1.2 trillion in the coming years; soon it would be time to savour the peace purchased with tears and a precious blood – that is, assuming that the remaining elements in the 2009 sticky agreement, especially the clause mandating another round of negotiation few months from now in 2014, sails without rancour.

    No doubt, the N200 billion intervention fund – slated to be shared among the three score plus four universities – federal and states – may seem a lot of money at this time. More like throwing water to a parched soul, it is a lifeline, sort of. However, the fund, when spread among the 701 projects dotting our universities’ landscapes as identified by the Committee on NEEDS Assessment of Nigerian Public Universities, which found 163 of them abandoned and another 538 on-going, it comes to pretty little – a drop in the ocean of the universities’ needs.

    By the way, the universities running costs are an entirely different matter; they are just as inadequate to cope with the demands of modern centres of higher education. It takes only a visit to our supposed citadels of higher education to appreciate the depth of the decay ranging from inadequate classrooms, ill-equipped libraries and laboratories to basic conveniences like lavatories and rest-rooms. The situation, to put it mildly, is unimaginable.

    The fundamental question remains – what happens after the N1.2 trillion is fully disbursed? Would that also call for another round of strike to press the same point about revitalising the institutions? And by the way, where is the guarantee that the current truce would last particularly as a lot depends on what happens in the coming months? Moreover, to the extent that the same elements of bad faith – which was not in short supply these past years – would remain a constant factor in the 2014 negotiations and beyond, the road ahead promises to be just as bumpy.

    The ultimate challenge, in the situation, is to find a lasting solution to the crisis to avert the fire next time.

    To be sure, the crisis of funding in our universities mirrors the larger crisis of our public finance system, the corruption and the rot, not excluding the warped definition of what constitutes national priorities for a nation that aspires to join the league of the top 20 economies in less than seven years from now.

    That is why the big question really is what to do – in the environment of competing demands on public funds not just in the context of the abysmal state of infrastructure, but also in the context of the grim reality of declining per capita spend on recipients of tertiary education in the last few years. Put simply: it is how to bridge the observed financing gaps in tertiary education.

    Now, if you are, like me, persuaded that the nation does not have an inexhaustible vault from where it could always draw upon, you may also agree that it’s time the beneficiaries are called upon to do their bit for the overall good of the system. Coincidentally, as Professor Niyi Akinnaso would have us know in his column in The Punch last year, Nigeria is not alone in this. Drawing his example from his base in the United States where he teaches, he noted that government appropriations, having dropped from over 50 per cent of university budgets in the 1980s to between 12 and 20 per cent in the 2000s has led to the hiking of tuition fees from some five per cent or less to between 25 and 35 per cent of university operational budgets.

    In our environment, such a proposition is certainly not popular to push. The truth however is that the illusion that tertiary education could be had for free can no longer be sustained any more now than the loathing of the idea of pricing that level of education like any other economic good. The challenge, to start with, is how to overcome the confounding reluctance by the universities themselves to determine the per capita cost of academic programmes as a necessary step to addressing the problem of funding in a realistic way.

    I had cause to address the issue on this page when the staff and students of Lagos State University took to the barricades shortly after the institution hiked tuition in that institution. Imagine a situation in which it costs N600,000 to produce a well-rounded doctor and the government is only able to put, say N300,000 on the table. Let’s also say, for the purpose of argument, that the student is made to pay additional N100,000 in tuition and associated fees. Of course, even if we take out the factors of corruption and leakages in the system, only in our typically creative imagination can we conceive of a situation in which N400,000 input would deliver the result of N600,000 input! Has anyone considered the output in terms of the cadaver that our medical trainee would never get to ‘see’ outside of the theoretical anatomy class throughout the entire five-year duration of the course?

    Here is my simple proposition: let begin with determining the cost of each academic programme. In addition to capital grants, let the government state how much, per capita, it is willing to put in. It is the educated thing to do. That way, everyone knows the gap to be filled. In the long run, the challenge is how to ensure that bright, indigent students are not denied university education.

    By the way, I have heard the suggestion about transforming the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETF) into an education bank to avail everyone that desires higher education loans.  If you ask me, I would not consider it a bad idea. Why should we baulk at the idea only because the Students Loans Board of old failed? And what is so sacrosanct about the TETF bureaucracy?

  • New turn in Nigerian politics

    New turn in Nigerian politics

    In the annals of political engagement, only in the rarest of circumstances does it happen that persons elected to high office on the platform of the ruling party and wielding the enormous powers of that office defect in large numbers to the Opposition.

    Nigeria may be the country of “anything goes.” But even there, that kind of migration was inconceivable — until last week, when five PDP governors defected to the APC.

    It is already one for the history books even if the PDP manages to stanch the widely anticipated migration in the weeks ahead of more governors, a raft of senators, and members of the House of Representatives, and of local government councils.

    No admirer of the self-styled largest political party in Africa, I confess to being smitten with schadenfreude. For, even at its least repellent, the PDP was more concerned with sharing the spoils of office than advancing the public welfare. Not even its most devoted followers have ever accused it of being imaginative. It has bred mass discontent and mass disillusionment

    It conducted itself as if it was an extension of the Presidency, wielding the wide powers of that institution without correlative restraint and responsibility. In relating to the rank and file, its senior officials behaved like schoolyard bullies. Having held power by hook or crook virtually unchallenged for 14 years, it had grown supinely complacent and developed an overweening sense of entitlement – the classic symptoms of regime fatigue.

    When key elected officials desert the protective ambience of The Umbrella and risk the petulant vindictiveness of the ruling party and its opulent agent, the Federal Government, for uncertain prospects in the Opposition, you know that a tectonic shift has occurred in the political landscape.

    Where it will lead is yet unclear. The new Opposition is an amalgam of political formations whose orientations span the entire ideological spectrum. Taking the situation in Kwara as an example, the amount of house-cleaning that it will first have to undertake will put it to the severest test.

    There, some two months ago, elements of the old PDP, with the active connivance of the state’s electoral commission, brazenly stole the re-rerun local government election in Offa, the state’s second-largest city and a stronghold of the APC. Several weeks later, it went on to stage state-wide local council elections, despite a subsisting court petition. The APC boycotted the poll, and the old PDP celebrated the outcome as yet another landslide victory.

    What is going to happen, now that those same elements of the old PDP have migrated en mass to the APC as decreed by the former governor and now Senator Bukola Saraki who, as chair of the Nigerian Governors Forum, had unsuccessfully sought the PDP’s presidential ticket?

    Before the grand defection, Dele Belgore, the senior attorney, was widely perceived as Kwara’s governor-in- waiting. As candidate of the now defunct Action Congress of Nigeria, he made a strong showing in the last gubernatorial election in Kwara. To this day, a substantial body of opinion in the state believes that he was robbed. If he secured the APC’s ticket for the next round, the election would be his to lose.

    Now, that calculus has become more complicated. With Bukola Saraki personally leading the mass migration of PDP members into the APC, and with his hand-picked successor Abdudlfatah Mohammed sure to seek a second term as governor, what awaits Belgore and his associates who had nurtured the ACN/APC and had been persecuted for their exertions?

    The situation in Kwara applies in other states, to a greater or lesser extent. Resolving it without rancour is not beyond the ingenuity of all those who fashioned the new coalition, but it is going to be a severe test.

    I was also concerned about how former Osun State governor Olagunsoye Oyinlola, the embattled secretary of the PDP and secretary, until its dissolution, of its breakaway faction, the new PDP, would fit into the latest arrangement.

    Apparently sensing the incongruity, he declared that he had not defected to the APC. With the merger, his post as national secretary of the new PDP no longer existed. But he remained national secretary of what is left of the PDP, he said. For his pains, the PDP, ramped up his suspension into expulsion.

    A war of words reminiscent of politics in the Second Republic – and indeed of the election at Eatanswill, recorded for the ages in all its hilarity by Charles Dickens in the Pickwick Papers –has since broken out between Oyinlola and his estranged protégé, Professor Wale Oladipo, who replaced him as PDP national secretary.

    I cannot repeat what Oladipo has said about Oyinlola’s mental state, or what Oyinlola said about Oladipo’s groveling ways without courting a writ of libel, especially from Oyinlola who is a qualified lawyer and has a partiality for litigation. If there are any adults still left in the room, would they kindly arrange an armistice? Where have you been, Tony “The Fixer” Anenih?

    Meanwhile, the grand coalition is gathering momentum. If this grand coalition coheres and endures, and if it is not just a vehicle for wresting power from the PDP and thereafter carrying on business as usual, it has the potential to set Nigeria on the path of real transformation. Even if it does not supplant what remains of the PDP as the ruling party, it will at least have positioned itself as a credible alternative. The enthusiasm with which it has been welcomed in many parts of Nigeria is a good augury.

    The chief architects of the grand coalition, Muhammadu Buhari and Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, deserve high praise for their vision, leadership, commitment, and tenacity, not forgetting their associates who toiled and are toiling even now behind the cameras and the headlines to hammer out the details of the historic merger.

    It must be accounted a mark of Nigeria’s growing political maturity that the coalescence of the groups making up the Opposition has not been portrayed by the news media as a “gang –up” and that the seven state governors who pitched their tents in the breakaway faction of the PDP were called the G7—the Group of Seven – rather than the Gang of Seven.

    In the Shagari era, the national television and radio networks and the NPN’s client newspapers would have pilloried the defectors and called them the most censorious names. Only Chris Ngige is receiving that treatment at this time, for the atrocious crime of seeking on the platform of the APC to be governor of Anambra State – the state in which he was elected senator under the banner of the ACN, and of which he was once PDP governor.

    Now, in his latest foray, some ethnic warriors enjoying privileged media access are casting him as an “agent” of Fulani/Yoruba elements bent on invading Anambra and lording it over the Igbo in their own homestead, with yet another allusion to the “deportation” of their kinsmen from Lagos as proof, were any still required, of the perfidy of the new coalition.

    In the wake of the “deportation” saga, they berated Yoruba indigenes of Lagos, which they impudently called “no man’s land,” for sticking with their traditional “oro” rites against the demands of “modernity,” and to the great inconvenience of the diverse elements that make up the population.

    The two positions — APC gubernatorial candidate Chris Nigige, an authentic Igbo, as an “agent” of rank outsiders and hence unworthy of election, and the subsistence of “oro” rites in the “no man’s land” called Lagos as an inconvenience to the non-native residents that must be discontinued – are all too emblematic of a political mindset summed up by the phrase: “What is mine is mine but what is yours is ours.”

    They do not bode well for building bridges of understanding and mutual respect.