The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tuesday

  • Again, capital punishment

    Again, capital punishment

    Encore un moment, monsieur le bourreau.

    Just a moment, executioner; just a small moment.

    Madame du Barry, at the guillotine, 1793

    Nigerians woke up two weeks ago to learn that four death-row prisoners in Benin City, who were convicted some 15 years ago but had not exhausted the appeal process, had been hanged

    The foursome had been convicted 15 years ago, and had not yet exhausted the appeal process

    The executions drew for the most part strong condemnation at home and abroad, and rekindled the on-again, off-again national debate on the propriety of capital punishment. They also raised searching questions about the ideological orientation of Edo State Governor, Comrade Adams Oshiomhole.

    It was troubling enough that this stalwart of the progressive community had signed off on the grisly proceedings in respect of two of the convicts ;it was unseemly, his colleagues-now-turned critics charged, that he defended his action so vigorously in the face of the outrage it generated.

    The condemned prisoners had committed crimes of the foulest kind; they had subjected their innocent victims to unspeakable brutality and then killed them in the most horrid manner conceivable. They had been tried, found guilty, and sentenced to death by courts of competent jurisdiction that afforded them at every stage the due process of law they had so wantonly and callously denied their victims.And what is more, the authorities said, the executions were carried out in accordance with the laws of Nigeria.

    In short, they fully deserved what they got.

    It would be unfeeling to dismiss this line of reasoning out of hand. Lives had been taken, careers and prospects and relationships had been savagely abridged. These heinous crimes, it would seem to follow, should be visited with appropriate retribution.

    But that is at bottom the Mosaic law of an eye for an eye. To achieve the grisly equivalence enjoined by that code, the state would have to do to torturers and murderers and rapists precisely what they did to their victims. In practice, no state does that. So, retributive justice cannot be a goal of the modern state, which is enjoined by municipal and international statutes to act humanely and eschew cruel laws.

    Nor does it help matters to insist that an act is justified or even proper just because it is sanctioned by law. That is the doctrine of rule by law, the doctrine the apartheid authorities in South Africa, and before them, Nazi Germany, invoked to justify their barbarous rule. It has little in common with the rule of law, which is premised on just laws justly administered.

    It is the contention of this column that capital punishment is inherently unjust; that it is inequitable, and that it serves no useful purpose

    Most homicides do not result from cold, brutal calculation. They result, criminologists say, from confusion, anger, stress and panic — in short, from a loss of capacity for rational judgment. The death penalty merely compounds the tragedy that flows from such lapses of judgment, to which even the most sober persons are susceptible.

    Even those murders planned to the most chilling detail and carried out with the utmost deliberation, psychiatrists maintain, result basically from an abnormal condition that may be biological or environmental or both.

    So that, when society executes a capital offender, it is at once condemning the offender for conduct that may have been biologically determined, and absolving itself of any responsibility in creating or sustaining the environmental forces that shaped the offender

    Capital punishment is not the blunt instrument of justice it is claimed to be. It is stacked against the poor and minorities and members of the underclass who, lacking the resources to hire competent attorneys and forensic experts, are more likely than better-endowed persons to be convicted. To the poor and disconnected, “equality before the law” is a myth.

    The support for capital punishment rests principally on the claim that it serves as a deterrent. Knowing that they stand to pay with their own lives if found guilty of murder, only those possessed by a death wish would kill. Without such a deterrent, it is claimed, the homicide rate would escalate.

    If this claim holds true, the homicide rates in the major industrial countries that have abolished capital punishment should have risen sharply. So should the volume of capital crimes in those states that do not practise capital punishment, or employ it sparingly. But this has not been the case.

    To take an American example, the homicide rate in Pennsylvania has remained roughly 6 in 100,000, despite the fact that Pennsylvania has carried out no execution since 1976. On the other hand, from 1977 to 1995, the homicide rate in Texas has stood at 13.3 per 100,000. Nor has the fervor with which Texas administered the death penalty under Gov. George W. Bush and his successor, Dick Perry, led to a significant decline in the homicide rate.

    The death penalty, then, is no deterrent. It deters only those who have been executed, for they will never kill again. But the same end can be secured with far less damage to the social psyche by keeping convicted killers in jail for life, without the possibility of parole.

    Perhaps the strongest argument against capital punishment is its finality. Once carried out, it cannot be reversed even if it turns out, as happens not infrequently, that the executed person was innocent, or that guilt was not established beyond a reasonable doubt.

    About a decade ago, it came to light that 13 of 18 persons on death row in Illinois had been convicted wrongly. This moved the state’s authorities to place a moratorium on executions. That moratorium remains in place to this day.

    No less instructive is the conclusion of a massive study of capital convictions and appeals in the United States between 1975 and 1995, conducted by James Liebman, of Columbia University Law School. The study covered 5,500 judicial decisions.

    In 68 percent of 4,576 cases they reviewed, the appellate courts found “serious, reversible error.” This means that roughly 7 of every 10 convictions did not pass close judicial scrutiny. “American capital sentences,” Liebman concluded, “are so persistently and systematically fraught with error that it seriously undermines their reliability.”

    Liebman’s study and the discoveries in Illinois that some innocent persons had been languishing on death row ought to move advocates of the death penalty to recognise, at the very least, that even the most scrupulous judicial proceeding may be tainted by errors resulting perhaps not so much from the perversity of officials as from human fallibility.

    The possibility that capital punishment may be administered in error — that possibility alone, however remote — ought to weigh decisively on the minds of supporters of capital punishment.

    Those who kill must be held to account. Life imprisonment, without the possibility of parole, sufficiently serves that purpose. When a society puts them to death by way of retribution, it sinks to their level of pathology instead of rising splendidly above it, as a growing number of countries have been doing.

    Of the 54 countries in Africa, 18 have abolished capital punishment, according to data supplied by the United Nations, among them South Africa, Namibia, Angola, Mozambique, Gabon, and, in Nigeria’s neighbourhood, Togo, Senegal, Benin, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Côte d’Ivoire, and São Tomé and Principe.

    Among those countries that still have capital punishment on their statute books, none has carried out an execution for 10 years.

    It is a dent on Nigeria’s international image and its claim to continental leadership that it is not numbered among the countries that have abolished capital punishment outright or placed a moratorium on it.

    Capital punishment is inconsistent with the spirit of the Fundamental Objectives and Directive Principles of the Nigerian constitution, and with the African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights, to which Nigeria is a signatory.

    It should have no place in the Constitution now under review.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Bonds: Stiglitz vs Okonjo-Iweala

    Bonds: Stiglitz vs Okonjo-Iweala

    If you missed Wednesday’s announcement of the outcome of the country’s billion-dollar bond offer to international investors by Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, you probably number among the uninitiated in the free-wheeling club of high finance.

    Just in case you missed it, let me attempt a simple summary of the outcome that has since kept Abuja on the orgy of wild celebration: Nigeria put one billion dollars bond on offer; the subscription, said to have drawn top investors from US, Europe and Asia, came in multiple of four! In layman’s language, it means Nigeria had sought to raise one billion dollars from the international capital market but got enough investors to stake $4 billion for a share in the Nigerian pie!

    That obviously meant a lot to Finance Minister Okonjo-Iweala; her excitement, so palpable, nearly went overboard. Hear her: “the fact that Nigeria could go to the bond market, after waiting a while and we got four times our subscription, shows confidence in the strength of the Nigerian economy… Over 200 investors could not get any share of the bonds because we were oversubscribed’’.

    She would also add: “The reason we are excited is because as you know, these are turbulent times, especially following expectations of tapering of Qualitative Easing by the U.S Federal Reserve Bank”. Lost perhaps was the irony that the feared quantitative easing actually drove interest rates down – not up; our officials are of course exultant about the prospects of borrowing at relatively high costs! That is what they call “confidence”!

    Let’s look at what the bond in two categories of $500 million each means for the ordinary Nigerian. Whereas the first tranche has five-year duration, it attracts a 5.125 per cent interest rate; the other, with 10-year duration at 6.375 per cent interest rate.

    What happened to the argument made only a short while ago that the loans being sought were cheap, concessionary loans of two percent with some 20-30 years repayment? Does that figure now in the current relapse into the old habits of debt peonage?

    Does anyone bother these days to raise questions about the bizarre financialism under which the nation would borrow at interest rates of six percent only to stash its Sovereign Wealth Fund in off-shore accounts to draw a measly below two percent interest?

    At this point, I should invite you, dear reader, to the seminal contribution Joseph Stiglitz and Hamid Rashid on the subject of Sub Saharan Africa’s increasingly insatiable appetite for sovereign bonds. A must read – if you ask me – for what I consider as its fresh perspective on the raging debate.

    Stiglitz and Rashid had posed the interesting question of why increasing numbers of developing countries have resorted to expensive sovereign-bond issues particularly when their existing foreign debt carried an average interest rate of 1.6% with average maturity of 28.7 years.

    The article, set in the background of the raging contagion of Eurobonds which first birthed in Ghana, but has since spread to Gabon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, C’ote d’Ivoire, Senegal, Angola, Nigeria, Namibia, Zambia, and Tanzania, also contains dire warnings on the danger of the ultra-orthodox financialism which most sub Saharan governments have since fallen spell.

    In it, the duo did a good job of ripping through the official mantra of “surging confidence” bandied as feeding the obsession for the debts when they noted that: “the quantitative easing having driven interest rates to record lows, one explanation is that this is just another, more obscure manifestation of investors’ search for yield”.

    That shouldn’t be hard to understand; in Europe, United States and Asia, interest rate capped at two percent or below offers little or no attraction for “vulture” funds. So, where would the ‘gamblers’ have taken their money except to regions where they can enjoy six percent interest with sovereign guarantee to boot?

    Since when did “confidence” stop being denominated in hard cash – the cash haul described as return on investment? Shouldn’t that knowledge have tempered the claim of achievement? Picture the gambler and the profligate in a game of feints and deception; isn’t it supposed to be game in the muddled world of high finance?

    The article under reference also identified “the conditionality and close monitoring typically associated with the multilateral institutions make them less attractive sources of financing”.

    I love the way the duo framed the rhetorical question: “What politician wouldn’t prefer money that gives him more freedom to do what he likes? It will be years before any problems become manifest – and, then, some future politician will have to resolve them”!

    Now, that is an elegant way to frame a problem that we know only too well – corruption.

    We know the attraction for bonds; they are cheap. The ‘cheapness’ is however not always the whole story. The rents – arbitrage – to be earned by thieving officials have more often than not constituted the major attraction. Even at that, it seems the best way to kick the problems down the road for the coming generation to solve. That is the way things have been. Apparently, they will remain so for a long time to come.

    So, what would the Jonathan administration do next? Go for more bond issues as proof of “investor confidence”? Leave the nation’s financials in utter mystery while living in denial that the nation is fast sinking into debt peonage?

    Have we parted with the so-called “odious” debts in 2005/6 only to re-learn the habits that we once assumed had been shed? How does one explain the mystery behind the mounting debts during a period of sustained oil earnings?

    Permit me, dear reader, to suggest that the so-called “investor confidence” is completely misconceived. The world knows better than celebrate the “fundamentals” of an economy where no meaningful economic activities are going on. Didn’t our officials announce way back in 2008 that our capital market has arrived on the world stage with return on investments said to be highest on the universe?

    How come the market took the hit at the onset of the global credit crisis with the exit of the vultures – the foreign portfolio investors?

    What is the difference between the SAPped 80s and the present? In the 80s, the nation ran into balance of payment crisis because oil prices took a dive. Unable to meet its import bills, and with a huge portfolio of debts to service, it had to endure all manners of economic prescriptions to keep afloat. Three decades after, the only difference is that oil price has not only kept steady, but has managed to surpass expectations. With $50 billion dollars in the kitty, as foreign reserves, even a blind vulture can afford to gamble. You call that achievement; well, I call it common sense.

  • Golden boy, golden age

    Golden boy, golden age

    There is something decidedly golden in the tenure and temper of Babatunde Raji Fashola, SAN, the governor of Lagos, who turned 50 on June 28.

    From “Babatunde who?” in 2007, Fashola has become an emblem of excellence. Perhaps never in the history of Nigeria’s fits-and-starts democracy has a rookie politician taken the public service lane by storm, posting a slew of solid performance, reaping tremendous accolades.

    Governor Fashola would rank second only after Alhaji Lateef Jakande, 2nd Republic Lagos governor (1979-1983) in the sheer race to nip the proverbial low hanging fruits, giving very early signals of a golden morning which forecast an even more golden tenure, which still has almost two years to run.

    Mr. Fashola is second to Alhaji Jakande because while Fashola had a solid foundation from which to launch his own campaign, Jakande was masterly master of his own destiny, despite the rot left by the departing military in 1979, at the end of Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo’s first coming.

    Indeed, in the Tinubu political court, this “foundation” has assumed the high fetish of hallowed debate, on which many stake their honour. Many would argue – and correctly so – that without Tinubu’s solid foundation, Fashola would have been nothing. Other would counter, with equal vehemence – and they are no less correct – that without Fashola keeping faith and brilliantly executing his brief, Tinubu’s own place would have been less assured.

    The truth of the matter is that Asiwaju Bola Tinubu and Mr. Fashola, his high flying protégé, are akin to King David and King Solomon of the Biblical Kingdom of Israel.

    Like King David who fought endless wars to secure the kingdom against fiery and implacable foes, Tinubu did fight gruelling wars: against a purported elected president with gruff military temper; against a federal constitution with a unitary soul; against general environmental crisis with sky-towering refuse, like Goliath over David; against military-era mindset that state governors were despicable prefects at the whims of an arrogant and insufferable presidency; and even against an impatient, if not outright cynical media, which all but declared Tinubu’s first two years in government as total disaster.

    In these high octane wars, an embattled Governor Tinubu had to juggle politics with policy, fix his state’s financial infrastructure, and engage the judiciary to push for the rights of the states against a behemoth federal government, among others. By the third year, the new vision was taking shape. By the eighth year, after a second term, the foundation was solid and ready.

    Then came “Solomon” Fashola: fresh, cool and focused to take the “kingdom” to higher heights. One of his low-hanging fruits, which by their plan he would quickly move to pluck, was the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT), which secured lanes were already in the works at the latter end of the Tinubu era. Fashola plucked it with admirable speed and pluck. It was his brilliant morning that foreshowed a dazzling day. The rest, as they say, is history.

    History would come to record Fashola’s many feats in high-grade urban infrastructure. When he eventually delivers on the urban transit trains in the works in the Orile-Iganmu-Mile 2-Badagry Expressway corridor, he would have put his own bold and brilliant signature on the new Lagos multi-modal transportation of his party’s dream. That would be a stiff mountain for the opposition to climb.

    Fashola has brought into the implementation of these programmes a rare reasoned passion – friends call it focus; foes call it coldness – that is nobody’s imprimatur but his alone.

    His healthy obsession with the environment is legendary. Want to know how creatively restless Mr. Fashola is? Beam your gaze on the ever-changing flora and continual landscaping, ever in a state of flux, that is the governor’s never-ending Lagos urban beautification, which he calls “greening”.

    After the impressive greening and lighting of the Lagos Marina, the Lagos inner ring road corridor, spanning Third Mainland Bridge, Iyana Oworo, Ogudu, Alapere and Ikeja Toll Gate, aside from other areas, have become clear evidence of the governor’s stellar environmental policy. Still, it is morning yet, on beautification day!

    What is more? From about the dirtiest city on the face of the earth, Lagos has become progressively cleaner; and ever more secure. The audacious bank robberies of yore have become but distant memory, thanks to a robust public-private sector security initiative that other states have copied. And whoever thought the Oshodi human-vehicular traffic logjam, on Lagos-Abeokuta Expressway, could ever be dislodged!

    But Fashola’s distinctive legacy is changing the focus of governance from politics to development. That later South West governors of his party have followed suit gives the happy feel that the glorious Awolowo days are here again.

    Still, the Solomon allusion is, for Fashola, a double-edged sword. Solomon, the wisest being that ever lived, was no fool. Yet, his fault, uxoriousness – excessive love of a woman – all but messed up his famed wisdom. That led to the violent split of the kingdom David gave blood and gore to build.

    Governor Fashola’s admirable focus on policy, almost to the total isolation of politics, is ironically the chink in his golden armour. But that tiny chink may well expand, for in the Fashola gubernatorial persona looms a disturbing peep of Thatcherism – a policy wonk’s cold resolve on the integrity of his initiative, even in the face of furious public outcry.

    In the Okada restriction policy, that resolve worked excellently well. The governor was the visionary leader who would enforce the welfare of the generality of his people, even if the affected ultra-vocal minority threw tantrums and cried blue murder.

    But not so in the LASU fee hike policy – and the reason is simple: for a developing country, education is key. Trite: there is nothing like free education. It is “free” because the state is paying for it. Even then, a developing country, in a vast swamp of poverty, cannot afford the Thatcherite conceit that there is nothing like community; and everybody had to carry his or her own educational can.

    Besides, all of Fashola’s now glittering infrastructure would eventually fade and decay. Only education would appreciate with time: in quality, world-class human resource.

    A serious, progressive state must, therefore, make strategic investments in that sector to justify its essence. The Awo credo, that gave Western Nigeria a great head start, was all about that strategic investment. That is why Governor Fashola cannot afford to be sanguine about high fees in the state university, despite the government’s admitted lean resources.

    The political cost of such sanguinity could be devastating. Sound policy might be the hallmark of good governance. But more often than not, even the best of policies are choked by hostile politics.

    Fashola has mastered his policies. But at 50, he must begin to master his politics, if he hopes to go far in statecraft. So far, however, he is sheer gold to Lagos and to his generation.

  • Where is the flood money?

    Soon, it would be exactly one year the unprecedented flood overran many communities located on the banks of rivers Niger and Benue, down to the delta region, destroying houses, farmlands, livestock and fish ponds.

    The surging flood forced most residents of these areas to abandon their ancestral homesteads and other properties to seek refuge on higher grounds where rattled state governments had hurriedly set up relief camps for those who had no where to go. The fortunate ones who have children and benevolent relatives in the cities had a good excuse to proceed on compulsory vacations.

    Though the National Emergency Management Agency exists, they initially didn’t know how to deal with the peculiar situation for obvious reason. They’ve never been confronted with a natural disaster of that magnitude. All they had contended with in the past were plane crashes and collapsed buildings. So, it took quite some time for government and its agencies to come to terms with how to respond to the strange ravaging flood.

    Finally, in a morning televised broadcast on Tuesday, October 9, 2012, President Goodluck Jonathan announced the release of N17.6bn to assist states and communities affected by the flood. Of this amount, N13.3bn was allocated to states and N4.3bn went to relevant federal government agencies.

    The money was appropriated according to the severity of the impact of the flood on the states and their communities. The most affected states (in category A) like Kogi, Anambra, Delta, Bayelsa and Benue got N500m each. Others in categories B, C, and D were given N400m, N300m and N250m respectively.

    Months after the disbursement of this fund, the beneficiary state governments hosting affected communities that are in dire need of relief and rehabilitation were still prevaricating as to how the funds should be deployed until the rumour mill came alive with insinuations that the funds might have been misappropriated by politicians.

    In my own Anambra State, there were whispers that the money had either been fixed in a particular bank of the government to yield interest or simply set aside for the impending gubernatorial war. This perhaps, prompted the Secretary to the State Government, (SSG) Oseloka Obaze to issue a media statement assuring the people that the money is intact. And that the money would only be spent after the board of trustees would have reviewed and agreed on the target sector needs. Shortly after this pronouncement, the government released a consignment of food items comprising of bags of maize, rice and garri to the affected communities. The SSG was later quoted as saying that these items cost N128m. Subsequently, a round of cash was distributed. Atani, the headquarter of Ogbaru local government area of Anambra State got N10m and Osamala got N10m, while other smaller communities got less depending on their sizes. Money was equally distributed around other affected local government areas in the state. When the N10m was shared in Atani, for example, some families got N2,000, some got N1,000 and those living in urban areas and cities but whose properties were equally affected got nothing for the simple reason that the money could not go round.

    The question that many of us have continued to ask is: in what way would this pittance bring about the much vaunted ‘relief’ and ‘rehabilitation’ to the flood affected communities? Is this all the board of trustees and government relief strategists could think up? People’s houses have been damaged; their farmlands decimated; their livestock gone. Instead of government to come up with a resourceful economic rehabilitation program that will help the hardworking people rebuild their lives, it is handing down money to them as if they are beggars. Now that the government has opted for this path, one may be tempted ask what has happened to the rest of the money. Or has the N500m been exhausted?

    The story is not too different in Delta State where affected communities have formally petitioned the state House of Assembly and EFCC to investigate the management of the flood relief money. They allege that instead of openly utilizing the fund, government is selectively giving out N2,000 – N3,000 to flood victims. But instead of addressing the content of the allegation, the Commissioner for Environment, Frank Umare reportedly said that Delta State requires N20bn to deal with flood victims and that N500m is not enough.

    Is the money not being enough an excuse for not managing it transparently?

    Some groups in Kogi State have also accused their government of distributing N3000 to flood victims. This compelled a rebuttal from Alhaji Yabagi Bologi, Commissioner for Information who explained that a total of N139,550,000 was distributed to the affected local government areas and N81,376,646.55 was ploughed into the rehabilitation and reconstruction of schools used as relief camps. What a curious appropriation. Is the commissioner implying that if the federal government did not provide the relief fund, the dilapidated schools wouldn’t have been repaired? That notwithstanding; so what happened to the balance?

    The case in Adamawa state is perhaps the most pathetic. According to NAN’s report which was widely replicated in most newspapers, it was alleged that flood victims were given various paltry sums of money that ranged from N200, N240 to N250. According to Moses Ginam and Francis Emmanuel that spoke to NAN’s correspondent, Mbula chiefdom, one of the worse hit communities in Adamawa state, rejected the 1.8m purportedly allocated to them by the government because it would amount to N200 per person after they would have shared it.

    This appears to be the trend in most states prompting Senator Claver Ikisikpo, chairman, Senate Committee on Special Duties to declare that the flood relief fund has been clearly mismanaged.

    It would seem as if the flood victims are unlucky on all fronts. Apart from the obvious lack of transparency on the part of the states in managing the fund, the Dangote/Agbakoba Flood Relief and Rehabilitation Committee are having difficulty in recovering donations made at the special public fund-raising they held shortly after they were constituted to support federal government effort in rehabilitating flood victims. Angered by the non-redemption of the pledges made by these seeming scam donors, the committee threatened to publish their names except they take concrete steps to redeem them. But if the aim of the threat is to name and shame these questionable donors and so called philanthropists, the Dangote/Agbakoba Committee may have to think again as a good number of them are shameless. They might have made the bogus pledges with their eyes on some flood contracts they could get. And as soon as it wasn’t forthcoming, the flood victims may jolly well go to hell (where they would stay dry). So, for all they care, the committee can broadcast their names on CNN!

    Once again, I implore the Dangote/Agbakoba committee to come up with their own strategy on how to deploy the funds they have raised in order to guarantee some level of transparency and best corporate practices which is grossly lacking in the states disbursements.

    Since the flood relief fund which the states are spending (or have spent) came from the federal government, it is only appropriate that the federal legislative organs or the relevant federal government institution carry out an inquisition on how the flood money has been spent by the states.

    Another rainy season is already here and the meteorological agency has repeatedly warned that this year’s flood could be more devastating, yet the money released to help victims attenuate the impact has been hardly accounted for. What a shame!

    • Nwosu writes from Lagos

     

  • In America: A sad day for civil rights

    In America: A sad day for civil rights

    Last week, as the civil rights community and African Americans in particular awaited the ruling of the United States Supreme Court in Shelby County vHolder, the mind called up an incident that had occurred some 19 years earlier, in 1994.

    I was on assignment in Washington, D.C., and had gone to the sprawling Barnes & Noble Bookstore downtown during a break, more to feed my eyes than to purchase all those seminal books I wished I could add to my collection, based on their rave reviews and the reputation of their authors.

    As I was leafing through one volume, I noticed a middle-aged man stop as he approached me from the other end of the aisle, take a close look at me, and then move one. When he went through this procedure a second time, and then a third, I could hardly contain my discomfort.

    On his fourth round, he stopped just a few feet from me, and taking my full measure with his eyes, said, in a voice that was non-threatening but inquiring: “Sir, would you be Justice Clarence Thomas?”

    I still had a fairly decent head of hair and a moustache sprinkled with grey, was roughly of the same age, and might indeed be thought to bear some resemblance to the contemporary associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, the second black person to hold that distinction.

    My discomfort grew into panic.

    The last person you want to be mistaken for in progressive circles or in the African American community is Justice Clarence Thomas. In his three years on the Court, he had more than earned the denunciation that greeted his nomination and the vilification that dogged his confirmation hearings. He was the polar opposite of the great legal icon he was named to replace, Justice Thurgood Marshall, whom The New York Times described on his retirement as “a model and a monument.”

    If word went round that Thomas was in the neighbourhood, there was no knowing what might follow. Any trace of panic on my part could make matters worse.

    So, I summoned my voice at its most untroubled, looked my interlocutor in eye and said, “No, sir. I am not Justice Thomas. I do not know him. I have never met him. I have never . . .”

    Apparently sensing my deep unease, he cut in.

    “You are not Justice Thomas, I can tell,” he said. “You have an accent.”

    Was I mightily relieved!

    But the feeling was short-lived. As if determined to prolong my agony, he said, almost off-handedly, “But you sure look like him.”

    As soon as he turned the corner, I dropped the book, ran out of the store and jumped into the first available taxicab.

    To return to Shelby County v Holder, the case that called forth the foregoing recollections: the case originated in a petition by a county in Alabama, a state with an odious record of racial discrimination, urging the courts to strike down a law that bars nine states from changing their voting laws in ways that could disenfranchise residents without the approval of the United States Department of Justice.

    The law, revalidated by the Court’sunanimous decision in 2006, was enacted as part of the historic Voting Rights Act of 1965, which made it possible for generations of African Americans to register to vote for the first time, without having to pass stultifying literacy tests and without having to show that they owned property.

    The tests were so brazenly manipulated that very few even among educated and propertied African Americans could pass them, leading a frustrated the Rev. Dr Martin Luther King, Jr., to complain that, at the rate at which it was being carried out, voter registration of the black residents of the state of Alabama would take about 150 years.

    Some five decades later, the right to vote continues to be circumscribed, especially in states controlled by the Republicans, in ways that on their face seem to apply to the general population but are at bottom designed to suppress the votes of African Americans and Latinos who tend to support the Democrats.

    It is notorious, for example, that African Americans generally flock to voting centres to cast early ballots after Sunday worship. To prevent that, some states outlawed Sunday voting. In a variation of that theme, they also cut early voting so drastically that, as happened last November, voters in many cities had to wait in line eight hours to cast their ballots, a steep price for persons at the lower end of the economic scale.

    In yet another variation of that theme, the Republican majority in many states redrew electoral districts in such a way as to dilute the black vote and make the election of African Americans or a Democrat virtually impossible. So that, today, although Republican candidates polled at least a million votes fewer than Democratic candidates, they hold a commanding majority in the U. S. House of Representatives.

    It took spirited legal challenge mounted by disaffected citizens, with the backing of the Justice Department, to block the enforcement of the more brazen of these voter suppression laws during the 2012 U.S. General Elections.

    Scarcely five months later, a county in Alabama – a state in which an election was cancelled recently because an African American was favoured to win despite all the mago mago – was asking the Supreme Court to void the federal law mandating Department of Justice to vet changes of that kind to the state electoral laws.

    Last week, a month to the 50th anniversary of the historic March on Washington and its highpoint, Dr King’shistoric “I Have a Dream Speech,” the Court did just that, effectively cutting the heart out of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, in a 5-4 ruling that seems to have been scripted from the oral arguments it had heard in March 2013.

    Chief Justice John Roberts, for the Court, said as he had said during the oral arguments, that the United States had changed to the point that the law no longer reflected current racial realities in the United Sates.

    His four fellow conservatives on the Court, including Clarence Thomas, duly concurred.

    Separately, Thomas, who as is his habit had sat impressively through the 79 minutes the oral arguments lasted and had asked no question nor demanded any clarification from attorneys to the parties,entered it as his opinion that voiding Section 4 of the Act requiring the nine states to obtain federal clearance before changing their voting laws did not go far enough.

    He said he would also have struck down Section 5, which seeks to prevent the 9 states from circumventing the prohibitions of Section 4. He went on to note gleefully that, with Section 4 voided, Section 5 had become otiose.

    In a powerful dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg reached back to a speech by – who else? – Dr King about how the “moral arc of justice,” though long, “always bends justice” to admonish the Court’s majority for the great harm it had just done to civil rights and justice. Its decision, she said, was an egregious error and a disservice to Dr King’s legacy and the nation’scommit-ment to justice.

    The Court’s ruling is only the latest in a long line of illiberal judicial opinions that have curtailed class actions, made it harder to sue manufacturers of dangerous drugs, employees accused or discrimination in the work place, and, in the words of the commentator Frank Rich, continued to do “everything to permit the abridgment of the rights of minorities even as it strengthens the rights of corporations.”

    This is the company Clarence Thomas keeps and revels in.

    Planting Clarence Thomas in the Court was a masterstroke by President George W. Bush and the Conservative Establishment to slow down, if not reverse, the march of civil rights and indeed the progressive agenda in America. And it has worked beyond their most optimistic calculations.

    The first President Bush probably spoke a greater truth than he realised or intended when he declared that Thomas, who had no judicial experience whatsoever, was “the best man for the job.” Their job.

    In the African American community, there were dozens far more qualified than Thomas on every score. But none could be counted upon like Thomas then – and even now — to be the scourge to his own people.

    The U.S. Supreme Court could not have gutted perhaps the single most important piece of legislation from the civil rights era without Clarence Thomas’s collaboration. His abstention would have saved it, at least for now.

    Next time anyone in the African American community tells me that I look like Clarence Thomas, Iwill call 9-1-1.

     

    •Portions of this comment first appeared in my March 5, 2013, column, titled “In the Shadow of Rosa Parks.”

     

  • Westminster has gone mad again!

    When Nigerian playwright, Prof. Ola Rotimi (God bless his soul!), wrote his hilarious play, Our Husband Has Gone Mad Again, he certainly did not have Britain in mind.

    But is the Queen’s own country capable of the sick joke of a proposed visa bond targeted at former colonies in Africa and Asia: Nigeria, Ghana, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka?

    The hilarity is not in Britain’s right to control its immigration. That is legitimate and serious business. It is rather in its hypocrisy of comic pretence: playing dumb that its cruel empire past has caught up with it.

    So, the mortal fear of forfeiting three thousand Pounds Sterling, courtesy of a visa bond, would keep desperate economic barbarians off their former Metropolis, when the former colonies are in all but ruins? Ah!

    Coming from a Tory government, headed by The Right Honourable David Cameron, which name ironically sounds like Cameroun, another raped victim of German, British and French colonial greed, the policy has all the notoriety of Thatcherite racism.

    But did Westminster think that after decades of blind plunder under many fanciful names – Pax Britannica, British Raj, British Pacification of the Natives, etc, etc, – citizens of its former colonies would just melt away, while the colonisers live happily ever after?

    Meanwhile, the most pleasing irony: if at the height of British imperialism the chaffing colonies screamed “Africa for Africans!” or “India for Indians!” it is sweet comeuppance Britain now wants to bawl, “Britain for the British!”, but is too hypocritically restrained, stiff-upper lip tradition, to scream! Hence, Mr. Cameron’s proposed racist policy. But good to know the Brits also cry!

    Still, you must feel their anguish. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian-born Al-Qaeda terrorist who gained global notoriety as the “Underwear Bomber” despite his failed mission, used the Queen’s own city as his own Londonistan to savour hate sermons and hone his terror skills.

    Then, the evil Michaels: Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale, Islamist twin-loonies ironically bearing the Christian name of the fiery archangel, and GOC of the heavenly hosts, Angel Michael. The loonies subjected the holy streets of London to the most profane slaughter of a British soldier, Drummer Officer Lee Rigby.

    The irony is these two loonies are ethnic Yoruba – in any case, their parents were; before getting lost in the Diaspora. Yet, in the Yoruba motherland, only the raven mad would kill in the name of religion. The Yoruba credo of religious freedom and faith liberality is long settled.

    So, how did Britain hap on this monstrous duo that caused universal pain and anguish, with their gruesome murder of that innocent British soldier?

    Because of this bone-chilling outrage, the Brits are perhaps more than justified to design policies that ban, from their country, African and Asian barbarians; the first of which is Mr. Cameron’s proposed visa bond.

    But perhaps if the colonised peoples too had had the muscle to repress the colonising Brits, with the invaders’ pacification (euphemism for mass murder of the resistant, which ran into millions), and the ensuing mass physical, psychological and spiritual dislocation over endless years, there would not have been brainwashed monstrosities like Abdulmutallab, Adebolajo and Adebowale. Nor would there be economic migrants.

    Chinua Achebe’s famous Things Fall Apart spoke of such spiritual and psychological disorientation, using his native Igbo as case-study. So, did Kenyan Ngugi wa Thiongo’s Weep Not Child, a classical match-up between greedy British ruffians and land grabbers using the missionaries as front and an equally determined though pitifully less armed locals, insistent on reclaiming their land; thus creating the classic Yoruba fabled confrontation between the happy killer and the merry suicidal.

    Even Brit, Edward Morgan (EM) Forster, in his A Passage to India, painted the snickering bigotry and allied evils of the British against natives in the so-called British Raj of India which, by the way, had as victims most of today’s India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, the latter-day pariahs of callow Mr. Cameron’s new visa bond!

    Did Mr. Cameron think something would not give, after his ancestors’ brutal repression of other peoples, and making away with their wealth; and thereafter installing near-imbeciles to ensure the British gravy continued long after flag independence?

    True, the likes of Achebe used the dominator’s language to achieve global fame, a far cry from the self-fulfilling prophecy of congenitally challenged Africa and Africans, by the likes of Joseph Conrad and his Heart of Darkness. Wole Soyinka used this same English language to win the Nobel, the prime global literary prize. wa Thingo has enough literary clout to live in exile’s happy pain, as his native Kenya treats him like the Biblical prophet without honour.

    But to every Achebe, wa Thiongo and Soyinka, there are myriads of economic flotsam and jetsam, churned out by a disarticulated Africa and, to some extent, Asia. This is the global class that has come to plague Britain and it co-western imperialists. It is therefore a question of the Brits’ ancestors having eaten sour grapes; and their offspring’s teeth set on edge! That is Mr. Cameron’s generation; and that explains his bond!

    But not even Mr. Cameron’s visa bond would remove that plague. Still, a fairer international economic system could. If more Africans and Asians live and earn productive living in their home continents, then maybe Westminster would need less punitive visa bonds to control immigration.

    But the humongous western greed is yet to be sated; and Africa, mostly run by pre-programmed cretins, is not about to surrender its notoriety as global economic laggard. That is why Mr. Cameron must reveal his callowness by trying to bully his favourite African retards to join the 21st century Sodom and Gomorrah his country and Uncle Sam unashamedly lead; and daring any African moron, on the pains of aids, to raise his voice against same sex marriage, the West’s latest abomination!

    Still, a Ghanaian that goes flocking to Britain only has himself or herself to blame. Ghana is no El Dorado. But by somewhat gathering its best hands over time, despite the western hysteria that subverted Dr. Kwame Nkrumah and nearly aborted the Ghana dream, the old Gold Coast is well on the way to attain its manifest destiny.

    Not so for Nigeria, ruled from the beginning by Whitehall’s cynically programmed Uncle Toms. And that is bad news for Mr. Cameron’s visa bond. So long as there is economic paralysis at home, the economic barbarians from here would do whatever it takes to hang in there, visa bond or no!

    The bottom line? The Nigerian government must wake up. Mr. Cameron’s visa bond might well graduate into mass expulsion of Nigerians from Britain. Such reverse forced exodus forebodes nothing but ill.

    The angry and bitter repatriates would settle for nothing less than where they were coming from. Meanwhile the local misfits holding mediocre courts are absolutely incapable of upping their game. Before you know it, the happy-to-kill clashes with the merry-to- die!

    If a better Nigeria emerges from the smoke, then something good, though unintended, would have come from Mr. Cameron’s visa bond.

  • A visa bond of trouble

    From all indications, the British government may have, at least for the time being, backed off from its earlier proposal to impose a ‘punitive’ £3,000 (N730,000) visa bond on travellers from a group of six Afro-Asian countries deemed to pose “high risk” of immigration abuse. Last week, UK’s The Guardian quoted a member of the Liberal Democrats, the coalition partner of the ruling conservative government as saying that the policy has not been “signed off’. However, far from suggesting that the proposal was off the table, he gave hint that the government still agreed in principle with the policy although he noted that the “exact details of how it is to be piloted, including the size of the bond, is still being discussed in the government”.

    In other words, whether the six countries affected by the policy likes it or not, the visa bond policy which targets India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nigeria and Ghana — all non-white Commonwealth nations may have come to stay.

    The collective outrage by the nationals of the affected countries about a measure they considered as discriminatory, although understandable is somewhat misdirected. To start with, visas are by their nature inherently discriminatory; countries put visa regimes in place to restrict the influx of immigrants into their territory. It is elementary that not every one that applies for a visa ever gets one, including applicants ordinarily deemed as qualified!

    What are the arguments against the measure? That Her Majesty’s government, as leader and primus inter pares in the Commonwealth has no business imposing such patently unfair visa regimes on fellow commonwealth members? And that because of the rich historic ties between her and the group of six, the measures are simply unfair! In the first place, those who bandy the argument obviously forget or chose to forget, that the sun of the British Empire is said to have set in different parts several decades ago. It set in India and Pakistan in 1947; Sri Lanka 1948; Ghana in 1957; Nigeria 1960, Bangladesh 1971. Just as it seems fashionable for my generation to recall a time when they needed no visas to travel to Britain, part of the problem is the temptation to relapse into nostalgia; to reset the relations buttons to the 60s and the 70s!

    The issue here is that Her Majesty’s Government has already determined that the targeted countries posed high risk of immigration abuse! That is the judgment by a sovereign government to which they are entitled! Shouldn’t we have spared ourselves the emotionalism while making the case that our citizens seeking sojourn in UK are model citizens?

    Today, the global economy is in a flux; In UK for instance, youth unemployment is 7.8 percent, moderate by the standard of its peers in Western Europe. Before the global crisis, it was a little over five percent. The International Labour Organisation (ILO) for instance reports that the number of people looking for work for over a year has more than doubled since 2007, up from 391,000 to more than 902,000.

    Like America, the subject of immigration remains a hot button one. A Britisher put the issue in perspective when he observed rather wryly: “You don’t need a PhD to understand that when the number of unemployed people vastly outnumbers the number of job vacancies, and public housing stock is under huge strain, it’s a very bad idea not to radically restrict immigration. This isn’t rocket science”.

    So, is the £3,000 the answer to the immigration problem?

    I agree that the policy lacks rigour. What it does is adjudge the potential traveller as guilty until proven otherwise. Moreover, the act of singling out of six countries as “high risk” immigration violators is apparently in bad taste. And if you ask me, it is unlikely to deter the potential illegal immigrant; it simply jerks up the cost of procuring the exit card!

    However, I think the problem is that we pay too much attention to what the Brits are doing to fix their problem. My problem is that we are not even about to start dealing with ours which is to fundamentally address the question of why our youths have found the lure of foreign pastures irresistible despite the dangers and frustrations, or why many would readily pay the ultimate price than stay to work things out.

    Last week for instance, we heard Foreign Minister Gbenga Ashiru swear to “defend the interest of Nigerians by whatever means we can”. With what? A tit-for-tat wouldn’t be a bad proposition except that in our circumstance, it would be a most laughable one. What would that amount to given that the migration is almost wholly one-way?

    I say take it easy; we have seen similar posturing before. Didn’t one minister, Stella Oduah once threaten to ban British Airways from flying the Nigerian airspace over claims of unfair discriminatory practices? Has the world ended since the threat came to no effect?

    At the root of our problem is governance. We churn out graduates into a labour market already bursting in its seams. We cannot even guarantee admission for our children in higher institutions preferring instead to outsource admissions to Ghana, Ukraine and other foreign universities. In the last Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination UTME held in April for instance, of the 1.7million that sat for the exam, only 520,000 spaces are said to be available – less than a third. For our army of youngsters, theirs is an annual sentencing into an uncertain, bleak future.

    If you ask me, I’ll insist that our enemy is within; at least the Brits are not nearly the enemy we think they are – not anywhere those foreign investors who pose as friends but act like fiends by bringing in labour for jobs that locals can conveniently do.

    As always, the point must be borne in mind that the right to travel is nowhere guaranteed; not even in No-Man’s-Land.

  • The Abia youth empowerment model

    April 24, was like no other day in Umuahia, capital of Abia State. For those who were witness to history, the city happily embraced thousands of Abia youths who had thronged the Michael Okpara Auditorium and the Umuahia Township Stadium for two epoch-making events. They had come from all the nooks and crannies of the state and beyond, to participate in the Abia Youth Empowerment Summit – a policy initiative aimed at uplifting young men and women in order to harness their creative potentials.

    The spontaneous show of solidarity and appreciation for the driver of the event, Governor Theodore Ahamefule Orji, was overwhelming. In their numbers and colours, thousands of youths cheered as he made for the podium in the company of Mallam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria ( CBN ), who had been billed to speak to the youths.

    Sanusi, ever engaging and never shy to address important subjects, did not disappoint as he made a meal of the instructive topic, “ Youth Empowerment as Panacea to Insecurity in Nigeria.” His appearance at the 1st Ochendo Annual Lecture Series which was symbolically dedicated to the youths, was as pioneering as it was thought-provoking. Indeed, the occasion served as a reminder to the fact that one of the greatest challenges confronting leadership, especially in emerging economies, is the task of harnessing the huge deposits of human capital. To state that this critical resource remains the most strategic of all factors of production is to repeat the obvious. Does elementary economics not teach that labour is the factor that bears the brunt of managing other elements in the production equation? And where else can we readily find a better stock of ‘Labour’ if not amongst this vibrant strata of our populace ?

    Available data gleaned from reputable global agencies continue to support and lend credence to the above assertion. While this fact is held as correct, there is also a constant reminder that each economy remains unique in the shape and size of its demography. The matrix of this relationship is, perhaps, the reason some societies have been celebrated for the large number of youths that make up their population.

    No doubt, a robust and youthful population is a huge asset waiting to be deployed for greater deliverables. And, this is where Africa nay, it’s components, is generally believed to hold a comparative advantage. Or, what would you make of an economy where nearly 45 percent of its ever-growing population is within the age bracket of 18-35 years? Now, you know why Africa would continue to remain a source of envy even though the industrialized economies continue to hold the levers of technology, dictate the pace of development, and largely determine what price to pay for what they lack.

    Indeed, this is the crux of the matter. To argue that Africa’s rich endowments and poverty of ideas is a huge paradox would be an understatement. Her comparatively younger population, largely unskilled, illiterate, sick and malnourished has become a bomb waiting to explode. And, it may, indeed, explode if the growing class of emerging leaders insist on playing politics with the future of youths.

    This piece, therefore, lauds the exemplary policy initiative aimed at redirecting the course of development and hinging same on youth and people empowerment. First, while the Ochendo Annual Lecture Series is designed as a fertile ground for intellectual exchange, the Abia Youth Empowerment Summit, A- YES, organized in collaboration with the Ochendo Youth Foundation ( OYF ) is the vehicle through which the governor is systematically investing in the future of Abia State. This was why after the Lecture at the auditorium, everybody moved to the Umuahia Central Stadium where hundreds of free equipment for self reliance were distributed to young beneficiaries from across the state.

    Governor Orji’s several interventionist programmes are the reason the state has now attained an enviable height in peace and security management.

    Central to the Abia youth development model is the aggressive pursuit of education-for-all policy. Under this scheme, education is being offered free to all Abia children up to secondary school level. This is in addition to the return of schools to their original owners and the total infrastructural overhaul of remaining public schools. This scheme is further complemented by scholarship grants which is enjoyed by students at both local and international universities as well as the regular retraining of well motivated teachers to cater for citizens who cannot afford to attend private schools. Thousands of young Abians are currently reaping from this novel initiative.

    The state, in partnership with the CBN, has disbursed agricultural loans worth over a billion naira with special focus on areas that support young farmers. The Ochendo Liberation Farms which are located in the 17 local government areas of the state attest to this fact. Statistics show that over 20,000 youths are currently engaged in the return-to-land project involving the revitalization of many farm settlements and plantations across the state. The resuscitation of all the plantations in Abia State has created so many opportunities. Viable palm plantations, cocoa, rubber, plantain and most recently cassava is now found in the three senatorial districts.

    The state is also aggressively pursuing the agriculture value-chain concept by introducing hybrid seedlings and developing processing factories which hold ample job opportunities for youths in the rural areas. The process of fertilizer distribution has been made less laborious for rural farmers with the youths being given free fertilizer allocations to encourage their involvement in this critical sector.

    Self-employment is also being driven to the zenith by training and equipping youths with both financial support and the asset base that support the growth of their businesses. The cab operators and other services is located within this sphere. For the first time in the history of Abia State, Governor Orji gave out over 200 brand new commercial vehicles free to young beneficiaries. This, in addition to easing the transportation challenges facing the state, has created a trickle down effect in the economy. This initiative has been complemented by the First Lady, Mrs Odochi Orji, with her efforts focused on girl-child education and skill acquisition. Today in Abia, you can see proud young owners of fashion shops, hair dressing salons, bakeries and other ancillary businesses feeding their aged parents and sustaining their families.

    To further drive youth employment in the rural areas, the state recently met the partnership requirement to enable her participate in the Rural Access and Mobility Projects ( RAMP ). Under this initiative, over 500 kilometers of access roads is being tackled in rural Abia with multiplier effects on the agro-economy and youth employment. Indeed, nearly 7000 youths have been trained and absorbed in the direct labour scheme of the Abia State Oil Producing Areas Development Commission ( ASOPADEC ) and Abia Road Maintenance Agency (ABROMA). These youth centered initiatives of Governor Orji has wiped off all manners of criminality in our rural areas.

    Many more have become self – employed even in the urban areas. Specific mention must be be made of the biggest industrial market in Umuahia and Ohiya Artisans Village which have productively engaged over 5000 youths. These two specialized centers were specifically conceptualized by the governor to target the thousands of freed apprentices who roam the streets because they are unable to start their own business. Today, if you go to the industrial market and the artisan village, you will see proud young shop owners living their dreams as a result.

    A lot more could be said but even ardent critics have come to acknowledge that Governor Orji’s response to governance is providing answers to the dilemma confronting his peers in the quest to strike a sustainable balance between resource and management. In Abia today, enterprising young people are gainfully engaged, the rate of crime is at its lowest ebb. There is security of lives and property and with the current revolution in infrastructural provision coupled with the conducive political environment. Abia State under Ochendo is witnessing unprecedented renaissance .

    Any surprise then that accolades continue to trail his several engagements with Abia youths which has turned Abia from a pariah of sorts to a Mecca for major national events. In the last 12 months alone, NUJ, JAMB, NYSC, Catholic Bishops of Nigeria, Senate Press Corps and many other organizations have held their Annual retreats in Abia. These and more are golden testimonials to what can be achieved when a creative,committed leader is in the saddle. From kidnapping and other social vices , Abia youths are now the fulcrum around which the new era of liberty and prosperity is hinged. For Ochendo, it is time to say a well deserved well done.

  • Thinking aloud

    It is fashionable these days to blame all our woes as a nation on Britain, the colonial master that coupled together the northern and southern protectorates of the territory around River Niger in 1914 to birth a country christened Nigeria.

    The British no doubt have had more than a hand in our fortune or misfortune as a people since we were forced to be together as a country a century ago next year, but we should take the praise for what we have done well and accept the blame for every misfortune that might have befallen our dear country.

    Among the colonial masters that Britain sent to administer Nigeria before independence in 1960, one name stood out and will forever be remembered as long as we remain a country: Lord Frederick Lugard.

    He, it was that merged the northern and southern protectorates to create the country Nigeria, so named by his girl friend then (we were told) to describe the area and the people around River Niger.

    Down the years up till independence the British sent different officials to administer the country and their decisions had profound effect on us as a people. Independence did nothing to reduce the British tendencies to make policies and legislations that have impacted well or badly on us. Remember the botched Anglo/Nigeria Defence Pact immediately after independence that was fiercely opposed by Nigerians, especially students of the University of Ibadan.

    There had been more, and one in particular that is still with us today was the decision of the British under their iconic Tory Prime Minister Mrs Margaret Thatcher to impose visa restrictions on Nigerians traveling to the United Kingdom. Prior to that time, Nigerians, as citizens of the British Commonwealth (of nations) had easy access to the UK, but Thatcher changed that and today hundreds if not thousands of Nigerians queue at the gate of British High Commission every week day seeking entry visas into the United Kingdom.

    By the way, the visa is not for free and some of them even had to borrow to raise money to pay for the visa and even some among the very few that were lucky to be granted the visa had to sell or use their properties as collateral to raise money to buy air tickets and meet other sundry expenses. Some emigrated to seek better life in the UK only to be disappointed by the reality of the situation that the streets of London are not littered with Pounds Sterling. To come back home became a problem to them, not only because of the shame of being labelled a failure by their folks back in Nigeria, but most importantly because the resources to return were not just available. So they became a burden on the British.

    And now to heap more miseries on these unfortunate/desperate Nigerians who still believe they can’t succeed in life unless they get to the UK, another Tory Prime Minister David Cameron plans to introduce a £3,000 indemnity fee for all Nigerians seeking visa to enter the land of Queen Elizabeth. The money would be forfeited to Her Majesty’s government should they overstay the time on their visa. And if and when they are caught, its straight back to Nigeria.

    Immigration is a hot political/economic issue all over Europe and even the United States and Cameron might just be pandering to the extreme right of the political spectrum in the UK who blame every economic, social and even political misfortune of the British society on immigrants, especially those of Africa and Asian origins.

    While the British are within their rights to regulate entries and even departures into their territory, singling out Nigeria and a few other so called high risk countries for this new visa regime is discriminatory and smacks of racism. Are Nigerians the only people that overstay their visa in the UK?

    It is good that the Nigerian government has decided to fight this new British visa regime, but that is not all. Our government should vigorously pursue and implement policies and programmes that would make going to Britain unattractive to Nigerians especially our youths. It is a fact that most of these people emigrate for economic reasons. Millions of our youths are not employed and in some cases unemployable. I am sure if there is something good for them to do at home they wouldn’t be rushing and desperate to emigrate to any other country. So, while the federal government fights to get Britain to dump this new visa regime targeted at Nigerians, it should also fight to create employment, make our schools and hospitals better, world class, and make the roads and other social infrastructures better. We can start with uninterrupted power supply and we would be amazed at the number of jobs, especially small scale businesses that this would create.if we can achieve this it would be thanks and no thanks to Britain.

    May be we need to fight this battle harder so as to safe our youths in particular from being exposed to the kind of sexual culture that is so pervasive in the western world including the UK. The other day Prime Minister Cameron was chiding Nigeria for our government’s (national assembly) strident opposition to same sex marriage. Leaving the insult aside that Britain still believes she can dictate to us, especially our social life, same sex marriage is alien to our culture and it is those demented few amongst us who engage in it that wants to destroy our culture and the fabric of human existence. Under the guise of protection of fundamental human rights Cameron, Barack Obama and their co-travelers in Europe and America want to destroy us and our culture, tradition and existence, we should not allow them. They should let Africa be.

    The other day some of these demented Nigerians protested against the arrest and prosecution of some members of the so called Nigerian Gay and Lesbian community by the police in a Magistrate court some where in Anambra state. It was also recently reported that some of them had a meeting in Ibadan, the Oyo State capital and even issued a press statement to that effect. What is this country turning into? Sodom and Gomorrah? I think the police should be alive to their responsibility here. Anybody that violates the law against same sex conduct or marriage should be made to face the music. The problem with our police is that before you know it, some bad eggs in he force would turn the law into an opportunity to extort and even frame innocent people. Yes our police men and women are poorly paid and badly treated, but extortion is not the way out of their plight.

    May be the government has found a way out of the problem of underfunding of the police with the recent decision to give one percent of revenue from the federation account to the police. The amount would be treated as first line charge, meaning that the money would be removed first before whatever is left is shared among the three tiers of government. This is good. But can we trust the Nigeria Police and indeed the politicians in the Ministry of Police Affairs, the Presidency and even the Police Service Commission to spend this money judiciously and for the right purpose?

    Over the years there have been reported cases of massive corruption in the police. Some former Inspector General of Police have been indicted and even convicted on fraud, in some cases, outright stealing of police funds. If they could do that with the ‘little’ that gets to them now, you can imagine when one per cent of our consolidated revenue is remitted to them in addition. But this is not enough reason to deny the Police better funding. One strongly believes that poor law enforcement and not inadequate laws is responsible for most of the crimes committed in this country, including fraud, election rigging, money laundering et al. If our police are well trained, remunerated, and properly quartered they will curb most of these crimes and our society would be the better for it. But if we leave them the way they are, then we should be pleased to live with the consequences of such a rotten system. The way you lay you bed is the way you sleep on it.

    Finally, the Sunday newspapers were awash with the photograph of President Goodluck Jonathan and Rivers State Governor, Rotimi Amaechi shaking hands at the Port Harcourt International airport. That the two are sworn enemies is not in doubt, but let’s hope this photo op is not a photo trick after all. This is hoping the hatchet has been buried. The better for the nation.

     

  • Appraising Osun’s tablet of knowledge

    […] It is only when the minds of men have been properly and rigorously cultivated and garnished, that they can be safely entrusted with public affairs with a certainty and assuredness that they will make the best of their unique opportunity and assignment. —Chief Obafemi Awolowo.

     

     

    Anyone who conscientiously observes the policy initiatives of the current administration in the State of Osun since inception may not be hard-pressed to aver that it is increasingly working its fingers to the bone in order to make the effects of governance felt in all households in the state. Through many of its “O’projects”, the Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola administration is unusually raising the bar of governance. Indeed, here is a governor who with uncommon hardihood and ideas is making life more meaningful for the generality of Osun citizens.

    What I personally find incredible is that in less than three years of assuming office, this O’Governor (as some people warm-heartedly brand him) has initiated a highly comprehensive reform that the Philistinic and rapacious PDP administration deemed impossible in the education sector of the state for an unbelievably uninterrupted seven years! In various aspects of the education sector of Osun today is striking evidence of how structured thinking and judicious use of resources can make a huge invaluable difference in the life of a people. As clearly stated in the epigraph to this piece, only rigorously cultivated and garnished minds can make the best of the opportunity availed them to serve the public.

    One of those beneficial projects Governor Aregbesola’s government will be forever remembered for is the newly launched computer tablet, an I-pad-like learning device christened Opon Imo. It was reported that about 150,000 units of the device would be given free of charge to both students and teachers in the state’s public schools – 20,000 for teachers and 130,000 for students in the high schools. With the introduction of this learning device, there is no doubt that the lacuna between teaching and learning, and access to requisite materials will be greatly reduced.

    It is noteworthy that the tablet is preloaded with different tutorial notes, past questions, and textbooks on 17 subjects that students register for in the West African Senior Secondary Certificate Examinations (WASSCE), the National Examination Council (NECO), and the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME). This is a potent elixir for students; they will be motivated to settle down for business as the tuneless music of lack and dearth of necessary learning materials would have been taken care of. Experience has shown that where students are availed of the required learning materials, their capacity to excel is greatly enhanced. I am confident that the use of this device will greatly increase the capacity of our students for remarkable performances in their studies. Also, with Opon Imo, it is certain that public schools in the state will no longer produce students who are happily alien to the use of computer, which every young adult in current time can only neglect to their own disadvantage.

    For the government, parents, and teachers, it is all the way a win-win situation. In other words, while government saves money from buying textbooks (each computer tablet has about 65 textbooks), the teachers as well will no longer be tortured with teaching students who know nothing about the unsullied joy of possessing textbooks. Let me observe here that those who whoop and whine about the substantial billions of naira that the government will save from not having to buy textbooks because students can now access them on the tablets are only being mischievous. Only asinine kind of opposition politics would inspire anyone to condemn and howl negatively against a prudent government, which has even demonstrated in more ways than one, that it is committed to allocating resources across the various sectors of the state astutely. I think it is a sensible and laudable move for the Aregbesola government to even recognise in the first place that it can make savings from the huge investment it is making in the education sector. What is more, even parents, especially those with financial challenges, now have their burdens significantly crashed as they may not have to worry about how to buy textbooks for their children. Whether the nagging nabobs of notorious negativities in Osun find it palatable or not, the different households in the state are firmly convinced that they have a government which adds lasting values to their lives.

    The Opon Imo device is also said to contain six extra-curricular subjects, to wit Sexuality Education, Entrepreneurship, Yoruba Proverbs, Civic Education, Yoruba History and the Yoruba Traditional Religion. This is a welcome development as it will go a long way in equipping the minds of the students with knowledge in other useful areas other than their school subjects. The fact that the students may not be examined on these areas suggests to me that the government is directly awakening the consciousness of the students to the inexorable need for them to stuff their minds with knowledge not purposely for the sake of examination. Their capacity for dialectical thinking will be developed and they will not suffer from the malaise of insular and shallow thinking mostly favoured by charlatans and pedestrian souls. Surely, as they furnish their minds with the knowledge from those diverse subjects, they will know something about everything and everything about something. That is how to produce sound and round students. Precisely, the aspect on Yoruba, history, traditional religion, and proverbs are part of the effective ways of imbuing these students with the understanding of their culture.

    Surely, with its manifold brilliant and remarkable initiatives in the various sectors of the State of Osun, especially the education sector, the Aregbesola government is not unmindful of the tested and true view that the extent to which a government accords attention to its educational system will determine the level of the socio-economic development of the state or country, after all it has been proven again and again that there is a direct relationship between education and development. As the computer tablet affirms, the State Government of Osun knows what is at stake if it does not modernise its learning system.

    I can only cheer parents, teachers, and other stakeholders to help in ensuring that the students make valuable use of the device. The government must also continue to deepen this ICT-compliant learning system, even as it allows the worrywarts to keep clutching their permanent crutches of baseless bellyaches.

     

    • Alawode, a retired secondary school teacher, lives in Ile-Ife, Osun State.