The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tuesday

  • Copyright Commission and impunity

    Copyright Commission and impunity

    Would a Director General wilfully disregard the directive of the nation’s chief law officer without any consequence? Or, should a lawyer flagrantly disobey a subsisting court order barring the agency he heads from any such act by despatching his men to raid such a body corporate? These posers would form the basis of this discourse. But first, a brief background to what has become a titanic rivalry between a government regulatory agency and a private organization within the same sphere of influence.

    The Nigerian Copyright Commission, NCC, came into being with the promulgation in 1988 of the Copyright Decree (No. 47) of that year. The Decree was re-designated the Copyright Act in Cap 68 Laws of the Federation of Nigeria, 1990 and amended by the Copyright Act (Amendment) Decree (No. 98) of 1992. The Act makes provision for “the definition, protection, transfer, infringement of, and remedy and penalty thereof, of the copyright in literary works, musical works, artistic works, cinematograph films, sound recordings, broadcast and other ancillary matters”.

    The Musical Copyright Society Nigeria, MCSN, on the other hand was set up in 1984 to take over the responsibilities of Performing Rights Society, PRS and Musical Copyright Protection Society, MCPS both of the United Kingdom as they divested from Nigeria. Prior to this, most Nigerian composers and authors were registered with them for the collection and distribution of performing and mechanical rights in musical works. While many Nigerian creators transferred to MCSN, others remained with both PRS and MCPS. This prompted MCSN to enter into reciprocal representation contracts with them by which it (MCSN) became vested with the copyright in virtually the entire repertoire of copyright music in Nigeria.

    Also, MCSN has reciprocal representation arrangement with SACEM of France, ASCAP of USA, whereby it represents their interests in Nigeria and vice versa. It is a full member of La Confederation Internationale Societies des Auteurs et Compositors, CISAC, (International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers), the International Bureau of Organizations Managing Mechanical Reproduction Rights, BIEM and affiliated to 225 societies in 118 countries.

    MCSN thus predates the establishment of the copyright commission and the expectation was that both would work together to create a robust copyright system in the country. After all, the government regulatory agency was just starting out and with MCSN already on ground, a symbiotic relationship was all that was needed to expand the frontiers of copyright for the benefit of musicians, authors and publishers. Sadly, the commission shut out MCSN from its radar once it took off, choosing instead to midwife a brand new organization, called Performing Mechanical Rights Society, PMRS, which morphed into today’s Copyright Society of Nigeria, COSON, licensed as “government sole collecting society”. Meanwhile, MCSN’s application for approval as a collecting society was rejected! Why the pioneer Director-General of the commission (and others that followed) could not license two collecting societies to pave the way for the liberalisation of the sector and create choice for stakeholders is still a matter of conjecture. Refused approval by the commission, MCSN was either to atrophy or seek life support. It thus instituted a series of court cases against the commission many of which it won giving it the leeway to operate as owner, assignee and exclusive licensee.

    But the commission has refused to recognise the court rulings and would rather abate the infringement of MCSN’s works by writing to corporate pirates not to pay royalties to its rightful owner because it “is not approved as a collecting society”. This has crippled the administration of copyright in Nigeria since its “sole collecting society” does not own the works it was officially licensed to collect from! And the petitions to the commission by MCSN are treated with levity. That was until the current Attorney General and Minister of Justice, Mohammed Adoke, SAN, waded in.

    Initially, he referred the dispute between MCSN and the commission to the World Intellectual Property Organization, WIPO, for mediation. But in a letter to MCSN dated August 10, 2011 discontinuing the process and signed by the current Director-General, Afam Ezekude, the minister directed that “both parties be advised to seek judicial resolution to the issues in dispute by pursuing on-going suits instituted at the Federal High Court. Parties are further advised to refrain from taking any action which is capable of undermining the judiciary and to ensure respect for and observance of the law”.

    A few days after, one of the pending cases instituted by MCSN against the commission for the enforcement of its fundamental human rights occasioned by the raid and arrest of its chief executive with another staff, as well as the removal from the office of files and essential equipment in 2007, came up for ruling.

    In his landmark judgment on August 25, 2011, Justice Archibong of the Federal High Court Lagos, was unequivocal when he said: “The first Respondent (Copyright Commission) has failed to acknowledge, appreciate, or welcome the notion and reality that owners and assignees of copyright can enforce property rights without necessarily being registered as a collecting society by the copyright commission. registration as a collecting society is not a prerequisite for the enjoyment and exercise of rights of an owner or exclusive licensee of copyright”.

    He had then pronounced: “Nothing in the Copyright Act denies the owner, the assignee or the exclusive licensee of a copyright the right to collect royalties for the performance of their works in public or to transact commercially with anybody in respect of such works or appoint agents to claim and enforce directly their rights under Section 6 of the Copyright Act and I so hold. The offence of purporting to perform the duties of a society without the approval of the copyright commission created by Section 39 of the Copyright Act cannot and does not relate to the activities of owners, assignees and exclusive licensees of copyright and I so hold”.

    The judge further clamped a Garnishee order of N40 million against the commission for damages with the specific order for the applicants: “not to be arrested or further arrested or detained by the respondent or any of its officers, or agents unless a proper and complete investigation has been carried out and the applicants are reasonably suspected to be guilty of a criminal offence”.

    But on September 18, officials of the commission raided MCSN again, this time arresting five staffers who were detained for two days and carted away files and computer units. In a statement justifying the action, Nseabasi Ukagwu, of the Public Affairs Unit of the Commission stated: “The operation was carried out following information that the said MCSN was performing the duties of a collecting society without the approval of NCC”. And it relied on a 2010 judgment which is on appeal at the Supreme Court by MCSN between it and an alleged infringer, not the commission as basis for the action. Pray, what about the subsisting court order of 2011? Is it a question of selective adherence to judgments?

    • Johnson, a public affairs analyst wrote from Abuja.

  • Albert agonistes

    Albert agonistes

    Caveat Emptor: the title of this piece, after John Milton’s Samson Agonistes, takes nothing from Prof. Albert Chinualumogu Achebe, without doubt Africa’s most popular novelist. It is only to get into the genre of literary-powered political forays, as the literary giant first did in his The Trouble with Nigeria (1983); and now, with his newly released Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970) memoirs, There was a Country.

    Both express Achebe’s long running agony on how Nigeria savagely did in – and, in his fervent view, continues to do in – his native Igbo people. In the professor’s cosmos of demons, as far as Nigeria’s sad narrative is concerned, the Hausa-Fulani post-colonial empire builders run neck-on-neck with their Yoruba co-conspirators, in an unconscionable bid to crush the Igbo.

    And in the hottest part of this Achebe hell reigns Obafemi Awolowo, in Achebe’s view, the Igbo Enemy No. 1. Though Chief Awolowo has been resting with his creator for some 25 years now (leaving behind his profound thinking and winning developmental ideas to rattle and dazzle a stiff-necked Nigeria), the literature professor’s enduring clinical hate for, and analytical prejudice against the Awo persona would appear undiminished, the stuff of which professorial spite is made.

    That was clear from Achebe’s The Trouble with Nigeria. It is reinforced in There was a Country; at least from the excerpts released by Penguin, the book’s publishers; and published in The Guardian of London, in which Prof. Achebe literally canonisedAwo as the philosophical king of Nigeria’s post-independence systemic and systematic crushing of the Igbo.

    Yet, wild or jaundiced, Prof. Achebe has his points, particularly in the sickening festival of mutual hurts – and hate – that is the story of Nigeria.

    To be sure, the Civil War (1967) was an unconscionable gang-up against the Igbo by the rest of Nigeria. But so was the June 12 annulment crisis (1993): a pan-Nigeria gang-up against the Yoruba. The Goodluck Jonathan opportunistic abridgement of the zoning policy; and his resultant “pan-Nigeria mandate [as Ripples put in a previous piece] of Southern Nigeria and the Middle Belt” (2011) was a pan-Nigeria gang-up against the political North. Again, as Ripples earlier put it, Nigerians at crucial junctures in their history, always band together for injustice to inflict pains on the section at the receiving end.

    While the East was at the receiving end during the Civil War, there is nothing to suggest that a section of the Igbo, Prof. Achebe’s perpetual “victims”, did not merrily join the pan-Nigeria gang-up against the Yoruba on June 12; and against the political North in 2011.

    Witness: the Uche Chukwumerije (now a senator of the Federal Republic) Goebbels show for Gen. Ibrahim Babangida, in a bid to sustain the criminal annulment of the 12 June 1993 presidential election that MKO Abiola won and for which cause he lost his life. Chukwumerije’s orchestrated threats and war drums sent the Igbo scuttling across the Niger. And didn’t the late Ikemba Nnewihimself gloat that his Abacha-era National Constitutional Conference “mandate” was superior to MKO’s presidential mandate?

    Also, witness: the scandalous over-voting in the South East, in the southern electoral conspiracy to crown Goodluck Jonathan at all cost; and give the Hausa-Fulani hegemony its comeuppance!

    In all of these, where fits in Achebe’s emotive tale of the Igbo as perpetual victim, always sinned against but never sinning, to borrow a phrase from Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles?

    Still on the Civil War: it was one mass slaughter to be decried, no doubt. But before that war, was the first coup (15 January 1966); where the idealism of Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu, and his fellow braves badly miscarried. Then came the counter-coup (29 July 1966).

    But in-between the two coups were the pogroms, the mass murder of the Igbo in the North, that turned the Thomas Aguiyi-Ironsi government a nightmare.

    The pogroms triggered the war, which was just as well – for whichever people would fold their arms and swallow the brazen elimination of their kind, without lifting a finger? But something else also triggered the pogroms: provocative Igbo youths taunting Kaduna locals over the killing of the Sardauna, Alhaji Ahmadu Bello, and other northern leaders in the first coup.

    Of course, at independence (no thanks to British perfidy) was an uneasy North-East power cohabitation, which left the North that worked least for independence, in the power cockpit; but which nevertheless rewarded Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe’s nationalist strivings with a ceremonial presidency.

    If the January 1966 coup threatened this delicate cohabitation, the post-coup taunts sent the Hausa-Fulani hegemony into blind panic, realising their loss of power might just be the loss of everything. That drove the counter-coup, which drove the Civil War. So, whereas the Civil War was sold as a patriotic endeavour to keep Nigeria one, it was actually a northern plot to consolidate federal power, if not by the ballot box, then by the bullet.

    In Things Fall Apart and its tragedy, Achebe created the Okonkwo complex: that brash penchant to rush at a problem (consequences be damned!), even if you were not in full control. As Okonkwo rushed to his doom, many blamed Emeka Ojukwu for “rushing” headlong to war; and committing his people – as if many in his shoes, under those circumstances, would have done otherwise.

    But so did Achebe, Okonkwo’s literary creator, in a stunning case of life following art. Unlike Wole Soyinka who tried to explore a “third force” (neither Igbo secession nor northern unification farce) to checkmate the war, and paid a hefty price of 22 months in solitary detention in a Lagos gulag, Achebe jumped into the war, on his native Biafra side, as war ambassador.

    Unlike Ojukwu however, Achebe emerged from the war with an eternally poisoned psyche. That would explain his wild charges against Awo as Igbo Enemy No. 1; and even wilder charges against the Yoruba as stoutest obstacles against Igbo success in Nigeria.

    The Yoruba, with their Afenifere (live and let live) credo, have more productive things to do than mount themselves as blocks against other people’s success; even if, to be fair, there is a great deal of rivalry between the two peoples, as is to be expected in a federation.

    The Civil War and its heart-rending horror and bitter after-taste resulted from serial errors for which everyone is today a victim. Explosive and insensitive comments in There was a Country, therefore, are highfalutin distractions (with literary licence to boot!) that do no one no good.

    Even if Nigeria breaks up today, peoples of the former territory would still find ways of relating with themselves – after all, that Yugoslavia is defunct does not automatically raze Serbs, Croats and the rest from the face of the earth. So, why is Achebe, 81, using yesterday’s hurt to poison the well for tomorrow’s generation?

    The trouble with Achebe, like his Trouble with Nigeria, is his unrelieved bigotry against others, ironically served as red hot jeremiad, protesting anti-Igbo bigotry.

    That is the story of his just released bitter Civil War memoir. It is a most dangerous distraction.

  • Why some things can’t change

    Why some things can’t change

    Just as rows between the executive and the National Assembly over budgets have become a permanent fixture of the nation’s experience, it is fairly easy to spot the contrived nature of the latest row now on the verge of being escalated. That the National Assembly is again hinting at a showdown with the executive over the shape and size Budget 2013 clearly suggest that the issues involved in the division are far more intricate, or rather deeper, than the parties would let Nigerians into. After all, it is barely two months since the Lower House threatened President Goodluck Jonathan with the sword of impeachment over an alleged failure to implement Budget 2012.

    Whereas the bone of contention last time was the performance of the budget, this time, the disagreement centres on the basis of revenue estimates – the reference benchmark price for the nation’s crude to be used in the formulation of Budget 2013. The executive is said to have set the price at $75 a barrel –consistent with its 2013-15 Medium Term Expenditure Framework and Fiscal Strategy, whereas the lawmakers prefer the higher price of $82 a barrel as part of its plans to reduce the budget deficit.

    The more I reflect on the tango, the more I am reminded of the story of husband and wife locked in a feud. While both partners admit to the raging low-intensity war; however, the matter of the casus belli, being matters behind drawn curtains, would remain a guarded secret!

    It does not matter that the ordinary citizens, on whose behalf the whole theatricals are being staged, are for all intents and purposes, unknown quantities in the equation. Indeed, by the time the whole brouhaha is stripped of the pretences and the attendant grandstanding, the issues underlying the feud comes to nothing on substantive matters of governance – the very things that are supposed to count.

    Not that the unfolding drama does not have a comical side to it. Courtesy of the impeachment axe dangled by the lawmakers in August, the budget implementation is believed to have gone some notches up – with the finance ministry reportedly turning on the treasury tap with capital releases to Ministries, Departments and Agencies in deference to the threat. However, while the degree of implementation remains a subject of guesstimates, the question of why the funds were held up in the first place has not quite been sufficiently addressed by the finance ministry. That obviously would have to wait – that is if it will ever get attention.

    For the Presidency, the dividend has come by way of the latest mantra: the mantra of performance contracts for ministers and other strategic officials of government. This is what the lack-lustre administration appears to have hung its new activism. Added to this is the fad –road shows mounted by ministers and heads of parastatals to announce commitments to timelines and specific deliverables in the budgets they formulated in the first place!

    Of course, it seems unlikely that the angers of the Reps spoiling for war over perceived poor budget implementation of Budget 2012 would be doused permanently anytime soon. In the first place, the field reports from its oversight activities would seem to suggest that the rosy picture of implementation painted by the executive is not exactly correct. Indeed, Abdulmumin Jubrin, the Chairman of the House Committee stated that much when he reportedly told the duo of Yerima Ngama and Bright Okogwu, the Minister of State for Finance and Director-General of the Budget Office penultimate week that the degree of implementation remained “dismal”. Second reason is the status of the pork said to have been built into the budget by the lawmakers which Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala described as the fuel feeding the lawmakers fury. See why the lawmakers cannot but be angry?

    What we are seeing would seem a case of the lawmakers bidding their time with the benchmark price of crude assumed in Budget 2013 supplying the perfect foil. Whereas the executive wants the 2012 benchmark crude price of $75 per barrel retained, the lawmakers have since reasoned that a higher price of $82 would be desirable.

    Of course, the argument has long endured – and I agree to an extent – that a conservative benchmark price makes sense given the potential volatility of oil prices and the need to insulate the budgetary process from its possible shocks.

    The arguments of the lawmakers in favour of higher benchmark price are, without question, no less persuasive. Adopting the higher price means hiking the federally collectable revenue to N7.9 trillion from the N7.3 trillion figures of 2012. Aside translating to a federal government share of N4.137 trillion, the case of the hike would be better appreciated when it is realised that the 2013 Budget has an in-built deficit in excess of N1.3 trillion. Need I add that higher revenue figures portend good for the pork described as constituency projects?

    The old illusions are, no doubt, back. I refer here to the illusion that more cash in the coffers would somehow translate to better budget performance. This is where, in my view, the lawmakers erred tragically. They want more cash, no doubt; the pertinent question however is – more cash, for what?

    Let me be clear, I have argued on this page that there is no way meaningful development can be achieved without bold and equally ambitious programmes of public expenditure, particularly in upgrading the enablers of the real sector. Just as it seems clear to me that the problem isn’t so much about what gets spent but the question of the value delivered in the end, it is even clearer that the posturing by the lawmakers over a patently flawed budgetting system is unhelpful.

    Isn’t it amazing that the lawmakers cannot appreciate this elementary point – that for every naira spent to deliver on capital projects, the federal government currently spends thrice the amount to service the running of the bureaucracy and the allied infrastructure of governance? Are we ever going to address the question of how the bureaucracy’s cart has come to drag the nation’s development horse?

    I must also state that the posturing of the executive is no less hollow. Apparently, it seems in order that the federal government would continually impose the so-called benchmark price by fiat and without the concurrence of state governments – co-beneficiaries from the consolidated fund. And while it suits it, it mounts the high streets with its vacuous preachments on frugality even when – as the example of the illegal subsidy payments does show – it is not exactly averse to unilaterally dipping its itchy fingers into the piggy bank called the excess crude account.

    I guess it’s time someone out there educate the rest of us on what makes the federal government believe that it has exclusive preserve of common sense. I suppose the same goes for the need for reconsideration of the basis on which the so-called funds are shared by the two-tiers of government. By the way, where are the federalists?

     

  • A conclave of freeloaders

    A conclave of freeloaders

    Freeloaders, all. And ingrates to boot.

    Some six weeks ago, they dominated the front pages and the headlines in the national media, from the moment they landed at Abuja Airport until they departed some four days later and even thereafter.

    They were the talk – and indeed the envy – of the town as they were whisked from one event to another in the finest automobiles that ever rolled off the assembly lines of the Bavarian Motor Works in Germany, from lavish breakfast, with judicious helpings of cassava bread, I gather, to sumptuous lunch, and thereafter to opulent dinner, with the choicest victuals in between.

    By one account, one of them could not find her way to Abuja in a manner befitting of members of the conclave. Pronto, an executive jet from the Presidential Fleet had to be dispatched to Lilongwe to fetch her, and apparently to fly her back at the conclusion of the proceedings.

    Practically all of them were heard to remark in their less guarded moments that never had they never enjoyed such a good time, inured from the querulous intrusion of the media back home and the malicious gossip of the domestic staff.

    They came, they ate, and they left, laden with precious souvenirs.

    But not a word of solicitude or solidarity has been heard from members of this conclave, severally or jointly, about their ailing Abuja host who left nothing to chance to ensure that they would forever remember their visit as the happiest time of their lives.

    As far as I could ascertain, they have not sent flowers to her bedside in the German hospital where she is reportedly convalescing, let alone a deputation to comfort her. Nor have they summoned the presence of mind to send a goodwill delegation to her husband through whose office all that munificence they enjoyed had flowed.

    Anyone who has hosted a regional conference, to say nothing of a national conference, knows how exacting the task is. Hosting an international conference is prohibitively more exacting. When it comes to staging a continental conference involving first ladies, the task grows by geometric progression.

    Indeed, so enormous was the stress and strain occasioned by the convening and hosting of such a conference that the convener had to repair to the quiescent clime of Dubai just to decompress. But the damage had been done, and opportunistic complications set in.

    And yet, as I was saying, the African First Ladies Peace Initiative, to come right out with it and call the conclave its proper name, has expressed no concern or solidarity with its chairperson and convener, Dame Patience Jonathan, with her husband, and with the people of Nigeria.

    Whatever happened to ubuntu, that hallowed imperative that enjoins us, Africans, to look out for one another, and in this particular instance summons the first ladies to be their sister’s keeper?

    Where is the solidarity?

    Dame Jonathan even took a shellacking for allegedly muscling her way through the bureaucracy to secure for the organisation’s headquarters building choice land in Abuja — land to which her predecessor claimed to have genuine title. She was called all kinds of names in the media, but she endured it all graciously, unshaken in her commitment to the goals and objectives of the African First Ladies Initiative.

    Is it too much, then, to expect her fellow first ladies to show humane concern for the health and well-being of one who has sacrificed so much and endured so much to advance the organization’s interests?

    When it comes to Nigeria the host country of its most recent summit, the African First Ladies Peace Initiative has been even more remiss. Since that summit, hardly has a week passed without some shadowy organisation carrying out a slaughter of innocents, much of it sectarian, in the northern part of Nigeria.

    The Independence Day massacre of 42 students of the Federal Polytechnic, in Mubi, Adamawa State, is only the latest episode of what Festus Eriye, editor and columnist for the Sunday edition of this newspaper, has with his accustomed perspicacity called a “descent into depravity.”

    If any country not at war qualifies for an urgent visitation from the African First Ladies Peace Initiative, that country, surely, has to be Nigeria, which hosted its most recent summit.

    Yet, there has not been the merest hint of a move in that direction; no appeal to the rampaging bomb-throwers and gunmen to end the slaughter and allow for the kind of mediation that women are uniquely suited to promote, as mothers and wives. They have sent no message of commiseration to the beleaguered, and offered no succour to the most vulnerable casualties, children and older women especially.

    They had better prepare an answer for their serial derelictions, for their chairperson is sure to demand an explanation when she returns to circulation any moment from now. And it had better be a robust one.

    Dr Jonathan will have some explaining to do, too.

    Something tells that if Dame Patience finds on returning to circulation that “First Lady” is no longer reflexively prefixed to her name; that she is now largely seen more as her husband’s wife than as Nigeria’s preeminent woman, and that she can no longer command the kind of attention she used to command, she is sure to demand an explanation.

    She will surely find out that her husband treated her indisposition as a family matter that did not rise to the level of national concern, and that he did not give a damn about the public’s right to know, even if only in outline, what was happening to the woman they had come to regard as Her Excellency the First Lady.

    In the process, he reduced her to an object of tawdry gossip and tabloid titillation.

    She will discover that, by his silence and his secrecy, Dr Jonathan blocked the outpouring of sympathy and goodwill that Nigerians typically manifest toward the indisposed, and that by the same measure, he may have taken her out of public consciousness.

    The video clip aired on national television the other day showing Mrs Jonathan “hale and hearty” with her husband and children at an undisclosed location in Germany did little to clear the air.

    While the reservoir of sympathy and goodwill has not dried up, she will find it no easy task to re-enter the public consciousness in a positive light.

    But one writes off Mrs Jonathan only at one’s peril. I will not be surprised if, the day after her return, she carried on where she had left off unfazed, and unstoppable as ever.

    Still, I don’t envy Dr Jonathan.

     

  • Constitutional amendments; a bad workman…

    Constitutional amendments; a bad workman…

    A bad workman, the English say, quarrels with his tools. Few people demonstrate the accuracy of this aphorism as Nigerians – certainly the politicians among them – do in their attempt, once again, to review the Constitution of their country as it clocks its 52nd year of its Independence from British colonial rule on October 1, 1960.

    First, it took them all less than six years to throw away the parliamentary constitution they had inherited from their colonial master and, in effect, adopt a unitary constitution.

    Not that ordinary Nigerians really had much choice in the matter when the soldiers overthrew the country’s unpopular civilian rulers on January 15, 1966. That first coup has since been blamed much for being the trigger of the country’s sharp decline since Independence. But this is only being wise after the fact; back then most Nigerians believed the coup was good riddance to bad rubbish.

    Naturally, when Major-General J. T. Aguiyi-Ironsi took over power as our first military ruler he and his colleagues abolished the Independence Constitution. Then in February he set up a Constitutional Study Group under Chief F.R.A. Williams, aka “Timi the Law”, to work out a new constitution. However, even before the group could settle down to work, the new head of state enacted Decree 34, the unification decree which abolished the then four regions – North, West, East and Mid-West – and replaced them with the provinces in those regions as the units of administration.

    That, as is well known, proved his nemesis; in July there was a bloody counter-coup in which the top casualty was the general himself, and following which the new kids on the block quickly abolished the decree. This was in September, barely two months after they came to power.

    The counter-coup, in turn, led eventually to a three-year civil war which ended in 1970. By then General Yakubu Gowon who had taken over from Ironsi as military, ruler, had been in power for over four years. When the war ended he promised a return to civilian rule in four years i.e. by 1974. However, as the deadline approached the man changed his mind and it became apparent that he had allowed himself to be persuaded by those around him that, like several of his counterparts elsewhere, notably Egypt, he should swap his khaki for mufti and remain in power.

    This, again as we all know, proved his undoing; he was overthrown in 1975 but unlike his hapless predecessor, he did not pay the ultimate price, reason being he was out of the country at the time of the coup.

    Apparently the new set of military rulers learnt the lessons of the demise of their predecessors, which was that in the long run no good ever came out of wanting to cling on to power; they promised to return the country to civilian rule in three years and set about their commitment with a vigour unknown in most military dictatorships, certainly those in Africa.

    Such was their commitment that even when some misguided elements in the army killed the head of state, General Murtala Mohammed, on February 13, 1976 in a failed attempt to overthrow his government, the new military rulers stuck to their transition programme to hand over to the civilians on October 1, 1979.

    The lot of implementing the programme fell on General Olusegun Obasanjo, General Muhammed’s deputy. Top of the programme was the provision of a constitution for the country. Before his assassination, General Muhammed had inaugurated a Constitution Drafting Committee (CDC) under – who else? – “Timi the Law.”

    Suspicions that there were strings attached to the CDC’s brief soon provoked a huge controversy. The suspicions were first aired by Malam Aminu Kano, the late radical politician who led the opposition to the ruling party in the North. During one of the conferences organised around the country to generate input for the CDC – this one was on the Congo Campus of Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, in March 1977 – Malam Aminu claimed there was not only a “soft-subterranean influence” by the army to jettison the parliamentary democracy of the First Republic and replace it with American type of presidential democracy. He also said he had reason to believe the CDC had succumbed to the military’s influence.

    This columnist had the privilege of reporting the story for the New Nigerian as a junior reporter.

    That claim got Chief Williams’ dander up. Unless the radical malam withdrew his claim, the chief threatened in effect, he would sue him for slander. This threat got my bosses understandably worried, given the chief’s huge reputation of hardly ever losing his cases. So worried were my bosses they sent me to Kano to seek clarification on the issue from the malam.

    I did and he stuck to his gun. “I must,” he said in a short written statement he gave me, “say that I have grown old enough in the politics of Nigeria and generally of Africa to avoid equivocation or sycophancy and to know the difference between political consistency which is hard to maintain and political acrobatism, simple to operate. The first I will continue to do, but the second I condemn and reject until death, suffering and ostracisation notwithstanding.”

    The New Nigerian led with the story in its edition of April 4, 1977 under the headline, “Aminu Kano Unrepentant – stands by his words.” As far as I know, Chief Williams never sued the malam until his death.

    More significantly when the CDC submitted its report to the authorities it opted for the American type presidential democracy as if in vindication of malam’s claims. As we all know this was adopted by the Constituent Assembly (CA) of 1978 that eventually wrote the 1979 Constitution that ushered in the Second Republic and a document which has remained the country’s constitutional framework, give or take not a few amendments by the various military regimes that have ruled this country up to 1999.

    And so it was that the first opportunity Nigerians had of drafting their own constitution without supervision by any colonial master, they chose to throw away the one they had inherited, lock, stock and barrel.

    It has since become conventional wisdom to say the military imposed the presidential system on the country. The truth is much more complex than that. True, the Obasanjo regime that midwifed the constitution not only held a veto over it. It exercised the veto by inserting a few important clauses in it and deleting a few, without subjecting the document to a referendum or to even reconsideration by its CA.

    However, the fact was that the mostly elected 1978 CA agreed with the military in their choice of the presidential system over the parliamentary. It was also a fact that there was a popular support for the system. So it is simply historical revisionism to blame the soldiers alone for the country’s jettisoning of parliamentary democracy after the country had used it for less than six years.

    In truth the greater blame for this “imposition” should go to our politicians who, it seems, have a penchant for quarrelling with their tools. This much should be obvious from the fact that most, if not all, of them blame our Constitution more – much more – than their own behaviour for the problems of this country.

    According to The Punch (September 29), there are at the moment 264 proposals before our National Assembly for amendments in our Constitution which is barely 12 years old. Among these, the newspaper said, are 61 demands for the creation of states before the Senate and 27 for same before the House of Representatives, making a total of 88.

    Neither the parliamentary constitution of the First Republic, nor the presidential one we have since replaced it with are perfect, being documents written by imperfect human beings.

    It is also true that it makes no difference what type of tool a country chooses to solve its problems with. In the end, however, what is more important than the right choice is how a tool is used. Only a bad workman, which your typical Nigerian politician is, will contemplate amending a constitution he has used for barely 12 years in no less than 264 places.

    Worse, only such a bad workman would demand for the creation of 88 more states in a country where we all agree, the existing 36 have proved too unwieldy and too costly.

  • Osun SAS and the reign of rumours

    Osun SAS and the reign of rumours

    For some time now, the rumour mill in the State of Osun has been unduly astir and agog with its worrisome pastime of tickling the ears of people with fantastic untruths. The emerging pattern appears to be that anytime the government of Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola introduces any comprehensive people-oriented policy, those whose pseudo patriotism inspires to harvest defeat from the jaw of victory quickly move to town, spawning a web of lies to discredit the programme.

    Few months ago, some local political irritants and their unconscionable federal sponsors sought in vain to make sense of their hollow claims that the governor had concluded plans to first Islamise the state and then secede using the services of the young men it had trained in Cuba. These accusations fell flat and their sponsors were soon put to shame.

    The latest in this concatenation of ridiculous and reprehensible rumours concerns the activities of the joint security taskforce code-named Swift Action Squad (SAS), recently inaugurated by the state government to combat criminality and make the state unappealing to criminals of whatever pedigree. The objectionable gist in the current rumour making the rounds is that the men of this new security team are fashion police put in place by the government to deal with ladies who dress indecently, and to harass innocent citizens!

    Of course, since the rumour began, not one of the many ladies so punished by men of the SAS for wearing “too sexy clothes” has come to validate the bland claim. Except in the waning and circumscribed imagination of the peddlers of the rumours, nobody has come forward with a shred of evidence to prove a case of harassment or act of impunity against the joint patrol team of security men.

    In the version voyeuristically favoured by one Alabi Sodiq (circulated on some blogs and published in the September 4, edition of Thisday newspaper), it was claimed a young lady was “arrested” by SAS operatives on Saturday August 25, at Iwo. He claimed that the lady “was accused of wearing a top revealing her breast and the soldiers forced her to remove her top so as to totally reveal the breast she was ‘trying to flaunt’. Then, goes the story, a passing innocent Okada rider, who had no idea what was happening, was also stopped and asked by the soldiers to fondle the exposed breast of this young woman. The Okada man tried to turn down this offer and that’s a decision he would be regretting for a long time. He was mercilessly beaten and at the end he had to do as asked”.

    On the surface, it appeared Sodiq was doing the right thing that any public-spirited, law-abiding citizen would do – calling the attention of the authorities to the unlawful actions of a security unit, more so that, in his claim, the information was not fictitious. But in truth, this was blatant disinformation meant to cause needless apprehension in the peaceful people of the state. Except that he saw a young girl running for whatever reason on sighting a patrol vehicle, every other thing in his boondoggle was a product of hearsay. Perhaps because he is alien to the culture of crosschecking the facts of his claims beyond any scintilla of doubt as any credible writer and well meaning citizen would have done, he unquestioningly accepted the hogwash he was told hook, line and sinker as gospel truth!

    For those living in or visiting any part of Osun, it is very clear that all of the red security vehicles used by SAS have bold numbers inscribed on them, both front and back, for easy identification. The easiest thing for anybody who witnessed the wrongdoing of these security men to do is to take down the number and include it in their reports. But in the circulated reports against SAS, not one person – not even the seemingly observant Sodiq– has provided the vehicle number of the particular SAS unit that carried out the rumoured act. There has not even been any simple verbal description of the vehicle. Not one of the different versions of the wicked rumours gave a clear description of the actual place where the incident occurred. I have heard and read different places like Osogbo, Ile-Ife, and Iwo mentioned without any precise location within them identified as the place where passers-by witnessed the event.

    Assuming I were ignorant of what the average Nigerians can do with their camera phones at the scene of a sordid event, I might not have bothered surfing the net for a video or picture from episode. However, since the story was a product of the fevered imagination of rumour-mongers with sinister intentions, no single picture or video clip exists to affirm the veracity of the claims. It was Nigerians, not foreigners, who witnessed the beastly assault some low-minded Naval ratings executed against Uzoma Okereke sometime in 2010, that recorded the shameful acts and uploaded it on the Internet for the world to see. Did camera phones or other similar devices go into extinction while soldiers assault and harass a lady and an okada rider (the imaginative creations of mischief makers)?

    Moreover, I remember that the Special Adviser to the Governor Aregbesola was on live broadcast of the state television station about two weeks ago to encourage witnesses or victims of the untoward acts of SAS to contact him or the TV station with useful information. He gave out his personal number and six other numbers for this purpose. Not a single person has ventured in that direction.

    I have the hunch that those behind these rumours are incorrigible enemies of the state, who are unhappy with the progress being made. It is not even unlikely that these supine and faceless people behind the misleading tales are the ones who are exceedingly uncomfortable with the reality that they may not be able to rig elections because there is a crime-fighting military apparatus on ground. Politically-motivated crimes are stamped out in Osun and the graceless sponsors are in distress, hence the horrible rumours. What is more, in the better-forgotten years of the Oyinlola administration, Osun citizens were at the mercy of criminals. Today, it is a different story with the current administration. With the solid presence of security men in strategic areas around the state, it is very possible that criminals are sorely troubled that the party is over. This too could be another reason for the ruinous claims against the new security outfit the government has put in place to ensure the security of life and property of the people.

    While it is not impossible that some of these security men could be guilty of certain excesses in the performance of their duty, it is also not inconceivable that some weightless politicians and their foot soldiers incapable of deep introspection would resort to cheap lies and rumours in order to destroy a scheme that serves the people of the state very well.

    In his address at the inauguration of SAS, Aregbesola did not mention fashion policing as part of the duties of this security scheme. What will make sense is for people to report any unseemly conduct by members of the squad, with verifiable evidence. It is another way we can all participate in the onerous task of ensuring the security of the people of our various communities. Let all mischief makers, rumour-mongers, and political irritants know that no edifice of lies can survive where the sledgehammer of truth is active.

    • Alowonle writes from Osogbo

  • CBN debtors’ list

    CBN debtors’ list

    •People who take loans must be ready to pay or face the consequence

    LAST week, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) returned to the name-and-shame tactics of publishing the names of the financial sector’s biggest debtors. Prominent among the 113 companies and 419 directors/shareholders in the list are Femi Otedola, Alhaji Sayyu Dantata, Sir Johnson Arumemi-Ikhide, Prof Barth Nnaji (former Minister of Power), Mrs. Elizabeth Ebi and Dr. Wale Babalakin.

    Unlike in the past when it stopped at the point of making the names public, this time, the apex bank announced the extraordinary measure of shutting them out of further credit. It also threatened to hand them over to law enforcement agents in the event of their continuing neglect to fulfill their repayment obligations to the lenders. Banks which flout the directive would be made to make an immediate provision of 100 percent of total principal and interest outstanding in the account of the customer and related parties – without prejudice to regulatory action that the CBN may further take.

    As a newspaper, we are torn between the tendency to criminalise debts that is increasingly commonplace, which we deplore, and the offensive criminal impunity underlying the transactions that have now constituted an albatross to the financial system. Much as we are willing to concede to a world of difference between the class of genuine borrowers who became unwilling victims more by factors beyond their control than anything else – and the class that now constitutes the delinquent class renowned for preying on the financial system, the trouble has been in spotting the difference.

    Unfortunately, in the circumstance in which the banking sector found itself saddled with a staggering toxic loan portfolio of N3.4 trillion, the CBN seems to have reasoned that the situation dictated drastic measures. At this point, it is increasingly hard to fault the apex bank. True, the Asset Management Corporation of Nigeria (AMCON) has taken over most of the toxic loans in the bid to give some breather to the financial system; this itself has come at huge costs to the treasury. Meanwhile, a good number of the debtors have neither shown enough efforts to engage their creditors let alone the willingness to pay what they owe.

    The measure by the apex bank, in our view, speaks to the exigency of the situation. The initiative, and, if we dare say, courage, by the CBN in making public the names of the individuals, is deserving of commendation. Far from being drastic, it comes with the territory that those who borrow from the financial system must see themselves as having the obligation to pay. Failure should therefore come with expectations of penalties, if only to discourage irresponsible debtors from bringing the roof down the heads of everyone.

    In the specific case, it seems to us a necessary step to complement the on-going efforts to sanitise the financial sector. It is important to send the signal to those whose activities contributed in no small measure to the unravelling of the sector that the impunity of that era would not be overlooked. We cannot imagine a closure to the unfortunate event that culminated in the failure of some of the nation’s big lenders, and the collateral cost of the loss of investment by nearly two million shareholders, outside of the drastic prescription. Those not averse to hiding behind legalism to frustrate legitimate debt recovery need to be taught the lesson that the alternative to being credit-worthy is being shut out of formal credit. If we must make the laws stricter to make it mandatory for people to know that loans are no free funds, we should not hesitate to do so.

    All said, we must note that the financial system would not have found itself in this mess if credit bureaus were in operation. Clearly, the coming of the bureaus as a guide to the making of credit decisions has become imperative. Everything that needs to be done to get the bureaus on board must be done – immediately.

  • Nigeria at 52

    Nigeria at 52

    To anyone in the business of public comment, one uncomfortable burden must be the duty to constantly answer to the question of whether Nigeria is headed in the right direction at every turn. Like the cliché goes – as it was in the past, so it was yesterday, so it would be tomorrow – and evermore. Like the proverbial bad coin that keep showing up at intervals, the question of the nation’s destination would again pop up at the occasion of its 52th independence anniversary.

    Let me state that ritual of self-score that keeps producing what most Nigerians have come to regard as spurious verdicts – which suggest that the nation is finally getting things right – is nothing unusual. As uncomfortable as that ritual of outlandish self-assessment is, and which successive administrations have entertained themselves to at the expense of the long-suffering citizens, it does serves one important function of letting citizen into the mind of the leader – if only to allow them measure how far detached the leadership is from their reality.

    Take yesterday’s address by President Goodluck Jonathan with its beautiful presentation of the economy as one finally revving in full throttle: an economy which in the last two years has maintained a sustained path of growth with the real Gross Domestic Product averaging 7.1 percent.

    Until yesterday, I actually thought that we had gone beyond such meaningless statistics. After the spurious growth of the last decade that neither delivered jobs nor spread prosperity, I thought the adumbrations ought to have been tempered by the frightening reality of joblessness and rising poverty in the land. In vain did I search for recognition for the troubling, but long recognised fact.

    Now, I understand: the path would point in the direction of an underachieving presidency!

    From the power situation, to the economy; from job creation to security, the President insisted that he has his hands firmly on the handle. Unfortunately, the citizens who have borne the brunt of the failed policies of the administration couldn’t be sure.

    It seems not too long ago that the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) drew our attention to the yawning disconnect between the growth and the incidence of poverty. I recall the bureau summarising the trend this way in February: “In 2004, Nigeria’s relative poverty measurement stood at 54.4 per cent but increased to 69 per cent or 112.518 million Nigerians in 2010″.

    The statistician would observe in summary that “It remains a paradox… that despite the fact that the Nigerian economy is growing, the proportion of Nigerians living in poverty is increasing every year.”

    Did the President offer proof to show that the trend has changed? He didn’t. He needn’t. Nigerians know that things have grown worse, not better!

    Let’s move swiftly to the President’s claim of performance in the real sector. In the President’s own words: “we have improved on our investment environment; more corporate bodies are investing in the Nigerian economy. Our Investment Climate Reform Programme has helped to attract over N6.8 trillion local and foreign direct investment commitments”.

    Was it entirely surprising that the President would not see his score-card as complete without touting Nigeria’s emerging status as the preferred destination for investment in the continent? Hear the President: “the nation’s share of total FDI flows into the continent is in excess of 20 per cent”. Really? Where?

    There are of course the add-ons which he threw in; the registration of close to 7, 000 companies within the second quarter of the year alone; the 249-odd new members enrolled in the manufacturers’ club – the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (MAN) as at July this year. All these – the President seems to have reasoned – were proof enough of the economy in full flight.

    If Nigerians expected the administration to be forthcoming on the specifics of jobs created through the trillion-naira FDI, they got none. Rather, it was sufficient for the President to claim that millions of job opportunities are being created for the youth and the general population – in public works, in the local content initiative in the oil and Gas sector and the agricultural transformation programme of his administration!

    Now, there must be something extraordinary in the federal government’s professed love for FDI at a time when no finger is being lifted to help the few indigenous companies. The result is that many of them have bitten since the dust. Does the love of FDI reflect our typical preference for dispensing our charities abroad?

    Now, FDI is good. Often touted as a measure of international confidence in the national economy, it is admittedly a sign that some things are being done right. The problem however is the fetish being made of the so-called FDIs.

    Coincidentally, as this is being written, I have a report quoting the Nigerian Association of Chambers of Commerce, Industry Mines and Agriculture (NACCIMA) as stating that no fewer than 800 indigenous companies closed shop between 2009 and 2011 due to harsh operating business environment. While it seems unlikely that those in the list would be among the 249 which the President’s hyperactive MAN recently enrolled on their membership register, the President did no more than gloss over the issue of the harsh operating environment which has rendered manufacturing business a nightmare.

    For instance, nowhere did I hear the President address the question of easier access to credit; the unconscionably steep interest rates; the poor transportation infrastructure all of which constitute significant cost elements in manufacturing, but which with proper attention from government would keep the economy roaring.

    Not while there was something to boast about in the modest improvement in the power supply situation, the arrival of the Presidential cassava bread, the Presidential rice which promises to keep Thailand rice permanently outside our shores. Oh; I nearly forgot the dozen-plus contracts to revive the railways!

    Finally, does it count for anything that the Presidential Change of Guards –part of the independence ceremonies – was again held within the fortresses of the Villa?

    Does it equally matter that the place of the once bright and colourful Eagle Square as host to national events have since faded into distant memories?

    Talk about the dread of the Boko Haram being the beginning of Presidential wisdom.

    Here is to Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala

    At a forum in Awka, the Anambra State capital sometime in August 2011, you spoke of the plan by the Goodluck Jonathan administration to overhaul the mortgage system. Then, you rightly identified the absence of the mortgage institution as one of the key drivers of corruption in the public service. I thought the idea was spot on.

    It seems easy to imagine that a good number of the public servants under pressure to steal public funds in order to be able to put a roof over their heads would be less pressured to do if they access to relatively affordable mortgage.

    Well, it’s been more than a year since you let us into the plan. Do we need to wait till 2020 for the plan to materialise?

     

  • Unmasked

    Unmasked

    •Blowing the cover off the operatives of the SSS is a new low in the war against the state

    It seems quite an innocuous act but it may well be one of the deadliest blows the Boko Haram Islamist terror group has dealt the Nigerian authorities. There are no suicide bombs deployed or heavy gun battles as had been the case in the past.

    No. This time, the terrorists cut deep into the heart of Nigeria’s elite security outfit, they blew their cover. To unmask a spook is akin to rendering a damsel naked in public; it was a premeditated decapitation of Nigeria’s number one secret service.

    A few weeks back, the social media were awash with a deluge of information about officials of the State Security Service (SSS). Sensitive data and detailed information about the outfit were uploaded into the global information highway.

    According to report, the data of over 60 personnel, including the director-general of the agency Mr. Ita Ekpeyong were posted on the internet by suspected sympathisers of the Boko Haram sect. The information released included full names of operatives, their mobile numbers, names of next of kin, bank account details and other sensitive private information.

    This indeed is a punch below the belt as the expose is capable of not only jeopardising the lives of the men but also their career and operations. The intention of course is to ridicule and embarrass the service by the very exposure.

    The power and mystique of the secret service is in the secrecy of its operations and the ability to surprise through covert and undercover activities.

    For the Boko Haram Islamists, considered to be rag-tag, untrained and unprofessional to break the code of the SSS, is the very limit of humiliation.

    It is salutary to note that the service has redeemed a bit of its image by tracking the culprits, especially the moles in the house who breached its security. As it turned out, the agency was infiltrated by the sect who violated their system.

    The agency has vowed to clear the mess by flushing out the bad eggs and restructuring the service drastically. While we are at it, we want to differ that what has happened was a human error and not necessarily a structural one.

    Need we restate that the breaking of the cover of Nigeria’s elite secret service by the Islamists sect is a slap on all Nigerians. One would have expected that the SSS would have upgraded its activities in the light of the recent upheavals. It is worrisome that lapses of this nature still exist in the system. If the sect could break into the very heart of the SSS, there is no telling where else it has penetrated or is trying to.

    We call on the service to brace up. If there is nothing else Nigeria learned from the incipient terrorist activities, it must be the rudiment of security operations.

    We expect that by the time Nigeria is done with Boko Haram and its attendant security challenges, she ought to have one of the best security apparatus to be found anywhere. After all, it is said that every adversity has its bright side.

     

  • Trapped in the past

    Trapped in the past

    Kano sure does have them.

    There was Mallam Aminu Kano (1920-1983) of blessed memory, the patron saint of the northern talakawa; and undisputed muse of the Nigerian masses.

    So radically committed to the talakawa cause was Mallam Aminu that Second Republic President, Alhaji Shehu Shagari, once said Mallam Aminu was a professional agitator; so much so that were he president, he would bear a placard against himself before being reminded he was president! As an iconoclast and champion of the liberated masses, he was well and truly sublime.

    But there was also the tragi-comic Sabo Bakin Zuwo, of blessed memory. The lexically challenged Bakin Zuwo, who had no formal education but who jokingly declared himself “student” at the “Mallam Aminu Kano Political School, Sudawa, Kano”, sentenced many to wild guffaws when, at the hustings for the 1983 general elections, he said Kano boasted many “minerals” like Coke, Fanta and Mirinda! When after the Second Republic had crumbled and the messianic pair of Muhammadu Buhari and Tunde Idiagbon were handing out jumbo jail terms to errant politicians, Bakin Zuwo released his parting bazooka.

    Accused of warehousing N3.4 million (a mighty sum in those days!) in Government House Kano, the irrepressible Bakin Zuwo gave an apocryphal quip: “Government money in government house – so what the heck!”, or something to that effect. The media screamed Banking Zuwo, a bathetic pun of his name; and the immortal Banking Zuwo was born! He got 300 years in the slammer. Bakin Zuwo was as ludicrous as Aminu Kano was sublime.

    And now, here is Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso. Now, where does Governor Kwankwaso stand in the sublime-ludicrous continuum? He certainly is no Banking Zuwo, some lexically challenged comic and butt of media jokes. But neither is he a sublime defender of the talakawa, as the immaculate and incomparable Mallam Aminu was.

    But he certainly is a doughty defender of his native Kano, with his radical offensive against the creation of more states in the South East; and a straight-shooter when the issue is the North and its political ascendancy or decline. Indeed, Governor Kwankwaso is as radical in his attack of whomever or for whatever reasons bring Kano to ridicule; as he is inconsolable in his lament over what he called the political decline of the North.

    Ike Ekweremadu, deputy president of the Senate and chairman of the Constitutional Review Committee of the National Assembly, stoked the governor’s fury. Senator Ekweremadu used the slicing of old Kano into Kano and Jigawa states; and the seven states in the North West geo-political zone to make a case for the creation of one additional state in the South East; to make it at least at par with the other four geo-political zones of South West, South-South, North Central and North East.

    That would appear fair, on the face of it. If other zones have six states each, why should the South East have just five? Why indeed should the North West have seven states, two more than the South East, and one more than the other zones?

    But an irate Governor Kwankwaso used a welter of statistics (in a lengthy interview with The Nation, Saturday September 29), to remind Senator Ekweremadu (the young man of no more than 50 years!) and his ilk that going by the 2006 census figures, the combined population of South East and South-South is 37 million, just one odd million more than 36 million that the North West alone recorded. So, how dare they question the right of Kano and allied states to have as many states as their land mass and population merited?

    He therefore not only canvassed for more states for Kano but also pushed for the merger of states with an average of two million population, reeling off the likes of Bayelsa, Ekiti, Ebonyi, Taraba, Gombe, Kwara, Abia, Cross River, and even Enugu, Ekweremadu’s state, which peaked at just over three million people!

    And with a seeming Banking Zuwo affliction as regards federalism and its tenets, he queried why these puny states should have equal representation in the Senate with his humongous Kano; forgetting that in a federation the Senate is an electoral equaliser, while the House of Representatives is based on population. The governor signed off with the lament that the insults from the likes of Ekweremadu could emanate simply because the North is now “politically down”! What hubris!

    Governor Kwankwaso’s “facts” are a classical example of card-stacking; in a structurally skewed Nigerian federation. But then, the power elite craving more states, along the present sharing paradigm, handed the governor his ammo. He bombed them so spectacularly!

    But the Kano governor would appear far less formidable, if the paradigm were to change to productive federalism from the present consumptive unitary system, posing as federalism. That way, the people of Kano would sure have the right to carve themselves into as many states as possible. But they have to pay for that luxury: not awaiting some virtual freebies from a bloated and unfocused centre!

    Everybody earning his keep would clearly teach the governor that he would need quality and not quantity population to create and run a state. That should wean him from the wastefulness and needlessness of creating states (and local governments) as political tool to corner national resources, as against mobilising scarce local resources to forge a lean and efficient administrative infrastructure to push scarce resources to gain sustainable development and prosperity.

    Governor Kwankwaso would probably fall into a swoon, were the South West to demand more states for the old Western Region, after all, numbers don’t lie! Look at the stats: old Western Region, now South West: six states; old Eastern Region, now South East and South-South: 11 states; old Northern Region, now North Central, North East and North West: 19 states.

    But the regnant political school in the South West realises that pushing for more states, under a moribund corrupt and sharing system, is akin to the Biblical wide and merry way that leads to perdition. Hence, their angling for regional federalism to drive their own business.

    The Igbo elite sure have a right to have their due under the present system. If that means creating one more state for them, so be it. But they must realise their salvation is not in a sinking centre, but in their own hands.

    Governor Kwankwaso is something of a paradox. From his interview with The Nation, he boasts a laudable and futuristic education policy. Yet he himself came off as one whose mind is irredeemably chained to the past, the way he laments the current “weakness” of the North; and bludgeoned the South East for making a reasonable demand.

    The governor’s latest radical campaigns on onshore-offshore dichotomy and opposition to the South East demand for an additional state look steeped in the past. It has little to contribute to a restructured Nigeria, where everybody earns his keep.