The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tuesday

  • Learning from Rotary

    By Gabriel Amalu

    Each time, yours sincerely attend the District Team Training Seminar (DTTS), the annual training programme for District Rotary leaders, I get the feeling that Nigerian leaders need to attend similar training, to learn one or two management techniques. With the challenges bedevilling our country, the federal executive sometimes give the impression they are not on top of their game.

    So, could it be that appropriate trainings are not organised for those in charge of our lives, or is that the trainees are not putting to practice what they are taught? Apart from the security crises that is almost overwhelming our nation, there are failures in several other sectors. In the past few weeks, some users of the Murtala Muhammed Airport (MMA), Lagos, have been exposed to excruciating punishment.

    Because of the absence of planning by the aviation sector managers, the necessary landing equipment at the airport are not in place, even when huge resources were reportedly budgeted for them. The consequences have been that some MMA bound airlines were diverted to neighbouring countries, and in some cases returned to base. Of course, the cost and logistical nightmare for the passengers are better imagined.

    Yet, a basic training programme would have provided the managers, the requisite skills to avoid the present crisis. For instance, a trainee under the DTTS can teach them that as the management, they ought to have a set of goals for each airport in the country (long and short-term); and that to efficiently set a goal, the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, (otherwise known as SWOT analysis) that face each airport needs to be evaluated.

    A proper SWOT analysis, would have identified the present challenges faced by the MMA in advance, and a strategic plan put in place to avert the crisis. At DTTS, trainees are taught that leaders have to set down goals to align with the strategic plan. Such goals have to be shared, measurable, challenging, achievable, and time specific. The MMA management should have known the equipment that needed to be changed, the cost implication, when it should be imported, and when to initiate the process to meet the timeline.

    The trainee would teach them to set an action plan to achieve the goal. Who was supposed to do what to get in the equipment, starting with identifying the necessary equipment and the manufacturers, sending in the budget plan for executive and legislative approvals, making the order and initiating the payment, and putting in place the logistics plans up to the installation. Of course, the top management ought to monitor and evaluate progress of the action plan, and have contingency plans for any delays.

    If all these were done, those responsible for the failures at the MMA that has thoroughly embarrassed our country and caused untold hardship to travellers in the last few weeks ought to be held to account. It should be unacceptable to President Muhammadu Buhari’s government that the nation’s preeminent international gateway can be treated with such levity, by those in charge without any consequences. No doubt, many view the failures at the MMA as a signpost of what is obtainable in several other ministries, departments and agencies of the federal government.

    Another agency of the federal government that may need the type of training available at DTTS are those in charge of information management. Clearly, the recent outburst of the Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Muhammed, debunking the fake news about the travel plans of the president, and reiterating the determination of the federal government to pass the social media regulation bill, is ill-timed. As the liaison between the federal government and the public, the honourable minister should concentrate on more important communications.

    For instance, Nigerians would be more interested to hear from the minister what the federal government is doing about the insecurity in the land. The people travelling through the MMA would want to hear apologies and explanations about the travelling crisis foisted on them and what the federal government is doing to avert such problem in future. Nigerians would want to hear the government policy on community policing and why it has taken so long and so many avoidable deaths to wake up the federal government on this project.

    Indeed, those in charge of the community policing project should avail themselves of a leadership training seminar, like the DTTS. Of note, the project has been in the offing far too long without any progress, unless the federal government is not genuinely interested in the project. Even with the prompting from the southeast governors, as an alternative to the regional policing model, there is no clear definition of the concept. Yet, a SWOT analysis would show that the present policing architecture cannot sustain security in our country.

    So, what is happening to strategic planning, as a tool of management, at the federal and state levels? At inception, the Buhari-led All Progressive Congress (APC) held out so much promise when it came to power nearly five years ago. Many of the promises have not been meet, a fact which even the president has acknowledged. Perhaps, it is not late to commission a SWOT analysis of the top management of the various ministries, departments, and agencies of government.

    That would help the president and his men provide answers to the myriad of problems that are weighing our country down. One critical issue that requires an urgent SWOT analysis is whether to sack or retain the security chiefs. Even a critical evaluation of the goals set for them and how much of it they have achieved, could help the president appropriately make up his mind on whether or not they should be retained. Without a proper analysis, a wrong decision may be made.

    This column has severally argued that the Rotary type of orderly transition is worthy of emulation; just as well, the training programmes organised for its cadre of leaders. The recent DTTS organized by the next District Governor of District 9110 Nigeria, Rotarian Bola Oyebade, who would be in charge from July 1 to June 30, 2021, is to prepare the district leaders for the challenges ahead. A sizeable number of the trainees were similarly trained last year, before the present District Governor Jide Akeredolu, took over.

    Some, will still be trained again next year, when the District Governor Nominee for 2021/22, Remi Bello, would be in charge, and even more training in 2022/23, when District Governor Nominee Designate, Omotunde Lawson, would mount the saddle as the first female District Governor, for D9110 Nigeria. Such is the order in Rotary, and such is the continuous training for Rotary leaders that our bleeding nation can learn from.

  • The North rumbles

    By Olakunle Abimbola

    You, Preener from the South West and Exceptionalist from the South East, can you hear the rumble from the North?

    What can you make of it, beside predictable gloating, that barks: “serves them right!”, with manic excitability and glowing finality?

    To refresh, hear the flowers of the North, moan and groan over the thorns of the North.

    Emir Muhammadu Sanusi II of Kano, the North’s capital of commerce, speaking at Kaduna Governor, Mallam Nasir El-Rufai’s 60th birthday: “Eighty-seven per cent of poverty in Nigeria is in the North … nine states in the North account for 50 per cent of the entire malnutrition burden of the country.  Besides, there is Boko Haram and the Almajiri problem …”

    Senate President Ahmad Lawan, at the same birthday: The North’s 13 to 14 million out-of-school children are “dangerous for the country … Until we are able to reverse this kind of trend, no matter how much infrastructure you put, you will still have that social angle that will actually lead to serious insecurity …  So, we need to look at people.”

    Katsina Governor Aminu Masari: ”What we need is not only infrastructure.  We need capacity building of the people in this part of the country.”

    But unlike the doleful Sanusi and Lawan at El-Rufai’s gaily show, the governor was performing grim duty: receiving a presidential delegation come to condole with him on umpteenth banditry, which wasted 31 lives, in Batsari local government area of his state.

    As Emir Sanusi graphically painted, the North teems with grave developmental crises: 87 per cent of Nigerian poverty — almost nine, out every 10 Nigerian poor, domiciles in the North!  Half of all Nigerians that eat chaff, too poor to afford wholesome wheat, are from nine states in the North! These indeed, are devastating stats!

    Then, the systemic attempt to skew, in the North’s favour, Nigerian common opportunities — couched as “federal character” — appears spectacularly back-firing.

    Again, Emir Sanusi puts it like no other: “The reason that people like Nasir stand up … is that they don’t have any sense of inadequacy.  You don’t need to rise on being from Kaduna State or being a Muslim to get a job.  You come with your credentials.  You go with your competence.  You can compete with any Nigerian from anywhere.”

    It can’t be better framed!  Yet, the grand irony: an Emir Sanusi, unfazed symbol of court and elite education, blowing the lid on the clear catastrophe, from the North’s lack of mass education!

    Sanusi and El-Rufai epitomize the putative competitiveness of the North had, over the years, the bulk of northern kids had access to Western education, combined with its traditional forte of Islamic scholarship.

    Boko Haram’s opening gambit, “Book (Western) education is evil”, could well show the fierce tension, between Islamic and Western education, in what could have been the North’s glorious dual heritage.

    Yet, neither Sanusi nor El-Rufai is an exemplar in compact brood — the one, blissful product of royalty with all its plums; the other, faithful mirror of northern multi-spousal families.

    Though western education has had little dent on this practice, even among the northern aristocracy and general elite, at least this elite class has the cash to cater for own brood.

    That can’t be said of the masses — and the consequent population explosion explains the developmental drag.

    Indeed, the crux of the northern bind is the absence of mass and structured public education.  Yet, the North holds no monopoly, of underinvestment, in that sector.

    Of Nigeria’s original three regions of East, North and West, only the West, under the great Obafemi Awolowo, invested big in structured mass education.

    It not only started its epochal free and compulsory primary education in January 1955, it also invested in tertiary scholarships for its natives, though most were bonded to serve the region in its area of manpower needs.

    The East, under Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, later launched own free primary education policy. But that attempt collapsed after two years.  But such ravenous was the Eastern appetite for western education that when the government faltered, individuals and communities took over.

    The East, willy-nilly, got itself educated, in one of the most amazing tales of laudable self-help in human history.  But lack of moderating public policy birthed individual conceit and collective hubris, which thrust forward the individual but relegates the community.  That social disequilibrium still haunts the East, particularly in consensus building.

    The North largely kept faith with elite education.  But it extended its regnant policy of court education to capture its aspiring merchant and middle class.  With the help of British colonizers, it shut out Christian missionaries from the core Muslim parts.  That considerably narrowed mass access to schools.

    Not a few even swear Awo’s persistent electioneering attempts, to push mass education, against the North’s elite education consensus, led to his political odyssey, shortly after Nigeria’s flag independence in 1960.

    One thing is clear: the North’s developmental odyssey today, which has metastasized into Boko Haram, banditry and sundry violence, has its roots in the strategic blunder of the 1st Republic and before.  It is a case of strategic blunder of the past, boding even more strategic ruin for the future.

    Yet, about everyone serenades that era as some golden age of public policy, across regions.

    The growing brood of South West irredentists, basks in that Awo-era policy acuity, and fancy themselves as some special breed.  By that, they completely miss the point.

    Between the North and the West, there appears an eerie parallel.  As the North had a head start in Islamic scholarship, so did the West in Western education.

    But had the North pushed mass education, and the West embraced the North’s exclusive trajectory, the northern burden today could well have been the South West’s, other things being equal.

    So, the developmental gap between the two regions may well be down to one man and his radically blinding vision — a vision that even cost Awo’s ruling Action Group (AG), the immediately following federal elections.

    That hardly equates pan-ethnic genius, against other pan-ethnic laggards!  Which is why the South East Exceptionalist too, with his penchant for condescension towards the so-called northern laggards, should learn to be humble.

    But whatever the cross-regional temper to the northern mess, that the North is troubled by own sore is remarkable. Even more encouraging: some northern leaders appear tackling the issue, even if it’s early days yet.

    El-Rufai is said to be investing 40 per cent of Kaduna budget in education.  Kano, under Governor Abdullahi Ganduje, just translated science textbooks into Hausa.

    Even Boko Haram-plagued Borno, under its last two governors, Kashim Shettima and Babagana Zulum, are expanding educational frontiers. That is a redemptive retreat from the tragic path of Ali Modu Sheriff, that led the state to Boko Haram catastrophe.

    It’s a race against time.  But with focus and persistence, the North can correct its age-old strategic blunder.

    That would be boon for a renascent future Nigeria, now threatened with ethnic venom and balkanization.

  • The imperative of media literacy

    By Olatunji Dare

    About ten years ago, Steve Ballmer, co-founder with Bill Gates of the information and communication technology (ICT) giant Microsoft, said the state of the industry vis-à-vis its capability was about as advanced then as the 1947 Ford motor car compared to what were then the latest automobiles.

    Just to give you some idea of how advanced that car was: Henry Ford, its proud manufacturer, said you could have it in any colour so long as it was black.

    Today, thanks to advances in ICT, we have self-driving vehicles, robots that perform tasks previously performed by humans and perform them without the errors to which humans are prone, the most notable examples being in manufacturing and surgery.

    Through our smart phones and other devices, the internet has become extensions of ourselves, for better and for worse. We can employ them to cause pleasure or inflict pain, to mobilise for worthy causes as well as ignoble ones, to spread knowledge and enlightenment or ignorance and prejudice, to torment or to comfort.

    ICT has abolished distance and constricted time itself, but it has also abolished privacy and instituted voyeurism of the most pernicious kind. It has created a parallel world, and alternative universe, in which many now insist that there are no facts, no objective reality. You create your own reality, your own alternative fact, and anyone who doesn’t like it can go create his or her own The only reality that matters is what you believe to be real; everything else is a fake or a hoax.

    It used to be said that foto no dey lie: A photograph does not lie. It is as good as the actuality and as reliable a substitute for it. Not in the age of Photoshop and other computer applications. What you see in a picture many be nothing more than what the person who made it wants you to see .You can manufacture opinion pro or contra any issue

    No one know what will come next. The possibilities are not even limited by human imagination if, as has been hypothesized in some circles, that machines or systems created by humans drive this mesmerising new world could one day assert their own autonomy and become more intelligent than humans. But all this probably lies in the long run, when we have the comforting assurance of John Maynard Keynes, we all are dead.

    Meanwhile we will have to find ways of addressing with the social fragmentation actual or potential, the deception, the manipulation, the growing difficulty of building consensus and finding common purpose that the deployment of some of the most basic manifestations of ICT, the so-called social media about which very little is social, has wrought.

    I was moved to think on this matter last week by a statement credited to General TY Danjuma which a subscriber to WhatsApp brought to my attention.

    The statement was seditious and incendiary through and through. It was calculated to stir up hatred, set tribe against tribe, tongue against tongue, creed against creed, and to incite an armed uprising. In my line of work, I have come across and even endured some of the most scurrilous pieces that a crackpot ever conjured up, but the one credited to Danjuma takes the cake.

    It is probably just as well that its author has as no familiarity with the phenomenon known as Deep Fake, in contradistinction to the now well-worn ordinary fake.

    An ill-intentioned promoter puts out a video that purports to show a particular person purportedly making a statement in a voice purportedly his or her own, with the person’s lip movements in perfect synchrony with the words he or she appears to be uttering. The physical resemblance of the person seen depicted in the video matches so closely the appearance, the voice, the gestures and the speaking style of the person it purports to depict, that all but the most alert would fall for the fakery.

    If the author of that satanic post had used that technology to promote his odious tirade, fires would have been raging all over the country before the whole thing was seen for the hoax that it was. Had people not seen Danjuma with their own eyes and heard him with their own ears urging them to spread his message, arm themselves and take to the streets?

    The fellow who had sent me the post apparently believed it. I told him in an email that that Danjuma did not issue and could not have issued that statement.

    “How do you know?” he queried.

    “Because, to start with, Danjuma is no agitator. He is outspoken, blunt sometimes to a fault, but he is no agitator. The statement contained no indication about where it was issued, and when. It was not signed.”

    “The General may have omitted all those niceties deliberately, to give himself deniability,” he countered. “Is he not a politician?”

    “Not your typical politician,” I said. “His interventions in public discourse are few and far between, measured but never ambiguous. No equivocation. He leaves you in no doubt as to where he stands on the key issues of the day. And he always takes responsibility.”

    I cannot confidently assert that my correspondent went away persuaded that Danjuma was not and could not have been the author of the hateful WhatsApp post attributed to him.

    And the encounter set me thinking about an issue that society will have to face squarely in the years ahead. In an era of media saturation, an era in which anyone who can work a mouse can post just about any material on the Internet anonymously to a global audience, how do you ensure that the fountain of public information is not fouled up?

    The problem ante-dated the internet to be sure, going right back to the advent of mass circulation newspapers and yellow journalists The great journalist and philosopher Walter Lippmann was lamenting back in the 1920s that those “pictures in our heads” with which we navigate “the world outside” were incapable of helping us understand that world. So, leave that task to experts trained in information gathering and verification, who would then tell the general population the actual state of things.

    Experts could be just as credulous and prejudiced as experts, argued the education philosopher John Dewey. Educate citizens to their highest capability, and they would be able to judge for themselves what is fit to believe want what is fit only for the trash can. What Dewey argued for was education in its broadest sense; education that focuses on how to think, not what to think.

    That is the kind of education I have in mind, specifically, media literacy, to foster informed reading and understanding of media content and presentation.

    To evaluate the post attributed to General Dajuma, for instance, the reader who has taken a basic course in media literary would ask the questions I raised earlier, namely: When did Danjuma issue the statement? Where? What was the occasion?

    Beyond that, the reader would seek corroboration. How many other news outlets carried the statement?

    The reader would be alert to the use of vague generalisations, nebulous terms such as “several” in place of specific numbers, take note of attributions and other vital information missing from the story, of false inferences and non sequiturs, and of dozens of other factors that usually point up the inadequacies, and hence the believability, of a story.

    The reader will also be more discriminating in choosing web sites. Of the lot, commercial (dot. com) sites are the least reliable. Sites promoted by colleges and universities (dot.edu) and research and allied institutions (dot. org) bent to be more reliable.

    In the years ahead, fostering media literacy is going to be one of society’s most important tasks, given the vast and growing reach of the so-called social media, starting from the home and continuing through an individual’s lifetime.

     

  • Supreme Court not the problem

    By Sanya Oni

    With politics and politicians on rampage and the courts finally sucked into the roforofo in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s upturning of the governorship elections in Imo and Bayelsa states, we have since entered an era where just about every Citizen Joe who, after a feast of barely digested news/articles in the popular media, continue to pronounce, not without a tinge of magisterial arrogance, on weighty matters of law and jurisprudence hitherto the preserve of our learned men. If Nigerians let pass the Zamfara debacle in which the entire candidates of the ruling APC who won the elections were sacked by the apex court for legal and procedural disabilities, its findings in the Imo and Bayelsa has since thrust it into the maelstrom of Nigeria’s politics and with it the impassioned and sometimes unfair commentaries that come with the territory.

    Unfortunately, we may have overreached that boundary into another territory where invectives are freely hurled at jurists and their abodes wantonly violated; where the mob could march on the residence of an apex court judge as we saw of the storming of the residence of Honourable Justice, Mary Odili last week.

    Aside merely stripping the institution of its aura and mystique; it seems to me the dawn of that moment when nothing anymore is held as sacrosanct. I shall return to this later.

    More than a week after, yours truly is still waiting not just for the denunciation of the foreboding sacrilege by the federal government but to the news about those involved being called in for questioning. Yes, a few condemnation here and there mostly by partisans and notably, the National Human Rights Commission which expressed concern on the ‘unwarranted attacks and harassment’ of judicial officers in the legitimate and constitutional exercise of their functions; the overall sense is that this was somewhat tolerable – after all that two supreme court justices, Sylvester Ngwuta and John Okoro had received similar unwanted visitors in 2016.

    Unfortunately, if the politicians could be forgiven for occasionally flirting with delinquency; we have seen a strain of gracelessness is not only infectious but destructive. In 2007, they tried the games in the Rotimi Amaechi case and got bruised.  Then, a candidate validly elected at party primaries not only developed K-leg all of a sudden; he would suffer the jeopardy of being excluded from the ballot – substituted by a candidate who did not take part in the primaries. Although not on the ballot at the time the election held, the Supreme Court ruled that the winner of the primary was the rightful candidate of the PDP and winner of the April 2007 Governorship election in Rivers State. To those who considered the judgment strange, the apex court would later explain that the votes cast were for the parties and not the individual.

    Twelve years after, the same scenarios would play out in Zamfara where muddled primaries purportedly returned candidates that eventually garnered the highest votes in the elections. That was until a five a five-man panel led by the Acting Chief Justice of Nigeria, Justice Tanko Muhammad, ruled that the party did not conduct primaries in the state. With the APC votes declared void, the losers were ushered into the government houses!

    Now, it has happened in Imo and Bayelsa states.

    To the extent that the principle of majority rule is inviolable, I do appreciate the basis of the current anger against the apex court. However, if only those caught in the rage would pause to reason, they just might, in time, be able to give the apex court the benefit of the doubt! In Imo for instance, it came to what to do with the hundreds of the ballot boxes said to have been illegally excluded in the final tally. As far as the Supreme Court was concerned, INEC had no legal basis to have excluded them considering that the outcomes would still be litigated upon!

    I have heard the argument – and it sounds pretty impressive – that the apex court ought to have returned the matter of determination of their validity back to the trial courts. To them, it hardly matters that the Supreme Court thinks otherwise – hence the award of the votes to the challenger, Hope Uzodinma, of the APC.

    Here is my point: right or wrong, the apex court is the final court of the land; and we must learn to treat it so. That is also an element of the democratic spirit. Second, much as many do feel strongly about the case, the court would seem an unlikely place to introduce new evidence. In other words, it is not a trial court – hence not customarily disposed to sitting in appeal over itself! I speak as a layman though!

    The same with Bayelsa. Here, the issue is that the deputy governorship candidate, Biobarakuma Wanagha Degi Erkmienyo, had not only presented different versions of the same name at different times but had sought to remedy the defects by means of a serial affidavits! Whereas a High Court had earlier turned in a ‘no-go’ verdict, the Court of Appeal it was that returned the candidate to the ballot. What the Supreme Court did was merely to accept the finding of the trial court. Many unfortunately forget that.

    And now, we are told that the matters would be back in court. While the lawyers are busy putting together their papers, the rest of us can only express worry at what the unfolding developments represents. Now, the rumour in town is that losers in already decided cases across the federation are also exploring avenues to re-open their cases. It’s our season of political delinquency!

    Sincerely, I believe matters should end as it is. The danger of not heeding this advice is to open the floodgates to fresh rounds of litigation on already decided cases!

    Times like this can only remind of the statesmanship of former United States Vice President Al Gore when his country was presented with a similar dilemma. Moments after the US Supreme Court ruling that terminated his quest for the highest office, he told his countrymen and women: “Now the US Supreme Court has spoken. Let there be no doubt, while I strongly disagree with the court’s decision, I accept it. I accept the finality of this outcome which will be ratified next Monday in the Electoral College. And tonight, for the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of our democracy, I offer my concession!”

    That is the spirit; to disagree without being disagreeable. Here, the problem isn’t just that the political parties have long abdicated their solemn duty to be fair and just to their members; the polity as a whole suffers the plague of players who think little of bringing down our institutions whenever they find themselves on the losing side.  And now that they have foisted the constitutional mess on the country, they expect our hallowed apex court to carry the can.

  • Nigeria’s North problem

    By  Sanya Oni

     

    Yours truly has waited in vain for the reactions of the Multi-Purpose-Vehicle (MPV) that goes by the rather nebulous description – Coalition of Northern Groups (CNG) to say something on the debilitating poverty in their beloved North.

    Had the group not been too engaged in their pet project, Shege ka fasa (I dare you) and other variants of prebendal politics that has become its pastime, the group might just have still enough time to spare to peruse countless literature on the more serious existential threat posed by grinding poverty in their backyard.

    As a pressure group devoted to defending the interests of the region, I understand that the group wants heard on virtually all matters affecting their beloved North.

    In their impatience, they have dared other groups in the Nigerian federation; after scoffing at the typically conservative northern establishment; they have gone ahead to mock their leaders – the northern governors as indeed the national security establishment for being ineffectual in matters of security. In all, they have become something of a gadfly – impossible to ignore.

    Unfortunately, like many of their misguided youth compatriots across the federation, they have neither a clear understanding of the issues let alone a workable pathway forward. It is perhaps sufficient for them to push for their Shege ka fasa since the Southwest already have Amotekun.

    For a North described not too long as grandmasters of real-politics, never mind that its derivatives have not been entirely wholesome for the people, we are witnessing a new kind of leadership regression that is unequalled.

    If one expected some thinking at all from those said to own the future on the millions of out-of-school kids, the hordes of Almajirs clutching begging bowls in northern cities and, on the poverty-bred delinquency that has thrown the region into a theatre of insurgency, what we have is a most unproductive politicking sadly at a time of dire emergency.

    Now, the elders say they are angry – not that the youths have abdicated their generational responsibility of rising up to the challenge but for crossing that fine line between activism and rebellion!

    Here is what the Sultan of Sokoto, His Eminence, Saad Abubakar, said at a security meeting in Kaduna recently.  Telling the northern leaders to call the CNG to order, he said: “I saw it on the television, and the media gave them attention. Now, the elders allowed these youths to go forward.

    So, the elites are our problems, the elders are our problems. If the elders don’t take the lead, the youth will do whatever they like and think they are right. You have to caution these youths by giving them good leadership”.

    He said more: “Now, they have launched their own security outfit I don’t know what they call it, Shege Ka Fasa’, meaning what? So, I want to call on northern elders to caution them.

    Don’t allow these youths to take over leadership from you. You have to reach out to everybody no matter how low the person is.

    Read Also: North cannot continue to rely on quota system – Emir Sanusi

     

    So, I think we need to take the bull by the horns and not allow the youths take over responsibility. I think we need to do that and much more.”

    To those who see the problem of the North as one of poverty, the Sultan has most certainly provided something new to chew.

    Yes, the World Bank may have been spot on when it says that – “Poverty in the northern regions of the country has been increasing especially in the north-west zone” and that “Almost half of all poor lived in the north-west and the north accounts for 87 percent of all poor in the country”, one other element hardly factored into the debate is the poverty of the leadership.

    While the leaders, in the view of the Sultan is guilty of abdication, the youths, presumably misguided, are deemed to have lost control.

    The other element in the northern poverty mix is of course the uncontrolled birth rate. The Emir of Kano, Sanusi Lamido, recently warned the people about certain socio-cultural practices that predispose the North in particular to poverty:  the culture of marrying many wives even by those who cannot even properly take care of one and as a consequence producing children they cannot cater for.

    He said: “There are people who cannot afford to feed one wife but are ready to marry three wives and have more children than they cannot feed, talk less of paying for their school fees”.  At the end, the children are sent into the streets to fend for themselves.

    To that, a leading light from the emirate, a principal officer in the national legislature has since countered by proudly showcasing his harem of four wives and 27 children as proof of his phallic proficiency!

    Those who argue that the North is Nigeria’s problem are right. Poverty, most certainly, is terrible; it is associated with all manners of societal problems such as the country is currently experiencing.

    So is the explosion in population fostered under a system where responsible parenting remains largely, an alien concept.

    Both monsters, unfortunately appear to reside more in the north than anywhere else in the federation; it is no mere coincidence that this is also where the discipline and tenacity to confront them are most sorely lacking. Does anyone see why Nigeria is in deep trouble?

  • Kukah cooking again!

    By  Olakunle Abimbola

     

    Catholic Bishop of Sokoto, Father Matthew Hassan Kukah, just dished the latest broth, from his spicy kitchen.

    But the starry-eyed had better be wary of rushing to taste: it might just harbour a virulent public discourse strain of coronavirus!

    The Surgeon-General (SG) just warned that could be lethal to the mind!

    If your focus is to think through the challenges of a country in crisis, and not just to titillate the traumatized public, as the good Bishop is wont to do, you will do well to heed the SG’s advisory.

    Hear the holy polemicist go on a savage blast of cutting poetry: “Nigeria’s years of hypocrisy, duplicity, fabricated integrity, false piety, empty morality, fraud and Pharisaism have caught up with us.”  What colourful rush of poetry!  Simply brilliant.

    Make no mistake: that poetic bazooka was levelled at President Muhammadu Buhari — he, whose integrity has been a subject of intense peer envy and disputation, both on the spiritual and temporal fronts.

    But here lies the supreme irony: that damning portraiture is even truer of the sacred Father’s constituency: the ecclesiastical hustlers, though posturing as people’s champions, gunning for increased market share, in power, glory and influence.

    All that became clear, and the scales fell off the eye of not a few, during the hyper-corrupt Goodluck Jonathan Presidency, when the holy hustlers, under the Ayo Oritsejafor-led Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), played merry Rasputin, on account of religious fealty, to the sinking Jonathan order.

    Remember Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin, the Russian mystic that had the spiritual number on the last Russian Emperor, Nicholas II?

    Yet this immaculate lobby, that wildly savoured illicit “Christian” influence under Jonathan — holy filth, sacred scandals, et al — are now railing and howling and growling and thundering about “Islamization” under Buhari!

    The Holy Kukah is right: his holy ensemble is riven with “hypocrisy, duplicity, fabricated integrity, false piety, empty morality, fraud and Pharisaism”!

    Didn’t Father Kukah himself urge everyone to leave Jonathan-era rot behind and “move on”?

    And what could have amounted for the ruin of the present, than the free-wheeling heists of the past, which the immaculate Father would rather gloss over — because a “Christian” president was involved?

    Still, it’s only fair to link Father Kukah’s comments to its two settings.

    One: a hurting Kukah’s homily to a pained congregation, at the funeral mass for Seminarian Michael Nnadi, slain by Boko Haram lunatics.

    And two: by own words, “provocative questions on corruption” at the public presentation of former EFCC chair, Farida Waziri’s memoirs, One Step Ahead: Life as a Spy, Detective and Anti-Graft Czar, where incidentally Femi Adesina, President Buhari’s top spokesperson, was also book reviewer.

    Now, no sane person would blame Father Kukah for being grumpy at such a tragic funeral mass.  The pained congregants needed re-assurance; and the Bishop’s offering was probably the psychological lift they needed.

    Besides, you can’t blame anyone for giving the Buhari Presidency a proper dressing down, over the worsening insecurity spikes.  The government is there to secure and protect.  If it is failing in that cardinal duty, the citizens are entitled to howl, for a quick and sustainable fix.

    But legitimate mourning is one thing.  Weaving wilful falsehood that claims terrorism — of which everyone is a victim — is targeted solely at Christians, just because a Muslim is president, is another.

    That is arrant crap — and that’s where Father Kukah wilfully got it wrong.

    Besides, by giving this dangerous narrative traction, are Their Holinesses bent on inspiring own holy band of Crusaders, to duel Saracens, for Nigeria’s theocratic soul?

    That would lead nowhere but perdition.

    CAN President, the Revd. Samson Ayokunle, latched on to this false narrative, after the callous be-heading of the kidnapped Adamawa State CAN chairman, the Revd. Lawan Andimi, again by Boko Haram beasts.  The Baptist priest went on and on, claiming Boko Haram was the latest proof of Christian “persecution” in Nigeria.

    But again, that was pure fib.  Inasmuch as many Christians have been victims of Boko Haram terrorism, particularly its latest flare, these drugged fanatics are free-wheeling anarchists, who have wreaked far more havoc on their fellow Muslims.

    But even this notorious fact — as the Presidency rightly pointed out — Father Kukah adroitly skewed, with a rather mischievous turn of phrase: “If your son steals from me, do you solve the problem by saying he also steals from you?”

    The unwary would cheer this riposte.  But it’s nothing but a classic case of polemical fraud.

    Read Also: FG to Kukah: work for religious harmony

     

    By “your son”, is the good Father suggesting Boko Haram has Islam’s divine stamp?  Or that because the president is Muslim, Boko Haram is regnant state policy to wipe out Nigerian Christians?

    That fib isn’t supported by facts — and cleverly twisting stuff, to score cheap points, is dishonest and certainly un-Christian.

    But again, perhaps one should concede to the Father that the alleged Islamist domination he passionately attacks, goes way back to his troubled southern Kaduna nativity.

    In that cultural quicksand yoked together by mutual hate, there appears no love lost between Christians and Muslims, in their unending feuding to dominate one another.

    That the Muslim side often gets illicit cover, from their religious cousins in power, appears an open secret.

    But that is countered by the no less illicit one-sided media splurge, that the Christian side enjoys, from the dominant southern media — again, often times, on account of blind sympathy and faith fealty.

    Even then, conflating these age-old ethno-religious feuding, with Boko Haram terrorism, is rather rich, if not satanically romantic.

    It does nothing but muddy the waters.  The net-gainers from such emotive goading are the anarchists, against who everyone must unite, face down and defeat. Otherwise, the grand victims would continue to be the ordinary, vulnerable folks, Christian or Muslim.

    One thing is interesting, though: even with the good Father’s bombast and tempest, he still sits pretty as Catholic Bishop of Sokoto, the seat of the Sultanate and the North’s capital city of Islam.

    Even in Borno, the epicentre of the Boko Haram insurrection, a Muslim Governor, Babangana Zulum, just openly openly celebrated a lowly Christian teacher, Obiageri Mazi, for exceptional devotion to duty, even in the face of acute danger.

    Might the Bishop in Sokoto, and Christian teacher in Maiduguri, be part of the Christian-Muslim Armageddon the good Father belched in his homily?

    At the Farida Waziri show, Father Kukah even waxed philosophical over corruption as biological necessity, or political intervention.  Finger-pointing is cherished fetish of the Nigerian critical class, temporal or spiritual!

    But pray, if Kukah and co are so super-efficient at own spiritual duties, how come Nigeria, wild with religiosity, is a stinking moral sewer and a haven of crippling sleaze?

  • Jokes on Imo

    By Gabriel Amalu

     

    This is not a great time for Imo indigenes, particularly if one is a politician, and a member of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to boot.

    Admittedly, in other places, many politicians stand for nothing, and that reflects in the way they jump from one political party to another, in search of stomach infrastructure, apologies to former governor Ayo Fayose, of Ekiti State, who defended the phrase as the very essence of participation in politics.

    The joke is on ndimo, because of the way members of the PDP have been struggling to outdo each other in denying the sacked government of Hon. Emeka Ihedioha, which they claimed few weeks ago was the best thing to happen to Imo.

    If the happening in Imo were to be a nollywood movie (many have claimed it is), the author could ingeniously return Emeka Ihedioha, to the Douglas House, just for the viewers to enjoy how the PDP turncoats would lick their spittle, and limp back with the floor strewn with their faeces.

    Portraying themselves as completely vacuous, the speaker of the state house of assembly, and the PDP members who had control of the house, in a fit of political chicanery, announced their mass defection to the All Progressive Congress (APC), the party of Governor Hope Uzodinma, returned by the Supreme Court, as the winner of the 2019 governorship election, in a verdict that has raised a lot of dust.

    Since the matter is back to the Supreme Court for a review, an onerous task, it is prejudicial to express any opinion on the matter.

    But while it is within the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court to interpret the laws of the land, it is remiss for those who ordinarily would be considered the leading lights of a political party in the Imo State House of Assembly, to only think through their stomach, without any regard to honour.

    The speaker, and his colleagues, has made a joke of the honorary title of honourable members of a state assembly.

    If honour is scarce amongst the former PDP members in the state House of Assembly in Imo State, why should our laws allow the badge of dishonour to be worn with pomp in a place ordinarily referred to as an honourable house? Of note, section 109(1)(g) provides: “A member of a state House of Assembly shall vacate his seat in the House if – being a person whose election to the House of Assembly was sponsored by a political party, he becomes a member of another political party before the expiration of the period for which that House was elected.”

    The section goes ahead to make a proviso: “Provided that his membership of the later political party is not as a result of a division in the political party of which he was previously a member or of a merger of two or more political parties or factions by one of which he was previously sponsored.”

    On the face of the above provision, the aggrieved members of the PDP would have threatened the defectors with an action in court to declare their seats vacant.

    Indeed, it was reported that upon being confronted by a potential sack, the defectors recoiled and denied jumping the ship.

    While that recoil has not been openly confirmed by the defectors, the possibility of declaring their seats vacant is made more complicated by the provision of the constitution. Section 109(2) provides: “The speaker of the House of Assembly shall give effect to subsection (1) of this section, so however that the speaker or a member shall first present evidence satisfactorily to the house that any of the provisions of that subsection has become applicable in respect of the member.”

    The provision of section 109(1) in essence is supposed to be given impetus by the speaker of the house of assembly, who in the present instance in Imo State is one of the defectors.

    Even more interesting is that by some reports, all members of the PDP, except one, have moved over to the new ruling party, the All Progressive Congress (APC).

    Read Also: Ihedioha: Imo elders hail CJN’s, S’Court’s courage to review judgement

     

    So since the defectors are in the overwhelming majority, there is little likelihood that the provision of the law would be tested, how much more given effect by the speaker.

    But the wave of abandoning the recently sacked PDP government has overwhelmed the entire state, with the traditional rulers being the latest to invariably condemn their past endorsement of Emeka Ihedioha and leap frog to a new endorsement in favour of the new governor, Hope Uzodima.

    Before them were various state-based youth organisations, including the Ohaneze youths, who hailed the Supreme Court judgment and said that the new government was the best thing to happen to the state.

    Interestingly, the sacked Emeka Ihedioha-led government was hailed by these same groups and touted as the best thing to have happened to Imo State after Sam Mbakwe, the beloved second republic governor of Imo State.

    While this piece is not about which of the two gladiators, Emeka Ihedioha or Hope Uzodima, that is preferable, the concern is the absolute lack of principles by the turncoats.

    Of course, as I said earlier, while it has become common for elected officials to move from one party to another in this dispensation, I doubt if such wholesome abandonment of a party has taken place since 1999, in any other state.

    In the run up to the 2015 general elections, it was the so called new-PDP whose majority members at the National Assembly left their party in similar disarray and joined the APC.

    As expected, after bringing their former party to ruin, they attempted to do the same to the APC, but couldn’t. Thoroughly beaten by the weather, the ring leaders led of the rebellion, led by former senate president, Bukola Saraki, are back in the PDP, shell-shocked by their losses.

    Perhaps the Imo State APC should be wary of the PDP members who couldn’t even wait for a proper burial of their party’s governorship tenure in the state, before discarding their mourning garments and offering themselves as brides to the party.

    Even if they will serve the immediate need of orgasmic release, their haste to jump ship depicts them as dishonourable, and there is no greater danger than hunting with unscrupulous members in the same boat.

    While the losers lick their wound and the winners their lollipop, there is the need to use the laws to curb the ambition of dishonourable members of the legislative assembly.

    Without doubt, the people of Imo State are represented in bad light by the inordinate ambition of the members of the state house of assembly, who jumped ship without scruples.

     

  • To you, Oodua nationalist

    By Olakunle Abimbola

    The flared temper over Amotekun is betraying a direr Yoruba distemper: “self-determination”.

    But as Amotekun is different things to different lobbies (as Ripples argued in Amotekun!, January 21), “self-determination” too could be a code for a rainbow of meanings: re-federalization, confederation or even outright secession, depending on placid, frenzied or even frazzled tempers.

    Why, the giddiest, of the Yoruba “self-determination” lobby, is already dreaming and crowing “Oduaexit”, after Brexit, Britain’s exit from the European Union (EU)!  Trust the excitable Nigerian to crunch and gobble the latest global slogans!

    Still, a caveat: nothing is wrong with self-determination — absolutely nothing.

    Indeed, it is both fundamental and legitimate, particularly in a federation, yet to find its true soul, since its dawn with the Lyttleton Constitution of 1954.

    Besides, the same theory valid for Nigeria’s independence from colonial yoke, could well be valid for Nigeria’s radical re-tinkering: if the omnibus isn’t delivering value and joy, to its restive components.

    Remember Jeremy Bentham and his greatest happiness of the greatest number?

    So, in pursuit of that common happiness, nothing really should be off-limits — even secession — if rigour is the criterion; and whatever goal in view, is achieved by democratic means.  Mass happiness and citizen satisfaction, after all, confer legitimacy on any political territory.

    So, the angst is not about “self-determination” per se, but the gung-ho, rabid Yoruba nationalism fuelling it all.

    Behind this preening, leering, ethnic back-slapping, set in a boisterous orgy of mutual-serenading, is a rather vacuous premise: grab ye first the Republic of Oodua and you have a Utopia of utopias, where everyone lives happily ever after!

    This costly conceit is not supported by history, far or near.

    Ay, Amotekun has brought about rare Yoruba unanimity.  But even the most casual follower of Yoruba history would know the Yoruba always band together in periods of great peril.

    What happens before and after a major crisis, however, is far less predictable.  Which is why the frothing ethnic pride, driving this fervent “self-determination” push, after the Amotekun breakthrough, appears rather curious.

    Let’s start with near-history.  The great Obafemi Awolowo social revolution, that made the old Western Region a clear pace-setter and the envy of all in the Nigerian federation, peaked when the British were still in charge (1951-1959).

    By Awo’s own account in Adventures in Power 2: The Travails of Democracy and the Rule of Law, by November 1960 — a month after independence — a North/East high-wire plot was on, by parliamentary deputies, to clamp down on the West.

    Most of the plotting deputies, that launched an anti-West debate in the House of Representatives, were from the North and the East, goaded on, with frenzy, by their regional leaders.

    But no less active, in that plot, were Awo-loathing Yoruba elements, hiding behind partisan differences to cock a snook at Awo.

    Sure, their main target was the uppity “Mr. know-it-all” Federal Leader of Opposition.  But they seemed not to particularly care that the West, their region, could end up as grand collateral damage — which was what happened.

    At the depth of that debacle, the West had birthed iron-clad camps of Awoists versus anti-Awoists — the anti-Awoists not unlike the scorned anti-Christ in Christian orthodoxy.

    That division has more or less defined the Yoruba political orthodoxy till this day. The regnant Awoists, clearly in the majority, look down on the other camp: at best, as leperous conservatives to be kept at arm’s length; at worst, as a scum of anti-people reactionaries, always at the ready to undo, with alien conspiracy, the Awo political estate.

    But to the Yoruba conservatives, the distaste is mutual: many so-called Awoists are pretentious ideological vacuums, barren without vomiting Awo’s inherited manna.

    Still, both camps, progressive or conservative, boast pan-Yoruba elites.  But their followers are much more skewed, sketching out some rough neo-Kiriji massing of partisan alliance: the Ijebu-Ekiti-Ijesa-Ondo, widely against the ethnic Oyo, with the Egba boasting decent sprinkles in both camps.

    Neo-Kiriji!  That echoes the Kiriji War (1877-1893), that fierce late-19th century intra-Yoruba conflict that raged for 16 years, and ended in a stalemate because the British moved in to impose order.  That pushes the discourse back into the far-history of Yoruba harmony or crisis.

    At its zenith (1608-1800), the bulk of the people that the Oyo Empire subjugated and plundered were fellow Yoruba: from Metropolitan Oyo, to the adjoining Yoruba vassal states in the heart of motherland, to the far-flung coastal Egba/Egbado corridor, which linked Oyo merchants to the sea.

    After its decline (which started circa 1754 and peaked in 1836), the main victims of the rising Ibadan military hegemony, to shore up a falling Oyo, were also fellow Yoruba.

    Indeed, the mass rebellion that triggered the Kiriji War, arose from wanton rape: in Oke-Imesi, the Ibadan Ajele (viceroy) there, Oyepetun, had raped the wife of Fabunmi, an intrepid local, who in rage lobbed off the randy viceroy’s head.

    The Ibadan response was war, not to condemn rape but to teach Fabunmi and audacious folks a stern lesson — Kiriji!: an onomatopoeia of booming guns, wreaking  great slaughter!  Again, the Ekiti-Ijesa Parapo military alliance, arrayed against the imperial Ibadan, were fellow Yoruba!

    Even the coastal Ijebu, that shut out Oyo-Ibadan subjugation, played the neo-Sparta of that troubled era — Sparta, that impenetrable Greek city state with mythical military might and a healthy suspicion of aliens!

    The Ijebu sealed their borders and made hay, golden middlemen, trading in coastal slaves, with foreign vendors; and arms and ammo, with the Yoruba interior.  Again, the bulk of the victims here were fellow Yoruba.  It took the Ijebu defeat in the Anglo-Ijebu War of May 1892 to open up the Ijebu country.

    But why this long foray into history?  For starters, Yoruba solidarity isn’t historically given.  That, however, is much mitigated today, given the general peace that has held from the 20th century till now.

    But much more important, there is a bogey — Nigeria — on which neck every intra-ethnic foible is hanged; and the past is over-romanticized as lost utopia.  That would appear the delusion driving this current Yoruba ultra-nationalism.

    Nigeria is yet to be anyone’s dream — which it can be, when well-structured and well-run.  But it has been the unsung bogey, to which every problem is adduced.  That is delusional.

    The Yoruba should try every constitutional means to secure their region.  But that should not automatically equate Oduaexit, as many are mouthing.

    Renascent Nigeria, a continental power with immense size, and global pride of the Black race, is a much more strategic turf, for the Yoruba to play.

    Even Awo, dubbed a “tribalist” by his malevolent opponents, was anxious to unleash his cutting ideas on Nigeria, rather than limit them to an ethnic cocoon.

    He knew it was a far better deal, than an Oodua Republic, which could just be a blip, even if brilliant, on the global map.

  • The stud as lawmaker                  

    By Olatunji Dare

     

    There was a time, not too long ago, when no policy statement, no plan or programme, and no proposition was considered adequate unless it was dedicated to some virile end.   More often than not, no greater end than virility itself was desired.

    Virility, the writer and feminist scholar Jane Bryce observed at the time, had become a national pre-occupation if not an obsession. So often was it invoked as a desideratum, a magic wand, that if Archimedes had been a Nigerian, he would have demanded not a lever but virility to move the world.

    Our agriculture had only to be virile, imbued with rugged masculinity, that is, and all our problem would be solved.  Without a virile educational policy, Nigeria’s march to greatness would be imperiled.  A virile policy on technology and technical training, it went without saying, was inevitable if Nigeria’s much-postponed technological take off was ever to leave the launch-pad.

    Only a virile population policy could guarantee that there would be more than standing room only for the hundreds of millions that will inhabit Nigeria by 2050.  And only a virile foreign policy could lead Nigeria to take its foreordained place in the community of nations.

    It came as no surprise that General Murata Muhammed enjoined the Constitution Drafting Committee in 1976 to produce nothing less than a virile draft.   But it was a surprise that in its submission, military president Ibrahim Babandiga’s Political Bureau recommended some measures designed to bring virility to, wait for it, the Executive Branch!

    Back in 2005, those who claimed to know why President Olusegun Obasanjo replaced the much accomplished Foreign Minister, Olu Adeniji, with finance minister Dr Ngozi   Okonjo-Iweala, said it was to “inject” some virility into the making and execution of Nigeria’s foreign policy.  They could not have been thinking of Obasanjo who, to give him his due, is nothing if not virile. As for Adeniji, we will learn one day from his biographer what he made of the innuendo.

    At any rate, that was 15 years ago.  In the intervening period, paeans to virility have been sparse in public discourse.

    Until the Majority Leader in the House of Representatives, Alhassan Doguwa (APC Kano Tudun-Wada) brought the matter up dramatically in that hollow – I take that back — hallowed chamber the other day.  He brought it up just like that, apropos of nothing; gratuitously.

    Read Also: Doguwa threatens columnist for display of four wives

    It was not for nothing, he said to vehement cheers, that he was called a “powerful parliamentarian.” And for the benefit of his colleagues who might be thinking that his power was limited to the House and circumscribed by the rules of order, he added: “I am also powerful at home.” By “home,” Doguwa meant the place which President Muhammadu Buhari referred to with touching delicacy the other day as The Other Room.

    He asked his four wives whom he had ferried in for the occasion to stand up for recognition, which they did dutifully. Together, Doguwa told his colleagues, amidst raucous laughter and subdued jeers, that the foursome had given him 27 children.  And the pipeline (pun intended, courtesy of Chinua Achebe, in Anthills of the Savannah) was in no danger of drying up.

    He earned no rebuke for subjecting his wives to wanton ridicule.  He was not censured for conduct unbecoming of a person of his status.  He was not suspended, for bringing the House into odium and disrepute.  It was just another day in an Assembly steeped in scandal.

    Why not?

    Because, in that gathering, there were probably not a few members who have more wives and more children than Doguwa and can lay claim to greater prowess in The Other Room, only they were too discreet and discerning to advertise their crassness.

    None of them wanted to cast the first stone.

     

    Bamidele Adeboye Adepoju (1949-2019)

    Family, friends, associates and a generation of students he had taught and mentored and whose careers he had guided and shaped, gathered at  ECWA Chapel, Ilorin, in Kwara State, last Saturday to celebrate the life of Professor Bamidele Adepoju

    Until his retirement at the end of the 2018/2019, was a professor of Business Administration at Bayero University, Kano.  Apart from the years he was away on leave of absence taking an MBA at Indiana University, in Bloomington, Indiana, and a Ph.D. at the University of Lagos, he spent his entire academic career spanning some 40 years at BUK.

    Freed at last from the demanding schedule of teacher and researcher and the call of public service, he and his wife Bolaji set out to visit their children abroad.   There, unencumbered by the discontinuities of life in Nigeria, Dele would continue his convalescence from a prolonged illness that had vitiated his last year in service, and plan for life after retirement.

    But it was not to be.

    They were visiting with their son Tolu, a business intelligence consultant, in Phoenix, Arizona, when the end came on December 19, 2019.

    Dele had called us several weeks earlier to tell us he was in town, and that he would be around for a while.  He spoke of his recent medical history, and how he was thankful to be alive. I shared my own  identical story with him. We reminisced on our days at Indiana, and about those of our contemporaries we had encountered since we parted, what they were doing, where, and so on and so forth.  And we agreed to resume the retrospective — which we did when I called him at Thanksgiving.

    And that was it.

    In a chance phone conversation, my wife had asked a former schoolmate resident in Ilorin teasingly to guess whom she had been talking with a few days earlier.  None other than Bolaji Adepoju, their fellow alumna of St Clare’s Grammar School, in Offa, Kwara State.

    “You haven’t heard what happened to Bolaji’s husband, then?” the schoolmate asked.

    That was how we learned of Dele’s passing.  We had called on Christmas Eve, not knowing that he was no more.

    Dele was gregarious, expansive and solicitous. He was ever cheerful, as if he had not a care in the world. You felt you could always take his goodwill for granted.  And he never let you down.

    At Indiana where we first met, the Nigerian student community was large, second only to the Saudi community.  It was during the Oil Boom years, and most of the students had one kind of government scholarship or another.  A good many of them had their wives and children with them, and rare was the weekend during which one family or another was not celebrating a birth, a christening, an anniversary, or some event.

    You not only found yourself taking the same courses with other Nigerians, but also living next-door to them in the dorm or hostel or family housing.  We not only marked Nigeria’s independence anniversary on a grand scale; we also celebrated Nigeria’s Children’s Day.

    Sometimes, it got too oppressive, since you were more or less constrained to associate with some people you would have preferred to keep at a distance.

    But Dele was different.  Our relationship was sealed when they learned that Bolaji and my wife were alumnae of St Clare’s, and that Bolaji’s nephew (or brother) Abimbola Adesoye had been my student at Oro Grammar School, in Oro, Kwara State.

    He had come to Indiana with a First in Business Administration from Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, but that distinction never got into his head.  In fact, he rarely mentioned it.  He let his scholastic record at Indiana reflect his pedigree.

    Dele was born and reared in Erin-Ile, Kwara;  Bolaji (née Adesoye), in Offa.  Before urban sprawl swallowed it, the distance between the two towns was never more than three miles, four at most.  Now the two communities have virtually merged.

    Yet their relationship, such as it is, is marked by strife and mutual loathing.  They have had so many bloody clashes and fought so many legal battles on their disputed boundary.  One of them has only to embrace a course of action, only for the other to reject it angrily.

    How was it that Dele, a son of Erin-Ile, and Bolaji, a daughter of Offa, were able to share a life of love and respect and harmony for some 40 years while Erin-Ile and Offa have remained at daggers-drawn?

    The answer may well help illuminate the path to peace and amity for the two communities.

    Bolaji, their children, and those Dele left behind, will draw enormous comfort from knowing that he lived a fulfilled life, a life of accomplishment, service, duty, devotion to worthy causes, and abiding concern for others.

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  • Before anarchy is let loose

    By Sanya Oni

    It is not entire surprising how some in our activist community have ingeniously framed the return of restriction clamped on the use of motorcycles and Keke for public transportation in some parts of Lagos as something of the government versus “the people”. In a country where the rich are said to entreat themselves to all manners of indulgences that our commonwealth can offer, the poor, it is argued, deserves to be left alone or worse, left to inflict their own share of communal rupture perhaps as salve to our seared consciences!

    Just by the multiplicity of tales of agonies and deprivations woven around the enforcement, you’d be tempted to confuse the minor inconveniences imposed by the quest for modernity with the collapse of the entire transportation system! In the circumstance, the distinction between ‘restriction’ and ‘ban’ has become merely academic. If a few are willing to accept that the clampdown is limited to six Local Government Areas, nine Local Council Development Areas (LCDAs) and ten major highways in the state, just imagine what it would take the rest of the vocal, insular crowd to appreciate the wider context in which the regulation was made. Such, unfortunately has been our tolerance of disorder that a major blight which that mode of transportation represents are not only rationalized but vociferously defended by those who should know.

    Sure, there can be no end to the debate on whether the ban is a response to the growing insecurity in the mega-city; the public health and safety issues posed by their continuing operation or the attendant nuisance they constitute. Clearly, the more distracting the debate; the better it would be – so long as it keeps Nigerians doing what they love to do the most – talk! The difference is whether a government elected to solve fundamental problems can afford to dither on the menace that their operation has become.

    We are not just here talking about enforcing the law but driving a fundamental social policy. I assume that Nigerians already know what the law says. Section 15(1), of the 2018 harmonized law signed by former governor, Akinwunmi Ambode is clear: “Subject to the provisions of Section 46 of this Law, motorcycles above 200cc engine capacity are exempted from the restriction on the use of motorcycles on the state highways.” And section 46(1) is even more specific: “As from the commencement of this law, no person shall ride, drive or propel a motorcycle or tricycle on a major highway within the state.” And the cost of violation – both rider and passenger – which is three imprisonment and forfeiture of motorcycles or tricycle to the state government.

    In the same vein, I also assume that Nigerians also appreciate that Okada, as a mode of commercial transportation was something of a happenstance. And that while the other modes came under strict regulation for the purposes of public safety, the government, before now, merely looked away hoping that it would, at some point, disappear the same way it crept upon the system. Well, it hasn’t – and it doesn’t seem that it would disappear anytime soon! And the result – the swarming of the city-space by people by a band of unlicensed – and more often than not –anonymous operators.

    There is a saying among my people – you withhold the rod so the child can live; isn’t that itself a recipe for delinquency of the type guaranteed to invite certain death?  Yours truly is certainly no stranger to the discourse – my post-graduate dissertation was on the subject. In a society riven with inequalities and one where opportunities are narrow and restricted, I understood the choice then as a mechanism of adaptation – what the American Sociologist Robert Merton described as innovation even if must admit that the context has changed dramatically over time. Then, we didn’t have to battle with terrorism; we didn’t have our streets and neighbourhoods invested with vagrants. Kidnapping was still an alien concept and landlords could be trusted to keep tabs on the tenants.

    Surely, we didn’t have as many cars cramming the roads and the Okada claiming to be lord of the Manor. In any case, we didn’t have as many of the barely out of school kids hopping off with passengers on those contraptions without license all in the guise of trying to earn a few bucks. Then, there was something called apprenticeship – and the associated rigour of learning a craft. Now, they are all gone. Between then and now, it is a different world out there. Part of the new reality must be a Lagos – without the Okada.

    I understand the anger of those complaining of being forced to trek, even if I believe it is misplaced. Rather than demand for the return of Okada, they should ask the government to create walkways to ease movements.  That way, they get to shed fat – which doctors assure, won’t hurt.

    If you ask me – the focus of the current debate should be how to reduce the number of cars on the roads particularly during business hours; how to get water transportation running and to ensure an early completion of the intra-city rail. On a training programme, years back in the Singaporean enclave of Lee Kuan Yew, I observed that one drove to the central business district at peak period at the pain of shedding few dollars to the treasury. While I understand that change can be sometimes difficult; the alternative can sometimes equal stagnation. Lagos deserves to move – forward!

    And now this…

    Penultimate Sunday, Nigerians woke up to the news of an attempt to bomb Bishop Oyedepo’s Living Faith Church, Kaduna. As would be expected at a time like this, the discourse would soon veer to the religion of the alleged bomber. In a video clip that went viral, the police would seem far more interested in the religion of the alleged bomber than establishing the motive(s) or other possible linkages.

    Now, we know that the alleged bomber is Nathaniel Samuel. What else does the police know? What of possible motives? Any clues yet? Is it an act of a lone wolf or are there accomplices? Is it, as some appear to suggest, a case of loony plain with the fireworks (banger).

    While Nigerians can’t wait to hear the rest of the story, can’t we for once get serious as a people?