The Nation Newspaper

Category: Vincent Akanmode

  • Re: Okada riders’ suicide mission in Lagos

    •Why can’t okada riders obey simple instructions meant for their own safety? What kind of country is this? Those who produce okada are not riding them in their country as a means of public transportation. Why here?

    Gordon Chika Nnorom, Umukabia, Abia State.

    What was responsible for the heartless vandalisation of public property? Let the truth be told for once in this country. What were government’s plans for these okada riders. Government will cause more harm than good with this policy. Okada riders are jobless people because and it is impossible for government to provide jobs for all of them. There should be orientation and training programmes for them, not proscribing okada. Thanks.

    OIK, Minna.

    •Thank you, Vincent, for your balanced judgment over the conflict between the Lagos State Government and okada riders. Granted that the cyclists had offended the law and should be punished, the government resorting to the destruction of the confiscated motor bikes instead of imposing some fines or taking other restrictive measures against its owners is akin to applying jungle justice to the okada riders, which no government with a true sense of purpose ought to do to its citizenry, no matter the level of provocation.

    Sentiments apart, crushing one’s source of income can be provocative. In legal parlance, provocation is classified as temporary madness and a madman on the rampage can go to any length to inflict harm or damage on anybody or anything, not minding the likely unpleasant consequences of his action. Although the okada riders have done no better, those who destroyed their bikes in the first place committed greater sin and are to blame.

    Emmanuel Egwu, Enugu

    •I agree that okada riders did wrong by attacking public buses. But the government did the abominable It means that nothing good will come out of the existing social system. That is why the oppressed should organise and wrest power from the present bankrupt ruling class.

    Amos Ejimonye, Kaduna.

    •Okada riding is one of the businesses people have resorted to in order to battle hunger and hopelessness. The same government that is responsible for the alarming rate of unemployment has no moral justification to impound or destroy anybody’s source of economic survival. If the government provides gainful employment for the youth, no reasonable person would ride okada.

    Ifeanyi O. Ifeanyichukwu

    •I don’t know why you people have nothing to write except on okada, instead of asking the government to provide good roads, which would have discouraged people from going on okada. I know that many of you junk writers are on the payroll of the ACN government.

    08085857485

    •Whichever way anyone looks at the above subject, it is the responsibility of government to provide security by way of adequate infrastructure that will aid security itself. It should also provide sufficient recruitment of law enforcement, military and para-military agents as well as CCTVs and street patrol.

    Seizing and destroying motor bikes is the most crude and wicked way of checking insecurity. So, crime will stop or/and has stopped with the vandalization of people’s bikes? Not at all. Provide jobs. Let education and health services be made free and 60 per cent of the present okada riders will quit voluntarily.

    When taking a drastic action like the Lagos State Government has done, it should have adequately prepared for protection against reactionary possibilities like the destruction of BRT buses. The society is tough, Vincent. In suffering, you do not apply the advanced countries’ solutions in a less developed world where alternatives are hardly provided.

    Lanre Oseni.

    Re: Tell them, Tambuwal, budget is no ritual

    •Let us believe that the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Aminu Tambuwal, spoke the mind of every Nigerian on the poor implementation of the 2012 budget and the nation’s infrastructural decay. Democracy is taking shape since the Speaker can speak to the President eye ball to eye ball on the state of the nation without compromise.

    Democracy is about checks and balances between the three arms of government. All the three arms should sit up to move the nation forward.

    Gordon Nnorom, Umukabia, Abia State.

    •I think your friend, Hon. Femi Gbajabiamila, deserves our collective pity because it is clear that he lacks the intellectual capacity and legislative sagacity to understand that a budget which began in April cannot hit 100 per cent performance by September. Please, let’s tell them to focus on how to reduce their jumbo pay and begin the process of impeaching those who turn oversight functions into ‘farouklized’ functions.

    Ogbaisi Godfrey.

    •With the melodrama on the presentation of the 2013 budget by the President, between the executive and the legislative arms in recent times shows the beauty of democracy. However, I would have wanted a situation where we can effectively check the legislature. Sometimes, they wield power dishonestly.

    The executives are hereby advised to execute our budget honestly and committedly. Sometimes, followers and members who actually are supposed to execute and implement are worse culprits than the President., the Senate President and the Speaker we accuse.

    Lanre Oseni.

    Re: Labaran Maku’s penance at National Assembly

    Labaran Maku is working hard to save his job through his utterances to Nigerians and the lawmakers. He should apologise to Nigerians over his outburst.

    Gordon Chika Nnorom

     

  • Doctoral degree holders as truck drivers

    I got the shock of my life as an employee of a newspaper house sometime in 2007. I had interacted with one of the security guards at the company for some time and grew to like him because of the mature and responsible way he conducted himself. I marvelled at his courteous mien and kept wondering how a security guard could speak the English language with such flawless skill. I could not bring myself to ask him about his academic background because I suspected that he could have taken up the job as a last resort. Asking such a question in such a circumstance therefore could cause him some distress.

    But an opportunity to ask the question came the day I found him with a copy of William Shakepeare’s classic, Antony and Cleopatra. It was one of the texts I used while studying Literature in English for the Higher School Certificate (HSC). Wondering what business a security guard could have with a highly sophisticated Elizabethan book whose study nearly drained my blood as an advanced level student, I engaged him in a conversation only to discover that he had also read the book as an advanced level student and was trying to refresh his memories of it. More shockingly, I discovered that the security guard was not only a graduate of Political Science, he also held a master’s degree from a popular university in the north!

    I was reminded of the shocking experience during the week with the news that no fewer than 13,000 people had responded to 2,000 vacancies announced by a subsidiary of the Dangote Group of Companies for intending truck drivers. Numbered among the applicants were six doctoral degree (PhD) holders. Sixty-five of the applicants had master’s degrees in Business Administration (MBA) while 649 others were master’s degrees holders in other disciplines. A whopping 8, 460 respondents to the advertisement were degree holders!

    For sure, many would hold up the development as an indication of the level to which the unemployment situation in the country has degenerated. More and more graduates are being churned out simultaneously as companies are folding up or relocating from Nigeria to Ghana and other neighbouring countries. For instance, the northern cities of Kaduna and Kano, which once brimmed with industries that employed millions of people, are now reputed more as graveyards of businesses and outposts of the dreaded Boko Haram and other insurgency groups. Even in Lagos, the nation’s commercial nerve centre, there has been a mass exodus of companies like Dunlop and Michelin which were once the havens of graduate employees.

    The biggest problems have been lack of security and infrastructural facilities like good roads and electricity which would have provided the kind of environment needed for businesses to thrive. In spite of ‘threats’ by successive administrations to declare an emergency in the power sector, the nation remains largely in darkness. Barbers, tailors, welders and other artisans whose jobs are electricity-dependent are swelling the ranks of robbers, assassins and okada (commercial motorcycle) operators. They have constituted themselves into security threats to the nation after years of frustrating encounters with the agency responsible for the supply of public power.

    Public office holders who are saddled with the responsibility of building infrastructure that would serve the public interest are busy diverting the funds into their private pockets. They are so engrossed in their craze for material acquisition to realise that the people they had denied the public utilities could constitute a threat to their ill-gotten wealth. I once lived in a part of Ogun State where the road that led to the mansion of a commissioner for works was not passable. So, each weekend he came home from his base in Abeokuta, he rode in his exotic SUV to his mansion on the extremely bad road, squeezing his face as the car dipped into one ditch after the other.

    Rather than initiate policies that could generate jobs, our policy makers have been busy playing politics with the issue of employment generation. Sometime in June, the Minister of Trade and Investment, Dr. Olusegun Aganga announced to the world that his ministry had created more than 1.4 million jobs in less than one year. Not a few commentators faulted the claim, but the minister and his aides stuck to their guns until Dele Sobowale, an imaginative columnist with the Vanguard , pulled the rug off their feet.

    With the minister’s claim that about 1.3 million of the jobs in question were generated at the Bank of Industries, Sobowale wrote an open letter to the Managing Director of the bank for confirmation. But he said that the bank promptly responded to his enquiry, saying: “The attached summarises the highlights of BOI’s operations and their developmental impact over a ten-year period (2001-2011). As indicated during our brief conversation, the number of direct and indirect jobs created under reference are cumulative; not for one year.”

    But all these are not to absolve the minders of our educational sector as well as individual applicants of blame. Sometimes, the quality of our graduates is so low that you wonder if truly they entered the four walls of any university. Their conduct is disgraceful. Their mode of dressing is embarrassing. Their spoken English is appalling. More often than not, they are products of glorified secondary schools and other mushroom institutions that parade themselves as universities. Hence their products emerge not just as unemployed graduates but unemployable ones. It won’t come as a shock if some of the applicants who parade themselves as master’s or even doctoral degree holders can barely spell their names and could have been going from one establishment to another in endless search for jobs.

    There is also the problem of poor remuneration by rapacious employers of labour. Many employers of labour are so greedy that they would rather corner all their excess profits than increase the wages of their employees to motivate them for better productivity. It is not certain how much Dangote intends to pay his graduate drivers as wages. But it is possible that the prospect of owning the trucks after driving them for four years alone is bigger remuneration than some of the doctor applicants are earning in their current employments.

    Yet nothing detracts from the fact that the unemployment situation in the country is alarming. And there is nothing now to suggest that things will get better for the growing army of unemployed graduates in the near future. If anything, the future appears even bleaker as the population keeps growing and more and more graduates are rolled out every year. There is need for renewed focus on technical education and back-to-land agricultural programmes for the unemployed youth. The earlier the government realises the danger the current situation portends, the better for us all.

  • Tell them, Tambuwal, budget is no ritual

    Tell them, Tambuwal, budget is no ritual

    While the dust raised by the House of Representatives over the abysmally poor implementation of the 2012 budget was yet to settle, President Goodluck Jonathan on Wednesday presented the 2013 budget to a joint session of the National Assembly. The House had been at daggers drawn with the executive arm of government, threatening to commence impeachment proceedings against the President if the N4.7 trillion budget presented by the President last year was not fully implemented.

    Hon. Femi Gbajabiamila representing Surulere, Lagos, who initiated the debate on budget implementation after the various committees constituted by the House to monitor the MDAs had discovered that funds were not released to the MDAs which were supposed to implement the various projects in their purview, had threatened that if the economy was not properly greased by September, the House would be left with no option but to begin impeachment moves against President Jonathan.

    It was on the basis of the foregoing that the House initially threatened to boycott the presentation of the 2013 budget when Jonathan informed the Senate and the House of his plan to present the budget to a joint session of the two chambers on October 4. The lawmakers had earlier warned they might reject the presentation altogether if the level of performance of the current budget remained unsatisfactory. They, therefore, passed a unanimous vote, calling on the President to defer the presentation to allow the House to complete its evaluation of the budget implementation. After some pressure from the executive arm, the House eventually yielded ground and agreed to join the Senate to host the President on Wednesday.

    The budget read by the President on Wednesday would pass for a good one, considering the fact that for the first time in a very long while, the education and health sectors enjoyed a good share of the budget. Only defence would seem to have to have enjoyed more vote than these two critical sectors whose importance have hitherto been undermined by successive administrations. And it is understandable if defence is given as much attention as it has enjoyed in the budget, given the scary security situation in the country.

    One would, however, expect that more money would be voted for agriculture, particularly when the President is conscious of the looming prospects of food scarcity on account of the terrible floods that have ravaged Kogi, Niger, Benue and other parts of the country considered as the nation’s food basket. Thousands of acres of farmlands where the bulk of the nation’s food crops like yam, cassava, maize, millets and guinea corn are grown have been washed away. If food is still the most critical necessity of life, agriculture deserves more than was allocated to it.

    The real worry, however, stems from the fact that budget in this part of the world has been reduced to mere annual ritual with public office holders in charge of its implementation and their cronies the only beneficiaries. Last year, the nation had a budget of N4.7 trillion even though its income from oil revenue alone could be in excess of N10 trillion. But the life of the average Nigerian remains miserable.

    Our roads remain the death traps they have always been. Water taps continue to run dry. Even claims of improved electricity supply in some quarters remain a mystery to many, including the residents of Otunba Gbenga Daniel Housing Estate, Ota, Ogun State, where some of the residents told me recently that they have not sighted public power for months!

    The only perceivable impact from successive budgets has been the exotic lifestyles of many of our public office holders. Their castles, exotic cars, wives and concubines are multiplying in geometric proportions simultaneously as the mass of the people sink deeper and deeper into poverty because the enabling environment is not created for their trades to flourish.

    The foregoing explains why Jonathan’s announcement at the joint session of the National Assembly on Wednesday that the 2013 budget would witness an increase of 5 per cent from N4.7 trillion last year to N4.92 trillion would make little or no meaning to the average Nigerian.

    The President had said his budget of “physical consolidation with inclusive growth” was underpinned by parameters that would reflect government’s prudent economic policies. The parameters, according to him, include the rise of oil production from N2.8 million barrels per day for 2012 to N2.53 million barrels per day. And the benchmark of US$72 per barrel in the current budget will increase to US$75 per barrel next year. These, ordinarily, should be good news in a country where budget means more than rhetoric. But in our part of the world, all we have are figures without nuances.

    The matter is even more complicated in the case of the Jonathan administration because it is one that thrives on insincere promises. One and a half years into his tenure after the initial two years he spent to complete the tenure of the late President Umaru Yar’Adua, virtually none of his electoral promises has been fulfilled.

    Defending the nocturnal hike in the price of fuel in January, the Minister of Finance, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, had vowed that with the additional revenue from the fuel price hike, the nation would start witnessing serious transformation of its infrastructural facilities from June this year. She had also vowed that luxury buses purchased by the Federal Government would pimple our roads to ease transportation problems arising from the price hike. Besides, she said our roads would be so neatly tarred that a motorist would drive on them with a cup of tea on his dash board. The month of June has come and gone and another June is approaching without any sign that the promises will be fulfilled any time soon.

    It is just as well that Tambuwal reminded the President on Wednesday about the colossal failure of the current budget. Interim reports on field oversight of the 2012 budget by the House standing committees, he said, “are clearly unimpressive both in terms of releases as well as utilization.”

    Will the implementation of this year’s budget be any different?

  • A case for one man, one gun

    I would start by declaring that I am quite aware of the sensitive nature of the issue I have chosen to write about. I am also not oblivious of the criticism it may attract from many of our countrymen who believe that since Nigeria remains a baby at 52, its citizens must necessarily be infants endowed more with infantile emotions and temperament than discretion and sound judgment.
    I am talking about the need to grant responsible and emotionally mature Nigerians access to arms to defend themselves and family members in the face of increasing inability of government to live up to its basic responsibility of protecting the lives and property of its citizens.
    While British philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, might not have had Nigeria in mind when he propounded his theory of state of nature in the 19th Century, no honest observer would dispute the fact that Nigeria today is a replica of the picture he painted of the human society before the advent of government. Life in that primitive society, he said, was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.
    To be sure, the debate on whether private arms should be legalised is not new. But at no time was the issue as germane as it has been in the past one year or thereabout, considering the numerous sources of violent attacks on innocent Nigerians. The attacks had come mainly from armed robbery and hired assassination. Now, the people are contending with insurgent groups like the Boko Haram. In many of the northern states, for instance, churches have become desolate as Christians in those states fear that they could be attacked during service as has been experienced in states like Borno, Yobe, Plateau, Niger, Kaduna, Adamawa and Kano.
    The foregoing is besides the menace constituted by thugs who are in the habit of unleashing terror on workers and owners of new building sites. The Yoruba call them omo onile. Armed with all manner of dangerous weapons, they move from one building site to another, brandishing guns and other dangerous weapons as they make illegal and unreasonable demands from the owners of such projects. There is also the menace of kidnappers; a trend that has virtually brought the states in the South East to their knees. Ten days ago, it took a combined squad of the Inspector-General of Police and the Special Anti-Robbery Squad of the Anambra State Police Command to unveil an intimidating armoury of a kidnapping gang that had terrorised the zone for years. So massive was the armoury that the Commissioner of Police in the state said the kidnappers were capable of defeating a small army.
    Early in the week, dare-devil robbers laid siege to Lagos, the commercial nerve centre of the nation, killing no fewer than 10 people as they embarked on a shooting spree around the city after attacking a bureau de change, carting away about N150 million away. The robbers, who were said to number about eight, including two women, drove round in two SUVs. They shot at five policemen inside their patrol vehicle, killing two of them instantly while the third died in the hospital. A stray bullet was said to have hit a six-year-old girl in the eye while her grandmother was hit in the forehead as they watched television in their home.
    The Lagos incident occurred at a time that residents were beginning to think that the police in the state had finally found the winning formula against the men of the underworld. With a lot of support from the state government, the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) of the state’s police command had taken the battle to robbers and incidents of robbery reduced remarkably. The sudden burst of robbers to the scene last Sunday, therefore, came as a shock to many. It pointed to the fact that the police are overwhelmed by the crime rate in the nation, not necessarily because they are incompetent but partly because they lack the necessary equipment. With the nation’s population standing at more than 150 million, the less than half a million policemen available in the country is a far cry from the United Nations’ recommended police strength of 222 per 100,000 people.
    The foregoing scenario has triggered the agitation for a state police in some quarters, but the fundamental question remains how states that are barely viable enough to pay their workers’ salaries would muster the funds needed to equip and maintain its own police? The only viable option we are left with, is to allow individual Nigerians to take their destiny in their own hands by making it possible for them to own their own guns and stop living at the mercy of heartless robbers, kidnappers and hired assassins.
    The fear that is often raised against this proposal is that it could lead to needless killings as temperamental individuals could open fire on their compatriots at the slightest provocation. But this line of reasoning is flawed because it presupposes that such trigger-happy fellows will get away scot-free, whereas we have laws that stipulate death sentence or life imprisonment for such an act. The average Nigerian is a passionate lover of life and would do anything to avoid an act that would lead him or her to incarceration, not to talk of being executed. The current setting in which millions of Nigerians acquire arms illegally is more dangerous because it leaves the law abiding citizens at their mercy. And because the guns in circulation are not registered, it is easier for their owners to kill and get away with it.
    The principle of one man, one gun sets up a scenario of mutually assured destruction. It inhibits the reckless use of gun, knowing full well that the man you set out to kill, his friends or neighbours could also be armed. Armed robbers operate with the brazen boldness they do because they know that the likelihood that they will be challenged during an operation is remote. An armed robber will think twice before invading another man’s house if he knows or suspects that his would-be-victim could be armed.
    Patriotic Nigerians need as many guns as they can muster to neutralise the ferocity of bloodthirsty criminals that hold the nation by the jugular. The alternative is to continue to live at their mercy because the security agencies in whose hands we have entrusted our lives and property have proved time and time again that they are incapable of standing up to them. Imagine how many lives could have been saved in Jos, Maiduguri, Adamawa, Yobe, Kaduna and Kano if ours were a country of one man, one gun. It may not provide the answer to bombs, but it is capable of inhibiting other forms of reckless killings.