Category: Wednesday

Boolekaja (Come-down-and-let’s-fight-it-out) was the nickname given to the rickety commercial buses of old, whose drivers and conductors were often in conflict with passengers over several issues, ranging from fares and change to damaged seats and changed routes. Quite often, the passengers’ anger would boil over and they would take it on the bus driver and his conductor, who were often discourteous and rude. It was not uncommon for a fight to break out between the parties.

A number of Nigeria’s domestic airlines today operate more or less like the Boolekaja buses. This is especially true of the three airlines, which fly the Akure-Abuja and Akure-Lagos routes.                              

The greatest problem with the airlines is lack of schedule integrity. They hardly keep to their advertised schedules as published online and as imprinted on passenger tickets and itineraries. More often than not, flights are delayed or cancelled, usually without informing passengers well in advance. In some cases passengers could be at the boarding lounge for hours, waiting to board as scheduled, only to learn that their flight had been cancelled. This happened to me at least on three occasions within the past one year. On one occasion, in Abuja, I had to intervene on behalf of the poor airline agents, some of whom did not know why exactly the flight in question was cancelled.

My most recent experience was with two of the airlines, namely, Overland Airways and Airpeace. My Akure-Abuja return ticket was purchased from Overland Airways on April 24, 2023, for an outbound flight to Abuja on April 26 and a return flight to Akure on Saturday, April 29. It was the only airline available for the outbound flight on April 26. At 12:54pm the following day, I got an email from Overland, informing me that the “Akure-Abuja flight of April 26, 2023, at 11:40am has been rescheduled to 2:30pm due to operational reasons”. That was nearly a 24-hour notice, which I appreciated. Good enough, the rescheduled flight worked, although only after nearly a one-hour delay.

I should have taken the delays on the outbound flight as a proper omen for more delays to come. However, what came next was worse than a delay. As early as 8:51am on April 28, I began to receive messages from Overland, informing me that my “Abuja-Akure flight of April 29, 2023, at 10:15am has been cancelled due to operational reasons”. I received the same message four times by email and at least once by SMS.

Nevertheless, I still applaud Overland Airways for the persistent effort to communicate with its passengers. I also admire  the prompt positive response to my request to keep my ticket open until further notice.

Since I could not find another flight to Akure on Saturday, April 29, I decided to leave Abuja on Sunday, April 30, because I must be at Akure on May 1. Unfortunately, however, Overland had no flight to Akure on Saturday or even Sunday, or so I was told by its agents. I ended up purchasing two different tickets, Abuja-Lagos on Sunday, April 30, and Lagos-Akure, May 1, both on Airpeace. Both turned out to be bad choices.

At 6:31pm on April 29, I got a message from Airpeace that the Abuja-Lagos flight, originally scheduled for 2:10pm on April 30 had been rescheduled to 5:20pm. No reason was given for the change. By 10:37pm, the same day, another message came from Airpeace, notifying me of a change in schedule from 5:20pm to 7:20pm. Reason? “Technical issues on operating aircraft”. Then came the mother of all changes at 1:15am on April 30, indicating that the same flight has again been rescheduled from 7:20pm to 7:00pm for the same “technical issues”. Now, you would think that’s a gain of 20 minutes for the passengers. Right? Wrooong!

By 5:00pm, I was at the Airpeace counter at the airport to check in my luggage and obtain my boarding pass. I was among the early birds.  I then went upstairs to the Protocol Lounge, waiting for a boarding announcement by 6:30pm for the 7:00pm flight. No such activity took place until about 8:00pm. We finally took off around 8:20pm and landed in Lagos about an hour later.

As I wondered about the several changes to the Abuja-Lagos flight, the size of the aircraft and the nearly 200 passengers on board gave me an idea. On that day, Airpeace advertised at least four flights to Lagos, the last one being the 7:00pm flight. It occurred to me that the airline simply  moved its passengers into a single end-of-the-day flight, because they did not have enough passengers for each of the three other flights. Alternatively, they might indeed have experienced technical issues with their aircraft.

However, my experience with the Lagos-Akure flight the following day, May 1, led me to suspect  that there probably were not technical issues after all. On April 28, I received a message from Airpeace at 4:05pm that the Lagos-Akure flight originally scheduled for 10:50am had been rescheduled for 7:00am. Accordingly, I slept early and set my alarm for 4:30am. When I woke up that early, I noticed that another message sent at 12:35am was waiting for me from Airpeace. The 7:00am flight had been moved to 1:00pm!

Oh, well. What to do? Shower and get ready for the day. Who knows, another message might soon come. Since none came, I headed for the airport. By 11:00am, I was already at the Airpeace counter to check in. This time around, I only stayed in the Lounge for about 2 hours as boarding was called about 1:14pm. We took off at 1:28pm and landed at Akure at 2:06pm.

Incidentally, just a week earlier, Jumoke Oduwole, Executive Secretary of the Presidential Enabling Business Environment Council, had a bitter experience with Airpeace on its Akure-Lagos flight. Here’s how she described it: “On Saturday, April 22, 2023, two Airpeace tickets were purchased to return to Lagos from Akure with a departure time of 3:30pm … On Tuesday, April 25, 2023, a schedule change notification was sent informing me of an earlier departure time from 3:30pm to 12:40pm. A subsequent notification was sent at 2:37am today, April 28, 2023, informing me of a further time change from 12:40pm to 8:30am”. She abandoned her programme in Omuo-Ekiti but missed the flight because of the deplorable road condition, especially from Iju to Akure airport. She had no option than to embark on a 5-hour road journey from Akure to Lagos in order to make a 5pm meeting in Lagos.

This topic will be explored further next week.

About eight years ago or so, Kole and I were returning from Adekunle Ajasin University at Akungba-Akoko, where we were engaged in different tasks. He headed the Department of English, while I was Director of the Teaching and Learning Centre I was invited to establish there in 2013. It was a lend-us-your-experience assignment for each of us but we took it seriously. We normally commuted between Akure and Akungba but would stay over at Akungba for 2 or more days, depending on our load of work and the tasks to be accomplished.

On that occasion, we were about half-way on our way back to Akure, when we ran into a traffic jam at the roadside market in Emure-Ile. As usual on Nigerian roads, a two-lane (face-me-I-face-you) road had become four or more lanes. Traffic was more or less at a standstill as market women and their customers meandered through vehicles on the already congested roadway. One commercial bus driver nearly hit our car as he tried to double-cross us but for our alert driver who maneuvered his way out. As we drew parallel with the driver, Kole asked him, “Ki lo nwa yi?” Instead of a simple apology, the driver turned spiritual: “Ki Olorun gba wa ni o”. Visibly angry at the response, Kole muttered to no one in particular, “Ki lo kan Olorun l’oro yi bayi”.

I draw from the preceding paragraphs two of several post-retirement experiences Kole and I shared. One was the Akungba experience, which gave us deep insight into the state of university education in the country-the declining quality of scholarship and research; the inadequacy of infrastructure; and the lack of appropriate teaching tools, including books and teaching technologies. The other experience, which we both had shared for a long time, is non-alignment with any religion of the Book. Kole’s reaction to the invocation of God by the wayward driver comes from this non-alignment.

However, we both value and seek to uphold Yoruba culture and its modes of expression and reproduction, particularly language and the vast odu Ifa. In fact, Kole once proposed a Yoruba Language Institute and was working on it before returning to South Africa.

We also shared other experiences in our post-retirement years. We were both consultants to the Ondo state government on the invitation of Dr Olusegun Mimiko, Governor of Ondo State (2009-2017). After Akungba and the consultancy, Kole went on to head the English Department at the then young Elizade University, while I served on the Governing Council, and later Board of Trustees, of the same institution. Simultaneously with these activities, we also were columnists for different newspapers.

Straddling these activities and experiences was the three-some monthly discussion lunch with our mutual friend, Professor Ladipo Adamolekun, usually at Sunview Hotel or sometimes at Hotel Continental. At other times, one of us would host the lunch at home. This last experience was the most rewarding of all, because it afforded us the opportunities to reminisce about our varied professional experiences, the state of the nation, and the situation of our universities. On one occasion, Ladi also shared with us his own observations during his short post-retirement stint at the Federal University of Technology at Akure.

On several occasions we bounced off our observations against our experiences at the University of Ife, where the three of us taught during the university’s prime time in the seventies and eighties. Incidentally, all three of us left Nigeria in the late eighties. Ladi left for the World Bank, while I left on a Senior Fulbright Fellowship to the University of Wisconsin. I returned briefly to Nigeria on a research grant and later took up a permanent appointment at Temple University in Philadelphia. On his part, Kole fled to South Africa over possible persecution for his acclaimed novel, Just Before Dawn, published in 1988, which irked elite, especially military, sensibilities at the time.

In all my years with Kole as a close friend, three traits of his character struck me deeply. One, Kole is incapable of capital accumulation, not  because he is lazy or because he cannot spend money wisely, but because he cannot engage in piling up wealth as a capitalist. In other words, he makes only the money he needs to support himself and his family. If there is some excess beyond his immediate needs, he would enrich his bookshelves instead of his shoe rack and then give the rest to the needy.

He once told me of his experience when he bought his first car. It was a Volkswagen Beetle, which he drove to visit his uncle. On sighting the car, his uncle upbraided him for buying Ajapa, the local term for VW Beetle. He swallowed the censure but decided never to visit the uncle again! He did’t want any uncle to push him to spend beyond his means.

The second trait is Kole’s sense of social justice. For him, injustice is not limited to bondage as in slavery, forced labour, and sex trafficking. For him, most boundaries create prejudices, which then reinforce injustice. To demonstrate his dislike for boundaries, Kole once insisted on his house-help sitting at table to eat with the family! That’s why, in his writings, he explores the boundaries created by inter-racial, inter-generational, interethnic, and inter-national, marriages, some of which he himself experienced.

But above all, the third trait is Kole’s humanity. A compassionate, sympathetic, and generous disposition not only permeates his behaviour; it also leads him to expect reciprocity. That’s why the central theme in his writings is questioning the humanity of African leaders and intellectuals, who make a wasteland of their states, by failing to create the conditions for unity, social justice, equity, and the socioeconomic development on the continent. This is the question underlying Kole’s scathing revelations of the trials, tribulations, and failings of the Nigerian state in his acclaimed novel, Just Before Dawn. However, those whose leadership and judgement were questioned over the riots, uprisings, violence, coup d’etats, and corruption that have held Nigeria back for nearly a century all but asked for the author’s head.

The situation of the country has hardly improved beyond the description in Just Before Dawn, leading some Nigerians today to go back to the novel in order to better understand why we are still where we are today.

Kole, as you turned 80 on April 21, 2023, be rest assured that you successfully pricked the conscience of your nation with Just Before Dawn. Once more, Ladi and I are happy to welcome you to the club of octogenarians.

For the avoidance of doubt, the 2023 Census … like previous censuses of 1991 and 2006, have no questions on religion and ethnicity”.

—Director of Public Affairs Department, National Population Commission

Population census is not just about the number of people in a country. Rather it should collect data on a vast range of demographics, such as ethnicity, religion, age, gender, income, employment, literacy or educational level, and other data as may be deemed necessary. These demographics are used not just for planning and governance purposes by the government collecting the data; they are also used for research by scholars and by R&D departments of companies and corporations at home and abroad; for feasibility studies for programmes, products, and projects; and for projections by international bodies, such as the World Bank and the United Nations.

The National Population Commission (NPC) acknowledges the importance of these demographics: “A population and Housing Census (PHC) is of great relevance to the economic, political and socio-cultural planning of a country. Reliable and detailed data on the size, structure, distribution and socio-economic and demographic characteristics of a country’s population is required for policy intervention and monitoring of development goals”.

Some of these demographics are more important in certain countries than in others. For example, in diverse African countries, ethnicity and religion are very important demographics, which affect people’s life chances. This is especially the case in Nigeria, the largest Black nation on earth, universally recognized for its multiethnic, multilingual, and multi-religious structure.

Yet, for the third time in a row since the NPC was established by military decree in 1989, Nigeria is about to engage in a population census in which the key demographics of religion and ethnicity are not going to be collected. According to the NPC, “it was agreed that religion and ethnicity should not be included in the Census questionnaire in order to insulate the process and outcomes from unnecessary controversies”.

To be fare to the Commission, its decision was based on precedents. There has hardly been any census taken in Nigeria since colonial times that was free of political rancour. Some census data were rejected outright, while others were contested in court. For example, the pre-independence census of 1952/53 was rejected for under-enumeration and non-simultaneity of the exercise (North, May-August 1952; West Dec-January 1952/53; and East May-August 1953).

Similarly, the 1962 exercise was completely rejected for political reasons. The repeated exercise in 1963 was also rejected, having been contested before the Supreme Court, which ruled that it lacked jurisdiction over the administrative functions of the executive branch! Contrast that decision with the recent Naira redesign (termed Naira swap) policy on which the same Supreme Court ruled against the executive branch. It is tempting to conclude that even the Supreme Court played politics with the census in 1963; but you can draw your own conclusions.

The 1973 census did not make the light of day to even be contested. As is the case with many high-powered commissions and committees, plenty of money was expended with no outcome. To lessen the attendant controversies, questions about religion and ethnicity were deleted from census questionnaires as from 1991. Yet, controversies still attended the 1991 and the 2006 figures.

Now fast forward 17 years later to 2023 and see how you as a Nigerian would want these questions answered: (1) Will it not be useful to know how many distinct ethnic groups we have in the country for planning, governance, and research purposes? (2) Will it not be useful at federal, state, and local government levels to know how many people belong to what faith—Islam, Christianity or neither of the two, also for planning, governance, and research purposes?

The truth, of course, is that we know that certain ethnic groups are concentrated in certain parts of the country. We also know that certain parts of the country are populated more by members of a certain faith than others. What we don’t know is the exact or at least approximate number in each case. We also don’t know exactly how mixed each state is in terms of ethnic and religious affiliation. Yet such data are useful for national and subnational planning and governance purposes.

Recent events in our political development show that religion and ethnicity are critical factors in our political behaviour, in employment opportunities and patterns, and in the distribution of resources. There is a sense in which the federal character principle acknowledges these demographics, which are often masked by artificial creations, such as region, geographical zone, and state. Moreover, the whole idea of zoning positions, such as the presidency at the federal level and the governorship at the state level, is a further acknowledgement of these demographics.

Even with its elimination from previous census data, religion still loomed large in the last presidential election. On the one hand, there were loud criticisms of a Muslim-Muslim ticket. On the other hand, voices were raised against overselling religion, leading to criticisms of overzealous Christian pastors, who converted church services into electoral tutorials. Similarly, the role of religion and ethnicity was evident in voting patterns across the country. We know, for example, that each of the four top presidential candidates got the majority of the votes within their ethnolinguistic group. We also know that some candidates exploited these identity markers more than others.

One question that has hardly been asked is why the government decided way back in 1991 to stop collecting data about religion and ethnicity. How was it determined that these two demographics were the determinants of controversy over past censuses, rather than other factors, such as under-enumeration, over-enumeration, poor data collection, archaic methodology, and non-simultaneity of the exercise across the country? After all, these are the factors identified for the rejection or outright cancellation of past censuses.

Fortunately, according to the NPC, technology is now being deployed such that “the 2023 Census will be Nigeria’s first Digital Census and will change how the Census is being conducted in Nigeria before now”. Now that the NPC has taken adequate measures to ensure efficient mapping of enumeration areas and adequate data collection, why still remain bound by the 1991 ban on religion and ethnicity, which, today, stare us in the face? For how long shall we continue to run away from collecting data about critical markers of our identities, while we continue to play identity politics?

It is often hard to be objective when we analyse political behaviour. This is especially true of elections in our own country, because we often invest our emotions, our hopes, and our expectations in such elections. Many Nigerians who have written about the 2023 presidential election in Nigeria have done so against the backdrop of their investment in a particular political party or its candidate. Some of the analysts are objectively subjective, while others are subjectively objective. Yet, others are downright subjective. Few are downright objective, especially when they analyse only statistical data, such as voter turnout, voting trends, and who gets what votes where. Regardless of the degree of objectivity or subjectivity, every analyst looks for data to justify their perspective and conclusion about the election. My literary “daughter”, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, is no exception. The above title is a parody of her “We remember differently” (Premium Times, November 23, 2012) in response to Chinua Achebe’s There Was a Country.

Adichie supported Peter Obi of the Labour Party, while I supported Bola Ahmed Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress. I have known Tinubu for about 40 years in Nigeria and in the United States. As friends, we once had political differences and I wrote about them in 2012, when I was a regular columnist for The Punch newspaper. But we resolved our differences on his birthday in 2013, without even talking about them.

Those differences cannot remove my appreciation for his efforts as Governor of Lagos State in growing the state’s Internally Generated Revenue from a paltry hundreds of millions to multiple billions of Naira monthly and in laying the foundation for the growth of the state to the status of the fifth largest economy in Africa. Nor could those differences obliterate my appreciation for his consistent progressive political philosophy ever since he stood for election over thirty years ago. Equally unforgettable is his nurturing of a political party and his role in the formation APC. Besides, he is the only one among the four major candidates, who has never switched parties or ideological orientation.

These are the reasons I endorsed him beyond being a friend. I did so long before the election, and, after the election, I wrote about his path to victory, which the other candidates lacked (see How to become President of Nigeria, The Nation, March 8, 2023). I was not surprised that similar factors were outlined as underlying Tinubu’s victory by an American diplomat, Jonnie Carson, currently Executive Director of the United States Institute of Peace, who led the US-based National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the International Republican Institute (IRI) on an international observer mission to Nigeria for the 2023 presidential elections. He affirmed that Tinubu undoubtedly won the election based on three factors, namely, financial resources, a nation-wide organisation, and “the ground game” (see How Tinubu won presidential election—American Observer, Premium Times, April 6, 2023).

I have no quarrel whatsoever with Adichie’s support for Peter Obi. She said she supported him because “Obi was different; he seemed honest and accessible”. She is also happy with “his vision of anti-corruption and self-sufficiency”. I have no quarrel with her reasons, either. However, I have three misgivings with her open letter to President Joe Biden, titled Nigeria’s Hollow Democracy, published in The Atlantic (April 6, 2023), the same day we learned about the reasons given for Tinubu’s victory by Carson, the American observer.

My first misgiving is with her choice of arbiter, namely, President Biden, whose own election in 2020 was denied by his opponent, Donald Trump, the same way that Obi is now denying Tinubu’s election (see Obi: Trump of Africa, The Nation, April 5, 2023). Why report your country to a foreign nation, especially when  election denialism occurred in that country? It will be interesting to know if Adichie joined the Obidients at the equally futile protest march in Washington DC on April 4, 2023. Why shame your country so hard, because your candidate lost an election?

Second, why did Adichie ignore the facts of the election altogether and rely on anecdotes relayed to her by relatives and friends in Nigeria as well as social media portrayals of the election? Did she ever follow the negative social media portrayals of presidential candidates and their campaigns in which videos were doctored and faked, while facts were distorted and falsified? What did she tell Obidients, who manufactured stories and spread outright untruths about Tinubu during the campaign? Or did she report them to anyone?

Finally, did the following data not emerge also from the same presidential election? As many as 20 (12 APC and 8 PDP) state Governors were unable to win the election in their states for their respective presidential candidates. Did Adichie reflect on the fact that, on the one hand, Obi won Lagos State with over 582,000 votes? That’s Tinubu’s home state, where he was Governor for eight years. And what did Tinubu do? He pacified his supporters as soon as the results were released: “The fact that the APC narrowly lost Lagos State to another party should not be the reason for violence. As a democrat, you win some, you lose some. We must allow the process to continue unhindered across the country while we maintain peace and decorum” (The Guardian, February 27, 2023). On the other hand, did Adichie notice that Tinubu could only muster about 127,000 votes in all five Igbo states of the Southeast, where she, Obi, and most Obidients come from?

It was not only Tinubu, who lost his state during the presidential election. The leader of his political party, APC, incumbent President Muhammadu Buhari, lost his state to the PDP. Similarly, the Chairman of the APC, Abdullahi Adamu and the Chairman of the party’s Presidential Campaign Council, Governor Simon Lalong, both lost their states to the LP. A careful observer with knowledge of Nigeria’s demographics and social formation would quickly realise that Obi won where there was a concentration of Igbo and/or Christian voters. To parody Carson, Obi lacked national organisation and ground game but relied heavily on ethnic and religious bigotry.

The above data show clearly that blatant rigging that characterised past elections in Nigeria was reduced to a negligible proportion. In those elections, it was unthinkable to have a Governor lose election or his state, unless, of course, you had former President Olusegun Obasanjo in power, who routed all Alliance for Democracy Governors out of power in 2003 and installed his party acolytes. The only Governor, who successfully fought and won the battle against Obasanjo then, is no other than Tinubu, the President-elect.