The Nation Newspaper

Category: Discourse

Aregbesola: moving Osun from mediaeval dependency to modernity
The past few months have witnessed critical and growing press attention to the crippling insolvency of twenty three of Nigeria’s thirty six state Governments, a situation that became public knowledge after several states had failed to pay workers’ salaries for upwards of six months.

This distress has not discriminated against the States in any discernible pattern- by political party affiliation, geographical location, ethnic composition, etc, the usual culprit factors that political commentators often latch on to. Financial distress as grave as this was last experienced thirty two years ago (in 1983) during the reckless Second Republic government led by President ShehuShagari when most of the then nineteen states of the Nigerian Federation ran their economies aground by depleting the dwindling federal allocations that all had depended on without exception.

The reasons for the 1983 salary crises at the State and Federal levels were: drastic fall in the price of Crude Oil in the international market, profligate spending, and white-elephant projects executed with little attention to financial and schedule discipline, and outright theft of state resources. The states, then as now, were heavily dependent on the tempting but unreliable income from Nigeria’s Oil export, which experiences cyclical glut and price fluctuations with the boom-and-bust cycle of the world economy, a systemic problem only occasionally ameliorated when the shock of war jacks up Oil prices in key oil supply markets.

Ironically, it was MuhammaduBuhari, (President of the APC-led Federal Government), then a serving army General who led the military coup that swept away the foundering democratic regime of President ShehuShagari on the 31st of December, 1983, to the relief of many Nigerians who were tired of the politicians and economic difficulties they plunged the country into. We have returned to that terrible past of insolvency and economic stagnation, with some distinct differences.

The country’s population has more than doubled from 68million people in 1985 to 174million today, while the number of states has also almost doubled as if on a cue. Nigeria is now unique in being perhaps the most over-governed but under-administered territories in the world where most of the wealth is arrested from circulation or cornered by officials past and present, leaving over 50% of the sprawling country’s population illiterate, and over 70% of the population in grinding poverty and governments inefficient and the society in decay. And the country has not managed to construct a viable economic foundation since the 1982/83 crash.

Of the twenty three State governments affected by the salary crisis, Governor Aregbesola’s administration has been singled out for a most severe attention about which Ogbeni (as he is fondly called), has agonised in public and in private. The crisis and its virtual grounding of the State’s economy and the resulting harsh situation have left an overwhelming number of government pay-dependent families without alternative income in serious financial and emotional distress.

The strong feelings brought on by months of waiting for salaries the payment of which government workers had long taken for granted has soured the governor’s once excellent relations with labour in the state; however, the generality of the citizenry has shown understanding for Aregbesola’s predicament and still support him. All that will help now is rescue by every means available.

No argument, no matter how logical, will assuage the strong feelings of workers who find themselves stranded and helpless ‘for no fault of theirs’. The Federal government’s immediate financial rescue can forestallturning workers’ frustration into open antagonism, the possibility ofsuch an outcome is being constantly explored by the OsunPDP‘s warlord politicians who are stoking civil conflict with all manners of provocative publications and discredited allegations.

The situation has created a feasting frenzy for faceless hack writers, paid jobbers and ‘critics’ of Governor Aregbesola who churn out damning commentary based on inaccurate data and ill-educated, and coloured observations about the State government’s policies and thestate of things in OsunAregbesola’s often brilliant and biting insights on the political-economic state of Nigeria and his hard extempore jibes unsettle many without a doubt, and they want a pound of his flesh.

Some of the anti-Aregbe opinionates may benefit from informed responses so that the reading public is not misled by the critics’ biases. We are in a season when contract writers resurrect once dead journals for tempting profits in the spirit of capitalistic amoral adventurism, when the sworn enemies of labour and do-gooders primed in the art of exploitation of the disadvantaged swear by mammon that they love the Osun government workers more than Ogbeni, because of this salary palaver.

One reason that Aregbe has been singled out for this hash treatment is because he is seen as the arrow-head of the ‘APC Change Movement’. I ask the critics to not forget thatthe salary payment default contagion actually involves twenty three state governments or nearly two-thirds of the States, as well as the Federal Government of Nigeria, and more States will likely follow unless some drastic measures are taken now to increase available resources, expand government’s revenue base, cut wages, or lay-off workers, or do all four. I shall argue here for the option of shifting or transfer of labour to sectors where they are most needed.

All of these four actions may in fact be needed to get States out of the logjam. It should be borne in mind that Nigeria is a free enterprise mixed economy, and no question about it, at some point we must take that bitter pill.

The wide-spread nature of the salary default tells us that something fundamental is amiss; it is not enough to make a bogeyman out ofAregbesola, whose strength of character and uncommon political vision and coherent theory of governance are only matched in this dispensation by another Comrade, Adams Oshiomhole, Governor of Edo, with some distinct differences. This is not a coincidence but the result of their backgrounds, deep self-learning and immersion for decades in practical matters of delivering public goods. This is what informs the level of social consciousness and astuteness noticeable in their governance styles and their ability to mobilize public opinion with ease. These are the formidable huddles that desperadoes who want to bring Aregbe down face. It is an aberration to pretend to govern a people without passion or a coherent theory. (I shall come back to this point later).

Causes of the 2015 salary default backlog in Osun

•Drastic drop in funds allocated to States from the FederationAccounts

•Direct impact of the 2011 across-the-board pay rise for Government workers

•Large investments in economic infrastructure and social services

•Low IGR

•Effects of the brutal 2014 Osun Governorship electioneering

All of the above factors have combined to create the backlog of unpaid salaries and the general lack of development in most of Nigeria’s states. Aregbesola, easily one of the most communicative State governors in Nigeria, has taken the pain to explain over and over again that the seeds of today’s problem were sown by the astronomic rise in the wage bill due to the compulsory implementation of the new minimum wage set by the federal government in January, 2011, barely two months intohis administration. Osun government employees had insisted at the time on an across-the-board wage increase to reflect the new N18, 000minimum wage, and to drive home their demand theyembarked on a crippling strike action that lasted for several months.

The new government of Aregbesola, compelled to accede to the across-the-board pay rise had lamented that the increase meant that its financial burden rose by three hundred per cent (from N1.4billion to N3.5billion per month!) and that this was unsustainable and would have consequences sometime in the future for the state’s development. But nobody listened or took him seriously.

Late in 2013, there was a sudden drop in funds allocated to the State from Federation Accounts beyond all rational expectationswith the situation becoming worse in 2014.But Nigeria earned $92.752b as excess crude revenue from January to December 2014 (from crude oil sold above the Government’s budget reference price of $65 per barrel),a contradiction of the reason for the drop in allocation.

The cut in allocation made it virtually impossible to fund or sustain government’s commitments. Another factor is the relatively low level of internally generated revenue of the State government, which had actually doubled from N600million in 2011 to N1.2billion per month in 2013. It should be noted that Aregbesola was elected with a mandate to implement major social and infrastructural change in the State as enunciated his green book- “My Pact with the People of Osun” and was duty-bound to fulfill this mandate in best interest of the State.

Aregbesola’s Osun development blueprint and strategy

The Aregbesola administration came in with an Agenda styled the Six-Point Integral Action Plan designed to banish poverty, unemployment and hunger, and restore communal peace and progress and finally to promote functional education as the bases upon which to build a thriving society in Osun.

Bearing in mind that without a strategic initiative to increase its limited IGR,Osun would remain a rural backwater state continuing along the well-worn path of arrested its development, government embarked on a major change project. This involved new infrastructure at various levels, agricultural development and provision of social services and employment generation as the means of building a viable alternative economic base in Osun in place of going cap in hand to Abuja every month.

With the understanding that providing an attractive environment and the right tools for human capacity development will aid productivity improvement, the Aregbesola government pursued key projects and programmeswith three to five-year horizons toward this end.

These have laid astrong foundation for sustainable development in Osun, a notable departurefrom the entrenched preference for short-term goals and high recurrent expenditure of the past.Of course, major infrastructure projects absorb a lot of finance and they do not yield direct revenue to the state’s coffers in the short term, but they impact economic activities far into the future by attracting investors to the state.

A state enjoys a sub-sovereign status as a going concern with longevity, like a nation, and it makes sense to embark on infrastructure development early because inflation is ever on the move, and if one delays, project cost doubles within eight years with inflation at 10% per annum; time makes all the difference.

The quality of infrastructure and efficiency of the services it renders are the keys to economic development and growth, and through their multiplier and knock-on effects businesses will thrive and government’s tax revenue will grow.

The bitterly fought August 9th 2014 Osun governorship elections

Another factor in the financial crisis in the State was the bitterly fought governorship elections and the strains of campaign expenditure in the face of low level state revenue. It was widely reported that PDP in its determination to wrest power by all means from APC in Osun pumped some N15billion into the elections, giving free Kerosene, Rice and cash for votes. Fifteen billion naira is equivalent to five months’ revenue for the State, and this is approximately the amount which had been cut from the state’s federal allocation between January and July in the months preceding the elections! One can imagine the financial demand that a meaningful, if asymmetrical response to this kind of challenge would have imposed on the APC government. The impractical alternative of folding the arms and resigning to fate in the face of the desperate and overawing onslaught by the irresponsible Osun PDP and the PDP Federal Government could not even be contemplated by a seriousAPC government. Ironically, the group of electorates most courted by the PDP during the electioneeringwasgovernment workers and some had gladly lapped up PDP’S inducement largesse – the consequence of which is today’s predicament for all. PDP had believed that it could exploit workers’ grievances to thwartAregbesola’s re-election as was done to Chief BisiAkande’s second-term election bid in 2003. For this reason, the solution to the salary crisis must include a campaign funds reform, eradication of pervasive poverty, abhorring greed and opportunism (andembracing ethical maturity) on the part of the citizenry so as to prevent the corrupt use of money infuture elections.

To survive,the states must face down their wages overburden

Governor Aregbesola had argued strongly back in 2011 that salaries could not be uniform across the country in a Federation, since no two states had the same quantum of resources or cost of living.

He also argued that salaries should not be adjusted across the board in tandem with the new minimum wagesince doing so would increase the gap between the poorest paid and the highest paid, thus eroding the intent of the pay rise and leading the State into insolvency and as well as stalling the its development projects.

During the emotionally-heated debate on the effects of implementing the new minimum wage by the state, Governor Aregbesola in presenting the difficult choices before the new government and people of the state had made it clear to the Unions that if workers’ emoluments outstripped available revenue, government would have no choice than to retrench workers since it could not borrow perpetually just to pay salaries, whilst neglecting the core reason for having a government.

It was noted that State’s revenue could not fully augment the new wage bill if there was a shortfall in federal allocation. Thus, assuaging workers’ demands for across-the-board wage rise by spending all of the state’s earnings on emoluments means leaving nothing for the future, and trusting the future to chance,postponing the evil day.

The governor had also reminded all back then to bear in mind that the Federal allocation to the state was meant for all of the state’s 3.2million residents (now 3.5million), and not the exclusive entitlement of the 40,000 or so State employees and political appointees. This was not a popular position to take at the time, but it was, and still is the plain truth.It was decided instead to work harder to generate more internal revenue for the State, until it could not cope in the months before the August 9th, 2014 governorship elections, and ever since, things have remained difficult.

the euphoria of better pay for as long as it lasted from 2011 to 2013, but it was not long after that the Federation accounts allocation to Osun dropped dramatically from a high of N5billion (Five billion naira) in 2012, to as low as N400m (Four hundred million naira) per month in April 2015. With this, the salary crisis had become an emergency: workers could no longer be paid, and the banks which had been extending credit to government to bridge the ever-widening gap in its obligations stopped extending credit to the State. This effectively brought all activities, including on-going capital projects in the state to a halt. As things stand now, the State’s entire Federal Allocation is exclusively for the benefit of government and its workers;we are operating an unsustainable welfare state that will sooner anger the excluded 98% of the population who fend for themselves. The States and Federal governments owe collectively close to a trillion naira debts for salaries, pensions, bank charges, contractors’ bills, etc without payment of which their economies will remain in a state of paralysis. The injection of cash from the Public Sector through payment of workers’ wages and contractors’ bills provides disposable income that translates intoincome for businesses, traders, transporters, artisans, food vendors, etc, and tax revenue for government. The absence from circulation of this important cash for over six months is deeply felt in the local economy. The cash –flow of a modern State ought not to be so tied to one risky source; this is not good for the future of labour, government or businesses.

UNDERLYING REASON FOR STATES’ LOW IGR AND FEDERAL DEPENDENCY STATUS

The underlying conditions that triggered 2014/2015 salary crisis are a repeat of the conditions leading up to Nigeria’s economic disaster of 1982 because we have not taken to heart the lessons from that era. Like the federal government, most of the States failed to anticipate and prepare themselves to cope with the scale of the financial down-turn again this time because we found ourselves somewhat insulated from the 2008 financial melt-down in the leading industrial economies. Nigeria’s governments after the First Republic have been propped up with Oil income and government organs have been multiplying like mushrooms in theforest and in effect loss-making ventures where budgets reflect neither true costs nor benefits for the citizens.The inability of Nigeria’s dependent States to generate an impactful level of internal revenue is rooted in the absence of a genuine local economy based on industries that are not tied to Government’s Oil revenue and the importation syndrome. Industry is the biggest source of IGR in a normal developing economy.Nigeria’s so-called neo-liberal macro-economic policy centred on importation of foreign goods (in effect exporting Nigerianjobs abroad), and entrenchment of inefficient municipal services, corruption, etc, are all leading to de-industrialization and ever deeperdependency and underdevelopment. This is the result of Nigeria’s so-called development strategy: import substitution turned to import dependency and trickle-down development. If Nigeria’s fortune is to change for the better, this recession gives us the opportunity to confront the realities of our weak and shallow economy. States’ lack of sizeable internal revenue is an indictment of Nigeria’s lopsided federalism whereby the states are mere adjuncts incapable of making any fundamental changes to macro-economic policy, and this makes both State and Federal Governments weak and vulnerable to manipulation by foreign interests. The states are guilty of fickleness, juvenile dependency behaviour and lack of creativity, intuitive initiative and the discipline to follow through good ideas for the longer term benefit of their people because of bad politics- the right things never get done out of fear of losing an election, an all-too-real fear. The great diversity of Nigerian States, cultures and climatic conditions, the bases of complementarity and means of positive competition, two critical ingredients for national economic virility and success have remained unharnessed. This makes Nigeria hostage to a neo-colonial and subordinate mindset of waiting for ‘ideas from abroad’ in a world of developmental competition anchored by a strong sense of national identity, initiative and creativity.

It is time to formulate a thorough-going economic strategy for the country and its component regions with which we can build without further delay a lasting foundation for a vibrant economy and finally change the culture of entitlement and sharing of booty that has become ‘Public Service’ in Nigeria. For example, why should Federal allocation be for payment of government salaries? Federal allocation belongs to the entire population of a state and should be invested primarily in capital formation projects and activities, such as critical infrastructure and direct business opportunities that enhance growth, create jobs and expand revenue), thus enabling the economy of a state to grow. When contractors handling visible construction works that help to create a future for the children of today’s government workers don’t get paid, their workers don’t get paid. Let us treat all workers equally, government and contractors’. A State’s government’s workforce should be paid from the state’s internally generated revenue, and thisshould in turn determine the size of the workforce. No business employs more workers than it can reasonably pay from its earnings, not from donations. We are not in a war-torn zone where disruption of normal life makes charitable donations the only lifeline available. It should be mandatory for government to pay its employees based on performance as it is done in the rest of the economy,rather than continue in the indulgence that is ruining many lives unknown to most of them.

The high cost of generating alternative power with diesel-electric sets has forced many manufacturing companies to move their operations outside of Nigeria while manufactured goods are smuggled in. It is such that even IT and mobile telephone service companies touted as models of growth now prefer to locate their core activities in territories with dependable and cheap power supply. Another serious problem is extortion and collusion by government agents and officials who facilitate the exporting of capital that is badly needed for development at home. The number of manufacturing companies in an economy that is the biggest consumer of imported goods in Africa is not unexpectedly small for all these reasons. Until there is a change from this economic policy and the negative operating environment, Nigerian states will continue to generate very low levels of IGR and attract only a handful of desperate ‘businessmen’, not genuine investors and manufacturers. A trickle-down economy works like the filter blocking the passage of the solidsin a stream (such as targeted investmentsin resource utility maximization and talent development) the building blocks of a production and manufacturing economy; this means that the pivot on which our IGR hope hingeswill be built only when we have a different kind of development policy.States’ IGR breakdown shows that they are dictated by Nigeria’s importation-centred economic policy which kills industries and bloats up the bureaucracy- the reasons why the States are unable to grow their IGR substantially. The absence of industries has meant that most of the states depend on Government workers’ PAYE tax for fully 50% of their IGR, a great irony whose meaning is better understood now that government is unable to pay its workers. It is an absurd kind of economy. Other sources such as licensing fees (vehicles, radio, TV, etc), real estate land charges, tenement rates, markets rates and rents, and the least of these, Private Sector small businesses’ taxes, (including PAYE) in a healthy and diverse economy should be contributing at least 60% of the IGR.A few states Lagos, Anambra and Osunhave managed to invest in construction and industrial manufacturing ventures. Anambra has no debts primarily because the state under Governor Peter Obi failed to embark on any long-term vision-driven project, typical of a former banker who fearsto take the pill they shove down the throat of borrowers. But the future will come sooner and Anambra will find itself ill-prepared to deal with its infrastructural bottlenecks.Infrastructure-led development, investing in Agriculture,industrial entrepreneurship and human capital development and tools, not patching up what we have today, are the keys to long-term competitiveness.

CONFRONTING THE REALITIES OF NIGERIA’S WEAK AND SHALLOW ECONOMY

‘A weak system breeds a weak ethos and makes a cynical society’

Nigeria’s economy is truly an irrational one. It is a fact that corporations are more efficient than countries, and it is important to know why. The main reason is focus on objectives, resource concentration, efficient organization design, lean management, more hands at the coal face, systems, processes, standards, effective mission controls, performance management, fairness to all, caring for their greatest assets (human capital), etc. Let us have some perspective on Nigeria’s true status in the world. The world’s biggest company is a retailer(Wal-Mart)operates in 11,495 locationsand employing 2.2million people it earned revenue of $486billion in 2014, meaning that each employee contributed or (is worth) $1.434million. Toyota, the world’s biggest manufacturer employs 338,875workers and earned revenue of $252billionin 2014, meaning each employee contributed (or is worth) $743, 637. These corporations have run their businesses profitably for generations and they are growing stronger. These businesses spend no more than 15 to 20% of their revenue on administration and you can see the work done, compare this to Nigerian governments that spend 70% of their budgets on salaries and nobody can point to work done anywhere!The total output of Nigeria’s 176million peoplewith‘rebased’ 2014 GDP is $594billion dollars, meaning each Nigerian contributed (or is worth) not more than $3, 375 or N675, 000. If you ask the average Nigerian,that is ‘big money’ and he/she will gladly ask to be given that N675, 000 as their share, now!This is really the way we are and itmeans thatany Nigerian, no matter how ‘big’ we may consider him/her to be,is seen in the eyes of the world to be worth no more than just that. And it is one reason the world treats us shabbily. We produce next to nothingbuthave a high taste for the goods that others produce and we import, if possible, steal them. Our dependency is both external and internal, for example, most southern States depend on the northern States for at least 50 per cent of their food consumption. We import and burn N3.5trillion on diesel and petrol for standby generators and automotive cars, trucks and trains annually, whilst also flaring all the gas we could have used to generate the electricity needed to save ourselves from this wastage. Besides the capital cost of generator imports, self-generated power costs ten times as much as grid power! It is like buying one item and paying for ten without knowing. This way of life fuels inflation, extortion, ever rising demand for wages by the unions, pilfering, treasury lifting and all manners of fraud just to ‘meet up’, and everybody puts everyone else they can under pressure. It has institutionalized wickedness as the way of life in Nigeria. In the midst of all this the main reason we have government is forgotten: the security and welfare of the citizens (i.e. empowerment to grow and prosper in safety and security). The States and Local Governments simply complete the circle of Nigeria’s irrational economy.

Those who work for our governments (from the President, State Governors, Senators, Representatives, Justices of the Supreme, High and Low Courts at the Federal, State or Local Governments), are addicted to this system of guaranteed personal income, whether work gets done or not, relevant quality or not, and efficient or not. It has created a State in name but not in character. Also common to the state and federal civil services is the absence of a genuine performance management system, meaning that workers get paid whether they perform and deliver results or not, because there are no performance standards (tasks and targets, qualitative and quantitative) to hold workers up against. Yet there is an annual performance appraisal system which is merely a bluster and blackmail instrument. Everybody scores 90% and above!

Many activities of government lack rigorous monitoring and control because of a cultivated mind-set that prevails among government employees as State dependents that live on the assumption that a seat is all it takes to own the budget and one’s monthly pay is assured without a question. It has also cultivated a cynical citizenry who believe that those inside our governments are simply salting away money, and on this account do not trust them.

But we have progressed somewhat: from reckless sharing of money without any development worth its name to overleveraging what little there is because there is not enough left after salaries. This leads to heavy indebtedness to local contractors on account of which many projects are executed in fits and starts with consequent price escalation from accumulated interest on bank loans, the cost of rework of projects damaged by rains such as unprotected earthworks, vandalism and the effect of inflation on prices. This situation calls for careful selection and balancing of project portfolios and tightly disciplined cost and schedule management that is not a strength of government.

OSUN REVENUE: FACTS AND FICTION

Between November 2010 and December 2014, Osun received a total statutory allocation of N108.3billion, and if we add Osun’s receipts from January to April 2015 of N7.04billion, this makes a total of N115.34billion. Osun expenditure on salaries alone from November 2010 to December 2014 was N120.4billion. This left the state with a deficit of N12billion. If we add other emoluments, Osun’s total recurrent expenditure comes to N206billion, compared to its statutory allocation of N108.3billion. If we add other accruals from Abuja, the grand total of all receipts from Abuja is N204billion. Yet a newspaper published the unverified claim made by the politically interested former Head of Service of Osun and candidate of SDP at the last governorship election that Osun received “over N350billion” in federal allocation since Aregbesola’s inception as governor! He also made other unverified allegations to the effect that N436billion in statutory allocation was made to Osun’s thirty Local Governments in the same period. To put things into perspective, in 2011, allocation from Federation Account to Osun was an average of N4billion per month, this level held steady until it fell to N2.6billion in July 2013, from when it began a downward slide to N466million in April 2015! At first the downward slide was thought to be temporary, but alas, it became a collapse! Osun’s internal revenue grew remarkably from N600million in 2011 to a peak of N1.6billion in 2013 as a result of Government’s revenue drive but it is not sufficient to meet its obligations to the citizens. When Aregbesola mounted the saddle on November 26th, 2010, the total monthly salaries and emoluments bill was N1.4billion, (including N200million for pensions). In 2015 Osun workers’ emolument was N3.6billion, and Pensions: N530million, and since workers’ salaries are adjusted every six months these will jump up to N4billion in December! In January 2015, net statutory allocation to Osun was N1.25billion; February N1.12b; March N624m; April N466m. If we add to these other accruals, such as VAT, SURE-P, Excess Crude, Exchange Rate differential, total allocation for January is N1.99billion; February: N2.05b; March: N1.61b; April: N1.39b. About N700million is deducted for repayment of Osun’s loan liability every month. However, from July 2013, just as the IGR milestone achievement was being commended, there was a sharp drop in federally allocated funds to Osun; this drop became very pronounced from January 2014. With the knowledge that the longer one delays, inflation escalates project cost and renders a project less effective and less attractive, contracts for various major projects had been awarded in earnest in 2011 by the government based on its long-term finance plan and scenarios. There is also the matter of mass exit of older experienced staff at the end of 2012 in order to beat the deadline for the introduction of the mandatory contributory pension scheme (PENCOM) that was to take effect from January 2013, to replace the traditional government pension payment system. This mass exit has also led to a big rise in the State’s commitment to payment of gratuities and pensions to historically high levels and added to the financial shocks the state is contending with. New workers recruited to fill the vacancies created by the retiring staff lack the experience to deal with issues that call for systemic knowledge and this has also created some challenges.

LABOUR AND AREGBESOLA’S ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT STRATEGY

Nigeria is a country at the ‘food stage’ of development and badly in need of industries that produce what people need and want to pay for: food, clothing, consumer goods needs, including shelter and household needs, that’s where surplus labour should be shifted to as rapidly as we can. These cannot be provided by the multiplication of layers of government bureaucratic jobs as we have been doing until now. It will take rare courage on the part of the governors to make the initially disruptive shift of labour to productive economic activities where many hands are needed to wean Nigeria from the consumption of imported goods. With the understanding that people always move where the money is, it should be possible with some competitive inducement to persuade the state’s labour force to make the transition to productive areaswhere more hands are needed to help turn around the state’s fortune.I believe that this step will prove to be a blessing in a couple of years to many. Agricultural production and processing, and production of goods currently being imported will absorb hundreds of thousands of workers (more than the State government’s current labour force), relieving the State of its debt burden of salaries for sinecure jobs. Labour, Capital and Technology must move to the markets where the needs and opportunities are, or atrophy.The 2015 salary crisis, a repeat of the 1982/83 experience is an object lesson by first-hand experience that the neo-colonial state was not designed to bring about sustainable development and cannot always pay its workers. Only a productive and vibrant economy has such a chance in today’s world of free enterprise mixed economy and competition, we owe it to ourselves to create one; and the earlier, the better. This means that the State and Federal governments must make major macro-economic policy changes: ban or place prohibitive tariff and administrative, regulatory restrictions or huddles on imported items that can be produced in Nigeria from the land and natural resources. Federal and State governments should enable ventures processing into finished goods and enforce standards for local consumption and support demand and market supply chain. This will grow the States’ IGR through a wider and more realistic tax net.

AREGBESOLA’s VISION, ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT STRATEGY AND PROJECTS

Anyone who came to Osun before the advent of Aregbesolain 2010 will have taken it for granted that it is a prototype rural state where everythingshould look like it wasin mediaeval times. It was, and still is a place where opinions are strong and tend to be fixed and the people are very politically astute. Aregbesola inherited a State of sprawling rust, dust, decay and chaos, where there were no social services or institutions worth its name to talk about, and to cap it all, with an empty treasury and a mountain of debts for projects with little economic foundation or possibility of positive returns. This is the tradition of Nigerian governance for which our misbegotten elites are to blame. The people copy whatever the elites do.

From the beginning, Governor Aregbesola demonstrated an uncommon and penetrating insight into the condition of Osun, the economy, the land and the people as shown by his in-depth and engaging discourses and legendary consultations with people. On the bases of these, he came up with an intuitive strategy and intelligent and inclusive solutions to issues, always taking the long view of the development of Osun, never held down by the pedestrian limitations. Aregbesola is audacious and not a novice when it comes to state governance and administration, he has been deliberately cautious in the handling of issues affecting various political interests and constituencies in the state whilst keeping his gaze fixed on the long-term objective: making Osun the number one State in Nigeria in all important indices of development, human, social and economic. While acknowledging his predecessors in office, especially the highly disciplined and irrepressible Chief AdebisiAkande, he has been careful and strategic in his selection of projects, the likes of which had never been attempted in the state while implementing his vision for a great State. His first project was to work to change the mindset of the people and how the state was perceived.He did this by creating a new brand identity-IpinleOmoluabi, the State of Osun, Nigeria. He next faced the thorny issue of youth unemployment and disorienatation by setting up the OYES (Osun Youth Empowerment Scheme), a scheme that has drawn many curious delegations to visit the state. OYES engaged 40,000 youths in the first four –year term of Aregbesola. OYES was recommended for adoption/adapataion as a model job creation and youth enegagement scheme by the World Bank who styled theirs YESO.Ogbeni as he is fondly called came up with his well-publicised Five –Point Integral Action Plan for the total transformation from mediaeval city to a modern society, a hub of Commerce, Industry, Culture and Tourism. He pioneered several unique and far-reaching programmes and projects, like the super highways from Gbogan junction to Osogbo, Osogbo-Ila-Odo, the East Bypass (Oni Aderemi Road), and the MoshoodAbiola Airport, besides over 600kilometres of asphaltic roads Roads (within townships, intercity and inter-state), (fifteen kilometers in every town and Local Government), besides the special attention to Osogbo. The remodeling of the Osogbo Railway Station and the rail corridor into a beautiful avenue is now noticeable and it triggered a directive by President Jonathan’s government to the Nigerian Railway Corporation to beautify the Rail terminuses across the country.

Osun has embarked on a number of far-reaching economic and social infrastructure projects and programmes, some of which have received international and local acclaim and have been adopted as national programmes by the APC Federal government of President Buhari because of their high impact multiplier effects and potentials. For example the O’Meals Elementary School free lunch programme has raised primary school enrolment in Osun to the highest level in Nigeria, developed commercial scale food vendors and created a vibrant agriculture and agro-processing sector in the state. These social change programmes include: Osun Youth Empowerment Scheme (OYES), the community service volunteer scheme that has trained 40,000 youths in various skills and re-oriented them toward rendering selfless service. Others are Schools infrastructure reconstruction and upgrade, O’Meals Elementary Schools’ Lunch and Health programme, Opon Imo (Computer Tablet), Omoluabi Scholar buses, the schools’ uniform project that has now attracted industrial tailoring a major growth industry to the state, schools calisthenics programme (teaching pupils orderly behaviour, organization, situation awareness, team work and coordination). He invested the state’s resources in rural economic infrastructures: extension of electricity and roads to many rural farming communities, to make the industrialization of the rural economy possible in a few years through the commercialization of Agriculture. He created countless innovative and far-reachingprogrammes in Agriculture for farmers for livestock breeding and multiplication: O, Bops (broiler), O’Fops (Fish), O’Beef, O’Honey, and for arable farmers, all targeting the Schools feeding programme. Not to be ignored are the new security infrastructure, and social services introduced in the state: network of Police Patrol, armoured protective vehicles located near Banks and strategic spots, emergency ambulance service, township door-to-door garbage collection service, channelization and de-silting of streams and rivers that has put an end to perennial flood disasters, and environmental beautification projects visible in Osogbo and the Ibadan-Ilesa Expressway.

The leveraging of state funds for financing major capital projects has enabled some States to raise long-term funds, in particular, bonds from the capital market for major infrastructure, such as Dual Carriage ways, flyover bridges, etc. These projects are expected to stimulate economic activities and trigger businesses to invest in the states, and increase State revenue from taxes and levies paid by businesses from which the state will pay back the long-term funds (bonds) in reasonable time. One impact of Aregbesola’s developmental efforts is the jump in the population of Osun 3.2m in 2010 to 3.6m in 2014.

Osun now needs a deluge of direct investments in key commercial, industrial, agro-processing, mining and tourism in order to begin to reap the benefits of Aregbe’s first term investments as they get completed one after the other over in the months ahead.Osun has a great potential in Tourism because of its history, culture, abundance of vibrant community festivals and nature sites that draw hundreds of thousands of people even with little or no publicity and certainly few facilities, if any. Before the immediate past Federal government wrecked the security of the country and its economy to boot, Osun had been a major internal educational tourist state attracting pupils from as far away as the Niger Delta and the Eastern part of Nigeria; the fair number of highly reputed private Secondary schools in the state attests to this fact. Today, Osun has been restored to one of Nigeria’s most peaceful and most secure states by Aregbesola’s regime. Thus investments in Schools, health facilities, roads agricultures and in an International Airport are coherent and fore-sighted initiatives designed to complement and enhance the State’s endowments. Soon investors, businessmen and tourists will begin to respond positively to these developmental strides. It is called infrastructure, human capital and services-led development.

It has been argued by some that a number of these projects are sheer ego trip but at the bottom, some of it is sound economics. Inflation of course, will double the cost of any project in Nigeria in less than eight years, so the earlier you embark on a key economic or social infrastructure project in Nigeria, the better you are. The only proviso is that it must be able to attract and secure economic returns on the invested funds over time. Of course, uncompleted projects do not give people any beneficial service but they can create a whole cascade of troubles.

We are in a state of economic emergency in Nigeria today precisely because nobody had bothered to create an alternative economy based on regional comparative advantage and complementarities since the last massive economic down –turn that lasted from 1982-1999. We have no choice but to wean ourselves (politicians, importers, retirees, workers, unemployed and students) from the psychosis of the dependent economy and the juvenile mindset and disposition it has engendered in Nigerians. The world will not wait for us and they don’t owe us a meal.

To the credit of RaufAregbesola who inherited a State deep into debt overhang from projects of doubtful economic or social value for a hinterland state (five stadia at a go!), given Osun’s lack of a meaningful economy. He worked out or engineered a financing strategy that enabled the state to embark on major game-changing and face-changing projects for Osun, that had been marooned in rural obscurity where even its principal city, Osogbo was simply a rustic backwater glorified with the label of State Capital, had nothing capital about it and little trace of Stately existence. As far as some cynical citizens who work for government are concerned, as long as money can be found to pay salaries the state can remain in this depressed condition for ever. Everybody takes it for granted that their grown-up children and wards must go to Lagos or travel abroad as economic refugees elsewhere and then come back home to build houses they will live in for a few days in a year while on holiday. Resignation and self-condemnation to hopelessness in the face of this level of decay tells us more about ourselves than would anything else. The people who constantly undermine their best this way have no self-confidence and I doubt that God will help such.

Although Aregbesola’s physical infrastructure projects are yet to be completed, even his worst critics give him credit for daring to transform the state from its mediaeval look to a worthy place in the modern world. He has been criticized for looking too far ahead in his frenzied drive to secure for the state a future commensurate with its historical and cultural potential. His massive and well-targeted infrastructural change projects have been carefully prioritized to make the desired impact. Beginning with roads in the most populous residential areas of nine major towns and cities of Osun and its thirty Local Government headquarters, the State Government did 10 kilolmetres of high standard asphalted roads with reinforced concrete drains and road markings to enhance safety, the LGAs also did 5kilometres of roads to a similar standard, to give the entire territory a total of 295 roads and the state at least 450kilometres of good roads. At the same time, he embarked on rural access roads (non-asphalted) totaling about 250 kilometres with good drainage to ensure that farmers have access to farms and ease evacuation of produce to the markets. He has also constructed over 60 brand new schools to a standard that only the best Private Schools have and offered free lunch to elementary school pupils attract and to keep them focused on their future.

Aregbesola has been implementing his big and bold vision for Osunelucidated in the green book ‘My Pact with the People of Osun’and he has never hidden the fact that a state of well-being for all citizens that he has envisioned can be made possible only through the devotion of the greater part of the resources of the country to empowerment of the citizenry for the development of a viable economic base and a positive and vibrant societal ethos. As the widespread problem of state insolvency has revealed, we have only multiplied the problems of thirty two years ago, and have found no solutions. Except for Lagos (and for exceptional reasons), our thirty six State governments are infantile. The Stateseach with its Civil Service executive bureaucracy, legislative and judicial arms, and a total of 774 Local Government administrations, and Federal government altogether employ about four million workers between them and gulp down enormous resources but with none of them, Federal, State or Local Government having any viable internal economic activities to turn to for succor. They are the results of a presumptuous, even reckless convenience, naïve and adolescent mindset, not of necessity.This situation calls for a fundamental review of the entire gamut of the Nigerian State, its philosophy, activities and departments to align them with what ought to be the essence of a modern independent state- empowerment of the people as the source of strength of the State. A population of 176million people divided into 774 Local Government Areas works out as an average of 225,000 persons per LGA per State.The question has been asked time without number: Do we really need to have 36 State governments, 36 Houses of Assembly, 36 Arms of the Judiciary and 36 Civil Service bureaucracies and Federal government as large as we have today? Each one of these competes for the right to salaries and other emoluments and pensions that cannot be rationalized on the basis of productive output, or available resources.An apt question to ask is what does each member produce? How do they live and what do they really wish their lives to be like, say in 5, 10, 15 or 20 years compared to what it was twenty or thirty years ago? Collective answers to these questions should be formulated into Communal, Local Government Area, State and National Development Master Plans, (instituting a bottom-up approach to planning and entrenching a truly grass-roots democratic culture) which should become the reference document, (MOU or Social Compact)with each territory and people-thus setting an agenda that matches means-and- ends, sets the right priorityand addresses the core issues of politics and governance in each territory. It is from this Compact, based on the Master Plan for Local Community, Area and State that should be aggregated astheNational Development Plan from which Political Parties should derive their Manifestoes and Agenda for canvassing for the support of the electorate. This will provide the ultimate solution to the unsteady progress of the Nigerian state under Presidents, Governors and LGA Chair persons with widely different inspirations and motivations and bring an end to the culture of wastage, abandonment and frustration common in government. The proper role of Political Aspirants willbe that of mobilizers and leaders of the effort to implement society’s agreed and documented vision and skillful motivators and managers of the process of putting into effect the collective will. Ideally, our governments should operate like PLCs where the LGA Chairman, Governor and President are the CEOs and report to us the Shareholders yearly or twice yearly for evaluation of their performance score cards, based on the concrete tasks and targets we set for them. This is the crux of the matter and kind of thought thatAregbesola has consistently championed. It is the source of his good troubles for being an advocate of CHANGE!

‘The cut in allocation made it virtually impossible to fund or sustain government’s commitments. Another factor is the relatively low level of internally generated revenue of the State government, which had actually doubled from N600million in 2011 to N1.2billion per month in 2013’
- Abimbola Daniyan, Osogbo
13th July, 2015
July 15, 2015
Legitimacy of Political Science as a discipline in Nigeria

Text of a lecture delivered by Dr. Tunji Olaopa as Guest Speaker at the Department of Political Science, University of Ibadan’s Public Lecture and Post-lecture luncheon in honour of Prof Emeriti ‘Bayo Adekanye and John Ayoade held at the university.

Permit me to express my sentiments at being on this podium at this time in these words: if I say that I am profoundly honoured and humbled to be invited to make an intellectual statement by my mentors and founding fathers of the Department of Political Science, University of Ibadan, who also constitute the core of this assembly, then I would have simply made an understatement.

Having expressed that sentiment, I want to begin by deeply appreciating the organisers of today’s programme. My gratitude comes on two significant fronts. The first is that we are paying fundamental tribute to the personalities and achievements of two worthy avatars of political science scholarship in Nigeria. I am not sure if there is a precedent for this commendable gesture. I recognise the deep import of such gesture because I have made it the underlying principle for the series of newspaper articles I wrote to critically celebrate Nigerians who have confronted the Nigerian state and her national project in national proportions. I took that critical celebratory challenge from one of our own, the late Prof. Claude Ake, who lamented, in the foreword to my biography of Prof. Ojetunji Aboyade that Nigeria is a country which ‘yearns for heroes, acknowledge none and it devalues and derails those who could be.’ Today, it is commendable that we are unlearning Nigeria, and celebrating those who have impacted our lives in one way or the other.

And this takes me to the second point of my gratitude to the organisers of this programme. It is as if I have been brought back home to pay homage to the indefatigable dedication of those who sharpened the teeth of any scientific and analytical skills I can lay claim to today, especially in my reform campaign for a better and world-class public service in Nigeria. I began from this place, and these two old gentlemen played some defining roles in my theoretical maturation. I consider it a distinct privilege to be asked to speak at such an august occasion that honours two personifications of what political science used to be in Nigeria, and what it ought to return to as a matter of urgency.

As a last point, I desire that we observe a minute silence in honour of the late Professor Adekunle Amuwo who eventually succumbed to the pandemic anomie we are all struggling to make sense of.

Introduction

We lost Billy Dudley, then Claude Ake and Omo Omoruyi and lately Ali Mazrui and now Kunle Amuwo. The lesson is this: they all fought a good fight; but they were not done fighting, and scholarship need not bow to finitude. The battle is still raging, and the prospect of a worthy contribution by political science to the eventual victory is not looking too good. Nigeria has, since her independence in 1960, thrown political science scholarship in Nigeria some serious challenge—Boko Haram and insecurity, corruption, bad governance, abuse of power, poverty, dissonance, bad leadership, the list is endless.

I should know about all these because I have been engaged, for the past twenty five years or so, in the forefront of recalibrating a public service that is deeply challenged and requires massive reform to move forward as a valiant institution. The crisis of the civil service system in Nigeria is simply a reflection of the crisis of the Nigerian state in the dynamics of reinventing good governance.

The privilege of standing before you all today, and before these veterans of political analysis and confrontation with the Nigerian state, is that we can get down to serious heart-to-heart real talk about our collective responsibility as Nigerian political scholars. This is like a homecoming for me. But while I have been away, I have noticed all manners of intellectual morbidity with scholarship in Nigeria. In recent times, I have had to comment on philosophers, and on the humanities as well as the general state of the Nigerian educational system. Where we are now is precarious and troubling.

I carry a personal vision which I first got when I read Plato’s Republic in my pre-university days. That lesson is this: scholarship must be responsible. And specifically, according to Plato, until philosophers become kings or kings become philosophers, the task of social order will become impossible. Let us grant Plato his disciplinary pride. At least he sees the connection between his discipline and the salvation of Athens.

Getting admission into the political science department in 1981 was a defining moments for me. And I came in at a period when the department was in what we can call its heydays—all the big fish were present then: Essien-Udom, Peter Ekeh, Bayo Adekanye, John Ayoade, Larry Ekpebu, Busari Adebisi, Tunde Adeniran, Alex Gboyega, Augustus Adebayo, Femi Otubanjo. Fred Onyeoziri, Bayo Okunade, Kunle Amuwo, Adigun Agbaje, Egosa Osaghae, O. B. C. Nwolise, Jimi Adisa, Rotimi Suberu. These were the stars in my intellectual firmament at that time.

Civil-military relations resonated with us in those days from the energetic Professor Adekanye. Though the Shagari administration was in the saddle at the time, but the option of diarchy was in contention, and so, civil-military discourse was topical. So also were federalism and the role of the legislature which Professor Ayoade taught us.

As these two emeriti are celebrated today, it would be significant to reflect deeply on a discipline they have spent most of their life and intellectual energies nurturing. It has become a troubling pastime to worry about the general state of education in Nigeria. And this is because we all recognise the role that education plays in the harnessing and positioning of the human capital of any nation for worthwhile and composite development. The situation, it is sad to say, has further degenerated. It has now become imperative to commence another diagnosis from a disciplinary perspective. What do the disciplines need to do to assist in nation building? The concern for me has always been with my constituency, what I am calling the humanities and the social sciences (HSS). But today, we are forced to beam the searchlight of critical inquiry on our most immediate constituency—political science and its scholarship. Specifically, the question is: What is the state of political science in today’s Nigeria?

From then to now: Initial worries

Political science scholarship has been around for a while now. The two avatars we celebrate today are in the best of position to outline for us a critical historical excursus on the trajectory of events and circumstances that gave birth to this scholarship in Nigeria, and how it has evolved over time. Like most things “Nigerian”, it is likely that their narrative will end with much solemn shaking of their heads at what we have now compared with the high hopes we began with. I also have reasons to share in this unflattering assessment. This is because I was also part of the beginning, in a sense. As a student at both the undergraduate and postgraduate levels, I felt the pulse of the department’s energy when it was still at its highest. I was taught by the best, including our distinguished professor emeriti here today.

I remember the rigour and earnestness of spirit with which we were taught. Of course, it is only the perceptive hindsight that now reveals that the academic drill we had then wasn’t just the consequences of the whims of some academic sadists inflicting intellectual pains on a bunch of hapless students. There were two distinctive things about the period then. The first is what we can call a disciplinary framework of engaged political scholarship that had Professor Adekanye espousing civil-military relationship, Professor Ayoade taught federalism with a passion, Professor Osaghae was then beginning to work out the framework for his ethnicity and ethnic theory, Dr. Adebisi revealed the dynamics of international political economy structure within the centre-periphery configuration as imperialism, Professors Tunde Adeniran, Femi Otubanjo and Jimi Adisa took us through the labyrinth of international relations and strategic studies, the late Essien Essien-Udom was then one of the leading light in nationalist studies and pan-Africanism, Profs Alex Gboyega and Bayo Okunade and Augustus Adebayo introduced me to public administration. I also had other erudite scholars like, Profs. OBC Nwolise, Larry Ekpebu, Fred Onyeoziri, Kunle Amuwo and Adigun Agbaje who grounded us in research methodology, statistics and some dimensions of theory. I can definitely speak for the generation of those of us taught by these great teachers that we got the best they had to offer. They all knew what political science was capable of.

The second distinctive thing about my education in political science then was the robust cross fertilization of ideas in the entire faculty of the social sciences in which political science was not a mere onlooker. By its very nature, political scholarship is concerned with themes and subject matter—democracy, politics, political institutions, etc.—that are necessarily cross-disciplinary and embrace other social sciences and humanistic studies. This period was defined with collaborations across disciplines. Our experiences as students were refined by an active town and gown interaction that saw the likes of Ojetunji Aboyade returning regularly to the classroom with insights drawn from national development planning in the Central Planning Office in Lagos and the planning studies programme he ran with Akin Mabogunje. Those were the heady days of real scholarship!

But obviously, something has gone critically wrong.

It is our duty, as concerned stakeholders, to raise the stakes of our expectations about a discipline that has aided our intellectual development in more ways than we can appreciate. I am a true beneficiary of political science scholarship. I can boldly say that what I have been able to achieve in terms of the understanding and facilitation of the reform agenda for the Nigerian Civil Service were due largely to my early preparation in political analysis and methodological intervention. I left University of Ibadan at that time with an acute sense of the worth of institutions and institutional values, and how the Nigerian national project can be reinvented through institutional rehabilitation. So, I suppose I have a moral right to be concerned.

Why should we be worry about political science scholarship in Nigeria?

In the days leading to the just concluded general elections in Nigeria, one of the respected voices in political science scholarship in Nigeria, Prof. Ayo Olukotun wrote a piece in his celebrated column in the Punch newspaper. He titled it: “Elections: Where are our political scientists?” that article lamented not only the glaring invisibility of the political scientists in Nigeria on the national conversation about national development and progress, but also about the role of public intellectual in national discourse. His opening epigraph is instructive:

Public intellectuals attempt to widen and deepen the public discourse by adding further analysis and coming at issues in surprising or unexpected ways. There is a craving for that thoughtfulness which public intellectuals are able to provide.

Substitute ‘political scientists’ for ‘public intellectuals’, and you still get the same result. However, we are all in full retreat from an arena that ought to motivate our scholarship. Allow me to outline a specific dimension of my larger worries.

For a while now, as my recent newspaper articles reveal, I have been deeply troubled by the state of the humanities and social sciences, especially within the context of Nigeria’s development. I had called out philosophers and humanistic scholars on their responsibilities to the Nigerian project. It was only logical that I would sound the alarm on my own discipline. So, I took an interest in the Nigerian Political Science Association (NPSA). What better way to follow its progress than to access its website. I came away utterly disappointed. The NPSA website is totally out of date. You cannot even get an updated list of political science departments in Nigeria or the names and affiliations of political scientists! My first query is simple: Shouldn’t we judge the state of political science scholarship in Nigeria from the dearth of significant activities in NPSA? One of the scanty information the website reveals is that the NPSA executives themselves recognise that political science in a certain state. What is that state? Well, first, the website of its professional body is bare! Second, when was the last conference, how regular has it been and where are the concrete outputs and outcomes? What has happened to Studies in Politics and Society, the flagship journal of the association? Lastly, does NPSA have any hold on the generality of political science teachers and researchers in Nigeria (we do not even have the list of the various departments of political science or a database of political scientists in Nigeria)?

The larger point is that if the body that ought to oversee the affairs of the discipline of political science is comatose, what can we then say about the legitimacy of such a discipline? The NPSA is needed to coordinate the national relevance and focus of the discipline. Its absence could only imply that individual political scientists are thereby left to forge ahead alone in their specific intellectual development. And those who have any fundamental insights into the Nigerian predicament may just be backing against a stone wall. There is no concerted effort at influencing policies either on education generally or on specific issues. Individual political scientists speak alone, and are mostly ignored by that fact. As the disciplinary gatekeeper of the study of politics, it seems to me that NPSA has bowed finally to those morbid symptoms of national dysfunction it is meant to actively and proactively diagnose!

STEMming the tide: Between knowledge and power

The global educational awareness is focused right on the evolution of the STEM fields—science, technology, engineering and mathematics—as the engine of national development anywhere. The STEM revolution derived from the United States’ concern with the need not only for an integrated curriculum in education but also with its perceived lack of specialists for specialised tasks. These two concerns are understandable within the context of a nation striving to increase its development profile in a global world of economic and technological competitiveness. It has become so significant in the United States that it determines some aspect of its immigration policy and the issuance of visas.

The essence of STEM is to place a nation on the cutting edge of development through a sound educational programme that transforms learning into a serious human capital empowerment. However, the basis of STEM is fundamentally flawed. It considered that development is only possible through the coordinated expression and application of the four STEM disciplines. But the significant lesson to draw from this STEM discourse is the consequences of the relationship between knowledge and power. In other words, knowledge is a singular sine qua non for prodigious progress anywhere. And the addition to this truism is that the type of knowledge one chooses also determine the type of development path one is likely to take, and the kind of consequences that will result. When Prometheus decided to steal fire from the heavens and bring it down to earth, humans were not aware of what that kind of gift would do to them; when Adam and Eve got the knowledge of good and evil, they didn’t know it will lead them out of the blissful Garden of Eden. The search for knowledge empowers. But we need to beware the kind of power we desire.

The underlying philosophy behind the STEM curriculum is the assumption that the study of nature is more worthwhile that the study of human nature. It is this distinction that explains the ever growing divide between the sciences and the humanities and social sciences. Yet, the knowledge that can be derived from studying nature cannot be empowering if it fails to enlighten us about the human condition. Knowledge for knowledge sake cannot translate to power unless it enables us to know ourselves as human beings and how we can positively translate such knowledge to our own well-being.

July 3, 2015
‘How Southwest was shortchanged in SURE-P projects’

Former Chairman, Ekiti State Special Intervention and Empowerment Programme (SIEP) Committee, a portion of the state subsidiary Reinvestment and Empowerment Programme, Chief Samuel Bandele Falegan, in a letter to former President Goodluck Jonathan and Vice President Namadi Sambo in January last year, highlight how the states in the Southwest were shortchanged in the SURE-P projects.
The letter reads:

Your Excellencies

UTILIZATION OF SURE-P FUND

I am reluctantly compelled to write this letter to you on the above subject, especially the controversy about the “missing N500billion”.

The document on SURE-P released in January 2012 contained among other things the following:

·   The total projected subsidy reinvestible funds per annum are N1.134 trillion based on average crude oil price of US$90 per barrel. Out of this, N478.49 billion accrues to Federal Government, N411.03 billion to State Governments, N203.23 billion to Local Governments, N9.86 billion to the federal Capital Territory (FCT) and N31.37 billion as Transfers to Derivation and Ecology, Development of Natural Resources and Stabilization Funds.

·   In order to transform the economy, in line with the Vision 20:2020 objectives, critical infrastructure projects in the power, roads, transportation, water and downstream petroleum sectors will be executed.

·   Public works programmes will include projects such as:

a.   Environmental Projects

i.    Execution of flood and erosion-control works;

ii. Waste disposal and sanitation community projects;

iii. Tree planting to combat desertification.

b.   Education Infrastructure: Rehabilitation and Maintenance of Education Infrastructure and Facilities.

c.   Health Infrastructure: Rehabilitation and Maintenance of Health Infrastructure and Facilities.

After deciding to remove oil subsidy, the Federal Government set up a subsidy withdrawal organ (SURE-P) which is to use the proceeds or savings from the subsidy to finance development projects nationwide. Under it, each state, including the Federal Capital Territory, share in the proceeds of the oil subsidy in accordance with the Federal Revenue allocation formula. While each state is free to use its own share for projects of its choice, the Federal share is to cover the whole Federation in key areas warranting development.

As a follow-up, The Federal Ministry of Finance, Abuja made the following release in the Punch Newspapers on Wednesday April 16, 2012.

FEDERAL MINISTRY OF FINANCE, ABUJA

SAVINGS FROM SUBSIDY REINVESTMENT AND EMPOWERMENT PROGRAMME, FEBRUARY, 2012

At the inception of the Subsidy Reinvestment and Empowerment Programme (SURE-P), the Jonathan administration made solemn commitment to the transparent and accountable implementation of the programme. In keeping with this pledge, here is breakdown of the subsidy saving for February 2012 allocates to the Federal, States and Local Governments.

At the inauguration of the Ekiti State’s committee, the following are extracts from the Governor’s speech. “On 1st January 2012, the Federal Government announced the full deregulation of the downstream petroleum sector of the economy. To an average Nigerian, this only means removal of fuel subsidy and an increase in the pump price of petrol. The pump price of petrol then moved from N65 to N141 per litre and later reduced to N97 per litre.

In February 2012, the President, Dr. Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, GCFR inaugurated the subsidy Re-investment and Empowerment Programme (SURE-P) headed by Dr. Christopher Kolade to utilize the funds accruing from pump price increase for inventions in critical sectors of the national economy to touch the lives of ordinary Nigerians. On our part, we had wanted to inaugurate this scheme as far back as February 2012, but our accrued share of the gains was not released until May, 2012. As a matter of fact, the Federal Government released the accruals from the savings from the subsidy removal policy for the first five months of the years to the three tiers of government just recently. A separate account has been opened for this purpose in the State.

This committee that is being inaugurated is a creation of the State Executive Council and it is empowered to provide the implementation plans for the management of the fund with clear concentration on projects that will have a direct impact on the people. In this regard, attention will be given to Youth Empowerment through commercial agriculture which was launched recently, health Care Delivery with particular reference to save Motherhood and Public Transportation which will promote tricycle rather than Okada for hinterland access in our urban and rural areas among other critical schemes aimed at complementing the Government’s various social empowerment interventions.

Distinguished Ladies and Gentlemen, members of this committee have been carefully selected to reflect the importance attached to the assignment on hand. By every standard, these distinguished citizens have proven track record of capability, integrity and courage to call a spade its name. They are people of character who have over the years created a niche for themselves in their various professions and callings as excellent performers. I can say with certainty that they would apply themselves to the work with dignity so that the common man would further have a feel of purposeful governance that our administration has been identified with. This Committee has been structured not to be held hostage by bureaucratic red-tape given the sense of urgency that the various initiatives require.”

At the Ekiti State level, I was privileged to have been chosen by the State Governor to manage with a committee of 9 members the Ekiti state portion of the SURE-P re-christened Ekiti State Special Intervention and Empowerment Programme (SIEP). With all sense of responsibility our books are available for public scrutiny; we have scrupulously and honestly kept to our mandate.

For the utilization of the State’s own SIEP, a Bureau of Special Projects was created which as appeared in THE NATION Tuesday March 12 2013 was to embark on the following projects:

i.    Renovation of 18 General Hospitals;

ii. Construction of 3 Mother and Child Hospitals;

iii. Construction of 16 Local Government Markets across the State;

iv. Construction of Bus Terminus in Ado-Ekiti;

v.   Drilling of Boreholes;

vi. Construction of 36 Bus Stops in Ado-Ekiti;

vii.      Completion of Staff Clinic at the State Secretariat Complex.

Incidentally the SIEP support funding of the Dualization of ADO-IWOROKO-IFAKI road which is a Federal road project arises from the failure of the Federal Government to reimburse or refund the money owed to the State Government on the road.

With the approval of the state Governor, the following on-going projects are being       jointly developed with the State Government with financial support from SIEP:

(A) State Legacy projects

(i) Freedom pavilion to which SIEP has contributed over N500million is nearing completion.

(ii) N350million for Life Academy Centre at Iluomoba.

(B) N300million for the state Ministry of Education for the rehabilitation and renovation of three major secondary schools one in each senatorial district.

(C) N300million for SUBEB for textbooks and core subjects.

The crux of the matter

However, what you will observe Your Excellency is that while each state has or is receiving its share of the subsidy based on existing revenue allocation, the Federal Government is to use its own portion to intervene in specific areas throughout the Federation.

Some of such areas as listed in the SURE-P release and contained in the Federal Ministry of Finance shown above is the very crux of the matter. It is the inequity, political disfranchisement and bias in the utilization of the Federal portion which has marginalized the core / South-West of Nigeria that I will illustrate with three specific instances.

The Role of SURE-P As An Instrument of Nation-wide Intervention Development Strategy.

(i)         Infrastructural Discrimination

A major marginalization of the core South-West, is the Federal Government announcement that it plans to construct 10 new rail lines as reported in The Punch of 24th December 2012. The information as contained on Page 26 of that paper is partly reproduced below:

“The Federal Government has announced plans to construct 10 new rail lines to cover other parts of the country currently not linked by rail. The Minister of Transport, Senator Idris Umar, said on Friday that already feasibility studies have commenced on seven of the proposed railway lines. Umar who spoke in Lagos at the inauguration of the Lagos-Kano train service and resumption of fuel haulage by train from Lagos to Offa, said that the feasibility studies on three other planned rail line would be done in 2013. He gave the total distance of the areas to be covered by the seven rail lines as 3,421 kilometres. The Minister said that at the completion of the feasibility studies, the railway development project would be undertaken through public private partnership arrangement. Upon final construction of these lines, it will improve mass movement of Nigerians and open windows for rapid economic development minister and regional interaction,” he said. Umar stressed that all the new rail lines would be constructed as standard gauge track for the movement of fast trains. According to him, the new lines would cover Lagos-Sagamu-Ijebu Ode-Ore-Benin (300km); Benin-Agbor-Onitsha-Nnewi-Owerri-Aba, with additional line from Onitsha-Enugu-Abakaliki (500km).

It also includes a 615km-high-speed rail track from Lagos, Oshogbo and Baro. The minister listed Ajaokuta-Obajana-Jakutu-Baro-Abuja, with additional line from Ajaokuta to Otukpo (533km), Zaria-Kaura Namoda-Sokoto-Ilela-Birnin Koni (520km) as other areas to be covered. Others are costal rail line linking Benin-Sapele-warri-Yenagoa-Port Harcourt-Aba-Uyo-Akampa-Ikom-Obudu Cattle ranch (673km); and Ajaokuta-Eganyi-Lokoja-Abaji-Abuja line (280km). The other three lines whose feasibility contracts would be awarded next year are Port Harcourt-Umuahia-Enugu-Makurdi-Lafia-Kaduna-Bauchi-Gombe-Biu-Maiduguri; Ikom-Ogoja-Kastina-Ala-Wukari-Jalingo-Yola-Maiduguri and Kani-Nguru-Gashua-Damaturu-Maiduguri-Gamborun-Ngala.

With 10 new railway lines that excludes the core southwest, pray does the phrase “other parts of the country currently not linked by rail” include Oyo-Ekiti-Ondo? Pray why such planned railway not extended between Oyo State (Ibadan) to Ekiti-State (Ado-Ekiti) to Ondo State (Akure)? After all, each state capital was planned to be connected by rail under the Obasanjo administration.

How will envisaged economic benefits extend to those neglected states? How do they benefit in terms of employment, enhancement of trade and commerce within and outside the communities? How do the neglected states take pressure off the overburdened roads and reduce frequency of road accidents, strengthen social and intercultural relations? How do these excluded states benefit from economic integration so orchestrated? This deliberate marginalization has further shifted the operations of the companies mentioned (Lafarge, Dangote cement etc) which own the heavy duty trucks and trailers to the neglected states to further damage and destroy both state and federal roads being reconstructed by these neglected states out of the meager funds they get from the federation account.

You need to travel through Ilesha-Akure-Owo-Benin road and see daily carnage. Ekiti State is completely caught off between Akure and Ado-Ekiti unless you go via Akure-igbaraodo-odo in a circular way. Although contract for Ilesha-Akure road was recently awarded for reconstruction (not dualization), why not the whole hug from Ibadan? Why should Okitipupa-Ondo-Akure-Benin road not be dualised? Why should Akure-Ado-Ekiti-Omuaran road not be dualised from the same SURE-P funds? More questions are definitely begging for answers.

Item 2.9: List of Road Projects:

Of the 1,326km roads, the 295km allocated to SW/S covers Benin-Ore-Sagamu dual carriage way.

It should be observed that this Benin-Ore-Sagamu dual carriage way has always been factored into the annual Federal budget for roads in the past 20 or more years. The Nation of Saturday 16 February 2013, page 6, carried another news item that the Federal government has obtained fund from SURE-P to dualise Abuja-Benin road. Yet, the federal authorities are aware of the appalling state of federal roads in middle and core Southwest states.

(Ondo-Ekiti-Osun) where federal roads vertically and diagonally pass through: Akure (Ondo State) to Ilesha in Osun State. The same is true of Iyamoye (Kogi) to Omuo, Ikole, Ogotun in (Ekiti state) to Osun state. Ekiti state has the shortest federal roads in the federation, yet not one kilometre road is considered by SURE-P for rehabilitation out of the poor roads listed above.

Item E1:33 Irrigation Projects:

nineteen irrigation projects are listed with four going to North East; three each for North West, South East and South South. The two listed for South West go to Ogun and Oyo States as if those are the only states in the South West. The Ero Water Dam and Lake, covering 11Kilometres in Ekiti State, is one of the largest water/irrigation projects in Nigeria, established at the same time as those listed above in other parts of the country which are to benefit SURE-P. Why should it not qualify for SURE-P’s attention like others listed above?

Item E2:34 Rural and Urban Water Supply Projects:

The little Osse mentioned in Ekiti State is put there to demonstrate precedence and involvement. The Ero Water Dam mentioned above can serve the purpose of both irrigation for agriculture and water supply, while Arinta Waterfalls should qualify for Tourism intervention under the Federal scheme.

Item 36 & 37: Selected Power Projects:

What is needed here from the Federal Government is a second 132/33KV power substation project in the northern part of Ekiti and the urgent completion of the on-going one which is no more adequate for the state capital, not to talk of the whole state.

If the Federal Government can embark on all these projects with or in addition to SURE-P funds, why is it that none of the federal roads as shown earlier in these core southwest states is receiving Federal attention?

While our legislators must continue to be vigilant and alive to their responsibilities to the electorate, they must not underestimate the negative influence of policy formulators who deliberately and mischievously plan and execute such discriminatory policies to their (sectional) advantage.

That is why I appreciate the action and vigilance of Senator Femi Ojudu (Ekiti Central) in detecting the fraud, if not dishonesty, in the 2013 budget proposal for roads in other states were shown as Ekiti State roads!

I will like to draw the attention of Senator Ojudu to the dredging and canalization work at Ureje River (that is Ureje Water Works) under the Federal Ministry of Environment in Abuja. The contract was awarded for N1.2billion and reported to have been completed and paid for in 2010 when, in fact, up till now, no work has been done on the site, which is now overgrown with weeds. The contractor who quoted N890million for the job lost out.

(ii)       Utilization of Ecological Funds/Environmental Projects Discrimination

It is common knowledge now and as revealed and confirmed in some daily papers that all PDP States received N2Billion Ecological Funds for the utilization of Ecological and environmental problems to the exclusion of non-PDP states which largely affect the whole of South-West States.

I have with me as shown in the table below 25 Ecological Projects that the State Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA) in Ekiti has submitted to the Federal Environmental Protection Agency (FEPA) all with negative replies as if we are not entitled to attention from this commonwealth purse.

Each of the affected area deteriorates during every rainy season with the attention of the FEPA drawn to the yearly deterioration and expansion of damage to the areas affected with no positive response from FEPA.

I have refused to allow my area, Falegan Estate most severely devastated by torrential rain – to be done in isolation from others. The last rainfall not only weakened my walls but had part of the wall broken down under the weight of the heavy downpour. It is available for inspection. A major danger which can lead to a landslide that will affect about 20 houses lies ahead if the next rainy season should meet us here.

I have it on good authority that my Governor in Ekiti State Dr. Kayode Fayemi and his officials have paid not less than 5 visits both to the Federal Ministry of Environment and FEPA on the issues listed in the table above without any polite or positive result. How do you treat a head of a state government with such derision, contempt and lack of respect? Is this how to live together as one country?

It is no exaggeration that natural disasters like flood and rain storm incidents have been occurring indiscriminately across the length and breadth of the country with all states facing virtually the same climatic challenges. For instance, the Global Warming Syndrome has made a mess of climatic restrictions to certain geographical locations such that incidents of flood etc now cut across virtually all states.

(iii)     The screaming headline of the Nigeria TRIBUNE No 15,880 of Friday 27 December, 2013 “N30BN 2014 IRRIGATION PROJECTS SOUTHWEST SHORT-CHANGED” North 80%, SS/SE 18%, S/West 2% cannot but worry people like me at my age at 80 whether Nigeria as at present being governed is worth dying for or whether a patriot is not a fool.

The above is just one item of capital expenditure where the discriminating Minister and her Permanent Secretary are from Plateau State and Bauchi State up North respectively.

While the 2013 budget proposal for roads in other states were shown as Ekiti State roads (as discovered by Senator Ojudu), the 2014 budget does not show any appropriation for roads in Ekiti. In which case, there is no budget for Ekiti State for two years running.

The Federal Agency on Roads (so called FERMA) that pretends to operate in this part of the country merely ends up creating more problems that solved. It engages in merely parching the roads and adding more layers of bumps that peel off at the slightest rainfall. The Federal road between Ado-Ekiti in Ekiti State and Akure in Ondo State as a good illustration.

In civilized environment, where politics of subtle and creeping compromise and discrimination does not hold, the ecological problem facing us in Ekiti State is sufficient to declare the whole state a disaster area. It is the prayer of people like me that Nigeria survives and its components love, and as a Nation live together in peace. But Your Excellency, peace won by compromise of principles and discrimination is a short-lived achievement. A fabler with two wives says “Yield to both and you will soon have nothing to yield”, while Wilson Churchill said “An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last”. No axe can sit down and withhold his hands from warfare against wrong and get peace from his acquiescence.

Your Excellency, It is not that any N500billion is missing or that Dr. Christopher Kolade resigned because of any missing N500billion. If anything, Dr. Kolade, (who I know very well; we grew up here together in Ekiti; his mother is from Igede-Ekiti, while his father who was a godly Priest in Ekiti here where Christopher was born is from Erin-Ijesha in Osun State). A transparently honest and shrewd diplomat must have resigned because of evidence of compromised cheating, inequities and partiality, made up of ungodly and heartless discrimination against his own part of the country by an organization over which he is supposed to preside. Why should Dr. Kolade continue as of conscience to be Chairman of an organization that discriminates against his own part of the country? Discretion, they say, is a better part of valour. Why are we building some people up and bringing others down, yet pledging we live together in peace as one. It is a spiteful political decision which does not reflect any credit on the balance and maturity of the people who take such decision either on your behalf or at the directive of MR. President. It is an avoidable arbitrariness in the utilization of funds while in turn breeds corruption.

I can not lay hold on the concluding part of the information above. With this kind of lop-sided and sectional ownership of the main source of income, the country is heading for a serious crisis ahead of itself.

At a glance, the above can lead to a violent revolution that can make nonsense of a National Dialogue or National Conference, whose end is already being foreshadowed of disintegration if the threat of the demagogue Asari Dokubo were to be taken seriously of a South-South serial nation-wide pipeline vandalisation in the absence of a negotiated “Ijaw State or “Ijaw Nation” that own the oil unless you are re-elected President of Nigeria.

Here is a cabal, holding the whole country by the jugular. Whether in Government or in Opposition this crop of rapacious, selfish and greedy people including their sponsors and backers can not but be a collective threat to the stability and security of the country and any government now or in future that fails to dismantle them and cancel all their monopolistic grip on the Nigerian economy is doomed to failure.

While the Dangotes, the Adenugas and Conoil are visibly employing their “lots” for productive use, stimulating the economy through employment generation and business expansion that are impacting positively nation-wide on the economy, all the others merely stand aloof displaying their loots in provocative vanity through “fronts” that create “rentier class” for the rest of the country who is made to eat from the crump that falls from the table, starking their “loots” abroad with their foreign collaborators who readily acquiesce because they use the funds to provide employment for their own people. Their transient political and financial support, however beneficial must be weighed against the lethal danger they constitute in the long run to the stability and security of this country. Their collective threat and stranglehold which must be seen as providing resentment, irritation, agitation, resistance and uprising which are all evident in the rising tempo of national distrust, ethnic and religious conflicts, increase in hitherto unknown crime of kidnapping, wave of pirates’ attack on Nigeria’s territorial waters, must be laid before the National Conference for deliberation because they are all induced by the Nation’s main source of wealth and means of livelihood.

This class of special people induce jealousy and hatred and create the so-called “Boko Haram” which protest ostensibly against injustice whose cancerous spread has contaminated innocent people individually, corporately, sectorally, sectly and religiously, even the security outfit defending the country.

June 19, 2015
Lessons from Malaysia, Singapore, China and Dubai

Being a speech delivered by Sam Nda-Isaiah during the 1st City People monthly lecture on Sunday, August 17, 2014, at Protea Hotel, GRA, Ikeja, Lagos.

General Yakubu Gowon, one of the former leaders of this country that I believe has not yet been given his rightful place in history, told me in a private discussion last year that what pained him most about the coup that removed him from office was not the loss of power but the loss of opportunity to implement his Third National Development Plan, which started the year he was overthrown and which could have moved Nigeria to the level of the Asian Tigers. He said that, before he left power, international organisations including the media were already saying that Nigeria was on the same development trajectory with some of these nations. And General Gowon believed his programmes would have taken us there. He has a lot to show for his tenure as leader. Apart from prosecuting the civil war and keeping Nigeria one, which Nigerians will eternally remember him for, Gowon also achieved significantly in the development of the country. I know there are people who may differ on this but most of the developments we still have on ground today in Lagos, Kano, Kaduna, Benin City, Enugu and a host of other cities are traceable to Gowon’s era. I also believe that the First Republic leaders still have a lot of good history going for them.

Sardauna of Sokoto Sir Ahmadu Bello’s record still stands for him. The Ahmadu Bello University remains one of the biggest universities in Africa. The Hamdala Hotel he built, even though now mismanaged and run down, still remains the biggest hotel in Kaduna. The New Nigerian was, until recently, probably the most influential newspaper in Nigeria. The Ahmadu Bello Stadium is still the biggest stadium in the north. There is also the NNDC. There are several other monuments to his name. He believed that education should be a priority and a tool of modernization, so he insisted on free education without making even a campaign issue of it. But his greatest achievement appears to be bringing together the nearly 200 diverse and disparate tribes of the north, irrespective of religion, to live in peace and harmony – something that present-day leaders have failed to sustain.

Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the premier of Western Nigeria, built the first TV station in Africa. The University of Ife, which he founded, and of which I am a proud alumnus, remains one of the best in the world. The Cocoa House was at one time the tallest building in Africa, projecting strength, power and prosperity for our nation. He built the Liberty Station in Ibadan, the first of its kind in Africa. He also insisted on free education for all. Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe taught Nigerians how to unite the country. He named the university he founded as premier, University of Nigeria. And he would have become the premier of Western Nigeria in 1951 if the carpet was not pulled from under his feet. These were significant moves considering the level of ethnic nationalism of those days.

There are a few more leaders that came and did their best, but we obviously lost it at some point. I love the story of Singapore so much that, about four years ago, I attended a governance programme at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy of the National University of Singapore where most of the resource persons were former principal secretaries and ministers of Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, who is considered the founding father of modern Singapore. One of the former principal secretaries of Lee Kuan Yew told us that when Singapore gained independence in 1965, apparently without hope or a future to look up to, their greatest ambition was to grow to be like Nigeria and the Philippines in the future. Today, it is Nigeria and the Philippines that want to be like Singapore.

Nigeria, Malaysia, Singapore, China and Dubai have a roughly similar history and circumstances. All of them were once considered Third World countries and were once termed emerging markets. Today, all the others have joined the First World; only Nigeria remains a Third World nation. And nobody still calls China, Malaysia, Singapore and Dubai emerging markets anymore. China emerged from behind to overtake every European country in terms of size of economy and has now overtaken Japan to become the second largest economy in the world; it is poised to become the largest economy in the world shortly. Of these countries, only Dubai is homogenous in terms of race and religion. The three others, Malaysia, Singapore and China, have demographics that are even more variegated than Nigeria in terms of race and religion.

One thing that separates Malaysia, Singapore, China and Dubai from Nigeria is leadership – consistent leadership. Singapore had Lee Kuan Yew, China had Deng Xiaoping, Dubai has Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum and Malaysia had Mahatir Mohammed. Even though credit for the very existence of China today should be given to Chairman Mao, it was the courage, vision and character of Deng Xiaoping to chart a new direction for China that have made China an economic superpower and the main issue in today’s world. It was Deng that opened up China to the world by liberalising the economy. China became a market economy, reducing the central command structure that started what will soon make it the biggest economy in the world, that has substantially reduced poverty, and raised its people’s standard of living. He de-emphasised ideology and emphasised wealth creation. He is the author of the famous quote, “It doesn’t matter whether the cat is white or black; if it catches mice, it is a good cat.” He was the one that started negotiation with the British for the return of Hong Kong to China. He also started the negotiation for the return of Macau to China from Portugal. Deng was not a perfect leader but he, not Chairman Mao, is the father of modern China.

Lee Kuan Yew is to Singapore what Deng is to China. At independence in 1965, Singapore was hopeless. It was too small and too poor to have a future. They had no resource at all. In desperation, they wanted to remain with Malaysia but the Malaysians threw them out. They thought Singapore was a liability. Lee Kuan Yew took the bull by the horns, supported by some of the best minds the country had such as Goh Keng Swee, who was at different times minister of finance, education, defence and deputy prime minister. Lee Kuan Yew was without government service experience when he took over but was armed with courage, vision and character – the most important ingredients a leader needs to change a nation. He decided to build the biggest seaport in the world and he succeeded. He decided to have the best airport in the world and he succeeded. He decided to have the most beautiful city in the world and he succeeded; and even though Singapore does not produce a drop of crude oil, he decided to make his country an oil-rich nation. He succeeded. Today, Singapore through several indigenous and multinational companies refines nearly 2 million barrels of oil daily and exports to countries like Nigeria. But the first thing to know about Singapore is her strict adherence to the rule of law. Corruption is punished harshly.

Sheikh Mohammed Al Maktoum is the ruler of Dubai, and, in his book My Vision – Challenges In The Race For Excellence, he tells us that what we see in Dubai today is nothing compared to his ultimate vision for Dubai. Dubai today looks like a utopian city, with the tallest building in the world. If Dubai today, which appears like a city running on steroids, has not started yet, then, I wonder what Al Maktoum plans to do. He obviously plans to disgrace every world leader that has no vision for his country. But that is what vision is all about.

Nigeria needs a new leadership. We need our own Lee Kuan Yew, Deng Xiaoping, Mahatir Mohammed and Mohammed Al Maktoum. And we do not even need to re-invent the wheel. Before Deng started his revolution, he visited Singapore in 1978 and met with Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew. He also visited Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur. In 1979, he visited the United States and looked at all the models and then improved on them.

Al Maktoum obviously wanted to make Dubai a First World nation for the pleasure of all Arabs in the Middle East. Instead of letting his people travel to Europe and the United States for vacation, he sought to create a place in the Middle East where they would prefer, and he succeeded. He has succeeded even beyond his imagination because not only Arabs, even the Europeans and Africans now patronise Dubai as a vacation spot. In his quest to create Europe and the United States in the Middle East, he outdid even the Europeans and Americans. Like he said, the race for excellence has no finish line.

One other thing that is common to these countries is that they are well secured. In Singapore, Malaysia, China and Dubai, nobody fears that he is going to be shot, kidnapped or bombed at any time of the day. I visit these countries, so I should know. And the reasons are straightforward. In Singapore, for instance, the penalty for arms trafficking is the death sentence. Crimes like murder and possession of hard drugs also carry the death sentence. And all crimes are punished. In Singapore, the definition of arms trafficking is being in possession of more than one firearm, and if you are found with just one firearm, you must prove that you do not intend to use it.

In all these places, corruption is punished severely. In China, certain levels of corruption carry the death sentence. When I was in China sometime ago, I read in their newspapers that two local government chairmen had been executed for corruption the day before I arrived. A serious leader must know that corruption can kill his country and treat the evil accordingly.

We are not yet on the path to development in this country. Nigeria is the exact opposite of these countries when it comes to the rule of law. We have a president who openly says there is a difference between stealing and corruption, and when the CBN governor raised the alarm over the theft of billions of dollars, his first reaction was not to get alarmed but to suspend the CBN governor. That shocked the world. Nigeria currently cannot even secure its boys and girls, as we have seen in Bunu Yadi in Yobe State, Chibok and Gwoza, both in Borno State. Additional 100 young men were abducted in Borno State three days ago. Since Jonathan became president, we no longer see people punished for corruption. We have ceded parts of our country to terrorists because money meant to buy ammunition is stolen daily. The same Nigeria that liberated countries like Liberia, Sierra Leone and southern African countries has become the butt of jokes of smaller nations. Last month, Ghana said they were sending troops to Nigeria to help us defeat Boko Haram.

How Do We Start Solving This?

Nigeria needs a brand new leadership. First, we must do something about education. The UN says Nigeria currently has the highest out-of-school children: 10.5 million children are out of school. The education of the youths should be the topmost priority of any nation. It is unacceptable that we now send our children to Ghana and even the Sudan to attend schools because our public schools have collapsed. The WASSCE result released last week showed that 70% of Nigerian students failed. It is very dangerous to continue like this. We will have to change the standards of both teaching and learning. The content of what we teach must also change. We still teach our children with some of the same curricula that we had 30, 40 years ago. But the world has moved on. The curriculum we teach our children must be dictated by the trends that move the world. The world has changed so much in the last 15 years that if we still teach our children with a curriculum that is 30 years old, then, we have lost it. Our curriculum must prepare our youths to graduate and become employers of labour instead of seekers of good jobs. We must now dedicate at least a quarter of our resources and budgets to education until further notice.

The unemployment level in the country should frighten all of us: 48 million Nigerians are unemployed. Since 48 million jobs are not available, Nigeria must create an army of entrepreneurs. Even though the economy has grown, the poverty rate has increased, precisely because the sectors driving the growth are not the ones in which the majority of Nigerians are accommodated. We must therefore bring in more youths into agriculture, online business, housing and manufacturing. Nigerian leaders must fashion out policies and subsidies that would create at least 10 million new small businesses in the next five years if we don’t want a misfortune worse than Boko Haram to destroy us. A small business typically creates between two and five new jobs; so, potentially, with 10 million new small businesses, we can create 50 million new jobs. Moreover, with Nigeria’s current housing deficit of 17 million housing units, Nigeria needs a government that will start building at least 1 million new housing units annually. This is huge, but very possible. With one million new housing units annually, several millions of jobs would be created: engineers, quantity surveyors, architects, labourers, block moulders, flourists, mortgage banks, estate agents, cement, tiles, paint sellers and manufacturers, food vendors at construction sites, etc, would be employed. We can borrow money from the N4 trillion pension funds since the houses are going to be sold to the public and the money will be paid back. And to encourage manufacturing, especially for the small-scale manufacturers, we need to strengthen our local currency and significantly reduce interest rates. We can strengthen the naira by paying the monthly allocations to all tiers of government in dollars since oil which is our main revenue earner is paid for in dollars. But instead of dishing out dollar cash which could encourage capital flight, the federal government should issue dollar certificates to the different tiers of government. These different tiers of government would then have to convert these dollar certificates to naira in our local banks. If more dollars start chasing less naira, the value of the naira would improve immediately. And if this happened, interest rates would also go down. Nigerian manufacturers would then be able to procure machinery and spare parts more easily and, at single-digit interest rate (instead of the current scandalous 25%), it would be possible for their products to compete with imported products. Our population of 178.5 million as currently estimated by the UN is a large market.

And talking about driving economic growth in the sectors that most Nigerians reside in – apart from the above, do we know that we can create a soccer economy in Nigeria? Nigerians’ passion for football is incredible. Most Nigerians have one European team that they support in the European leagues with a passion that is even greater than the support they give their own indigenous teams. And Nigeria has several soccer talents that have not been tapped. If European countries can have a thriving soccer economy, why not Nigeria? Most of the investors in the soccer economy in Europe are foreigners and many of their players are foreigners including Nigerians. Many of the stadia in Europe were built by foreigners and many of the clubs are now owned by foreigners. Old Trafford, the stadium owned and built by Manchester United, is said to fetch $1 billion for its shareholders every year. Emirates Airlines paid £300 million for a new stadium for Arsenal, and Etihad paid £270 million to acquire a new stadium for Manchester City. Soccer is serious business. We can also achieve this in Nigeria if we create the enabling environment for foreigners to invest in. Nigeria can have a thriving and sophisticated league. This is one of the several big ideas that can change our country. Moreover, we can use soccer to unite Nigerians.

The country also needs to tackle corruption urgently so as to loosen up more money to secure the country. If we defeat criminals, Nigeria can earn revenues from tourism just like Dubai, Singapore, Malaysia and China.

To move Nigeria forward, we must also change the way government works. Governments all over the world, but especially in Nigeria, have a problem of inefficiency, bureaucracy and corruption directly impeding several well-intended plans. We cannot change a country without first changing its government. I believe one way to achieve this in Nigeria will be by the appointment of CEO-style ministers and heads of government agencies with clear targets and commensurate salaries and bonuses.

I also think that Nigeria’s leaders should start reading. If you don’t read, how do you know what is happening in other countries? Nations are in competition with each other and every leader must know what his competition is doing. Many Nigerians don’t read. We must know that the educated man who doesn’t read is not different from a man who can’t read.

Finally, there must be an elite consensus in Nigeria to move the nation forward. The Nigerian elite must agree that the only way to move our country to the level of Malaysia, Singapore, Dubai and China is to get that leader with vision, character and courage and not to choose leaders because they are from our tribes or only on the basis of whether they are Christians or Muslims. All over the world, it is the elite that decides the fate of a nation. The Nigerian elite need to get serious.

The most important thing to know is that it can be done. And we must do it. All we need do is find that leader that wants to do it. A leader that knows that his first duty to the country is to secure the people, and not to complain that some people don’t like him and have decided to make the country ungovernable for him. We need a leader who will fight corruption. We need a leader with vision, character and courage who can think the impossible for the country and go ahead to achieve it. We need a leader who badly wants to leave a legacy for God and country.

Ladies and gentleman, we have to get that leader in 2015. May God bless the Federal Republic of Nigeria.

August 20, 2014
Perspectives & strategic responses to an emerging dictatorship in Nigeria

1.0 Background

The Jonathan presidency emerged on the platform of a much touted ‘Transformation Agenda’ which was animated by his personal life story from poverty to power, from a modest background into the exalted office of President of Nigeria. He garnered massive support from Nigerians on the premise of this populist assertion. Recent undercurrents within the Nigerian populace however indicate that the country is drifting towards a precipice of chaos as the political and economic situation in the country are facing dramatic and somewhat catastrophic disruptions.

Three years into his presidency, Goodluck Jonathan has shown numerous signs of an executive dictatorship that has threatened some provisions of the Constitution and weakened our democratic institutions. If left unchecked, his administration could erode the powers of other branches of government as he pushes through his political agenda on every front. Indeed there is a preponderance of evidence to back up the premise of a dictatorship being gradually established in Nigeria by the Jonathan administration which if left unchecked will erode the modest gains established by our nascent democratic journey.

With a frightening display of executive highhandedness and excessive use of state power now in plain view and increasing daily, one is tempted to ask: Are Nigerians too busy focusing on their own individual survival during hard times than recognizing that the nation, in the hands of a veiled dictator is heading down the slope rapidly?

2.0 Early signs of dictatorship

The President sees principled differences by the opposition and even within his party as an affront to his person or office or both. He is increasingly becoming intolerant of alternative views, arguments or debates on important national discourse. In November, 2011 during a parley with members of the National Assembly, the President likened dissenting views of Governors at a meeting with him as similar to ‘activist and anti-establishment posturing of NGOs and civil society and human rights groups.’ This could be interpreted as a perception by the President that principled disagreement is not just an evidence of differences in opinion, but an affront on established order and official government position.

In his attempt then to woo the members of the National Assembly into the oil subsidy agenda, the President failed to provide an evidence based and empirical logic to underscore his alarm that “the economy might collapse in three months if fuel subsidy is not removed.” At the meeting, the obvious negative response to his weak articulation and unconvincing presentation of his proposition seemed to drive him into frustration with an attendant tendency to take drastic decisions that were undemocratic and unpopular. It was clearly evident then that the president was gradually slipping into the deployment of power instead of persuasion to achieve his policy goals. It was clear for all to see that the otherwise cool and innocent mien of the President was beginning to give way to a ferocious insistence on his views in national discourse.

3.0 A glance into history

Most dictators are surrounded by an inner core of ruthless people who they believe are loyal and operate in absolute dedication. Hitler had his black shirted SS (Defence Detachment), Benito Mussolini had his Black Shirts. Saddam Hussein had the Republican Guard. Kim Jong-Il of North Korea who allegedly had nearly a quarter million people arrested during his rule and who is directly responsible for the starvation and deaths of millions of his countrymen was supported by such people too. Vladimir Lenin instituted the “Red Terror” or the systematic elimination of millions of people, including members of his own political party. Mengistu Haile Mariam of Ethiopia had no qualms about killing anyone he considered to be in opposition to his draconian rule.

In Nigeria, our case may not have been that bad so far but you recall that we also had the IBB boys, and the OBJ ‘Kitchen Cabinet.’ Now, we have the Resource Control thinkers and the adopters of the Jonathan fashion sense of ‘Hat & Tunic’. In extreme cases, dictators have a subterranean band of enforcers that often employ force and violence to entrench unpopular views and silence opposition. When a leader surrounds himself with such a group of violent people who deploy extreme language in national discourse and are intolerant of divergent views, all coming from the same ethnic stock and wear the same costumes, there is the very real danger of tyranny and suppression of any form of opposition. Of course this type of leader explains this away by alluding to minority rights and resource control and the need to protect national interest! The telltale signs of dictatorship and fascism abound in the nation today.

4.0 Empirical evidence of

emerging dictatorship

The country is gradually slipping into dictatorship and in the typical Nigerian despondency, most people seem to say it cannot happen here, but the reality is that the culture of executive impunity is becoming too obvious to be ignored. We have witnessed increasing religionalisation of presidential politics, we have also experienced growing militarisation of state elections and executive expenditure outside appropriation at national parliament is a regular experience.

The language of political discourse has become corrosive and laden with arrogance of power and contemptuous disdain for dissenting views. All views contrary to the governments in power at all levels are regarded as rebellious regardless of the merits and the facts of the issues raised.

Federal and state government relations have become that of “might is right” and master-servant relations. The sound bite, body language and content of political leadership have become arrogant, divisive, ethnic, rabidly partisan and increasingly tyrannical.

All things considered, it can be arguably said that Nigeria is gradually degenerating into a fascist dictatorship where the right of free expression, free movement is flagrantly abused by state institutions and actors that are constitutionally assigned to protect these rights. Over the years and recent times, the brazen acts of executive lawlessness, interference and dictatorship are on the increase. A few which seems to call for great concern will suffice at this juncture:

4.1 Sacking of dissenting

public officers

The hasty removal of Lieutenant General (Rtd) Abdulrahman Dambazau, former Chief of Army Staff and other service chiefs on assumption of office despite public criticism showed the dictatorial side of the President. Also the suspension and ultimate retirement of Justice Ayo Salami of the Federal Court of Appeal against the strong advice of the advice of the former Chief Justice of the Federation who called for his reinstatement showed a leader with absolute disregard for laid down procedure and due process. And of course the standoff between erstwhile governor of the CBN Sanusi Lamido Sanusi (now Emir of Kano) and the President which led to his highhanded removal in controversial circumstances.

4.2 Arbitrary arrests and

human rights infractions

Malam Nasir El-Rufai was arrested and detained by the State Security Service, SSS on January 27th 2014 for criticizing the government. It is worthy of note that in the past, ethnic loyalists of the President have made highly inciting public utterances but it took massive public outcry before one of such was invited for questioning and unheeded warning by pliant security operatives. Also at a conference in Kaduna on the 23rd of June, 2014, the Speaker of the House of Representatives was harassed by soldiers though public apologies were offered later by the National Security Adviser, NSA.

4.3 Media Censorship

Between June 8th and 11th there was widespread unwarranted seizure of newspapers and harassment of distributors of prominent media outfits especially those critical of some government policies in the past. The government only soft-pedaled after the Newspapers Proprietors Association of Nigeria, NPAN and the Nigerian public expressed outrage at the development. The newspaper houses are still counting the losses incurred in this 4-day siege on their legitimate operations.

4.4 Draconian stance on live

broadcast

On May 30th 2014, the National Broadcasting Commission, NBC wrote letters to broadcast media organizations in the country on new modalities for operation. Part of new regulations according to the NBC was that broadcast stations must notify the commission in writing, at least 48 hours before transmitting a political programme live. This is no doubt an attempt to gag the media further and emasculate free speech. It is also an attempt to silence dissention and opposing political and ideological views. At present, most media outfits submit their lists of programmes quarterly to the regulatory body without any prompting. The new directive no doubt points to the antics of a government that may have graduated into full blown dictatorship.

4.5 Politically motivated deployment of troops

On November 27th, 2011, President Jonathan deployed troops to his state, Bayelsa without consulting the National Assembly. This led to the undue militarization of the state. The President was severely criticized for the deployment of federal troops to secure Bayelsa after tension allegedly erupted when the PDP banned former governor Timipre Sylva from seeking re-election under the party’s platform. A day earlier, governor Sylva had allegedly been harassed by security operatives. Hundreds of policemen and soldiers deployed to the state barred him from coming out of Creek Haven, the seat of the Bayelsa State government. Consequently, Sylva could not participate in the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) ward congresses ahead of the governorship primaries from which he had been barred by PDP’s National Working Committee (NWC). During the entire period of the siege, the economic life of the people was affected as fierce looking soldiers patrolled the streets.

In January 2012, during the protests that greeted the fuel subsidy removal, the soldiers that President Goodluck Jonathan deployed to quell the protests in Lagos remained on the streets of the state despite pleas by eminent Nigerians including Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka asking the President to rescind the deployment. In the last Ekiti polls, over 37,000 security personnel comprising soldiers, policemen, civil defence operatives and SSS were deployed by the Federal Government to intimidate members of the opposition and voters. Over the years, there have been other instances of needless deployment of troops at the pleasure of the President.

4.6 The Adamawa siege

On July 5th, 2014, armed operatives of the state including the police and soldiers reportedly invaded the residence of the Acting Chief Judge of the state, Ambrose Mammadi located at Masakare in Jimeta and at gun point coerced him into ratifying the formation of the 7-man investigation panel set up by the state assembly which was in the process of impeaching the governor, a known critic of the president. The Presidency did not deny the media reportage of the siege on the Judge’s residence. Few days after, the dailies were also awash with reports that the president had urged the governor to apologize for his ‘misdemeanor’ so that the impeachment process could be aborted. The governor reportedly refused this overture. The police and soldiers also gave full security coverage to the panel all through their meetings at the behest of the Federal Government. It is no longer news that the state governor has been impeached which clearly shows that we have a President who would not relent until his wishes become reality.

4.7 Impeachment train moves to Nassarawa

Twenty out of the 24 legislators in Nassarawa State House of Assembly (dominated by the PDP) also recently initiated impeachment moves against the state governor, Umar Tanko Al-Makura, an APC governor. The lawmakers are leveling a 16 count charge against the incumbent with extra focus on ‘misappropriation of N13bn, extra budgetary expenditure and gross misconduct and abuse of public office.’ The speaker, Hon Musa Ahmed had to call the members hurriedly from their recess to attend a plenary session where the impeachment process was initiated on Monday 14th July 2014. Perhaps to lend credence to the widely held beliefs that the current impeachment process is only part of a script being acted by the PDP-led government to cause political quagmire in selected opposition states, newspaper reports have it that the helicopter of Mr President which conveyed him to the state landed barely a few minutes after the 13 minute legislative session. The President was in the state to commission a project that could have been handled by one of his subordinates or aides. The state attorney general, Lagi Innocent in a media interaction also criticized the impeachment process adding that the legislators ‘have a predetermined motive less than noble.’

4.8 The comedy of errors

in Rivers State

On May 12th 2013, 5 anti-Amaechi lawmakers with alleged presidential support went into hiding to impeach the governor. Strangely, on April 29th the other 27 lawmakers loyal to the state governor including Speaker Otelemaba Dan Amachree were ‘suspended’ by the Felix Obuah- led PDP state executive. A year after, anti-Amaechi forces with invincible support are still waxing strong. On June 19th, 2014, another plot to impeach Amaechi hatched by 6 PDP legislators who met at Krisdera Hotel, Port Harcourt was also unearthed.

4.9 The drama of parallel

assemblies in Edo State

Nine rebellious PDP members of the Edo state assembly backed by the police broke into the hallowed chamber (which is undergoing repairs) on July 7th 2014 and recruited two sacked staff of the Edo House of Assembly Service Commission as Sergeant-at-arms and Clerk-at-table respectively. Both had been sacked by the commission in December, 2010 and February 2011 respectively for certificate forgery. The media statement by Chairman, EDHASC, had stated that the rebel lawmakers were led by the minority leader and minority whip. The House had been in disarray since June 9th due to the suspension of 4 PDP lawmakers for alleged misconduct as provided for under Orders 38 of the Rules and Procedure of the House. The rebel legislators backed by security operatives in the payroll of the federal government have continued to make moves to scuttle parliamentary activities in the state. It still remains to be seen what the covert script of the FG will be in its unrelenting efforts at destabilizing the state and preparing it for the forceful takeover by the ruling party via an impeachment of the governor.

4.10 Federal legislators not

immune too

On January 12th, 2014, Senator Magnus Abe, (APC, Rivers) was shot by the police when he attended a rally of the Save Rivers Movement, a political group in support of the state governor, Rt Hon Chibuke Amaechi, a critic of the Federal Government. A day earlier, Senator Ali Ndume’s convoy was attacked on a Saturday night by a fighter jet of Nigeria’s military.

Ndume, an opposition lawmaker had been on his way to the scene of an attack by suspected Boko Haram militants when his convoy was allegedly bombed by the government jet.

4.11 Grounding of aircraft and movement restriction of opposition state governors

The jet of governor Amaechi was grounded by National Airspace Management Agency (NAMA) in Kano on June 8th 2014 at Kano International Airport due to ‘orders from above.’ His ‘sins’ appear to have been his private visit to congratulate the former CBN governor, Sanusi Lamido (another critic of the president) for his appointment as Emir of Kano. The Bombardier plane was not given takeoff clearance by the airport authorities. The governor had to travel by road out of Kano late at night.

On April 26th 2013 his plane was equally impounded for 2 hours while he was on his way from the burial of late Ekiti Deputy Governor, Mrs Funmi Olayinka.

During the recently organised Ekiti polls, two opposition governors were restricted from entering the state to attend a rally organized by the APC. On June 19th, Governor Amaechi was stopped by a detachment of soldiers led by an army Captain at Odudu, on the outskirts of Akure. His plane was equally stopped from flying out of Akure airport which was closed to traffic from 12pm, Thursday. Other flights were impeded that night.

In the case of the Edo state governor, Adams Oshiomhole, on the same day, his chartered flight was grounded at Benin airport. The Governor was informed by the commander of the 81 Air Maritime Group, Benin City, Air Commodore Soji Awomodu that he received orders from above that no aircraft be allowed to fly out of Benin. The helicopter with registration 5N BQ8 later flew out of the city without its intended passengers.

4.12 The takeover of Emir of Kano’s residence by

security operatives

Between June 11th and 12th, 2014, the calm city of Kano erupted in chaos as a result of the assumption of throne of the new emir, Sanusi Lamido, a staunch critic of the federal government. Allegations that the Federal Government fuelled the crisis have not been laid to rest. The state Governor, Alhaji Rabiu Kwankwaso stunned the nation when he said he had ‘credible information’ that the President had instructed his supporters to cause mayhem in the ancient city. Security operatives were deployed to seal off the palace of the Emir while he was forced to operate from the state government house while police details attached for his safety were unceremoniously withdrawn. There is no report that the president has publicly congratulated the new traditional leader nor denied the alleged covert intrusion of the Federal Government in the matter.

4.13 The ‘politicisation’ of Maiduguri airport

On the 11th of July, 2014, the Maiduguri airport which had been closed since June 27th due to security considerations by the Military was opened for the former governor of the state, Ali Modu Sheriff ostensibly as a result of ‘orders from above.’ At about the same time, due to the closure of the airport, the incumbent state governor, Alhaji Kashim Shettima, (an APC leader) with his entourage had to travel to Kano by road. It would be interesting to note that these events occurred just as the former governor, Sheriff declared his intention to join the PDP. The airport which had been off-limits for civilians for weeks was besieged by supporters of the ruling party while soldiers provided cover. The ex-governor who arrived in a private jet registered 5NBMH at about 1.32pm was welcomed by a military troop led by a garrison commander. The airport which was closed on June 27th could not be utilised by 276 pilgrims who had to travel to Kano by road to make alternative arrangement for their spiritual trip. On the same day, a chartered flight that brought the wife of the state governor, Hajiya Nana Shettima was forced to take off to Abuja empty even though Senator Ali Ndume, another government critic, was waiting to board it.

5.0 Consequences of use of Federal might to oppress dissent

The avalanche of cataclysmic events that characterize revolutions and mass uprisings are usually triggered by seemingly innocuous events like the 26-year old Mohammed Bouazizi, a street vendor setting himself on fire in the Tunisian city of Bouzid on December 17, 2010 over his frustration due to the worsening economic conditions under the failed leadership and dictatorship of former President Azedine Ben-Ali. What started as an isolated case of individual frustration became a regional revolution that spread like a wild fire to Egypt, Algeria, Yemen, Jordan, Oman, Bahrain, Syria and swept away the regime of former President Hussein Mubarak as well as led to the fatal end of otherwise invincible Ghadaffi of Libya.

The pervasive abundance of such events that could spark off a revolution of gargantuan proportion abounds in Nigeria on every street corner of our city slums and urban neighborhoods. Daily we stare at police brutality, extra judicial killings, the menace of Boko Haram, and kidnapping in the South-east, Niger Delta insurgences etc. These incidences could be real triggers of mass uprising that will blow the wind of revolution to Nigeria if care is not taken.

Much more disturbing is the silence of the man at the helm of affairs in Africa’s most populous nation. In saner climes when issues that border on the welfare of the people are threatened by state actors, leaders in such places do all it takes to clear their names of culpability in such acts. Apart from unconvincing responses from the president’s media handlers that aggravate issues more, the president is better known for his disturbing silence at such critical moments. The silence of the president in the face of all these infractions only points to one thing: acquiescence. The culpable silence which is a tacit approval has the potentials of further driving Nigeria to a precipice of destruction which can only lead to a total breakdown of law and order.

6.0 The failing state debate

According to Wikipedia, common characteristics of a failing state include a central government so weak or ineffective that it has little practical control over much of its territory; non-provision of public services; widespread corruption and criminality; refugees and involuntary movement of people; and sharp economic decline. It is clear that Nigeria has most (if not all) of these traits under the present leadership.

The Failed States Index of Fund for Peace of 2013 placed Nigeria in the ‘Alert’ category with countries like Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, Haiti, Zimbabwe and Iraq amongst others. The Index categorizes states in four categories of Alert, Warning, Stable and Sustainable with variations in each category. The categorization of ‘alert’ represents those countries that are most critical and imminent to fail.

7.0 Perspectives & scenarios

Before we write it off in the characteristically Nigeria manner of “it cannot happen here”; let us be reminded of the unpalatable outcome of similar events in other climes. It is in this context that we must never underrate the sad experiences that are visited on ordinary Nigerians due largely to the failure of government and leadership to deliver on promises and guarantee acceptable minimum living standards among the people.

As 2014 builds momentum, it is perhaps timely to assess the state of affairs in the nation and build worst case scenarios of possible situations that may arise in the country with a view to knowing what proactive steps to be taken to cushion the impact of such negative development on Nigerians.

7.1 Economic collapse of the Federal Government:

President Jonathan in 2011 painted a picture of possible economic collapse of the FG if the oil subsidy was not removed within months. Though unsubstantiated with facts and figures, this position is consistently being touted by all the key officials of the FG including the Minister of Finance. Saddled with ballooning domestic and foreign debt obligations, there is a growing concern of whether the FG will have enough resources to meet the growing infrastructural deficit as well as the need for increased social spending to meet improved service delivery in the country. The situation is further exacerbated by falling demands for Nigeria’s Brent crude by USA and China. If the FG becomes unable to fund JAAC what will be the fate of states and what will be their coping mechanisms?

7.2 Full blown dictatorship and silencing of opposition:

This scenario now manifests in the total clamp down and iron fisted control of all arms of governance by the ruling party. The dispensation will further be characterized by the erosion of all democratic processes and the imposition of a unilateral agenda by the Federal government. The legislature and the judiciary, which hitherto formed checks and balances for the executive will become mere rubberstamp for the dictatorship. There will be the deployment of federal law enforcement agencies as tools of total suppression for opposition and an attempt at gagging the media. Recently, it would be recalled that an attempt was made to gag the media when soldiers, backed by the administration were deployed to the streets to forcibly seize copies of newspapers from vendors and newspaper distributors on a flimsy security excuse.

7.3 Mass protest and civil unrest:

The suppression of dissenting voices, violation of fundamental human rights coupled with inability of the citizenry to seek justice and redress in the court of law are danger signs in any democracy. A crucible is reached when this is coupled with poor governance and the complete dearth of the most basic social amenities. This could lead to mass revolt and the breakdown of law and order. The abduction of the Chibok girls, subsequent mass protests at government ineptitude and crackdown on some protesting groups by security forces is a pointer to this.

8.0 The way forward

It is pertinent to note that while the immediate reasons for the scenarios painted above are largely traceable to the Federal Government and the Presidency, the location of impact is in the states and local governments. This fact underscores the need for discerning states and geo-political zones to take pre-emptive rather than reactive action to forestall the impending danger of a dictatorship. Nigerians must prepare for another round of integrated and systemic rights activism. This should be the basis of intelligence-based governance and strategic response by all zones. The following are action areas for consideration:

8.1 Advocacy & public enlightenment

The Civil Society Organisations, CSOs, the media and non-partisan opinion builders have a role to play in energizing Nigerians to resist these aggressive attempts to subvert the will of the people through brute force and coercive means. There should be increased public education on the symptoms and risks of an emerging dictatorship through partnerships with the civil society. Also the facilitation of re-engagement of aggressive civil society activism against dictatorship is crucial including the awakening of the public on the re-encroachment of social injustice through manipulation of the judiciary.

8.2 Repositioning and rebranding of the opposition

Increased dialogue among opposition parties to form a strong coalition and become a bastion and frontier of resistance to dictatorship has taken place. The All Progressive Congress, APC should reform and prepare itself to be the new home for the growing ranks of disenchanted Nigerian political elite who are seeking more principled, more ideological and more people – oriented political platform. The elected members of National Assembly from minority parties constitute the single largest pool of this category of Nigerians. The conscious, strategic steering of the opposition to embrace more nationalistic participation and the accommodation of a broader base of political ideologies that cut across socio-cultural & ethnic boundaries should be underscored and enhanced.

8.3 Cooperation amongst the public, CSOs and relevant stakeholders

There should be an increased synergy between Civil Society Organizations, the public and relevant stakeholders with the view of forming an en bloc resistance to the present oppressive establishment. Also, the stepping up of research and collective action amongst the populace by putting in place legal, legislative, social & economic structures to test run collectively conceived ideas is crucial at this stage.

July 28, 2014
Tips on how to develop our economy, by CMD chair

Only a purposeful and knowledge-based leadership will transform the nation’s economy, Chairman, Governing Council of the Centre for Management Development and former Minister of education Prof. Tunde Adeniran has said.

Adeniran said the country is one of the most blessed with enough human and material resources, but added that a review of the recruitment pattern should be undertaken to allow the best and right persons take charge of management decisions.

The one-time Nigeria Ambassador to Germany, who spoke at the closing ceremony of the training on “International Workshop and Study Tour on Best Practice in Documentation and Records Management” at the CMD centre in Lagos said Nigeria has the human resources to manage all its affairs.

He said: “We have enormous human resources. The only problem is that we have not been utilizing the resources that we have, particularly the human capital. There is hardly any sphere of human endeavor that we are not endowed.

But one thing we need to do is to take a look at our recruitment pattern, in terms of leadership, resource and management recruitment. If we are able to put the right peg in the right hole, this country will go places. There is no area where we will say we need expatriates because all the resources are right here with us at home.

Adeniran explained that “we have not invested enough in human resource, getting the right people in the right places. We seem to think of ourselves first, by thinking of ourselves first, when there is job to be done, we look for friends, relations, and that we never help this country. We have to look for the right people to do the right job. If we continue to apply the wrong method and hope to get the right result, we are deceiving ourselves. We have to develop the culture of looking for the right people to do the right thing for the country.”

July 28, 2014
The Governance Predicament: Poverty, Terrorism and Democracy

Conclusion of a lecture delivered at Freedom House, Lagos, Nigeria by Larry Diamond June, on 30, 2014

•Continued from Friday

I think there is something to be learned from the experience of India in institutionalising the extraordinary power, independence, and administrative capacity of the Election Commission of India. The position of the Chief Election Commissioner is one of the most crucial and respected in India, equivalent in stature to Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and it has been held by some of India’s most highly accomplished and talented career civil servants. Why not call one of them in to advise on elections here, or even to sit as an advisory member of the INEC (Independent National Electoral Commission)?

It is vitally important that the INEC vigorously advance its work, with the broad assistance of civil society and the Nigerian media, to educate Nigerians about the coming elections and strongly encourage them to register to vote. An election can only be as good as the electoral register, and it takes many months to ensure that the register of voters is as accurate, up to date, and inclusive as possible. It helps that we are in a new era now technologically, where biometric tools of voter identification can help to root out fraudulent inflation of the electoral register. But those tools, as well, must be applied in a rigorously neutral and transparent way. Every step in preparing the election must be open to scrutiny.

Second, there is a clear and unimpeachable gold standard for monitoring the fairness of elections. Neutral monitors in civil society must have the freedom and resources to conduct a parallel vote tabulation (PVT). The technology for this is well established, and Nigerian civil society organizations are well experienced in this task. In previous recent elections, their parallel counts have not (to my knowledge) dramatically diverged from the official percentage tally of the vote. Nigeria must have neutral and credible judicial processes available should the parallel vote tabulation in2015 clearly indicate a different electoral outcome than the officially declared one.

Third, there is a need to advance internal democracy within Nigerian political parties. There is a growing recognition internationally that you cannot have a quality democracy unless there are adequate procedures for transparency, accountability, constitutionalism, and democratic procedures within political parties. This must include democratic means for the selection of candidates so that they become accountable to the voters more than to party leaders and “godfathers.”

Fourth is the need to reform and modernise the state security apparatus. The military, police, and intelligence must be trained and equipped to wage the security response with the proper tools and strategy, and to target the use of force carefully and effectively. They must also be instructed and monitored to avoid needless civilian casualties, and they must be held accountable for violations of law and procedure. But reports of recent confrontations between Nigerian security forces and Boko Haram suggest that the former have often been significantly outgunned and outmaneuvered. It is the responsibility of civilian political leadership in the executive and legislative branches to work with the military and oversee the military to ensure it has the necessary weapons and other tools. International security cooperation is also needed to track and confront the shadowy movements of arms and money across borders.

Fifth, the laws on paper against bribery, corruption, and conflict of interest are reasonably good in principle, but they have huge weaknesses in enforcement that must be repaired. Corruption is like water seeping into the ground; it will find any crack or crevice and make use of it. The only way to fight it is with a system of horizontal accountability that is vigorous, comprehensive, independent, and interlocking.

A critical, indispensable condition for successful enforcement is transparency. What good is it for public officials to declare their assets if those declarations are not made publicly available? The Code of Conduct Bureau has never had the staffing, the manpower, the energy, and probably the will to vigorously investigate the veracity of all of these declarations. It needs the public’s help. And it needs the help of the international community. By law, all assets declarations should be made available online for public scrutiny. And since Nigerian law forbids the President, Vice-President, Governors, and federal and state legislators from operating foreign bank accounts, why not require them to sign, along with the Code of Conduct, a legal declaration foregoing any right of privacy or any claim to ownership of any foreign bank accounts that may bear their name. This still leaves open the question of accounts owned by their spouses and children, another loophole that would need to be addressed. They should also be asked to forswear ownership and invite surrender of any real property or other assets, foreign or domestic, that are discovered to be in their names, which they have not listed on their assets declaration.

In the early 1990s, when I was researching the problem of corruption in Nigeria and the total inefficacy of the Code of Conduct Bureau at that time, it became clear to me that little sustainable progress in controlling corruption would be made unless politicians knew that the public, and the international financial system, would be mobilized against them if they accumulated vast wealth in office and then tried to hide it. It took me a long time to get a Nigerian politician to engage me in an honest conversation on the subject, but finally I found one. When I explained why I thought it was essential to make the assets declarations public, he agreed with the logic of my argument, but said it would be impossible, because: “If the people ever found out how much wealth the politicians have, there would be a revolution in this country.”

Maybe it is time to declare a financial amnesty: Account for what you have, bring your money back home, hand over the bulk of it, and you will not be prosecuted. Maybe the only way to begin is by following the maxim of the leading anti-corruption scholar, Robert Klitgaard, that you must “fry big fish” if you are serious about controlling corruption. But that requires a serious and independent anti-corruption apparatus. And that in turn means hard thinking about how to insulate these bodies from partisan political control and other forms of subversion. Nigeria needs to do some creative, hard thinking about how to appoint the members of crucial agencies of horizontal accountability—such as the Code of Conduct Bureau, the INEC, the Federal Judicial Service Commission and possibly some of the other bodies enumerated in article 153 of the Constitution. If the country gets a president seriously committed to good governance and political reform, then it works fine to have the president appoint and the Senate confirm the chairmen and members of these bodies. But constitutions should be designed to protect against the worst leaders, not to empower the best. Is there a way to involve civil society in the selection of these crucial positions to ensure that they are independent and vigorous personalities, dedicated to the role envisioned in the Constitution? Would the power of appointment to these bodies be better vested with the Supreme Court or some other body?

If you want to think radically, here is a sixth possible policy reform. Give some of the oil money directly back to the people. There is growing international interest in the idea of “oil to cash,” essentially the “Alaska model,” wherein the state directly gives some of the oil revenue back to each individual citizen. With the growth of mobile phone access and mobile banking, this is a much more feasible approach in Africa than it would have been even a few years ago. And technology will make it increasingly feasible. Nigeria may be too populous a country to distribute revenue to everyone, but cash payments could at least be targeted on the poorest of the poor, as India is doing with income supplements. Some allege that the poor would waste the money on impulsive spending. But, can the poor really do a worse job than Nigerian politicians have done over the last several decades? If, as was reported in the recent Ekiti elections, Nigeria’s voters are going to demand that candidates for office pay attention to the “infrastructure of the stomach,”[13] maybe the state should do that directly and then let the voters decide who can best deliver development.

Iwould like to conclude with one final appeal. And it is addressed to my own country and to Europe, as much as to Nigeria. Whatever the total amount of money that successive generations of Nigerian politicians have embezzled and looted, some significant portion of it—probably well over $100 billion—sits outside Nigeria today in identifiable liquid and fixed assets: bank accounts, stocks, property, and other investments and luxury wealth. We cannot bring back to life the millions of Nigerian children who have died needlessly because their government leaders were more concerned about accumulating personal wealth than ensuring that their country’s children had clean water, decent roads, adequate food, comprehensive vaccinations, and effective education. But when the time is right, when Nigeria has a government that is serious about controlling corruption, we can help bring back as much of this stolen wealth as possible. And we can work with Nigerian government officials and civil society to help build the systems of accountability to minimize this hemorrhage of public resources in the future.

Like many people around the world, I have been deeply moved by the international campaign with the hashtag “#bringbackourgirls”. But let us use this opportunity to mobilize not only for these more than 200 abducted girls, but for the more than 2 million Nigerian girls who have died before their fifth birthday just in the last decade. I would hope in the years to come that a similar level of international outrage and commitment can be mobilized behind a broader and more transformative campaign, led by Nigerians but eliciting unprecedented international partnership:

Thank you.

July 14, 2014
The Governance Predicament: Poverty, Terrorism and Democracy

Lecture delivered at Freedom House, Lagos, Nigeria by Larry Diamond June 30, 2014

It goes without saying that something is seriously wrong when the Governor of the Central Bank finds that during an 18-month period between January 2012 and July 2013 Nigeria failed to repatriate three-quarters of the roughly $65 billion it presumably earned from oil sales.[3] Add to this the findings of the Farouk Lawan Committee, which exposed a fuel subsidy scam costing Nigeria some $7 billion, the work of Nuhu Ribadu and the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, and so many other reports and revelations not just in recent years but over the tragic history of oil wealth in Nigeria, and it is hard to dismiss the assertion of former World Bank Vice President and former Minister Oby Ezekwesli that some $400 billion of the Nigeria’s oil revenue has been stolen or misspent since its independence.[4]As one of the most astute foreign scholars of Nigeria, Peter Lewis, recently observed to me, “In the last decade, the government has been hemorrhaging the resources from Nigeria’s second oil boom. Not even the electricity program that is supposed to be part of the government’s “transformation agenda” can move ahead.”[5]

It is just not credible for defenders of the current order to dismiss all these allegations as partisan or “unproven”. They form a pattern of documentation of embezzlement, mismanagement and misappropriation of public funds that is shocking in scale, irrefutable in essence, and devastating in impact.

Certainly Nigerians perceive that corruption is out of control. In the recent Global Corruption Barometer, 78 percent of Nigerians—one of the largest proportions in the world—said corruption is a significant problem in the country. 72% felt it had increased substantially in the last two years. 75% said the government was doing little to combat it. 94% perceived political parties as corrupt or extremely corrupt (and about the same percentage the police as well).[6] These percentages are backed up by expert ratings, such as those done by the World Bank, which rank the quality of governance in Nigeria in the bottom quartile of all the world’s countries.

This scale of corruption has serious consequences for development and human wellbeing. To understand this, let us look at one simple statistic—the percentage of children under five years old who die every year. And let us compare Nigeria and Ghana. Four decades ago, in the wake of the first oil boom, Nigeria was a much wealthier country than Ghana. Its per capita income was about 40 percent higher than Ghana’s.[7]Since the darkest days of military rule and partial state collapse in Ghana, that country has moved forward to develop democracy and lift up state capacity and performance. Nigeria has not. As a result, Ghana has significantly improved its rankings onthe quality of governance, while Nigeria’s have remained miserable. In control of corruption, Ghana is now in the 56th percentile worldwide, Nigeria is in the 11th percentile. On Rule of law, Ghana is in the 50th percentile. Nigeria is in the bottom 10 percent. Here are the other percentile rankings, on a scale from 0 to 100:

State effectiveness: Ghana 52, Nigeria 16.

Voice and accountability: Ghana 60, Nigeria 27

Regulatory quality: Ghana 56, Nigeria 25.

As a consequenceof all of this, Ghana ranks in the 50th percentile in terms of political stability, and Nigeria is in the third percentile, down in the neighborhood of Iraq, Afghanistan, and the DRC. And this was before Boko Haram abducted some 276schoolgirls in Chibok a few weeks ago as part of its latest and most ruthless rampage. Given these data, how surprised should we be that order is disintegrating in a part of Nigeria’s territory, with repeated bombings as well in and around the capital city?

Now let us look at under age five mortality rates. Ghana has reduced this grim statistic since 1980 by 57%; Nigeria by only 42%. Today about 7.2% of Ghanaian children under age five die each year—a horrible statistic, but much better than the Nigerian rate, which is 12.4%. Nigeria has the ninth worst child death rate in the world, of the 196 countries for which UNICEF presents data. The difference between Nigeriaand Ghana is the difference between one out of 14 kids dying a year versus one of out eight. UNICEF estimates that 827,000 Nigerian children under age five died in 2012, about one of every eight such deaths in the entire world. Now imagine for a moment that Nigeria had Ghana’s under-five mortality rate of 7.2 percent. The number of Nigeria’s child deaths in 2012 would have been about 347,000 fewer. Multiply that figure, or some large portion of it, by however many years you wish to go back in time, and the number of children who have died because Nigeria’s child death rate is larger than Ghana’s runs well into the millions. In the last decade alone, it has surely been over two million, probably over three million Nigerian children. That is many more deaths than in the Nigerian civil war. It is more than three times as many deaths as in the Rwandan genocide, and comparable to the number of Cambodians murdered by the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s.

These were children, who had their whole lives ahead of them. It is hard to see what can possibly account for the difference in child death rates between Nigeria and Ghana except the demonstrably worsegovernance in Nigeria.

Allow me to quote again from your former Education Minister, Oby Ezekwesili:

By conservative estimate, our country has earned more than $600billion in the last five decades and yet can only boast of a United Nations Human Development Index score of .4 out of 1, proximate to that of Chad, and [a] maternal mortality rate similar to that of Afghanistan! Nothing reveals the depth of our failures [more] than such performance indicators, considering the vastly greater possibilities that we have been bestowed.[8]

53 years after independence, an estimated half of Nigerian adults are illiterate, 70 percent lack access to improved sanitation facilities, a quarter of all children are underweight, and over a third of them are not being immunized.[9]

Who will be held accountable for these developmental failures, and for the roughlythree million children who would not have died if Nigeria’s Fourth Republic had managed to improve the quality of governance—not to the level of Sweden, just to the level of Ghana? When political leaders murder a million of their own people, we call it genocide. We do not have a term for the crime that is inflicted when egregious corruption and mismanagement cause the needless death of three million children over an extended period of time.

When more than 200 school children are abducted from their school dormitories by a terrorist organisation, outrage comes easily, and justifiably. We know the names and faces of those girls. Where are recorded the names and faces of the 347,000 children under five years old who died last year but would still be alive if Nigeria had—I repeat—merely decent governance?

The current moment begs another question: If the Nigerian state, with all its natural wealth, cannot ensure that its children are given decent levels of social and economic security—education, immunization, and nutrition—how can it ensure that they have physical security? Why should anyone expect the army and police to show greater purpose, efficacy, and selflessness than other segments of the state and the body politic? Bad governance is like cancer; it is malignant—it spreads throughout the body. And cultural norms are set from the top, as people watch not what their leaders say, but what they do. This is why President Shehu Shagari’s declaration of an “ethical revolution” during the Second Republic was so unserious. What is the point of appealing to the public for better ethics when government and politics are riddled with pervasive, unchecked greed?

One of the oldest aphorisms about governance, which many cultures claim to have originated, is this: The fish rots from the head down. As Chinua Achebe eloquently noted in his essay, The Trouble with Nigeria, “The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership. There is nothing basically wrong with the Nigerian character. There is nothing wrong with the Nigerian land or climate or water or air or anything else.”

Leadership sets the tone. Some thirty years ago, when I was writing about the failure of the First Nigerian Republic, a phrase kept ringing in my ears. It was prompted by years of corruption and repression, and then the blatant rigging of the October 1965 Western Regional election, which plunged the region into violent rebellion against the government of Premier Samuel Akintola. I wrote about that period:

Looters and highway robbers were aware that their behavior differed only in its openness from that of the politicians. Said one young man as he threatened to ignite a car he had stopped on the highway, “Akintola has had his share. Now we want ours.”[10]

When most leaders of politics and government are seen as scoundrels and thieves, ordinary people tend to behave in kind, because they do not trust their fellow citizens to behave any differently, and they do not want to be the lone fool who obeys the formal rules. That is not the kind of social, legal and moral foundation on which a country can build democracy, development, or peace and stability.

The link to terrorism and insecurity

In the absence of very serious and far-reaching governance reform, the problem of Boko Haram’s murderous violence in the north is not any more amenable to termination than is the problem of piracy and criminality in the Niger Delta area. There is no purely security solution to either of these security challenges. Each emerges as a twisted response to a situation of pervasive corruption, injustice, distrust, moral decay, and state weakness. And each appears to be intertwined with struggles for political power in complex, opaque, and volatile ways.

It is not merely social scientists that have stressed the significant social, economic, and political roots of terrorist violence, across a wide range of national situations, of which Nigeria is only one. In April 2012, the then National Security Advisor to the President, the late retired general Andrew Owoye Azaze, made a similar point in a public speech, stressing that the mobilization of force alone against Boko Haram could not work, and that Nigeria could not achieve security without broad-based development:

…Even if all the leaders that we know in Boko Haram are arrested, I don’t think the problem would end, because there are tentacles. I don’t think that people would be satisfied, because the situations that created the problems are not just about the religion, poverty or the desire to rule Nigeria. I think it’s a combination of everything. Except you address all those things comprehensively, it would not work.

…It is not enough for us to have a problem in 2009 and you send soldiers to stop the situation, then tomorrow you drive everybody underground. You must look at what structures you need to put in place to address the problem holistically. There are economic problems in the North, which are not the exclusive prerogative of the Northerners. We must solve our problems as a country.[11]

It is also important to stress another lesson of comparative experience in countering insurgences: By further victimizing many innocent people, human rights violations by state security forces enlarge support for the insurgency. In and outside Nigeria, there is growing concern over the climate of impunity for state security forces who are responsible for, to quote the latest annual report of Human Rights Watch, “indiscriminate arrest, detention, torture, and extra-judicial killing of those suspected to be supporters or members” of Boko Haram.[12]

What is to be done

I don’t think many Nigerians needed the suffering and shame that Boko Haram has inflicted on this country to see that the situation is desperate and is not amenable to platitudes and faint-hearted solutions. Intellectual honesty can only point in the direction of comprehensive and far-reaching policy responses. When corruption has brought a country down to the bottom three percent in the world in terms of political stability, it’s time to think outside the box.

I want to suggest six reform responses. I don’t presume that these are the only ones, and I realize that some of these are definitely “outside the box.” Nigeria has to do multiple radical and unconventional things if it is going to climb out of the deep trough in which it has been stuck for half a century.

The place to begin is with elections. Two key requirements for clean elections are effective and neutral administration, and comprehensive transparency. On the first, some progress has been made, but there are serious concerns about whether the country’s electoral administration is up to the coming challenge in 2015. There is at least on respect in which the recent Ekiti election does not inspire confidence. You cannot have the police and the military blocking the supporters (not to mention fellow governors) of one party from moving about a state and campaigning, and call that a fully free and fair election. Democratic elections require a level playing field. That must mean freedom to campaign. And it must mean strict neutrality of all the instruments of state security.

I think there is something to be learned from the experience of India in institutionalising the extraordinary power, independence, and administrative capacity of the Election Commission of India. The position of the Chief Election Commissioner is one of the most crucial and respected in India, equivalent in stature to Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and it has been held by some of India’s most highly accomplished and talented career civil servants. Why not call one of them in to advise on elections here, or even to sit as an advisory member of the INEC (Independent National Electoral Commission)?

It is vitally important that the INEC vigorously advance its work, with the broad assistance of civil society and the Nigerian media, to educate Nigerians about the coming elections and strongly encourage them to register to vote. An election can only be as good as the electoral register, and it takes many months to ensure that the register of voters is as accurate, up to date, and inclusive as possible. It helps that we are in a new era now technologically, where biometric tools of voter identification can help to root out fraudulent inflation of the electoral register. But those tools, as well, must be applied in a rigorously neutral and transparent way. Every step in preparing the election must be open to scrutiny.

Second, there is a clear and unimpeachable gold standard for monitoring the fairness of elections. Neutral monitors in civil society must have the freedom and resources to conduct a parallel vote tabulation (PVT). The technology for this is well established, and Nigerian civil society organizations are well experienced in this task. In previous recent elections, their parallel counts have not (to my knowledge) dramatically diverged from the official percentage tally of the vote. Nigeria must have neutral and credible judicial processes available should the parallel vote tabulation in2015 clearly indicate a different electoral outcome than the officially declared one.

Third, there is a need to advance internal democracy within Nigerian political parties. There is a growing recognition internationally that you cannot have a quality democracy unless there are adequate procedures for transparency, accountability, constitutionalism, and democratic procedures within political parties. This must include democratic means for the selection of candidates so that they become accountable to the voters more than to party leaders and “godfathers.”

Fourth is the need to reform and modernise the state security apparatus. The military, police, and intelligence must be trained and equipped to wage the security response with the proper tools and strategy, and to target the use of force carefully and effectively. They must also be instructed and monitored to avoid needless civilian casualties, and they must be held accountable for violations of law and procedure. But reports of recent confrontations between Nigerian security forces and Boko Haram suggest that the former have often been significantly outgunned and outmaneuvered. It is the responsibility of civilian political leadership in the executive and legislative branches to work with the military and oversee the military to ensure it has the necessary weapons and other tools. International security cooperation is also needed to track and confront the shadowy movements of arms and money across borders.

Fifth, the laws on paper against bribery, corruption, and conflict of interest are reasonably good in principle, but they have huge weaknesses in enforcement that must be repaired. Corruption is like water seeping into the ground; it will find any crack or crevice and make use of it. The only way to fight it is with a system of horizontal accountability that is vigorous, comprehensive, independent, and interlocking.

A critical, indispensable condition for successful enforcement is transparency. What good is it for public officials to declare their assets if those declarations are not made publicly available? The Code of Conduct Bureau has never had the staffing, the manpower, the energy, and probably the will to vigorously investigate the veracity of all of these declarations. It needs the public’s help. And it needs the help of the international community. By law, all assets declarations should be made available online for public scrutiny. And since Nigerian law forbids the President, Vice-President, Governors, and federal and state legislators from operating foreign bank accounts, why not require them to sign, along with the Code of Conduct, a legal declaration foregoing any right of privacy or any claim to ownership of any foreign bank accounts that may bear their name. This still leaves open the question of accounts owned by their spouses and children, another loophole that would need to be addressed. They should also be asked to forswear ownership and invite surrender of any real property or other assets, foreign or domestic, that are discovered to be in their names, which they have not listed on their assets declaration.

In the early 1990s, when I was researching the problem of corruption in Nigeria and the total inefficacy of the Code of Conduct Bureau at that time, it became clear to me that little sustainable progress in controlling corruption would be made unless politicians knew that the public, and the international financial system, would be mobilized against them if they accumulated vast wealth in office and then tried to hide it. It took me a long time to get a Nigerian politician to engage me in an honest conversation on the subject, but finally I found one. When I explained why I thought it was essential to make the assets declarations public, he agreed with the logic of my argument, but said it would be impossible, because: “If the people ever found out how much wealth the politicians have, there would be a revolution in this country.”

Maybe it is time to declare a financial amnesty: Account for what you have, bring your money back home, hand over the bulk of it, and you will not be prosecuted. Maybe the only way to begin is by following the maxim of the leading anti-corruption scholar, Robert Klitgaard, that you must “fry big fish” if you are serious about controlling corruption. But that requires a serious and independent anti-corruption apparatus. And that in turn means hard thinking about how to insulate these bodies from partisan political control and other forms of subversion. Nigeria needs to do some creative, hard thinking about how to appoint the members of crucial agencies of horizontal accountability—such as the Code of Conduct Bureau, the INEC, the Federal Judicial Service Commission and possibly some of the other bodies enumerated in article 153 of the Constitution. If the country gets a president seriously committed to good governance and political reform, then it works fine to have the president appoint and the Senate confirm the chairmen and members of these bodies. But constitutions should be designed to protect against the worst leaders, not to empower the best. Is there a way to involve civil society in the selection of these crucial positions to ensure that they are independent and vigorous personalities, dedicated to the role envisioned in the Constitution? Would the power of appointment to these bodies be better vested with the Supreme Court or some other body?

If you want to think radically, here is a sixth possible policy reform. Give some of the oil money directly back to the people. There is growing international interest in the idea of “oil to cash,” essentially the “Alaska model,” wherein the state directly gives some of the oil revenue back to each individual citizen. With the growth of mobile phone access and mobile banking, this is a much more feasible approach in Africa than it would have been even a few years ago. And technology will make it increasingly feasible. Nigeria may be too populous a country to distribute revenue to everyone, but cash payments could at least be targeted on the poorest of the poor, as India is doing with income supplements. Some allege that the poor would waste the money on impulsive spending. But, can the poor really do a worse job than Nigerian politicians have done over the last several decades? If, as was reported in the recent Ekiti elections, Nigeria’s voters are going to demand that candidates for office pay attention to the “infrastructure of the stomach,”[13] maybe the state should do that directly and then let the voters decide who can best deliver development.

I would like to conclude with one final appeal. And it is addressed to my own country and to Europe, as much as to Nigeria. Whatever the total amount of money that successive generations of Nigerian politicians have embezzled and looted, some significant portion of it—probably well over $100 billion—sits outside Nigeria today in identifiable liquid and fixed assets: bank accounts, stocks, property, and other investments and luxury wealth. We cannot bring back to life the millions of Nigerian children who have died needlessly because their government leaders were more concerned about accumulating personal wealth than ensuring that their country’s children had clean water, decent roads, adequate food, comprehensive vaccinations, and effective education. But when the time is right, when Nigeria has a government that is serious about controlling corruption, we can help bring back as much of this stolen wealth as possible. And we can work with Nigerian government officials and civil society to help build the systems of accountability to minimize this hemorrhage of public resources in the future.

Like many people around the world, I have been deeply moved by the international campaign with the hashtag “#bringbackourgirls”. But let us use this opportunity to mobilize not only for these more than 200 abducted girls, but for the more than 2 million Nigerian girls who have died before their fifth birthday just in the last decade. I would hope in the years to come that a similar level of international outrage and commitment can be mobilized behind a broader and more transformative campaign, led by Nigerians but eliciting unprecedented international partnership:

#bring back our money.

Thank you.

July 11, 2014
The way out for a nation under trial

Text of an address at the Ninth Convocation ceremony of Covenant University, Ota by the Chancellor, Dr David Oyedepo on Friday, June 27, 2014.

It is with thanksgiving and deep appreciation to God that I welcome us all to the 9th Convocation Ceremony of Covenant University, dubbed the Release of Eagles 2014.

I also invite you with excitement to connect with the spirit and symbol of what the convocation ceremony holds, which is indeed a commencement to higher levels of responsibility and a testimony of the goodness and faithfulness of God in seeing the vision of raising a new generation of Leaders realized. This is indeed a time to mark the validation of Covenant University’s total substantiation and credence to the pursuit of learning and character worthiness, in the actualization of her vision of being a leading World-class University, as we have vowed to see demonstrated, in the quality and overall disposition of the graduates of Covenant University. We have every assurance that they have satisfied all the quality assurance criteria to ignite the change we all desire. We are indeed happy to release to world, an army of reformers, fresh from the stable of our University. On this note, I again welcome everyone to this august occasion of the 9th Convocation Ceremony of Covenant University.

I have continued to explore the relevance of University Education as a platform for addressing the issues of the day and I have come to the realization that Universities do not just exist to teach and graduate students, but rather to provide a platform for rigorous intellectual discourse that aims at providing solutions to the bugging issues in the society. This is what has informed the topic of my Convocation Address today, captioned: Towards the Way Out for a Nation under Trial.

As we are all aware, the state of Nigeria today speaks of restiveness and unrest. It is therefore with a deep sense of responsibility as a stakeholder, a patriot, as well as one of the leaders of the day, that I will, in communicating my thoughts on this issue, be constructively pungent, responsibly factual, patriotically objective, positively futuristic, as well as passionately optimistic( Oyedepo, 2012 & 2014).

At this point, I want to believe that a detailed diagnosis of the current state of our nation is vital. Medical doctors as we all know will always demand the running of series of tests before embarking on any treatment; this is the process of diagnosis. To disregard the result of diagnosis, is to expose a patient to the risk of death. I believe it is high time we began to x-ray and explore the root cause of the prevailing issues in our nation in order to come up with applicable solutions to the grave situations bedevilling our great nation Nigeria.

It is glaring that in Nigeria today:

•Danger is looming, but there is hope

•The nation is fast drifting towards disintegration, but there is hope

•Nigeria is facing challenges that openly threaten her existence, but there is hope

•Some are bent on religious war for whatever their reasons, but there is hope

•When a people become hopeless, they become helpless

•Faith will not produce when hope is dead

•To keep hope alive is to stay alive (Oyedepo, 2012)

The story of the biblical prodigal son is apt here and we can therefore draw a corollary and applicable lessons for weaving solutions for the current predicament we are faced with as a nation in mapping out the process of restoration, peace, stability and prosperity.

Firstly, the prodigal son came to himself, told himself the truth about himself, when he came to his wits end. We must come to ourselves as a nation and tell ourselves the truth, no matter how bitter.

Secondly, he outlined the steps of action towards the restoration of his dignity.

Thirdly, he rose up to action, and overnight, his frustration and devastation was turned to restoration and celebration.

This is what this Convocation Address is set to accomplish, to bring Nigerians to see the facts of the situations and engage with the issues in order to outline the way out.

Now, let’s look at the problem.

In a recent article, captioned: Boko Haram Led Pogroms, Ethnic Cleansing and Medieval Bestiality in Nigeria’s North East, Co-written by Dr. Pogu Bitrus, Rev. Ibrahim Dauwa, and Rev. James Yaga, JP, and published in the Guardian of June 10, 2014, the following issues which should be of grave concern to every responsible Nigerian, were outlined:

Firstly, the writers asserted;

“In 2012, in a widely publicized video recording that is easily accessible on the internet, Abubakar Shekau, the late erstwhile leader of Boko Haram announced the mission statement of his sect. Among other things, he said ‘this war is not political. It is religious. It is between Muslims and unbelievers (arna). It will stop when Islamic religion is the determinant in governance in Nigeria or, in the alternative, when all fighters are annihilated and no one is left to continue the fight. I warn all Muslims at this juncture that any Muslim who assists an unbeliever in this war should consider himself dead’, as confirmed by the writers of the article.”

Secondly, the writers stated;

“As communities in the defunct Northern Region we are not unaware of the inspiration of Boko Haram and their sponsors. It is no news that the average Northern Muslim thinks that Nigeria is his to dominate, and its riches his to dispense. In October 1960, the late Premier of the defunct Northern Region and Sardauna of Sokoto, Sir Ahmadu Bello, had declared: ‘The new nation called Nigeria should be an estate of our great-grandfather, Uthman Dan Fodio. We must ruthlessly prevent a change of power. We use the minorities of the North as willing tools and the South as a conquered territory and never allow them to rule over us, and never allow them to have control over their future.’ (Parrot Newspaper, 12th Oct. 1960; republished on November 13, 2002, by the Tribune Newspaper, Ibadan.)”

The above statement is quite pregnant and portends a political time bomb should the present generation of the defunct Northern Region dare to pursue this stance.

Thirdly the writers further stated that;

“Before the late Sardauna made this very revealing statement, the Conference of Northern Chiefs, in response to a letter from the UK-based West African Students’ Union (WASU) to the Northern emirs asking them to support the constitutional evolution of Nigeria into an independent nation, had declared ‘holding this country together is not possible except by means of the religion of the Prophet. If they want political unity let them follow our religion.’ (Obafemi Awolowo, Path to Nigerian Freedom, London: Faber and Faber, 1947, p.51.)”

Again, I see another bomb shell here, which is more of call to a religious war.

Most disturbing, is the reported raid of the Boko Haram sect across 26 villages in Borno State which are predominantly Christians; where homes and churches were razed down and thousands scattered. The data from this article indicated that well over 500 people were killed in twenty of these villages, while the number of deaths in the six others was not determined. Also, over 50,000 were reported displaced and fled to neighboring Cameroun and other parts of the country.

It is disheartening to note that Boko Haram sect is reported to have brought down the Nigerian National Flag in the raided communities and hoisted their own flag in its place.

From all the forgoing and without mincing words, the nation is already at war. The leader of the Boko Haram openly claimed that the sect is an Islamic Jihadist group and they have proved this over and again by their heartless atrocities to date. They have declared, and that openly, a total war against Christianity, Western Education, with a vow to drag Nigeria back to the Stone Age.

Furthermore, certain painful thoughts can be gleaned from all of these; a religious war is looming, in fact, in some parts of the nation, that war in my view has already broken out. To pretend not to see this simply amounts to hypocrisy. We must therefore not politicize this issue. Action is not only needed but timely action.

Taking a cue from the case of Iraq, I want to believe that, if the Iraqi Government had taken timely action, the catastrophe that now plagues that nation, may not have arisen. We must indeed wake up to the truth that we have a deadly battle in our hands as a nation; we must therefore rise up to speedily address this grave situation, before it becomes too late.

The cost of insurgency

Let us take a cursory look at the cost of some major wars in Africa, and see how foolhardy it is to go to war.

Sudan

Nature of Conflict: Ethnic and religious

Duration: 1955-1972; and 1983-2005 (almost 50 years of conflict)

Casualties: About 500, 000 killed; over 2 million displaced

Sudan/Darfur

Nature of Conflict: Religious and ethnic (Darfur Genocide)

Duration: 2003-Date (9 years of conflict)

Casualties: Over 400, 000 killed; 3 million displaced

Somalia

Nature of Conflict: Religious and ethnic

Duration: Ogaden War, 1977- 1978; Civil War, 1991-2003; Islamic

War, 2003- Date (22 years of conflict)

Casualties: 550, 000 killed

Ethiopia

Nature of Conflict: Power struggle

Duration: 1971-1984 (12 years of conflict)

Casualties: 500, 000

Rwanda

Nature of Conflict: Ethnic

Duration: April-July 1994 (just within 100 days)

Casualties: Over 800, 000 killed

Democratic Republic of Congo

Nature of Conflict: Power tussle among political gladiators, and resource struggle

Duration: 1996-Date (6 years of conflict)

Casualties: 800, 000 killed

Liberia

Nature of Conflict: Ethnic and political (class, personal; ambitions of warlords)

Duration: 1990-1995; 1999-2001 (7 years of conflict)

Casualties: 220, 000

Sierra Leone

Nature of Conflict: Political, resource (diamond) struggle, ethnic

Duration: 1991-2000 (9 years of conflict)

Casualties: 200, 000

Uganda

Nature of Conflict: Power struggle, class and personal ambitions of Political leaders

Duration: 1969-1979; 1989 (11 years of conflict)

Casualties: 300, 000; 30, 000

Nigeria

Right here in Nigeria, the Civil War, an ethnic-induced conflict of only 30 months claimed over 800, 000 lives.

The above gory picture of destruction, disruption and desolation of lives and property, is the reason why we need to think and re-think. All of the statistics above should provoke our commitment to timely engagement in a quest to finding solutions to this looming danger, by finding the way out of our current events before it degenerates to a calamitous situation. May we not experience another war as a nation forever!

The place of the university context in all of these

Generally, education in my view is a platform for empowering Man’s intellect to think solutions, while University education is all about empowering Man to create solutions to the challenges besetting humanity.

Putting in context what a University should offer and the contributions it must make to society, let us examine a statement made by John F Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States of America, who noted that:

“We live in an age of movement and change, both evolutionary and revolutionary, both good and evil. And in such an age a university has a special obligation to hold fast to the best of the past and move fast with the best of the future.”

These thoughts should help us reassess the role that Universities must play today in Nigeria, particularly in the current times, in addressing the issues of the looming danger and the concomitant repercussions, if not nipped in the bud!

In my view, a University is a place where solutions to societal problems are found and value added to humanity. A University is not a place for hermits so that people there live as recluse, but a platform that defines values and inspires research. The real worth of a University is only determined by the problems it solves and the solutions it proffers.

In order to be relevant as Universities, we must continue to engage in research that will help solve the challenges and problems our societies face. Robust thinking that comes with quality education must be the reason behind the stability, security and economic empowerment of the developed nations of today. As long as we remain regimented, we will continue to be relegated. As embedded in our Departure Philosophy in Covenant University, we must continuously advocate new ways of thinking.

The mind of the Nigerian should be transformed into new minds that can conceive a new Nigeria into existence, indeed, minds that can resist the indoctrination of evil. This is why I believe that developed nations are far more politically stable, economically buoyant and far more futuristic in their perspective and engagement, all of which is traceable to their solid educational infrastructures. The fact is, wherever goes education, there goes civilization. When Egypt was leading in education, she was also leading in civilization. For example, Greek historians, artists and Mathematicians went to Egypt for their education between 2900 – 2400 BC. This is why university education has been a vital platform for national development all through human history.

The way forward

It is my expectation that this Convocation Address will serve as a wake-up call to all those who believe in the Nigerian Project, to rise up to give hope in these trying times. We can therefore create the tomorrow we desire by creatively engaging our diverse resources- cultural, intellectual, human, and natural, etc. We can indeed create the tomorrow we desire by creatively engaging our intellectual resources towards its realization. This is where the University Context in Nigeria comes in and indeed Covenant University. Universities in Nigeria, and I dare say, in Africa, must drive relevance by continuously addressing and proffering solutions to the challenges of the day. If a University is to be the bastion and a place for the creation of ideas and ideals, the current saga of Boko Haram and all the associated challenges, including the bewildering disappearance of over two-hundred (2OO) plus Chibouk Girls are issues that should engage the University platform in intense discourse, debates and solution finding workshops, etc.

The University System in Nigeria must become responsive to the issues and challenges of the day. It should no longer be business as usual. University education should be beyond certification and must seek application in real life context for improving the lot of humanity and driving causes for the good of all.

It is high time that government began to partner with universities in searching out answers to bugging issues such as we have on our hands today. Likewise, universities should engage in relevant topical research, exploring time tested truths with demonstrable futuristic engagements as they champion the expansion of the frontiers of knowledge. This will be a step in the right direction in tackling the current challenges as this will benefit the society immensely. New programmes can be evolved in areas such as, Security Science,Management of displaced persons etc. These along with similar programmes can come up as new subjects of study and research in our Universities.

For example, only last month, 26th -28th of May, 2014 to be precise, Covenant University’s African Centre for Leadership Development (ALDC), (a Centre committed to nurturing transformational leaders for Nigeria and Africa, hosted a Conflict Management and Resolution workshop aimed at seeking indigenous solutions for contemporary socio-political, economic and cultural issues affecting Nigeria and Africa at large. Many of such initiatives should become the order of the day in our universities.

Where do we go from here?

It is pertinent at this point in the course of this lecture to critically examine the options at our disposal that can be employed in putting a halt to this impending holocaust.

I have always believed in finding indigenous solutions to indigenous problems. You will agree with me that in the animal kingdom, all animals find local solutions to their local problems. They do not travel neither do they import goods and services, yet they succeeded in providing solution to all their problems. It is also common knowledge that in the plant kingdom trees do not move, yet from the same position they are able to access all they need.

But man is the most intelligent creature of all of God’s creation, yet because he will not take responsibility, he has not succeeded to find solution to his own local problems.

Someone once said, you are not a failure until you start looking for who to blame for it. There is no amount of foreign interest or support that will be a substitute for our indigenous engagement in finding solutions to the issues of our day.

I have always believed that no solution can be more enduring than home-grown solutions.

I am therefore putting forward the following thoughts which should inspire both the citizens and those in government to engage in the process of finding lasting solution to these unfortunate issues.

It is therefore important to note the following:

1.  Definitely not talking about the issues at stake is not the solution

2.  Ignoring the facts before us will not make it falsehood

3.  Wishing the challenges away is not the solution as wishes never change situations. For instance, it will be sheer madness to wish that Boko Haram does not exist. The facts and figures are evident.

4.  Poverty can not be adduced for the reason for the Boko Haram Insurgency. As recently reported in international media, Two Syrian brothers born of same parents who are citizens of Belgium joined the jihadist fighters in Syria. They were young men who had good jobs but chose to join the jihadist.

5. It is not class discrimination either, otherwise other villages being raided should not have come to play; because their inhabitants are poor people, living on subsistence farming.

6. It is also not about oppression of the high and mighty, otherwise, the issues of the abducted Chibok Girls should not have been part of the fight. The issues here are raised for us to search deeper. It is against this background that I am calling on our Universitiesto look into the issues staring us right in our face and with every sense of urgency, proffer home-grown solutions.

In addition, it is my expectation that the Nigerian Government at all levels, National University’s Commission, the Leadership of Universities at various levels, stakeholders in education and other sectors of development will respond to this clarion call.

Pretense has always been a failed ideology and it must have brought us to where we are today. As I once noted, you cannot not fail with facts. We must come to understand where we are and the issues at stake and how to deal with them. From the information available in the media- print, electronic and social, Nigeria is fast becoming a breeding ground for a potential, religious and ethnic war. We either stop it now or it stops us later. The destiny of our nation Nigeria is hanging in the balance. This means therefore that all men and women of substance and courage should rise up and speak up. Before our very eyes, Abuja has been hit several times. The seat of Government in the nation has constantly been threatened by insurgencies more frequently in recent times.

Only two days ago, 25th of June, 2014, Banex Plaza, a commercial centre in Wuse, Abuja was hit. In addition, many villages in the North-East of Nigeria have been turned to ghost towns overnight as their inhabitants had to flee for safety! This is why all Universities across the Nation should create platforms for intense discourse and publish widely for Nigerians to know what our findings are.

Enough of these pretenses, we are face to face with a looming holocaust. This is a call to take up intellectual arms, Nigerian Universities must arise and speak up, and individuals in the nation must rise up to this call! It is time for all of us to start seeking the way forward.

Conclusion

Having examined and presented the issues of the day in our nation, we must not despair but with every sense of hope and faith in God, look forward to a future we desire with great optimism as there is no irreversible situation with God. We must therefore keep hope alive, for a better, peaceful, stable and prosperous tomorrow for our Nation Nigeria.

May I at this point congratulate the Parents of our dear Graduands, hearty congratulations! I salute your tenacity and commitment and celebrate your role in this process. May you live to enjoy the fruit of your labour. Amen.

Finally to the Graduating class, the Elite Set, our soon to be released Eagles, we are releasing you as Eagles. If there ever was a time, that your world needed you, that time is now. Everybody will admit that never has the world faced the kinds of challenges it faces today, but challenges are stepping stones to championship, and only the challenged end up a champion. Go forth therefore and take the Covenant University vision to the uttermost parts of the world at large and be the world changers that you have been raised to be as you see all the challenges on your path as opportunities; as you continue to build on the foundations of Character, Courage and Capacity and you can be sure you cannot fail. Remember that Life is a race not a sprint but a marathon and will always require patience and endurance to make the most adventure of life!

Let me leave you with these rules which are sure to make prize winners of you in the race of life:

1: Recognize that Life is a race and only runners ever win the prize

2. Life is work and the worth of every life is a function of the quality of its work

3: Life is a seed time and harvest adventure; and whatever a man sows that he shall reap. Therefore, every good thing a man does the same he shall receive from the God.

4: Life is warfare; and it is largely spiritual warfare;

5. Jesus is life, and taking Him along in your journey makes the journey great.

Therefore, we release you today as Covenant Eagles, the Elite Eagles, spread your wings and soar, your world is waiting for you. I love you with passion and I cannot not wait to see you manifest as the Eagles you have been raised to be! Be blessed, every one of you in Jesus Name. Amen

May I on this note ask us all to appreciate the faithfulness of God in bringing us to this point in time in the history of our University, culminating in this 9th Convocation Ceremony. I deeply appreciate everyone who is here today to celebrate the release of the 9th batch of Eagles, thank you so much and God bless you.

God bless Class of 2014, the Elite Eagles,

God Bless Covenant University,

God bless Nigeria, and

God bless Africa!!!

Thank you all for listening.

David Oyedepo, FNAE

July 8, 2014
Pathway to sustainable education in Nigeria

Concluding text of a keynote address delivered by Aare Afe Babalola, san, at the 29th Conference of the Committee of Vice-Chancellors at the Afe Babalola University (abuad).

•Continued from last Tuesday

There is need to amend NUC laws making it mandatory for any proprietor, state or federal government to acquire permanent site and have enough structure and facilities on it before commencing academic program.

The multifarious so-called University campuses established by State Governments all over the country should be scrapped. These so-called campuses were ill equipped and poorly staffed. The damage done to education by these campuses is better imagined.

Public Universities are weighed down by the bureaucratic demands, thereby preventing capacity to innovation. The appointments and decisions made from outside the university, are in most cases influenced by nepotism, godfatherism, lobbying and political patronage. Therefore, the enabling laws which vest government with undue influence and control over routine university matters should be amended. Therefore, the Chancellor, Pro-Chancellor, Chairman of Governing Council, Vice Chancellor and Members of Councils should be elected by the staff, students and other stakeholders without any imput by the government.

University authorities must be given the freedom to chart their own academic programmes and implement them without undue interference by government. Universities must have budget freedom and financial independence to be able to attract the best brains from anywhere in the world, embark on meaningful research programmes and distribute their fund according to their problems and need.

The Governing Council should be free from undue governmental influence and be given the freedom to formulate growth strategies for the universities.

Nigeria Universities must be free to decide and distribute their funding including ETF fund internally according to their priorities, needs without restrictions.

To avoid any legal technicality, the Vice Chancellors are advised to call on the government to amend the Education Tax Act Cap. E4 Section 7, Laws of Federation of Nigeria (LFN) 2004 to include private universities.

Education & security

Distinguished Ladies and Gentlemen, having discussed a number of issues affecting instability of education, I wish to address very briefly the critical issue of security and sustainable education.

Hitherto, Nigeria has been a safe place where all Nigerians were able to move freely, travel at any time of the day and night and study, work or register in any university in any part of the country. Unfortunately, however, things have changed dramatically in recent times due to the prevalence of bombing, killings and in particular the kidnapping of over 200 innocent Secondary School students in Chibok, Borno State as a result of which parents are now withdrawing their children/wards from schools, colleges and universities in some parts of Northern Nigeria while some schools have closed down.

Matters have got to a head that teachers are now asking for protection before they could go to work. The National Union of Teachers is not left out in the orgy of fear as it recently issued a Press Release chronicling the number of University teachers mowed down in the mindless, inhuman and barbaric gory carnage as a result of which several hundreds of innocent Nigerians lost their lives and goods worth several billions of Naira. The truth is that the recent insurgency in some parts of Northern Nigeria has impacted negatively on learning, teaching and research in our schools and universities.

As the Chief Executive Officers of our Universities, you cannot fold your arms and leave this meeting of all Nigerian Vice Chancellors without addressing this grave issue affecting sustainability in education. We need to come out of our comfort zone and be counted positively on the side of history. As I speak with you even in the Southern parts of the country where there is no insurgency, there is constant fear of insecurity.

It would appear that the cankerworm of wanton violence and insurgency is predicated on the fact that both the government of Nigeria and indeed the respected Vice Chancellors have never addressed the issue of education seriously since we became independent in 1960. We have failed to emphasise the critically important place and import of education in the lives of Nigerians, that education is a veritable weapon to conquer ignorance, disease, poverty, discrimination and religious bigotry.

It goes without saying that if one is properly educated, he will be healed of the virus of the palpable ignorance demonstrated by those who assert that Western education is a sin or that a citizen who does not share one’s belief should be murdered. The government and the Vice Chancellors together or severally must share the greater share of the blame.

It is now incumbent on the Vice Chancellors of Nigerian Universities to cause the Federal Government to call an Education Summit to properly address the problems all of us had wittingly or unwittingly created for ourselves in not tackling the critically important issues of quality education either seriously and or adequately. In the same vein, I challenge the on-going National Conference to address the serious issues stated herein which have affected the importance, quality and functional education in our country. This is not the time to shed tears but time to act positively and aggressively, failing which the future of project Nigeria is doomed.

Conclusion

In summary, the education system with particular reference to public universities need urgent and drastic total overhauling and total insulation from political interference. Since such overhauling of our education system can only be addressed meaningfully where peace and safety of life and property reign supreme, there is urgent need to first tackle the issue of security to be followed by education summit to consider the pressing issue of overhauling of our education system.

No apology

In the unlikely event that any one of us in this hall or elsewhere believes that by way of innuendo, he is hurt by any portion of my address, I claim privilege under Section 36 of 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria which guarantees freedom of speech. I offer no apology.

Finally, I invite you to take time to go round our clean and beautiful campus. Feel free to interact with students’ workers and teachers. Touch, feel, see and dream of ABUAD and become an apostle of ABUAD’s reformatory education agenda. I wish you a wonderful stay in ABUAD.

July 7, 2014