Category: Letters

SIR: As 2015 general elections crawl closer, Niger State deserves a honest, credible, trustworthy, experienced and dedicated statesman to lead her. A governor who will not govern with negativism and fear of the future, but with vigour, vision and aggressive leadership—one who will not be isolated from the people, but will feel our pains, share  our dreams and take his strength, wisdom and his courage from us. Like “Oliver Twist”, the state is asking for more in the areas of infrastructure (roads) education, agriculture, health and job creation.

The aspiration of the masses is to see more indicators in terms of human and infrastructural development, as the state is lagging behind many of its counterparts in the country. It’s worrisome and disheartening that despite its abundant human and natural potentials, the evidence of good governance is not being felt or seen in many sectors. Now that the state is preparing to elect another governor in 2015, it’s imperative that the mandate be given to an aspirant that is endowed with public and private sector experience in order to meet the yearnings and expectations of the people. The state deserves a visionary and charismatic leader, with economic policies that will encourage growth and development of all sectors.

The state needs a chief executive whose policies are realistic and innovative. A type who will stand by his words and promises to the electorates. It’s time to vote for a governor with fresh perspective and foresight for a changing world, a kind who understands the unconventional challenges we face and who can lead us to overcome them, not a tough talking type without anything to show.

Going by the zoning agreement in the state, it’s the turn of Niger North Senatorial zone to produce the governor. Abdulkadir Kure served his term from 1999-2007 for the Niger South Senatorial zone and the incumbent, Babangida Aliyu from Niger East Senatorial zone would be completing his term of 2007-2015. Now that it’s anticipated, the next governor will come from Niger North Senatorial zone, Nigerlites should not sacrifice merit despite the zoning arrangement; the electorate should look out for the best so as not to sacrifice merit in the governance of the state. It will be a setback to the state if we vote in someone that is coming to learn the job on how to pilot the affairs of the state. It is necessary for us to re-launch ourselves; it is not in our interest to continue to have anointed, puppets or an inexperienced person as governor. The state has tested products of anointing and the end results have not been too palatable.

Engineer Mustafa Bello’s credentials as one of the candidates from Niger North Senatorial zone has shown that he will not be a round peg in a square hole, if elected as governor in 2015. Going by his rich experience in the private and public sector, his election would definitely open the door to a balanced solution to the state’s problems.

Mustafa’s election would curb the growing power of pockets of special or quack interests, which so often conceal their self-serving agenda behind a facade of fist-in-the-air patriotism and unfulfilled promises. He represents humility, wisdom, loyalty, discipline, exposure, honesty, hard work, know-how, patriotism and accountability. Now that we are prepared to make another choice, let’s choose wisely in order not to put our lives into the hands of those gamblers, deceivers or chance takers.

The choice is therefore ours to either choose to rebuild our future, by positioning the right candidate or continue to sustain what we will inherit; unfulfilled promises and disappointments.

• Ibrahim Muye Yahaya,

 Muye, Niger State

SIR: If the Chinese proverb that “a picture is worth a thousand words” is right, then should pictures not be used more cautiously than words? When are nauseating images of gore and dead bodies’ offensive and when are they necessary? Has the mobile revolution moved death from the taboo closet that the African culture has kept it in for ages to the open? What is the effect of the repeated publication and circulation of graphic images on public consciousness? Is the dead entitled to the right to be treated with dignity? At what point do the dead stop being just mere news item and object of morbid fascination and become human?

Perennial photographs of carnages on the famished Nigerian roads, of suspected criminals killed by security agencies in shoot-out, of the victims of the Boko Haram inhumanity and other images of random deaths are now a staple served to the Nigerian public by the mass media, all dished out with munificent goriness. Online images which are products of the mobile revolution and street journalism, is even edgier and explicit than it appears in print.  Nigerians without any professional journalism training snap shots of severed limbs and burnt corpses with their phones and cameras and upload them directly online and thousands of Nigerians flock to these sites to view them.  It is no longer awkward that at the scene of death, some Nigerians are more concerned with capturing graphic images than with offering aid and respect to the dead and dying.

Irrespective of the arguments put forward in favour of the publication of graphic content in the Nigerian media, it is no doubt a blatant violation of the African culture and runs against the very grain of the African philosophical worldview that considers death and dying an indivisible part of the same cycle of life and a journey into a new phase of existence, so the dead is respected. The exploitation of the images of the dead for political and/or commercial ends violate a sacred constituent of the Nigerian culture.

While the dead have minimal or no rights, perhaps except the right to remain silent, undisturbed and unmolested, that right is universally held sacrosanct. The 1949 Geneva Conventions protects the sanctity of corpses even in the chaos and unpredictability of conflict scenes by explicitly providing for “search for the enemy’s dead and prevent their dead being despoiled”.

Furthermore, such publication without the consent of the family of dead impugn their privacy and as well as their rights to peace in the wake of a tragic event and such imageries has a potential to continuously torture the kin of the deceased.

The argument that the publication of graphic photographs arouses public conscience to action is not proven and it has been stated by some that such practice in fact deadens and inure us to the horrors that these images represent. The progressively worsening Boko Haram insurgency in itself invalidates this position, publications after publications of stomach churning scenes of carnages and death wreaked by the group has neither roused the Nigerian state into effective action nor reverse the group’s ascendancy; also vivid and sometimes crass portray of fatality on Nigerian roads has not impelled the government to action nor moved the potential victims of the next butchery to demand change, so of what good is it?

Can it be said that the dead was dignified as was the case in the Abuja bombing when the remains of the victims of the bomb blast were heaped into the back of an open truck and the picture splashed over the internet? Doesn’t it violate our collective humanity when the remains of accidents are haphazardly hulled into the backs of security trucks and photographed? At what point in our national life will it become a collective affront to carelessly transport the dead? At what stage will it become a standard practice in Nigeria to transport dead bodies using body bags or covered sterile evidence sheet and ambulances?

There is a need for a collective critique of the tone of unnecessary pictures and videos that show very graphic portray of mortality and the misery of hapless Nigerians, this cruelty is neither necessary in helping readers apprehend the multifaceted challenges that the Nigerian states faces nor does it dignify the dead. It is pure sensationalism.

• Tosin Osasona,

Centre for Public Policy

Alternatives, Lagos

SIR: Late last week BBC news announced that the President, Goodluck Jonathan would finally visit Chibok, the scene of a colossal and ongoing national heartbreak, before jetting off to Paris for a conference.  A few hours later, NBC News in America reported that Jonathan had cancelled the visit.  Something was murmured about security fears.   Everything became muddled.

In the end, Jonathan did what he has always done: he bungled it.

As father of the nation, the President’s visit would have had a reassuring and calming effect on the people of Chibok – especially those parents whose daughters are missing.  A presidential visit would have helped steady the nerves, it would have given everyone a shot in the arm, it would have helped wipe away some of the bitter tears, it would have encouraged people that the government is on their side and that they are not groping aimlessly alone, and it would have directly connected the government to the people in a very personal way.  But here we are; over 200 young girls were abducted on the night of April 14, and, more than a month later, foreign news media are the ones telling us about our President’s indecisive peek-a-boo.

What a President!  What a leader!

Just breaks your heart, doesn’t it?  And this is the pattern, I’m afraid.  This is what’s been our lot for four years.    Nigerians are people of goodwill; we just need an active and dynamic-enough President to unite behind.  Unfortunately, and despite a majority fervently wishing him to do well, Jonathan has persistently dropped the ball.

Simply bleating ad nauseam about ‘transformation’ is not it.  A leader must let his people feel his passion.  A leader has got to let his people know that he’s got their back.  Sadly, we don’t feel that with Jonathan.  We appear to be lumbered with a Presidency without bite.  It is one committee after another.  Either that or we get another statement pressed together by brother Abati.  That doesn’t do it for us anymore.  It only highlights a lack of dynamism, and citizens are forced to wonder whether they are truly on their own.

• Michael Egbejumi-David

demdem@hotmail.co.uk 

During the tenure of former Vice Chairman of the Nigeria Communications Commission (NCC), Ernest Ndukwe, he used to bring together telecommunication service providers and customers (that is stakeholders), at least every quarter, to listen to public complaints over poor network connections, high call rates etc.

At this forums, customers complaints were made known to service providers so they (service providers) could say publicly what they want to do to be more efficient, effective and less costly.

However, since Dr Eugene Juwah came on board, he has not been calling the stakeholders together on how to solve these problems. Now, we are troubled by poor network, no network, text messages not delivered but money deducted from customers, jammed network and other sundry problems.

In the last four to five weeks, there has been no network or less than twenty percent performance. People keep asking, is there no longer any supervision for service providers?

If Dr. Juwah is not up to the task the presidency or the supervising ministry should please relieve him of the burden and find another person to do it.

By Dn. A. A. Akinola

Ojokoro, Lagos.

I, personally, consider it stomach-churning the wild cry about B.Sc./HND dichotomy both in places of work and career progression, and I therefore feel the compelling need to put things in proper perspective.

By the original plan of the National Policy on Education in Nigeria, Polytechnic graduates are conceived and conceptualized as radical breed of the Nigerian elite. Polytechnic education system was meant to build a special class of ambidextrous individuals, those who are capable of manipulative skills both by their heads and hands. This was the reason in the heydays of employment in Nigeria, Polytechnic graduates were as hotly demanded for as fruit pudding in the critical technical sectors of the economy; but suddenly, the country took a deplorable descent into the craze for theory and arm–chair technological pontification, hence, all manner of office engineers and technicians sprung up. This culminated into the unreasonable agitation for parity with university graduates by polytechnic products even, worse still, polytechnic teachers.

Whereas, each group of graduate was intended to pursue a self–actualizing and self–fulfilling career independent of each other. The polytechnic counterpart should even be more fulfilled having been well and better versed in the pragmatic and practical sense of the word ‘education’. It is the same reason we hear of a state governor; a product of polytechnic education; asserting with precision, self–dignity and professional integrity that after passing out of  The Polytechnic Ibadan, he saw no need for any further education as far as what he needed to know about engineering was concerned.

By Yisa Yusuf Muslim.

The Polytechnic Ibadan, Oyo State.

SIR: The bane of Nigeria problems is the inability to make realistic appraisal and evaluation of her socio-economic vices. By analysis, Boko Haram insurgence is peculiar to the North; communal clash is of the North-central; pipeline vandalization is of the South-south while kidnapping is endemic in the South-south and South-west of Nigeria. Armed robbery and raping are common and general to them all. All these vices are not novel, they are normal bi-products of an ailing and bad economy. Imagine the number of graduates that the country produces from our tertiary institutions per year without proper planning by the government to fix them up, either directly or indirectly. It is high time our leaders realize that if they are careless about the rest of us, nature is not careless! Let them know that these army of un-employed graduates must ‘wack’ (apology to Fela Anikulapo), whether they work or not. The question is how are they going to achieve this? Going by a popular theory of Maslow’s Needs, food is one of the vital components of man’s basic needs. Food is fuel to man as petrol is to automobiles. When the means of getting it is perceived to be bleak, the tendency is there for man to take to other non-conventional means of getting it to satisfy the need. This explains why we are having myriads of social vices in the society today. Psychologically speaking, when one is pushed to the wall, the tendency is there to change behavior and do against his/her will.

From the foregoing, what can prayer do? Prayer is the only medium of communication between man and God. Of course it is the language best understood by Him. However, it is not that we have not been praying before, but this time we need to pray more with intensity of repentance and belief in its efficacy to avert the on-going calamities in the land. Our knowledge in everything is failing us and there is need to call on to our creator through prayer to help us. It is common knowledge that most of these problems started like a child-play some years back, before escalating to this alarming and uncontrollable dimensions, because of care-free attitude. The little knowledge from both local and international wars made me to perceive that what is currently going on here ( Nigeria) is more than war, most especially when one considers the number of causalities per year particularly since the insurgency broke out! It is more than war because war is usually waged between two opposing parties that are armed to halt, neutralize or come to terms with each other. But the nature of this ongoing Boko Haram is such that the other party is usually taken unaware; in their sleep, leisures; studies and even in their prayers just like that!

• Ipadeola J. Adebayo

Ibadan