The Nation Newspaper

Category: Opinion

  • Rethinking the unemployment crisis

    By Ifeanyichukwu Mmoh

    It is a known fact that every government agency, business enterprise or technological approach that once solved or is still solving the needs of mankind started with an idea which was conceived on a fertile human mind, believed and acted upon immediately. And if this is generally accepted, it translates then, to the fact that unemployment can only happen when ideas or solutions to a human problem are no longer conceived or believed.

    The question begging for an answer becomes: Are there no longer human wants to be solved? Or is the mind of the average Nigerian no longer capable of conceiving bankable ideas that can create career opportunities?

    Or is it government’s laziness?

    Human wants have never needed urgent solutions in any civilization than is happening in our days and bankable ideas that can create possible solutions as well as career opportunities have not been more forthcoming in any age than in the present age. The trouble is not even with contemporary civilization which has done more to turn ideas into realities than any other civilization ever did. It is neither a lack of raw materials, electricity or needed technology.

    What the high rate of unemployment in the country today truly depicts is that both the federal, state and local government as well as the private sector lacked the will-power to continue to initiate ideas that are capable of providing solution to the numerous human wants of contemporary existence while providing employment for the unemployed; in the process. As the APC-led government boasts about lifting 100 million Nigerians out of poverty; it is necessary they understood what job creation required.

    Since 2015, Nigeria has witnessed an onslaught against business establishments, under-funding of relevant government agencies responsible for the salaries of many and stringent multiple tax regimes that has compounded the dilemma of the average Nigerian of productive age. Just recently on February 1, the implementation of the new VAT of 7.5% commenced and, you get the impression that even though government wanted to create jobs, it’s policies are destroying the existing ones.

    Would it not have made sense if more jobs were created instead of increasing the VAT? This is the reason I urge that government needed to first understand what unemployment was in order to know what job creation entailed. A few years ago, following the inability of the Nigeria Telecommunication (NITEL) to generate returns on investment for government, there became the need to liberalize that sector.

    And, it turned out that the liberalization of the sector alone created hundreds of direct jobs as well as thousands of indirect jobs. That was an eye-opener which many believe should guide the government to do an overhaul in agencies like the Nigeria Police, the electricity sector, the transport and the housing sectors. Insecurity today begs for more police personnel and jobs can be created while tackling insecurity.

    The housing sector too can generate thousands of direct jobs if government can initiate a property tax designed on the pay-as-the-rate-go basis to compel the greedy that monopolized the sector to relinquish these empty and un-rented properties to tenants. This way, the real estate agents, the solicitors who administer estates, the realtors and street hustlers will be engaged and be able to earn again.

    What can the government do to grow the rice industry? A price intervention on rice is urgently required if government would kill smuggling and unlock the potentials of the home-grown brands! You see why government – in my humble opinion – cannot create jobs unless it understood unemployment?

    And, if Nigeria’s existence in this age of limitless opportunities still attracted an unfriendly unemployment statistics, what other evidence do we need to show that the employment generator (our mind) in us was sleeping and needed to be urgently awakened?

    • Comrade Ifeanyichukwu Mmoh; Abuja

  • ‘Hard war’ isn’t enough

    By Kayode Robert Idowu

    If we take the word of Borno State Governor Babagana Zulum as gospel, it was a disaster foretold yet not averted. Terrorists struck with impunity in Auno, Konduga council area of Borno, penultimate Sunday, leaving blood and charred bodies in their wake. Some 30 travellers were reported killed, most of them burnt to death during their lay-by sleepover at the rural community on Damaturu-Maiduguri road. More than 20 others were abducted and herded away by the assailants, who left 18 vehicles and other items razed in a fiery monument to their demented exploits.

    The travellers had been compelled to lie over because military personnel manning the highway had locked up the thoroughfare at a checkpoint they mounted close to the Auno community. There is a curfew regime on the highway effective from 5p.m. daily; and even though many of the travellers got to the point a little past 5p.m., they were forced to spend the night there because of the lockout by soldiers who deserted the post.

    When terrorists stormed in at about 9.50p.m., it was an open season of unbridled violence against the hapless travellers. Reports said they started a wild fire by igniting a parked fuel laden tanker with grenade, which upon bursting into flames lit up other vehicles parked close by and incinerating sleeping occupants. Some travellers spared that hoary fate were corralled at gunpoint by the terrorists into vehicles with which they made a crowdy getaway.

    An outraged Governor Zulum, during a visit to the attack scene, said there was prior intelligence by the Department of State Security that fell through the crack. “Information was circulated and we got a security report from DSS that Jakana could be attacked, and they came and attacked as predicted,” he lamented.

    The governor was also angry that military personnel locked out travellers at the checkpoint and were nowhere nearby when the terrorists struck. “Since my inauguration as governor of Borno State, Auno town has been attacked about six times. And the reason is that the military have withdrawn from the town. We have made repeated pleas to the military to re-establish a base in Auno since it is one of the flashpoints of the Boko Haram (insurgency), but nothing has been done to that effect… As soon as it is 5 o’clock and they close up their gate, they abandon the people and move over to Maiduguri,” he said.

    The military, for their part, explained that operational designs did not allow for personnel to remain at the checkpoint after night fall. Operation Lafiya Dole Theatre Commander, Major-Gen. Olusegun Adeniyi, said: “The military is conducting an intense counter-insurgency, which makes us work 24hours a day, especially on the Maiduguri-Damaturu road. By day we are busy securing the road, ensuring that commuters are able to move…and by night we go after these (insurgents) that are coming to attack people in their communities. The Army usually carries out its night attack and ambushes on Boko Haram with the understanding that the road has been closed to commuters and there are no vehicles on the road.”

    He blamed travellers for this latest attack, which he said was avoidable if they had kept to the ban on plying the road after 5p.m.

    There has in recent times been a spike in security breaches, costing lives and limbs of many Nigerians and prompting high profile calls for a sweeping change in the security high command. The porous security situation nationwide has also inspired regional self-help initiatives, such as the nascent Southwest network codenamed Operation Amotekun. Amidst the crisis, the standard tack by the Muhammadu Buhari presidency has been to shore up the mechanistic capacity of security agencies. This is the ‘hard war’ from which stemmed access lockouts as preceded the Auno attack. Few days before that incident, President Buhari reaffirmed commitment to fortifying the military for the hard war as he inaugurated some Nigerian Air Force helicopters in Abuja.

    But serial and fatal security breaches as we have experienced in recent history – involving banditry, bloody communal clashes as well as terrorist strikes and executions of unarmed abductees – index the insufficiency of mechanistic approach to tackling insecurity. Legendary Chinese leader, the late Chairman Mao, expounded the psychological dimension of warfare that he considered more crucial in victory strategy. Other proponents of ‘soft war’ approach like Carl von Clausewitz argued that a vital success strategy in war is to alienate fighting armies from base populations, since people provide the passions that drive fighting zeal.

    Not that this is one theory far fetched, as casual application would show. President Buhari during his sympathy visit to Maiduguri, last Wednesday, over the Auno attack (he curiously didn’t think it necessary to get to the epicentre) canvassed intelligence sharing and synergy between security operatives and the civil populace. “Boko Haram can’t come into Maiduguri or the environs without the local leadership knowing because traditionally, the local leadership is in charge of security in their respective area,” he said. Earlier, Chief of Army Staff Tukur Buratai was reported saying the Army had not been able to wipe out Boko Haramists, who kicked-off their insurgency since 2009, because their leaders and recruiters live in communities and mix with locals.

    While strengthening the mechanistic capacity of security agencies for hard war, government should as well deepen its soft war competences. For instance, from where do terrorists get their funding, and who/what are the conduit channels? Even if most of their arms are leftovers from Gadhafi’s war in Libya, where and by who have these been warehoused and are being dispensed for use by contemporary terrorists? How do we alienate criminal suspects from base populations, such that persons wanted by the law are not shielded by lawful kindred to escape the law? Government needs to pay attention to the soft war just as it is doing with the hard war.

    • Please join me on kayodeidowu.blogspot.be for conversation.

    Judicial Electoral Commission

    Nigeria’s political system has settled into the last never being heard of electoral verdicts until the judiciary has spoken. And when the judiciary speaks, it atimes radically overturns the order arising from Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) pronouncements. Politicians much of the time work for this outcome, such that they scoff when INEC declares election winners and just look ahead to judicial declarations.

    Last week, the Supreme Court overturned the election of David Lyon of the All Progressives Congress (APC) as governor of Bayelsa State barely 24hours before he was to be sworn into office. This verdict resulted from Lyon’s running mate, Biobarakuma Degi-Eremieoyo, having filed fake credentials with INEC for the 16th November, 2019 governorship election. The apex court ordered that the Certificate of Return issued to Lyon be withdrawn by INEC and re-issued to the next candidate with highest votes and geographical spread in the poll, which happens to be Duoye Diri of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).

    Even if INEC knew with certitude that Degi-Eremieoyo filed phony documents for the governorship poll, there was nothing it could by itself do to block him given Section 31(1) of the Electoral Act 2010, as Amended. It is based on this provision also that after the electoral commission had monitored primary elections of political parties, some parties foist persons who had not even participated in primaries as their candidates with INEC not being able to reject such imposition.

    Amid ongoing efforts to rework this country’s electoral laws, this particular provision should be reviewed to enable INEC gate keeping; such that elementary issues like phony documentation by gladiators would not discredit the entire electoral system, rubbish INEC and reserve authentic electoral declarations for a Judicial Electoral Commission.

  • Lassa fever and other plagues

    By Kayode Ojewale

    If serious health concern lately, has been the ravaging scourge and spread of Lassa fever in Nigeria. Lassa fever has been a major health challenge in West Africa and its spread has created panic even as concerned private and public health institutions battle hard to curtail it every year when it raises its ugly head.

    As at first week in February, the death toll from Lassa fever outbreak in Nigeria had risen to 47 as disclosed by Nigeria Centre for Disease Control in its weekly situation update for week five (January 27 to February 2). The spread of this killer-disease may not be easily curbed since there is no known vaccine for the prevention of the disease for now. However, it could be curtailed and managed when informed decisions are taken by every citizen.

    What makes Lassa fever challenging and a bit difficult to diagnose and treat is the fact that it initially assumes and mimics the symptoms of malaria. This in turn leads to delays in treatment because only few laboratories in Nigeria can diagnose Lassa fever virus. Lack of treatment commencement worsens the condition of an infected person as early diagnosis and treatment of the disease are key to any survival chance.

    It is also important to bring to the attention of Nigerians that we should be weary of smoked meat slices (Suya), bean cake (popularly called ‘akara’ in local parlance), roasted corn and other food items or snacks that are usually sold by wrapping them in old newspapers or other paper materials where rodents might have excreted on them. That paper-wrapped food item may not be washed or rinsed before consuming so it becomes unhealthy to eat. It is therefore not hygienic to keep food items in used papers. These papers may not, by mere visual inspection, reveal rodents’ urine or excreta, so difficulty may arise in discerning which ones are contaminated or not. One never can tell if these papers have come in contact with excreta from rats. When an individual then consumes food items wrapped in these contaminated papers, such a one may be at high risk of contracting Lassa fever. It is therefore advisable to play safe by taking your container to receive the food items at the point of sales or requesting them to be sold in a safe and healthy wrapper.

    Not too long ago, a Director of Public Health, Enugu State, Dr Boniface Okolo, warned Nigerians against the consumption of cassava flakes (garri) to avoid contacting Lassa fever. Boniface said the rats that caused the disease were mostly in contact with the most popular Nigerian staple food, garri.  When garri is soaked in ordinary water and consumed, one is exposed to the risk of contracting Lassa fever. But if the water is boiled to make ‘eba’, it could go a long way to kill the bacteria caused by pest or rodents in garri.

    Last month, Nigerians woke to receive a shocking alert issued by the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control, NAFDAC, on the use of paracetamol as tenderizers to cook meat by some unscrupulous food vendors. Paracetamol is added to soften the meat thereby saving cost of cooking for a longer time. Some households and restaurants have adopted this fast but deadly means of cooking meats meant for consumption. No wonder some meats are so soft and tender that they can be split into halves with ordinary plastic spoons or bare hands. It is not to say that there are no other healthy and legitimate ways of tenderizing meats but there are other harmful, illegal and unhealthy ways of boiling meats as revealed in a recent warning issued by NAFDAC.

    The public alert from NAFDAC reads: “The members of the public, especially restaurant operators are cautioned to desist from the dangerous and unapproved use of paracetamol tablets to soften meat used in food preparation, as such illegal practice makes food to become toxic, unwholesome and unfit for human consumption.” The statement further explains the effects and health implications of consuming paracetamol-treated meats. The statement adds: “when used to cook, paracetamol is broken down (or hydrolyzed) into a toxic substance. This substance untimely damages the liver and some other organs in the body. Thus, the consumption of toxic and unwholesome food illegally prepared using paracetamol tablets may result in serious health consequences, including liver damage, kidney failure and untimely death.”

    As alternatives to paracetamol tablets, NAFDAC suggested other established and safe methods of tenderizing meat. They include the following: Cooking with a pressure cooker; marinating (soaking) with vinegar, citrus juices or wine before cooking; marinating with enzymes (pineapple, pawpaw, kiwi, ginger and Asian pear contain enzymes which can soften the meat); slow-cooking the meat or using commercial meat tenderizers in moderation which are sold in powder or liquid form.

    It becomes scary and worrisome to know that some food vendors deliberately indulge in toxic processing practices. It was recently revealed by some government officials in Osun State that some food vendors in the state use bleach to process cassava used for garri. This practice is not only unhealthy it is heartless and barbaric too. It therefore becomes imperative for NAFDAC, the food safety agency in the country, to arrest, prosecute and make public culprits who put consumers in harm’s way through such deadly practice.

    As at the time of writing, another plague, coronavirus has claimed more lives than SARS did in 2002/2003 worldwide. Although no reported case of Coronavirus yet in Nigeria, Nigerians must, in order to protect their health and prevent this disease outbreak, begin to practise protective measures against the deadly coronavirus presently tearing China apart. One of such measures is washing of hands with soap and water frequently. Also avoid touching your mouth, nose or eyes with unclean hands. Some health experts have also warned against consumption of raw or undercooked animal products.

    We should deploy the best practice of food storage to prevent contracting and spreading of diseases that could be avoided by simple hygiene practice at home. Air-tight containers must be used to store food items, especially grains/cereals and powdery food items. Fruits and raw vegetables should be thoroughly and properly washed before consuming.

    Above all, diseases of any kind can be reduced if not kept at bay if we adopt regular handwashing practice to prevent easy spread of diseases.

    Our preparedness for and response to disease outbreaks, especially Lassa fever which ravages Africa’s most populous country yearly, would go a long way in reducing deaths that may arise from the spread of the disease.

    Furthermore, to nip the spread of Lassa fever and other plagues in the bud, there should be public awareness and continuous sensitization of the general public on various personal preventive measures to curtail diseases indoors or outdoors.

    • Ojewale writes from Idimu, Lagos via kayodeojewale@gmail.com.

  • Okada restriction: Good radiance to bad rubbish

    Sam Onyekachi

    All over the country, the nuisance of Okada and Keke’s riders has become a major subject of discourse. Being the commercial nerve centre of the country, it is not surprising that the activities of Okada and Keke riders have been very menacing at the nation’s ‘Centre of Excellence’.

    In almost every part of the metropolis, Okada and Keke riders have constituted themselves into a nuisance. They ride recklessly, flouting traffic rules at will. And whenever they are apprehended by law enforcement agents, they resort to unbelievable acts of violence.

    It is no longer news that, in Lagos, not a few Okada and Keke riders are fond of contravening traffic laws in irresponsible fashion. For instance, the BRT lanes are strictly dedicated for BRT buses, most of them flout the rule with impunity.

    Sadly, the unruly penchant of these riders for disobeying simple traffic rules and regulations often lead to traffic snarls that give room for social miscreants to rob motorists of valuable items as well as other unsocial acts such as vandalizing of vehicles.

    More so, most of them are quite lawless. They not only ride against traffic, they usually carry more than the required number of passengers, stop to pick passengers at un-designated places and over speed among many other dangerous acts. As earlier stated, each time they are stopped by law officers, they take to harassing, and even beating them up.

    It is in view of the foregoing that one will really like to applaud the Lagos State government for recently coming up with the order restricting the activities of Okada and Keke riders. With this latest development, the state government has shown itself as one that takes a scientific and methodical approach to governance.

    Indeed, there is no better way for the government to demonstrate that it is a listening one better than through such a well thought out measure.

    Before now, a lot of us have been crying out loud in the social media and other such platforms against the unruly attitude of these riders in Lagos, especially in the past few months. For me, worst hit is the Apapa-Oshodi Expressway axis, where they have become astonishingly anarchic in their conduct. Well, many other residents have similar ugly experience in their respective axis.

    They act as if there is no government in place. Any government that condones such impunity doesn’t deserve the respect of the populace. For all I care, the unruly attitude of these chaps far overshadows whatever good argument anyone might want to bring up in their support as a means of transportation.

    Therefore, I see the order restricting their activities in the state as one primarily meant to protect the interest of the public. It is meant to ensure that people do not ride on Okada along routes that could put their lives and those of others in jeopardy.

    Universally, one of the major responsibilities of government is the protection of lives. Hence, the Lagos state government is only performing one of its constitutional duties through the restriction order.

    Motorcycles have worse pollution control mechanisms. The smoke emitted from bikes not only poses serious health risks like pulmonary diseases, but also contributes to the depletion of the ozone layer.

    • Onyekachi wrote in from Lekki, Lagos

  • 2020 – 2029: Decade for climate action in Africa

    By Oluwaseun Oguntuase 

     

    Since the Swedish scientist, Svante August Arrhenius established the contribution of carbon dioxide to global warming in 1896, the scientific consensus is that greenhouse gas emission from human activities is responsible for climate change.

    Today, climate change is arguably the greatest challenge facing humanity, as the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – basically the gold standard for climate science – warned of several regional changes in climate with global warming of up to 1.5ÚC (equivalent to 2.7ÚF) compared to the pre-industrial levels.

    In September 2016, the atmospheric carbon concentration crossed the symbolic redline of 400 parts per million (ppm) of Co2, and the forecast for 2020 is for it to remain above 410 ppm for the entire year.

    According to World Meteorological Organization (WMO), global temperatures have risen in parallel to the atmospheric carbon concentration.

    The last decade was the hottest ever recorded on the planet. The record-setting 2016 at 0.56°C above the 1981-2010 baseline range was the hottest year since record started in 1880, while 2019 was just behind by 0.04°C.

    Our planet is not only warming, fingerprints of anthropogenic climate change is increasingly seen in diverse arrays of meteorological and hydrological phenomena around the world, from heat waves to coastal damages during extreme tides and storms, flooding from more intense precipitation events, and severe drought.

    It is also manifesting in changes to growing seasons, shrinking great ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica, retreating mountain glaciers, water resources, ocean acidification, and coastal flooding.

    The IPCC has warned that the increasing magnitudes of warming exacerbate the likelihood of severe, pervasive, and irreversible impacts.

    Climate change is an exemplary illustration of inequality in the 21st century. Future climate will depend on committed warming caused by past anthropogenic emissions, as well as future anthropogenic emissions and natural climate variability.

    The bulk of the temperature increase is due to historical emissions of developed countries that have attained their current levels of development through carbon-intensive growth since the pre-industrial period.

    The Least Developed Countries (LDCs), even though they have contributed relatively little to the current stock of emissions causing the problem, are facing the sharp end of climate change.

    They are highly vulnerable to extreme weather events and these are anticipated to increase in frequency and intensity with climate change.

    Hence, while efforts to mitigate climate change are crucial, it is also essential to assist developing countries to adapt to the impacts of climate change already being experienced due to the past and current greenhouse gas emissions.

    Africa is home to more LDCs than any other continent and is where most of the adaptation work in this decade will be done. The continent has contributed little to climate change (just 3.8%) but is disproportionately vulnerable to its impacts which are compromising the continent’s development and threatens millions of Africans and their livelihoods.

    The continent is highly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change due to the interaction of multiple stresses occurring at various levels, dependence on climate-sensitive sectors and low adaptive capacity.

    This vulnerability is exacerbated by existing developmental challenges such as endemic poverty; poor governance and weak institutions; lack of awareness and access to knowledge; high dependence on natural resources and rain-fed agriculture; limited access to capital, including markets, infrastructure and technology; recurrent droughts; ecosystem degradation; and associated complex disasters and conflicts.

    Finance is a major challenge to climate action in Africa as in most LDCs.  Public climate finance is largely inadequate, inefficient and ineffective due to poor revenue generation, rising public debt and onerous debt servicing.

    The aggregate costs of adaptation in Africa, home of about two-thirds of LDCs and arguably the most vulnerable region in the world to the impacts of climate change, were estimated by the African Development Bank in 2010 to be more than USD600 billion over the next 10-20 years.

    Climate finance has been a perennial sticking point at international climate meetings. The evolving concept of additionality of climate finance is also a highly political and hotly contested issue in climate change negotiations.

    Read Also: Nigeria and climate change challenge

     

    The developing countries contend that developed countries should not merely redirect resources previously earmarked for other environmental and development areas including official development assistance to climate change, but that developed countries should provide new and additional financial resources,  as stated in the Article 4 of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), towards mitigation and adaptation in developing countries as part of a larger finance and sustainable development agenda

    In recognition of the importance of public finance, the global community has established several climate funds. These multilateral climate funds are designed to disburse funding to developing countries to help meet the cost of climate change mitigation and adaptation.

    Capitalized primarily by developed countries, the funds also serve as recognition of the greater historic responsibility these countries have for current atmospheric greenhouse gases. However, these funds have failed to meet up with global expectations.

    Several developed countries have failed to meet their commitments, with the gap between what is needed and what is available growing deeper with each passing year.

    Furthermore, there is challenge of accountability and transparency and failure to balance funding between adaptation and mitigation, as well as geographically.

    Greenhouse gas emission, which causes planetary climate change, qualifies as the biggest negative environmental externality affecting all sectors of the economy and threatening financial stability and longer-term prosperity, underscoring the need for private fund and institutional capital to finance climate action.

    Climate change does not just represent risks, but also opportunities for investment. The International Finance Corporation (IFC) has called for a significant private sector investment of about $23 trillion worth of potential investments by 2030 in 21 big emerging markets, which is estimated to yield about $7.1 trillion in economic benefits.

    These opportunities include the development of new technologies, improvement of infrastructures, reforestation, as well as products and services that can mitigate or help people adapt to the effects of climate change.

    Every investment contributes to short and long-term positive and negative social and environmental effects. Investors shape these effects through investment decisions.

    Impact investing has emerged as an innovative approach to mobilizing both public and private capital to solve the world’s seemingly intractable social and environment problems.

    The common theme across impact investing is the aim to achieve measurable social and/or environmental goals in addition to achieving financial returns.

    The current and potential sizes of the impact investing sector are debatable. Widely cited numbers range from estimated value of $502 billion by the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN), to as high as $1.3 trillion in assets of signatories linked to sectors related to specific and environmental goals identified by United Nations’ Principles for Responsible Investing.

    Impact investors’ appetite was estimated as high as $26 trillion by the International Finance Corporation (IFC).

    Over half of all respondents to the GIIN Annual Impact Investor Survey 2019 considered contribution to a global agenda, such as the Paris Climate Accord or the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals, a ‘very important’ motivator for making impact investments.

    Furthermore, impact funds have a higher proportion of their portfolios in regions outside of Europe and North America, or in emerging regions.

    This suggests that impact investors have a special willingness to invest in locations that traditional investors may avoid, and regions where investment needed for climate action is the greatest.

    For Africa to keep benefiting from the increasing impact investments, policy makers in Africa must provide the favorable institutional arrangements to attract impact investing to their countries and jurisdictions.

    Public policy discussions and decisions around legal and regulatory frameworks, fiscal incentives, innovation system, education, training and skills, technology transfer and acquisition, and infrastructural development should be centered on attracting investments in areas related to climate adaptation and mitigation.

    In conclusion, the climate change scientific debate is over and the impact investors’ appetite is huge; poor policy and weak governance structures must not stand in the way of attracting the much-needed climate finance. This decade is crucial for Africa, we must start now.

     

    • Oguntuase is of the Centre for Environmental Studies and Sustainable Development,

    Lagos State University.  

  • Travails of the girl-child

    By Abdulganiyu Abdulrahman Akanbi

     

    It is a statement of fact that females around the world witness infringement of rights on a daily basis. Discrimination, violence and harassment of weaker sex have contributed a tad to the dimension of public discourse globally.

    The advocacy for “women and men, and girls and boys, to enjoy the same right, resources, opportunities and protections”, as defined by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), is gaining momentum by the day; a  sign that gender parity may have finally come to stay.

    Gender equality is the state of equal ease of access to  resources and opportunities regardless of gender, including economic participation, and decision-making; the state of valuing different behaviours, aspirations needs equally, regardless of gender.

    The girl-child is given less priority at home than the male child, usually because of the notion that the latter sustains the family name while the former adopts another man’s surname. The cultural belief that the female sex is weaker than the male sex also festers gender inequality. Domestic chores are considered the duty of the female child. She is conditioned to the stereotype of washing and cooking. She is married off at a tender age.

    A recent study reveals that Nigeria has the largest number of child brides in Africa with more than 23 million girls and women married as children. Most of them are from poor and rural communities. While data suggests a decline of nine per cent in the prevalence of child marriage since 2003, and a projected further decrease of six per cent by 2030, Nigeria’s rapid population growth means that the number of child brides will in fact increase by more than one million by 2030 and double by 2050.

    The girl child is also raped

    The rate at which rape occurs in the world increases daily, making headlines and hitting trends on social media.  In 2012 alone, about 687 cases of rape were recorded in Nigeria.

    Daily Sun reported in 2014 how a girl was gang raped by three men on her way back from school. This was preceded by The Guardian newspaper’s report about one Masonter Iyanga raped a girl. Even the church is not exempted from the scandal, a motivation behind the #ChurchToo campaign. On October 25, 2013, a report by Vanguard newspaper revealed how a 50-year-old pastor allegedly raped three girls, of not more than nine, seven and eight years of age.

    More so, the girl-child is given less education than her male counterpart.  The auxiliary/local health system is predominated by women with little or no professional medical training. This is because of the notion that too much of education denies a woman a matrimonial home.

    United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organis ation (UNESCO), estimates that 130 million girls between ages six and 17 are out of school and 15 million girls of primary school age, half of them in sub Saharan Africa—will never enter a classroom. For example, in Nigeria, only four per cent of poor young women in the Northwest zone can read, compared with 99 per cent of rich young women in the Southeast.

    The marginalisation of women in politics is another form of gender inequality. There is low inclusion of women in top public offices. Yet, some states in the country have yet to give full rights to women to own property. Such states include Kaduna, Sokoto and Zamfara—where only married women are permitted under the law to own a property.

    Meanwhile it is important to note that infringement of women rights is ungodly as no religion encourages such. And wherever women and girls are treated unfairly, there is bound to be more conflict and less prosperity.

    • Akanbi is a 200-Level student of Islamic Studies, Usmanu Danfodiyo University, Sokoto.

  • Maryam Sanda: Our courts are creating new orphans

    By Abdulwaheed Sofiullahi

    The issue of Maryam Sanda who, a fortnight ago, was sentenced to death by hanging by the Supreme Court for killing her husband Bilyamin Bello, has continued to generate arguments on both the traditional and social media.  However, before you could also lash her, why don’t you ask yourself how the journey between Sanda and Bello began.

    Despite that they were both from privileged background, do we think Maryam would have willingly promised her husband a journey of no return? Like others, they had hoped for a life of bliss when they said ‘yes’ to each other. They once ate and smiled together in love before life brought into their home suspicion and pessimism. It was amid a heated  argument, and Maryam, in a fit of rage, reportedly stabbed her husband in the neck while in his sleep on November 19, 2017.

    Yet, like others, their family was once a peal of laughter. They once ate, smiled with love until life showed them its other dimension. They were blessed with a child (some say two ). However, with the situation of things, who would claim them since with the present scenario, the child (children) automatically becomes orphan.

    Evidently, it’s right and acceptable when Sanda was charged with ‘causing brutal and murderous anguish’. She was accused of stabbing her husband to death with a broken bottle. It’s not new in Nigeria and the world over, how the lives of young people have been affected through domestic violence.

    Domestic violence is an uncommon vice in this common world. Many people need to be made to adapt and endure with other human beings alike. The problem is that the consequence of domestic violence as in Sanda’s case is more detrimental to the child than the parents. Regardless of who chooses to act like a biological mother to the orphan, things would never be the same. And to the child they left behind, how would it sound to her that her father was killed by her mother and the court slammed her with ‘death by hanging’?.

    As a result of this abuse, the child may experience physical disabilities, aggression, mental illness or a poor ability to create smooth and interacting relationship.

    We shouldn’t be insensitive to protecting the younger ones who are victims of circumstances. Even though the judge may have been fair enough by following the dictates of the law, the  negative effect is that, via that judgment, an orphan has just been created.

    • Adeniyi is a 300-Level student of English Language Education, Usmanu Danfodiyo University, Sokoto.

  • On ‘Abacha Loot’: Once upon a conference

    By Mohammed Adamu

    They say that the seemingly unending repatriation of the now infamous ‘Abacha loot’ is gradually becoming suspect. And pro-Abachas now wonder: ‘could Obasanjo, in collaboration with his Western friends, have maliciously and malevolently set this unending recovery it up in order to rubbish – in perpetuity- the image of his late traducer, General Sani Abacha? My answer to this lies especially in a revisit to a piece I wrote three years ago (April 20, 2017) on the title ‘Grand Corruption’.

    ‘GRAND CORRUPTION’

    I wrote ‘CORRUPTION: IS THY NAME NIGERIA?’ over a year ago (January 12, 2016), and in it I narrated a privileged experience, as far back as 2001 when I attended Transparency International’s 10th International Anti-Corruption Conference in Prague, Czech Republic. It was an event attended by virtually all the nations of the world, from as mighty as the United States of America to as minuscule as a 200,000-strong nation of Vanuatu. All 52 members of that country’s unicameral parliament were in attendance at the conference; -to learn a thing or two about new ways of fighting corruption even though ‘corruption’ in such tiny archipelagic countries with transparently lean workforce is hardly ever threat enough to excite such keen interest in new fighting tools. Conversely, and painfully so, of the nearly 500 members of Nigeria’s wastefully bi-cameral legislature, not one legislator was in attendance, even though Nigeria ranked high on the ladder of nations in which corruption has assumed a malignantly nation-threatening proportion.

    Many of these lawmakers had in fact applied and received various sums of per diem (estacode) in dollars under the pretense of attending the conference. They did not. Call it ‘stealing from the purse of the ‘avenging angel’ itself. Stealing in the name of attending an anti-corruption conference to fight stealing. This was not ‘corruption’ as we know it in aggressor-mood attacking to take what does not belong to it; nor was this ‘corruption’ in defensive mood, ‘fighting back’. This was a disdainful poke right in the eye of ‘anti-corruption’ by skin-deep ‘corruption’! When a relatively unknown Oby Ezekwesili, then a special assistant to Obasanjo on economic matters introduced me to the Justice Minister late Bola Ige as a Special Assistant in the Department for Legislative Liaison and the Cicero asked me rather sarcastically: ‘’Where are our members of National Assembly?” I probably should’ve said that they had stolen their way out of participation.

    The five-day conference which was attended by many world leaders, specialists and experts cutting across public and private sectors, attracted politicians, lawmakers, judges, captains of industry, clergies, personnel of the armed and paramilitary forces, security agencies, civil servants, representatives of national anti-corruption agencies, Non-Governmental and Civil Society Organizations, the media and sundry others. They had all gathered in that Eastern European country, to compare notes, share experiences and exchange ideas on how to effectively tackle the menace of corruption at the global, continental, regional and national levels- especially with regard to its ever changing faces and the need, globally and nationally, to constantly review legislation to check its mutating nature. And so, the critical role of parliaments in this regard, could not have been overemphasized.

    At the end of those five engaging days the conference had acquitted itself as a practical, action-oriented event with focus on case studies, concrete strategies and impact assessment from the diverse experiences of different nations which not only provided workable ideas and networking opportunities for public and private sector personnel, but also went beyond political statements to take stock of what strategies had worked and what methods were certified ineffective in the various anti-corruption measures used nationally and internationally. There were over a hundred workshop topics up for delivery by experts from diverse fields of experience -offering participants a multi-faceted view of the subject matter and a multiplicity of approaches on how to deal with the menace of corruption and other ethnics-related issues: topics such as ‘Building Ethics in the Civil Service’, ‘creating an Honest Police Force’, ‘Causes, Consequences and Remedies of Judicial Corruption’, ‘Curbing Corruption in the Oil, Gas and Mining Sectors’, ‘Money Laundering and Recovery of Proceeds of Corruption’ and ‘Blowing the Whistle on Corrupt officials’ among many others.

    I was particularly interested in topics relevant to our local situation, as Nigeria was –and still is- notoriously shaping up to be both prolific and versatile especially in the areas of ‘money laundering’ and recovery of looted funds abroad -no thanks- to the infamous ‘Abacha loot’. Plus I was curiously interested in ‘Whistle Blowing’ –a universally novel anti-corruption tool kit which up until that conference in Prague was still relatively alien to Nigeria’s anti-corruption experience. It was quite an auspicious moment particularly for Nigeria and Peru, because both countries were singled out for special mention at Plenary especially for their tenacity in the pursuit of looted funds abroad belonging to their respective countries. And although the conference admitted the existence of serious man-made bi-lateral and multi-lateral bottlenecks to the recovery of looted funds –offering high-profile strategies for scaling them- Nigeria’s and Peru’s success stories provided an opportunity by the conference to loud the efficacy of the so called ‘Mutual Legal Assistance’ initiative designed to help victim-nations recover looted funds abroad.

    It is not sufficient that a nation has succeeded in trailing and tracing her looted funds abroad. The real challenge is in the bilateral and or multi-lateral efforts to repatriate such funds through the labyrinth of complex municipal laws of harboring countries. Most of these complex laws victim-countries believe are made to frustrate efforts at discovery, recovery and repatriation. Whereas many such victim-countries rarely have the patience to go through the tedium of these laws, Nigeria’s and Peru’s perseverance in that regard was not only commended but showcased as proof that the ‘Mutual Legal Assistance’ initiative, in the end, does achieve result; if –and only if- victim-nations are patient, painstaking and persevering. Meaning that in the predictably inevitable ‘eye-ball to eye-ball’ scenario between a victim-nation and a loot-harboring-country, the former must not blink.

    The whole of Peru for example was battling for years to recover a paltry sum of $22 million. This, in the parlance of boxing categorization, was a measly ‘feather’ or ‘bantam’ weight compared to the several hundreds of millions of dollars of the ‘Abacha loot’ alone that Nigeria had almost forever been the trail of. Yet that nine million-strong Latin American Republic, Peru was, reportedly in an upbeat mood at the prospect of such ‘huge’ amount about to be recovered and injected into her twin economic mainstays of agriculture and mining. Ironically in today’s Nigeria even a spoilt child of a poorly-ranked corrupt politician in Nigerian could conveniently have paid Peru her looted funds without batting an eyelid. That is a measure of how obscenely corrupt we have become. But we are not only dealing with insane politicians who have stolen billions of dollars, side by side with that sickening reality we also have to cope with the insanity of a multitude of raggedy, bigoted others who are telling us to forgo the loot and to “let bygones be bygones”.

    In fact it was at the Prague conference that I first heard the phrase ‘grand corruption’, symbolizing perhaps a malignant stage of corruption from which it is said that a dangerous alliance can happen between corruptly-wealthy politicians and organized business crime groups with the inevitable result that a nation is perpetually held to ransom -as we see in many parts of Latin America. And it was on this subject of ‘grand corruption’ that another moment for Nigeria came up again at the conference; this time alongside Russia. The two countries were singled out for special mention as destinations where corruption had reached ‘grand’ level and that therefore the threat of the emergence of power groups stronger than government was not only likely, it was imminent.

    A report presented at the conference which was prepared by the UN Global Program Against Corruption, said that in about “a ten year period”, Nigeria and Russia alone, had seen “more than $250 billion looted by corrupt leaders”. This amount which the report said was diverted mostly to banks in Europe and the United States was “the equivalent of the World Bank budget” in that same period. In fact on the same subject and around the same period, ‘The Financial Times of London’, writing under the title ‘Nigeria’s Stolen Money’ (July 24, 1999), had reported that of the one trillion dollars in criminal proceeds laundered through banks worldwide each year, about $100 billion came from corrupt regimes nested, feathered and plumed in Nigeria.

    By the way even as Obasanjo was commended for its un-yielding efforts in the recovery of the ‘Abacha loot’, the conference could not conceal its reservation that repatriating such back to a “systemically corrupt environment” like Nigeria, would be ‘penny-wise’, for the reason that corrupt politicians would still re-loot the loot. Quite an uncanny piece of prophesy you might say, because it did come to pass that the so-called ‘recovered’ Abacha loot was allegedly ‘re-looted’ by corrupt politicians in government. Or were we not told that between Jonathan’s discredited anti-corruption Caesar Lamurde, his all-talk-and-no-result finance minister, Ngozi and his serpentine -ala-Malibu- AGF Adoke, most of the Abacha loot, like ‘needle in a haystack’, was missing?

    And although things have only gotten worse in my country since 16 years ago when I attended that conference, I am still consoled by the fact that in Prague I was privileged to be part of an important movement namely the brave reaction of right-minded citizens of the world to the pernicious threat that corruption poses to democratic governments around the globe. No feeling could be greater.

  • Nigeria is dying

    By Oseloka H. Obaze

     

    Nigeria faces an existential threat. Slowing but surely, Nigeria is dying. Its demise will not be by implosion and a bang as some had forecasted; but by agonizing segmental dissipation, and a whimper. The National Assembly’s recent kneejerk effort to review the constitution panders to the incremental approach, when the needed review should devolve to the people as was done in 2014. With ongoing zonal coalescing and alignments, the nation is already at risk of a constitutional force majeure. Nigeria will not decline into a categorical failed state; it will just disintegrate, courtesy of bad leadership and the crass unwillingness to act and arrest the nation’s insecurities and prevailing dichotomies. Whether Nigeria’s splintering will be peaceful, or by force of arms, remains an open-ended question.

    The whole body begins to hurt and die, when parts of the whole are malignantly afflicted. That is Nigeria’s fate. Let no one be in doubt. The sepsis has been long in coming; and long hidden canker sores are now festering open sores of the nation. There are no more pretenses. And there shouldn’t be. We are a nation in dire crisis. The corporate body known as Nigeria, which for long was held and bound together by hope, tolerance and accommodation, is in a free all. Insecurity, the cheapening and devaluation of lives, has left the nation hopeless. Where there ought to be frightening noise, and cry for remediation, the nation has become catatonic.

    Nigeria is no longer at ease. And this is not politicking. It’s about the nation’s state of mind, which is such that there is an eerie silence in the land; when there should be discourse, dissension or even protestations and civil disobedience over the state of the nation. Suddenly, Nigeria has gone catatonic. Why? And why is no one speaking up? Nigerians are tired of Nigeria. They have fatalistically given up on the nation, thus willing for the chips to fall where they may. This is not mere rhetoric. The predisposition is real.

    For long Nigeria had suffered from the cruelty of false hope. In this post-change era, the vicissitudes and vagaries of governance aside, endemic challenges, and the inability of the national elite to rally to a consensus on the way forward, are wrecking Nigeria. Renascent sectionalism, and unbridled ethnicity and sectarianism, which undermine the nation’s secularity, as well as unkept promises, continue to elicit deep resignation.  What is even far more worrisome is that ongoing retrogressive developments in Nigeria should give us pause, since Nigeria’s foreign friends and adversaries are watching her closely. But rather than worry, we are all mute and acquiescent.

    Insecurity has become second nature in Nigeria. And there is evidently an external dimension to it, as the Nigerian military hinted recently. Discovery of some sophisticated weapons in the insurgency theatres speak to this concern. The long festering insurgencies aside, visceral bloody conflicts and crimes are being unleashed daily against Nigerian citizens, mostly by foreign Fulani cohorts, who have embedded themselves into different parts of the nation, while masquerading as cattle herders. Nigerian citizens -Christians and Muslims alike – are being killed daily. The former are deliberately targeted; the latter, tend to be collateral damage. A corollary is that multiple quiescent ethnic and religious fissures are manifesting, now without pretenses. This is to say that the die is cast. Nigerian leaders must brace up for the possible emergence of proto-states; and do well to draw lessons from Southern Cameroon.

    Government’s responsibility to protect, extend to maintaining sanitized and secure territories. As a nation, we can no longer pretend that with our open border policy, Nigerian territories are now prone to the insinuation of ISIS and Al Qaeda terrorist cells. Conflicts in Libya and the Sahel make this scenario feasible, as does our numerous ungoverned spaces. This outlook makes existing Boko Haram and ISWAP challenges a child’s play. But more worryingly, we know that where active terrorist cells are domiciled, we can expect that the U.S. and other global anti-terrorist forces to come calling. Are we as a nation, willing to be the next theater for global anti-terrorist military campaigns? I hope not. This is more so, since images and memories of the Aleppo Governorate in Syria are still very fresh in our minds. If our government has knowledge or evidence, of foreign nations that are funding insurgency in Nigeria, or abetting local bandits, this is the time to come clean. Such nations must be publicly identified and challenged.

    Security has for long been a joint responsibility of the state and people; but the primary responsibility to protect Nigerian citizens as encapsulated in the 1999 Constitution, belongs to the state. But our governments -federal, state and local – have failed Nigerians collectively. The toll in human lives, loss of properties and productivity, is spiraling. Human insecurity, including food insecurity keeps creeping up. Small arms and light weapons are proliferating. Meanwhile, Nigerians are fast losing confidence in our statutory security arrangements. Thus, it seems the only option left to Nigerian citizens, is resort to collective regional, community or individual self-defense. That reality is also manifesting as the clock ticks. Read differently: it means an ensuing state of anarchy!

    In Nigeria, clear and present danger is lurking around. There is a time to speak and a time for silence. There is also a time to act. In the national interest, this is a time to speak up; and a time to act to save corporate Nigeria. Only a frank and selfless national dialogue on security and restructuring will save Nigeria. Shamefully, our leaders and most of the national elite across ethnic, religious and political divides have opted for taciturnity rather than speak truth to power. To paraphrase John Foster Dulles, such disposition is “immoral and opportunistic.” Such reticence is insidiously dangerous for an ill-at-ease and already disintegrating and dying Nigeria.

    • Obaze is MD/CEO, Selonnes Consult – a policy, governance and management consulting firm in Awka.

  • Security conundrum: Beyond law and order enforcement

    By Charles Onunaiju

    The growing calls to establish unorthodox security measures to contain the worsening security situation in the country implies that the current security challenges in the country flow majorly from the lapses in the enforcement of law and order.

    The Southwest governors acting purportedly in the best security interests of the people of the region have set up a security outfit tagged “Amotekun”, launched with fanfare with regional command in Ibadan. A section of some elements in the North has launched a similar security outfit.

    Most likely, other zones in the country would follow the pattern of establishing regional security outfits to protect lives and property within their domain. All these regional security initiatives are purported to fill the gap in the enforcement of law and order, with the ultimate aim to guarantee lives and properties of citizens.

    Beyond the drive for regional security initiatives, calls have gone out for government to remodel its security framework, though, according to the perspectives of its proponents, this would only consist in the shake-up of the top echelon of the country’s formal key security institutions.

    In addition, loud calls have also gone out for community policing, a major vocabulary in the current raging discourse on the country’s security challenges, but which, if soberly deconstructed, amount to very little in substance, because it is difficult to imagine what the over-hyped community police can do, that the current federal police is not doing in the local domains.

    However, the assumptions behind the vociferous calls for all manner of unorthodox security initiatives to fill the gaps in the purported failings in law and order enforcement is seriously deficient and even misleading to the understanding of the current existential security challenges in the country.

    Firstly, a social order perverted by structural exclusion with an entrenched road block to social mobility is condemned to structural disorder in which law enforcement can be nothing but barely rudimentary.

    The pool of untapped manpower ignored and left to boil over deepens the crisis of structural social exclusion with the consequence of a growing reserve of the discontents, standing perilously and tendentiously on the free-flowing slope to crime and other anti-social vices. Actually, no army in the world or any other security organization, including a hundred regional security outfits can arrest the inexorable drift to the sliding slope to crimes, including insurgencies.

    The truth is that assorted strata and formation of the Nigerian elite most vociferous in the current alarm of the national security quagmire are culpable in its making. With a huge sense of entitlement, they have taken out and still takes out from the total social pool, disproportional share of the commonwealth with little consideration for any mechanism for replenishing and multiplying the stock, the only guarantee for an enduring social order. The embarrassing state of the current security imbroglio in the country cannot be blamed alone on the failure of existing national security institutions to cope with the incremental breakdown in law and order and the uncanny impunity with which marauders and other anti-social elements breach security. The desperate calls and even rush to set up regional security outfits testify to the misguided national penchant to treat outcomes instead of fundamental causes. And more importantly, it suits the culpable elite and their narrative that the spate of insecurity is only a failure of the country’s security institutions to muscularly enforce law and order. Their notorious avarice and corruption that have dried up critical investments in strategic sectors that is germane to an inclusive social order is the fundamental cause in the upsurge in crime, banditry, kidnapping and insurgency is hardly a factor, they care to ruminate over.

    Traditional rulers that accept public funds to such personal conveniences like guest houses outside their domains, chartered air-crafts for routine local runs, religious leaders that scoop huge revenues from tithes and other offerings and pour it into prestigious auditoriums, property speculations, luxurious private aircrafts and politicians that yank away unconscionable sums from the national pool to fund their next elections and other out of this world luxuries, along with bureaucratic parasites who lay siege at the public service arena to the nation’s dwindling resources are variously and collectively culpable to the current spate of insecurity.

    The unconscionable consumables procured with public funds for personal convenience deprive vital investments in critical sectors that would generate employment and create a value-chain that can considerably reduce the number of our youthful population, most vulnerable to crime and other anti-social vices.

    Additionally, the new national craze of wedding, naming and birthday parties to hold in Dubai should interest the tax authorities, where at least 10% of the total spending on such parties should be plunged into the social insurance pool to fund investments in employment-generating schemes.

    Muscularly enforcing law and order to reduce the spate of the current insecurity is admirable but is certainly not enough. The various levels of government, especially the state and local governments must take measures like establishing skill acquisition centres, entrepreneurial training centers, farm settlements, small scale industrial processing plants to engage the burgeoning pool of idle manpower that naturally mutate and drift to crimes and other anti-social vices, without constructive engagement to positive endeavors. Huge financial outlay that would be channeled to regional security outfits can usefully be deployed to critical investment in skill acquisition and establishing secondary industrial processing plants, which would in turn create value chains that could turn potential criminals to prospective entrepreneurs.

    National security cannot only consist merely in the enforcement of law and order, but also in the conscious and deliberate cultivation of an inclusive socio-economic order, where equal opportunities are elaborately offered to all citizens to usefully engage their individual talents and abilities. In fact, law and order is more efficiently enforced where majority of citizens are freely privy to a social consensus and voluntarily networked to its defence, unlike the tall order in law enforcement, where unwilling majority is being bullied and dragged to acquiesce to a social contraption.

    Also, recent calls to sack the hierarchy of the security institutions, especially the military will bring little or no value to the security situation. While there may be other serious reasons to sack the service chiefs, the assumptions that their sack would be the magic wand that will improve security is only a conjecture.

    The resurgence of the insurgency in the northeast calls for a new strategy of a political solution, which may consist in a dialogue with the terrorist insurgents, since defeating them, has become a hopeless illusion. The sheer spectacle of sharing a negotiating table with murderous insurgents, who have no clearly defined cause, might be harrowing but the illusion of seeking to defeat them is even more harrowing as they sow death and destruction in their deadly encounters.

    For Nigeria to emerge from its serious security challenge, a new social charter has to be forged and this is far more fundamental than the mere political accommodation that politicians seek through their ceaseless call for restructuring and national conference. A social charter is a revolutionary social reconstruction that can be affected by a strong and responsible state or the outcome of a social havoc that would be wreaked from below by legions of the discontented.

    As it is now, the former U.S President J.F Kennedy refrain that “if a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich,” is down on us and the implication of social justice and its imperative in the current travail of national insecurity is beyond the call for a rejigging of the “security architecture,” an overused and probably the most abused vocabulary in Nigeria’s public discourse today.

    • Onunaiju is research director of an Abuja Based Think Tank.