The Nation Newspaper

Category: Commentaries

  • Bode George and the boy pastor (II)

    Why would Hardball return to this rather faustian fellow after devoting this space to him last week? Simple, one has a duty to seize any opportunity to hoist our tormentors up the pole and literarily impale them as a token of our angst and outrage. Last week, Hardball had dissected Chief George’s cant and irreverence in his interview in a national newspaper. The subject of last week’s tutorials to Chief George and his ilk is: never abuse or talk down at an ordained man of God, especially if you claim to be a Christian. It is something close to a sacrilege in Christendom to publicly disparage a priest for his sermon from the pulpit.

    Why did he dash to the church straight from the purgatory if he detested the truth? He was obviously peeved that all the men of God had not joined his uniformed horde of sycophantic reception train singing and drumming his triumphant return from the ‘battlefield’. He was particularly “livid” because it was “that boy” pastor, of all the clergymen at the Cathedral who had the temerity to tell him not to sin.

    Today, Hardball goes a step further to insist that Chief Bode George has no grounds to show so much umbrage and righteous indignation over the young priest’s admonition to him to “go and sin no more” during the thanksgiving service upon his return from jail. First, a true Christian of Chief George’s age ought to have learnt that no man is without sin as we are all born with sin only to be saved by grace if we believe, repent and obey.

    Second, Chief Bode George is the archetypal Nigerian leader and politician, who is unrepentant and who indeed, glories in his crimes and evil ways. The polity is dismal and derelict today because our leaders have become inured to corruption and vices. Many are philistines, who have forgotten the proper code of ethics and behaviour. Chief George insists on his innocence even after he had been tried and convicted for corruption and abuse of process while he was chairman of the board of the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA). He has returned to court to contest his innocence even after serving term. He seizes every opportunity to rail and rant that his conviction was orchestrated by enemies; he swears by everything that his tenure at NPA was squeaky clean. But most Nigerians, including Hardball, would swear that if that be the case, then Chief Bode George deserves to be sainted, he would indeed pass for an angel. It seems most improbable, going by the records of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). We all know that some ‘rich’ government agencies have become sluiceways for the party’s slush funds.

    Why, for instance, has the NPA board chairmanship always been reserved for the party’s big wigs and ‘warlords’, who often have deep interests in the party’s campaign efforts? Apart from Bode George, some of the prominent PDP strong men who have been on ‘special assignment’ at the NPA include the chief Tony Anenih, currently chairman of the board of Trustees and Chief Ahmadu Ali, former chairman of the party.

    Besides, Bode George kicks and shouts as if we all don’t know that board appointments are largesse and settlements for party stalwarts across the land. They are ‘payback’ jobs for party loyalists, who are entitled to a chunk of the commonwealth on the account of the fact that they belong to the ruling party. Going by the recent appointments to boards, which feature all sorts of strange fellows, it is obvious that boards are no longer constituted to add value but to breach the system and debase the economy.

    Yet Chief Bode George seeks to harangue and browbeat us into accepting that his stint at the NPA board was without a stain. That would be a wonder of our time.

  • A nation without a statesman

    Nigeria is walking deep into more ironies. Dogs are no more eating dogs. The cheetahs are now food for dogs. Government is no more governing, it is now being governed. Citizens are no more protected by the police, they are now the casualties of the police. Once, there was Apo 6, now we have Gudu 9. Death is no more strange to people, it walks in the streets in the midst of the people. Nations are fasting and praying against atrocities, we are here celebrating Boko Haram and other iniquities. ‘Gbomogbomo’, a Yoruba word for kidnapping, was an uncommon crime in the past, today, it is a commercial venture with its own structure. In time past, people wailed and wailed for losing their kids to ritual killers today parents themselves are hawking their kids for a fee. Crisis used to be a visitor in the past, now it is a bona fide citizen of Nigeria. What private schools collect as school fees from a child today was the total budget for the education of a whole community in those days. And yet we say we are making progress. The progress that is destroying the gains we made in the past.

    The truth is that we need the urgent intervention of a wise man. The intervention of a sage. A sage that is a messiah. A messiah of intervention not a messiah of occupation. A messiah wearing the mantle of peace. More succinctly, we need a statesman: one that will be the conscience of the nation; one whose intervention can halt the raging storm troubling our nation. This is the crux of the matter; there seems to be no such man in our land. We have no statesman that we can depend on to bring things back to order.

    It is freaky that none of our leaders since independence, particularly those who are alive, has transformed into a statesman. It is more confounding that all of them but one stumbled and fumbled while in power. Yakubu Gowon, a repentant born- again General, was shovelled out of office in 1975 by Murtala Mohammed and company for being unfaithful to even his own promise to hand over power to civilians. His repentance and present vocation of praying for Nigeria has earned him the forgiveness of the nation for whatever minor role he played in the Dimka Coup, but forgiveness does not erase the recording of history. Therefore, he has to live with this stigma.

    Obasanjo was not badly rated in his first time out as Head of State in 1976 to 1979, albeit his careless sarcasm which had a veiled reference to Chief Obafemi Awolowo almost affected his rating. His statement, “we know those who will not succeed us” was undignified and impertinent. This explained why the whole 12 2/3 saga was seen as part of the plot by his government to prevent Chief Awolowo from succeeding him. Nevertheless, Obasanjo’s second coming in 1999 to 2007 was an anticlimax to an image already on the slope. His third term project signposted a major deterioration in whatever was still left of his credibility and integrity. It is a sad commentary on Nigeria’s leadership that it is the same Olusegun Obasanjo that is dominating national discourse pretending to be a statesman. Why must we continue to desecrate our national altar by allowing men who are indebted to sanity to induct themselves as oracle of the nation when indeed we all know that they cannot even put their houses in order? Aside from the nonsensical controversies which Obasanjo’s contributions to national discourse normally provoke, there is virtually nothing intellectual, sensible, “statesmanlike” and edifying in most of his contributions. At best, and possibly because of their dramatic presentation, they only provide a sort of comic relief for a nation that is perpetually under tension. Statesmen are not made by lousy visibility and promotional theatrics but by their discretion to maintain dignified silence when there is no uproar.

    Shehu Shagari, Nigeria’s president from 1979 to 1983, is a failed ‘statesman’. The profligacy of his government has no precedent. It was a government that was bereft of vision, mission, character, ideas and wisdom. He secured a political victory through a judgment of the Supreme Court that should never be cited as a precedent because of its peculiarity. If the election that brought him to power was controversial, the one that swept him from power was a monumental fraud with a notorious slogan tagged ‘landslide’. So, what does he have to say on electoral malpractices as a statesman? There was nothing about Shagari and his government that was good for precedent.

    Muhammed Buhari is one man whose ‘sins’ in office have also been forgiven judging from the effusive sympathies people showed him for his many failures in politics. The stigma of the 53 suit cases, the high-handedness of his government which slided into unprecedented tyranny and despotism and the retroactive killings of citizens for crimes and offences committed before the death law came into existence, were just a few of what disqualified Buhari from being a statesman. In addition, his religious disposition is also suspect in view of certain statements he made in the past which did not dignify his personality as a statesman. A statesman should be tolerant of other people’s religions and show some respect for their God or gods.

    Ibrahim Babangida that was favoured by many positives and projections to be Nigeria’s statesman that ever lived having conducted the most peaceful and credible elections in the history of Nigeria in 1993 bungled the opportunity when he annulled the same election. By this heinous action that plunged Nigeria into many days of infamy and mayhem, everything called honour and integrity was squeezed out of him. These days, when he speaks on any national issue, nobody pays attention. It is the people’s way of telling him to contend with the shadow of his evil. Babangida is a ‘staleman’ not a statesman.

    Abdulsalam Abubakar, another General that once occupied the highest seat in Nigeria between 1998 and 1999 kept faith with his transition programme by handing over to Olusegun Obasanjo. But his short intervention was not enough to enrich his profile for the status of a statesman. He was just a providential opportunist.

    I have respectfully excluded Nigeria’s dead leaders from this list in order to allow them to rest in peace. The turbulence of their sojourn on earth was sufficient trouble to contend with in their graves. Besides, their departure does not make any difference to the fact that a nation of about 150million people has never produced and may never produce- going by the decline in the quality of leadership – a statesman of the same aura and personage like Nelson Mandela of South Africa.

    What our leaders should know is that Mandela became a universal legend because his heroic exploits in the era of apartheid and the long years he stayed in jail were complimented by his very rare and ‘unafrican’ decision not to seek a second term at the expiration of his first and only term. He shunned both local and international pressure for his continued stay in power.

    If we claim that Mandela’s enigmatic status was only because of his role during apartheid, what do we say of Robert Mugabe who was also a colossus in the emancipation struggle in Zimbabwe. Of course, Mugabe’s image has nosedived tragically even within his own country because he stays too long in power to command any respect just like it would have happened to Mandela if he also overstayed his welcome in power.

    We need somebody like him (Mandela) in our public space at this critical period. Government needs the input of its citizens on some of these critical issues because it knows that it does not have the monopoly of knowledge and wisdom. This is where the statesman comes in: to assist the government in proffering solutions to some, if not all of these issues: kidnapping, Boko Haram, insecurity, killings in Ombatse, political and ethnic conflicts, government’s loss of focus as a result of distractions, frequent ASUU- government disputes, economic crisis, unemployment, infrastructure deficit, leadership tussles and many more.

    I have an exhaustive list of respectable Nigerians whose interventions in the past had got Nigeria out of some crisis situations but I think they are more of social critics and activists than statesmen. A social critic is at best an active member of the civil society who takes it upon himself to ensure that every policy of government is in the best interest of the people and the country. They operate more with the passion and vehemence of concerned citizens who are very protective of the people and their country.

    The list includes but not limited to the following Nigerians: Olubunmi Cardinal Okogie, Bola Tinubu, Wole Soyinka, Bishop Gbonigi, Matthew Kukah, Tam David-West, Bolaji Akinyemi, Bala Usman, Abubakar Umar, Femi Falana, Jide Osuntokun, Baba Omojola, Balarabe Musa, Eskor Toyo, Emeka Anyaoku, and Alex Ekwueme and other unidentified ones.

    I concede that these are all noble men with integrity, honour and credibility. They are people who distance themselves from government and they are men who talk to government with candour. They are men of wisdom, knowledge and uncommon maturity but they lack the transcendental mystique of an avatar which is one of the special qualities of a statesman. Wole Soyinka, an intellectual who does not indulge in extravagant adoration and exaltation of political leaders, surprised me when he referred to Mandela as an avatar- a god in human form- in his book, You Must Set Forth At Dawn.

    A statesman therefore, is a person around whom there is a mystery of a god, a belief of a genius, a similitude to the supernatural, a tale of the unusual, a story about the uncommon, an explanation for the unknown and a testament of a mythical narrative. A statesman is a person whose perceptive power moves him to the level of a prophet. He sees many years ahead when others are battling to understand the present. He is like a god but he is not a god. He is one of us; he does not enjoy any immunity against mortality. What make him special are the incredibility of his perceptive instinct, humility and the rarity of his sacrifice to humanity.

    I have approached this discourse and evaluation from a captious angle in order to restore the quality of our value system. If we keep encouraging value fluidity, we will one day find ourselves in a situation where the society will attach importance to what every Tom, Dick and Harry calls himself. Already, those who have never added value to our collective corporate existence are calling themselves ‘elder statesmen’. In virtually all the political parties, every elderly person (including those with questionable antecedents and zero-credibility) in the party is an “elder statesman” as if statesmanship is about old age. If we therefore decide to liberalise the template for statesmanship in order to accommodate people on the basis of sentiments, the value we are trying to enhance will sink into banality.

    The question now is: when shall we have a statesman that will become an exemplar for all that is good in leadership? Goodluck Johnathan is the only Nigerian President who has the convenience of becoming the first Nigeria’s statesman ever if he does not allow the trappings of power to delete him from his place in history.

  • Governance by ignorance

    Wonder in Nigeria shall never end. One of the things the Nigerian media enjoy is that it always has something new or strange to report. They are never devoid of odd issues to report on. Little wonder, they believe bad news is good news.

    Before I proceed, please permit me to doff my hat and salute the Christians, particularly the Catholics in Imo State, who stood by unborn children whose death warrant Governor Rochas Okorocha and his cohorts assented to.

    It amazed me some days ago when I heard that a governor who is adjudged to be a man of the people, somebody that claimed to love children and a man with special interest in children could sign such a dastard bill into law. It is disheartening to see one of the most revered governors owing to his unprecedented antecedents, legalise abortion in the state.

    Looking at it from the religious angle, Christianity frowns at it. This is because, when ever abortion is committed, life is terminated which God forbids. As the omniscient God, He knows everything even before they happen, and more so, nothing happens without his approval.

    This might raise eyebrows as regards why they relegated their faith to the background. But thank God the Christians made him see reasons to have a rethink.

    Although, legalising abortion in Nigeria is contestable as regards the incessant rape cases threatening womanhood. These days, seldom a day passes without a report on rape. Minors, young girls are now vulnerable to sexual assault. The worst is that even old women are not left out. What an unfortunate generation! This consequently leads to untold future agony and trauma, as it will degenerate into stigmatization, unwanted pregnancy and the likes.

    While considering the foregoing, a responsible government should investigate what precipitates rape, molestation among others and find remedy to address the menace. For example, the raping of old women, minors and even insane women have spiritual undertones. I expected the government to cut the roots and not the branches.

    While I was brooding on the issue, I could not fathom the kind of leaders we have in Nigeria. This is because our so- called leaders just wake up in the morning to take any decision they think is good for the people without making due consultation. Is this what the electorates bargained for?

    I was a bit relieved when l saw a headline recently-Governor Rochas: I signed bill ignorantly. While I expressed my displeasure over that ignorance which is not an excuse, I am equally giving him a half standing ovation for not only admitting his flaws but also apologizing.

    The other time, a Senator who claims to be representing his people sponsored a bill of child marriage, how unreasonable! This raise the question as to whether there are no pressing needs other than girl- child marriage? Or better still, why prioritising that when there are one thousand and one problems bedevilling the country that needs urgent intervention. Does that suggest we are being governed by ignorant folks who parade themselves as presidents, governors, law makers and the like? This is just a handful out of many.

    I suppose it is high time religious and other well meaning bodies took giant strides in scrutinizing public policies and proposed bills with the intent of pointing out loop holes, just like the Christians in Imo State rather than being their puppets used for widening ethnic, political and religious cleavages whose consequences are better imagined than experienced as it is the joy of unscrupulous politicians and a sweet story for the media.

    By Emmanuel Onoja,

    Ibadan.

  • The squeeze of law and order among youths

    Nowadays, one can hardly read a newspaper without being inundated with various accounts of criminals and devilish activities being perpetrated in our society. The height of this unbecoming higgledy piggledy moral decadence and the squeeze of law and order reached an alarming rate and I feel I should express my opinions as regards the remote and immediate causes and proffer solutions to these ignominious acts.

    Unusual incidence of cult-related stories, rape, murder, robbery, arson and cases of prostitution in particular are prevalent. Yesterday, I read about a case where a family of five was shot to death and put into unruly extinction by a gang of three boys with sophisticated weapons. As if that was not enough, just this morning, we heard of a case where an elderly woman was locked up and raped in a room by four young boys. What can we say about the outrageous, barbaric and uncivilised act by our young ladies who go about having sex with just anything all in the name of money what a shame!

    Besides, the present upsurge in social vices in general is mainly caused by the collapse of traditional values and norms. For instance, over the years, the cherished virtues of chastity and moral purity previously the pride of damsels and their parents have been abandoned just as respect for honest toil has largely given way to the worship of filthy lucre.

    Furthermore, if the economic quagmire in the country is not addressed, then this unbecoming development would be unending battle and moral decadence will assume an alarming proportion. Because mass property lies at the root of the moral decay in the land. Therefore, I want to make bold to say as an antidote that the government should put in place policies that would help elevate the moral standard of the people. In fact, government should pass a bill that provides stiffer penalties for anyone caught in the illicit trade of prostitution and others.

    Finally, efforts must be made by all concerned to open up economic opportunities in the country. Government at all levels should do more than pay lips service for the need to create Jobs for the nations intimidating army of unemployed youths whose idle minds and hands now lend themselves readily to the proverbial use of the devil.

    Omoba O. Purity,

    Etsako East,

    Ogiriga – Okpella,

    Edo Staten.

  • America’s new wave of secessionists

    America’s new wave of secessionists

    It seems to be sweeping the nation, with Texas seeking to become its own country and parts of Maryland, California, and Colorado trying to break off into new states. But do any of these movements have a chance? Caitlin Dickson reports

    Five counties in Maryland want to form their own state. So do eight in Colorado and one in Northern California. And the Lone Star State is on its way becoming an independent “island nation,” according to an influential Texas Republican.

    The wave of U.S. secession movements, the largest since the South tried to break up with the Union, is being fueled by a deep urban-rural split, said Frances Lee, a professor at the University of Maryland’s department of government and politics. The fault lines are partisan affiliations and social issues such as reproductive rights and gun control. So it’s no coincidence that the counties seeking to break free generally identify as conservative or libertarian, nor is it a coincidence that they tend to be in rural areas. “This has a lot to do with the current composition of the White House,” said Lee. “Rural counties want to secede from states where they’ve been on the losing side of politics—even at the state level.”

    In an interview with The Washington Post, Western Maryland Initiative leader Scott Strzelczyk said his region, along with several others across the country vying for the title of America’s 51st state, is determined to separate itself from “the dominant ruling class.” Strzelczyk, an information technology consultant, said he is frustrated with Maryland’s influential Democratic Party. “If you don’t belong in their party, you’ll never have your views represented,” he told the paper. “If we have more states, we can all go live in states that best represent us, and then we can get along.” Although the Western Maryland Initiative is little more than a Facebook page today, it’s gaining traction and support from members of the community eager to offer their services and suggestions for the formation of their dream state.

    The movement in Colorado has made a bit more headway. Officials from eight counties met in July to start drawing up boundaries for a state dedicated to bettering the lives of those living in rural northern and northeastern Colorado. “Our voices are being ignored in the legislative process this year, and our very way of life is under attack,” Weld County Commissioner Sean Conway said in July, adding that not only is the effort “not a stunt,” it is indisputably motivated by a feeling of disenfranchisement among people in rural communities. Weld County is one of six in Colorado that will vote on a secession initiative in November.

    Many of the rural counties itching for independence in northern Colorado are dependent on the oil and gas industry, said Kimberly Karnes, a professor of political science and geography at Old Dominion University in Virginia. So it stings when liberal politicians who live far from the range push for things like renewable energy. “Issues such as energy policy, gun control, taxes, and social issues often break on a rural-urban divide,” Karnes told The Daily Beast. “So if the state legislature produces a policy that a majority of residents in the urban and suburban areas prefer, it leaves the rural residents feeling like they are ignored, which over time can build to resentment and lead to the choice of extreme response, such as secession.”

    Just last week, the Board of Supervisors in Northern California’s Siskiyou County voted almost unanimously to make a declaration of its intention to break off from the state and invite neighboring counties in California and Oregon to join them in forming a new state called “Jefferson.” Ahead of the vote, more than 100 citizens gathered to debate, most of them apparently in favor of separating themselves from the regulations and values supported by their state’s more populous and liberal Southern region.

    The last time a state successfully sought approval from the state legislature and Congress for secession was West Virginia in 1863. And while clusters of counties have attempted unsuccessfully to form their own states over the years, social media and the Internet have allowed these movements to gain more traction than they may have in the past. Now, instead of simply commiserating with their neighbors about the liberals in the capitol and trying to get a representative with their values elected, disgruntled Californians can find and meet like-minded residents around the county, encouraging them to give secession a shot.

    And then there’s Texas. A couple of weeks ago, Texas railroad commissioner and aspiring attorney general Barry Smitherman declared that the Lone Star state has “made great progress in becoming an independent nation.” Smitherman, whose job is to regulate the state’s energy industry, not its railroads, argued that Texas’s “energy resources, fossil and otherwise, and our own independent electrical grid” make the state “uniquely situated” to “operate as a stand-alone entity” if the United States falls apart.

    Texas’s motivation for wanting to break free doesn’t fall along the same rural-vs.-urban pattern of the rest of the counties seeking secession. That’s hardly a surprise. In political science, “Texas is Texas. It doesn’t really follow what other states do,” said Karnes. “There’s really an independent political culture of that state that definitely identifies with its independence, the Republic of Texas. It doesn’t follow the trend of what these other states are doing. It’s in its own unique situation.”

    Still, that doesn’t mean Texas has a greater chance of seceding successfully than western Maryland or northern Colorado or “Jefferson.” Even if one of them were to get the approval of both Congress and their state legislatures, they’d be faced with a barrage of new issues such as how to collect taxes, provide education, or transfer public records from the original state to the new one. How would a new state—with a rural economy that in many cases has long been propped up by its state’s urban and suburban economies—fund all these programs?

    The list of issues Texas would face as its own country is even longer. Creating a military, setting up trade agreements, and finding a way to compensate for the federal funding it receives—whether or not its lawmakers want to admit it—only scratches the surface of what it takes to form a country. As for the counties seeking statehood, even if they accomplished their goal and became “the promised conservative or libertarian utopia these residents so often seem to want, the state is still a part of the United States of America, meaning it answers to and must work within the U.S. system, as it currently operates,” said Karnes. “For residents who want more personal freedoms and less government intrusion, they may find that even in a new state, Uncle Sam is still a frequent visitor in their community.”

    Courtesy: The Daily Beast

  • Riding on the wings of fresh paradigm

    Riding on the wings of fresh paradigm

    Rev. Chris Okotie’s initial forays into elective politics which started dramatically in 2002 caught my attention, and like most Nigerians, I was taken aback. I’d questioned the rationale behind his audacious bid to contest the presidential election, wondering how he’d combine tending his flock at his Household of God Church, Oregun, Lagos with the rough and tumble politics of Nigeria.

    I had reasoned like millions of others that it would be difficult to combine running his pace-setting teaching ministry with politics. So, I concluded that the whole thing was probably a joke or some publicity stunt. But more than ten years down the line, especially with his sensational court victory which voided the deregistration of his party, FRESH Democratic Party, by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), the man of God has literally shifted the governance paradigm, and millions of mockers like me have become admirers or followers. He has brought politics of issues, rather than persons to national discourse.

    Well, if you accuse me of being a turn-coat or cross-carpeter, that is your problem; after all, failure is an orphan, but success has many fathers. We learned this game of riding on the wings of success from our political godfathers and governing elite who cross over to winning parties once they lose nominations or elections. Simply put, it is in our genes.

    Political in-fighting is always going on in all the parties, in our embattled country where the plight of impoverished 112 million Nigerians is ignored by the governing elite, led by Dr. Goodluck Ebele Jonathan who is in office, but yet to prove beyond reasonable doubts that he’s in power, except because he is President and lives in the Aso Rock with his gutsy wife, Dame Patience, otherwise called “mother” of Mr. Rotimi Ameachi, Governor of Rivers State.

    Amaechi himself is a “rebellious” son who has teamed up with six under-employed, over ambitious northern Governors, to try and unseat his “mother” and her husband from the presidential villa, when father Jonathan had, through stealthy maneuverings and deft political calculations, planned to renew his mandate in 2015. What kind of a son is that who rebels against his father on the throne? Ameachi is a Christian, at least, by all indications, so he must have been inspired by Absalom in the Bible. Let us pray he does not end up like King David’s rebellious son. According to Rev. Okotie in one of his articles: “Provision of basic amenities ought to be the subject of political discourse not the ongoing skirmishes between presidential aspirants. Almost on a daily basis, the headlines are dominated by new attack lines and mudslinging between feuding politicians who are jostling for power, while little is said about the dividends of democracy”. Good talk!

    In legal terms, President Jonathan can run in 2015, if he so decides because the constitution gives him that right. Any of the seven rebel Governors can run. Any Nigerian who meets the constitutional requirements can run for any office. So the present drums of war beating in the ruling People’s Democratic Party, PDP, is uncalled for.

    But let us get it straight. The Nigerian presidency is not a chieftaincy, academic or religious title which could be conferred honoris causa on the highest bidder. It is a serious business to govern a nation of 160 million people with great potential as one of the world’s emerging economies. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit, Nigeria’s GDP at Purchasing Power Parity, PPP, nearly doubled under President Olusegun Obasanjo, from $170.7 billion dollars in 2005 to $ 292.6 billion in 2007. The GDP per head also jumped from $692 per person in 2006 to $1,754 per person in 2007. That was six long years ago, and inspite of the ineptitude of the PDP-led administration, the current economic indicators are even better.

    Now, having already yielded our initial target of being one of the world’s 20 emerging economies by 2020 to oil-rich gulf kingdom, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, according to experts, may become one of the 30 top economies by 2030. That projection is based on the assumption that our rulers will change the governance paradigm and focus on the business of managing the nation’s economy rather than looting the treasury.

    So, in real terms, the leadership of Nigeria is not a tea party. It should be handed over to someone who has a workable, realistic and transformative vision with proven leadership skills and a firm commitment to arrest the present slide to the abyss. This is not a time to bicker over cake sharing or who gets what, or what zone is next to produce the president. These are archaic concepts.

    In the academic world, you get a PhD degree not by zoning, tribal, racial or religious consideration, but by writing an academic thesis. If you pass, you then qualify to be called Dr. Jack or Jill. So must the presidency. A contestant must convince us with his thesis which in this case is the manifesto or blueprint by which he hopes to govern. Elections in this country must be contested by such standard rules of engagement, not primordial sentiments as is the case currently.

    Again, this is why I agree with Rev. Chris Okotie who has been promoting the concept of paradigm shift as a way of rebranding, repositioning and repackaging our governance apparatus and personnel after more than 52 years of movement without motion. The first thing to do in achieving this all-important change is to jettison the geriatric propensity in our polity. Look at the statistics of our leadership faculty. The average age of those who control the levers of power in the ruling PDP is 70. In the states, the average age of Governors is 50 which should be what ought to obtain among the presidential aspirants. A 50-65 age bracket is still not bad for a presidential aspirant.

    However, like India’s Mamohan Singh showed, if a head of government is over 70 and is performing well, he earns himself the right to be in power and even renew his mandate, if his health permits. Zimbabwe on the other hand, where Robert Mugabe (89) is in power is a typical example of how inept old leaders could stagnate a potentially great nation. What was called Rhodesia in the pre-liberation days under racist Prime Minister Ian Smith was labelled as the “Pearl of Africa” because of its thriving economy, despite global sanctions imposed because of its apartheid policy. Smith ruled a nation that almost achieved parity with developed economies in terms of the excellent state of infrastructures and standard of living. All that has given way to poverty in Mugabe’s black-ruled Zimbabwe after 28 years of monumental mismanagement.

    When faced with this predicament, it is time to try a fresh governance template; or what do you think?

    •Okey wrote from Lagos.

  • ‘This earth, my brother, shall witness a crashing collapse’ – Awoonor

    The above is a quote from Kofi Awoonor’s book, This Earth My Brother, a book that may be described as iconoclastic for breaking the bounds in African literature of the early 1980s era. It is unique for Awoonor’s deployment of the stream of consciousness device in telling his story. He took liberty and exercised great literary licence by intermingling straight narrative with the rich effusions of his pithy mind. The book set in Ghana, explores the post-Nkrumah and pre-Rawlings eras of the great African state that went awry.

    Awoonor x-rays an age when the “Black Star (independence ) Square was black” as a result of power outages in the nascent nation and crass power struggle. It is an elegant depiction of Ghana caught in the throes and contradictions of its new-found independence. Kwame Nkrumah, the incandescent liberator of Ghana had fallen from grace, the way of all heroes and his revolution had unravelled also the ways of all revolutions. The new nation-in-the-making was stewing in the crucibles of its newly won independence and self-governance. As one leader fumbles and tumbles after another, the nation spins and flounders. Awoonor gives a peek of it when he presents a government official on duty as “a veritable picture of human lethargy translated into power at the most resigned and unconcerned pivot.”

    Awoonor’s protagonist, Amamu, a tragic hero not too dissimilar to his country, is a foreign-trained native, who returns to a country that is too much in a swirl to find accommodation for him. Amamu breaks down. Not unlike Ghana of that period which also broke down.

    This Earth is a classic and more fascinating in that it is a book you could never finish reading; the more you read it, the more you find new deeps, new meanings and fresh juicy pickings. It has also been said by those who knew Kofi Awoonor that the more you knew him the more you wanted to know him. A novelist, poet, scholar, diplomat, world citizen and a man of immense learning and culture, Awoonor was killed last Saturday in a manner this master prose stylist could never have penned in all his literary fecundity.

    Though he wrote that the world shall witness a crashing collapse but he would never have conjectured that such universal calamity would loom so soon or so close home. Ever willing to share the sweet wine of his rich knowledge and push literary renaissance in Africa, Awoonor had gone to Kenya to participate in an African literature talk shop and it turned out to be his last. Terrorists had stormed the Westgate Mall in Nairobi Kenya last Saturday and the great man of letters had been cut down by the staccato poetry of hooded men who compose their verses with Kalashnikovs.

    This is Hardball’s special tribute to the 62 dead and over 170 injured people in the mall attack; it is an especial dirge for the soul of one of Hardball’s kindred spirit and an inspirer. Awoonor is sure to find citizenship on the celestial plane as he so easily found among men and of course his soul will find solace and repose and eternity. On the other hand, those who trade in violence and relish a repast of hate will find no peace here and will indeed, end up in the raging inferno of hereafter. That is divine injunction. Adieu Awoonor, spirit of light and enlightenment.

  • Disturbing increase in sexual crimes

    SIR: There is a pronounced rise in sexual crimes particularly rape across the globe and in our country. Hardly does a day go by without one reading of the rape of a woman, an adult defiling a child, father having carnal knowledge of daughter and similar depraved acts somewhere in the country. This is very disturbing.

    Rape is a horrible crime that deserves condemnation by every right-thinking human. But as one condemns, one should also pause a while and consider if he is not in any way contributing to the crime. While physically we may appear irreproachable, spiritually, we cannot escape our share of the guilt of such atrocities.

    Presently, the earth is saturated, choking with erotic thoughts. Wherever one looks it’s all about sex. Sex has since become about the highest selling commodity –if it isn’t sexy, forget it; and so many are just too eager to cash in on the boom. The fashion of today reeks of nudity and sensuality. Consider popular music, movies, and TV reality shows of today. They are mostly celebration of sensuality, nudity, lust, calls for debauchery. The celebrity must exude sensuality, in fact the more he/she projects sex, the more he/she is celebrated.

    The print media is not left out. Take a look at magazines and even dailies. So much space is now being taken up in the latter for sex talk. Sex is even incorporated into adverts of products which have nothing to do with it. This is just ridiculous!

    The effect is a poisoning of the thought environment hence many find themselves thinking of sex more often than is healthy. And the more people contemplate sex, the stronger the erotic thoughts surrounding the earth (and almost strangling it) becomes. Sex has lost its taboo; it has become just too casual. With this initial boundary crossed, naturally perversions set in.

    A more enduring solution is for humanity to begin to get the present sex-mania under control. We must begin to advertise sex less, to de-emphasize it. Let us make effort to keep the hearths of our thoughts pure. By so doing, we’ll reduce the strength of erotic and indeed other harmful thoughts and save ourselves heartaches.

    •Nnoli Chidiebere

    Aba, Abia State.

  • Nigeria: Correct diagnosis

    Nigeria: Correct diagnosis

    Governor Kayode Fayemi of Ekiti State is a son to me. But as I sit here reading the Fawehinmi Memorial Speech which he delivered in Lagos some time ago, I am not just a father proud of a worthy son, I am also a grateful Nigerian – an old Nigerian grateful to a prominent young Nigerian for his very helpful perception of the daunting ills of our country.

    His diagnosis departs bravely from the type that we Nigerians are used to hearing from our leaders. He dares to pin-point Nigeria’s central disease. He dares to expose the baselessly romantic picture that a lot of Nigerians habitually paint about our country. And he dares to point out the only viable path to making our country orderly, harmonious and successful.

    Very many prominent Nigerians prefer to avoid telling the truth about our country. Some of these, out of fear of losing their shares in Nigeria’s oil wealth, or out of a desire to keep the power and loot which they already hold, make a habit, as the Bible says, of calling evil good and black white. You will hear them often using the word “great” for Nigeria. But they are not being truthful.

    I suggest that if you want to assess whether your country is great, you should perform this exercise. Sit back, select any year in the past (make it as far back as you can remember), and visualize various things in Nigeria’s life as they were by that date and as they are today: the local primary school near your house; the state hospital nearest to you; the quality of education you could expect your child to get at school or university then and now; the chances of your graduate son or daughter getting a job then and now; if you are a citizen of the Western Region and you knew Obafemi Awolowo University campus then, how does its condition then compare with what it is today; the quality of safety and security in your street, your town, your state, your country, then and now; your access to electricity then and now; if your town had water supply then, the condition of it then and now; if your life involves travelling long distances in your country, the condition and safety of the highways then and now; the level of your confidence in your local government, state government, federal government, Police Force, the Nigerian military, your government’s Civil Service, then and now; your chances of being financially comfortable then and now; etc, etc.

    The answers you are most likely to get from this exercise cannot possibly sustain the statement that our country is “great”. On the contrary, Nigeria is a country that is squeezing and crushing its citizens more and more, day by day. For any country, that is not a definition of greatness.

    In his Fawehinmi Memorial Lecture, Governor Kayode Fayemi dared to say those things as they really are. And as for the inevitable consequences, he summed them up as follows:

    “We have witnessed the rise and resurgence of ethnic and religious militia, communities and groups who have taken up arms against each other and the state, the privatization and erosion of the state towards narrow gains and selfish interests, the lack of subscription of diverse peoples and groups to a common mythology or purpose, the desertion of the state, and a host of other indices that reveal the essentially problematic nature of citizenship in the country”. All of these and more, he added, have tended gradually to lead towards the implosion of the British experiment that is Nigeria.

    He then expertly put his finger on the fundamental roots of Nigeria’s malaise. Our country is a country of many different nations and cultures – “the British brought together ethnic nationalities that were autonomous political, cultural and economic units” and governed them without proper attention to their obvious differences. As our country was handed to us at independence, it was “foreign in its conception and organization”, and it bore the destructive cancer of the imbalances which the British had deliberately inculcated into the scheme of Amalgamation of the Northern and Southern Protectorates in 1914 and after. All these resulted in serious “fault lines and fissures”. Consequently, as soon as the British departed, the elite classes of the different nationalities embarked on “competition for political and economic advantages in the attempt to govern and control the resources of the state”.These brutal and often murky rivalries resulted in the consequence that there was gradually imposed on our federation a structure that cannot possibly produce anything but conflict and failure. Ultimately, therefore, the heart of the Nigerian problem is the “National Question”.

    Let me explain the National Question. Each nationality in Nigeria, large or small, is an organism that has evolved gradually over thousands of years. Each has its own territory, life, history, and ambitions.It is laughably unrealistic for any Nigerian to think that any Nigerian nationality can be suppressed for the sake of building Nigeria, or that his own nationality can possibly “dominate” Nigeria indefinitely, or to ask that Nigerians should junk their ethnic identities for a Nigerian identity, or to think (as some Igbo folks do) that, because we are all now Nigerians, their own nation is welcome to grab any part of the patrimony of any other nation. In the modern history of the world, no two nations belonging to the same country have been as close and interwoven as the English and the Scotts who have been in Britain together for about 600 years. And now the Scotts are preparing to quit Britain and establish an independent Scotland of their own. That is the way the human world operates. How many multi-nation countries or empires of the past still exist today? No nationality that is now part of Nigeria can give up the possibility or thought of one day having a separate country of its own and determining its own destiny. Asking any of these nationalities to agree to die for the sake of Nigeria is an exercise in folly and futility. As for Nigeria as it is today, no matter how much it is loved and desired by some of us, it will come to an end – as some of the nationalities now in it take their exit. There is nothing unknown or evil in that. The immaturity that makes us rush for guns at the mention of the word “secession” will pass away.

    Therefore, the key to the Nigerian problem is to find, together for now, a sensible and harmonious pattern of relationships, or structure, for our federation. At independence, we had a federal structure that was fairly right. We ought to have built on, and refined, that. Instead, some powerful ones among us proceeded to erode and brutalize it – until now we have a chaotic unitary mess. All in all, rather than roll out the drums to celebrate the centenary of the 1914 Amalgamation, we should call out Nigerians to put heads together to find the path forward to Nigeria’s stability.

    “The question of the national structure is the central issue that will not go away”, Kayode Fayemi says very correctly. This young man’s perspicacity is drawing much attention to him and a huge amount of support to the party of which he is one of the intellectual leaders.

  • LG autonomy, a necessity

    SIR: Before the National Assembly went on their recess in July, the Senate and House of Representatives had separately debated and voted on the various items listed for amendment in the constitution. Of all the recommendations in the reports presented by the Senate Committee on Constitution Review and their House of Representatives counterpart, autonomy for local governments was of great concern to Nigerians.

    The Senate public hearing held across the six geopolitical zones and public sessions conducted by the House of Reps last year in the 360 federal constituencies of the country attested to the fact that majority of Nigerians were evidently for local government autonomy.

    However, at the end of voting on each item, the Senate dropped the clause for the proposed financial autonomy meant to abolish the joint state/local government account and allow the local councils to get direct funding from the federation account.

    On their part, the Lower House unanimously voted in favour of the abolition of the joint account in line with the aspirations of the people. However, all hope is not lost on the issue of local government autonomy. Since the House passed its own version, there are chances of it still scaling through at the conference session, where the committees of the two chambers will meet to harmonise their differences before the final passage by the National Assembly.

    Much as the lawmakers would want to remain loyal to the governors for the role they might have played in their electoral victories, they must know that it is equally important to protect the interest of the populace, who gave them (the legislators) the mandate to represent them in the parliament.

    Granting financial autonomy to the local councils is a necessary option to open the door of rapid development at the grassroots level.

    • Michael Jegede,

    Abuja.