The Nation Newspaper

Category: Editorial

  • Incompetent teachers

    Incompetent teachers

    •This is a serious problem that governments must address because it is ‘garbage in, garbage out’

    THE problem we are facing today is as a result of problems in the education sector … Our failure to train these youths is making us to spend more money on security. If you fail to spend money on the education of the children, one day you will spend more money in buying bullets to kill them.” This statement from the Chairman of Kaduna State Universal Basic Education, Ishaya Dare Akau, in reaction to a survey recently carried out on teachers in the state, is thought-provoking.

    At least 1,300 teachers in the state were said to have failed in tests generally meant for primary four pupils. The state commissioner for education, Alhaji Usman Mohammed, made the revelation at an education summit tagged “Education for all is responsibility of all,” held at the Hassan Usman Katsina House.

    “A total of 1,599 teachers selected from across the state were given primary four tests in Mathematics and Basic literacy. Only one of them scored 75 percent, 250 scored between 50 to 75 percent and 1,300 scored below 25 percent,” he said. According to the commissioner, the same examination was conducted for 1,800 primary school pupils and many of them failed woefully. If gold rusts, what would iron do?

    Unfortunately, the story is the same in most parts of the country. Perhaps what is sadder in the Kaduna episode is that this scandalous development is just being discovered now. Teachers in Kwara State also performed woefully in a similar test in 2008; the Ekiti State government has been having a running battle with teachers in the state since it mooted the idea of teachers’ proficiency test.

    If we talk of falling standard in education in the country today, perhaps this can be situated within the context of the wobbly beginning that many pupils had. Primary education is supposed to be the foundation on which subsequent learning would be built. Where the foundation is weak, whatever is erected on it is bound to crumble. Sadly, the government is to be held responsible for this trend. Years back, it came up with a policy lowering admission requirements for people seeking to pursue careers in education, thus giving the impression that teaching is an inferior course.

    Again, most of the satellite campuses in the country have crash programmes for teachers, where they certify them competent to teach after two summer programmes. The implication is that we have half-baked teachers all over the place who have little or nothing to offer. These are unleashed on hapless pupils and students who come out of their academic programmes only a shade better than they were when they gained admission. This is contrary to the practice in some other countries like Finland and South Korea where teaching is held in esteem and their best are sent to the classrooms.

    Nothing here suggests that there are no good teachers in the country. But the point is that many of the people in our classrooms are not qualified and this is a challenge we have to address. The starting point is to ensure that only qualified teachers are recruited.

    Gone were those days when teachers’ rewards were in heaven; teaching is a great profession and until we recognise it as such, we would continue to have problems in our classrooms and this would tell on the country because education is the bedrock of development. Even when we have qualified and competent teachers, they must undergo regular training to build their capacity and they should be encouraged to upgrade and update their academic qualifications periodically. Also, their welfare and remuneration must be enhanced to retain and get the best from them.

     

  • Suicide mission

    Suicide mission

    • Lagos State govt should outlaw hanging on moving trains by commuters

    Lagos State House of Assembly has joined other well-meaning Nigerians to call for appropriate sanctions against those that hang on train coaches on Lagos routes. The assembly raised the alarm against allowing passengers to indiscriminately hang on moving trains, describing the trend as dangerous and an embarrassment to the Nigerian Railway Corporation (NRC), and the host Lagos State.

    Members of the assembly at a plenary last week called on the state commissioner for transport, the Management of NRC and the Nigeria Police, Railway Command, to arrest the ugly trend, to avoid likely loss of lives and limbs to accidents caused by such behaviour.

    Hanging on moving trains has become trendy among many young commuters on the very busy Lagos to Ogun State rail route. Observing this macabre form of transportation can be heart-rending, as young men recklessly hang on any piece of metal on the body of the trains as they speed along the routes, giving the impression that life is of little value or easily replaceable. The NRC had threatened to prosecute those involved in such illegal act for attempted suicide. Indeed, sometime last year, the corporation claimed that those arrested were undergoing trial for breaking the law. The corporation also warned people without tickets against free ride on trains.

    We appreciate that hanging on trains may partly be a sign that there is more demand for services than supply on that route, or even a sign of economic deprivation and poverty. To stem the ugly tide, there is need for an increase in the number of coaches, and the number of times that the train runs, especially at peak hours. Where there is increase in the number of coaches and routes, the NRC can reduce the cost offered to commuters based on the economy of scale.

    The corporation may note the speed with which commuters embraced the resuscitated rail services, as a sign of the potential huge market waiting to be tapped. Indeed, rail services are one cheap and efficient system of mass transit, and the long-suffering masses of the country can do with an efficient service to reduce the pain in the country.

    The current dangerous rides also expose the failure of regulation and law enforcement by the railway corporation and the police. We doubt whether passengers who did not pay would be allowed to ride freely, albeit dangerously, if the services are rendered by a private company. The corporation must therefore rise up to the challenge of rendering efficient and secure services. One way forward is to equip and effectively mobilise the railway police, to combat this dangerous activity. The corporation may need to weigh whether to bring in private security or fund its police command, to arrest accidents that can expose it to scandals and legal liability for negligence. A stop of such dangerous rides will likely save scores of lives of young Nigerians, engaging in stunts, in the name of free ride.

    While the illegal passengers are exposing their lives to danger, they constitute a nuisance to regular commuters and the general public. Their conduct, as rightly observed by the Lagos lawmakers, constitutes a serious embarrassment to the image of the Lagos State government. As such, there is need for the state to join hands with the police and the corporation to check the trend. The reasons offered by the corporation that these passengers board the trains after their departure from regular stations is no justification to allow this public ridicule of the transport system of an emerging mega city like Lagos.

     

  • Dame’s banquet

    Dame’s banquet

    • After lying about the first lady’s illness, the presidency flaunted an obscene party

    When the first lady went to Europe for medical treatment, it was a furtive adventure. It was not our business, so Dame Patience Jonathan simply vanished out of presidential sight. But the nation knew and wondered, and later journalists asked questions. So insistent and inescapable was the enquiry that the media team of the presidency felt compelled to respond. When they did, they fibbed. She did not go for medical treatment, they lied. She went to rest. So the first lady escaped to rest?

    Even the president, who should understand, obfuscated the matter by defiantly saying that she went abroad for medical reasons. No more details. The nation could bear shrouding the doings of its first lady in obscurity.

    When first lady Dame Patience Jonathan returned, she evinced a lack of grace, but spoke with noxious irritability about those who wished her dead. She invoked superstitions peddled in the polity about the motif of deaths and funerals accompanying one of the first spouses since the former bespectacled military despot, General Sani Abacha, passed on from the pinnacle of power.

    She had in mind the fates of such other persons as President Olusegun Obasanjo’s wife, Stella, and the late Umaru Yar’Adua. Dame Jonathan lacked the grace and generosity of spirit for a person who escaped the clutches of a terrible affliction. According to her own story last Sunday, the hospital subjected her to an improbable ordeal of about nine surgeries in one month. She has not told us the name of the illness.

    We expected a loftier and nobler temperament for a beneficiary of such superlative miracle rather than the air of bilious contempt for her so-called detractors.

    Be that as it may, she recovered. But then, no one knew how serious her ordeal was, even if many suspected that she could not have travelled abroad for a protracted period without a serious affliction, especially since she and the presidency locked her state in curious silence. To cap it all, she returned to gloat in triumph.

    It is the sort of obscurantist pose we condemned in January about the attitudes of some governors who travelled abroad without informing the citizens about their states of health. They left the press and the civil society to a fever of speculations. It is a bad omen for a democracy that extols the virtues of due process and transparency. The argument that a person’s illness is a personal matter is only true if the person does not occupy a public office. To all intents and purposes, these persons take advantage of taxpayers’ resources to fly to the upscale hospitals of the world while neglecting the humbler citizens to the moribund death channels that our hospitals at home have become.

    To stress the cynicism, the presidency organised an obscene banquet to fete the first lady and it was beamed live to the world. Clearly the dances, choreographies, drum rolls, fluty tunes, flattering rhetoric that characterised the “praise and thanksgiving” event were not for the first lady’s rest abroad, or mere medical reasons as President Jonathan contemptuously described it.

    The nation’s government and party elite were invited to Abuja and they deployed what was clearly an obscene sum of money to celebrate what they denied at first. They were asked to celebrate a lie and the fiction that she was sick. They lied to the world but celebrated in God’s holy of holies.

    President Jonathan turned that party into a vengeful extravaganza when he said he approved the party to counter the superstition that one of the spouses must die in office. It was therefore a new low in presidential malice. He organised the party as exhibition – with all the money, so-called dignitaries, frills and a vaudevillian stage – to launch revenge against his enemies.

    It is also a new low in presidential speech, a low of malice as well as superstition. Presidents evince magnanimity, not the folly of malice.

     

  • Badagry deep port

    Badagry deep port

    • This is good, but there are other issues to be considered before giving a final nod to it 

     

    The report that the Federal Government, in conjunction with the Lagos State Government, plans to develop a deep seaport in Badagry, Lagos State, is cheering news. To push the quest, the Federal Government is reported to have inaugurated an eight-man Steering and Project Development Committee for the Badagry Deep Seaport in Lagos, with members drawn from the Federal Ministry of Transport, Lagos State Government, Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA) and the Infrastructure Concession Regulatory Commission (ICRC).

    As the transport minister, Senator Idris Umar noted, “the maritime sector of Nigeria, with 84,000 square nautical miles, is central to the nation’s economic development as a medium of transportation, for global commerce, resource exploitation and recreation”. With the combined handling capacity of the six ports at Apapa, Tin-Can, Onne, Port-Harcourt, Calabar and Warri at 60million metric tonnes out of the over 100million metric tonnes cargo coming into the country annually, it seems about time the Federal Government took steps to bridge the huge shortfall.

    Of course a new seaport in Lagos means additional jobs as well as related support services will be created. This is good for Lagos. As a matter of fact, many people will argue that anything that would take our teeming unemployed youths from the unemployment queues is welcome.

    We also appreciate the government’s intention in proposing the Badagry port; for instance the need to accommodate high volume of cargo generated through international maritime trade and to enable the country attain status of a maritime hub for West and Central Africa. The port will also accommodate dry docking facilities for super tanker vessels which would offer low-cost access to both offshore oil/gas fields.

    These are laudable intentions. But then, we have to consider the other side of the coin. With only the Apapa and Tin Can ports in Lagos, Lagosians know what their experiences are, especially on the Apapa-Oshodi Expressway, as a result of the activities at the ports. The road is ever busy, with all manner of articulated vehicles either going into the ports to load, or coming from there with different kinds of cargoes. Because of heavy vehicular traffic, the road is overstretched, making it require being fixed almost all the time. We cannot count the number of accidents that the articulated vehicles plying the road have caused.

    If there are alternative means of transporting the cargoes from the ports, perhaps the situation would have been different. There is no functional railway to take the heat off the road; even the road from Sokoto to Apapa that was conceived about 20 years ago has been abandoned. We do not know why, but if experience is anything to go by, then it is even possible that the government has forgotten that such an abandoned project exists. At any rate, even if we need a new port, won’t it further suffocate Lagos, giving the experience with the ports in the state?

    What we are saying in essence is that the committee set up for the Badagry port may have some balancing act to perform. It should look at all the possibilities with a view to coming up with recommendations that would be truly beneficial to the state and the country at large. We count on the experience and expertise of its members and hope that they would come up with the best decision that will reduce to the barest minimum, if not completely eliminate, most of the hiccups presently encountered by stakeholders making use of the existing ports in the country.

     

  • Vaulting ambition

    Vaulting ambition

    • Govt should rehabilitate, expand and equip existing hospitals instead of building $650m medical city

    Ordinarily, it would have been celebrated as one of the greatest things to happen to Nigeria’s health sector today, but we have a different opinion. The story was abroad last week that the Federal Government plans to construct what it calls Abuja Medical City; a $650 million mega medical facility which will have about 1,687 beds with a capacity to cater for at least two million patients at a time. The ambitious project, which is expected to be completed in about 36 months will have 763 beds for its trauma centre, 524 beds in paediatric section, 300 beds for amenities care pavilion and 100 beds for physiotherapy and rehabilitation.

    According to the health minister, Prof. Onyebuchi Chukwu, the facility would be the first of its kind in Africa and will make Nigeria a medical tourist centre. It would provide first level medical facility and service in Nigeria and redirect high-complexity medical care to Abuja. The minister also noted that the proposed hospital was in line with the plan of the Federal Government to check Nigerians trooping abroad in the quest for medical tourism.

    This proposal initially seems welcome, especially in the face of the recent outcry concerning huge sums spent by Nigerians on medical tourism, especially in India and South Africa. Just last week, during a Senate public hearing on the National Health Bill, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Dr. Ifeanyi Okowa, had said that, “it is estimated that over N80 billion is lost annually to medical tourism.” He noted further that what is more worrisome is the state of infrastructure, equipment and staffing of our primary health centres across the nation, as this level of health care caters for over 80 per cent of our health needs.

    We agree with Senator Okowa, and this forms our basis of divergence with the proposed medical city: the Federal Government, as represented by the health minister, must return to the basics and work out the fundamentals first. The National Health Bill which has been in the mire over the past few years now ought to be our starting point. We would expect the minister to partner with all the stakeholders in the health community to have the document passed into law, being the roadmap for every development in the sector. But it does appear that the health ministry is not showing any interest whatsoever in the Bill and it may well be stuck in the National Assembly for many more years.

    Since the days of Prof. Olikoye Ransome-Kuti who hoisted the primary health care flag and pursued the credo to admirable ends; and to a lesser extent, Eyitayo Lambo, our health sector has been without any clear-cut policy or direction. All we have seen are off the cuff actions and knee-jerk reactions to Nigeria’s health needs as exampled by the move to build a so-called medical city, supposedly to counter the capital flight borne out of medical tourism.

    Well managed and properly coordinated health care services are still lacking in the country; the rural and primary health care gains of the Ransome-Kuti years have been lost as most rural hospitals are dilapidated, if not abandoned. Even the secondary and tertiary facilities, including the so-called centres of excellence hardly serve the populace because they are inadequate in all respects. Even the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) which has the potential to aid the radical restructuring of health care delivery in Nigeria seems to stump its managers.

    Health delivery is a very serious affair which requires a lot of hard work and introspection. It is disgraceful that we are still grappling with polio and other diseases long-eradicated in other parts of the world. Hedging against losses arising from medical tourism abroad is good but getting our health centres, general and teaching hospitals working makes more sense. To do otherwise is to worry about ringworm when a man is ravaged by leprosy.

  • VIP complex

    VIP complex

    •From South Africa came the lesson that all animals are equal

    Just what is the big deal about the news that Nigerian dignitaries were forced to queue up to enter the FNB Stadium, Johannesburg, South Africa, to watch the 2013 African Cup of Nations soccer final which Nigeria won against Burkina Faso? The fact is, it is indeed a big deal, especially as it involved two governors and a federal minister, among others.

    According to the report: “Unlike in Nigeria where top executives enjoy preferential treatment, the governors and other officials who were waiting by the side of the gate with the hope of getting access without observing normal protocol, were told to join the queue formed by other ticket holders.” The report said further, “Interestingly, no security officials from Nigeria were present to assist the officials.”

    Perhaps Governor Rotimi Amaechi of Rivers State, his Anambra State counterpart, Peter Obi, and Minister of Sports, Bolaji Abdulahi, experienced something of a culture shock. They reportedly waited in a queue “for several minutes” at the VIP gate before gaining entry into the stadium. The message was unambiguous: there was no way they would be allowed to jump the queue. They seemed unprepared for the undiscriminating personnel that manned the gate. Could they have expected special recognition? It is significant that the Nigerian dignitaries were not singled out to stand in a line, everyone else did.

    For the Nigerian VIPs, it was definitely a whole new ball game: apart from being subjected to the standard practice of queuing, they were without their usual overzealous protectors who would often go to absurd lengths to clear the path for power. The setting turned out to be a leveller of sorts.

    There is a point to ponder in this happening: back home in Nigeria where high political office holders generally have a superiority complex, it is unlikely that these same officials would have been so demystified. On the contrary, rather than stand in a queue prior to entry, they would have enjoyed special treatment on account of their positions and moved seamlessly into the arena, disregarding any existing queue. Alas, that is how power works in Nigeria.

    However, this egoism of power, which, it must be said, seems to be encouraged by the obsequiousness of the people, is a negative attitude that does the polity no good. When political office holders elevate themselves so high above the people, they tend to live in another faraway world and fail to connect with immediate socio-economic realities. Regrettably, self-centred power continues to be a major obstacle to the country’s development. Arrogant power must be made to understand one essential truth: it exists by the people and for the people, and certainly cannot be higher than the people. That is the beauty of the democratic system, in practical terms. So, the correct thing is that leaders must regard themselves as servants, rather than masters of the people.

    Judging by the report from the stadium, the body language of these Nigerian dignitaries mirrored their subconscious desire for acknowledgment, which did not materialise because the social milieu was quite different. It is hoped that they learnt a lesson in modesty from their experience. The impersonal approach of the gatekeepers as well as the behaviour of other ticket holders who used the VIP gate without attracting undue attention should be food for thought to them.

    Now that they are back home, it would be interesting to see whether the stadium affair, which no doubt provided useful leadership education for our VIP’s, would have any lasting positive impact on their idea of power and how it should be used.

     

  • Avoidable delay

    Avoidable delay

    Again, the economy is being handled incompetently by both the executive and legislative arms of government. The constitution is clear that public expenditure must be based on clearly articulated proposals passed by the National Assembly and duly signed into law by the president.

    Since 1999, passage of the Appropriation Bill has been a ding-dong affair between politicians in both branches of government. Last year, the Bill was passed in March and signed into an Act by President Goodluck Jonathan on April 13. It is unfortunate that the outcry on the dire consequences of this by the general public and economists has failed to catch the attention of public officials who keep suggesting that Nigeria is well on the way to joining the 20 most advanced economies within the next eight years.

    When President Jonathan presented this year’s budget proposals to a joint sitting of the two chambers of the National Assembly on October 11, last year, there were hopes that, for once, it would be passed and assented to before the year ran out. Almost 60 days after its passage by the National Assembly, the Bill remains a proposal on the president’s table.

    As always the case, the president is said to be studying the details with a possibility of sending it back to the National Assembly with his observations and objections. On their part, the lawmakers are said to be spoiling for a war that, in their view, would determine which of the two institutions is superior. One area said to be causing unrest at the Federal Ministry of Finance and the presidency is the reported padding of the financial estimates by the National Assembly. The lawmakers have obviously chosen to misuse their power of appropriation by forcing into the law a huge allocation for constituency projects in the 360 federal constituencies and the 109 senatorial districts.

    The president is also believed to be uncomfortable with the jacking up of the oil price benchmark. While the executive had predicated the budget on $75 per barrel of crude oil, the National Assembly increased it to $79 . The executive has argued that the willful increase by the lawmakers is reckless and constitutes a danger to the economy.

    The lawmakers have continued to argue that they would not succumb to blackmail, insisting that the marginal increase in the benchmark was informed by the average price in the international market in the past three years. The lawmakers said it was meant to reduce the deficit component of the budget and deemphasise the importance attached to the excess crude oil account that has strengthened the Federal Government to the detriment of the federating units.

    While the disagreement continues between the two arms, the people bear the brunt. Last year, there was a consensus that budget performance was under 49 per cent. This is regrettable. While the lawmakers are quick at pointing accusing fingers at the president, they have failed to acknowledge that only greed could have informed the power-grabbing mentality that made them insist on constituency projects. It is the duty of the executive to articulate and implement government’s programmes and projects. The lawmakers threw the spanner in the works by insisting on the projects and determining what must be spent in each constituency. This could only hamper the implementation of huge projects.

    We call on the lawmakers to retrace their steps and accede to the request to withdraw the constituency projects that have made monitoring difficult. No excuse would be acceptable this year if the economy is once again made a victim of power play by elected and appointed leaders.

  • Market share

    Market share

    Four years after the gale of sanitisation swept through the nation’s financial services industry, the goal of fewer and generally more effective banking institutions appears to have been met. Whereas in 2009, the motley assembly of anaemic financial houses numbered 24, it is currently down to 20, all of which are said to be relatively stable and in good standing. Between then and now, the industry has, without question, witnessed vast improvements in risk management practices and corporate governance, just as the environment of regulation has gone through some transformation.

    But then, the question bears restating, even now, as to whether the larger objectives which necessitated the wholescale restructuring of the industry can be said to have been achieved several years after the financial services industry set out on the restructuring journey.

    When the journey started in 2005, the objective was consolidation. The singular requirement was for the banks to raise their share capital to N25 billion. By 2006 when the exercise ended, 25 out of the initial 84 managed to scale the hurdle; a sizeable number went into mergers, others that couldn’t find suitors went into liquidation.

    Unfortunately, all manners of risk management and corporate governance practices would reduce the exercise to a farce barely three years after. By then, a good number of the newly consolidated banks were already in the financial hole. What followed was the remedy of sweeping sanitisation under which the entire executive management of eight banks were swept away. At the end of the exercise, the industry was further reduced from 24 to 20.

    Today, whereas the industry has emerged from the ashes of that turbulent phase, there are however isssues from that past that still linger. First is that of access to credit – the lifeblood of the economy; this has remained restrictive, particularly to the real sector. Indeed, the cost of funds has not only remained astronomical, it has remained the sore point, more so in an environment where other enablers of production are sorely lacking.

    Second is the issue of banking penetration. At current levels of 25million out of 84million adult Nigerians, it is well below those of other emerging markets and indeed below those of the nation’s frontier market peers.

    But a more interesting dimesion of the problem appears to have been captured in a recent report by the Financial Derivative Company when it notes that “imperfect competition still prevails , where five Tier 1 banks control about 70 percent of the market and 80 percent of profit before tax (PBT)”.

    Imperfect competition or not, the development comes as no surprise. While it may seem hard to reconcile the emergence of the big five with the objectives of deepening and liberalisation of the financial sector which the restructuring seeks, it seems to this newspaper an inevitable law of natural selection that dominant players would emerge at some point. What the development does is lay bare the pretence of some of the banks, particularly those that covet national or international classification without the requisite hard work, to grow their market share. We expect the report to cure them of their obsession with size which we consider absurd.

    The challenge is for the regulators to keep an eye on the operators, particularly the emerging big banks, given the potential systemic risks they pose in the event of their failure. We expect to see the push for financial system stability matched by an equal if not greater push to deepen financial services. Just as we expect to see the banks lend more to the real sector, we also expect to see the cost of lending go down in the long run. The latter is, after all, what constitutes the rationale of the banks.

  • G20 in search of recovery

    G20 in search of recovery

    When the Group of 20 largest economies meets, their top economic officials will see bad news whichever way they look. Following a year of slowdowns in the big emerging economies, all the rich countries – from the US to Japan, from the UK to Germany – went into reverse in the fourth quarter.

    The US and UK growth numbers – a tiny contraction and a 0.3 per cent quarterly fall, respectively – had been known for a while. This week news that Japan had slipped worse than the USin the fourth quarter (growth was expected) and the eurozone contraction was steeper than forecast added to the misery. France was set back 0.3 per cent; Germany took a bloodied nose with a 0.6 per cent fall.

    It may feel better to be in a hole together. But, ideally, the arrested recovery should focus G20 minds on what they can do to climb out of it together as well. The drags on growth are not mysterious. They relate to a self-flagellating policy of austerity even by those who do not need to pursue it, and to the determination of policy makers in the US and Europe to keep everyone in suspense about their next move.

    As the Financial Times has long argued, austerity is necessary for countries with record-high deficits and reliant on mobile investors. But economies with relative fiscal space, such as the large euro members, or those with captive bond markets – the US and Japan – should relax the tightening. The eurozone’s high priests of fiscal consolidation, especially, should note the effects of squeezing their export markets. In export-dependent countries such as Germany but also Japan, a fall in net trade was one of the most important factors in the fourth-quarter downturn.

    A pact in which countries with fiscal space slow their tightening to ease the adjustment for those without it is desirable, but unrealistic. A lack of will to co-ordinate policies is evident in the universal combination of easy money with a condemnation of competitive devaluation. In truth, the so-called “currency war” is not all bad: if everyone debases their currency, the world will get closer to the monetary stimulus necessary to outweigh excessive fiscal zeal.

    The other clamp on growth is uncertainty in Europe about the future of structural reforms within countries and integration between them. In the US, worries centre on the risk of abrupt fiscal tightening with a “sequester” only two weeks away. The bad growth numbers reflect drops in business investment unlikely to be reversed if leaders cannot give the private sector a clear sense of direction.

    – Financial Times

     

  • The Pope’s worthy example

    The Pope’s worthy example

    From Rome, a lesson in leadership

    The position of the head of the Catholic Church, the Pope, is easily one of the world’s most powerful and visible spiritual offices with tremendous political influence. Apart from its huge congregation of at least 1.2 billion adherents globally, the Catholic Church has a rich historical tradition that dates back several centuries. All of these make the office of the Pope one of the most coveted, revered and glamorous as the occupant wields enormous spiritual and moral authority. This is perhaps why, in about 700 years, only five Popes had voluntarily resigned from office. The first was Celestine V, a hermit who stepped down from the office in 1294, just a few months after his ascension, because he wanted a simpler and less physically demanding life. And in 1415, Pope Gregory XII resigned from office to help bring an end to rival claims to the papacy and preserve the cohesion of the Catholic Church.

    It is against this background that the decision of the current Pontiff, Pope Benedict XVI, to voluntarily step down as from February 28, is significant in the contemporary history of the church. On February 11, Pope Benedict announced to a shocked world that due to advanced age and increased physical as well as mental incapacity to cope with his responsibilities, he is giving way for the emergence of a new Pope in accordance with the church’s procedures.

    Through this action that has been widely lauded as courageous, ennobling and selfless, Pope Benedict XVI has shown a worthy example in a world filled with too many instances of individuals striving to hold on to spiritual or secular positions at all cost. His words announcing this decision clearly show a man of deep humility, simplicity, transparency and honesty. As the Pope simply put it: “After having repeatedly examined my conscience before God, I have come to the certainty that my strengths due to an advanced age, are no longer suited to an adequate exercise of the Petrine Ministry. I am well aware that this ministry, due to its essential spiritual nature, must be carried out not only with words and deeds, but no less with prayer and suffering. However, in today’s world, subject to so many rapid changes and shaken by questions of deep relevance for the life of faith, in order to govern the bark of Saint Peter and proclaim the Gospel, both strength of mind and body are necessary, strength which, in the last few months, has deteriorated in me to the extent that I have had to recognise my incapacity to adequately fulfil the ministry entrusted to me”. Following this extraordinarily candid confession, the Pope went on to declare that “I renounce the ministry of Bishop of Rome, Successor to Saint Peter, entrusted to me by the Cardinals on 19 April, 2005, in such a way that as from 28 February 2013, at 20:00 hours, the See of Rome, the See of Saint Peter, will be vacant and a new Supreme Pontiff will have to be convoked by those whose competence it is”. In a most moving gesture, the Pope asked for pardon for his defects as well as continued prayers for himself, his successor and the church.

    There is no doubt that Pope Benedict XVI has demonstrated his abiding love for the Catholic Church, and a readiness to sacrifice his own self-interest for the good of the church. As Pope Benedict moves from the palatial residence of the Pope to a life of prayer and reflection in a monastery in the Vatican, and reverts to the title of Cardinal and his natural name of Joseph Ratzinger, there will be contrasting perspectives on his eight-year reign. Within the context of increased moral relativism and laxity in the world, many support his Papacy’s strong conservative stance against abortion, gay rights and divorce.

    Yet, more liberal elements argue that the church under his leadership alienated more traditional Catholics by refusing to be more flexible towards a more secular world. His critics also contend that the strong moral authoritarianism, which he sought to enforce was undermined by widespread allegations of child and sex abuse in the church; crimes which he was perceived as not acting decisively enough to expose and punish. The Pope’s image and judgement was no doubt further tarnished by the conviction of his trusted personal butler for illegally leaking confidential papal memos.

    Pope Benedict XVI’s strong sphere of missionary interest was Europe probably because of the historical roots of the church there and the dwindling membership of the church in the region. But in picking the next Pope, the conclave of Cardinals cannot be indifferent to the surging growth of the church in Africa and Latin America, as well as the need for a Pope with the mental and physical vigour to confront the daunting challenges of the church in a changing world.