Category: Editorial

•In spite of his colleagues’ visit, Chime is yet to fulfill all righteousness

It took a visit to ailing Governor Sullivan Chime in London on Tuesday to draw out some facts about the Enugu State governor’s health. Prior to the visit by the Chairman of the Nigerian Governors Forum (NGF), Rivers State Governor Rotimi Amaechi, Benue State’s Gabriel Suswam and Akwa Ibom’s Godswill Akpabio, there had been speculations about Chime’s helpless and alleged hopeless state.

However, yesterday, the pictures of the visiting governors with their host showed Chime standing without support, and it was suggested that he had pulled through. He reportedly spoke with Vanguard, saying, “I am alive and will be back very, very soon.” His visitors also said he was moving about, eating and in good health.

That he was alive was obvious. That he did not appear to be in desperate health condition could not be controverted, either. But, the questions raised about the handling of the circumstances of flying him to London for treatment remain unanswered.

It is unfortunate that it takes speculations and rumours to force leaders of the country to come clean on issues that should interest the people. The Enugu State electorate had elected the governor to run the affairs of the state from 2011 to 2015. If anything were to break the pact, the people are entitled to know.

Even with the visit of the delegation of governors, Governor Chime and his government still fall below international standards in handling the situation. He is yet to tell his people what ailment took him out of the country, the condition under which he was admitted to the hospital, the course of treatment and the implications. It is not enough to see the governor standing with his colleagues. Standing, and perhaps looking calm, is not an indication that he has fully recovered. Or, that he is ready to take up the assignment he took on May 29, 2011.

When Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez needed help with his health, he held nothing back from his people. He was down with cancer, and he so declared. His choice of Cuba as destination for treatment was not hidden, either. Why is the situation in Nigeria different? For 136 days, Governor Chime has been away and saw no reason to convey the situation to the people of the ‘Coal City’ State .

Long after British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher left office, her health was still of public importance. She first suffered minor strokes in 2002. Six years later, she was at a dinner at the Westminster when she took ill and was taken to a hospital. And, in 2010, a bout with sickness made her miss the elaborate arrangements made to mark her 85th birthday. None of these was kept from an inquisitive British public, many of whom regard the former Prime Minister a hero.

In Israel, Ariel Sharon, a former defence minister, war hero and former prime minister took ill and slipped into coma in 2006. It was at a time he was involved in a campaign to return to office. Neither his aides nor the son thought it wise to deny the obvious. The details were released to the media and no one thought it made the politician any less a human being.

Having decided to release that photograph taken with the three visiting governors, Governor Chime should discontinue insulting Nigerians by insisting that he is hale and hearty. If he is, why has he been out of the country since September last year? What is he still doing out of his post?

Nigerians have the right to have information on their leaders. If Governor Chime has pulled through, he should return home immediately and resume work. If he has to wait a day longer, he must make full disclosure about the state of his health. We understand what the governors tried to do for their colleague by their visit, but note that Governor Chime has not fulfilled all righteousness in this matter, in spite of what they might want us to believe.

•A good move to stave off more militants from reinforcing Boko Haram

The military insurgency in Mali is surely turning into a major threat for the entire West African sub-region. The hoodlums masquerading as Islamists, the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa (Mujao),have declared their ambition to unite the so-called jihadists across the entire sub-region. With France spearheading, Nigeria has joined other countries in the sub-region to raise an army to stave off the insurgency. According to news reports, Nigeria will supply 1,200 soldiers, with major Western nations and the United States providing the logistics.

We support the move by the Federal Government to help fight off militancy in Mali, considering that a destabilised Mali will ultimately compromise Nigeria’s security. As experience has shown in Afghanistan, and the Middle East, insurgency in one country unfortunately spins off to neighbouring countries. Internally too, militancy in any part of the country ultimately threatens the peace and security of the entire country.

Even in our country, the Boko Haram sect started initially in Maiduguri, but is increasingly spreading across the entire Northern Nigeria, including the seat of government, Abuja. It is to avoid a similar experience that we support the effort by countries in West Africa and the major world powers to help Mali nip in the bud this attempt to create the Afghanistan experience in the West Africa sub-region.

We hope other West African countries will also supply troops; and that the cost of this military adventure will be borne proportionately by interested parties, including the United Nations. It will be unfair for Nigeria, which is supplying a major chunk of the military personnel, to be made to bear the costs when the benefit of security and stability is for all.

It is also important to remind the Federal Government and indeed the military leadership that our experience in Sierra Lone and Liberia should not be allowed to repeat itself in Mali. We recall the ugly experience associated with the high casualty and neglect of the soldiers sent to fight on behalf of our country in those countries. For untoward reasons, many of those that went to those wars, ended up being discharged with ignominy, or even court-martialled for asking for their entitlements from the authorities.

It will be unfair if the military leadership, as alleged in past interventions, turn the Mali venture into a cynical opportunity for self-enrichment at the detriment of the welfare and security of the personnel in the war front. Bickering between the personnel over the release of allowances, or the quality of the kits procured for the fighters must be avoided. In the past, food and other essential supplies were allegedly hijacked as a money-making venture for those in authority. We urge those that will be responsible for the welfare of our soldiers to conform to international best practices, in the interest of our national integrity.

The soldiers going to the war front have our best wishes and earnest prayers. They must however remember that they are bearing our collective destiny in their hands; as such, they must act professionally throughout their posting in Mali. We urge them to be disciplined in their relationship with Malians. They must look after their health, and avoid legacies that may haunt them when the war is over and they return to Nigeria. Since the Mali venture is merely one posting in their career, they would be unfair to themselves and their families to ruin an entire career by one indiscretion or another.

•The president struck an un-presidential note at his Ikeja Police College visit

President Goodluck Jonathan’s visit to the Ikeja Police College in Lagos last Friday generated much drama because the nation’s first citizen did not display first-rate approach. Rather than openly regret the institution’s squalor and human degradation, he turned it into an excuse to throw blames. He was more worried at the disgrace his government suffered from a documentary that brought it to light than the urgency of action.

Channels Television triggered the visit with its expose, beaming its searchlight on the feeding, dormitory and sanitary conditions in the college.

The documentary showed that only N150 is made available for feeding each recruit daily. Consequently, 50 young men are made to share a fish head. It is incredible that the situation could have gone unnoticed for so long until a television station adopted the institution’s rehabilitation as its Corporate Social Responsibility for 2013.

The President’s intervention in concrete terms remains to be seen. We welcome the probe panel he has instituted to report on what may be done. We however hope that it would not be turned into a mere witch-hunt, with a view to determining how the journalists gained access and earned insights into the sordid state of affairs in the college.

Really, the journalists deserve commendation. They have brought up, once more, the need for reorientation of the security forces. A police officer raised in an environment like the Ikeja Police College is unlikely to be civil in dealing with the people. What kind of mental energy could be exerted by a man who is constantly so poorly fed and, after graduation, is poorly paid and subjected to a regime of poor kitting?

It is not enough for the President to express angst at the rot in Ikeja. Has he taken stock of the state of the other colleges in Gwoza and Jos? What about the Police Academy at Kano? There is an urgent need to review the welfare condition of the colleges and academies training the security forces, particularly the police. It should also extend to the welfare of all police men and women and officers. There have been reports that men and officers are sent to confront well-armed criminals without even protective kits. Those who die in combat have little or nothing in form of insurance.

It is also disheartening that the commander-in-chief of the armed forces is oblivious of previous panels set up to review the situation in the Nigeria Police Force. For a man who became vice president in 2007, it is surprising that President Jonathan appears not to have an idea of the M.D. Yusuf Panel set up by the late President Umaru Yar’Adua in 2008, and the more recent Osayande panel. If previous reports were ignored up to the point that the nation’s chief executive is unaware of their findings and recommendations, what is the guarantee that the new probe panel report would be treated differently?

With security challenges such as the Boko Haram scourge, the morale that comes from the squalor in the police college can only worsen matters. Treating the Ikeja Police College saga in isolation would be a mistake. The President should muster the resources and commitment to implement the recommendations of the previous panels holistically. Nigeria and Nigerians certainly deserve more than they are getting from the government.

•It is a growing epidemic that we must tame

Last Tuesday’s arrest of a female passenger while trying to board an Emirate Airlines Flight EK 784 to China with $151,205 cash once again highlights the need to tackle the menace of currency trafficking, frontally. The passenger, Akinnuote Abiola Oluwafunke, was said to have declared $100,000 on the Nigeria Customs Service prescribed forms CDFIA and CDFIB; a search by officials of the Nigeria Customs Service would later yield additional $51,205.

This, of course, was merely the latest in the series of the growing epidemic. On September 27, 2012, one Abubakar Sheriff Tijani, was intercepted by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) operatives in Lagos as he attempted to board a Dubai, United Arab Emirates bound flight, with $7,049.444 cash.

On September 29, 2012, it was the turn of one Nkem Sebastian with $288, 000 cash. He was on his way to China en route Dubai. He had declared only $200,000.

The very next day, on September 30, 2012, at the Mallam Aminu Kano International Airport, Kano, one Tasiu Ilu Kura would also be held for carrying $700,000 cash. Dubai was also the destination.

On October 21, 2012, a security guard with the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria, (FAAN), Lagos, Adetula Akinyele, was arrested with two others, Ifeanyi Uramah and Emmanuel Nnanna, over an attempt to ferry $1.4million out of the country.

And, on November 7, 2012, one Abdulrasheed Ibrahim, a Dubai-bound passenger aboard Ethiopian Airline was arrested for declaring the sum of $45,000 when he actually had $188, 858 on him. Also found on him was 40 British Pounds and 5,753grams of solid gold said to be worth N34, 518,000.

These are of course the major ones out of the reported cases. It isn’t just the amount involved that is alarming; the trend would seem to speak to the malignancy of the problem of money laundering, a measure of the quantum of hot money – proceeds of crime – in circulation. Of course, the choice of destination must be seen as equally instructive: Middle East and Asia, countries which not only share the same problem of weak foreign exchange controls with Nigeria, but are similarly prone to money laundering.

For a nation like Nigeria, the challenge posed by the menace can hardly be overstated. First, there is increasing evidence to link the amount of cash available through illicit channels to the menace of smuggling and other illegal trades. Needless to add that it fuels corruption by facilitating the recycling of proceeds from corrupt acts and other illicit activities; and as been established, the practice has been linked to terrorists’ financing.

The current situation obviously calls for a new thinking in the management of the nation’s foreign exchange. A good way to start is to tighten access to foreign exchange by bureau de change operators. For all its acclaimed merits, it seems to us that the idea of an all-comer foreign exchange market once generously touted as the panacea to the challenge of the parallel market hasn’t quite worked. Indeed, evidence would seem to point at the lax foreign exchange regulations as the source of its sustenance, its staying power. We need to put a mechanism in place to ensure that those who actually need foreign exchange are availed ease of access without necessarily enthroning a free-for-all system as currently obtains.

Why is the practice common with Middle East and Far East destinations? The answer is not far-fetched: stringent anti-money laundering regulations of North America and Western Europe make the prospects a no-hoper – the same way that the lax regulations in Asia and Middle East make them game. In addition to enhanced surveillance, we expect the Federal Government to explore the possibility of collaboration with the countries to tame the scourge. Only when the risks are seen to be very high will the nefarious practice peter out.

Sultan: The North must solve its security problem, in the context of federal Nigeria.  But how? 

Alhaji Muhammed Sa’ad Abubakar III, the Sultan of Sokoto and President-General of the Nigeria Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs (NSCIA), hit the nail on the head on January 14 in Kaduna, the North’s political capital, saying northerners were to blame for that region’s retardation. The sultan spoke at a meeting of the Northern Governors Peace and Reconciliation Committee.

Referring to the Boko Haram insurrection that has rendered a large swath of the North prostrate, Sultan Abubakar declared that no Muslim group could Islamise Nigeria any more than any Christian group could Christianise the country. He therefore called for dialogue for mutual understanding, pledging traditional rulers were ever ready to play their parts in finding solutions to the North’s – and the country’s – problems; as they had always done in the past. He further stressed that dialogue, never violence, would solve the problem, in an apparently subtle appeal to both the Federal Government and Boko Haram insurgents.

At that same meeting, John Cardinal Onaiyekan, Catholic Archbishop of Abuja, Nigeria’s latest cardinal and foremost Christian leader from the North, fingered poverty as the core of that region’s problems, and called on the authorities to do something fast about it. That was well said.

But between Sultan Abubakar and John Cardinal Onaiyekan’s diagnoses, how does the North start fixing its problems? And how can it be done in the context of a federal Nigeria, since the North’s problem is clearly a Nigerian problem, just as the problem of any part of the country is ultimately a national problem?

Northern leaders need to go back to the basis. To start with, it is an open secret that the Northern ruling elite has been anything but altruistic. It is on record that the North has been heavily represented in the Federal Government since independence, whether as head of those governments or very influential parts. Yet, poverty has been all pervading in that region, with the North East virtually a poverty arid zone. That the North East is home to the root of the Boko Haram insurgency is therefore hardly surprising. Only those with the least hope to live find comfort in mass murderous religious dogmas that Boko Haram sickeningly epitomises.

But even beyond the North East, more disturbing has been a recent survey that found Sokoto as the poorest state in the country. Sokoto is part of the more privileged North West, which for a time produced streams of Nigerian leaders. The northern ruling elite therefore need to do some radical introspection; and change from the innate selfishness that has turned their region into a desert of want instead of a spring of opportunity, given the wealth of the region. That admonition falls squarely within the Sultan’s declaration that North’s problems are self-inflicted. It rankles but it is the bitter truth. But redemption is as simple as changing tack. What is needed is a will to make a change.

Beyond elite selfishness, however, is the region’s pristine conservative feudal system that tends to limit developmental opportunities to the privileged elite, rather than the general masses of the northern people. The situation, to be sure, has marginally improved over the years, with conscious efforts by northern governments to make access to education far more liberal.

Still, contrasted to the situation in the South, the efforts have been too little, too late. Indeed, as golden as the Sardauna era had been, when the best brains in any part of the North were identified and trained, no matter what their faith or ethnic groupings were, it could not be compared to the Awolowo free primary education campaign in the West, and the raw determination of the Igbo in the East to self-train themselves, even if there was no systematic success by the region’s government doing so. That explains the gulf between the North and the South in education; and much of the so-called religious riots in the North often emanated from raw xenophobia against “strangers” (southerners) who had come to snap up limited opportunities; and were almost always victims of those riots’ mindless killings.

It is high time, therefore, the northern system was re-jigged to create mass opportunities for the talakawa. If the Sultan, the religious head and prime symbol of that political system, has said the North suffers because its leaders had left what they should have done undone, then the time for positive change cannot be better than now. If, therefore, members of the Northern Governors Peace and Reconciliation Committee could achieve a developmental template change that would be binding on all northern states, that would really be the beginning of progress.

Even then, far-reaching investments to turn the North from a sprawling cost centre to a massive profit centre, with the concomitant development, cannot be attained with Nigeria’s present over-centralised structure, wherein the North cannot even mine the rich minerals in its bowels, except an ever hesitant Federal Government is ready.

The Sultan rightly suggested that talks should be encouraged among traditional rulers, to find a solution to the North’s problem. But these talks should not be limited to the conclave of northern traditional rulers alone.

Rather, the Northern Governors Peace and Reconciliation Committee should nudge the North towards accepting the inevitability of a grand All Nigeria Constitutional Talk that would break up the present unitary constitution posing as a federal one.

The resultant restructuring would free the creative impetus of all sections of the country and place the development of every part of it in the hands of the people domiciled there. The North can mine its minerals for the development of its people and the Niger Delta can mine its petroleum, with both, and other areas, paying tax over their economic activities to the Federal Government.

That is the most logical way to solve the North’s pressing problems in the context of a federal Nigeria.

Africa’s soccer showpiece begins

As the 29th African Cup of Nations kicks off in South Africa tomorrow, it will bring in its wake all the glamour and excitement of the African continent’s most prestigious soccer tournament. The championships will feature several of Africa’s acknowledged superpowers, including Nigeria, Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana, as well as formidable contenders like Zambia, Tunisia, Algeria and South Africa.

In many ways, AFCON 2013 will be a watershed for African soccer. It is coming at a time when several of the old assumptions about the continental game have changed. For example, the absence of countries like Egypt and Cameroon for the second time in succession has clearly shown that nothing is to be taken for granted. Similarly, the increased prominence of Zambia, the current AFCON champions, is an indication that the fielding of prominent players is no obstacle to success on the field of play.

What this means is that the Cup of Nations tournament is likely to be one of the most open in recent times. Even though the powerful Ivorien team is still favoured for the title, there is no doubt that Zambia’s feat, has encouraged many other competitors.

In the particular case of Nigeria, the Super Eagles will certainly be seeking validation in South Africa. The country was shocked by its failure to qualify for last year’s edition of AFCON in Equatorial Guinea and Gabon. The subsequent recriminations spurred a great deal of soul-searching, with many fans and administrators coming to the conclusion that too many things had been left undone in administration, player selection and team management.

Part of the fallout of the non-qualification debacle was the sacking of Samson Siasia, the erstwhile coach of the Super Eagles, and his replacement by Stephen Keshi. The new coach has sought to reinvigorate the team by bringing in new players, mostly from the local league. He has made the competition for places more competitive by emphasising current form rather than considerations of whether a player is based at home or abroad. In addition, he has placed great emphasis on team cohesion and discipline.

The pressure on the Super Eagles to do well is reinforced by its status as one of AFCON’s most consistent participants. Even though it has only won the tournament twice, it has more third-place finishes than any other country, as well as several silver medals. The team’s vociferous supporters are also insisting on a good performance. The Nigerian Football Federation (NFF) has made a semi-final appearance a condition of Keshi’s contract; the coach himself and several players have expressed confidence that the team will do well.

While it is not unreasonable to strive for the trophy, it is more important that the Super Eagles put in a performance that has positive indications for the long-term. The team has to evolve playing patterns that are reflective of indigenous tactics and strategies rather than a weak imitation of other nations; young players must be permitted to come through, regardless of where they ply their trade; local coaching must be given the opportunity to flower at the highest levels; administrative back-up should be more responsive to the requirements of national teams.

Fortunately, it appears that the Minister of Sports and Chairman of the National Sports Commission (NSC), Bolaji Abdullahi, has stressed that he is not putting pressure on the Super Eagles to become champions at all costs. The team should do its best to win the trophy, but greater emphasis should be on ensuring that Nigeria’s flag is flown with honour and commitment in South Africa by a Super Eagles that is well on its way to becoming the soccer powerhouse that it once was.