The Nation Newspaper

Tag: Adebayo Lamikanra

  • Highways are happy way

    Highways are happy way

    I have on several occasions in the last few years decided to write an article or even a series of articles about driving on Nigerian roads. Until now however, my resolve has faltered on each occasion for one reason or the other. This is probably because the only reason why I have always wanted to write about this subject is to encourage safer driving habits on our roads. After careful consideration I have come to realise the futility of doing that and this has become a stumbling block to putting my thoughts on this subject down on paper. And yet the urge to write has never really left me which is why I suppose I am writing these lines at this time.

    The futility of making any attempt to change this situation for the better should be fairly obvious to anyone who has taken a short trip along any road anywhere in this country. The fatalism attending any such journey is palpable. Just think of the number of times that gatherings do not break up until someone gets up to beseech God for what is described as travelling mercies for all those present and who need to travel back to their respective homes. To be frank, I have always wondered how this phrase was coined because its meaning cannot be immediately obvious to anyone who learnt to speak English anywhere outside Nigeria. The sentiment behind it is however immediately understood in any gathering. The point is that your arrival at your chosen destination is dependent on you finding favour with a rather capricious deity who bestowed favours to travellers or could withdraw them as he very well pleased. Go to any so-called garage or motor park and you are bound to find blackmailers in the form of beggars; men and women who prey on the fears of intending travellers who are never sure of their standing with the travel deity and are willing to part with some money to enhance their chances of surviving the journey before them. The reason why money is parted with at this time is so that the deity could be appropriately approached on their behalf by professional supplicants who know how to make their case to the deity effectively.

    The sad truth is that in spite of the large volume of prayers offered up for what is described as a safe journey, a distressingly large number of vehicular accidents happen on our roads on a daily basis. Motorcycle accidents happen so often that they are no longer thought of as being worthy of any report in any medium.I am sure of this because although I am seldom on the road these days, I have witnessed several motorcycle accidents in the last few months alone. This is by no means a deterrent to the millions of Nigerians who daily blithely take their lives in their hands by climbing behind okada riders and undertake journeys long and short, at considerable risk to their continued earthly existence. All people riding on a motorcycle are required to wear a helmet but that law is more respected in the breach than in its observance. And, whatever danger that they were courting by riding on an okada is more than doubled by the refusal to wear a helmet. To complicate matters a little bit more, there are occasions when as many as four riders are squeezed together on one bike. The danger from such an arrangement is monumental to say the least but who cares? a crumpled note slipped into the hand of some policeman at a conveniently situated checkpoint solves any problems caused by this egregious breach of a law of the land. And there is no limit to what can be carried on an okada. To make this point without any ambiguity, I once saw a corpse being transported on a motorcycle. The give away here was when the dead weight of the corpse

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    caused the motorcycle to become overbalanced, leaving both the living and the dead sprawled out on the cold tarmac. I am sure that every reader can provide their own personal example of this phenomenon.

    Motorcycle accidents have become so common that they are self reported anywhere even though orthopaedic wards all over the land as well as makeshift facilities manned by self styled bone setters are virtually overflowing with victims of motorcycle accidents.

    The number of casualties associated with motorcycle accidents are seldom impressive. Not so with a single form of mass transit; cars, SUVs, minibuses, so-called luxurious buses and even open trucks, more suited to transporting livestock. These are frequently stocked full of fee paying passengers and driven many miles at great speed cross country. As soon as you step into any of these vehicles or if you prefer, contraptions, you can consider that you have surrendered your life to blind fate. You will pick up the responsibility for your life at the end of your journey wherever that is. Unfortunately, many of such journeys are terminated abruptly, many of them far from the desired destination and for many of the people involved, they become grim items of statistics. The gory ends of such journeys are reported on the pages of newspapers or as brief reports on radio and television. To fit the tenor of today, videos shot at the scene are sent round the world on social media. The number of casualties of such accidents, which are almost inevitably described as ghastly by reporters, vary from one of two to several dozen. Never mind the number as it is soon forgotten. The injured are invariably reported as having been conveyed to the nearest hospital and the dead are always deposited, according to reports, in the mortuary. End of story.

    There are of course many reasons for the recurrent carnage on our roads. And the reasons keep growing. For example, motorists now have to contend with the insecurity challenges on our roads. The fear of kidnappers, bandits and the occasional plane armed robber must now be regarded by the understandably wary traveller as the beginning of wisdom. This is because fatalities which occur in the course of these operations are frequently reported. Gone, perhaps forever are night travels. Older readers may remember that until recently, night buses had converted our roads to busy traffic arteries in the dead of night. Now, there is a rush to get off the roads at dusk in order not to become an insecurity statistic. An unsung but quite lucrative casualties of the current state are outposts, many of them out in the bush, offering catering services to drivers and their passengers throughout the night. Without the traffic generated by  night travellers, these establishments, many of them that were quite famous, have had to be closed down. Unfortunately, the various agents of insecurity at work all over the country, are showing that they can do away with the cover of darkness and have turned virtually every trip on any road in Nigeria into something of a lottery. This has added another point to the prayer for journeying mercies.

  • Finding a cure for madness

    Finding a cure for madness

    Perhaps the most important aspect of writing a weekly column is to retain relevance throughout the period of its existence. Your readers deserve to come away with something tangible from reading any of your articles as this is the only way that they would come back week after week to share a few minutes with you. This does not mean that they would always take sides with your argument. Indeed, if this is one of your motives for writing then, you are bound to be disappointed if only because your readers arrive at your column with many different perspectives and there is no way that you can give satisfaction to all your visitors. You can only try but, no matter how hard you try, the thought must always be at the back of your mind that all you write will sooner or later  find its way to a rubbish dump both physically and figuratively, no matter how hard you try. And yet your primary focus must be to give some measure of room to your readers, to complete a circle of trust within which you derive the authority with which you command the attention of those who take the trouble to bring themselves up to date with the current state of your mind.

    When I turned my mind to writing this week’s edition of this column, my first inclination was to continue where I left off last week in my discussion of the current dire situation of academia in Nigeria. After all, whatever relevance I have cannot be separated from my academic career. Whatever the colour of my academic experience however, I cannot expect everyone to share my enthusiasm or interest in that subject, especially in the light of recent developments all around us. Midway through the first paragraph which was to launch my discussion on the travails of contemporary Nigerian lecturers, I found that my mind had strayed into fields of other pressing issues stirring the hearts and minds of the great Nigerian public to the virtual exclusion of everything else, except of course, the issue of the pressing matter of settling the issue of keeping body and soul together. In the interest of satisfying my readers I have therefore chosen to pivot to what I can only describe as a more exciting field of interest this week.

    I remember with startling distinction, the horror I felt that day, it was a Saturday, when I read in a newspaper that the leader of the Boko Haram group (or sect) had, to use contemporary description, been neutralised whilst in what should have been safe custody of the Nigerian Police. There was a time during the civil war when the term wasted was used to describe such an act. However, whichever way we care to say it, the man had been summarily executed and I knew quite instinctively that grave consequences were bound to follow that extrajudicial murder. What I had no way of knowing at the time was the quantum of the mayhem with which we were going to have to cope with, a decade and a half down the line. So many years of our discomfiture have passed and a huge deluge of dirty water has flowed under the bridge since then. And yet, the only thing we are clear about at this time is that our collective suffering over this matter, however painful it has been, is very far from over. The intensity has increased past fever pitch from time to time. It is no wonder that it has flared up recently and begun to raise our temperature in the manner of a herpes attack. The sad thing about herpes is that it is incurable. It comes and goes unpredictably but it is always there waiting to remind the sufferer of its maddening presence. Boko Haram and other related off shoots of this group have inserted themselves

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    with murderous intent into the very soul of our country. Curing it is presenting the level of difficulty associated with curing cancer. It cannot be done without inflicting a great deal of pain on the patient. Even after going through the terrible pain associated with this attempt at a cure, there is no guarantee that the attempt, any attempt at a cure, is eventually successful.

    One of the phrases trending these days and one from which you cannot get away is that you cure madness with madness. The madness of insurgence, whatever its form, can only be cured with the madness of high intensity military action, a form of insurgence on its own. The people responsible for our current troubles answer to many names; Fulani herdsmen, kidnappers, plain old fashioned terrorists, bandits and the odd armed robbers who operate within urban spaces. Their activities have made nonsense of our security and are now in a position to dictate terms to the government of Nigeria. In other words, they have left our sovereignty in utter ruins. Long gone are the days when our roads, all of them, in different parts of the country could be traversed with confidence at any time of day and night. This brings back to my mind a journey I made from Ife which ended in Kano at 3.30 am in Kano. Even as we made our lonely way through that dark night not once did any fear of danger cross my mind. That was in 1998, a date which has now been completely swallowed up in the murky mist of time.

    Gone also are the days when going to the farm to till the compliant soil was just part of everyday living. Now, farmers carrying on their calling in any part of the country, even those very far from the active theatre of insurrection have become members of a seriously endangered species. They are hunted down like vermin and their farms systematically looted and turned into sterile spaces where only sadness grows. When will the government, responsible for our collective security, dredge up the madness with which to cure the madness of those people who think that their madness is a ticket to some fantastic paradise. A massive time bomb is ticking in this respect.

    The threat of societal collapse in the face of the madness which has been unleashed on the country is a common factor which binds the disparate groups involved in undermining the sovereignty of Nigeria together. Another crucial factor they have in common is their stated allegiance to the Muslim faith and this is a complication which we could deal without. The vast majority of Muslims in this country have not been inflicted with the madness of insurgency but have not been spared the pain of the violence dealt out by some of the adherents of their faith. As a matter of fact, it may even be true to say that because the area of operations for these insurgents are inhabited mainly by Muslims, they are the primary victims of this madness. However, the equation is further complicated in those areas of majority Christian inhabitants. These people stand nakedly vulnerable to this mad situation and the charge of genocide or at least ethnic cleansing has has become increasingly difficult to refute. In some parts of the world this charge has become irrefutable and this has precipitated the furore which has gripped the nation in the last couple of weeks and continues to reverberate through it, picking up an unhealthy head of steam with every passing day. According to Donald Trump, the self proclaimed strong man of the United States and also the self appointed policeman to the world, he has ordered his sidekick in the so called Department of War to develop plans for the invasion of Nigeria. He has made it clear that this decision had been taken in the light of his determination to rescue Nigerian Christians from the hell that Nigeria has become.

    Quite predictably, this announcement has gathered a great deal of interest within the country. It is generating a great deal of heat but very little light and heating up the polity to no discernable purpose. It is however important to point out that it is wishful thinking for us to look up to foreigners, least of all, any American of whatever hue or stripe, to prepare and administer what would be a magic potion with which to cure the madness with which we are now afflicted. This is a home grown affliction which requires a local remedy for any expectations of an eventual cure to be entertained.

  • Honourable ministers

    Honourable ministers

    It is clear at this time that two Honourable Ministers are, to use a contemporary term, trending in the news. Their situation is such that I thought I must put Dangote and the Nigerian energy situation on the back burner this week in order to join the ministerial train or if you like, the ministerial band wagon.

    In early September, I turned my attention in this column to what I described as a gathering storm. The storm was in the process of gathering steam as a prelude to causing a great deal of havoc to the nation’s university system. ASUU, the union representing Nigerian university lecturers had begun to make some decidedly ominous noises over the refusal of government to implement the provisions of the 2009 agreement which was signed by both government and ASUU representatives as far back as the year of that agreement. The agreement was signed after it had been carefully worked out by representatives of the government and a high powered union delegation. The issues discussed covered staff welfare, resuscitation  of the moribund university system through adequate funding as well as issues surrounding university autonomy. For more than twenty years before then, these issues had plagued our university system within which strikes had become endemic and decay on the verge of being taken for granted. It appeared that both parties on either side of the divide were ready to stop bickering in the interest of presenting a viable university system to the nation. A system that was going to guarantee the quality of the products of that system. After that agreement was signed, we all heaved a collective sigh of relief and were prepared to get on with doing the work required to make the system work.

    The agreement was signed with great fanfare but, sixteen years later we are yet to see the results of that agreement. For a start, we were sure that the agreement was going to put an end to the perennial strikes of the last twenty years but we have since found out that the lice crawling through our collective hair were still alive and active. As a result, our finger nails are still bright red with blood. All our hopes have been dashed time after time.

    Having spent forty-seven of the most productive years of my life within the Nigerian university system, I cannot turn my back on it six years after retirement. As a university lecturer, I just did not go through the motions of being a university employee. My having spent thirty-one years as a professor within the system shows that I was never a passenger within it. My commitment was total and I was always aware that my achievements within it were to be my professional legacy. The inconsistencies with which I had to battle for the best part of my career however did not allow me to fulfill my potential and limited my scope as a lecturer and researcher. This is why I feel personally insulted by the totally unreflective response of the Honourable Minister of Education to the ongoing two week warning strike embarked upon by ASUU, embarked upon to remind the government of her responsibility to the Nigerian university system.

    It was no secret that an ASUU strike was in the offing but the nonchalance with which the notice was treated can only be described as shameful and disrespectful. After all, a union of university lecturers should not be dismissed out of hand in the way the minister has done. According to him, his government had done everything in response to the demands of ASUU and there was no earthly reason why they should go on strike. In the first place what is going on at thís time is a two week strike. It is time limited and designed only to sensitise the government and remind her of her responsibility to a critical sector. Rather than be sensitised, the minister has responded with fury. Previous governments for all their irresponsibility in this matter did not confront the lecturers with venom and did not threaten them with the withholding of salaries first of. And in any case, the no work, no pay threat has never been able to send striking lecturers back to work. True, university lecturers have been steadily impoverished by government policies over more than three decades, the threat of stopping their meager salaries can no longer be regarded as a fail safe deterrent. After all, he who is down fears no fall. On several occasions in the past, Vice Chancellors have been instructed to open registers so as to identify those of their staff who were on strike. That measure did not force lecturers back to work. Lecturers have faced down the threat of eviction from government quarters before and maybe it is to the minister’s credit that he has not yet issued the threat of eviction as a means of forcing striking lecturers back to work. In an attempt to break the ranks of ASUU, the last government threw their support behind a renegade splinter group of opportunistic lecturers who had chosen to curry her favour by rejecting the strike option within the university system. This has not broken the ranks of the lecturers. Those government recognised stooges, registered as a competing unit by the last government, even now, claim to be hard at work but the universities remain closed for business. So much for their effectiveness as strike breakers. One cannot but wonder why successive Nigerian governments have chosen to respond, first with indifference and then fury to the legitimate demands of university lecturers.

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    And yet the situation within Nigerian universities was radically different from what it is now. Back in 1972 when I graduated from the University of Ife, graduates did not choose to become lecturers. They were chosen. Such was the cynosure of lecturership positions that those chosen to undergo training to become lecturers were regarded as having been made for life. Not only did professors earn the highest salaries within the public service, their allowances and other perquisites of office put them in a class by themselves. In my generation, those of us that had the privilege of overseas study eagerly returned home to serve their respective universities. Those that were given the same opportunity a little over a decade ago have simply absconded and are now happily contributing to the development of universities abroad. They are never coming back home and why should they, when all they can expect is a tongue lashing from an entitled minister from time to time. Everything considered, the glory has departed from our universities and the likelihood of a return is slim.

    The other minister recently in the crosshairs of public attention is the Minister of Works, the hard working, self styled Professor of Engineering. So many Nigerians are desirous of being recognised as professors even as real professors are skulking away in their battered ivory towers. The minister was engaged in a heated argument with a journalist who obviously thinks that if the minister was a professor of engineering, he was a professor of interrogative journalism. The sparks created in the course of their public interaction engulfed them both. My interest in this matter concerns why in this country, the Minister of Works has to be an engineer, any kind of engineer and the Minister of Health must be medically qualified. Well, this does not have to be so and is not the case in other parts of the world. Those of us who are sufficiently long in the tooth remember that the Minister of Works in Gowon’s cabinet was a lawyer and the Minister of Health was a History professor. Those gentlemen performed their jobs admirably. The Ministries of Works and Healthare full of engineers and doctors respectively. The minister is a political appointee, put there to supervise the political leanings of the ministry, to see that the workers are ideologically committed to the manifesto of the ruling party. When we see the Minister of Works parading in a hard hat, we just know that he is doing so for the cameras. The serious work on site should be left to the engineers who were employed to carry out engineering works by the ministry. If that was the case, the Minister of Works would have been spared that ordeal of trying to deal with the verbal pyrotechnics which raised his ministerial hackles to an intolerable level.

  • Constitutional matters II

    Constitutional matters II

    All written constitutions have the American constitution as a reference document against which they can be judged. This is for no reason other than because it was the first written constitutionbto have been composed anywhere in the world. However, this does not excuse the close similarities between what was produced by the Americans in 1797 and that hand picked Nigerian committees in 1998. Putting the two documents side by side the charge of plagiarism against the Nigerians stands proven for all time. That in itself is enough to disqualify the Nigerian constitution as it is to act as a template for the governance of an ambitious country, not alone the star of Africa which we all liall to think Nigeria is. No wonder the Nigerian constitution is bereft of appreciation and respect. The consensus is that we have been wishing for a new and representative constitution ever since. This constitution has always been an excuse or an explanation for the failures which have dogged the nation since our reinstallation of democratic government and is likely to continue to strangle our development as a nation.

    The obvious response to the problem which is the current Nigerian constitution, at leat as far as its most implacable critics are concerned, is outright demolition and replacement as it is not fit for purpose. However, there are those who think that there is room for extensive renovation through the attachment of Amendments. After all, the American version has no less than twenty-seven amendments, acquired over a period of more than two centuries. The Nigerian constitution may have as manh as twice that number in a tenth of that length of time, provided that it is functional. In that circumstance, the tail of amendments will soon be long enough to wag the dog to which it is attached. If the truth be told however, the main problem with the Nigerian constitution is the dishonesty attached to its composition.

    The American constitution had a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) base and was written from the point of view of a shared past. The colonisation of Northern America started from 1607 with the Puritans pushed by the winds of religious dissent sailing out of Plymouth to colonise a part of Massachusetts. The Quakers also sought refuge in Pennsylvania and the Catholics went on to Maryland. They were all escaping from persecution from the newly established Church of England, the Anglican Church which exercised both religious and political power over all the subjects of the king. They also cast themselves into the wilderness of colonial America in order to make money, lots of money to slay the ghost of poverty which had haunted them all their lives. Thousands of miles across the sea however, they were still subjects of the king and paid taxes into his coffers even as they were not represented in the councils of his distant realm. They chaffed under the authority of the king and their resentment continued to grow until it finally burst into the flames of the revolutionary war. A war which ended in an unexpected victory for the American rebels and their ragtag army. This was the background to the meeting of twelve of the original thirteen states to sit down together to write a constitution which was to govern their newly independent country.

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    Reading through that constitution, it is clear that they were determined to prevent the development of a monarchy in the land, to ensure that power belonged to the people and was exercised by them to their individual benefit and not to any group of power brokers. Having felt the destructive tendencies of religion which had caused their ancestors to leave the land of their birth, they were fully determined to keep it out of the public space. The other important point of discussion was the right of states to govern themselves within a Federated republic, a right which each state was to guard jealously. They also laid down the guiding rules for elections to the offices of government from the lowly dog catcher in some backwoods settlement somewhere in the back of beyond to the President and Commander in chief. These guidelines have been polished by practice over the last two hundred and thirty years. They have survived a civil war, other wars all over the world including two world wars, serious racial tensions, drug use epidemics, bouts of economic depression, episodes of deplorable leadership and other serious challenges. They started out out as a backwoods, backward and depressed country and have grown to the largest economy in the world. All their activities have been regulated by their robust constitution aided by those twenty-seven amendments. All of them severely home-grown.

    Nigeria has had four distinct constitutional constructs in a little over sixty years, none of them grounded in home soil, with the people gone missing in action. In a country in wrack and ruin we are going round flinging blame like confetti. When the opportunity came for the composition of a new constitution we resorted to cheap and blatant plagiarism in the hope that the second hand constitution would somehow get out of the woods through which have been wandering aimlessly.

    If the truth be told it is apparent that we are yet to build a country fit for the talent which we have in abundance. Under present circumstances a new constitution is never going to be fit for use until we can find the bases for our existence as a country within which we can fulfill our  undoubted potential. We are yet to come to terms with the demands of a federated state and are yet to start to apply our intellect to chart a course for our development.

    Ask most people about the desired complexion of our federation and you are likely to be told that we should go back to the regionalism which was shredded by the military way back in 1966. My memories of that period does not chime with the expectations which are now ringing round our collective ears. It is becoming clearer that the minor successes of regional government which are being touted abroad now were due to the after taste of colonial inheritance rather than any intrinsic characteristics of the structure of our governance. Even at that time most of our leaders were on the track of their respective personal ambitions. They were therefore determined to secure their regional fiefdoms whilst poaching some underhand support from some parts of other regions. As in the days of frank colonialism the regions were still dependent on agricultural products for whatever was needed to run regional economies at a time when cocoa, Palm oil and groundnuts were fetching premium prices on the world market. The military could hardly believe their luck when crude oil was turned to black gold on their watch and the indigenization of the commanding heights of the economy went on furiously to the detriment of real economic development. With the sound of petrodollars ringing in their ears, they were reluctant to leave the stage to their civilian counterparts to take their share at what was left in the national feeding trough. When they were finally persuaded to leave, they left behind the overly expensive presidential system which was, as with a lot of other stuff, imported lock, stock and barrel from the USA. All efforts to domesticate this beast has failed woefully. The Americans devised that system of government in order to curtail the power of their president and subordinate the operation of the state apparatus to the people. In the case of the Nigerian state, the power of the presidency is out of all proportion to what is available to the people. Furthermore, the perquisites attached to the Nigerian presidency are so attractive that the heavy responsibilities of the office are no longer a deterrent to adventurers looking for thrills. It is looking increasingly clear that only old men, with any hope of becoming the president are those who are past the age of retirement from all other forms of useful employment. This is why there is a long line of geriatrics queuing up for what is essentially a job for the young and agile. The American president, tied up as he is by the bounds of the American constitution, must be casting envious eyes across the sea at the unfettered powers at the disposal of his imperial majesty, the president of Nigeria.