The Nation Newspaper

Tag: dialogues

  • Achebe’s legacy and more African voices in U.S.-Africa policy dialogues

    Chinua Achebe, the literary giant from Nigeria, passed away last Thursday. In his various writings, Achebe challenged the then Eurocentric perspectives and instead brought an African perspective to the story of colonialism in Nigeria as expounded in his books, Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease. These books showed the clash between the Igbo and the British in Nigeria: first from the perspective of a Nigerian father, and in the second book from the perspective of his European-educated son.

    Before Achebe, Amos Tutuola, Camara Laye and other African literary titans, the narrative of the African region and colonialism was handled primarily by the likes of Joseph Conrad, John Locke and Joyce Cary. Of course, these European perspectives are not entirely invalid. However, they represent only one broad perspective of Africa. As the old saying goes “Until the lion learns to speak, the tales of hunting will always glorify the hunter.” Fortunately, Chinua Achebe’s stories strengthened the African narrative and inspired future writers to realise the possibilities for African literature, as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie says in her Ted Talk, “I realised that people who looked like me could live in books.” Adichie, the author of Half of a Yellow Sun, takes Achebe as a lesson to avoid the “danger of a single story” or a single perspective. She also points out that in some cases the ability to voice a particular perspective sometimes boils down to how much dominance the story teller has, “How (stories) are told, who tells them, when they’re told, how many stories are told — are really dependent on power.”

    In the African policy dialogue in Washington, as in literature, there is a tendency for a single narrative or perspective to dominate otherwise complex and varied perspectives of the continent. For example, The Economist deemed Africa the “hopeless continent” in the early 2000s. This narrative was recently retracted by the magazine and revised as “A hopeful continent”. In policy discussions in Washington, it is not uncommon for think tanks and briefings on Capitol Hill to feature panel discussions on African policy issues with experts sourced entirely from Europe and the U.S. The perspectives advanced in such forums could be well informed, but like the pre-Achebe writings, the narrative ignores the African perspective. As we mourn the passing of this great literary hero, we see our mission at the Brookings Africa Growth Initiative to take Achebe’s message forward by incorporating African voices in the policy dialogue on Africa in Washington. By amplifying and raising African voices in the U.S.-Africa policy dialogue, AGI complements the U.S. or European perspectives to facilitate better decision-making and to avoid missing opportunities that could potentially benefit both the African region and the United States.

     

    •Culled from www.brookings.edu

     

     

     

     

  • Ten years of Trust’s dialogues (III)

    Ten years of Trust’s dialogues (III)

    Finally, this year’s dialogue. The reader will recall that in the second part of my review of Trust’s annual dialogue last week, I concluded with a couple of examples of how the Nigerian media often allowed partisan politics to get the better of its professionalism. This was in illustration of the consensus of last year’s dialogue which was on “Politics and the Media.”

    The chair was former military president, General Ibrahim Babangida. The panellists were Senate President David Mark, represented by Senator Victor Ndoma-Egba, the minister of Information, Labaran Maku, represented by his Special Assistant on Media, Dr Kingsley Osadolor, and Dr. Abubakar Siddique Mohammed, the radical scholar and one-time head of Ahmadu Bello University’s Political Science department.

    In his opening remarks the chair, it seemed, could not resist having dig at the minister who, as a student union leader, led violent demonstrations against the general’s increase of petrol price in the eighties. Wasn’t it ironical, the general observed with a knowing grin on his face, that several years on the minister would transform into one of strongest defenders of President Goodluck Jonathan’s unwanted New Year “gift” to Nigerians on January 1, 2012 of more than double the hitherto subsisting price of the commodity?

    The reader will recall that I quoted Comrade Adams Oshiomhole, the Edo State governor and one of the most regular participants of the dialogue, of accusing the media of often writing fiction. On that occasion the comrade governor was angry with the media for publishing a story that five mosques had been burnt down in Benin, his state capital. This was at the peak of the sectarian violence that had engulfed the country. He said when he confronted the reporter of one of the newspapers that published the story, the reporter disowned it and said it was his editors in Lagos who rewrote it based on information they got from a foreign news agency.

    All three panellists shared Oshiomhole’s concern about the integrity and professionalism of the Nigerian media. And all four barely stopped short of accusing the media of lack of patriotism. Among the four, Dr Mohammed’s criticism was strongest. Over time, he said, the media “have subjected this country to a sustained barrage of attacks like no other country in the world that is not at war.”

    The Nigerian media, it seems, is a paradox of sorts; most Nigerians acknowledge that it’s been a bulwark against tyranny and misrule in the country, going all the way back to our colonial past, but at the same time it has been widely accused of being too negative about the country. It’s difficult to deny the existence of both virtue and vice in the character of our country’s media.

    For me, however, Nigerians themselves are more to blame than their media. The media may often malign people and distort events in society. They may often even fabricate events. But if our media appear to harp more on the vices of our country than its virtues it is simply because our vices outweigh our virtues. In other words, the fault is less in our media than in our selves.

    So if Nigeria is yet to become a nation that its entire citizens can be proud of almost a century after its amalgamation in 1914, we should blame ourselves more than we blame our media – all its shortcomings notwithstanding.

    For its dialogue this year Trust could not have chosen a more appropriate topic than that of the challenges of nation building. Likewise it was hard to pick a more formidable panel than that of Bishop Mathew Hassan Kukah, Mr. Femi Falana, Ms Ann Kio-Briggs and Dr Sule Bello, all of them accomplished figures in their various fields of religion, law, human rights and academia.

    All four expressed unhappiness with the state of the nation but Ms Briggs stood out of the lot for her pessimism about the country’s future. “There is nothing to celebrate (about the country’s centenary),” she said, and in effect added that it may yet break up if the part of the country she comes from which produces oil as the main source of public revenue is not allowed to continue to lead this country after 2015 even though she admitted that President Goodluck Jonathan has been a big letdown as leader from her neck of wood.

    If Ms Briggs stood out of the panel for her pessimism, Bishop Kukah stood out for his optimism. All the widespread talk about revolution coming to Nigeria, he said, were just that – talk. “No revolution,” he said, “will take place in Nigeria.” He also did not believe the country will break up.

    I do not share Bishop Kukah optimism about this country’s future, even though I pray all the time that it never breaks up but neither do I share Ms. Briggs pessimism. To say, as she did, that there is nothing to celebrate about Nigeria is certainly untenable. If nothing else there is something to celebrate about the country’s unity. Several countries like the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, and closer to home, Sudan and Somalia, which seemed more united and more stable than Nigeria at the time of our independence 50 years ago, have since collapsed.

    We also have a lot to celebrate about our resilience and liberty. Few countries in the world, including Britain the oldest democracy, enjoy the kind of freedom that we do. That we take such freedom for granted is itself a cause for celebration.

    However, for Nigeria to become truly a nation-state its citizens can be proud of we need more than the unity and the freedom that we enjoy and the resilience that is so much part of our character. Of all the other we need, for me the most important is individual introspection about our responsibilities to our communities and to society at large. And the time for that introspection is now, as we begin a year-long celebration of our centenary.

    All too often we blame our leaders for the mess we are in. We are, of course, right to do so. In doing so, however, most of us hardly stop to ask ourselves how much of our own bit we have contributed to help our leaders do what is right by our society and by our country.

    The reader will pardon me if I get rather preachy at this point. But in my own reflections about the ills of our society, I have never found a better solution than the words of Prophet Muhammad (Peace be upon him) about the concept of shepherd-hood which has its Christian equivalent.

    “Everyone of you,” he is quoted to have said by some of the greatest narrators of his tradition, including Bukhari, Muslim and Abu Dawud, “is a shepherd, and everyone of you is responsible for his flock. The Imam is a shepherd, and he is responsible for his congregation. A man is a shepherd among his family and he is responsible for his flock (his family). A woman is a shepherd in her husband’s home and children, and she is responsible for them. A servant is a shepherd over the wealth of his owner and he is responsible for it. Lo! Everyone is a shepherd and everyone is responsible for his flock.”

    Each time we blame our leaders for the mess in our society, have we ever stopped to ask ourselves if we have done our own little bit in our own little world we control? When we jump queues in traffic, for example, are we not violating the time honoured principle of first come, first served? When we dump refuse in our gutters instead of properly disposing it are we not violating our responsibilities as shepherds over our environment? And so on and so on.

    We cannot hope to transform our country into a land of peace and prosperity that we will all be proud to identify with if we do not think seriously about the saying that a country gets the leaders it deserves. This is staple food for our thoughts as we celebrate our centenary which comes up next year.

     

     

  • Ten years of Trust’s dialogues (II)

    Ten years of Trust’s dialogues (II)

    In my overview two weeks ago of Media Trust Limited’s 10 years of annual dialogue which started in 2004, I said the four most exciting – and should have added most interesting – for me were the third on the scourge of corruption in Nigeria, the seventh on African women in politics, the ninth on politics and the media and this year’s on nation building.

    The other six were, of course, exciting and interesting enough. The first, as the regular participants would know, was on the same theme of nation building as this year’s. The second, though on the dismal science, was made interesting by the panel of three of Nigeria’s leading economists, Professors Sam Aluko, now late, and Mike Kwanashie of Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, and the prolific and ever controversial Malam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, the Central Bank Governor, but at that time the risk manager of United Bank for Africa.

    In their subject matter alone, the fourth (2007) on how to conduct free and fair elections in the country, the fifth (2008) on the challenges of democracy on the continent and the sixth (2009) on how to restore public faith in the country’s politics, were also exciting. But their various panellists – Professor Maurice Iwu, probably the most discredited chairman of the country’s election commission, Alhaji Ahmadu Kurfi, its longest serving executive secretary and Chief Segun Osoba, one of the five Action Congress governors in the South-West President Olusegun Obasanjo knocked out for six in the 2003 governorship elections through sheer cunning (2007), Ghana’s President Jerry Rawlings (2008) and the trio of Anambra’s Governor Peter Obi, former House Speaker Bello Masari and Comrade Adams Oshiomhole, then still legally contesting his defeat at the Edo governorship elections in the 2007 elections (2009) – ensured there were no dull moments during those three dialogues.

    The eighth dialogue in 2011 on the challenges of good governance in Africa was also a natural crowd puller if only because of the prevalence of bad governance on the continent. It was the more interesting because one of the three billed to lead the dialogue, Dr. Mo Ibrahim, the telecommunication billionaire, had instituted a well-endowed prize for good governance on the continent which is Africa’s closest answer to the Nobel Peace prize, in the sense that much of the widespread conflict on the continent can be traced directly to bad governance by its leaders.

    As things turned out, the audience did not get the benefit of Mo Ibrahim’s rationale for instituting his prize, among other things the audience would have loved to hear from him, even though he turned up for the event. He could not speak because he fell ill on the night before the event. It was then left to the pair of Mr. Fola Adeola, a highly successful banker and reformer of the country’s pension scheme, and Ms Arunma Oteh, the boss of Nigeria’s Security Exchange Commission, to lead the dialogue. For me the most memorable remark to come out of that year’s dialogue was Adeola’s profound statement that Nigerians seem to have outsourced their problems to God, instead of taking responsibility for what they say or do, good or bad. Since then God, it seems, has remained the patient refuge of every scoundrel, probably even more so today.

    All of which brings me back to the four dialogues I said were the most exciting and interesting for me, i.e. those of 2006, 2010, 2012 and this year’s. The first of this lot was the subject of this column two weeks ago. The problem of this country, I said, was not corruption as such but the brazenness with which it is practiced and the fact that, far from punishing corruption, we indeed celebrate it from the top to the bottom of society.

    It is this attitude towards corruption which has made it all so easy for many of our leaders to “chop and clean mouth,” to use the peculiar Nigerian expression for the complete lack of shame among our leaders about their sordid past, even the immediate past.

    This, more than the topic of the 2010 dialogue about the African women in politics and the formidable panel of Winnie Mandela, Kofoworola Bucknor-Akerele, Naja’atu Mohammed and Ms Samira Nkrumah, was what I found interesting about the year’s dialogue. It was truly amazing, at least for me, how President Obasanjo, as the chairman of the occasion, could look Nigerians straight in the eyes and tell them he did not know Alhaji Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, then governor of Katsina State, was a sick person when he imposed him on his party as its presidential candidate and went on to impose him on Nigerians as their president in 2007.

    But then Obasanjo knew his Nigeria like the back of his hand, as they say. So he proceeded to wash his hands off his handiwork and ask Yar’Adua, who he knew was at that point not in charge of his faculties, to “take the path of honour” and resign as president. A few voices were raised against the immorality of his pretence but the overwhelming majority, as he must have reckoned, focused on the message rather than on the messenger. In any case, the following day, the message virtually drowned out the subject of that year’s dialogue.

    As a veteran journalist and political pundit, it is not surprising that I found the subject of the 2012 dialogue among the most exciting and interesting. Image, as America’s Abraham Lincoln once reportedly said, is everything, or almost. This explains, at least partly, why journalists and politicians have been in a love-hate incestuous relationship of use and dump for as long as anyone can remember. This was clearly demonstrated by the way Governor Adams Oshiomhole, as much a man of media image as he is of his actions, condemned the media during the dialogue as all too often a purveyor of fiction, not, I must say, without justification.

    Two telling examples lend support to Oshiomhole’s charges, one ancient, and the other recent. The ancient was reported by the late Alhaji Babatunde Jose, the doyen of Nigeria’s press, in his 1987 autobiography, Walking a Tight Rope: Power Play at Daily Times. This was in his account of the 1953 so-called Hausa/Igbo riots in Kano. At that time he was a senior reporter with the newspaper and was on a familiarisation tour of the North. “I,” he said in the book, “had quite correctly reported it in my copy as a riot between Hausas and Yorubas. Somehow it appeared in Daily Times as a riot between Hausas and Ibos, a very different matter and potentially a very dangerous error.”

    The edition was seized and pulped by the colonial authorities and another with the correct version printed for circulation but not, unfortunately, before the damage had been done. “We,” he said, “never found out how the mistake occurred. Was it an accident or was it a deliberate attempt to foment trouble?”

    Whatever the motive, the acorn of distrust that story planted in the geo-politics of this country has since grown into an oak tree, perhaps bigger.

    The recent example of the press malice comes from a 1996 book, NIGERIA: Guerrilla Journalism by Michele Maringuez, by no means an enemy of the Nigerian press. On the contrary she had a lot of positive things to say about the country’s press in her book. Even so she lamented that it was “often astonishingly negligent about checking and confirming its sources or even statistics. Errors and glitches abound and are seldom corrected in the next edition.”

    She gave an example of how AFP, the French news agency, and The Guardian, the self-styled flagship of the Nigerian press, published different statistics from an IMF press conference in Lagos about Nigeria’s economy. When the worried AFP correspondent cross-checked with the IMF it turned out the flagship was wrong.

    Maringuez’s second example was even more egregious. In December 1993, she pointed out, three of the country’s leading news magazines carried a sensational story that former self-styled military president, General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida was on the run from the General Abacha regime. The News’ banner headline on its cover read “Babangida’s dramatic escape.” African Concord’s was “A dictator on the run.” Tell’s was even more dramatic. “Why IBB is on the run,” it said, with his picture along with his late wife, Maryam, getting off a plane.

    It turned out that, far from being on the run, the man and his wife had only gone for lesser Hajj in Saudi Arabia and for holiday abroad only to return a few weeks later. None of the magazines ever mentioned his return.

     

  • Ten years of Trust’s dialogues (I)

    Ten years of Trust’s dialogues (I)

    On January 15, 2004, Media Trust Limited, publishers of Daily Trust, Weekend Trust, Sunday Trust, Aminiya in Hausa, Kano Chronicle and the annual Kilimanjaro pan-African journal, held its first Trust Annual Dialogue in promotion of dialogue as a means of solving Nigeria’s problems. Ten years on last month, the annual event, a “town hall” meeting of sorts, has become possibly the most important regular platform for discourse in the country about its sociology, politics and economy. The dialogue has certainly made January an important date in the nation’s political and media calendar.

    The topic for the first dialogue was “The Nigerian Question: The Way Forward.” The chair was then Archbishop, now Cardinal, John Onaiyekan. The special guest of honour was President Olusegun Obasanjo, represented by his minister of Information, the youthful, dignified and somewhat reticent Chukwuemeka Chikelu. The panel of six, entirely from, or least of, the academia at one time or the other, paraded some of the country’s best egg-heads; Professors Bolaji Akinyemi, Jonah Elaigwu and Miriam Ikejiani-Clark, Drs Mahmud Tukur and Usman Bugaje and Messrs Kanu Agabi and Pharaoh Okadigbo.

    All six agreed that the answer to the Nigerian question was, to use Dr Tukur’s words, a “proper federation” with a “de-concentrated” centre. They were also unanimous about the need for the country to remain one. However, predictably for a panel of egg-heads, they disagreed on how to achieve these objectives. For example, whereas both Akinyemi and Elaigwu advocated for a national conference, Agabi disagreed.

    As special guest of honour Obasanjo, speaking through Chikelu, had asked, “When shall we move from the Nigerian question to the Nigerian answer?” The disagreement among the panellists about the means suggested that the time for Nigeria to become the answer remained in the distant future, if indeed it was not a mirage. Ten years hence it still seems that Nigeria has remained a question. This much is obvious from the fact that this year’s dialogue held last week – on January 23 – returned to the same theme of nation building as was the first.

    Between the first dialogue and last week’s there were the second on reforming Nigeria’s economy, the third on corruption, the fourth on free and fair elections, the fifth on democracy in Africa, the sixth on how to restore faith in the country’s democracy, the seventh on African women in politics, the eighth on the challenges of good governance on the continent, and last year’s on politics and the media.

    This year’s, as we all probably know, was chaired by the former president of Botswana, Mr Festus Mogae, who distinguished himself in office as honest, humble, transparent and accountable to his people. Trust could hardly have picked a better chair for a dialogue on how to build a nation. Similarly, it could hardly have constituted a livelier, more rigorous and more eloquent panel; Bishop Mathew Hassan Kukah, Femi Falana, SAN, Dr. Sule Bello of Ahmadu Bello University’s History department and Ms. Ann-Kio Briggs, well-known as a champion of the rights of the people of her oil-rich but much abused Delta region.

    Having attended virtually all the dialogues, the four liveliest, for me, were the third on corruption, the seventh on African women in politics, the ninth on politics and the media, and this year’s, if only for its context of the serious security threat posed to the unity and stability of the country not only by the Boko Haram insurgency but even more so by the brazen and unprecedented venality of government officials and their racketeering confederates in the private sector.

    To begin with the third dialogue on corruption, Trust could hardly have found a better chairman and panellists for the topic. Retired Major-General Garba Aliyu Mohammed, the chair, I knew very well from our days in primary school in Kano in the late fifties and early sixties. The man served the country as military governor of Niger State and minister of works and left as clean as a whistle.

    As for the panellists, didn’t it used to be said that the fear of Nuhu Ribadu’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission was the beginning of wisdom? Controversy may surround the legitimacy of the commission and its selective use by President Obasanjo may have detracted from its integrity but few doubted the sincerity of Ribadu. Since his contrived departure by Obasanjo’s successor, the late Umaru Yar’Adua, there is a general consensus that the EFCC has become a toothless bulldog.

    The other two panellists, Major-General Ishola Williams, retired, and Professor Attahiru Jega had built their reputations as incorruptible Nigerians in the pursuit of their careers as an officer and gentleman and a brilliant and profound academic respectively.

    For the general the story is told of how on the occasion of an army conference in the eighties one senior officer chided any officer who did not own a house by the time he was a Lt-Colonel as being irresponsible. This was apparently too much for General Williams who was present at the conference and at the time owned no house. He responded to his fellow general by saying that any officer who owned a house by the time he was a one-star general was a thief because it was hard to see how even on that rank one could own a house on one’s legitimate income. Not surprisingly the general went on to become the pioneer chairman of Transparent International (Nigeria).

    As for Jega, the chairman of INEC, he came to the job highly recommended for his dogged fight with the federal authorities as probably the most celebrated president of the Academic Staff Union of Universities who refused all and every blandishment to give in.

    Most Nigerians would agree with Jega’s assertion in his paper that “Corruption has become the second name of our country. It is all pervasive, it is brazen and it is simply unbelievable.” Among the few that would disagree is our president, Dr. Goodluck Jonathan. This much was clear from the way he rejected the cry by the officiating priest at the burial of General Owoye Azazi, a former National Security Adviser, who died along with Governor Patrick Yakowa of Kaduna State in a helicopter crash in Bayelsa State, that corruption had since become the problem with Nigeria.

    “Corruption,” the President said in reply, “is not the cause of our problem. Nigeria has more institutions (now) that fight corruption…If Nigerians would change their attitudes you will realise that most of these issues attributed to corruption are not caused by corruption.” For evidence, he made the rather strange analogy with what he said some senior staff of our road safety corps told him, namely, that most accidents in the country occurred on our good roads. Apparently the logic was lost on our President that just as his belief that good roads have not been enough to stop accidents, and indeed have led to even more accidents, the existence of more institutions to fight corruption is not enough to deter corruption.

    In any case his argument that attitude and not corruption is our problem begs the obvious question: attitude to what? True, corruption, even on the incredible scale of Nigeria’s, is not in itself alone the problem. There is probably as much corruption in, say India, China, Mexico and Italy, and even in America, as there is in our dear country. The difference is the attitude of each country towards the scourge. Whereas the corrupt in these other countries are punished, often very severely, in our country they are celebrated. It is this attitude of impunity by the corrupt that has kept this country in the terrible mess in which it has been, socially, politically and economically – and in whatever..ly you can think of.

    All three panellists at the Trust third dialogue made this fundamental point. They also agreed that the solution was a change of attitude to corruption, especially by our leaders. So in a sense our President was right in saying attitude is the problem of the country, only that he failed to ask the logical question about what the subject of this terrible attitude is for the simple reason that attitude is a noun that needs an adjective to make any sense.