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Tag: historical

  • A historical march into the future

    A historical march into the future

    •Celebrating with Prof. Ochonu on his endowment as Cornelius Vanderbilt Chair in African History

    Of all the snarky and humorous comments about historians, one of my favourite ones is still the one by Samuel Butler: God cannot alter the past, only historians. The joke here, of course, is on the jester who deliberately misconstrues the role of historians in the society. I leave you all to wonder why I am on the defensive at all when the quote is, in fact, a compliment. Indeed, if historians can do what God cannot do, then historians should be given due reverence and treated as deities! But since I am a bit of an historian myself, I can authoritatively say that historians do not alter the past to prove that they wield God-like powers; nor do they transcend the shortcomings of God himself. Instead, historians have a far more noble task: they are the adventurers who light a path through darkened caves of the human past so that others may chart their futures and never stumble. Today, (September 6, 2017), I present before you all a historian and scholar who has distinguished himself by not only interpreting the past as historians do, but also by committing himself to the worthy goal of mapping the future. Ladies and gentlemen, that historian is Professor Moses Ochonu.

    Everyone who knows Moses also knows I am a great admirer of him and his work. I have worked with him in various capacities over the years, and I can say that he is a highly skilled researcher, scholar, and teacher, as well as an exceptional thinker and writer. He is an historian par excellence, the one who has the incredible ability to forge through troves of documents from the past to gain insight into how the present will shape the future. I cannot stop talking about him any and everywhere I go. I am fascinated by his brilliance and his conscientiousness with regard to his scholarly and moral duty to history. I have had endless stimulating conversations with him, and sometimes I in fact like to disagree with him simply to tease out the vast oceans of knowledge and wisdom that constitute his mind, including the walking encyclopaedic volume his head carries! I trouble him with questions, even if his answers do not always satisfy me. He is an engaging intellectual, a deep thinker, and an incisive critic whose contributions to African history are both seeds and a harvest at the same time. Most certainly, Moses’ work has planted large plantations of intellectual ideas, scholarly contributions, and pedagogical initiatives that will continue to reproduce bountifully for generations to come.

    Indeed, Moses, as I know him, has come a long way on the path of scholarly excellence. He did not just become the Professor Moses Ochonu whom we have congregated to celebrate overnight. There is an African proverb that says that a chick, which will become a rooster, can be spotted from the day it is hatched. That tells us that potential is always obvious in promising young people such as when Moses displayed his potential for great success right from his days at Bayero University, Kano, where he obtained his undergraduate B.A. degree in History. Throughout his stay at Bayero, he held the Bayero University Scholarship for Outstanding Academic Performance. He eventually earned the Michael Crowder Prize for the Best Student in Modern African History and the Best Graduating Student in the Department of History of the class of 1997. His department was so enamoured with his achievements that they immediately offered him a graduate assistantship the same year. Moses, known for his relentless pursuit of his dream of scholarly merit and achievement, travelled to the United States, where he obtained additional academic degrees from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. In 2004, he was appointed an Assistant Professor at Vanderbilt University.

    Never one to rest on his oars or achievements, Moses continued to tread the path of hard work and research to build an illustrious career. At Vanderbilt, he established himself as an authority on the history of colonial and post-colonial Nigeria and as a distinguished scholar of Modern African History. Moses steadily rose through the academic ranks, to the position of Associate Professor in 2011 and, then, to a full Professorial position in history in 2015. At this point, he would have been forgiven by critics if he simply decided to sit back and never did another thing. After all, he had managed to build a star-studded career in a relatively short span. But no, not Moses! He continued to write, to publish, to teach, to give lectures, and to push the boundaries of his own achievements. Within this period, Moses received grants and fellowships from prestigious organizations that respect excellent scholarly vision and output. All through this time, Moses never once hid that he wanted the professorial Chair. That had always been his goal since he stepped into the academic profession, and Moses never wavered in the belief that he could achieve this dream. Today, he holds the Cornelius Vanderbilt Chair in African History. Moses, we are all very proud of you!!

    The endowed professorial Chair is in recognition of his prodigious scholarship and contribution to the growing literature on African History. At this point, let me “barbel” about his books. Moses’ first book, Colonial Meltdown: Northern Nigeria in the Great Depression, was published in 2009. He wrote this work to counter the existing historical accounts that have characterized the period of the Great Depression as one of non-existent colonial activity in Africa. Okay, so at this point, I think Moses has indeed proved Butler right. Historians, truly, alter the past, but they do so to show how accurate or inaccurate our assumptions and assertions about the past might have been. In this profound work of academic merit, Moses demonstrates the economic impact of the Great Depression on northern Nigeria, and also shows the resilience of the colonized people of northern Nigeria against the exploitation of the British colonial government.

    His second book, Colonialism by Proxy: Hausa Imperial Agents and Middle Belt Consciousness, published in 2014, also explores aspects of British colonial history where the colonial government created “subcolonialism” in northern Nigeria as a proxy system of government to rule over the people they considered too incorrigible to merit their system of indirect rule. His research shows how the legacy of that period, especially the manipulation of religious history for power, created a mechanism of dominance that continues to define modern Nigerian political culture. The book, very well done, was a finalist for the prestigious ASA Herskovits Prize for the Best Scholarly Book in African Studies in any Discipline in 2015. His third book, Africa in Fragments: Essays in Nigeria, Africa, and Global Africanity, also published in 2014, is a compendium of essays that explores Nigeria and Africa as it currently is, in a state of ebullition. His forthcoming book – and I encourage everyone to get a copy of it when it is released next year – Emirs in London: Nigerian Aristocrats, Metropolitan Travel, and Imperial Modernity, dwells on the travel narratives of the Emirs of northern Nigeria who travelled to the seat of colonial government in Britain in the early colonial and postcolonial period. This book is a fascinating account of how travel produced a class of citizens who demystified the white man and then turned around to establish themselves as brokers of a new regime of modernity in their local conclaves.

    In addition to these books, Moses has produced dozens of scholarly or peer-reviewed journal articles as well as book chapter publications in edited volumes. Despite the prodigiousness of his scholarship, he has not sealed himself within the ivory tower. Moses’ feet remain firmly planted on the shores of the local communities with which he works, and as a testimony to his passion for Nigeria, he continues zealously to produce numerous commentaries about Nigerian affairs. He analyses contemporary issues with the skills only a historian has mastered. Having diagnosed the problems, Moses proposes solutions for the country’s progress. His essays have appeared in major Nigerian newspapers in print and online. His provocative article “The Shattering of the Buhari Mythology” in African Arguments was voted by readers as the 2016 Best Article of the Year. On the USA Africa Dialogue Series forum, where I act as the moderator, he is that deep voice of Moses, whose refreshing and combative contributions show him as highly principled and humane, and that he is being seen as an intellectual driven by the goal of forging a better path for his society.

    Today, I congratulate Moses for his hard work, his zeal, his contributions, and even his faith in his own dreams. Certainly, historians can do a lot to alter the past as we have been taught to imagine it, but that is not even where their abilities end. What they also do best is help us to navigate the future by providing us with tools to understand the present. Moses is one of those eminent historians, who have empowered us by writing the past and present, while showing us the promises of the future of northern Nigeria, Nigeria as a whole, and modern Africa. His personal life and the scholarly paths he has taken are, in themselves, a scroll of history. His life – as he has lived it so far – is a unique account he is writing by continuously striving for what is better than the best. With his story, he is also shaping the future of others – in and out of the academia – who will rely on the path this historian forged through the dark and murky caves of the past to behold the promises the future holds for us.

    More grease to your elbow, Moses! You deserve the honour of an Endowed Chair bestowed by the honour’s name sake: Vanderbilt!

    • Prof. Falola is the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities and University Distinguished Teaching Professor, The University of Texas at Austin, USA.

     

  • ‘I love historical fiction’

    ‘I love historical fiction’

    What books are you currently reading?

    Eat, Drink and Blame the Ancestors by South African satirist, Ndumiso Ngcobo. I’m also reading Roses for Betty, an anthology of stories from the 2015 Writivism mentorship programme. On my tablet, there is John Cabot Abbott’s Napoleon Bonaparte and I’m rereading The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje.

    Who is your favourite novelist of all time?

    Difficult to choose just one. But it has got to be Michael Ondaatje. And then there’s J. M. Coetzee, but that would be cheating, wouldn’t it?

    Whom do you consider the best writers — novelists, essayists, critics, journalists, poets — working today?

    My bias is African, I’m for African arguments. So, Abubakar Adam Ibrahim, he’s doing something thoroughly exciting with fiction in Nigeria. Emmanuel Iduma, a literary stylist from Nigeria as well, great potential. Serubiri Moses is a critic of fine taste. Journalist would be Mehdi Hassan—intelligent and intrepid.. Best poet is a very tricky category—I like all the poetry collections of Ahmed Maiwada, I love Amu Nnadi’s Through the window of a sandcastleparticularly and third would be Harriet Anena, a northern Ugandan poet who put together A Nation in Labour. There are two other poets, forgotten, and I don’t know why they are forgotten—Niran Okewole in my generation, and Esiaba Irobi in the previous generation. Best essayist is easy, Yemisi Ogbe, sans pareil.

    What is your favourite Nigerian novel?

    Helon Habila’s Measuring Time. Followed by Biyi Bandele’s Burma Boy.

    What genres do you enjoy reading? And which do you avoid?

    Prose. Fiction and nonfiction, I like well written biographies and novels that aspire to the literary. Novels that take themselves seriously and unashamedly so. Historical fiction, I love. Next to this would be poetry, but one is more careful—a bad poet can ruin ones mood in a way all his own, hard to recover from. Drama is rare foraging ground for me. Regardless of genre, what seduces me is language, how well certain writers are able to charge mere words with resonant beauty and meaning. I stay away from romance, I don’t seem to have a soppy gene.

    What books might we be surprised to find on your shelves?

    Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. Currently considered an American “conservative” institution, I’ve often thought it’s unusual to treasure it as a writer.

    How well do you remember what you read? And the circumstances in which you’ve read a book? What do you remember most?

    I tend to remember the better books exceptionally well. Never to the level of remembering paragraphs verbatim though. I remember enough to recommend these books, even a decade after reading it. I recommended Okri’s The Landscapes Within weeks back, nearly two decades after reading it.

    If you had to name one book that made you who you are today, what would it be?

    Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead.

    If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?

    The Prophet by Gibran Khalil Gibran.

    You’re hosting a literary dinner party. Which three writers (living or dead) are invited?

    Michael Ondaatje. Jhumpa Lahiri. Lola Shoneyin.

    What books do you find yourself returning to again and again?

    The English Patient, Ondaatje. Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee. Cyprian Ekwensi’s novellas. The short stories of Jorge Luis Borges. I find myself returning to Cotyledons, a collection of poems by Esiaba Irobi.

    What do you plan to read next?

    Nadifa Mohammed’s The Orchard of Lost Souls and Ahmadou Korouma’s Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote.

    You are a lawyer, writer and publisher. How do you divide your time? Do you still go to court?

    One tries one’s best, the writing suffers a bit but then I always try to make up when I can. It’s a constant attempt to do corporate law and some real estate amd comsultancy. Easier, time wise. Tough to balance all these adjectives and the adjectives of a life, for someone like me who is an avid lover of discovering new ones, it is always a tricky, jealous lot. Regarding the courtroom, not so much. I have just two cases in court now. Most of what I do is corporate law, some real estate andconsultancy. Easier, time wise.

  • Terrorism: A historical perspective – 4

    In order to put these movements in perspective, it will be clearer if one looks at religious movements in the Sudan broadly defined as a whole. In the modern history of the Western and Eastern Sudan stretching from the Senegal valley across to the upper valleys of the Nile, Islamic fundamentalism has played a very important role. The most well known of Islamic revolutions in the Western Sudan is that of  Usman Dan Fodio, whose son Muhammad Bello and brother Abdullahi founded the Sokoto caliphate. Usman Dan Fodio was an itinerant preacher against syncretism, corruption and misrule among apparently Muslim rulers in Hausaland.

    Islam had been well planted in Hausaland since about the 8th century A.D particularly in Kano and Katsina with many clerics from North Africa visiting Kano and Katsina to lecture at mosques there. But over time, the Muslim rulers of these areas became more materialistic, corrupt and dictatorial in the conduct of state affairs. Taxes were arbitrarily levied on and collected from the peasants and the Nomads. It was these grievances that Usman Dan Fodio exploited to lead a rebellion against the Habe rulers between 1804 and 1808.

    This movement succeeded beyond his wildest dreams and drove away from their thrones Hausa, Nupe rulers and the Yoruba ruler of Ilorin. There is no doubt that Usman Dan Fodio was a pious man but one needs more than piety to found an empire. The political and military prowess of his son Muhammad Bello and Abdullahi his brother facilitated the emergence of the Sokoto caliphate. By the time the British overthrew the caliphate; almost all the evils of the Habe rulers had resurfaced in the caliphate and had undermined the moral fabric of the state. This point was proved by the Satiru revolt of 1905/1906 led by the blind cleric Saybu Dan Makafo who was able to mobilise people against the corrupt practices of the caliphate leadership and its English and French successors both in Sokoto and Dosso.

    The example of the Fulani-led revolt and the creation of the Sokoto caliphate were followed by fellow Fulanis in Massina now part of Mali and led by Sheikh Amadu Bakr Lobbo El-amin in 1810 and between that time and 1845, an ascetic type of Islam was imposed on the community and the Sharia and Islamic jurisprudence were strictly followed. A much wider movement in the Western Sudan was led by Al-hajj Umar Tall. He was a Tukolor, a group closely linked with the Fulani who also established along the upper Nile valleys, a so-called Segu-Tukolor empire in which he imposed himself on the largely Malinke ethnic groups in those areas.

    Al-hajj Umar is well known in West African history as the man who was responsible for spreading the Tijanniya brotherhood, a revolutionary form of Islamic tariqa that preached equality of all peoples. These three Islamic revolutions by and large purified the society and brought new regimes based on the Sharia that were more favourable to the ordinary people. Although over time their decline and eventual fall became inevitable. These movements had positive impact on the Western and Central Sudan. Even though they involved some element of violence, it was violence with a positive purpose.

    A much bigger and militant movement employing modern methods of warfare as well as sophisticated arms took place in what was then known as the Egyptian Sudan in 1881. This has gone down into history as the Mahdia or the Mahdist state which lasted between 1881 and 1898.

    The Sudan was for several decades under Turko-Egyptian control and oppression in the form of arbitrary taxation, corruption and inept rule was characteristic of the regime. It was not too difficult for a millenarian movement led by Mohammed Ahmad who proclaimed himself Al mahdi in the tradition of Islamic thought prevailing in that area. This was based on a doctrine that in difficult times, an “Imam of the age” would come and take over rulership of the state, purify the society and bring the society nearer to God.

    Sheikh Mohammed Ahmad declared himself this “Imam of the age” and the Messiah ‘Mahdi’ the people were waiting for. He was able to found a state between 1881 and 1898 before the combined forces of the Egyptians and the British defeated him under a Bible-waving General Charles Gordon, whose death aroused national sentiment in England. The man who later became British Prime Minister and Second World War hero, Winston Churchill took part in the fighting against the Mahdist leadership. The Mahdia has left an indelible imprint on Sudan even up till today and the Umma, a political party led by the grandson of the Mahdi, the Oxford educated Sadek el-Mhadi has been in and out of power several times.

    It is quite clear that any movement claiming to be an Islamic movement should aim at purifying society and since Islam generally does not separate politics from religion, such a movement must have a plan of creating a state in which the Sharia would be the law and some kind of theocracy would be the mode of governance.

    The closest thing we have to Boko Haram therefore was the Maitasine uprising in Kano in 1980 and its blind fury and murderous campaign against the society generally did not conform to any reformist paradigm of Jihad. It did not appear to have had a programme of creating a state or replacing the then political status quo. It was also secretive and syncretist in nature. It mixed Islam and traditional African religion. The Maitasine revolt however was on such a scale that a division of the Nigerian army had to be deployed against it. Muhammad Marwa its leader was apparently killed in the campaign against them.

    This Maitasine revolt later reared up its ugly head in 1982 in Yola, Adamawa state and Bulunkutu, Borno State at the outskirts of Maiduguri. It was also on the same level of violence as the one in Kano and thousands of people perished in Yola and Maiduguri. This latter offshoot of the Maitasine was apparently led by Musa Makaniki who after the violence in Yola escaped to Gombe and from there to the Cameroons before he was caught in 2004.

  • The dearth of historical consciousness in Nigeria (III)

    After the publication of the first part of this article, I received calls from two sets of readers. The first set – the optimists – are of the opinion that we need to be historically conscious if indeed we are serious about Nigeria “moving forward.” They wondered why any serious nation will neglect the teaching of history which often brings with it a sense of national identity and consciousness. The second set – the pessimists – believe that Nigeria, as a “contraption” is already unravelling and we only have to wait for this to eventually happens. To them, the Boko Haram (BH) insurgency is the beginning of the end.

    While I don’t share in their pessimism, I’m also not blind to the fact that we are at a crossroad as a nation with many Nigerians lacking the understanding of what being a Nigerian is or what Nigeria as a nation actually stands for. A colleague told me last week that after reading a simplified, but comprehensive history of America written for children and teenagers, he wasn’t surprised that Americans are the way they are; patriotic about their country.

    So we may ask ourselves why study history, and what does history have to do with all that is happening now? The answer – in my opinion – is because we virtually must, to gain access to the “laboratory” of human experience. When we study it reasonably well, and so acquire some usable habits of mind, as well as some basic data about the forces that affect our own lives, we emerge with relevant skills and an enhanced capacity for informed citizenship, critical thinking, and simple awareness. We need to study it in order to make progress, even though this progress may take years in materialising.

    I’m aware that any subject of study needs justification; its advocates must explain why it is worth attention. In a society that quite correctly expects education to serve “useful” purposes, the functions of history can seem more difficult to define than those of say architecture, engineering or medicine. History is in fact very useful, actually indispensable, but the products of historical study are less tangible, sometimes less immediate, than those that stem from some other disciplines.

    History should be studied because it is essential to individuals and to society as it helps us to understand people and societies. In the first place, it offers a storehouse of information about how people and societies behave. How, for instance, can we evaluate war if the nation is at peace. We can however do this with historical materials.

    Take the BH crisis as a case study. Terrorism – in the scale we have it today – is totally strange to us that is why our military were not effectively trained in counter-insurgency warfare; rather the effort has been on conventional warfare where you are trained to know your enemy who is expected to play by certain international rules and norms governing combats and the treatment of prisoners of war etc. Today’s enemy only puts on uniform as a decoy; otherwise he remains elusive or acts as a suicide bomber with scant regard to the sanctity of human life or decent societal norms.

    So what is a historian expected to do in this instance? He will sift through historical documents; study how similar scenarios played out elsewhere, what was done there and how it was countered. He will also strive to understand the role that belief systems play in shaping individual and family lives. By studying several societies where similar situations subsist, a conclusion can be drawn with solutions provided on how to address the situation.

    Some social scientists attempt to formulate laws or theories about human behaviour, but even these depend on historical information, except for in limited, often artificial cases in which experiments can be devised to determine how people act. Consequently, history must serve, however imperfectly, as our “laboratory”, and data from the past must serve as our most vital evidence in the unavoidable quest to figure out why our complex society behaves the way it does. This, fundamentally, is why we cannot stay away from history: it offers the only extensive evidential base for the contemplation and analysis of how societies function, and people need to have some sense of how societies function simply to run their own lives.

    History also helps us to understand change and how the society we live in came to be. The past causes the present, and so the future. Any time we try to know why something happened—like the BH crisis or religious/ethnic conflicts—we have to look for factors that took shape earlier.

    Sometimes fairly recent history will suffice to explain a major development, but often we need to look further back to identify the causes of change. Only through studying history can we grasp how things change; only through history can we begin to comprehend the factors that cause change; and only through history can we understand what elements of an institution or a society persist despite change.

    So how do we start to put the right foot forward? Realising the importance of history, Lagos State Government started the process of teaching the subject from the basic level two years ago, if handled well it may be the pedestal for grooming generations of Nigerians who would understand what being citizens of this potentially great nation really means despite our current challenges. I urge the state government to explore other avenues beyond the four walls of schools to enable its citizens have a positive and progressive sense of history.

    For those who may not know, history also serves as a platform for moral contemplation. Studying the stories of individuals and situations in the past allows a student of history to test his or her own moral sense, to hone it against some of the real complexities individuals have faced in difficult settings. People who have weathered adversity, not just in some work of fiction, but in real historical circumstances can provide inspiration that can galvanize an entire nation. The late Nelson Mandela and South Africa is a classic example that most people can easily recollect. Sir Winston Churchill, former Prime Minister of Great Britain’s singular role in rallying his people to confront Nazi Germany during the Second World War also readily comes to mind.

    In galvanizing a nation, – we all agree that Nigeria, as it stands today, need leaders that can galvanize her – no singular attitude is necessary than having a sense of identity; history provides this, which is unquestionably why all modern nations encourage its teaching in varied forms. Historical data include evidence about how families, groups, institutions and whole countries were formed and about how they have evolved while retaining cohesion.

    In my study of American history, I discovered that for most Americans, studying the history of their family amount to the most obvious use of history, for it provides facts about genealogy and a basis for understanding how the family has interacted with larger historical change. Histories that tell the national story, emphasising distinctive features of the national experience, are meant to drive home an understanding of national values and a commitment to national loyalty.

    Perhaps a key area we need to have a positive sense of the subject is in the area of good citizenship.  Most Nigerians will agree that we have a citizenship crisis in the country today. This is the most common justification for the place of history in school curricula. Sometimes advocates of citizenship history hope merely to promote national identity and loyalty through a history spiced by vivid stories and lessons in individual success and morality. But the importance of history for citizenship goes beyond this narrow prism.

    History that lays the foundation for genuine citizenship returns, in one sense, to the essential uses of the study of the past. It provides data about the emergence of national institutions, problems, and values which offers evidence about how nations have interacted with other societies, providing international and comparative perspectives essential for responsible citizenship.

    One salient feature of an advanced country is the ability to see the importance of nearly every discipline in the development process. While we see the study of history in Nigeria as “irrelevant”, an advanced country will tap into the mind of the historian and use his analytic mindset for progress, for instance in the business world. In the United States, Britain and France, there are historians that undertake historical research for businesses or public agencies, or participate in the growing number of historical consultancies. These categories are important to keep the basic enterprise of history going.

  • Historical development of pension scheme in Nigeria

    Historical development of pension scheme in Nigeria

    Nigeria being a former colony of Britain, it’s been argued, received a pension tradition into her public sector that is entirely modelled after the British structure.

    The Country’s pension scheme had started in 1951 when the colonial British administration established a scheme through an instrument called Pension Ordinance. It, however, had a retroactive effective from 1946 and applied only to Untied Kingdom officials posted to Nigeria.

    In Nigeria such enabling legislations include the pension increase Decree No. 42, 1975:

    (a) Military Pension Act Cap (Chapter or No.) 119.

    (b) Pensions Act Cap (Chapter or No) 147.

    (c) War Pension Act Cap (chapter or no) 212.

    (d) Pension (special pensions) Act 1961 (chapter or no) 1961 no. 15.

    (e) Widows and orphans pension Act Cap 220.

    (f) Pensions (Statutory Corporation Service) Act 1961 no. 61.

    (g) Pension (Transferred Services) Act 1965 no. 28.

    (h) Special Constables Decree 1966 no. 7.

    (i) Police Pension Decree 1966 no. 60.

    (j)  Pensions (Federal Fire Service etc) Decree 1966 no. 74.

    (k) Pensions gratuities (war service) Decree 1966 no. 49.

    (l) Transferred offices and pension liability 1971 no. 8.

    (m) Military pensions (Amendments) Decree 1975 no. 13 by Mohammed, head of the Federal Military Government, Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces FRON 20/12/75.

    (n) The Pensions Act of 1979 Decree No. 102, which awarded and united all pensions, acts.

    (o) The Public services the recommendation review 1974.

    (p) The armed forces pension act no. 103 of 1974.

    (q) The pension rights judges Act no. 5 of 1985 and

    (r)  The amendment Act no. 51 of 1988, 29 of 1991 and 62 of 1991.

    The whole of the ordinance acts and Decree is capped up in the Decree No. 102 of 1979, which took effect from April 1, 1974. It consolidated all enactments on pensions and in corporate pension and gratuities seals devised for public officers by the Udorji Public Service Review Concision in 1974.

    In the same way, Pension Act No. 103 of 1979 like its counterpart Decree No. 102, of 1979, on the other hand, dealt with pension benefits, liabilities and seals devised for the agreed forces.

    Features of the past pension schemes

    In the past, civil servants bore no direct responsibility, by way of payroll tax, for the provision of pension; instead pension benefits were paid through budgetary allocations to be kept in the Consolidated Revenue Fund. Thus, in most cases, the amount released usually fell short of the actual appropriation for pension payment.

    Another issue was that the past pension schemes suffered because politicians, eager to capture the votes of the electorates, were in the habit of offering fabulous pension increases that they either knew they were not going to pay or which may fall on regimes other than theirs. And due to the fact that the pension account was not distanced from political control, politicians usually dip hands into pension funds to cushion up temporary fiscal shocks.

    It is also claimed that pension debts in the public sector mount, in part, because of the failure of some state governments to provide their counterpart funds necessary to make up the amount provided by the federal government, in situations where the affected pensioners worked for both federal and state governments.

    Both the way a record of pensioners in the public sector is kept and the procedure for payment of pension created avoidable problems. In some establishments, no accurate record of actual pensioners exists. Corruption breeds more in the absence of facts and figures. Therefore pension costs in the public sector were inflated through insertion of fictitious names on the list of pensioners.

    Another weakness found in the public sector system concerns the less than dignifying manner with which the senior citizens were treated. One observes how weak and frail-looking elderly citizens are compulsorily required to travel long distances to the point of pension payment.

    Worse still, they are left, under inclement weather for long hours and sometimes for days, before collecting their stipends. Some pensioners were claimed to have died while standing in a queue waiting to receive pension benefits. This shows poverty of ideas or unwillingness to deploy ideas in the way pension payment should be handled.

    Introduction of pension reform in Nigeria

    Before the enactment of the Pension Reform Act 2004, which establishes a contributory pension scheme for all employees in Nigeria, the country had operated a Defined Benefit (DB) pension scheme, which was largely unfunded and non-contributory.

    The Scheme led to a massive accumulation of pension debt and became unsustainable largely due to a lack of adequate and timely budgetary provisions, as well as increases in salaries and pensions. The administration of the scheme was very weak, inefficient, less transparent and cumbersome, leading to bureaucracy and highly liable to corrupt practices.

    Due to lack of reliable records of pensioners, huge amount of resources on what became yearly verification exercises were expended which did not result into the timely and efficient payment of pension.

    In the private sector, on the other hand, many employees were not covered by the pension schemes put in place by their employers and many of these schemes were not funded. Besides, where the schemes were funded, the management of the pension funds was full of malpractices between the fund managers and the trustees of the pension funds.

  • International relations in historical perspective – 3

    The evolution of the modern concept of international politics could be said to have begun in 1648 with the end of the Thirty Years’ War which was concluded by the Treaty of Westphalia. In spite of this recognition of sovereignty of states in the European system, it did not stop the outbreak of wars. A philosopher such as Geog Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) who was to rise to the prestigious position of professor of philosophy at the University of Berlin argued in one of his books the Philosophy of Right that in the march of human history, dialectical clashes between nations advanced the course of human civilization. Nationalists, particularly in the divided German and Italian states quickly embraced this new philosophy which saw nothing wrong in wars, especially those arising from the quest for national Risorgimento. Coinciding with the rise of Hegelianism was the unification of Germany and Italy, a development that was to radically revolutionise international relations.

    Since the emergence of nation states like France and England as major players in the game of international politics, there has been a move towards two trends in international relations. The first trend was the idea that a state’s policy should be dominated by what it considers its national interest. It does not really matter whether this national interest is maintained by diplomacy, deception, duplicity or war. This concept of raison d’etat dominated the thinking and action of Armand Jean du Plessis, Cardinal de Richelieu (1585-1642). He was Chief Minister of France from 1624 to 1642. Being a Prince of the Church, one would have expected that he would champion the cause of the Holy Roman Empire and the universal Catholic Church. Richelieu came into office in 1624 when the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand 11 was attempting to revive Catholic universality, stamp out Protestantism and establish imperial control over the princes of, particularly the German speaking states and statelets of central Europe. What did Richelieu do? Under him, raison d’etat replaced the medieval concept of universal moral values as the operating principles of French policy. By the time of the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) each of the principal powers of Europe namely Denmark, Sweden and France reduced Central Europe into human waste and by the time the war ended the German population of Central Europe was reduced by a third.

    During the course of this struggle, Richelieu was able to expand the territories of France eastwards to encompass what later became the disputed provinces of Lorraine and Alsace. Few statesmen can claim a greater impact on history than this man. Richelieu was the father of the modern state system. Absolute devotion to the promotion of a state’s national interest, through the example of what Richelieu accomplished for France became the dominant theory and practice of international relations. The success of this policy of raison d’etat elicited another trend of balance of power politics in order to ensure that France did not impose an absolute hegemony on Europe. These two ideas, which started as facts of life and later as a system of international relations, were to dominate the international system for the next 100 years.

    Even when Napoleon upset the working of the balance of power during his conquests in Europe, he was eventually brought down by coalition of forces in which Great Britain played a dominant role. This again introduced another theme into European politics in which even though separated from Europe by the English Channel, Britain’s national interest moved her to intervene in Continental European politics to ensure that no one single country dominated the affairs of Europe. After the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte, the peace of Europe was maintained through the contrivance of balance of power politics and Europe acting in concert to maintain peace and to ensure legitimacy of European regimes and institutions.

    The architect of this policy of Concert of Europe was the cosmopolitan Austrian Chancellor Prince Clemens Wenzel Lothar Metternich (1773-1859) who was committed to maintaining the status quo in Europe and stamping out the spirit of nationalism which was antithetical to the interest of the ramshackle Austro-Hungarian Empire of several nationalities. This policy worked hand in hand with the traditional policy of national interest. The British Foreign Secretary and later Prime Minister, Henry John Temple, Third Viscount Palmerston (1784-1865) articulated this policy when on becoming foreign secretary in 1830, a position which he was to hold for years until becoming prime minister himself, said,

    “When people ask me … for what is called a policy, the only answer is that we mean to do what may seem to be best upon each occasion as it arises, making the interests of our country one’s guiding principle”

    “We have no eternal allies and no permanent enemies”, said Palmerston “our interests are eternal and those interests it is our duty to follow”.

    The policy of raison d’etat coupled with the policy of concert of Europe was built around a shifting coalescence of interests of Britain and Austria. For almost half a century this policy worked until the wars of German unification and Italian 11 Risorgimento introduced the potent force of nationalism, which had remained dormant since the French revolution. The emergence of Count Camillo Benso di Cavour (1810-1861) and Prince Otto Edward Leopold Von Bismarck (1815-1898) led to the modification of an old idea of national interest. This modification came in the form of a policy of realpolitik in international affairs.

    By this is meant accepting the world as one finds it and making the best use of the situation. The ideal world is utopian and can only be found in the realm of ideas, but the political world is dominated by struggle and national interest. The aim of nations was acceptably the avoidance of wars and the preservation of peace, preferably through diplomacy, but when all other options failed, war in the words of Karl Von Clausewitz (1780-1831) is politics by other means. This idea of realpolitik became the dominant idea of international relations until the eve of the First World War.

    This concept was not confined to Europe, as the earlier ideas were. It began to influence even American and Japanese politics. Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) who became the 26th president of the United States in 1901 and remained in office until 1909 was closer to European practitioners of the politics of realpolitik than any American politician of his age. He was as much an imperialist as Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoigne Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1830-1903) who with Bismarck and Jules Francois Camille Ferry (1832-1903) were responsible for the European partition of Africa and South East Asia as well as the intervention in China to carve out spheres of influence.

    Theodore Roosevelt not only fought against the Spanish government in Cuba before becoming president and in fact rode into the White House as a war hero. He in fact, parroting Bismarck’s comment, said,

    “if I must choose between a policy of blood and iron and one of milk and water… I am for the policy of blood and iron. It is better not only for the nation but in the long run for the world”

    American diplomacy had always been characterised by an idealism based on isolationism and non-intervention in the politics of Europe for fear of European entanglements. This policy had been an article of faith since the presidency of James Monroe (1758-1831), the fifth president of the United States. Theodore Roosevelt brought into American foreign policy the tradition of realism which would continue to struggle with the traditional American ideas of morality and idealism in foreign relations.