The Nation Newspaper

Tag: mediocrity

  • Melaye’s recall as triumph of mediocrity

    In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act” – George Orwell.

    Having taken a detailed insight into the ongoing recall exercise against Senator Dino Melaye, representing Kogi West Senatorial District, where this writer hails from, and the fact of me being a bonafide Kabba son with passionate sympathy for the plight of the common man and the downtrodden, I particularly find it very important for me to set the record straight, not only for our generation but the generations yet unborn.

    Although I am not a fan of Sen. Melaye’s embarrassing, oppressive and garrulous lifestyle, but he earns my respect for being elected to represent the good people of my constituency, having won the popular vote in the 2015 elections. I therefore give my maximum respect to the people’s choice. He was voted by the masses to represent the Senatorial District.

    However, the leaked video showing where the Chief of Staff to Kogi State Governor, Yahyah Bello, boasting that Sen. Melaye would not last in the Senate later than June 30, makes it apparent and easy to conclude that the action of the Chief of Staff could be likened to the biblical parable, which describes this agenda as voice of Jacob and the hand of Esau.

    With the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) releasing the timetable to commence the recall exercise, one can easily conclude that the conspiracy and political coup is an attempt by mediocrity to triumph over meritocracy.

    It is an incontrovertible fact that most of Bello’s appointees are sycophantic agents, trying to be more catholic than the Pope. Their knowledge of history and good governance is dull, and they lack the political will to drive Kogi State to the promised land because a good leader should have virtues of forgiveness, tolerance and must be able to unite his people, rather than dividing them.

    The question that an average Okun indigene should be asking is: on what basis is the recall exercise against Dino Melaye?

    Melaye’s achievements as the senator with the highest motion on the floor of the Senate and the senator of the Year should be put in mind. Whether these motions affected the people of Kogi West positively or otherwise is a debate for another day.

    Any of his motions has not been countered as meaningless. His allegations of corruption levelled against Sen. Smart Adeyemi and Gov. Bello have not been countered legally or morally. Has Sen. Melaye’s demand for the welfare of the masses and the workers of Kogi been met by Gov. Bello? I refer to the 15 months unpaid salaries of the workers and pensioners.

    What are the states of our tertiary institutions after months of closure? When is the state having its local government elections? These and many more are the fundamental issues that are begging for answers.

    If the rumour going round in town – from the university common rooms to the beer parlours and pepper soup joints – that the suspended Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF) Babachar Lawal is part of the plot to recall Dino Melaye is anything to go by, then the stakeholders must rise to save Sen. Melaye using the referendum as a viable panacea to the imminent anarchy.

    As for Governor Bello, it is imperative to draw his attention to the fact that there is a brutal danger ahead of this exercise, because the question of who will replace Melaye in the Senate would create more political crisis for him and his retinue of political almajiris as the political momentum reaches a point of crescendo.

    Let the governor be informed that beneath his happiness for the recall, there is a clear danger and tension which the exercise would generate, with potential possibility of taking the state further in its journey to become a failed state.

    The most painful thing is that, while both men (Melaye and Bello) are engaged in the battle for relevance ahead of the next elections, the people they are elected to serve are suffering from underdevelopment, high rate of unemployment and insecurity. Yet both abandoned issues to address tissues. What a tragedy!

    I urge INEC chairman and Inspector General of Police to ensure adequate security to protect lives and properties during and after the recall exercise.

    May God bless Kogi State and the Federal Republic of Nigeria.

     

    Sheyi Babaeko is a doctoral student of Policy Analysis and Counter–terrorism Strategist, University of Leeds, UK

  • Battling mediocrity

    I used to think corruption was Nigeria’s biggest problem, but I’m starting to doubt that. Every time I probe into one of the many issues this country is encountering, at the core I find the same phenomenon: the widespread celebration of mediocrity. Unrebuked underachievement seems to be the rule in all facets of society. A governor building a single road during his entire tenure is revered like the next Messiah; an averagely talented author who writes a colourless book gets sponsored to represent Nigerian literature overseas; and a young woman with no secretarial skills to speak of gets promoted to the oga’s office faster than any of her properly trained colleagues.”

    The quote above was the introductory paragraph of an article written by a Dutch Journalist, Femke van Zeijl whom Nigerians in cyberspace later named ‘Funke’ because of her firm grasp on Nigerian issues. She started a blog that lasted almost a year chronicling her experiences in the country wondering why a nation so blessed has remained so docile without demanding for accountability and the need for things to be done properly.

    I need to point out that she did not write what has not been written by Nigerians over the years, the interest – I guess – is because she was able to hit the nail on the head being a foreigner. She added – in the article – that corruption per se does not necessarily stand in the way of development. Otherwise a country like Indonesia – number 118 on Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index not that far removed from Nigeria’s 139 – would never have made it to the G-20 group of major economies. An even more serious obstacle to development is the lack of repercussions for underachievement. Who in Nigeria is ever held accountable for substandard performance?

    Not done, it took this foreign journalist just a short period to start wondering why we seem to wallow so much in mediocrity. “Nigeria,” she wrote “is the opposite of a meritocracy: you do not earn by achieving. You get to be who and where you are by knowing the right people. Whether you work in an office, for an enterprise or an NGO, at a construction site or in government, your abilities hardly ever are the reason you got there. Performing well, let alone with excellence, is not a requirement, in fact, it is discouraged. It would be too threatening: showing you’re more intelligent, capable or competent than the ‘oga at the top’ (who, as a rule, is not an overachiever either) is career suicide.”

    If this article had been written by a Nigerian, people would want to know what part of the country the writer is from, is he an APC or PDP member, a “hailer” or a “wailer” and other such labels.

    I was moved once more to write on mediocrity following what some see as “progress” after Nigeria won a bronze medal – yes a bronze medal – at the just concluded Rio Olympics in Brazil. Some even insinuated that during Jonathan’s era the country did not win any medal during the 2012 London games, so the one bronze medal is a plus for Buhari’s administration! Can you beat this level of reasoning?

    It is appalling that we are a country that seems to detest excellence. Can you imagine that the kits for Nigerian athletes that participated in the Olympics arrived in Rio two days to the closing ceremony! More appalling is the fact that the incident would pass with no one taking responsibility. That is why it is not uncommon to find Nigerians “congratulating” each other for such a woeful outing.

    Why can’t our policy makers for once sit down, reflect and make the necessary changes that need to be made by seeing sports development as part of overall economic development. In Singapore, the country gives any athlete that wins a gold medal over $300,000 reward. Where does this whopping amount come from? We should do well to ask them and learn some new tricks.

    Without an iota of doubt, the potentials to achieve lofty heights in sports abound. From football, to boxing, weightlifting, athletics, volleyball, handball, badminton, lawn tennis, cycling, team sports and others, the country certainly does not lack in manpower, talents and potentials. Painfully though, sports development in the country has yet to take the sector to the expected level. Despite the fact that sports at the moment remain the only true unifying factor in Nigeria; the sector has continued to witness serious hiccups, especially, in areas of management and policy implementation.

    Why can’t our policy experts see that sports touch the hearts of millions of people? Sports promote national unity and image. An efficient sports system is expected to assist in nation building, provide youth empowerment, wealth creation, employment generation, good health and social mobilisation. Sports is perhaps the only aspect in our lives where ethnicity or religion is not often an issue. Why are they not seeing this?

    I’m fully convinced that Sports development would contribute to the growth and development of the Nigerian economy. But how should we go about it? We won’t get it until conscious efforts are made to focus on school sports which are the basics for early talent discovery and weaning, otherwise the county would continue to lag behind. Also, sports academies under big sports institutions with clear cut policy on personnel, ‘catch-them-young’ approach and up to date data keeping and athlete monitoring would go a long way to taking the country steps closer to positive expectations.

    Even the blind can “see” that like other sectors, the sector has been poorly managed by the wrong hands; it will not be out of place to, once more, advocates that people with expertise be allowed to manage sports in order to turn the potentials into results. There is need to professionalise sports in Nigeria, and its subsequent removal from the mainstream of civil service. People with expertise, both athletes and managers, should be allowed to come in and manage sports. The government in making sports policies should see the sector as a specialised field where only the experts should be engaged.

    What is more, sustained competitions at the grassroots level, especially, the primary and secondary schools would continue to throw up quality talents that would sustain the supply chain for top national and international athletes that will keep Nigeria at the level her abundant endowment deserves. I see no reason why we cannot develop swimming, handball, basketball, judo and other sports that do not need massive capital investment.

    The Kenyans and Ethiopians know that their strength lies in athletics and they’ve developed these over the years. Kenya, for instance, has made inroads into rugby development which was why the country participated in the sport at Rio. If we do not make deliberate and concerted efforts, sports development efforts in the country would continue to go in circles unless the absence of an active base for sports development in educational institutions and the communities are addressed. We see this playing out almost daily in our most popular sport, football.

    Also, inadequate funding, non-functional database for planning and development, absence of deliberate policy on talent identification and development, inadequate corporate support and absence of legislative backing for the establishment of key sports institutions are clogs in wheel of progress as well as frequent changing of sports administrators and lack of both institutional and human capacity for sports development.

    The vast resources – human and material – available at the feet of the nation makes it is huge income earner waiting to be astutely tapped. Sports should be seen purely as business enterprise; so administrators should sit back, undertake real soul searching to see where they derailed. And for goodness sake, let it be taken away from unnecessary civil service bureaucracy. This is the singular reason the private sector shy away from Nigerian sports. We lack accountability and the private sector thrives on accountability and positive results always.

    When fundamental change occurs, the system cleared of filthiness that hinders progress, sponsors will rush to invest. But the multiple challenges of infrastructure provision and maintenance, official high handedness in management, policy implementation and most importantly, athletes’ morale, motivation and welfare must be addressed. Unless these are done, we will continue to see a single bronze medal as “progress.”

  • Experts tackle mediocrity at EIL 2.0

    In a bid to eradicate mediocrity, transform mindsets, and optimise potential while propagating excellence in the Nigerian society, prolific speaker and teacher Dr. Femi Paul, and Chairman, First Bank of Nigeria Plc Mrs. Ibukun Awosika, have advocated for excellence in the day to day activities of Nigerians.

    They spoke at the Excellence in Life series 2.0, which held at the Standard Alliance events hall, Lekki Phase I, Lagos.

    Convener Dr Femi Paul said: “Everywhere you go today, mediocrity and impunity stare you in the face. This sad development, which pervades most facets of our national and private lives, has now become a sub-culture.

    “This also explains why most Nigerians prefer foreign products to made-in-Nigeria one, irrespective of the price. The reason for this is that the productions of most foreign goods are driven by a culture of excellence.

    “It is our patriotic quest to salvage our country, build a culture of excellence and leave a lasting legacy for future generations that we present to you.”

    Paul added that excellence in life series will hold in other states like Rivers, Abuja, Enugu and the villages, as part of its commitment to building a culture of excellence in the country.

    Awosika, who wasn’t physically present but sent in her lectures through a video recording, encouraged Nigerians to be upright and take control of every opportunity. She added that capital is not necessarily needed to start a business, rather passion and excellence in ones choice of career or business will lead to greatness.

     

  • Endorsement of mediocrity

    SIR: Against all sound reasoning, permutations and calculations that the leadership of PDP will rise above mediocrity, and impunity in choosing its flag bearer in 2015 presidential elections, the party hierarchs gathered last week to endorse President Goodluck Jonathan as candidate of the party. To make matters worse, the leadership of PDP said there will be no Presidential primaries since the incumbent is their sole candidate and so cannot be challenged. I consider this an act of desperation, a celebration of impunity. It supports Senator George Akume’s assertion that ”the chain of ethical liability is unbroken” in Nigeria.

    In 1999 Nigeria generated about 4000mw of electricity. Nearly after 16years we are still under 4000mw. Now, are we making progress that we need to sustain this continuity? Security of lives and property was 90% efficient in 1999 and today that great progress has been eroded and undermined. We have lost more lives to carelessness in the last 16years than under military from 1985 to 1999. As I write this our nearly 300 Girls are still in captivity. Boko Haram has killed more than 3000 innocent Nigerians. Now, are we making progress in the areas of security to warrant this continuity mess?

    Recently, the Nigeria Immigration Service, NIS announced a job vacancy for 3000 people and nearly six million Nigerians applied. NIS tried to do an open aptitude test in public spaces and the bizarre arrangement backfired. Nearly 30 Nigerians died as result of stampede that greeted the awkward and primitive arrangement. Again in the face this mounting unemployment situation can Nigerians believe this continuity brigandage?

    From the Presidency to the National Assembly dominated by the PDP, from the Petroleum Industry to the Aviation Industry, from the Ministry of Works to the Civil Service as a whole, from the Defence to the External Affairs etc, its corruption and impunity all the way. A quantum of Nigeria’s budgetary allocations every year end into the private pockets. Recently they took a private jet belonging to Pastor Oritsejafor and loaded it with $9.3million for onward delivery to South Africa for an unknown transaction.. Even as I write this there has not been any serious explanation on how we got to this sorry pass that we have to traffic and abuse the United States dollars.

    How can we be talking about continuity in the face of abysmal performance in the midst of plenty? Why must PDP continue to talk about continuity when all our infrastructures across the country have broken down with no hope to fix them in sight? How can we still be talking about retaining a non performer in a nation of nearly 160 million people?

    How can the leaders of a very important country in Africa continue to travel abroad for mere medical check up when we have the capacity to build at least six world class hospitals in six zones of the country? How can we continue to lose students to quack universities in Ghana when we can build world class universities in Nigeria and invite other Africans to come here to study? How can we continue to take the insult that none of our universities can be rated high in Africa talk less of the world?

    I cannot continue to be led to believe that President Jonathan is the best we can throw up. He has tried his best and he has to be voted out for the Nigerians to breathe fresh air.

    Through actions and deeds, President Jonathan has divided Nigeria along religious and ethnic lines, he has pitched his Ijaw people against other Nigerians through patronage and lack of political will to call his people to order. He has not shown love to other Nigerians to prove that he is the president of all. President Jonathan has not been able to prosecute one high profile corrupt person since 2009. We have not been lucky in the department of leadership since PDP came to power in 1999. The world mocks us that we assume that somebody is in charge of Nigeria when nobody is really in charge.

    I submit that the endorsement of President Jonathan to continue to rule Nigeria beyond 2015 is an endorsement of mediocrity.

     

    • Joe Igbokwe,

    Lagos

  • The pursuit of ignorance and mediocrity

    Have you taken a closer look at our society lately? If you did, like I always do, have you noticed and pondered on the high level of ignorance and mediocrity that is the order of the day? This ignorance is more glaring and pervasive when it comes to the issue of education and choosing leaders to lead us. I have entered into discussions with supposed intellectuals and have been shocked at their level of reasoning when it comes to leadership selection in Nigeria. I’ve often left with the impression that if such individuals, with their level of education, reason the way they do, how would the man on the street reason?

    So how did we arrive at this place where some Master’s degree holders and even PhD holders are bereft of ideas or peddle ‘beer parlour’ discussions as theories? There is no need discussing our first degree graduates for what most of them are is plain to all.

    As I ponder this I’ve come to the conclusion that there is no doubt that much of Nigeria’s socio-economic challenges today stems from our lopsided system of education where standards are perverted alongside other values. One recurring decimal about us as a people is our misinterpretation and misrepresentation of things, concepts and situations which, in other places where sanity reigns, would have one rational meaning and significance.

    One of such areas is the quality of education. Over the years, a subtle debate has been a raging whether education should be free, subsidised or privatised. Some of us passed through a regime of free to subsidised education. But I must stress that what we learnt during this era is far removed from what is being taught in this era of unbridled privatisation of education. Some have argued that the ‘cheap,’ education in Nigeria is perhaps the bane of our development.

    I would rather see it the other way round. Beyond cost however, our education, especially in the public schools, is cheap in content. This cuts across board and applies to primary and secondary schools as well as the universities and polytechnics.

    The way Nigerian education is presently structured, it has become an easy means to ignorance and the celebration of mediocrity, rather than a means to individual and social freedom, which are the germs great societies are made of. In such societies, credible and functional public education system that builds the total man are encouraged and massively supported by the government. And in such societies, it has been at the forefront of jump starting their economies. Three examples would suffice here.

    South Korea, Japan and Singapore are countries with conditions similar to ours yet they were able to rise above their circumstances. After the twin atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki which promptly ended the Second World War, no one can doubt what education and social commitment can do in the transformation of communities and societies. The magic of post-war Japan has, indeed, been a function of a sound educational system and an inspiring commitment to the collective heritage and common aspirations of the people.

    South Korea which only six decades ago was classified alongside Nigeria as an underdeveloped society is now a global economic engine room with its products competing with the best in the world. The same goes for Singapore which rose from being a third world to a first world nation in almost the same time as South Korea.

    This goes to drive home the point that in no sane society can affordable and quality education be divorced from a holistic and sustainable concept of development. Not only that, education is also one of the major arbiters of socialisation. When it is reduced to mere ability to obtain a certificate by fair or foul means, – like is done in Nigeria – it becomes a tool for underdevelopment that glorifies ignorance and mediocrity.

    For qualitative education to be achieved and sustained, critical value must be placed on it so that those who receive it can see beyond carrying worthless certificates around which we see here as a passport to securing elusive jobs. Rather we need to refocus on the imperative to apply the gains of education to the needs of society. In other words, education, especially at the university level needs to be properly valued, if international standards can be attained.

    Painful as it may sound, I think we have arrived at a position where we have to review our public education system and see whether they conform with current realities, both internally and globally. I passed through the university system when tuition was free. But I often ask myself if this is feasible presently. The answer is a painful no as I come to the hard reality that the almost free nature of university education (especially in the federal universities) is part of the bane of education in Nigeria and the purveyor of ignorance and mediocrity.

    Looking at the obverse side however, one may say that state universities where higher fees are paid have not fared better. But I think that the fundamental index for determining the justifiability or otherwise of fees is the average income of those from whose pockets the payment is to be made. If Nigerian workers earned adequate income, the argument for fees increase would be much better justified.

    But all the same, it remains laughable that in today’s Nigeria children in day-care, kindergarten and primary schools pay several times higher than most university students in terms of school fees. I recollect an incident in the university when our dean of student affairs pointed this out to us during a demonstration for a slight increase in library fees; he had to hurriedly leave when the students threatened to stone him. This, coupled with lack of adequate funding, has left the university system in a very sorry state.

    The fact that education is ‘cheap’ remains the major problem in the sector. By the word ‘cheap,’ I am looking beyond cost now and directing attention to course contents. As the world develops right before our eyes and seeks new challenges, curricula in the Nigerian education system seem to be stale and shrinking. Lecture notes that were used decades ago are still being peddled by some lectures in some courses at our varsities. Much of what passes for the curricula of some major courses in Nigerian institutions of learning have not been reviewed for decades.

    Before now, only the best brains and outstanding scholars were employed in the schools, especially the universities. But today teaching, scholarship, and academics are all-comers affairs as the best brains go to other sectors where they may not be needed or may not have anything to offer.

    Much of the ignorance that encircles us certainly stems from the education industry. It is easy to point to government’s lackluster attitude as the major problem, but that cannot be the whole truth. The education industry is also an adversary unto itself. I watched a spectacle on television recently where secondary school teachers in a northern state could not read primary four English textbooks! If they can’t read how would their students fare then?

    At the higher level, there are instances of lecturers who are bereft of ideas and cannot write correct sentences; yet they are there teaching and supervising students. Given the role of education in human societies, Nigeria’s future remains very bleak unless something is done urgently. I say so because the educational system is a mirror of the society. This is especially true of the universities which should be centres of excellence, but which have become a pitiable extension of the decadent political system in Nigeria. This perhaps explains why some are never run with any defined budget and why some vice-chancellors operate like lords of the manor and cannot encourage true freedom which is germane to academic excellence.

    If the universities – indeed the entire educational system – must be the vanguard of excellence and development, they have to operate at a level higher than the not too pleasant realities that define contemporary Nigeria. They should serve as the arrowheads to tame the high level of ignorance and mediocrity that pervade our society. This is the crux of the matter: morality and education must go hand in hand in the moulding of the total man. The ultimate purpose of education is divinely central to the pursuit of a modern society, and that in this regard, most have fallen short of expectation in Nigeria.

  • Will the FoI Act contribute to ending primitive accumulation in Nigeria?

    Will the FoI Act contribute to ending primitive accumulation in Nigeria?

    [Being a Postscript to TLH 21, 22 and 23]

    The dictatorship of corruption and mediocrity that I discussed at length in the lecture that I delivered at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs on Saturday, July 13, 2013 and that was serialised in this column in the course of the last three weeks [TLH 21, 22 and 23] is the root cause of some of the worst problems and crises that our country faces at the present time. These include but are not limited to vast disparities of incomes and opportunities between the wealthy few and the teeming majority of the populace; insecurities of life, property and personal possessions for everyone, rich and poor alike; unemployment and bleak prospects for the future for our youths including those among them who have high school and university education; and rising tides of state-sponsored and non-statist violence. Yes, this undeclared dictatorship of corruption is the cause of untold daily hardship and suffering for millions in our country and for this reason, the very survival of the country is at stake and has been so almost since 1999, the year in which the present Fourth Republic came into existence.

    Many pundits now openly talk of the possibility, if not the necessity or the inevitability, of the end of our present experiment in democratic governance in a violent bloodbath. As I remarked in the closing paragraph of my lecture at the NIIA, quite possibly, the Freedom of Information Act is the only remaining legal instrument that we have for making the revolution that is coming a peaceful one. In this short postscript to the lecture, I wish to address this particular issue, this suggestion that in the FoI, depending on how well and vigorously it is put to use, our country may yet be able to avert the resolution of the explosive contradictions and crises that now beset it in anarchy and carnage.

    The opening shots in this scenario have already been fired and are reverberating in diverse areas of the country: Boko Haram; the emergence of ethnic militias; the escalation of rampaging and extortionate kidnappers in many areas of the country but especially in the Southeast and the South-south; state sponsored violence such as the one going on right now in Rivers State; and incessant bloody clashes between so-celled “indigenes” and “settlers” in some parts of the country. But we may yet pull back from the brink if we use the FoI vigorously and wisely.

    Am I putting too much faith in the uses to which the FoI can be put by suggesting that if used tenaciously and astutely it may yet save the Nigerian Fourth Republic from being drowned in anarchy and bloodshed? I don’t think so. The underlying basis of this suggestion can be teased out of one particularly crucial but unelaborated theoretical point that I made in my lecture at the NIIA. This is the claim that with regard to the legal rationality that underpins the FoI Act of 2011, what we have is the idea that Nigeria is on the verge of transforming primitive accumulation of a very vicious kind into a modern, market-driven economy in which, in conjunction with cutthroat competition, there is a consistent adherence to the supremacy of the law. Now, in the lecture, I suggested that one reason why the Nigerian press and the media houses in general have been remarkably reticent in using the FoI so as to test how far it can go to considerably curb – if not eradicate – rampant, blatant and wasteful corruption, is the fact that they either have not thought of the FoI in terms of primitive accumulation or if they have, they do not think that primitive accumulation is on the verge of being transcended in our country. This is the crux of my central argument in this short postscript to my lecture and I ask the reader to please keep it in mind as I now move directly to its elaboration.

    In strict historical terms, primitive accumulation belongs to the earliest phase of the evolution of laissez faire or free enterprise capitalism in which the market and its operations and forces and not the state – and not bands of robber barons – dominate the production and distribution of wealth. Also sometimes called “prior” or “original” accumulation, primitive accumulation was the stage in which the emerging wealthy classes and groups used the state and any means available to enrich and separate themselves from the working and non-working poor. In the perhaps most classic expressions of primitive accumulation, farmers and peasants were driven off the land by the so-called and aptly named “Enclosure Acts” that were enforced by the state and its agents. Without access to the land, the peasants perforce became wage workers because all they had was their labor power. The wealth or “accumulation” that resulted from this process was called “primitive” for two closely linked factors. One: the brutality in the way in which landless farmers were turned into wage workers. Two: the rates and levels of exploitation that then ensued once they became wage earners who had nothing to sell but their labor. Among hundreds of other works of prose fiction, essays and pamphlets written in the period, one has only to read Charles Dickens’ Hard Times to get a sense of how brutal, how “primitive” accumulation was at this stage of the evolution of capitalism. Indeed, inherent in the very notion of “primitive accumulation” is the contrary notion of the “civilising” of accumulation by making surplus extraction and appropriation of wealth more humane, more liberal: from the introduction of shorter working days, improvement of safety standards in factories, recognition of rights to unionization by workers to the institution of the modern social-democratic or welfare state.

    Against the backdrop of this historic account, what, in my lecture, I termed the dictatorship of corruption and mediocrity in our country at the present time is not merely a throwback to the early phase of the evolution of capitalism; it is in many respects a regression beyond that phase. Let us be very clear on this particular point: diverting or looting vast sums from our national coffers by our rulers and their cronies is causing great and terrible forms and levels of impoverishment and immiseration among the majority of the Nigerian peoples at the present time; and because what is looted now is not being converted into real wealth that can be equitably redistributed and made conducive to sustainable economic growth and development, it will also cause mass suffering and hardship in the future. This is because, first, it is so closely and necessarily tied to unimaginable levels of mediocrity and, secondly and more significantly, it has never been seriously challenged, never been held accountable. This is where the FoI comes into the framework of where the limits are located in “civilizing” the primitive accumulation that is choking vitality and survival itself out of our country’s collective bloodstream.

    Think of the issue in terms of the following scenarios and questions, compatriots. In the oil subsidy mega-scam of 2011, the colossal sum of N2.58 trillion naira was looted. This sum was more than half of the entire national budget for that year. The real and fake oil marketers to whom this sum was paid are known, together with how much each oil marketer was paid. But not a single kobo has been paid back to the national treasury. What is stopping all the trade unions, all the civil society organisations, all the professional associations of senior staff and all the organisations of market women and civic organisations acting together in a class action suit to invoke the FoI to force the government both to account for why half of the national budget was paid out in the mega-scam and why not single kobo has been paid back? Instead of just one single civil society organisation – LEPAD – acting with and through the dedication of one single patriotic activist lawyer – Femi Falana – invoking the FoI to try and compel the National Assembly to reveal the precise figures of the jumbo salaries and emoluments that its members are paid while most public and private employers of labour in our country are yet to implement the national minimum wage of a paltry N18,000 naira per month, why was it not movements and collectives of students, teachers, doctors, tradesmen and women that used the FoI to dare the National Assembly members to continue to feed fat on the backs of the masses of the Nigerians peoples? In the bitter 2006 feud between Obasanjo and Atiku, each of these two highest public officials in the land revealed the extent to which they were corruptly helping themselves and their cronies to the funds of the Petroleum Training Development Fund (PTDF), but to date they and their cronies have not paid back a single kobo of the sums they looted from our national coffers. As far as I know, there is no statute of limitation in the FoI and so we are forced to ask: Why have the Nigerian people, as organized in professional and civic associations, not used that 2011 Act to compel the present administration to make Obasanjo, Atiku and their cronies pay back what they looted from the PTDF?

    If the answer to each and everyone of these questions is not clear, let me spell it out: so far, at least in my opinion, the FoI has been generally regarded as a means for individuals and perhaps a few groups that are concerned enough to want to compel our rulers and public officials to act with probity and to be accountable to the country. However, what I am saying here with as much emphasis as I can muster is that as much as the FoI is indeed a tool for redress of individual grievance or dissatisfaction, it is also actually a radical weapon for mass and collective legal action whose political significance can be quite profound. Let me give a particularly concrete, specific and salient illustration of the point I am making here.

    Our newspapers and newsmagazines are consistent in the powerful and eloquent editorials that they write about the depth of the dictatorship of corruption and mediocrity that reigns in the corridors of power in the country. But as far as I am aware, with a few exceptions, the ownership structure of our newspapers and newsmagazines has been generally lukewarm in showing any interest in the use of the FoI, completely leaving the matter to individual courageous journalists. But is this not a gross shortsightedness, given the fact that newspaper proprietors, like all other institutions and organizations of legitimate business enterprise in the country, stand to gain if the crippling primitive accumulation that is perpetuated through the dictatorship of corruption and mediocrity is substantially reduced, if not completely curbed?

    Corruption is a form of accumulation and it exists and operates as a mode of accumulation as much in the rich nations of the world as in the poorest societies and regions of the planet. The big difference is that it neither reigns supreme nor remains “primitive” and even “uncivilisable” in the rich countries. Nigeria happens to be one of the countries in the world in which corruption not only reigns supreme but also exercises a dictatorship that masks itself in the outer forms of democracy. In the FoI, we have the one legal and moral instrument which potentially can strip the mask of democracy from this cruel and wasteful political order. But this will require of us to begin to see that Act of 2011 not as merely or only a means of getting redress for individual grievances or dissatisfactions but as a potential weapon for mass legal and political action and for showing the limits of the legality, the democratic credentials of the Nigerian Fourth Republic as it lurches towards the year 2015, the next big appointment with that avoidable but fateful happenstance that is commonly and erroneously known as destiny.

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

     

  • Freedom of Information Act and Dictatorship of Corruption and Mediocrity (3)

    Freedom of Information Act and Dictatorship of Corruption and Mediocrity (3)

    It is time in this lecture to address the equation between corruption and mediocrity that is a central aspect of the undeclared ‘dictatorship’ that I am engaging in the lecture. Corruption and mediocrity in our country at the present time are symbiotic, they feed off each other. Extremely poor performance or even no performance at all is no barrier to becoming very wealthy and holding very high public office in our country – including the highest office in the land. According to the House of Representative Ad-Hoc Committee Report on the oil subsidy mega-scam we see “a gross lack of record keeping”, “decadence” “rot” and “entrenched inefficiency” in the work of the public officials that supervised the payment of those vast sums to the oil marketers.

    These epithets of abysmally low standards of performance and probity were addressed to the specific case of the oil subsidy scam but they might as well have been addressed to the generation and distribution of electricity; construction of physical infrastructures like roads, bridges, hospitals and schools; public sanitation and waste disposal; social services for children, youths, the elderly and the disabled. Federal and state governments don’t have to perform well or perform at all to generate the budgets on which they depend; it comes to them like manna from heaven even though we know that the source is the rents from the oilfields of the Niger Delta.

    At the centre of things in the government of the federation and the ruling party, the standards of performance in virtually all areas of governance are so low that almost any other party or phalanx of politicians can credibly claim that they can do better than the current incumbents, even though there is little to choose between all the ruling class parties in terms of their ideologies and their value orientations. Almost everywhere that you find corruption in our country, mediocrity is never too far behind.

    At this point and drawing from my professional academic interest in linguistic, literary and cultural studies, I would like to offer some thoughts on the separate and yet connected relations between the cognate terms corrupt, corruptive and corrupted. My intension in doing this is both to further clarify and broaden the ramifications of this link that I am urging between corruption and mediocrity in our country. Thus, when we say that a person, an act, or a process is corrupt we are alluding adjectivally to a quality, a disposition or an effect. The term corruptive adds a dimension that implies an active transformation that turns that which is not initially corrupt to that which becomes tainted with corruption. The term “corrupted” lends an even more dynamic, more perfected or completed dimension to the term “corruptive”. At this level, the term corruption that we so often use to describe our politicians and their habitual practices takes on the quality of a specter, a malaise, a generalized social pathology that reeks of rot, decay, putrefaction. On this basis, I would argue that in our Nigerian context, “corruption” is to politicians and political parties as “corrupted” is to virtually all our institutions, both religious and secular, both private and public, both local and nation-wide.

    Pushing further on this observation, I would argue that we tend to associate corruption primarily with our electoral process and our politicians and political parties, but who among us is unaware of the cheap, superstitious and facile religiosity that underlies the nairamania, the amassing of great wealth in our mega-churches and among our most prominent, jetsetter religious leaders? Who is unaware of the scale of examination malpractices in our primary and secondary schools? Yes, the corruption has its roots, its foundations in the political order and among our rulers, but almost every institution in our country has become corrupted.

    Since I am an academic, I am particularly interested in the decay, the unspeakable fall in standards that has befallen our educational institutions. Here, I will give only a few particularly shocking examples of this terribly corrupted state of things in our secondary and tertiary institutions. The failure rates in our secondary school leaving examinations are some of the worst in the world. In the last one decade, I don’t think we have recorded anything higher than 35% of passes in these exams. In one particular year, in the NECO exams, only 1.8% of those who sat for the exam passed, leaving a staggering failure rate of 98.2%. Our universities are poorly ranked in the world; not a single one of them is among the 2000 most highly rated institutions. Far more alarming is the fact that our universities are also poorly ranked among African universities. In the most recently released rankings, only eight of our universities were listed among the first 100 universities in Africa and only one Nigerian institution is among the first 20. Within the country itself in the business sector of the economy, potential employers of our university graduates are forever complaining that the instruction our university students receive are so appallingly poor that a lot of the graduates are simply “unemployable”. The list goes on and on with a depressing regularity that has a grim foreboding for the future of our country.

    I do not wish to empty out the contents of the special focus of this lecture – the Freedom of Information Act of 2011 in relation to the dictatorship of corruption – into an endless jeremiad about the things that are prematurely but utterly corrupted in virtually all the institutions of our society. The Greeks have a saying that is very pertinent here that I wish to invoke to underscore this point: When a fish begins to rot, the process starts from the head and it is from there that the decay pervades the entire body of the fish. From this, I wish to state with as much emphasis as I can muster that it is our rulers, our politicians and political parties that we must hold accountable if we wish to arrest the rot, the decay that acts like a dictatorship in our present political order.

    One aspect of a comparative, transnational view of corruption that we would do well to keep in mind in this respect is the fact that corruption is not always or even necessarily linked with mediocrity as we find it with our rulers. As a matter of fact, as big as corruption is in Nigeria, it is nothing in size compared with the corruption that has been documented and much discussed with regard to some of the biggest transnational business conglomerates of Western and East Asian countries. Without in the least bit offering an apologia for the scope of corruption among our rulers, I would insist that it ought to be pointed out that Transparency International is able to regularly rank corruption higher in African and other developing regions of the world than what obtains in the West only because its figures pertain to the countries and regions of the world, leaving out the big business empires of the planet who, between them, account for by far the greatest share of corruption in the world, together with the effects that corruption has on the lives of the poorest and most vulnerable peoples of the planet. I repeat: corruption is not always and necessarily linked with mediocrity, with abysmally low or poor standards. The high incidence of corruption in the ranks of some of the smartest and most innovative corporations in the world is clear proof of this assertion. The movements and forces around the world that have taken on the corruption of these corporations have counted on rationality, legal and ideological, as weapons with which to wage their struggles.

    This is where, in my opinion, we must locate the potential of the Freedom of Information Act to make a difference in the struggle against corruption and the indifference to due process and accountability that reigns supreme in the highest corridors of power in our country. Like all other national versions of the Freedom of Information Act, ours also presupposes legal and moral rationality, especially as enshrined in the presupposition that the state, the liberal-democratic state, is founded on the rule of law, on the assumption that a country’s rulers, a country’s public officeholders and a country’s business enterprises must comply with the laws of the land, otherwise what you have is not a true democracy but a dictatorship hiding behind the outer forms and shells of democracy. Invoking the theoretical jargon of radical political economy here, I would argue that our Freedom of Information Act of 2011 presupposes that our country is on the verge of transforming primitive accumulation of the most vicious kind into a modern, market-driven economy in which, in conjunction with cutthroat competition, you have the supremacy of the law.

    It is doubtful that our press, our media houses have thought much of these ramifications of the Freedom of Information Act. This is because as much as they fought long and hard for the passing of this Act, they have been remarkably reticent in using it to compel our rulers, our public institutions and private business companies to comply with the provisions of the Act. Let me move to the conclusion of this talk by briefly engaging one of the few instances when the provisions of the Act was invoked – and met stiff, unyielding resistance from the powers that be in our country.

    This much is known about the scale of remuneration of the members of our National Assembly: Both in relative and absolute terms, they are the highest paid legislators in the world. Each member of our National Assembly collects far more in salaries, allowances and bonuses than the President of the United States, the most powerful man in the world.

    In the face of the universal outcry in the country against the whopping scale of our legislators’ remuneration package, they have been extremely secretive about the precise figures. Indeed the lengths to which they are apparently willingly to go to keep the exact figures hidden from public awareness and scrutiny seems to have no bounds. Thus, when a former member of the House, Honourable Dino Melaye, began to go public with these figures, he was swiftly and severely dealt with by the leadership of the House. Indeed, the manner in which he was silenced was so effective that no other member of the National Assembly has since then ever dared to follow his example.

    Far more cynical and indifferent to its claims to democratic norms is how the National Assembly responded when a civil society organization, The Legal Assistance and Aid Project, LEPAD, invoked the Freedom of Information Act of 2011 to compel our legislators to reveal to the Nigerian people exactly how much they are paid. They refused absolutely. Consequent on this refusal, LEPAD dragged the National Assembly to the courts. In a suit argued by the frontline activist lawyer, Femi Falana, SAN, a high court ordered the National Assembly to act in accordance with a law that it had itself passed by promptly releasing full details of the salaries and emoluments paid to members of the Assembly. They still refused and then took the matter to a federal appeal court. The case is still pending in the courts.

    I should mention that without being a lone figure crying in the wilderness, Femi Falana has done much to put the usefulness, the value of the Freedom of Information Act to test again and again since 2011 when the Act was enacted. He has invoked the Act in relation to a range of issues of public good that pertain to a whole group of governmental functionaries, parastatals, private commercial interests including but not limited to Minister of Justice and the Attorney General of the Federation; the Universal Basic Education (UBE) Commission; the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA); and the GSM/Internet Providers. I do not think that Falana harbors any illusions at all that by itself, the Freedom of Information Act will radically and positively transform the present endlessly corrupt and mediocre Nigerian political order. But he is taking this prevailing deeply unjust, wasteful and corrupted order to the very limits of its claim to being a democracy founded on the rule of law, not a failing state perpetually on the brink of becoming a failed state. Let Falana’s example be a wakeup call to our media houses and our journalists that they must rediscover the reasons why they fought long and hard for this Act to be passed. Quite possibly, the Freedom of Information Act is the only remaining legal and moral instrument that we have for making the revolution that is coming a peaceful one. But this line of reasoning requires another lecture, another set of reflections.

    Concluded

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Freedom of Information Act and Dictatorship of Corruption and Mediocrity (2)

    Freedom of Information Act and Dictatorship of Corruption and Mediocrity (2)

    For our third and final case, we must go all the way back to 1984 when Nigeria was still in the grip of the irruption of military dictatorships into political governance, an irruption whose end seemed to be nowhere in sight. The case in point is the Buhari-Idiagbon Decree No 4 of 1984, unquestionably the most notorious of all military decrees ever promulgated in Nigeria. That Decree has a special bearing on all that I have said so far concerning the challenge of the dictatorship of corruption and mediocrity to the Freedom of Information Act. This is partly because in military rule, dictatorship manifests itself directly and autocratically; it has no need to deviously manifest itself through corruption. Also, you simply cannot talk of a Freedom of information Act in the African dictatorships of the 1970s through the 1990s when the very first thing that goes with the inception of any military dictatorship is the Constitution itself, together with all the rights that derive from it. Moreover, African military dictatorships are notoriously very paranoid, to the extent that many military dictators at the time actually went so far as to promulgate decrees banning rumors, as if any human society has ever existed in which there can be no rumour-mongering as an inevitable part of social existence. At any rate, the Buhari-Idiagbon Decree No 4 of 1984 took this axiomatic and quixotic paranoia of African military dictatorships to a new level when it explicitly stated that you must not and cannot publish anything to embarrass military leaders and their support corps of civil service officials even if what you publish is true.

    It is important to state here that like the two other cases I have already mentioned in this lecture, this infamous decree against truth also had its origins in the phenomenon of endemic corruption in our country. This is because the decree came on the heels of allegations of the disappearance of N2.8 billion naira from the coffers of a federal ministry that had been under the headship of Buhari in a previous military administration. Allegedly, Buhari had been deeply embarrassed by this report and when he himself carried out a successful coup, he promulgated Decree No 4 to deal with those sections of the press that had been most vocal about the alleged missing N.2.8 billion naira.

    From these three separate cases, we can see that there is a common of corruption. However, unlike the corruption that we saw in both the oil subsidy scam and the Obasanjo and Atiku feud that paraded itself in broad daylight, the alleged corruption in the case of Buhari’s military dictatorship was hidden, subterranean. Everyone knew it was there and abundantly so; but you could not talk openly about it; you could not even engage in rumours about it. In Buhari’s Decree No 4 of 1984, this veil of silence and secrecy on corruption was made sublime in its impunity and brazenness: the decree stated without the slightest equivocation that even if true, any allegation of corruption could not be published because it would embarrass the military government and its loyal civil servants. This observation leads us to the next stage of this lecture, the stage in which we now directly engage the crucial issue of a dictatorship that is not military, not exercised through the gun but through the complex mediations of corruption and mediocrity of the highest order.

    To enter into this segment of the lecture, please consider the following ironic reversal of normal expectations concerning dictatorships and democracy. On the one hand, we have a military dictatorship that is non-elective, that is indeed totally contemptuous of popular mandate but is nonetheless very paranoid about being embarrassed by any revelation that it is corrupt. But on the other hand, we have an elective, “democratic” government that putatively bases its legitimacy on popular mandates but is completely unembarrassed by any and all allegations of corrupt practices and dealings.

    I would like to suggest that the irony in both cases is more apparent than real. Military dictatorships are characteristically, even extremely paranoid about being shown to be corrupt only because nearly all military coup-makers come into power on the claim that they have come to clean up the mess made by civilian governments, or even by a preceding military autocracy. Of all the governments we have ever had in Nigeria, the Buhari-Idiagbon dictatorship was the most self-righteous, the most fanatical about imposing discipline on Nigeria and Nigerians; for this reason, it absolutely could not stand being embarrassed by the taint of corruption, especially if the allegation happened to be based on truth.

    The irony in an elective, “democratic” government that brazenly washes the dirty linens of its oceans of corruption in the national and global public sphere is likewise a factitious irony with no basis in reality. This is because the presumption of virtually all our ruling class parties since the return to formal democratic rule in 1999 has been, quite simply, that no party, no politician ever wins or, conversely, loses an election on the basis of public exposure of huge sums that the politician or the party has looted from our oil wealth. At a more general level, winning or losing elections has little or nothing to do with your performance in office. You may be as corrupt and as mediocre as the worst politician on the African continent or the world, but that is no disqualification for you to become a member of the National Assembly, the Executive Governor of a State, or the President of the Republic itself – unless, of course you have been caught, tried and jailed.

    I readily accept the fact that not all our politicians are corrupt and mediocre. Indeed, there are a few state governors and public officeholders that are deserving of respect and admiration. But I think that the great majority of our politicians are fundamentally predisposed to being corrupt and mediocre. This is not because they are necessarily or inherently corrupt or mediocre; it just so happens that this is the prevailing order that they know; it is the universe of expectations and values in which they operate. Corruption and mediocrity reign supreme in our country at the present time because that is the game in town; it is the undeclared dictatorship which has apparently found a perfect hiding place in the outward forms and protocols of a formally democratic political order. Permit me to expatiate a little on this observation.

    I think it is safe for me to assume that most of us in this gathering this morning would agree to a proposition which states that an endlessly corrupt electoral system in which massive, blatant and violent rigging plays a central role is the main reason why virtually all our political parties and politicians do not really depend on their performance in office to win elections. Another way of putting this concretely is to say that rather than actually perform well in office and win the respect and the mandate of the people, virtually all of our political parties spend most of their time amassing the war chest that will enable them either to successfully rig elections or, conversely to prevent successful rigging by opposing political parties and politicians. In other words, rigging does not stand alone; it is part of a vastly corrupt and corrupting political party system.

    Because this is a very crucial point in this lecture, I wish to be absolutely clear about what I am asserting or even claiming here. For this reason, I wish to give one very concrete illustration of my claim here that rigging does not stand alone but is part of a vast network of corruption in our political party system. This illustration, I would argue, is one that most adult and politically sophisticated Nigerians know only too well. Thus, I don’t think anyone would seriously contest the fact that as the ruling party with a so-far iron-clad control of the centre, the PDP spends most of its time between election cycles preparing to rig itself back into power with absolutely no relevance to how it has performed in office. By contrast, the other ruling class parties not in control at the centre but in the seats of power in some of the states of the federation spend all their time between electoral cycles amassing the financial means and the strategies with which to prevent the PDP from rigging itself back into power. Nowhere is this whole apparatus of a deeply corrupt and corrupting political order more apparent than in our election tribunals in which, as everyone knows, political parties and politicians who have much more credible claims to having won elections must still bribe very heavily to secure legal redress for having been robbed of their victories through rigging at the polls.

    It is well known that the 2011 oil subsidy mega-scam that ran into more than N2.58 trillion naira had everything to do with the re-election project of the President and the PDP. But even with that dubious help, we shall never get a full measure of the actual sums that go into both rigging and preventing rigging by our ruling class parties. All we can safely say is that rigging and its opposite, rigging-prevention, are but the tip of an iceberg; behind the whole unholy party-electoral edifice in our country is the widespread, defining feeling among the Nigerian political class that the money is there to be looted either to stay in office or to come into power because, for a long time yet, the oil will keep flowing. I will come back to this point at the end of the lecture.

    In case the point I am making here is not yet clear enough, let me spell it out: the rigging of elections, as heinous as it has generally been in our country since the return to civilian rule in 1999, is but one factor among others that make our electoral system and our present political order so spectacularly corrupt and corrupting. This is why, as much as I loathe and condemn the rigging of elections in our country, I do not ascribe what I have in this lecture been calling the dictatorship of corruption and mediocrity to the agency or primacy of rigging; rather, in my view, corruption itself is the agent, the precondition of a dictatorship that is both kleptocratic and plutocratic.

    I have observed that in the Obasanjo-Atiku feud of 2006, both camps made revelations of corruption about each other that should, at the very least, have led to the impeachment of the President and the Vice President. But nothing happened to them and not a single one of their cronies, henchmen and girlfriends that were the beneficiaries of the “loot” from the PTDF was made to pay back a single kobo. Also, nobody has paid back a single kobo out of the N2.58 trillion looted in the oil subsidy mega-scam, a colossal sum that could make the lives of millions of Nigerians better than the horrible conditions they currently have to endure, thanks to this dictatorship of corruption and mediocrity. As a matter of fact, with regard to this particular case of the oil subsidy scam, the whole nation was treated to a comedy of errors and absurdity when the Chairman of that same House of Rep Ad-Hoc Committee on the oil subsidy scam, Hon Farouk Lawan, was caught by a hidden videotape camera receiving hush-money bribe from one of the biggest names among the cabal of real and fake marketers. Hon Lawan has not faced any significant legislative censure for this egregiously corrupt act. All that has “happened” to him is that he is being tried in a court of law in which he is apparently successfully tying up the legal process in a seemingly endless impasse.

    To be continued

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Mediocrity, the overlooked challenge on campuses

    Mediocrity, the overlooked challenge on campuses

    I had a shocker two weeks ago when I asked some undergraduates who sent me SMS reactions on a story I wrote to send to my email box detailed comments in long hand. Since SMS sometimes limits the expressions, I thought it appropriate they be given the opportunity to say what they wanted to say without limiting themselves due to cost or word constraints. I was surprised when they still sent the same coded messages to my email box; I sent another SMS repeating the same instruction and back came the same coded messages; I gave up and knew that my fear which dates back a few years back may have started manifesting. So it is not out of place to say we may be having another challenge with this generation regarding the mode of communicating in English and communication generally without realising it.

    Since almost everything has become like instant coffee to this generation, processes are truncated and they want the expression of something that could take say five years to manifest in hours, this has permeated all facet including education where teachers and lectures often complain of the ‘horrible’ written English of this generation. And of course, this has repercussions in the larger society, especially when it comes to the area of employment. It also breeds a high level of mediocrity which is now a major concern among us as it has permeated even our leadership.

    For the average Nigerian youth, the two most difficult hurdles to cross in the quest to become a productive member of the society and a responsible citizen that is acceptable are gaining admission into the university and getting a decent job thereafter. As we are all aware, several factors have been linked to the rising number of the unemployed in the country. From inadequate capacity building, hostile business environment leading to the closure of many companies, funding problems for educational institutions, archaic style of educational institutions, to most recently, the influence of the social media on youths’ writing style.

    Writing style and skill is critical now as it has always been, if we beam the searchlight on the employability or otherwise of many Nigerian graduates we will see the link. What the dearth and depth of coherent writing skill has done is that it has led employers of labour to keep redefining their recruitment strategies each time they notice new trends from this generation. Most times, employers’ first priority is to engage graduates with strong profession-specific skills and then to consider if they have the potentials to be ‘groomed’ for employment.

    This potential includes graduates’ personal characteristics and attributes, the diversity of their experiences and skills, as well as their understanding of what the workplace actually is. This is fundamental because employers of labour have complained that many youth definition of the workplace is at variance with conventional norm, some just need jobs ‘to get by’. While skills and others all seem necessary, English language proficiency seems to be an emerging key factor influencing access to skilled employment, but I am afraid that SMS ‘incursion’ into English has done more harm than good in this area.

    So what are employers, either directly or in most cases through their management consultants looking out for? They are likely to be influenced by a range of perceived attributes, including the quality of graduates’ prior training, their level of cultural enclosure, relevant work experience, and demand for courses studied by the applicants in the labour market. But recently, the test for English Language proficiency has become a tool for employers to screen applicants before the interview stage and this is where most of them are ‘weeded’ out.

    Beyond the progressively declining quality of Nigerian graduates, we are also dealing with a very narrow employment space, so the issue is not excess supply but quality. I recollect that it was Prof Charles Soludo, the erstwhile governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), who was among the first that raised the alarm on the ‘unemployability’ of many Nigerian graduates. He cannot be further from the truth. I interact with a number of Nigerian graduates regularly and I find appalling the quality of youths that parade themselves as graduates today.

    And one of the illusions some of them have is the dangerous mindset that jobs come automatically with being a graduate, and you don’t need to justify why the employer should hire you. One of such ‘graduates’ called me recently from Abuja and said he wants to be a writer since a job was not forthcoming, though his spoken English was something else I still gave him the opportunity to send in his story. When I managed to read through his two page story that took me almost an hour to decipher, it would be a miracle if anyone hires him. How would any employer employ an individual that cannot speak and write simple English in a country where the mode of communication is English?

    Brig.-Gen. Nnamdi Okorie-Affia, the Director General of the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) raised this concern recently when he said some universities have been sending “graduates” to the scheme who can hardly speak English. According to him, the quality of these graduates is so appalling that employers who can’t find any use for them are left with no choice but to send them back to the NYSC.

    Trying to find out why things are the way they are is not difficult, most, if not all Nigerian undergraduates have mobile phones or one form of mobile device or the other. With these devices they immerse themselves in text messaging, and other forms of social media chats. This has resulted in a situation that some teachers, parents and students themselves are expressing concerns that student-writing skills stand the risk of being sacrificed on the altar of text messaging.

    With the emergence of the new media, beginning with the SMS communicative style, attention seems to be no longer given to the grammatical rules of the English Language. English remains the language of ‘all’ official proceedings, communication, administration, education, law, commerce/trade, executive and legislative use in the country.

    Prior to the emergence of the e-mail, ours was a letter writing and voice-centric society through the telephone, and do Nigerians love to talk! But we began to see a shift to the written word once e-mail became widely available for business and personal use. The short messaging and instant messaging habits are like every other habit, which when formed becomes difficult to control or stop.

    There is little doubt that the use of text messaging is common among youths, students in secondary and tertiary institutions in Nigeria and has come to stay as most of them have formed the habit of using text messages in most of their communications. The reasons are obvious; it is quick, it does not adhere to the rules of English grammar and it is relatively cheap, more convenient, used in establishing new and re-enforcing old relationships among others. As a result of this influence, many students find it difficult separating formal and informal English as they freely use “U” for “you”, “4” for “for”, “pls” for “please”, “2mrw” for “tomorrow” among others, during formal writing”. Hardest hit are the conventions of capitalisation and punctuation, which has been sacrificed on the altar of good writing.

    With youth unemployment rate – which currently stands at 37.5 per cent, according to Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Nigeria’s Coordinating Minister of Economy – it appears there is no rainbow in the horizon. Statistics from the Ministry of Youth Development show that over 4.5 million Nigerian youths enter the labour market yearly, while that of the Federal Bureau of Statistics revealed that over 40 million Nigerian youths are unemployed, translating to at least one unemployed person in every household in the country. Scary statistics, but what would stand an individual out is to shun mediocrity and be exceptional.

  • Zoning and the politics of mediocrity

    Zoning and the politics of mediocrity

    For some time now, the media in Akwa Ibom state has been awash with arguments and counter arguments on where the next governorship seat in Akwa Ibom State should be zoned.

    Obong Victor Attah, the immediate past Governor of the State, hails from Uyo senatorial District. He ruled the State from 1999 – 2007.

    His successor and incumbent governor, His Excellency Chief Godswill Obot Akpabio, whose tenure will expire by 2015, is from Ikot Ekpene Senatorial District.

    Thus, there has been calls by various groups within the state that Eket Senatorial district be allowed to produce the next governor of the state in 2015 for the sake of fairness, equity and justice.

    Others disagree; they argue that in each occasion when governorship primaries were conducted, aspirants from the three senatorial districts were allowed to compete amongst themselves for the best candidate to emerge. They argue that, for equity to prevail their candidate should not be excluded from the primaries.

    Others reason that, since the PDP constitution recognizes zoning, its internal organ is usually manipulated to favour a candidate in the senatorial district the office is zoned. But the proponent of this idea fail to advance reason why this organ was not used to stop the present speaker of the House of Representatives from emerging as the winner of the election to the office of the speaker even though the party had zoned the office to the South-west. Though it could be argued that the event at the House of Representatives wasn’t purely a PDP affair that other parties joined in electing the current speaker, the truth of the matter is that some PDP reps members voted against zoning in that election; they voted for the best candidate and the best candidate won the election.

    This argument no doubt, will continue in weeks, months and years ahead of 2015. But one thing is certain; by 2015 a governor will emerge from one of the three senatorial districts. By then the gladiators will sheath their swords and turn it into ploughshare, party interest will prevail and everyone will be enjoined to support the government. That is the hallmark of party politics: no permanent friend or enemy but permanent interest. What this means is that whether there is zoning or not, each senatorial district has a duty to project a candidate that has electoral values.

    In my opinion, the argument about which senatorial district should produce the next governor of the state is neither here nor there. The exercise rests squarely with the delegates in one hand and the entire voting population in the state on the other hand.

    Though the debate may help to sway the mind of the delegates but each senatorial district must produce a candidate that possesses tall credentials that can be marketable to the delegates. The candidate must be seen to be above board in all his dealings both within and outside government. Emphasis shouldn’t be about power shift, but a person who will run a good government devoid of tribal and ethnic sentiments. He should be someone who would not allow the burning anger expressed by Governor Akpabio in his developmental strides to wane. Such person should be able to provide us with electricity, safe drinking water in our homes and not borehole water, harness hidden treasures in our land and use it to create jobs for our people.

    Thank God the present administration in the state has done a lot in the area of infrastructural development. But a lot more is needed to ensure that the “Real sector” of the economy work well.

    We desire a person who will focus on wealth creation, resuscitate our ailing industries and build new ones under Build, Operate and Transfer (BOT) model. It baffles me when things such as ceramic wares are imported into this country when we have abundant deposit of clay materials in Itu Local Government Area that can be used for ceramics work. So effort must be geared towards industrialization.

    The clamour for power shift to senatorial districts can only breed nepotism as a section will see it as an opportunity to enrich his people. It will kill patriotic and nationalistic zeal in our people. It will rather encourage a local champion whose score-card will be what he has actually achieved for his senatorial district while the state will be the worst for it. Neophytes, charlatans and mediocres could hide under the cover to find their way into the Hilltop Mansion.

    What the present democratic dispensation requires is for us to evolve a culture where every leader irrespective of his place of birth and dialect will see the state as his primary constituency, where governance will be carried out not by ethnic or tribal sentiment but based on fairness, equity and justice. Such that an Eastern Obolo man or woman does not need to wait until his kinsman becomes governor before roads, school, hospital and pipe borne water are built in his domain. Same goes with an Ibeno person and other ethnic grouping that make up the state.

    We should dissipate our energy on issues that unite us not those that divide us. The call for power rotation based on senatorial districts can further divide us as smart politicians could manipulate the system to permanently favour a particular tribe that have spread in all the three senatorial districts of the state.

    I am pleased with the way and manner the present administration is running the affairs of our state. The vision of the governor and his team from day one has been that of transforming the state from a mere pedestrian state to a destination of choice. This the administration has achieved by completing projects such as the Airport, Ibom Power plant and establishing new ones such as the E-Library, Ibom Tropicana, Specialist Hospital and Olympic-sized stadium project and other’s too numerous to mention. The facts here are that all these project are of high class and meet international standard. So any visitor to Akwa Ibom State either for leisure or investment will find on ground first class facilities to aid his stay thereby confirming the state as a destination of choice. This feat achieved by the current administration should not be squandered on the altar of senatorial district politics. This is because the governor as a former commissioner was groomed, tested and found to be suitable by His predecessor Obong Victor Attah to be his successor when he vacates office. So rather than zone the office to any particular senatorial district, an individual (irrespective of where he comes from) with potentials for good leadership should be identified and groomed to assume governance in 2015 and continue the good works.

    Collectively, we owe this state a duty to bequeath it a tested leader with proven track record of achievement when the current regime comes to an end in 2015.

     

    • Ntoop, a political analyst writes from Uyo