The Nation Newspaper

Tag: Nigeria newspaper

  • Soldiers rescue kid, six others abducted on Kaduna-Abuja road

    Seven persons including a seven-year-old girl kidnapped at Rijana on the Kaduna-Abuja highway last Saturday have been rescued by the joint Operation Thunder Strike.

    The victims, who were travelling from Ofa in Kwara State to Kaduna, said their abductors, who were dressed in full military camouflage, stopped them at Rijana at about 9:30 pm and moved them to the forest.

    They are: Aishat Bisola, 26, Ahmad Abdulrafiu, 26, Maryam Abubakar, 7, Suleiman Khadija, 25, Lawal Temitope, 23, Bala Abdullahi, 52 and Abdulrazak Okunola, 35.

    Operation Thunder Strike is a Defence Headquarters lead operation comprising the Army, Navy, Air Force, Police, DSS and NSCDC deployed to address security threats along Kaduna-Abuja, Kaduna-Birni Gwari and Kaduna-Zaria highways.

    The Force Commander, Operation Thunder Strike, Col. Ibrahim Gambari, said since the inception of the operation, they have been trying their best to end kidnapping.

    Read Also: APC condoles varsity community on death of kidnapped professor

    “Before the operation was launched, several cases of kidnapping on a daily basis were being recorded, especially during the day. But since the inception of the operation, we have been able to nip in the bud such incidents  and most of the cases that were recorded usually happened at night. That was why the Kaduna State Government stopped the mounting of roadblocks on the road,” he said.

    Two AK47, 130 rounds of ammunition, five magazine, two phones, N100,000 and three camouflage were recovered from the kidnappers.

    One of the rescued victims, Aliyu Aishat Bisola, said they were kept on a rock for the five days without food.

    “We trekked for over three hours before we reached the kidnappers’ den on a mountain top.

    “They collected our phones and money while they were negotiating ransom between N10million and N2million.

    “The kidnappers beat us everyday. They even covered the face of another male victim and threatened to kill him if he did not bring money.

    “They did not give us any food or water, we sat on the rock under rain and sun without any shelter from that Saturday till Wednesday when we were rescued,” she said.

    Kaduna State Commissioner for Internal Security and Home Affairs Samuel Aruwan, who received the rescued victims on behalf of the government, hailed the Army for the successful operation that led to the victims’ rescue.

    Gunmen have abducted the Chairman of Kogi State Miners Association, Yunusa Oruma, from his home in Ankpa Local Government.

    The victim’s brother, Prince Oruma, told our correspondent yesterday that his brother was relaxing in his house when eight gunmen invaded the place at about 8pm on Sunday and began shooting.

    He said they seized his brother and drove away with him, adding that no information has been heard since he was abducted.

    Oruma said the incident has been reported to the police and other security agencies in Ankpa, and appealed for their efforts to secure his brother’s release.

    Police spokesman William Aya confirmed the incident.

    He said efforts are on to rescue the victim.

  • Truth is in the telling

    After 100 days, our governors’ narratives sprout from a honeyed tongue, not the baleful patois of the boondocks. It is an aesthetic of seduction but like the sweet melody of the Sirens, it spirals like poisonous fumes, afflicting our land with a vapour of hanging participles and colourful hyperbole. The governors’ panegyric excites the passing tribute of a sigh.

    Of the numerous achievements spuriously cited as each governor’s selling points, the phantasm of road projects attains the pride of pitch. To mark their ‘first 100 days’ in office, several state governors boastfully published pictures and literature depicting their ‘widely appreciated and celebrated road rehabilitation’ projects.

    Like I said in last week’s piece, it defies reason and tact for a state governor or federal minister to roll out the drums to celebrate his commencement of repairs on a bad road, a decrepit school or public health facility – particularly when his claims are exaggerated or untrue.

    He is only doing the work for which he was elected and is being handsomely rewarded. Thus any governor that would commit the state’s resources to such fluff is in dire need of counselling and civic education.

    At the back drop of the specious figures being hurled around, Nigerians die for lack of good roads.

    On several highways, the random pothole becomes a vector of death. It attains urgent symbolism as a testament of neglect and element of Nigeria’s grotto of bad governance. Think of them as earth fissures detailing the 36 states’ mutation into varnished tombs.

    Several families have lost loved ones to avoidable accidents on the country’s bad roads. Many a job seeker have missed crucial interviews and lost promising employment opportunities because they got stuck in vehicle traffic caused by road craters.

    Lives are lost on the Bauchi-Alkaleri road as drivers and passengers die in accidents caused by potholes. Similar carnage occur on the Lagos-Abeokuta and Lagos-Ibadan highways; the latter, constructed in 1978 and said to be the busiest in Africa, has about 6,000 vehicles plying it daily according to the Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC). Due to government neglect, the road which connects Oyo, Ogun and Lagos States, leading to the northern, southern and eastern regions of the country, continually claims lives in ghastly auto accidents.

    Lest we forget the Enugu-Onitsha highway, the Calabar-Itu road, Calabar-Ikom, Kano-Kaduna, and the Bayelsa State axis of the East-West Road, where commuters extinguish in potholes and road craters.

    A tour across the states would avail our governors a more realistic experience of the inherent tragedy of plying bad roads, on which foul dust and mud spatter spring from the earth to discolour commuters’ vehicles, sully their clothes and corrupt their health.

    Governance in the country is literally grotesque. Like the deathly pothole or road crater, it is borne of a grotto of shady public officers, who like their predecessors, nurture a special affinity for ornamenting one hideous gaffe with another.

    They ignore crisis while it stews and hazard a knee-jerk reaction, when the crisis degenerates. Former Ogun governor, Ibikunle Amosun, and the Federal Ministry of Works, for instance, ignored the condition of the Lagos-Ibadan highway until a 20-feet container fell off a moving truck and crushed 12 students to death in a Toyota Hiace passenger bus, on a bad portion of the road.

    One would expect that frequent travel abroad would furnish our governors, among other public officers, with the necessary exposure about rehabilitating for the long-term, the country’s dilapidated road network.

    The value of good roads to a nation’s agricultural economy and financial regeneration cannot be overemphasised. The economies of the so-called ‘First World’ have been known to pirouette from a sound base of good roads and seamless transportation network. The evidences abound from Asia to Europe and America. In those climes, public officers walk their talk.

    Many a Nigerian public officer, however, would rather dazzle with talk while presenting what’s supposed to be a routine, official duty as stagecraft. It is part of our pagan heritage and rites of governance, our inherited artifice.

    The random imagery of a state governor donning a grim look while inspecting a bad road, predictably, excites applause among his lackeys and an illiterate populace. But it inspires in the observer, depending on his enlightenment, that stirring in the bowels identifiable as disgust or applause.

    The state governors parade a cabinet and coterie of spin-doctors adept at flipping over disgust to applause, by reportage. Truth is in the telling. Knowing this, they recruit a pliant press to entertain and hoodwink the citizenry with exaggerated accounts of their ‘sterling exploits.’

    The State House thus becomes our Versailles. Cradling doctored reports, the media evolves under its rule, into a class of courtiers; government publicists masquerading as journalists and pundits, cede their platforms to ‘friendly’ governors, for whom they spin, prevaricate and lie.

    Consequently, we hear little about the stories of pain and desolation afflicting the victims of bad governance and policy failure.

    In Lagos, however, Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu supposedly means well; after all, he recently approved the commencement of repairs on bad roads across the state. And in fulfilment of his executive order on zero tolerance for potholes in the state, the Lagos State Public Works Corporation (LSPWC) has begun full scale routine repair and rehabilitation of roads across the state.

    The General Manager of the LSPWC, Engr. Olufemi Daramola, during an inspection of the ongoing rehabilitation of Iju-Fagba road, recently, stated that

    despite the incessant rainfall witnessed in the past few weeks, the state had been providing palliatives with the use of gravel and crushed stones on strategic roads across the state to ensure free flow of traffic.

    This is, no doubt, a temporary palliative and is grossly inadequate as the patched spots eventually cave in, in less than two weeks.

    Daramola cited rehabilitation works in 26 different locations across the state. It is, however, sad to note, that for the umpteenth time, the Lagos government has failed to treat the sad state of the Lagos-Abeokuta highway and bypasses with the urgency and care it deserves.

    Like his predecessors, Babatunde Fashola and Akinwumi Ambode, Governor Sanwo-Olu’s palliative effort cuts off this neglected terrain of the coastal city.

    The roads are very bad in Agbado-Kollington, Dalemo-Akera, and Ijaiye-Jankara axis. You need only travel the cratered paths and bypasses of Abule-Egba, Ahmadiyya, Meiran, and Alakuko to understand the extent of devastation and neglect afflicting the area.

    Governor Sanwo-Olu has certainly got his work cut out for him. Its about time he understood that good roads and development must be evenly spread across Lagos; they should never be exclusive to the state’s supposedly posh, popular and gated communities.

    Given the pride of place he occupies as governor of the state widely acknowledged as Nigeria’s commercial heartbeat, Sanwo-Olu must shun pedestrian praise and commit to his task with unparalleled gusto.

    At the moment, he unfurls like a newbie at the State House’s pageant rites. Let him remember that his lackeys might be saboteurs and his critics may be friends; together, however, they constitute the periphery of governance. He is the man at the centre.

    And he has less than four years to ennoble his office and dispel inherited stereotypes. This wisdom applies to his 35 fellow governors.

  • Tourist in xenophobic country

    How would Nobel Laureate and Nigeria’s treasure, Prof. Wole Soyinka, advise a tourist, set to visit a country of rabid xenophobes?

    Judging by his poem, ‘Death in the Dawn’, he probably would start: “Tourist, you must set forth/At dawn/… The right foot for joy, the left, dread/And the mother prayed Child/May you never walk/When the road waits, famished”!

    That prayer is taken from a Yoruba superstitious-powered belief, which holds that the road at some time is thirsty for blood; and may one never travel at such precarious times!

    For that, as part of that poem dutifully records, you even make some sacrifice, or some  caring family members on your behalf, for your journey to be when the road is sated, and you come back safe from your journey.

    But how does this prayer even hold, for a tourist bound for a xenophobia country, where the natives always prime themselves for foreign blood — and foreign shops for prime looting?

    That is the unflattering image South Africa paints with its xenophobic thunder, and its periodic volcano.  Though it  now consumes foreign blood, limbs and sweat, eventually it will consume South Africa itself.

    Take tourism.  That market is dependent on a relay of foreign visitors come to feel the pulse of your country, taste its flora and fauna, sample its cuisine and drink in its landscape.

    But no matter how beautiful your country might be, how do you convince visitors — tourists — to come, when you make a manic show as unrepentant and unapologetic xenophobes, badgering and slaying foreigners in your midst, sacking their shops, looting their sweat?

    That is the sorry pass South Africa is wedging itself but no one seems to care.

    True, President Cyril Ramaphosa has decried xenophobia, which is fine.  But the body language of many in the Ramaphosa cabinet has been, at best, mixed: if not condoning then regrettably justifying — which is quite awry, for a state that benefited from huge foreign support to spring itself from apartheid White minority rule.

    But this show of barbarism would hurt South Africa most in the long run.  Traditionally, South Africa has a strong tourism market — exotic parks, game reserves, water falls, not to talk of other post-apartheid historic troves like the Mandela centre.

    But with an increasing xenophobic image, who in his right sense would travel to South Africa?  And if the tourism sector continues to contract, where would be the tourism aspect, of the so-called jobs, be — after the hated foreigners had all been killed, for taking natives’ job away?

    The xenophobe kills his tourism market — how sweet!

    Weep not for South Africa, the country that in Nelson Mandela produced the finest of humanity but also cancelled that out that trove with the very dregs in xenophobes!

    A tourist in xenophobes’ country!  How sweet!

  • Ikeja Electric begins e-bills for customers’ convenience

    Ikeja Electric Plc (IE) has introduced electronic billing (e-billing) platform, which enables customers to receive electricity bills promptly and conveniently, via channels, such as SMS, USSD, email, IE Bill portal and IE mobile Application.

    The e-billing initiative is part of the firm’s desire to leverage innovation and technology to improve customer experience. It is designed to deliver electronic bills directly to the customer thereby eradicating challenges such as misplaced bills or delayed delivery and other issues which are associated with distribution of physical bills.

    The company said that very soon, e-bills will be the dominant mode of bill delivery considering its numerous advantages, as well as the company’s mass metering of customers across its network.

    The Head,  Corporate Communications for Ikeja Electric, Felix Ofulue, said: “What we have done with e-billing is to create different platforms through which post-paid customers can easily access their bills. As a forward thinking organisation, we understand that a critical element of product development is customer convenience and ease to access. This is what we intend to achieve by providing post-paid customers with easier options of receiving monthly bills via SMS, e-mail, USSD, IE Bill Portal and IE mobile app.”

    Ofulue also stated: “We believe that our customers appreciate innovative services that offer convenience, eliminate hitches and also fit their lifestyle; which is what e-billing guarantees. Therefore, this initiative was driven largely with interest of customers at the heart of our business.”

    He further pointed out that from an environmental perspective, e-billing will help IE take a step towards greater environmental sustainability, and for customers, e-bills will help reduce unwanted clutter and strenuous filings. The e-bills will also enable customers access historical data of their bills including consumption patterns.

    The e-billing service is free. The SMS is delivered to the registered phone numbers of customers while PDF bills are delivered to emails submitted by customers. PDF can also be downloaded via the website. The App is available on Android and will soon be available on other operating systems. There is also a billing portal which customers can access to download their bills on a monthly basis.

    Customers can update their contacts by visiting the company’s website, Customer Care Unit or the nearest IE service centres. For customers who do not have contact details on IE website, account managers will ensure all bills delivered to valid contacts provided by such customers.

    With the introduction of e-billing system, bills are delivered faster, it helps customers to reduce unwanted clutter of papers in their home, it eliminates manual printing and distribution of bills with all its attendant challenges, the risk of bills being lost in transit or affected by bad weather is also avoided, while it offers electronic tracking of bills delivery.  In addition, the e-billing initiative is a step towards greater environmental sustainability.

    The e-billing initiative is the first in the industry and complies with regulatory requirements.

  • Criminality in Niger Delta and absence of governance

    Illegal oil bunkering seems to have become institutionalized in the oil producing states of Delta, Rivers and Bayelsa. Large volume of oil is siphoned from pipelines damaged by criminals and ferried into waiting ships on the high seas en-route Europe and North America. This is done with impunity. Periodic lamentation is all we get from the federal government even with its control of the army, navy, air force and the police. President Jonathan whimsical award of multi-billion dollar contract to Tompolo, General Boyloaf and other Niger Delta armed militants to secure our oil pipelines only led to the booming of illegal bunkering.

    Reporting in the Financial Times issue of June 26, 2012,   William Wallis  claims ‘The Nigerian state and oil companies are losing a billion dollars or more a month to oil theft by criminal networks whose activities have expanded rapidly under the government of President  Jonathan’. In 2013 during Spring meeting of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in Washington, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala the then Finance Minister and coordinating minister stated: “We estimate total loss at over 300,000 barrel per day,’’ valued at $1billion. The trade in stolen oil involves a sophisticated criminal network and international traders who provide oil at discounted prices to refineries in West Africa and in China and India”.

    Nuhu Ribadu-led Petroleum Task Force report  on the oil and gas sector put daily crude oil theft at 250,000 barrels daily at a cost of $6.3bn (N1.2trn) a year. This according to the report puts the total amount lost through oil theft in the two years of Jonathan’s government at over $12.6bn (N2trn).  Charles Soludo, one time CBN governor in his 2015 letter to Okonjo Iweala put the average loss figure at 400,000 barrels per day coming “to about $60 billion (12.6 trillion) ‘stolen’ in just four years” at a time of cessation of crisis in the Niger Delta, amnesty programme and huge amount paid for ‘protecting’ the pipelines and security of oil wells, asking if the ‘thieves’ were spirits”.

    Sadly, nothing has changed under President Buhari’s government of change. Earlier this year, Rotimi Amaechi, the minister for transport alleged as much as $25 billion is lost to oil bunkerers annually. Edo State’s Godwin Obaseki, who doubles as chairman of the ad hoc committee of the National Economic Council on Crude Oil Theft recently revealed that about 22 million barrels of crude oil have been shipped away out of our shores by the vandals in the past six months. And only last Monday, September 9, SPDC’s General Manager, External Relations, Igo Weli, during a media workshop on pipelines vandalisation in Port Harcourt was lamenting that “SPDC JV is currently losing about 10,000 barrels per day (bpd) of oil valued at N202 million and appealed to   government, communities and other stakeholders to stem the incessant attack on our oil assets in the Niger Delta.”

    The Nation newspaper editorial of September 8 titled “Flamboyant Vampires” however seems to have hit the nail on its head.  The reason the business of illegal bunkering continues to boom according to the editorial   is that “some of the security operatives assigned to protect the oil infrastructure have become the criminals-in- chief, not only aiding and abetting but also enabling, the army protects them on land and the navy at sea. Even members of the police force are also in on it. It is a massive mess”.

    And involved in the massive mess are the governors of the crime infected Niger Delta states who many believe arm the rampaging Niger Delta militant groups the elite use as foot soldiers, the traditional rulers who the late Saro wiwa described as ‘vultures’ for sacrificing the well-being of their people by receiving blood money from multinationals that pollute their environment and the federal government that treat the oil rich Niger Delta as a conquered territory.

    The nightmare of people in the Delta region started with the promulgation of the petroleum decree which wrested ownership of all land and any resource found in, under and upon the land, in the federal military government shortly before the outbreak of the civil war. Just like the foreign companies prospecting for oil in the region, the motive was greed. If consideration for the people and their environment came later, it was as an after-thought or as a result of pressure from the political elite from the area. And as it has sadly turned out, the leading light from the region including the governors ( Ibori, Igbinedion, Alamieyeseigha,  already convicted for stealing their states blind and Odilli, shielded by the courts,) who took the federal government to court over on-shore and off-shore oil revenue, the vultures who live on the blood and sweat of their people and the creeks armed gangs who after securing multi-billion dollar contracts from Presidents Jonathan and Obasanjo and today live like kings serve none but themselves. The poor whose names were used in vain are left alone to cope with consequences of devastated farmlands and polluted streams.

    Although it was the agitation by leading lights of the devastated Niger Delta area that  led to the establishment of The Oil Mineral Producing Areas Development Commission (OMPADEC) with Decree 23 of 1992, primarily to rehabilitate, develop and tackle the ecological problems through provision of infrastructures such as good  roads, electricity, potable water, land reclamation, agriculture, fish business and transportation, but OMPADEC also collapsed under the weight of corruption perpetrated by the same Niger Delta political elite.

    OMPADEC was succeeded by Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) empowered with 13 per cent derivation revenue. It was established to develop Niger Delta and end the restiveness among the youths in the affected oil producing communities. Again, NDDC failed to achieve its objectives. Many of the youths who received technical trainings abroad returned into the service of big time bunkerers who needed their newly acquired technical knowledge to damage pipelines in the creeks.

    Criminality in the Niger Delta region, like the Middle Belt, Southern Kaduna, Zamfara, Southwest and elsewhere in the country as many have argued, is evidence of absence of governance in the country.  Most of those regarded as leaders at all levels since the beginning of the fourth republic have turned out to be dealers. Both Obasanjo’s and the Niger Delta governors, that took him to court over resource control were neither sincere to Nigerians nor to the oil producing areas. One had eyes on a third term agenda while the other set out to further impoverish their people.  President Jonathan as commander in chief handed over the protection of our oil pipelines to armed gangs who were in the employ of dealers as leaders. That served only the interest of the terror groups he and other Niger Delta dealers put in place for political survival.

    It is not yet Uhuru. Beyond instutionalisation of criminality in the oil rich Niger Delta by successive Nigerian dealers, evidence of absence of governance today abounds everywhere. While soldiers, naval officers, air force men and the police are said to be aiding and abetting criminality in the Niger Delta and elsewhere in the country, one encounters on the roads and at functions obscene scenes of two dozens of DSS men and as many policemen wielding guns and intimidating people because a minister’s convoys of several SUVs is passing by. (Ministers during the administration of President Shehu Shagari in the second republic only moved around with a police man while minister of states had none).

    The country remains dysfunctional in the way those in Abuja today carry out the normal business of government.

  • Rescue plan

    •We welcome FG’s intention to establish six geriatric centres

    Help is on the way for Nigeria’s elder citizens with the federal government’s plan to establish geriatric centres in teaching hospitals in six regions. Announcing the plan, Coordinator, Healthcare Package for Improving Quality Care on Ageing Population in Nigeria, Dr Saidu Dumbulwa, said: “The  government, following the regional World Health Organisation  meeting in Addis Ababa in 2016, set in motion an actionable strategy with a view to improving the health status of the  elderly in Nigeria.”

    We welcome the early announcement of the laudable plan to address healthcare for the elderly. It is common knowledge that Nigeria is experiencing a major demographic transition that leaves the country year on year with a much larger elderly population than before. Just as the country needs to develop policies in the interest of its teeming youth population, so does it need to respond to its increasing number of elderly citizens, attributable to a combination of factors: better access to medications, greater literacy, and better health education, among others.

    It is remarkable that the current government plans to respond to WHO’s Global Strategy and Action on Ageing and Health by planning for a national initiative focused on healthcare for senior citizens. It is also instructive that, contrary to the nonchalant attitude to Nigeria’s attempts in 1989 to launch a comprehensive social policy on its rising population of old citizens, the Buhari government has opted to adopt some of the objectives of WHO: “commitment to action on healthy ageing in every country; developing age-friendly environments; aligning health systems to the needs of older populations; developing sustainable and equitable systems for providing long-term care for the elderly; and improving measurement, monitoring and research on healthy ageing.”

    The plan for geriatric centres promises to be a good beginning towards achieving the afore-mentioned objectives.  However, the six centres should not be conceived only as structures or facilities for teaching geriatric medicine, as good as this might be. Each of the centres also ought to be designed as research centres for producing knowledge to enable the country respond to the multidimensional character of ageing.

    Worldwide, longevity is considered a sign of social advancement. It is, therefore, salutary that the government has acknowledged many of the challenges of ageing in a developing country. Apart from the lack of specialist medical knowledge to treat geriatric medical issues, there are other factors that need to be considered as part of a holistic response to the surge in the ageing population. Apart from the prevalence of chronic diseases that come with age; cardiovascular, physical disability, diabetes, depression, and memory loss, there are other social and emotional issues, such as isolation, loneliness, anxiety, that deserve attention of policy makers.

    All these challenges call for integrated planning that can use research to stimulate creation of holistic approach to solving problems that are part of the human condition. For example, poverty or drastic decline in revenue for people in this demographic group may come largely from non-payment of pension for those who had pensionable jobs in their adult years, or from lack of income for self-employed citizens with inadequate preparation for old age. Associated problems, such as inability by a great percentage of the elderly to provide themselves with conducive environment in which to age, or inability of children to provide assisted living for their aged parents call for recognition by politicians and policy makers. In other words, research at the centres should provide reliable data to support comprehensive social policy in respect of the elderly.

    Furthermore, activities of the centres ought not be limited to tertiary medical services for geriatrics, as important as these might be. Linking such centres to provision of geriatric primary health services in both urban and rural areas is crucial to making such centres effective. Correspondingly, relating cultures to the design of geriatric health management is vital to creating new awareness about developing a fitting architecture of support for the elderly, not only at the level of government, but also at the family level.

     

  • Nigeria: Cry my beloved country!

    These are the worst of times for Nigeria.  Nigerians are being arrested in Los Angeles and New Jersey, United States for advanced fees fraud, impersonation and credit card fraud and for what is now generally called “Nigerian scams”.  When other people commit these crimes, they are charged for committing “Nigerian scam”. We have now gone into legal history as giving name to a particular kind of crime. Tens of our people are being beheaded in Saudi Arabia for drugs peddling.  The American FBI is looking for almost a hundred Nigerians for fraud. One of our country men even appeared on an ABC television network confessing his crimes and tearfully telling Americans how to identify “Nigerian scams”. Tens of our nationals are awaiting executions in Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore and Vietnam. Some are in Laos and Cambodia for one crime or the other deserving capital punishment. What the hell for goodness sake are Nigerians doing in Laos and Cambodia? I mean it’s a long way to Tipperary! Other Nigerians are being killed in South Africa for drugs peddling. Chinese and Russian jails are also full of them for one infraction or the other of their laws. Some years ago, they were brawling on the streets of a Chinese town until they were beaten to surrender by some burley Chinese constabulary.

    It seems wherever they go, they are followed by their criminal reputation. Genuine business people cannot transact business without being suspected of fraud. When our people particularly the young people have successfully conned an unsuspecting victim, they spend the money on frivolities like huge marriage celebrations, cars, hotels and on hedonistic life styles and prostitution.  They even not only spray our national currency which they march under their feet, they also spray dollars, euros and pounds sterling. And for these they are prepared to ruin themselves and ruin the image of our country and even to commit hara kiri because anybody caught with hard drugs in most parts of Asia and the Middle East is likely to be sentenced to death. Yet with wide opened eyes our people go to these places hoping they will not be caught. Our greed is what is killing our young people. There is of course unemployment at home but the fact is that many of our young people are not ready to do the work that is available.  They go to universities to avoid hard work or not to work at all. Even those who have jobs want to make it big by illegal and criminal ways. Why will a bank manager for example, resign his job to emigrate abroad where there is no certainty of a job but to join criminal gangs to defraud the system of the country he or she is going to? There is no Eldorado anywhere. There is no crown without thorns! This is the truth. A man who is a bank manager resigns and goes abroad only to wash dead bodies in the mortuary! Our young people must be realistic. I once participated in an interview panel for young recruits into an industry. When a young girl was asked what her goal in life was, she retorted that she wanted to “live large”. I had never heard the expression before. She was thanked for coming and asked to go and live large. I hope she has learned a lesson and would moderate her life expectations.

    Young people tend to blame us the older generation for having spoiled the country for them by our criminal indulgence in corruption, squander mania, mismanagement, lack of focus  general insecurity and planlessness. I plead guilty to all these charges of generational crimes. But I must say that this country has produced in the past world class scholars, international civil servants and administrators, jurists and distinguished medical scientists. Where we have failed is getting the right kind of political leadership and right helmsman at the critical juncture of national development. We were never able to find a leader who could cut through the miasma of tribal divisions and antagonism and chart a brilliant course of national integration for all round development. Poverty knows no tribe and prosperity also knows no tribe. Americans always say their favourite colour is green that’s the colour of the dollar. If Nigeria was prosperous, who will care what tribe the man at the top of government belongs to? I feel really ashamed that I am a citizen of a country that earned almost a trillion dollars from oil and gas over the years and we have nothing to show for it. No light. No potable water.  No motor-able roads. Hospitals are “mere consulting clinics “No schools and 30 percent of school aged children are roaming about the streets as almajiris and hawkers of all kinds of goods. We do not have comfortable means of transportation or communication. All the appurtenances of modern civilization are missing. Some of our leaders troop to England, Dubai and Abu Dhabi to invest stolen money .We build mansions that become useless even while we are alive and in any case our children will not be able to maintain them when we are gone and if they want to sell them there will be no buyers because they will be old fashioned by then. What we have built will become useless at the end and all we have accumulated primitively will become a manifestation of vanity.

    Vanity upon vanity is all vanity, said king Solomon in his Ecclesiastical discourses.

    If my generation has failed the country and our greedy youth has ruined the image of the country that the older generation built, shouldn’t we all start all over again and make hay while the sun still shines? Or are we going to throw up our hands and wait for Armageddon or the inevitable revolution?

    The signs of revolution are all over the place, we can no longer move from one city to another without the fear of being kidnapped. We can’t sleep with our two eyes closed. I arrived last week from London and my luggage was instantly stolen. Foreign investors except for intrepid Chinese and Indians, who are ripping us off, have stopped coming to our country. We must do something to rescue this land of our forefathers. It seems to me that we must prepare the next generation by teaching them how to behave right from home to primary and secondary schools. Cheating at entrance examinations must be severely punished.  Parents indulging in it must be publicly disgraced. We also must try and begin a campaign of moral rearmament and ethical revolution in our regular civic and religious lives. The church and the mosque must be engaged and charlatans masquerading as men of God must be forced out of their disguise. The government must mobilize the country for development.  All young people roaming about the cities must be taken away to state farms and agricultural settlements to be built by all state governments. Annual budgets without any appreciable change in our lives must give way to physical changes. This country needs to be transformed like China was after 1949 and even Vietnam in recent times. Within living memory, we have seen the transformation of Malaysia and Singapore with which we shared common colonial history. There is presumably nothing wrong with us as a race. We just must get out of this rot. We cannot continue like this.

    The reason why our young people have taken to crime both at home and abroad is that they think crimes pay. This is why we must approach punishment after crimes with full speed of the law. Punishment must be sure and swift whether crimes committed by herders, kidnappers, armed robbers, economic criminals and economic saboteurs damaging gas and petroleum pipelines. The spate of crimes committed at home and abroad indicates that our chickens have come home to roost and our cup is full. We must face our responsibility and take whatever measure that is necessary to stamp out all these criminal tendencies of our people. No one is born a criminal it is our degraded society that has made us criminals. We must therefore purify this evil society. Our legal system that allows criminals to exploit legal technicalities to avoid judgement and justice is not a worthy and worthwhile legal system. It must be thrown away. Recently a  British court fined us $9.6 billion to be paid  to so-called Irish investors who never dug the foundation of their so-called gas liquefaction complex in Calabar and then turns up to say because Nigeria failed to deliver gas to a non-existent gas factory, it lost  imaginary profits for 20 years. The deal ab initio was a product of Nigerian corruption and lack of patriotism and coordination.

    But what is most galling is that a Nigerian lawyer sat on the panel of arbitrators. What kind of legal system would condone this kind of fraud? We need whole sale judicial review in this country and Nigerian lawyers need to be more patriotic and less corrupt. Money is not everything. We brought nothing to this world and we shall not take anything with us when we depart it.

    Our cup is indeed full and we must change the course of our journey as a nation so that we don’t hit the rocks of the inevitable cascade into an abyss of no return.

    The recent situation of our much abused and despised people in South Africa, even though the involvement of many of them in drug dealing , prostitution and gang violence in which Nigerians are killing Nigerians in a foreign country, calls for close scrutiny of the kind of Nigerian migrants invading other people’s homelands. We must be frank with ourselves. I don’t like hearing we helped to end apartheid in South Africa. So what? Does that give us the right to invade another country with drugs? Our support for liberation of Southern Africa was based on enlightened self-interest of wanting to wipe out the blemish on and the humiliation of all black people on account of their colour which was what apartheid represented. Helping people in Southern Africa, in which I was personally involved, amounted to a second liberation of Nigeria from racism. There are Nigerian doctors, lawyers, professors, engineers and others making useful contributions in South Africa and they are not being molested. We must bring home our flotsam and jetsam and other deplorables ruining our image in South Africa. Must everybody be a trader? Enough is enough. Our humiliation in South Africa is part of the failure of our governments over the years that earned money and failed to industrialize the country and provide jobs for its teeming population. Enough of this voluntary second slave trade. We need introspection and soul searching to find solutions to what is wrong with Nigeria.

  • Lip service

    •Inadequate funding of R & D partly to blame for our underdevelopment

    Successive governments in Nigeria over the years have understandably realised and appreciated the critical, indispensable role of rapid advances in science and technology as a necessary condition for the country’s accelerated development. Unfortunately, they have habitually only paid lip service to the need to plan and diligently implement policies to achieve this objective, particularly in the crucial area of funding and properly coordinating relevant research and development (R&D) activity.

    Minister of Science and Technology, Dr Ogbonaiya Onu, underscored this point when he revealed at a press conference in Abuja that when he first assumed office in 2015, the National Research and Innovation Council (NRIC), had not met for 30 years after the approval of the policy by the Federal Executive Council in 1986, and the attendant establishment of the council. NRIC is the body statutorily responsible for implementing Nigeria’s science, technological and innovation policy (STIP).

    Expatiating on the pathetic state in which he met the ministry, the minister said, “When I was appointed as the Minister of Science and Technology, I came to a ministry where as many as five of its agencies had zero allocation for a whole year. There was money just to pay salaries. The ministry had a chequered history since its inception. At some time, it was merged with another ministry. At one time, it was scrapped completely and ceased to exist. At another time, it was constituted with only some of its former agencies”. Of course, no country that handles the very serious issue of research and development, especially in science, technology and innovation so cavalierly can make any meaningful developmental breakthrough.

    The lacuna in this area of our development planning is mainly responsible for the debilitating and chronic import dependency that drains the country’s foreign exchange, her continued substantial reliance on earnings from export of crude oil as the major source of revenue as well as the huge infrastructure deficit in various sectors of the economy. It is noteworthy that the 1986 STIP document was reviewed in 1997 purportedly to “lay more emphasis on the coordination and management of science and technology system sectoral developments, collaboration and funding”.

    Again, in 2003, the policy was reportedly updated this time “to take account of lapses observed in the implementation of the 1997 policy, especially on the need to address the institutional frameworks that should foster interaction among the various elements of the national system of innovation (NSI)”. The NSI was supposedly strengthened in 2005 when, working in conjunction with UNESCO, the country undertook a science, technology and innovation reform initiative.

    Not done, the STIP was again reviewed in 2011 by the Dr Goodluck Jonathan administration, which said its effort in this regard had taken “advantage of the experiences in the design and implementation of the science and technology policy in the last two decades and a half” and that it was “a product of a novel, all-inclusive, participatory policy making”. But then, if all these years, the Ministry of Science and Technology had been largely marginalised and unstable; its agencies unfunded for the most part, and the body responsible for implementing the STIP, the NRIC, had not even met for 30 years, what then was the point of all these policy reform and review initiatives? Has it not been a case of all motion and little movement, given the country’s obvious stagnation in the sphere of STI development?

    Unfortunately, the news reports did not indicate that Dr. Onu spoke about what steps he had so far taken as Minister of Science and Technology to ensure not just that the NRIC is revived and now meets regularly but that it begins to exhibit noticeable effectiveness in fulfilling its mandate. Beyond this, the herculean challenge before Dr Onu as minister is to spearhead the considerable strengthening of the Ministry of Science and Technology both financially and institutionally, as well as re-positioning the ministry and placing it at the very centre of Nigeria’s development planning and implementation where it rightly ought to be.

  • Alumni target N250m for repairs

    In preparation for the 70th anniversary of Ijebu Muslim College, Ijebu Ode, in January, the Ijebu Muslim College Old Students Association (IMCOSA) is hoping to add N250 million to the N50 million it has raised for the school’s infrastructural development.

    Chairman of the 70th anniversary committee, Sir Ben Oshadiya, said at a fundraising by the association last Sunday that the money would be used to rehabilitate the Old School Assembly Hall (N30m); construct a 1,200-seater dining hall (N125m) and four bungalows of 12 self-contained flats in the staff quarters (N100m).

    Others are: rehabilitation of the school road network (N40m), andold classroom blocks in addition to construction of good drainage.

    Occupying over 50 acres of land in Ijebu-Ode, Ogun State, the school was founded on January 27, 1950, by the Ijebu Muslim Community, to cater for needs of members’ childrens.

    The school started off as a boy’s only school with 60 boys and became co-educational in 1965. It moved from its old site at Olisa Street, Ijebu-Ode to its expansive site along the Ijebu Muslim College Road in 1953.  The school presently has over 4,000 pupils.

    Oshadiya said in the last 40 years, the school suffered neglect by the Ogun State Government which took over the school.

    “By the time the school attained the age of 40years, the situation had really become very appalling. Decayed infrastructure everywhere and the student population had more than doubled to over 2,000.  Therefore, there was acute shortage of accommodation with each classroom then having more than 120 students,” he said.

    With such appalling state of the school, he said the IMCOSA intervened and had been consistent in supporting the school.

    He noted that the school had also enjoyed support of various corporate organisations who donated computer centres, e-library, classroom block, and a modern science laboratory, which is under construction.

    IMCOSA National President, Kayode Sote explained that the school has withstood the challenges prevalent in the nation’s s education sector and has remained a powerhouse of knowledge and wisdom.

    He added that the fundraising was in honour of the school’s founding fathers who were pioneers of western education for the Muslim youths in Ijebu, and also to support the government in providing qualitative education.

    Also speaking, a lecturer in the Department of Mass Communication, University of Lagos, Dr Fassy Yusuf, said politics was the bane of educational development in Nigeria.

    He said free education lacks qualitative teaching and as such, parents are supposed to pay for their wards no matter how minimal. He noted that there was need for government to put a strategy in place that would guarantee that the poor have access to education and device a means of payment.

    “No matter what, parents must be involved in education.  Also students should be able to have access to loans if their parents cannot further their education. Then their certificates would serve as collateral for education banks that would ensure the money is paid back,” he said.

    The Managing Director of News Agency of Nigeria,  Mr Bayo Onanuga, bemoaned the poor state of the sector, noting that rigorous standard of recruiting teachers at all levels should be adopted.

    He advised alumni associations to invest beyond infrastructures and be more involved with content and quality of education provided in schools.

  • Before another attack

    Giving its history, a country like South Africa should be seen promoting tolerance and unity. As a country which rose from the ashes of racism, it should have learnt a big lesson from its dark past. South Africa was virtually a pariah nation when White supremacists cornered every part of it, riding roughshod over Blacks and other people of colour. The world refused to keep silent and that was what saved South Africa from the hands of the Whites.

    Nigeria played a key role in the fight for a democratic South Africa. It committed, man, money and material into the cause. It took up Britain again and again over the issue because of the insincerity of the United Kingdom (UK) in the fight against apartheid. Our leaders and musicians saw the South African cause as  personal. In their individual capacity, they waged war against the evil known as apartheid.

    Musicians waxed albums to condemn the evil practice. Our head of state, the late Gen Murtala Muhammed showed true leadership when at the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1976, he came down hard on world powers, especially the United States (US) for their support for apartheid. ‘’When I contemplate the evils of apartheid’’, he began, ‘’my heart bleeds and I am sure the heart of every true blooded African bleeds…

    “Rather than join hands with the forces fighting for self determination and against racism and apartheid, US policy makers clearly decided that it was in the best interest of their country to maintain White supremacy and minority regimes in Africa…Africa has come of age. It is no longer under the orbit of any extra continental power…’’ It took 18 years after that no holds barred speech for South Africa to become democratic and it was democracy well earned few years after its iconic leader, the late President Nelson Mandela, was released from 27 years imprisonment.

    Since then, South Africa has not looked back, but it seems to have forgotten where it is coming from. These days, some South Africans take delight in attacking foreigners in their land, levelling all sorts of allegations against them. If they do not describe them as drug barons, they will accuse the foreigners of taking their jobs. How are these foreigners depriving them of employment? The thing is they are suffering from inferiority complex. They hate to see foreigners, Nigerians especially because they cannot stand up to them in every facet of life. The next best thing to do in the circumstance, in their thinking, is to make wild allegations against these foreigners and descend on them in large numbers.

    These xenophobic attacks did not start today. They have been on for years and Nigeria has, in the spirit of African brotherhood, been considerate, too, too considerate in handling the matter. I can see reason with our leaders. They do not want to destroy the house they built with their own hands. But what if the occupants of the house keep making the house too hot for you as the South Africans are doing? Our government’s lukewarm attitude over the years may have emboldened the South Africans to continue to treat Nigerians like pests.

    We are no pests nor irritants. Nigerians are a proud people who can hold their own anywhere in the world. South Africans are not a match for us. I am not advocating a tit for tat, but it is high time these South Africans were put in their place. What do they think of themselves? Their people and government are not showing any remorse despite the diplomatic way Nigeria is handling the matter. Does South Africa think it can take on Nigeria if our relationship breaks down?

    Nigeria is speaking diplomatically, but they are talking aggressively. What do you make of this statement from Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula, South Africa’s Minister of Defence: “we cannot stop the xenophobic attacks. The truth is that we are an angry nation. What is happening cannot be prevented by any government’’. Haha! The minister was only toeing the path of some of her compatriots who perceive the Nigerians in their country as layabouts. This is why they call our people all sorts of names in order to justify the unwarranted attacks on them.

    If as the minister said no government can stop these attacks, then the government must have failed in its duty of enthroning law and order. A government that cannot control its citizens is no government. Perhaps, the simple explanation to all this is that the government is privy to what is happening and it is only pretending to sympathise with the victims. How will the South African government feel if Nigerians were the ones doing this to its citizens?

    It will not be happy just as Nigeria is feeling bad over the killing, maiming of its citizens and the destruction of their properties. When did it become an offence to seek greener pastures in a foreign land?