The Nation Newspaper

Tag: rebirth

  • O’dua and the rebirth of Daily Sketch

    Making my observations from afar, I can quickly count a number of hitherto thriving entities within the Od’ua Investment Company group that have either gone comatose or completely dead.

    Epe Plywood Factory, Nigerian Wire and Cable and Askar Paints are all now referred to in the past and this is despite the essential nature of the goods and services they were in the business of producing.

    It is easy to give the excuse that the Nigerian business environment is tough but there are numerous private entities surviving and returning good dividends to their owners. Many other competing outfits within and outside Nigeria continue to thrive relying entirely on the Nigerian market.

    The Nigeria NLG has been recently in the news for having provided billions as bailout packages to the Federation Account. Companies under the Dangote group are expanding to various parts of the world and making Aliko Dangote one of the richest men on earth.

    Yet, OIC Limited is as helpless as its owners in a moment like this when it should be providing financial succour to its owners who are unable to pay staff salaries and also providing much needed employment to the descendants of O’dua.

    Incompetence, nepotism, corruption and red-tapism are alleged to be the Archiles heels. Inside O’dua, life moves rather slowly, decisions take almost forever to make. The axiom ‘time is money’ means nothing here. Sketch group of newspapers was a thriving concern when it was handed over to O’dua to manage around the mid 1990s. It was run aground not long after.

    On October 24, 2013, the then Group Managing Director, Odua Investment, Adebayo Jimoh, announced plans by the group to resuscitate the comatose Sketch.

    He added that O’dua was already in discussion with intending partners who have shown interest in taking up Sketch’s patent. “The rebirth of the paper will be announced soon,” he declared.

    Also shortly after his farewell visit to Governor Ibikunle Amosun in Abeokuta, Jimoh told reporters that O’dua was working with a group of senior journalists in the bid to bring back one of the Yoruba legacies alive. This heightened popular expectations.

    It would seem a surprise that the announcement on Sketch generated such interest in an age where many mass media outlets are doing rather badly in the market and payment of salaries is a big issue.

    Online media and blogs have taken over and readers get information without paying for newspapers. But Sketch is more than mere newspaper to the O’dua nation. It is nostalgia. It is about a golden era that many would wish returned.

    Such old names like Peter Ajayi, Felix Adenaike, Olusegun Osoba, Sola Oyegbemi, Ademola Idowu, just to mention a handful are some of the media colossus that passed through Daily Sketch. It was said that at a point in its history, the owner governments relied on profit from the newspaper group to pay salaries.

    Also at a point in time when employment is a huge issue in the South West Nigeria, many had thought that O’dua Group and its owner states would consider it a god-sent for private businessmen to express interest in such gesture with the potential to boost employment generation and increase enlightenment.

    Alas! Nothing else happened until mid 2014 when news filtered that O’dua had entered an agreement with a private media outfit to re-package the legacy entity with privately sourced funds.

    Unfortunately, there was a change in management at O’dua and the process was forced to start all over despite the millions already expended by the private investors.

    Another round of due diligence was conducted after which it was learned that there was all-round satisfaction. There were also reports that the newspapers were likely to hit the newsstands by mid-2015.

    Now we hear that after several meetings and decisions reached since August, Od’ua management is again at its evasive, snail speed-foot dragging best in giving the final go-ahead. Inside sources are hinting and an ugly development on the issue. May be OICL management is not aware that a lot of people are insinuating that the foot-dragging is because the investors have not greased some dirty palms.

    It was also alleged that some individuals are deliberately putting spanner in the works despite the heavy investments that the investors have made for some illegal reasons.

    Inside sources disclosed that at a meeting in August, representatives of both parties agreed to a timetable on the series of events that will lead to publications. Even then, the renewed timetable is now a mess as the agreements scheduled to have been signed in the middle of September is still on hold with no sign that anything positive will happen soon.

    The question now is since O’dua is not contributing a dime to the planned resuscitation but will rather earn royalty and rent in addition to providing the much needed jobs in the region, why is the management foot dragging on the issue?

    Is it this lackadaisical attitude that led to the downswing in business operations of O’dua with most of its hitherto thriving business nose diving?

    –Banjomo, a social commentator, wrote in from Lagos

  • Muhammadu Buhari’s democratic rebirth

    Muhammadu Buhari’s democratic rebirth

    Pulling Nigerians together at a time of intensifying regional, religious and ethnic friction will be a daunting task for President-elect  Gen. Muhammadu Buhari, writes William Wallis in the Financial Times.

    Nigerians with a grounding in British history have found their analogy for General Muhammadu Buhari’s epic struggle to regain power in the legend of Robert the Bruce.

    Before inflicting a humiliating defeat on the British at the battle of Bannockburn in 1314, the Scottish king drew courage from a spider, grappling to spin its web across the roof of a cave. The spider only succeeded after three attempts, inspiring the maxim: “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try, again.”

    Buhari, who is among a clutch of former generals who rose to prominence in the turbulent aftermath of Independence in 1960, first came to power in a coup in 1983. Professing himself a born-again democrat, he made three previous attempts to win it back at the ballot box, each time gaining only about half the votes he needed.

    His resounding victory last week, in the face of bounteous skulduggery, is an object lesson in perseverance and arguably one of the most significant political events on the continent since the 1994 election in South Africa brought an end to white minority rule. For the first time in Nigeria’s history, an incumbent president has been unseated by the electorate, along with the party that has governed (and often misgoverned) Nigeria since military rule ended in 1999.

    For the first time also, a sitting Nigerian President accepted with humility that he was obliged to go. Elated by the positive implications for the country’s fledgling democracy, Olusegun Obasanjo, a former president, said last week that if he were to live another life, he would choose to be a Nigerian a second time. The country, he said, had surmounted many crises since Independence. “Some people in Africa believe an incumbent government cannot be removed by the will of the people,” he added. “We have done it.”

    Obasanjo, with whom the incoming president has not always seen eye to eye, said he believed Buhari was “intelligent enough” to move Africa’s most-populous state forward. “He is a man who lives a modest life and I believe he will manage the affairs of Nigeria by and large the way he manages his own affairs.”

    Although last week’s events are unique, there is also a sense of deja vu about the general’s march to power, 30 years after he first took it in a coup. In 1983, as now, Africa’s leading oil producer was in the throes of an oil shock. A collapse in state revenues revealed how bloated government had become. Austerity beckoned, and Buhari imposed it with a “war on indiscipline” in the 20 months before he was overthrown by rival officers.

    That period, when hundreds were locked up on the mildest suspicion of fraud, earned him an image of uncompromising ruthlessness that still unsettles many. But it also earned him admirers, who believe he was overthrown by corrupt elements of his own regime just as his policies began to yield results. “If I had had another two years in office then Nigeria might be a different place today,” he says. His ousting led to a prolonged period of detention after which he divorced his first wife Safinatu, with whom he has five children.

    His second wife, Aisha, with whom he also has five children, is now the First Lady-in-waiting. The statuesque beauty of one of his daughters proved to be an electoral asset; when a photograph of her went viral, one social media commentator observed that “anyone who can produce her can produce the change we need.”

    In 2011, when Buhari last tried and failed to win power at the polls, change did not seem so attractive. Each of his previous campaigns came at a time when oil prices — on which Nigeria still depends for about 70 per cent of state revenues — were either recovering or close to their peak. His ascetic reputation was a bit of a damp squib when the country was enjoying an oil boom.

    Curbing the excesses of the political class — the centrepiece of the lean, 72-year-old’s campaign — has a more urgent ring now the oil price has fallen. So has his pledge to tackle the spread of Boko Haram terrorists in the North.

    Buhari is something of a throwback, one of a group of generals and coup plotters from yester-year who have remained influential ever since. Their concern, when they joined the army as young men in the 1960s, was to find a way for the predominately Muslim North to catch up with the much more developed and mostly Christian south. That quandary persists today.

    Born in the northern state of Katsina, in the dusty brush of the Sahel, Buhari now sits atop a complex coalition that helped win him support in the South, where in the last election, he garnered almost none. He has softened and developed a twinkling sense of humour, as transpired in a recent interview I ran out of paper. “Not ideal for a journalist,” he quipped.

    Despite the broad alliance he has built, pulling Nigerians together at a time of intensifying regional, religious and ethnic friction will be a daunting task. Some southern Christians, conscious of how pockets of their region have modernised and taken off in recent years, remain uneasy that the presidency is shifting back north.

    “This is a major northern revival which will take a while for the others to wake up and recognise,” says a contemporary of Buhari’s who served in several governments. “When they do they are going to feel very uncomfortable. Much will depend on how he exercises power and how sensitive he is to national unity.”

                                                                                                    •Culled from Financial Times

  • A rebirth of our consciousness

    Memory is so vital and delicate. Its preciousness makes it a needed feature of a computer and a vital part of the human physiology. Physically, people ‘forget’. Digitally, files ‘delete’ from memory. People ‘recall’ after gaining consciousness of what transpire around them but electronically, the computer ‘restores’, that is, to bring back lost information.

    It is natural that humans grow from babies to adults and then come of age. During these stages of human development, we often find ourselves doing things that may hurt or please those around us.

    A question is put forward: “why on earth will someone live as though he is a computer system that needs to be refreshed always before it works properly? If I would say, he’d been affected by a virus.

    Judas’ brain, perhaps storage unit, is almost full to the brim with little or no memory to save information and limited processing speed. Thoughts of his present condition, secrets, financial status, and health weigh him down. Other peoples’ secrets are all enclosed in his memory. Always drunk and on hard drugs, he is often haunted by grievances and problems of all sort. The evil deeds he has committed are boomeranging. Feelings for others he could not express. He can’t think straight any more. Sometimes, he acts as though he is going crazy, with weird styles of dressing.

    Life to Judas has been turbulent like the sea waters. His habits are spiral in nature just like the spring. His subconscious has reached its breaking point and elastic limit almost exceeded. With dirty deals been executed, he has trampled upon lives to pave way for him to get to the top. Always fighting, he is full of envy and anger. Fear of being caught visiting diabolic places plagues him. Words, he could not utter. Plans and dreams have been dashed away.

    Properties worth millions he has stolen from both the church and from people have become an eternal yoke on him. The bribes he has given and collected; the countless lies been told; the hearts he has broken due to his lustful desires pretending to be in love; the unredeemed pledges; unpaid credits; images and notices declaring him wanted have taken a toll on him. All this thoughts and deeds in form of a virus are all encrypted in him.

    On this breezy and cold morning, Judas thought to himself within some micro-seconds. And he recalls the words of a preacher saying: “make way for the Son of God is coming soon”. He then exclaims in a low tone and said: “I wish I have no memory of all my life.”

    All this traits demonstrated by Judas, who is a young man, describes the situation of the Nigerian youth. Through a rebirth of our consciousness, instincts, beliefs, character, school of thoughts and attitude, our youths needs to wake up to the reality of their time. This is to re-awaken the youths to the challenge that much work is waiting for us to do and bring about the desired positive change in policy, governance, moral decadence of our dear country Nigeria. This will, nevertheless, create a new Nigeria that is void of bad governance, corruption, tribalism, drug abuse, religious sectionalism, cultism, nepotism, terrorism, unemployment, lawlessness and above all youthful exuberance.

    To start with, the change begins with the individual then collectively with the immediate family and largely with the community and by extension the country as a whole.

    Finally, in the last quote by our beloved literary genius, Prof. Chinua Achebe, in his book “There was a country”, he said: “…the task before the Nigerian youth is to transform this country Nigeria to a nation”. As Prof. Dora Akunyili would rather say: “Good People, Great Nation.”

     

    Benjamin, just finished from Physics Education, UNIAGRIC Makurdi

     

  • Nigeria at 52: Pathways to sustainable democracy and rebirth

    Nigeria at 52: Pathways to sustainable democracy and rebirth

    It sounds strange biologically and indeed laughable, if not unfortunate, to speak of rebirth of a country at 52 still gappling with the intricacies of how to even leave together; but democracy and the rule of law is not a finished product that is graffated into society rather its an evolutionary process that grows with the growth of a society, a dynamic task in constant progress (or sometimes even regress). Adopting democracy ,therefore, has not been an easy task, especially for Africans given their cultures and societies often steeped in hierarchical traditions, patrilineal dogmas and deeply religious traditions. Besides, the challenge of dialectics of two publics ( see Eke primordial and civic realms) on account of colonization. wherein an African or a Nigerian belongs to both realm he is not governed by the same morality or value template due to greater attachment to the primordial realm, the civic public or governmental realm is where you are expected take from(or steal) to saturate the primordial realm unlike the Europeans that has loyalty only to the civic public. The orientation of successive leaders that took over from the generation of those who fought for and secured independence and left governace frameworks that were abandoned with atttendant crises that have made national unity, progress and development difficult if not impossible. The difficulty of the task is universal, for in truth when we consider that; “the process of democracy building took between 27 and 256 years in Britain, between 78 and 168 years in France, between 30 and 80 years in Germany, between 30 and 70 years in the USA, and about 50 years in Japan (Karl-Heinz Nassmacher, 2003), then we must not only dwell on our difficulties, but collectively identify and confer through election authority on those Nigerians that are ready to make the required sacrifices that would turn around our development trajectory because the only thing that has seperated Nigeria from the rest of the developed world is leadership.At 52 we should only take measured satisfaction on our collective current efforts and how to sustain them, that we are alive to inspire hope, courage, find solace and ponder upon the pathways for future progress.

    At such times like this,we must remind ourselves of our own history as a people that given that we have been brought together by the event of 1914 that was not an act of God but the action of a human being, Lord Lugard, we should be together as a country for mutually assured prosperity and not Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). While this may be easy to say, the task of development which brings about prosperity has not been fully defined globally, some have defined development strictly on the terms of economic growth, using indicators like the productivity, employment rate and similar ratios and averages, while others have criticized this narrow perception of development, insisting that such averages do not tell the full picture preferring social indices which show not only the summation of economic growth but also the relationship of the people in a country with themselves, the degree of satisfaction and happiness derived from living in the total environment, as well as the safety and security of the people who live and thrive within the country

    At the milestone of five decades and two years, we are afforded another opportunity to define for ourselves, what the value of development means to us as a country, is it prosperity for our individual selves and our close friends? Is it prosperity for our specific tribes, religious groups and gender, age group or club members at the expense of others? This understanding is a crucial building block for our wellbeing because, we may strive, fight and even go to war for the sake of prosperity but never attain it because even when we are prosperous we may never know except we have set a benchmark to remind ourselves that indeed we had a goal and we can recognize when we get there.

    To define the goals of development for our country, therefore, we need to define what we mean by development, agree upon basic rules and pathways to get there, accept that as human beings which do not always find similar satisfaction in the same things at all times and on the same occasion regarding each and every sphere of endevours, we are bound to have differences in appreciation and satisfaction on the pathways to get to our common goal of development, such agreements cannot come within one day, one year or even ten years, and as we have learnt in our national case, may even be difficult to achieve even after 52 years given the enclave and backward mentality of a few but powerful elites on account of power relations.

    More important, to reach the goal of a common understanding for our development, we have to cast our consensual agreements in plastic, so that we may be able to remind those who which to drag us all from that part of development that we have a common compact. I use the term casting in plastic rather than casting in stone, because in practice, laws even national compacts in the form of constitutions are made for the requirements of some time frames, and practices over time may prove some laws impracticable or we may find that the benefits of using such laws are not worth the cost to society, and therefore accept that they need to be changed, modified or scrapped, these are not unusual but important baby-steps in the journey to democratic consolidation.

    We are at the threshold of such a moment in our country, for having practiced democracy in bits and pieces for sometime before 1983 and briefly in 1992- 1993, we have learnt useful lessons ( and here I hope I speak for all of us) about what works and what is unhealthy for our national development, we are all agreed that the process of transition of power, how it empowers or dis-empowers voters who decide what type of leadership they want is at the heart of our development goals, because when the right people decide development policy and take the views and sensitivities of Nigerians into consideration, we are likely to find peaceful progress, but how we implement that agreement is still ongoing.

    Agreeing on common things is not often an easy exercise between people even people with similar backgrounds, let alone a country with very much diversity like Nigeria, this is why rather than agreement, people use words like consensus, rapprochement and understanding. And for this reason matters which affects us in common need not be a win-lose affair, to exemplify this type of mind-set, we have recently witnessed budget issues between the executive and legislative arms of government. while it is understandable that budgets are issues of allocation of funds to interests and priorities, at the core of the process is the matter of common development, hence trade-offs and understanding should inform such national issues that are fundamental to development. For a budget is actually a financial plan, a forecast of intentions and how funds should be allocated to them to attain progress, even though it is initiated by the executive, modified and approved by the legislature, and the Act interpreted by the judiciary in cases of legal uncertainty when necessary, the impacts and benefits of a budget are not confined to any of these three arms of governance, these impacts and benefits are intended for the whole country, so if there are losers and gainers, the Nigerian people and the Nigerian nation, their gains and loss should inform the decisions of the people in any of these arms of governance, which is why having a common understanding of the issue of what development means to all of us is crucial.

    Current discussions have been focused on how and what we accept as a compact on the pathways to such development through a constitutional review. At the stage of 52 years, we must therefore be able to diverge from the failed pathways of the past 51 years, including the use of methods which we have repeated often and which bore very little fruit by way of development, hence in the next 50 years, our focus should start with three priorities on the pathway to consolidating our democratic quest, one is to agree and return Nigeria to development framework of federalism with all its essential features as given to us by our forefathers , Awolowo, Ahmadu Bello, Zik and others whose periods of leadership remained the golden era of development in our history, a consensual definition and goal for development, we should find common grounds to reach an agreement on the basics of a constitutional arrangement to strengthen federalism without destroying the strengths of unity in diversity and finally is the need to settle ones and for all time the electoral mechanisms for peaceful transition of power starting with an accepted methodologies and severe sanction for violation of party primaries election of candidates internal democracy laws within the parties given that political parties are the building bricks of internalized democratic culture in a society. In settling the process of transition we must keep in mind that there are 812 executive positions and over 1000 legislative positions including state and local council legislative positions which are contested politically in Nigeria, therefore, no one position or office is worth destroying the whole superstructure in other to have and assert it for just a particular time-frame. May God bless and save Nigeria as we should work more and pray less because God almighty has given us what is required to be one of the greatest countries in the world but leadership is what seperates us and remained our challenge not absence of prayers.

     

    Igini is the REC, Cross River State.

     

  • I’m for economic rebirth, says Oke

    The Ondo State Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) governorship candidate, Chief Olusola Oke, has said his administration would usher in an economic rebirth of the state, if elected in the October 20 election.

    Oke spoke at the Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ) Press Centre in Akure, the state capital, during an interactive forum organised by the chairmen of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) of Adekunle Ajasin University, Akungba-Akoko (AAUA) chapter and the Academic Staff Union of Polytechnics (ASUP) of Rufus Giwa Polytechnic (RUGIPO), Owo, chapter.

    The forum was under the auspices of Intellectual Platform.

    The former PDP Legal Adviser said Ondo State needs an economic rebirth.

    He said the state should have a deliberate economic agenda that would create opportunities, generate employment and ensure a secured future against likely external financial crisis.

    AAUA ASUU Chairman Dr Busuyi Mekusi, and his RUGIPO counterpart, Mr Olabamiji Kumuyi, said members of the academic community need to participate in the process that would bring quality leadership.