The Nation Newspaper

Tag: Still

  • Still on the Port Harcourt Four

    Still on the Port Harcourt Four

    SIR: Is history fair? No tale told by man is ever accurate just as history is mostly told from the perspective of the victor. In the circumstance, how can history be fair? History can be fair and a tale told by any man can come close to perfection if careful effort is made to examine issues involved so as to give sides in the subject matter a chance.

    The Aluu killing of the Port Harcourt Four has been an over flogged issue in recent times. The Jungle Justice meted out on four undergraduate of the University of Port Harcourt has boiled the emotion of many within and outside the country. Many have condemned the people of Aluu for the senseless murder of four young Nigerians. Without doubt the killing is unjustifiable!

    The Aluu killing has soon become an historic event with a lot of lessons for mankind: young or old. The victims in the historic event were accused of stealing phones and computers and they were tried by an incompetent court that lacks jurisdiction. The illegal jury of irate mob found them guilty as charged and passed the verdict of death sentence on them. Legal principles were violated: as the accused were not given fair hearing, neither were they allowed to employ the services of a lawyer. Who is surprised? No right thinking person is. Because, it was a kangaroo court that tried them.

    In all honesty, in the Port Harcourt four scenario, the victims of this historic event are fast emerging as the victors of the drama. If the historic even that transpired in Aluu would offer any meaningful instruction, one must look at the issue from the perspective of the vanquished. Then will history be fair.

    Five young men embarked on a journey. They left their campus by 5.00am to pull debt from a debtor in Aluu. One of the five was owed the debt, the other four were carried along to put pressure on the debtor or threaten him to pay his debt. This kind of odyssey is not new or strange. The strange thing here is that, it was an odyssey of no return. As they got to their destination, knocked on the door and demanded the door be opened; one thing could have been clear in their mind, “we will collect our money or….”Opening the door, the house holder would have been shocked to see his creditor accompanied by four other people whom he does not know. In the circumstance, he would be scared. His thoughts could be assumed,” have they come to kill me”. In his panic state, he must have shouted for help. Calling his uninvited guests thieves as a eleventh hour measure to save his life.

    In view of the poor security situation in Aluu at that point in time, what would you have done, if you were paid such a surprise visit? The lessons from this historic odyssey of no return are many. What prevents them from taking the matter to the police? They assumed the role of the enforcer of the law. One was even alleged to be with a gun: which aided his escape and as such the whole truth of the historic event could come to light.

    The lesson is obvious, youths must guard against blind followership. They should learn to act based on reason. Guard against peer pressure and never forget parental advice in a hurry.

    Jungle justice is not new in world history. The Aluu killing was therefore not the first in that line. Its popularity is due to the publicity given to the barbaric act. History helps us study past event so as to be able to understand the present and be able to act wisely in the future. There are definitely many lessons we all can learn from this journey of no return. History is a teacher you ignore at your own detriment.

     

    • Williams Orukpe

    Lagos.

  • Still on the Constitution and bad workmen

    Still on the Constitution and bad workmen

    Among the usual mixed reactions this column gets, that from one, Mike Oyeleke, to last week’s piece on what I obviously considered our wrong-headed belief that the sure-fire solution to the country’s problems is to fix its Constitution, looked like a most logical rebuttal of my thesis.

    For Oyeleke, whose reaction is reproduced below, I was obviously wrong to blame Nigerian politicians for quarrelling with our Constitution. They are, he says, right to do so because the country’s Constitution as the principal tool for its development is defective and in dire need of fixing.

    The gentleman’s point of view is likely to resonate well with advocates of Sovereign National Conference; they seem to believe convoking an SNC to fix our Constitution is the panacea to our problems. It is hard, I believe, to find a more simplistic thinking on how to solve Nigeria’s problems.

    True, our Constitution is defective and in need of fixing; it is a wrong reading of my piece last week to assume I did not think it is defective. After all, nothing man-made is, by definition, perfect because Man himself is imperfect.

    My argument was simple; warts and all, if Nigerians had kept faith with their Constitution their country would never have been in the terrible mess in which it is. To quote one of the respondents to my article in question whose response I did not reproduce here, one, Ogbuba Gabriel who said he is an engineer, “A good worker can mend a crack with a bad tool to some extent.” I, for one, couldn’t agree more.

    By the same token, even with the best tool available, no positive result can ever be achieved with the kind of bad faith Nigerian politicians have demonstrated in upholding the country’s Constitution in their politics.

    The monumental corruption and waste that have been exposed in the country’s oil subsidy regime is, for example, not the fault of the country’s Constitution. Neither is the Constitution to blame for the monumental “mismanagement and misapplication” of the country’s ecological fund – to use the words of the Senate Public Accounts Committee which recently said it has discovered N400 billion of the fund had been used in the last 10 years to buy such creature comforts like presumably expensive vehicles for public officials rather than for protecting and improving our environment. No doubt if half, or even less, of this huge amount – and chances are the corruption and waste was understated – had been spent on dredging our rivers and streams and generally on safeguarding our environment, the flood disaster we have witnessed this year all over the country, which has claimed hundreds of lives and thousands of livelihoods, would have been avoided.

    Again, it is not the fault of the Constitution that, as one of my respondents said, our presidential system has proved prohibitively expensive. The Constitution is not to blame, for instance, for the decision by our federal legislators to fix their own wages and allowances and keep us totally in the dark about the size of those wages and allowances. On the contrary, the Constitution couldn’t have been more explicit than it was about the conflict of interest in allowing public servants to fix their own remuneration.

    In these and all other cases of corruption and waste, there are sufficient Constitutional guidelines to stop abuse. There are also sufficient guidelines on how to punish abuse – and reward compliance. The problem for our country is that these guidelines have mostly been observed only in the breach. The problem is also that hardly does anyone get punished when the guidelines are breached. Instead our reward and punishment system seems to put a high premium on wrong doing and on self-service, as has been glaringly demonstrated by the country’s thoroughly discredited National Honours awards.

    By all means let us correct the flaws in our Constitution. But if we truly want our country to develop we must approach its amendment with the full knowledge of, and respect for, the fact that a rule is not worth the paper it is written on if, as is obviously the case in Nigeria, it can be disregarded with impunity, especially by those entrusted with the power and authority to ensure compliance with it.

    Talking about the importance of our politicians leading by example as the way out of our national decay, I witnessed a small but symbolically mighty example of it last week in Ekiti State when, on a visit to its governor, the youthful John Kayode Fayemi with my publisher friend, Chief Ikechi Emenike, he asked us to join his convoy on a trip from Ado-Ekiti, the state capital, to Ekiti East Local Government for a town square meeting with its people on next year’s budget.

    The first thing that struck me was that his convoy was a short five or six vehicle long, with himself and his commissioners and aides that accompanied him in a bus. That was a far cry from your typical governor’s convoy.

    However, what struck me even more was that the convoy actually obeyed traffic lights within the town, had no siren and did not disrupt the traffic on the highway all the way to its destination.

    It is small examples of leadership by example like this, much more than our proclivity in amending our Constitution at the drop of the hat, that will make the big difference in our struggle to become a peaceful, stable and prosperous nation.

     

    FEEDBACK

    Re Constitutional amendment: a bad workman…

    Sir,

    The tools the Nigerian politicians work with are not original tools. Rather they are working with corrupted tools. Whereas in America the senate president is the vice president, in Nigeria we have a vice president separate from the senate president. Since the tool is corrupted so will there be complaints by those who use the tools. Shouldn’t the office of the attorney general be separated from that of the minister of justice? Shouldn’t each federating state have its own constitution and its own police? Should the National Assembly members determine their pay? Bad workmen, bad tools.

    Mike Oyeleke, +2348162441631

     

    Sir,

    Thank you for your very interesting article: Constitutional amendments: A bad workman… This is just to correct a small mistake. You stated that Major-General Aguiyi Ironsi abolished the Independence Constitution. That assertion is factually incorrect. The Independence Constitution is the 1960 constitution. But there was another constitution in 1963. It is called the Republican constitution. It was the one abolished by Major-General Ironsi.

    Hon Samaila Mohammed, Jos

     

    Sir,

    I agree with you that the constitution do not constitute far greater problem in Nigerian affairs than the behaviour of our politicians. However, there is no doubting the fact that some sections of the present constitution need to be amended. And while the paramount condition for our national progress is change in attitude and behaviour, I also think that there is need to jettison this costly presidential system for a more cost effective parliamentary one. Unfortunately our legislators won’t support such move because they are only interested in feathering their nests with our collective wealth.

    Kingley Aduga, 08133071697

     

    Sir.

    Amend the constitution of Nigeria one million times it will not solve our problems. This is because those who are to protect and enforce will be ones that will work against it.

    Dr. John Ogbadu

    Sir,

    You will no doubt support that the present constitutional status quo be maintained given that your part of the world is unfairly favoured by the document. Yoruba speaking people of Kogi State, for instance, are treated like slaves by Igala colonialists who believe the state was a gift to them by (General) Ibrahim B. Babangida! Are you saying in all honesty and sincerity that they should continue to groan under such constitutional bondage? It is definitely going to be costlier in the long run to perpetuate such constitutional injustice, cheating and unfairness which may breed new militants and boko haramites.

    Musa Bakare

    +2348036351937

     

    Sir,

    As usual, you got your dates mixed up. Murtala was assassinated in 1976, not 1975.

     

    S.K. Mustapha

    +2348034235782

    Maiduguri

    I stand corrected. MKH

     

     

     

     

  • Still on Nigeria@52: Where is the love? The rights of Women at work; Police palaver

    Still on Nigeria@52: Where is the love? The rights of Women at work; Police palaver

    Nigeria or at least the electorate is still searching for a truly great selfless Nigerian with the love of Nigeria and the love of Nigerians as the cornerstone of his or her presidential policy thrust. As we ‘celebrate’ 52 years let us ‘cerebrate’ on the huge lack of achievement during that time compared with God-given resources, mineral, manpower and mental. If Ghana had a 100th of what we had, imagine where Ghana and Ghanaians would be now. We are also constantly reminded to look at Indonesia where imaginative leadership motivated by a deep love of Indonesia and Indonesians resulted in that Asian tiger riding on palm oil plantations originating from Nigeria. So we may be one year older, but are we one year better or one year wiser?

    The idea that the federal budget is for stealing needs a change. An anniversary is a good time to swear renewed allegiance and oaths to the country and citizenry. Of course they have been sworn but did they mean anything beyond photo-op for the paparazzi and yawning time for local channel viewers?

    I join millions of fellow Nigerians to apologise to our female police, rank and file, for the law that forbade them to marry or have children for three years after joining up and needing more than automatic permission to marry. Perhaps such a law exists throughout many uniformed and civil service institutions and even some banks et cetera may have such secret policies. I hate to think how many of them were forced to compromise themselves with immoral senior officers in order to get that ‘Permission To Marry’ stamp. In Nigeria nothing is as it seems and exploitation of employees is seen to be a right for the ‘authority figures’. They see nothing wrong with such bestial behaviour as ‘that was what so-and-so did in the ‘glorious past’, so why should they be any better?’ Nigerians will exploit every loophole and this is why we need much more good high level monitored policing from a better equipped, better focused police service than is available at present. Our police service must join the 21st century police services in many areas including human rights and employees’ rights. Giving birth is a national service –hence maternity leave. Some of the police stations are unworthy of the name with no facilities or amenities for the police- male and especially, female.

    The old standard Nigeria Police station should be re-designed with a leaf taken from South African Police stations, though the South African Police let Africa down by creating Soweto Two by shooting 44 miners and then accusing the miners of murder under an old obnoxious apartheid law. Police equipment referred to above includes every police station utilising locally available IT know-how with computerising of the police station and digital cameras to record crime scene and detained suspects for criminal face recognition records and fingerprints to avoid the Ibori incident, intelligence and weapons.

    Every policeman should have a pre-paid cell phone. This ‘no marry’ is blatantly discriminatory as it did not forbid men from doing the same. In these days of men developing cold feet over marriage for financial and other reasons, such a law complicates an already difficult situation further. Let us remember that reproducing is a national responsibility which keeps the population steady or growing. This obnoxious rule should have been thrown out years ago by the Police Service Commission and must be thrown out by the NASS if it has not already done so. It is as bad as the old Maternity Leave Law which gave ‘Six weeks before and six weeks after delivery’ under which most Nigerian mothers in employment would lose days and weeks if she gave birth earlier than was predicted by her Last Menstrual Period (LMP) or did not start leave early enough. Most women have always desired to work longer to around 36 weeks so as to get about 8-10 weeks with the baby post-delivery before having to send them to creche or give them up to a nanny at home. It was an avenue for extortion from the helpless women by unscrupulous doctors who had to sign the maternity leave forms especially for civil servants. I personally fought for years, and successfully, to get the Maternity Leave Law to be a consolidated to read ‘12 weeks maternity leave, regardless of the date of delivery’. Unfortunately some retrogressive elements in the federal and state governments are still living in the past and insisting on cancelling any leave not used fully if the delivery comes before six weeks into the maternity leave. By using the ’12 weeks consolidated Maternity Leave’ we were able to eliminate frustration of the mothers, a mountain of paperwork as the date the mother wanted was when the leave started and fraud from medical personnel colluding for money to alter maternity dates. The women in NASS and state assemblies should fight to ensure that the ’A Pregnant Woman is Entitled To 12 weeks Consolidated Maternity Leave’ is what is being practiced in their areas. Enough of cheating women. Women must demand their rights to pregnancy and full three months maternity leave. For Police or the public, ‘Pregnancy is a National Service’ lasting much longer than nine months and still too many fellow Nigerian women die trying to complete this service. What will Nigeria@53 bring? Is there any ‘Love for Nigeria’ out there?