I am the trouble with Nigeria, yes I am!

I have come today to make a confession. I am the trouble with Nigeria. I see things around me going wrong and say nothing. Is it fear? Cowardice? Lack of concern? Ignorance? Whatever it is, I am the trouble with Nigeria. I am past 18 years in age and I do not bother to find out when and where voter registration and the updating of the electoral roll is being done. I have long concluded that my vote will never count, yet I now and again murmur over poor governance. And when I am finally ‘persuaded’ to register to vote, I join the queues for the wrong reasons; forgetting that it is as I make my bed that I would lay on it. I vote on sentiments and inducements, yet expect performance. I am the quintessential ostrich that would, on sighting the approaching storm, bury my head in the ground even when my body remains exposed over-ground for all to see. I am the trouble with Nigeria. I pay no taxes, drive on the wrong side of the road, honk needlessly and expect to live in a great society where all systems work seamlessly. I accept bribes. And give some also. I cut corners, wait for hand-outs, fail to attend Parents Teachers Association (PTA) meetings for my children and wards; despise street and neighbourhood association convocations and yet wonder why the entire nation is not working; why great leaders are not being elected into office; and why the average politician is not any better than the motor park urchin that, back in the day, could not put his sums together properly. I am the trouble with Nigeria. I received bad education and I’m doing nothing about it going forward. I do not host a blog or write letters to the editor. I carry out my tasks and assignments perfunctorily. I impact nobody, encourage nobody, protect nobody, defend nobody, inspire nobody; yet expect to be in high spirits myself; I am the trouble with Nigeria. I see my neighbour’s children taking wrong turns, and I say thank God mine are doing better; I see ebola ravage the country next door and I heave a sigh of relief that it is not my problem at all. I get a contract to fix the road where I live; ‘it is my share of the national cake,’ I exhale; my Jeep will get me through the potholes even when they expand! I am indeed the trouble with Nigeria. I am the son-of-the-soil (really, totally fouled up) who sells the same plot of land to six different sets of land seekers. I hawk and dispense fake drugs. I write examinations for willing-to-pay candidates. I rape defenseless children. I cheat on my wife without blinking. I violate the laws of the land without flinching. I set the wrong example for succeeding generations. I am surely the trouble with Nigeria I will not do ‘menial’ jobs in Nigeria, but can ‘hustle’ them when I get to ‘Yankee.’ I throw empty cans, fruit peels and food wrappings out of moving vehicles and wonder why the country is so dirty. I am the trouble with Nigeria. I follow after God and obey His word but only in the parts that are convenient for me. I have ready excuses for all of my failings and live in denial over my own contribution to ‘the package.’ I wear a mask going through my day; here a smile, there a grin, but none of them ankle-deep. I take living as a winner-grab-all game: ‘you are not smart when you lose!’ I am the trouble with Nigeria. I have relatives and kinsmen who I know and have ample evidence of the fact that they are currently looting and despoiling our national patrimony. And rather than reprimand or distance myself from them, I ogle up to them, fawn over them and encourage them to ‘go on soun’ in the hope that as they grab more, some of the spoils would ‘drop for me.’ ‘Is it not our turn?’ ‘Fada!’ I am the trouble with Nigeria. I can recite the litany of problems with the country even without being prompted. They are right here on my palm! I know when they started and how to end them. Trouble is, I am not ready, and will do nothing to begin to practically reverse them; one step at a time. I am truly the trouble with Nigeria but could also be the solution if I want to. It has been my choice this far, and it still is even as I pen this confessional. (Boy, am I already feeling better with this load off my chest!) *Initially published on: http://www.hallmarknews.com/i-am-the-trouble-with-nigeria-yes-i-am/

What manner of man is GEJ ?

In our weekly editorial conferences, I find myself once in a while having to make very strong statements on the non-performance of President Goodluck Jonathan and with my CV on the desk some are puzzled as to why such critique should be coming from a fellow South southerner. Well, the fact of the matter is that yours truly is at heart one colour-blind Nigerian who wants the best for all of the citizens of the country no matter whose ox is gored and who, to paraphrase the world-famous Rivonia declaration, believes that Nigeria ‘belongs to and should serve the best interests of all of her peoples who dwell in it.’ For him therefore, the issues are quite clear. It is about whether the incumbent administration understands the meaning of Nigeria, the nation’s historical purpose and its consequential role in it. It is okay for a government to repair roads and pay salaries of its staffers. But in all honesty, every reasonable administration must do those. Dangote Cement does not claim to have grown because it sells a few bags of cement. The managers of Diamond bank do not claim success because they have paid their staff salaries. These are to be expected and there are no plaudits for the normal. What counts for success then would be whether the organisation has formulated and understood its vision and mission and established firm timelines for the achievement of identified and spelt out goals and objectives. And returning to Nigeria, the issue is critically about leadership understanding and actualizing the vision and mission of the nation. For the tribe of micro-politicians straddling our space today, Nigeria is largely a honeypot to be drooled over. That is tragic but it is the crux of the matter. This is because; this is a country that installed modern television before the Western European nations of Spain and Portugal. It is a country that Time magazine had - on account of the achievement of its ‘limited self-government indigenous leaders’ in the years immediately preceding independence in 1960 – confidently affirmed was going to be a world-beater. Alas. It is indeed very painful then that five clear decades after that forecast, we have missed it in every area where it matters even as liliputians today run our lives. Condolences, Okigbo would have written. For a country that called the bluff of the British, Americans, French, Portuguese and Spaniards when they were aiding and abetting the continuing perpetration of colonialism and racial discrimination in parts of Africa in the 1970s, nationalizing their assets and compelling them to draw up expedited timetables for the total decolonization of the continent, it is really very sad that we are today so blest (apologies to Ayi Kwei Armah). To be sure, our current state of visionary statis manifests in different forms. Over 200 Nigerian citizens are abducted and rather than promptly order their rescue, for weeks, taxpayer-funded state institutions and officials fall over themselves to hush up the evidence! Almost a half year after, the girls, parents, community, nation and world lament the saga of the #Chibok girls. The Chinese and Gabonese turn back our players from participating in competitions to which they had been duly invited on grounds of their having been contaminated by a ‘chicken virus’ that the likes of Professor Eni-Njoku of blessed memory would have quickly brought under wraps. To add insult to injury, there is indeed no evidence in the public domain that the ambassadors of the offending nations have been summoned to take protest letters to their home governments or that they have been surcharged for visible and invisible costs incurred in those unfortunate diplomatic spats. And we have leaders! In this season of untoward parodies, can someone please #BringBackMurtalaMuhammed of the ‘Africa has come of age’ fame? We must indeed be so sorely blessed in the leadership arena when high- risk alleged felons find themselves comfortably ensconced in bilateral delegations convened to discuss how to avert even more felonies in the land. It is indeed a sad day for Nigeria in the leadership circuit. Meanwhile there are critical issues begging to be addressed. In 21st century Nigeria, cattle herders and crop farmers clash by the week because no one has the good sense to inaugurate a regime of ranching. Tankers and trucks daily wear out what is left of our roads in addition to engendering more than their fair share of road accidents because the alternative – proper, high speed, standard gauge rail development - is only campaign rhetoric. Citizens without prepaid meters are whimsically and cavalierly (over-) invoiced even by the private buccaneers that have been handed over the power distribution infrastructure. For example, for his private residence (not factory) in rural and sub-urban Ogun State, yours truly got a bill of 16, 000.00 for May, 6, 335.70 for July and N30, 747. 38 for August! With dwindling electricity supply, no prepaid meter supplied - even after he had paid for one four years ago - and no meter reading carried out, the superintending Ikeja DISCO simply assigned him any figures that caught their fancy! Condolences. Leaving aside even issues of grand vision, national purpose and all that, if the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria is right in its claim that the security and well-being of the citizenry is the first business of governance then the question has to be asked if the current administration has succeeded in its set goal? That, and not geographical locus, for this writer, is the first basis for scoring a government as having succeeded or not. ii Before the ink dried on the first part of this piece, the big-wigs of the ruling Peoples’ Democratic Party, almost to a man, took our discourse a little further. As widely expected, they endorsed President Goodluck Jonathan as their preferred choice to fly the party’s flag in the 2015 polls. Now he has accepted. In the process also, they made this columnist’s task easier. As it is now apparent to all, the current leadership crisis in the land is in a sense therefore bigger than Jonathan. It is the point we tried to make a few weeks ago that it is indeed a bigger PDP crisis. That in the midst of such prevailing social statis and system-wide dislocation, the ruling party is rubberstamping its incumbent points to the fact that 16 years into its holding the baton, the party does not have the answers that, we the people, demand of our leaders at this time in our national life. But does this exculpate the President from personal responsibility in this disappointing saga? Should we just say it is system failure and let him be? Where is the place for individual action, initiative, vision and leadership? Was it not the same Nigerian system that Murtala Muhammed turned around to score very profound goals in the course of his short-lived administration? Was it not the same system that the Buhari-Idiagbon team worked to get some of the results that they secured? Was it also not a system that Gorbachev worked to reform the decadent Soviet system? No sirs, there is a role for President Jonathan to go beyond the ‘chop-make-i-chop’ construct that at the foundation is the soul of the PDP. That he has failed to do so this far makes it even tougher for him even as his party is presently setting him up, as others before him, for the verdict of history. Again, it is fully within the President’s remit to run for a second term as he wishes. But it is also fits within his present job description to patriotically confront the Boko Haram threat without providing any soft landing for some alleged backers of the sect that are his friends. It is equally his brief to run an administration that would not ‘wobble and fumble’ over a simple issue as schools’ resumption dates! It is his remit to not tie the hands of investigators by going to publicly identify with alleged violators of building codes that have resulted in the deaths of scores of innocent people. It is his task to fight corruption, cronyism, and several other challenges in the land that are simply begging for a touch of leadership, real leadership. I take the position I take because the President’s performance on the job has very direct implications on my person and my generations going forward. I am worried for my living, my children and my country. Yes, Goodluck Ebele Jonathan has the presidential seat, but to paraphrase the accomplished African American poet-raconteur, Langston Hughes, ‘I too am Nigerian!’ And so, his carrying on with the job and his aspiration for a second term has to take into consideration my own security and right to aspire for a decent living in the land of my birth. This is in addition to the well-being of my children and fellow countrymen. And if we are to take a lesson in politics 101, this precisely is why the Office of President exists! Sadly, the current holder of the office signposted from the beginning that he really did not have a handle on things. But we hoped he would learn and grow up. Properly speaking, he has not. His immediate post-election cabinet composition was not only most awful, but even when vacancies periodically showed up, there was so much dithering over finding and naming replacements and even when they were finally named, it was largely to use a Nigerianspeak,‘the same of the same!’ Requested to publicly declare his assets as a symbolic move that would help ginger the anti-corruption war and stave the very high rate of anticipatory assets declaration by political players who file reports of assets that they intend to acquire while in office as assets they already have at the time of entering office, he dismissed it with a wave of the hand, mumbling obtuse excuses like ‘personal privacy’ and ‘our culture.’ Your Excellency sir, goldfish have no hiding place! And there is more. At the peak of a ravaging Ebola crisis, Mr President approves the summary dismissal of 16, 000 resident doctors! And their crime? They had dared to take part in a strike calling attention to the poor state of the medical system; a system that days ago could not provide succour for my egbon, Dimgba Igwe as good Samaritans battled for four hours to find an ambulance, oxygen mask, a surgeon and a hospital to attend to him. The man died and of course the Presidency has dutifully commiserated with his family! In the midst of a national search for the sponsors of the rampaging Boko Haram sect, former Governor Modu Sherriff Ali, an alleged patron, and one whom the Department of State Security recently affirmed was being investigated, is ensconced cosily in a ‘chance’ diplomatic soiree with the Commander-in-Chief! And more specifically for those of us who hail from the Niger Delta, we have remained baffled by, what the Ijaw Youth Council spokesman, Eric Omare, a few days described as the stark reality that ‘the government and security agencies have not been able to summon the courage and political will to bring oil theft to a stop…The resultant effect of this government’s dereliction of duty and security agencies complicity in oil theft is massive despoliation of the Niger Delta environment. Today the flora and fauna of the Niger-Delta and the people’s source of living are gone.’ It is to this environment that Mr President would ultimately retire. Pity the nation, pity my people. But then I am pragmatic enough to admit that no matter his very glaring inadequacies, this President is very likely to be returned elected in 2015. At that time, we would then have no other option but to live with him in the saddle for another four years and continue to ‘look up to the hills from where our help comes.’ Good morning Nigeria.

What manner of man is GEJ ?

In our weekly editorial conferences, I find myself once in a while having to make very strong statements on the non-performance of President Goodluck Jonathan and with my CV on the desk some are puzzled as to why such critique should be coming from a fellow South southerner. Well, the fact of the matter is that yours truly is at heart one colour-blind Nigerian who wants the best for all of the citizens of the country no matter whose ox is gored and who, to paraphrase the world-famous Rivonia declaration, believes that Nigeria ‘belongs to and should serve the best interests of all of her peoples who dwell in it.’ For him therefore, the issues are quite clear. It is about whether the incumbent administration understands the meaning of Nigeria, the nation’s historical purpose and its consequential role in it. It is okay for a government to repair roads and pay salaries of its staffers. But in all honesty, every reasonable administration must do those. Dangote Cement does not claim to have grown because it sells a few bags of cement. The managers of Diamond bank do not claim success because they have paid their staff salaries. These are to be expected and there are no plaudits for the normal. What counts for success then would be whether the organisation has formulated and understood its vision and mission and established firm timelines for the achievement of identified and spelt out goals and objectives. And returning to Nigeria, the issue is critically about leadership understanding and actualizing the vision and mission of the nation. For the tribe of micro-politicians straddling our space today, Nigeria is largely a honeypot to be drooled over. That is tragic but it is the crux of the matter. This is because; this is a country that installed modern television before the Western European nations of Spain and Portugal. It is a country that Time magazine had - on account of the achievement of its ‘limited self-government indigenous leaders’ in the years immediately preceding independence in 1960 – confidently affirmed was going to be a world-beater. Alas. It is indeed very painful then that five clear decades after that forecast, we have missed it in every area where it matters even as liliputians today run our lives. Condolences, Okigbo would have written. For a country that called the bluff of the British, Americans, French, Portuguese and Spaniards when they were aiding and abetting the continuing perpetration of colonialism and racial discrimination in parts of Africa in the 1970s, nationalizing their assets and compelling them to draw up expedited timetables for the total decolonization of the continent, it is really very sad that we are today so blest (apologies to Ayi Kwei Armah). To be sure, our current state of visionary statis manifests in different forms. Over 200 Nigerian citizens are abducted and rather than promptly order their rescue, for weeks, taxpayer-funded state institutions and officials fall over themselves to hush up the evidence! Almost a half year after, the girls, parents, community, nation and world lament the saga of the #Chibok girls. The Chinese and Gabonese turn back our players from participating in competitions to which they had been duly invited on grounds of their having been contaminated by a ‘chicken virus’ that the likes of Professor Eni-Njoku of blessed memory would have quickly brought under wraps. To add insult to injury, there is indeed no evidence in the public domain that the ambassadors of the offending nations have been summoned to take protest letters to their home governments or that they have been surcharged for visible and invisible costs incurred in those unfortunate diplomatic spats. And we have leaders! In this season of untoward parodies, can someone please #BringBackMurtalaMuhammed of the ‘Africa has come of age’ fame? We must indeed be so sorely blessed in the leadership arena when high- risk alleged felons find themselves comfortably ensconced in bilateral delegations convened to discuss how to avert even more felonies in the land. It is indeed a sad day for Nigeria in the leadership circuit. Meanwhile there are critical issues begging to be addressed. In 21st century Nigeria, cattle herders and crop farmers clash by the week because no one has the good sense to inaugurate a regime of ranching. Tankers and trucks daily wear out what is left of our roads in addition to engendering more than their fair share of road accidents because the alternative – proper, high speed, standard gauge rail development - is only campaign rhetoric. Citizens without prepaid meters are whimsically and cavalierly (over-) invoiced even by the private buccaneers that have been handed over the power distribution infrastructure. For example, for his private residence (not factory) in rural and sub-urban Ogun State, yours truly got a bill of 16, 000.00 for May, 6, 335.70 for July and N30, 747. 38 for August! With dwindling electricity supply, no prepaid meter supplied - even after he had paid for one four years ago - and no meter reading carried out, the superintending Ikeja DISCO simply assigned him any figures that caught their fancy! Condolences. Leaving aside even issues of grand vision, national purpose and all that, if the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria is right in its claim that the security and well-being of the citizenry is the first business of governance then the question has to be asked if the current administration has succeeded in its set goal? That, and not geographical locus, for this writer, is the first basis for scoring a government as having succeeded or not. ii Before the ink dried on the first part of this piece, the big-wigs of the ruling Peoples’ Democratic Party, almost to a man, took our discourse a little further. As widely expected, they endorsed President Goodluck Jonathan as their preferred choice to fly the party’s flag in the 2015 polls. Now he has accepted. In the process also, they made this columnist’s task easier. As it is now apparent to all, the current leadership crisis in the land is in a sense therefore bigger than Jonathan. It is the point we tried to make a few weeks ago that it is indeed a bigger PDP crisis. That in the midst of such prevailing social statis and system-wide dislocation, the ruling party is rubberstamping its incumbent points to the fact that 16 years into its holding the baton, the party does not have the answers that, we the people, demand of our leaders at this time in our national life. But does this exculpate the President from personal responsibility in this disappointing saga? Should we just say it is system failure and let him be? Where is the place for individual action, initiative, vision and leadership? Was it not the same Nigerian system that Murtala Muhammed turned around to score very profound goals in the course of his short-lived administration? Was it not the same system that the Buhari-Idiagbon team worked to get some of the results that they secured? Was it also not a system that Gorbachev worked to reform the decadent Soviet system? No sirs, there is a role for President Jonathan to go beyond the ‘chop-make-i-chop’ construct that at the foundation is the soul of the PDP. That he has failed to do so this far makes it even tougher for him even as his party is presently setting him up, as others before him, for the verdict of history. Again, it is fully within the President’s remit to run for a second term as he wishes. But it is also fits within his present job description to patriotically confront the Boko Haram threat without providing any soft landing for some alleged backers of the sect that are his friends. It is equally his brief to run an administration that would not ‘wobble and fumble’ over a simple issue as schools’ resumption dates! It is his remit to not tie the hands of investigators by going to publicly identify with alleged violators of building codes that have resulted in the deaths of scores of innocent people. It is his task to fight corruption, cronyism, and several other challenges in the land that are simply begging for a touch of leadership, real leadership. I take the position I take because the President’s performance on the job has very direct implications on my person and my generations going forward. I am worried for my living, my children and my country. Yes, Goodluck Ebele Jonathan has the presidential seat, but to paraphrase the accomplished African American poet-raconteur, Langston Hughes, ‘I too am Nigerian!’ And so, his carrying on with the job and his aspiration for a second term has to take into consideration my own security and right to aspire for a decent living in the land of my birth. This is in addition to the well-being of my children and fellow countrymen. And if we are to take a lesson in politics 101, this precisely is why the Office of President exists! Sadly, the current holder of the office signposted from the beginning that he really did not have a handle on things. But we hoped he would learn and grow up. Properly speaking, he has not. His immediate post-election cabinet composition was not only most awful, but even when vacancies periodically showed up, there was so much dithering over finding and naming replacements and even when they were finally named, it was largely to use a Nigerianspeak,‘the same of the same!’ Requested to publicly declare his assets as a symbolic move that would help ginger the anti-corruption war and stave the very high rate of anticipatory assets declaration by political players who file reports of assets that they intend to acquire while in office as assets they already have at the time of entering office, he dismissed it with a wave of the hand, mumbling obtuse excuses like ‘personal privacy’ and ‘our culture.’ Your Excellency sir, goldfish have no hiding place! And there is more. At the peak of a ravaging Ebola crisis, Mr President approves the summary dismissal of 16, 000 resident doctors! And their crime? They had dared to take part in a strike calling attention to the poor state of the medical system; a system that days ago could not provide succour for my egbon, Dimgba Igwe as good Samaritans battled for four hours to find an ambulance, oxygen mask, a surgeon and a hospital to attend to him. The man died and of course the Presidency has dutifully commiserated with his family! In the midst of a national search for the sponsors of the rampaging Boko Haram sect, former Governor Modu Sherriff Ali, an alleged patron, and one whom the Department of State Security recently affirmed was being investigated, is ensconced cosily in a ‘chance’ diplomatic soiree with the Commander-in-Chief! And more specifically for those of us who hail from the Niger Delta, we have remained baffled by, what the Ijaw Youth Council spokesman, Eric Omare, a few days described as the stark reality that ‘the government and security agencies have not been able to summon the courage and political will to bring oil theft to a stop…The resultant effect of this government’s dereliction of duty and security agencies complicity in oil theft is massive despoliation of the Niger Delta environment. Today the flora and fauna of the Niger-Delta and the people’s source of living are gone.’ It is to this environment that Mr President would ultimately retire. Pity the nation, pity my people. But then I am pragmatic enough to admit that no matter his very glaring inadequacies, this President is very likely to be returned elected in 2015. At that time, we would then have no other option but to live with him in the saddle for another four years and continue to ‘look up to the hills from where our help comes.’ Good morning Nigeria.

2015, the PDP and the rest of us

The caption of this piece is not original, as many things in the world are not. It is a play on words from a book by the pan-Africanist, Chinweizu, and entitled, The West and the Rest of us. Yours truly recommends that you will gain much from reading it. That point made, the jury is out today on the subject of political parties, their value, differentiation, ideological content or lack of it and overall contribution to the Nigerian state today and the march of development of our people and nation. Indeed, are political parties really useful in Nigeria today? To address this point, we need to get to the roots of the matter and properly situate what political parties are and what they do. Wikipedia for example outlines that ‘a political party is an organization of people which seeks to achieve goals common to its members through the acquisition and exercise of political power.’ Central to the definition and categorization of a political party then is the assumption that it must be organised around a set of coordinate principles or ideals. Typically also, while there is general consensus that the rights of citizens may be better protected under a multi-party regime, pragmatically however, even within this framework, there is sometimes a natural shift to having one of the existing parties rising up to assume a dominant party status. Says Wikipedia of this tendency: ‘In dominant-party systems, opposition parties are allowed, and there may be even a deeply established democratic tradition, but other parties are widely considered to have no real chance of gaining power. Sometimes, political, social and economic circumstances, and public opinion are the reason for others parties' failure. Sometimes, typically in countries with less of an established democratic tradition, it is possible the dominant party will remain in power by using patronage and sometimes by voting fraud….’ Bringing it home, the Peoples’ Democratic Party, Nigeria’s leading political party has been the dominant player on the national scene now in the last seventeen years, a period that also approximates the length of time that our current republic has existed. But it is also one party that this writer would not consider joining in a hurry on account of the basic fact that it has been unable to match presence with purpose. To be sure, the emergence of the PDP in 1998 was not in itself a bad thing. The nation was in a political bind on account of the crisis that had begun with the former military President, Ibrahim Babangida’s ‘crafted democracy’ arrangement which culminated in the annulment of the results of the June 12, 1993 elections, the introduction of the short-lived Interim National Government and its subsequent supplanting by the Sani Abacha junta and later by the transitional Abdulsalami Abubakar administration. It was within this vortex of events that several leaders of the political class convened to establish the G-34 which after a while was to form the rump of the PDP. As the manifestation of a tradition of big, strong, pan-Nigerian parties, it has had its uses and still does. In the First Republic, this strand was seen in the NPC-NCNC alliance. During the Second Republic, it was expressed in the National Party with its tell-all catchphrase, One Nation, One Destiny, One God.’ And to prove that this inclination towards sustaining a big national party was not only a right-leaning expression as it was with the First and Second republics, in the short-lived Third Republic, the triumphant big, national party, the Social Democratic Party, SDP, was the vehicle through which the billionaire mogul, MKO Abiola, finally contested that election. Now it is the turn of the PDP even as the nation has returned to the era of right-leaning big, national parties in control of the dominant lever of power at the centre. It is also this position that the APC is vying to fill, and without adding much that can be said to be different in terms of grand ideas of, and commitment to change; which in part explains its Ekiti debacle. In all therefore, the big national parties basically worked within the framework of keeping the nation together, sustaining national unity and mediating geo-political intra-elite conflicts and tensions with very little being added to the grand vision of Nigeria, post-Independence. However, the challenge of today signals that the PDP needs to go beyond these. The crises of unemployment, industrialisation, Ebola, Boko Haram, declining educational standards, etc in the land today point to the critical need for a political party that would put strong and solid principles of development on the political table. After the generation of the independence crusaders and the leaders of the self-governing regions in the last years of colonial rule, we last saw something like that in the Murtala Muhammed and Buhari-Idiagbon eras, warts and all. Indeed, this is arguable, but with the benefit of hindsight and without any intention of any sort to vote for the possibility of its re-emergence, it would indeed seem that some of our most visionary developmental moments as a nation have for example been achieved during one or more of our unfortunate military interregnums. The Murtala Muhammed ‘Africa has come of Age’ era which decidedly struck the last blow at colonial rule all over the continent is in the view of this writer one such sterling moment. Since the PDP has then become for all intents and purposes our very practical one dominant-party champion, it must next give itself the task of bringing us the leader that would deliver on the promise of development. That is missing today. And that it must fix if it will be useful to all of us, failing which, like the proverbial people of Abame in Chinua Achebe’s things fall Apart, it puts itself at risk of ultimately being rejected by the very people whose interests and aspirations it had failed to properly represent.

Ebola, Sirleaf’s letter and where we lost it

President Johnson Sirleaf’s Ebola-provoked ‘letter to the world’ which was broadcast over the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) at the weekend is indeed a most agonising piece of composition. But is it really breaking news? Or to put in less arcane terms, why did West Africa, Africa and the world let its conscience get so dulled that Madam Sirleaf has literally been compelled to, like the Syro-Phoenician woman, pick up the begging bowl over a fight that we all ought to have naturally embraced from the onset as our own also? Coincidentally, Sirleaf’s letter came on the eve of Nigeria’s celebration of her WHO-sanctioned Ebola-free status. And Nigeria and Nigerians cannot by any shade of imagination be faulted for exhibiting plain relief that the Ebola scourge is safely outside our borders. Interestingly also, it took a flight from Liberia to take the virus from the distant pages where Nigeria had placed it for almost all of four decades to the hard, solid, streets of Lagos. And when it came - along with the gnawing reality that Ebola could be just an inch away - many Nigerians lived in fear and trepidation. Handshakes, hugs and other social niceties were curtailed, people looked over their shoulders and age-old habits and practices were vigorously reviewed. The Nigerian, almost everyone knows, can really be loud and gregarious. Ebola was changing who we were! So give Nigerians a break. They just want to be who they are: good, old Nigerians – who not long ago were adjudged the ‘happiest people in the world!’ Equally Nigerian also is the current disputation over who should take the largest share of the credit for killing the elephant. Is it the trackers who corralled the beast into a dead end? Or the slinger who hurled pelts at the massive animal as it ran around in circles? Or the lancer whose spear finally pierced the hulk’s jugular? Pray who killed the elephant? While Ebola’s exit from Nigeria is itself no mean achievement, there is also a sense in which it may not be the best to celebrate too loudly. Overall, the elephant has not fallen and the owners of the farmland where the battle is fiercest have practically no weapons with which to stave off the debilitating assault from the rampaging beast. See how President Sirleaf herself put it: ‘There is no coincidence Ebola has taken hold in three fragile states – Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea - all battling to overcome the effects of interconnected wars. In Liberia, our civil war ended only eleven years ago. It destroyed our public infrastructure, crushed our economy and led to an exodus of educated professionals. A country that had some 3,000 qualified doctors at the start of the war was dependent by its end on barely three dozen…. To her credit also, the hard-fighting President does not leave us without defining an exit path: ‘This fight requires a commitment from every nation that has the capacity to help – whether that is with emergency funds, medical supplies or clinical expertise…From governments to international organisations, financial institutions to NGOs, politicians to ordinary people on the street in any corner of the world, we all have a stake in the battle against Ebola. It is the duty of all of us, as global citizens, to send a message that we will not leave millions of West Africans to fend for themselves against an enemy that they do not know, and against whom they have little defence….’ This then should be where our current ‘victory’ should then be routed. Unlike in the beginning when Liberia was being bashed for ‘bringing Ebola to us,’ the truth is that we should rather focus on thanking God for his little mercies even in the face of our affliction in this saga. For the fact that unlike in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone where the virus came in through multiple animal sources in largely poverty-stricken and illiterate rural populations, it was to Nigeria’s best-resourced city, Lagos that our single entry-source, Sawyer came...for Adadevoh and the team at First Consultants…for the American Centre for Disease Control…for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation…for the Federal and State ministries of Health…for the medical and para-medical volunteers…for prayers…for the Nigerian press…for citizens who drank salt and recovered…for schools that were shut, opened and shut again…for everything! That done, we next must engage the core failing that made this possible, and this namely is the almost wholesale demise of the values that made it possible for us to communally fix problems like Ebola in times past. No matter how inconvenient it is, the Ebola challenge graphically demonstrates how low we have sunk as a people in the critical areas of communal vision, charity and pan-African brotherhood. Time was when this same Ebola-besieged sub-region and continent - which is today at the risk of postponing all of its inter-state sporting events no thanks to the Ebola panic - had leaders like Nkrumah and Murtala Muhammed who would insist that the independence of the countries which they were presiding over was meaningless without securing freedom for other fellow Africans. That was when people had something to spare. Sadly now, we are so besieged that we only live for ourselves. And this for this correspondent is the core challenge of the Sirleaf letter even as it calls us back to the bigger truth that it is in giving that we get; that it is in helping others that we are helped. This is African, this is good. And if the rest of the world joins in, it truly would be the more the merrier. But at the moment, let us commend the Lagos and Federal Governments for offering to help practically in Liberia. And here is hoping that this truly is the beginning of the resurgence of Ubuntu.

Wanted: A moratorium on crude oil production (2)

There are indeed very enormous other costs associated with the ‘oil as economic domino’ model that the country currently operates. These include oil spillage and the despoilation of the environment, criminality, banditry, piracy and illegal bunkering, the rise of an easy money culture, spiralling corruption and graft, lowering of the work ethic and indeed the incentive to work and an overall decline in productivity. The truth is that when people see that they can get things the easy way, they would not be motivated to go about their lives following what they consider to be a somewhat ‘more difficult route,’ even when for all practical intents and purposes, their greater reward and achievement is to be found there. However, it is important to address the other side of the tale, namely, what does the nation do in the short-term to address the issue of immediate revenue declines that would accompany the coming into force of our proposed moratorium on crude oil production? And then for how long should the moratorium be in place? Two quick answers can be deployed here. One, while it is true that there would be a resource strain on the nation in the short term on account of the moratorium, the point is that the hope of the gains that would emerge at the end of the day as well as a combination of deft and sincere economic management strategies and the putting in place of a staggered programme of implementation would help ameliorate the short-term challenges. For example, we could in the first instance request the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, OPEC, to progressively reduce our assigned production quotas to 75 per cent of current figures in the first year, 50 per cent in the second year and 25 per cent in the third. For the next three years after then, we could cut back further to just only 10 per cent of current production quotas which should almost exclusively be used to power local demand and needs. Two, the continuing improvement in Internally Generated Revenue, IGR, in states like Cross River, Ogun and Lagos suggests that there is indeed a basic premise for the more efficient generation of revenue and opening up of the economy countrywide if the enabling environment to drive this is put in place. Our moratorium which would reduce revenues going to states would serve then as a litmus to tighten efficiency in governance and administration at the state level which is the critical plank upon which the new and more productive economy being envisaged would be hinged. The benefits from this scheme therefore would include improved fiscal discipline across board, the development and expansion of alternative economic paths, reduced oil spills and expectedly also, agitation from local communities and a lowering of the presently denuding practice of very ferocious intra-elite contestation for more and more resources from the little that is presently being generated. In its own way, this scheme being proposed is not without precedents in our history. We have already made allusion to the First Republic where the regions grew their internal revenues better, stimulated increased development and promoted a far greater regime of transparency and scrupulous spending than we presently have today. A second reference would come from the effects of the withholding of revenues due Lagos local government councils by the then Obasanjo administration which propelled the state to take even more seriously the need to generate more and more of its own revenues outside of the Federation Account. Today, the state is a net winner for it as it generates well over 70 per cent of its revenues internally. To be most effective however, the proposed moratorium scheme must be seen for what it is. It is not a scheme to punish any section of the country. It is not a scheme to withhold revenues that should be contributed by a section of the country at this time. It is not a ‘victor or vanquished’ project. No, it is a critical economic and social imperative that would help all of the constituent parts of the nation to grow better as well as result in a regime of increased revenues across board, along with additional side benefits that include an enhanced sense of mutual respect by Nigerians for each other, a healthier environment and eco-system and an overhaul of our presently retarded work ethic. Second, the season of implementation of the moratorium would have to be supported by political reform to ensure that states control the bulk of the resources and economic activities from their areas as an incentive to getting them to explore more and more resources that lie within their power to tap. And this is where leadership from the Presidency would be most critical. For example, under the current Constitution, the President, in conjunction with the Revenue Mobilisation and Fiscal Commission is empowered to make proposals to adjust the revenue sharing formula. Equally, the Executive along with the ruling political party is also empowered to make proposals for constitutional reform to the national Assembly to ensure better and more timely governance. Given the very obvious limitations that we have seen in say the award and supervision of road projects in distant states and locations by Abuja-based bureaucrats, a reform-minded Presidency would do well to work on the emergence of a new model where both the resources for as well as the implementation of the bulk of road projects countrywide goes to the states even if this would result in the extant Federal Ministry of Works losing as much as 90 per cent of its current budget. Another reform that would boost productivity, internal competition and growth for example would be a review of the current VAT model to ensure that states receive VAT only on goods and services within their own precincts. There are of course many more but the point has been made. For Nigeria today, economic reform is a task that must be done.

Wanted: A moratorium on crude oil production 1

For several months running, they gathered in the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja to discuss issues related to the restructuring of the Nigerian federation. As this piece was being put together, the conferees were supposedly on the last lap of the process. And the signals that much would indeed be achieved from that convocation were not there. But did anyone expect more than that? At its inception, some of us rooted for the Confab. But it was neither for want of anything better to do nor because we did not know that there was a real likelihood that not much would be achieved at the end of the day. It was more because, having elected to function as a democracy, the only lawful option for the people of Nigeria is to talk through any and all problems. Any other path is haram. Which brings us to the subject of this piece. Calling for a moratorium on crude oil production in Nigeria today may be misunderstood by some as selfish (coming from a Niger-Deltan) and seen by some others as an extreme reaction. But this writer has some defence in the Itsekiri adage which says that ‘the sacrifice that calls for blood would not accept palm oil substitute.’ The truth about the Nigerian condition today is that we are indeed in very dire straits. Papering the cracks would just not do. At the core of the motivation for the harsh measure being advocated is the imperative of arresting the slide in the land and dealing with the crisis of productivity. This is because, far beyond the availability of natural resources and the sheer mass of population, productivity is truly the real winner for any national economy in the world today. And this involves at its base the provision of an enabling environment as well as the continued supply of incentives with which this would be achieved. When the Chinese faced the crisis of productivity several decades ago, they wisely resorted to a programme of liberalising parts of their economy from the stranglehood of obtuse central planning. It helped. The defunct Union of Soviet Socialist Republics did not get it. It crashed. There is a time to take a decision. There is day to fix a problem. Nigeria, this is your day. To be sure, Nigeria’s decades-old over-reliance on crude oil exploration and production for its revenue receipts was clearly going to be a problem. In addition to the fact of living in dread of price shocks that come from time to time on account of the global politics that has now come to be part of the economics of oil production and pricing, there have also been introduced additional difficulties on account of the distortions in our national governance order. Hemmed in on both sides, the managers of the nation constantly then have to juggle all of the balls at the same time. They have to watch out for anticipated crisis in the world that could have a negative impact on the price of crude oil, hence the continuing attraction to base the annual budgets on less than market prices which in turn fuels further failings. They also have to constantly balance political interests within the land that stem from the unavoidable demands for more and more resources from oil-producing communities and the countervailing interests of non-producing communities and states who worry that they would continue to get less and less resources from the composite ‘federal’ pie if more and more of these resources are shelled out to the producing communities and states. Within this dialectic of perennially increasing demands and counter-demands, we lose sight of the bigger issue. And this namely is to gauge whether indeed the nation is preparing for, and mobilizing the best of the productive potentials of all of her people in such a way that the cumulative result will be a net performing nation in economic terms. And when this path is not taken, we are correspondingly confronted with the current situation where we are constantly moving from one spiral of crisis to the other. Last week for example, the Minister of Petroleum Resources, Mrs. Diezani Alison-Madueke, explained that the current resort to the option of transporting crude oil to the refineries by vessels due to the activities of vandals and oil thieves who periodically rupture oil-bearing pipelines has increased the cost of refining the product by $7 per barrel. Before Diezani’s revelation, there had been other costs. There is for example the legendary one about the loss of inter-regional economic competitiveness that was the hallmark of Nigeria’s First Republic. During that period, the leaders of the regions strove among themselves to develop resources with which they would later deliver dividends of independence to the people. Sadly, the end of that era has left us with the very precarious mono-economy that we have today even as it has also encouraged the very tragic structural alienation of the citizenry from direct involvement in the workings of government; leading to the non-involvement of the mass of the people in the affairs of state and the improvement of their well-being. There are other costs. Oil spillage and the despoilation of the environment, criminality, banditry, piracy and illegal bunkering, the rise of an easy money culture, spiralling corruption and graft, lowering of the work ethic and indeed the incentive to work and an overall decline in productivity are some others. The truth is that when people see that they can get things the easy way, they would not be motivated to go about their lives following a ‘more difficult route.’ Having made our core point, it is important to address the other side of the tale. What does the nation do in the short-term to address the issue of immediate revenue declines that would accompany the coming into force of our proposed moratorium on crude oil production? And then for how long should the moratorium be in place? Two quick answers can be deployed here. One, while it is true that there would be a resource strain on the nation in the short term on account of the moratorium, the point is that the combination of deft and sincere economic management and putting in place a staggered programme of implementation would ameliorate the challenges. For example, we could in the first instance request the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, OPEC, to progressively reduce our assigned production quotas to 75 per cent of current figures in the first year, 50 per cent in the second year and 25 per cent in the third. For the next three years after then, we could cut back further to just only 10 per cent of current production quotas which should almost exclusively be used to power local demand and needs. Two, the continuing improvement in Internally Generated Revenue, IGR, in states like Cross River, Ogun and Lagos suggests that there is indeed a basic premise for the more efficient generation of revenue and opening up of the economy countrywide if the enabling environment to drive this is put in place. Our moratorium which would reduce revenues going to states would serve then as a litmus to tighten efficiency in governance and administration at the state level which is the critical plank upon which the new and more productive economy being envisaged would be hinged. The benefits from this scheme therefore would include improved fiscal discipline, the development and expansion of alternative economic paths, reduced oil spills and expectedly also, agitation from local communities and elite contestation for more and more resources. To be most effective however, this scheme would have to be supported by political reform to ensure that states control the bulk of the resources and economic activities from their areas. And this is where leadership from the Presidency would be most critical.

At a time like this...

As I write this piece today, #Nigeria is trending. Ordinarily this ought to be good news. And it could have been. After all, the nation just completed a rebasing exercise which, unlike the verdicts from our recurrent electoral contests, was so very professionally done that no one has accused us, yet, of ‘figures-rigging.’

Again the outcome of that exercise should ordinarily predispose us to a year’s standing ovation from all over the world. As the outcome so graphically outlines, the result situates the nation in the rank of high-flying economies as one with the 26^th largest GDP base globally and incontrovertibly the numero uno economy in the mother continent.

Another reason why the glasses ought to be clinking is the fact that the nation last week hosted regional and world leaders and indeed the global investing community to a Special session of the World Economic Forum on Africa at its Federal Capital city, Abuja.

There are other things to cheer, including the fact that its national football team, the Super Eagles, is one of only 32 the world over that would shortly be headed for the South American and samba-loving nation of Brazil to take part in one of the biggest events in the globe today, the World Cup.

But then there are other issues that dampen the mood. One is that the impressive GDP results, as we say in these parts, have not translated to dividends for the mass of the people at the grassroots. And yes, while the President is right that the 24^th richest man in the world is a Nigerian and that the nation is today the private jets capital of the world, the other very inconvenient truth is that Mr. Poverty is indeed also Nigerian. Talk about having the best and the worst of indices cohabiting together in the same space!

Second, Nigeria has continued to grapple with an embarrassing barrage of clearly solvable troubles. It cannot refine enough oil for its people so fuel queues are an enduring decimal. Graft has gone haywire. The educational system is tepid and comatose. Power supply is a mirage. Roads, rail air, water and other transport infrastructure stinks. As some friends casually remark, the situation is indeed so dire that it looks like the nation, citizens included, has indeed been kidnapped!

Within this climate of despair has been added a gory scepter of senseless killings, unexplained deaths, kidnapping and abductions with the security services that ordinarily should inspire confidence in their stern and professional resolve to combat these aberrations now having an added credibility deficit in terms of their conduct and public pronouncements. So where do Nigerians turn?

It is within this vortex of confusion and disappointment that fresh word came out last week that the Presidency had accepted to receive help from the United States and indeed some other nations to help resolve the issue of the abduction of Girls and other wanton atrocities being perpetuated by operatives of the Boko Haram sect in Borno State and elsewhere within and beyond the nation’s borders. So we also now have the scepter of formal exposure to foreign security operatives carrying out campaigns within our sovereign national space!   

On a normal day, my patriotic self will object to our so-called ‘Post-colonial Sovereign State’ accepting help from another nation 63 years after it began its sovereign nation-building journey. It just does not add up.

But these are strange times and existence surely precedes essence.

But how did we really get here?

The writer, Chinua Achebe is many things to many people. But without any controversy there are three attributes that resonate from his life’s story. One is that he is simple even when he is not a fool. Another is that he can be blunt and would not cower from a fight if one was needed. And third, he was such a deep and introspective thinker that when he did step into any fray, his views were not likely to be so casually dismissed.

And so when he picked up his pen to write what his perhaps his slimmest published book during Nigeria’s second republic, many read him. In the book, ‘The trouble with Nigeria,’ Achebe, went straight to the point: ‘the trouble with Nigeria, he laid bare, ‘was simply and squarely a failure of leadership.’ He had made his point. And characteristically, he would not say anything else.

At a time like this when Nigeria is caught in the throes of multiple crisis and failings, we need our Achebes to stand up to be counted. This is the least we can do to avert looming disaster and the latter-day censure of history for all who would survive. As J.P Clark would say: the casualties are not only those who are dead.’  And there surely must be hope ‘for the living dead.’

Nigeria will rise again.