How are you running?

Attitude is everything. And there is a recommended attitude for him that would no longer be disabled. For this one, he is required to cultivate the attitude of the champion long distance runner. It is called running the race with patience.


It happens like this. All of the participating athletes are called up to the starting block. This is not a sprint event, no; it is long-distance and they are lined up, waiting for the take-off whistle. It goes and even when a few so visibly beat the gun, the mature referee does not ask for a repeat of the starting formalities. He has been this way many times.


The sophomores are going on strong, anxiously competing for the front places so early in the day. A few other recliners are simply trotting along, conscious of the fact that the journey is as long as their breath supplies are short. Hedged in-between these two are the champions. They had been up many dawn hours, practicing their routines and building capacity. Through this, they have picked up an internally consistent rhythm where their body clock has been synchronised with their running pace. They are not overly bothered by the external gyrations taking place all around them but are rather led by the internally structured running time-frames that have now become a part of them. They are running essentially against themselves; to meet and better the times achieved in their frequent training sessions. By the time the third lap begins, they are clearly the ones to watch.


Like the long distance runner described above, the race of life and indeed of success is such a winding and constantly changing one that you will miss the point if you do not come to it with a comprehensive strategy to last the whole distance. ‘All the days of my appointed time, the Holy Bible champion of patience, Job, encouraged himself, ‘I will wait until my change comes.’
Job sure knows and can therefore teach us a few things about patience. Here was a man who had everything going for him. Great family, great wealth, great reputation, great grace, great friends, great parties, great faith, great worship; indeed he was the quintessential example of one who was living the proverbial good life.


And then tragedy set in and by the day, he began to experience grief in unparalleled dimensions.


‘This is just too much; curse God and die,’ his distraught and exasperated wife chirruped. His answer: ‘Shall we receive good from The Almighty and not take bad when it comes?’ ‘We have found you out, o pretender and deceiver. Holier-than-thou! Cunning hypocrite! You are experiencing all of these because of your sins,’ his great friends, surmised; ‘repent pal, repent!’ His answer: ‘you guys really do not get it. My integrity was never a game and remains speaking till date!’ Indeed Job was not only just a quintessential fighter, but equally one who was well aware of the fact that there was indeed a lawful way to achieve mastery and victory. And so he ran his race with patience.


(from my forthcoming book; Stand up disabled!)

Gov. Okowa, behold your brief!

Your Excellency sir,

Let us not argue over nomenclature. I am calling you Governor and not Governor-elect deliberately. It is because I really want you to know that the party is over. Yes, you may yet meet some of your opponents in the election that has presently changed your status at the petitions tribunal. But if history is our guide and given the way we yet are, it is looking like you may very well serve out your tenure as Governor until May 29, 2019. So let us cut to the chase.


You are no stranger to the politics of the state and indeed the country. Since 1999, you have been a standing fixture in the text. From Commissioner to Secretary to Government to Senator and now Governor, your dossier is clearly a most loaded one. This ordinarily should be an asset. But as we have seen in several other instances, there is really no guarantee this would truly be. The critical point then would be YOU. What do you understand your brief to be; and what would you insist that you do?


A recourse to history would help. The territory of Delta State is one that predates the military grant of statehood in 1991. It is an area peopled by hard-working and self-assured peoples who established diplomatic treaties with Europe as far back as the 16th century! At least one of the traditional institutions in the state was led in the 17th century by a graduate king who had trained at the University of Coimbra in Portugal. It is also a state that has had and continues to sustain a rich stock of merchants, intellectuals, professionals and now comedians! To paraphrase my publisher, you are clearly not presiding over a two kobo state!


I have gone into this much detail so you can connect with the fact that the least you must do is to, as we used to say in Government College Ughelli, keep the ship sailing! As Governor, you no doubt would be a most powerful person. But all power comes with a burden: and it is that of looking forward to the end of the day, when, we the people, would ultimately score you. Make no mistake about it sir; that day will come.


From where I am standing then, there is no ambiguity in my mind about the job that you are gearing up to take up soon. You are Governor of Delta State to improve the lives of all of the people that live in the state. You are not a Governor for your party members. You are not Governor for your predecessors. You are not Governor for your community of origination, sub-geography or linguistic area. You are also not a Governor for ancestral Deltans only. No sir; you are Governor for the improvement of the lives of all of the people that live in the state.


I make this point very clearly because as a student of Delta and Nigerian political history, I know that this is the only way to make a critical impact on the lives of the people and indeed the state. To do otherwise would mean that you are yielding yourself to be torpedoed by the elite forces of reaction and opportunism that have continued to ensure the underdevelopment of the state and its peoples.


You would already be familiar with the self-styled advocates for ‘fair sharing of the resources of the state to all interests.’ This Your Excellency, is merely a euphemism for elite grabbing. When you pass it on to the promoters in the manner of appointments, contracts, etc, as they are pressuring you to do and will continue to do over the next four years, you may very well need to go back and check whether the jobs really get done and the perks do indeed trickle down to the people of the communities and interest-blocs in whose name they had approached you in the first place. This has been the pattern. Of local government chairmen who live outside their council areas. Of commissioners who do not even touch base with their people. Of contractors who feed only their stomachs. Opportunism upon opportunism, all is opportunism.


If you permit this state of events to continue, you should also be prepared to go into the growing hall of infamy; of former leaders of the state who have colossally failed to impact on the real lives of the people. And there will be very few tears shed for you that day. But it need not be so if you take our counsel today.

Someone paid the price…

One of my most inspirational Christian hymns is the song, "It is well with my soul." It is said to have been written by the lawyer, Heratio Spafford.

As the story goes, the build-up to its crafting was not pleasant in any way. As the apostle Paul would put it in his own case, Spafford was literally ‘being poured out as a drink offering.’ His only son died at age 4 in 1871. On October 8 of that same year, The Great Chicago Fire wiped out huge chunks of his estate. In 1873, he sent his wife and four daughters over to Europe on a recuperative trip aboard the SS Ville du Havre, planning to join them subsequently. SAVED ALONE is the text of one of the world’s most famous telegrams ever. It was dictated by his wife. The ship had sank and with it, their daughters.

That was not all. A fire equally claimed his law firm. Insurance refused to pay, arguing that it was "an act of God!” Now penniless, he lost his house.

The Christian gentleman that he was, Spafford yet looked ‘up to the hills from where his help came.’ This was the down payment for the epigrammatic hymn that has continued to bless generations of Christians and indeed many others that have heard it, through the years.

‘When peace like a river, attendeth my way
When sorrows like sea billows roll;
Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say,
It is well, it is well with my soul

It is well, it is well
With my soul, with my soul
It is well, it is well, with my soul.’

Troubles are not pleasant when they occur in our lives. But trust God, they are more than the painful incidents we see and experience. Have a faith-filled day!

(extracted from my forthcoming book: Stand up, disabled!)

Nigeria, pan-Africanism as saviour

The concern over the possible northernisation and Islamisation of Nigeria in a Buhari-Tinubu presidency and the recent comments credited to the Lagos monarch, Oba Rilwan Akiolu, attempting to put the Igbos and indeed other non-indigenes ‘in their place’ flow from the same source: Nigeria has not yet defined itself and located her national purpose. It is yet a babel of opportunistically contending fiefdoms that must yet strive to disprove the Sisyphian construct that all of its attempts to build and develop a strong powerhouse in Africa south of the Sahara ‘is vanity and a mere grasping for wind’ (apologies, the Bible Book of Ecclesiastes).


Your correspondent is a Christian who believes that the almighty God carefully pre-determines all that he does. So British scheming notwithstanding, the question to ask when interrogating the Nigerian construct would simply be why he permitted God amalgamation of disparate territories and nations into a unified Nigerian nation in 1914?


Like America, Nigeria, this writer contends, was only designed to make sense within a larger construct of an expansionary developmental scheme. When Thomas Jefferson and the rest of the pilgrims elected to leave the covering of imperial Britain to not only found a brand new nation, but to also give to themselves globalist institutions that would match the broadness of their vision; they were responding to a divine pull to establish a mega-state that would subsequently stand up to be counted years later for earth-redeeming values like anti-slavery, world peace and the universal brotherhood of man. And so Uncle Sam’s country continues to play its role in the promotion and perpetuation of values like democracy, religious tolerance and global development.


If America was designed to do as much on the global stage, Nigeria this writer is most persuaded, is to do same within the context of Africa. However, when Nigerian leaders retreat into their small and most limiting cocoons and therein push their small, divisive and intra-competitive agendas, what happens is a colossal mismatch. Like fish out of water, the nation can no longer hold. A nation designed to pursue large causes and undertake great schemes has now been so sorely hobbled to the very disgusting travesty where lions now feed on carrion!


One Nigerian leader in our history who was very well placed to advance the pan-Africanist purpose as about the most rational ideological underpinning for Nigeria was the late Nnamdi Azikiwe. In capitulating to the reductionist schemes of his rivals of his time, quitting the Western House of Assembly and returning to displace Eyo Ita in the Eastern Regional Assembly, Azikiwe was putting a sultry knife into the Greater Nigeria project. I stand to be better educated but contend that it is not enough to argue that Zik was pushed out by the antics of the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo and his co-travellers then. What is germane is that in not standing up for the long-term values of the pan-Africanist enterprise that he had long been associated with, and continuing to canvass his case within the framework of the Western House of Assembly and the evolving Nigerian nation, a heroic opportunity had been lost. And so today, we continue to live in fear over what Buhari could do even as the Oba Akiolus of this world now and again shock us with similarly obtuse revisionist perspectives that have never built great schemes, cities and nations.


To advance Nigeria therefore would mean a conscious attempt to look at 'the road not taken' and return to a path of course correction. If the Nigerian elite continues to mis-lead the peoples of Nigeria into seeing the nation within the insular constructs of ethnic and religious atavism as the Akiolu gaffe and the lopsided voting patterns of the just concluded presidential elections clearly epitomize, then the same elite must wait to be judged for squandering the potentials and possibilities of a great nation ‘whose builder and maker is the almighty God himself!’


Indeed, Nigeria’s failure to enter into its ordained role as a mega-African champion is continuing to provoke very frustrating reactions from fellow Africans who can see what is all too obvious and are troubled that we just do not get it! In an encounter with President Robert Mugabe a few years ago, he tersely dismissed the nation as ‘big country, big problems.’ The latest pained expression is from former President Jerry Rawlings who stridently charges President-elect Buhari to see his victory within the context of Nigeria’s pan-Africanist purpose. And he makes sense.


Postscript:

As this script was being reviewed for publication, the dominant news was of the xenophobic assaults in Jacob Zuma's South Africa. He clearly is not a Madiba. And of course he equally does not know the first thing about the pan-African enterprise. It is really very troubling but the sad events there equally reinforce our basic thesis that African leaders must in the main, look for a higher value other than their own parochial limits as the core organisational basis for the nations they have been favoured to govern. It is only then that 'the labours of our heroes past shall never be in vain.' We still believe!

Now that we have voted

Nigeria has in the past few months been caught in the throes of partisan political disputations. By God’s grace, that is about being concluded now and with it the shift of emphasis from political campaigning in favour of a re-energised focus on nation-building. It is also very important for our nation that the presidential elections did not only produce an acceptable winner, but that the loser has also accepted the fact of his defeat.


Now elections are good and as important as they can be. But they are only a means to an end. And it is that end that this correspondent would rather focus on at this time.


Along this line, two news items have attracted my attention, recently. One, the Army Chief confesses that the Boko Haram challenge had almost disgraced the armed forces before the latest determined push to roll back the tape and frontally confront the insurgents. And two, gun-totting OPC members took to the streets, asking for a halt to the card reader scheme and the sack of the INEC chairman, only days to the long-scheduled polls. To redress the first point, the military is being re-equipped. But the authorities must go beyond that to include equipping the police and reviving the practice of up-front and professional intelligence gathering and processing. We could also use the present situation to review our national security policy framework in such a way that all adults get to serve time and remain as reservists in the nation’s defence infrastructure as is the case in Singapore and Israel. The current Youth Service scheme can be the beginning.


Political actors must also be very clear headed in their security responsibilities. For them going forward, this must be more than having access to an innumerable company of escorts and approving and gobbling criminally insensitive security votes. Our long-term strategy for nation building must also, and most incontrovertibly, be one where all criminals, militias, and militants must be actively encouraged to demobilise and then functionally re-integrated into regular society. Granted that we have sadly put ourselves in a bull-in-a-china-shop situation today, they must however not be overly pampered, encouraged to be a permanent class of ex-militants, and of course, they must also not be manipulated to serve untoward political ends. It is not a decent and progressive leader that takes advantage of their brawn to further his political interests. No, you make them poorer in that way and the society you should be properly leading less secure


It is also time equally then to return all traditional state security activities (the currently most controversial, pipelines protection included) to the established security agencies, and to properly train and integrate serving and ex-militants that want to function in regular security agencies so they can have a chance of properly serving the nation in that arena provided they pass all the required tests and sign up to submit wholesomely to all of the laws of the land. But to leave them just hanging in there and continuing to make a living and profit contemptuously as permanent members of a dubiously acceptable ex-militants club is only disaster waiting to escalate.


Give me jobs, or…

There is also the jobs imperative. When President Goodluck Jonathan emerged winner of the 2011 polls, accompanied by the protests that greeted his emergence, notably from Northern Nigeria, I wrote a piece calling attention to the crying need for the administration to properly interpret that expression of angst and resentment. At the surface, it was ethno-political, but underlying all of that was a deeper crisis of alienation that was being fed intravenuously by poverty and a sense of hopelessness. These were further being fuelled by a very poor educational base, lack of skills and consequently outrageously very high levels of unemployment and under-employment.


To be sure this was not just a Nigerian problem, but it was getting most acute here and leading to other problems. As a document from one of the sessions at the 2015 World Economic Forum outlines, the problem has since persisted: ‘populations have expanded exponentially, literally taking governments by surprise. Saudi Arabia has 70% of its people under 30 and half of that number under 20. Kuwait has 60% under 25. Nigeria has 75% of its 170 million population under 35. It gets worse; 40-50% of them are unemployed.’ This is a demographic time-bomb any day and it is one that any government ignores at its own peril. Mr. President-elect, you got your job cut out for you. Already.