THE Senate, on July 4, 2024, passed for a second reading a bill that seeks to remove police retirees from the Contributory Pension Scheme, CPS. Promoters of the bill, which seeks, among other things, to replace the Nigeria Police Force Pensions Limited, NPF Pensions, the pension fund administrator, PFA, charged with the exclusive administration of police pensions, with the Nigeria Police Pensions Board, aver that it will correct the inequality in the pension benefits paid to police retirees vis-à-vis their counterparts in other security agencies.

Let me state from the onset that it will not. Instead, the exit will make the lot of an average police retiree more precarious. I will explain shortly.

Leading the debate, the sponsor of the bill, Senator Binos Yaroe, who represents Adamawa-South in the Red Chamber, lamented the poor pension of retired police officers.

“The inclusion and continuous stay of the NPF in the PenCom has placed them on the wrong end of the post-service emolument life, even though the Nigeria Police is saddled with the responsibility of not only protecting the lives and property of the citizenry but detecting crimes,” Yaroe said.

On the face value, his argument is very seductive but it was all déjà vu because the issues he raised are as old as the CPS itself. Numerous public hearings have been organised by both chambers of the National Assembly on the issue of exemption. For instance, on February 22, 2022, the House of Representatives Committee on Pensions held a public hearing on two bills for the amendment of the Pension Reform Act 2014, with the first bill sponsored by Francis Ejiroghene Waive, seeking “to amend the Pension Reform Act 2014 to provide for the exemption of the Nigeria Police Force from the Contributory Pension Scheme and for related matters.”

To be sure, nothing is wrong in calling for an enhanced retirement package for the police because when it comes to issues of welfare and salaries, they hold the wrong end of Nigeria’s emolument stick.

But the low police pension is neither the making of National Pension Commission, PenCom, nor NPF Pensions Limited. The pension is paltry because historically, police salaries remain embarrassingly measly. Therefore, the solution lies outside the exemption paradigm as canvassed.

Today, NPF Pensions is the most thriving police-affiliated institution because it is run by professionals from outside the police establishment, and not manacled by the asphyxiating police. Not only that, PenCom has carved for itself the niche of being the most efficient regulator in the country’s fiscal space.

When the Pension Reform Act 2004 was enacted, the idea was to have a new scheme that is not only contributory and fully funded but also privately managed, with funds and assets based on individual accounts under third party custody. The overarching goal was to ensure, unlike in the Defined Benefits Scheme, DBS, that everyone who has worked receives retirement benefits as and when due.

But the government, which modelled the country’s CPS after the Chilean scheme that exempted all its armed forces, retained the police while exempting the Army, the Nigeria Intelligence Agency, NIA, and the Department of State Security, DSS.

The subsequent agitation for exit led to the incorporation of NPF Pensions on October 21, 2013, as a mono-clientele PFA exclusively responsible for the pension assets of all police personnel in Nigeria. It started operations a year later, making it the 21st PFA in accordance with the 2014 Pension Reform Act (PRA 2014).

The PFA became a roaring success instantly. Today, not only is it the most successful police investment entity, it has become the measuring rod in the pension industry with Assets under Management, AuM, crossing the N1 trillion threshold, making it the fourth biggest PFA.

Yet, the success has not deterred the exemption protagonists who seek to amend section 5 (1) of the Pension Reform Act of 2014, to include officers of the NPF as part of the categories of persons exempted from contributory pension.

But exiting the CPS will not serve the ultimate goal of enhancing the welfare and well-being of officers and men of the Nigeria Police because that route will lead, once again, to the Defined Benefits Scheme which was abandoned in 2004 because of its impracticability.

Exemption as being canvassed will also ultimately lead to the dismantling of the institutions, systems and processes that government has put in place towards the implementation of the pension reform scheme, in addition to upsetting government’s fiscal policy.

Data from PenCom reveals that as at January 31, 2024, Nigeria’s pension fund assets stands at N19.531 trillion, which represents more than ten per cent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product, GDP. When contrasted with Federal Government’s budgetary pension deficit, estimated at N2 trillion as at June 2004 under the Defined Benefits Scheme, it will be suicidal to hearken to the exemption calls.

Therefore, since the elephant in the room is the abysmally low pension of police retirees, which has to do with ridiculously low salaries, rather than legislating for exemption, the government should administratively address the issue of low wages through upward salary adjustment, maximizing the opportunity of the ongoing new minimum wage negotiation. As Aisha Dahir-Umar, PenCom director-general, once noted: “Pension is a function of salary, and as long as the salary of officers continues, then there is no need to exit.”

What needs to be done?

At a three-day investigative hearing by the House of Representatives Committee on Pensions in March 2020, measures were articulated by Dr. Sule Wuro Bokki, former Managing Director of NPF Pensions, which if taken, will holistically address the plight of police retirees and mitigate the constant clamour for exit.

The first is a presidential approval of special gratuity for police retirees at the rate of 300 per cent of their last annual gross pay so that the balances in their Retirement Savings Account, RSAs, will be channeled towards their monthly pension payments. This will be in accordance with Section 4 (4) of the Pension Reform Act which provides that an employer, notwithstanding the provisions of the Act, may agree on the payment of additional benefits to the employee upon retirement. The second is treatment of retired police officers from the rank of AIG and above as public officers who should retire with their full benefits, as it is the case with permanent secretaries.

Besides, the major challenge faced by pension managers is the backlog of accrued rights owed by the Federal Government. Pension is made up of the accrued rights, which is the service rendered by policemen to the Federal Government from the time they enrolled in the CPS in 2004 and only payable when the officer serves notice of retirement, and the contributions from both the employee and employer.

But because the accrued rights is so huge, the illiquid Federal Government opted to pay in instalments every year. But the snag is that unless that is received, the PFAs cannot pay the portion that is with them because the account has to be consolidated. Right now, the accrued rights have not been paid in over 15 months, which means that no policeman that retired since then has been paid pension. The government may find a way of paying the accrued rights of retired officers separately to mitigate the delay.

These issues should be addressed administratively by the government. The National Assembly is in a pole position to facilitate the process rather than legislating for the exit of the police from the CPS that will destroy not only the thriving NPF Pensions Limited but also dismantle the entire contributory pension infrastructure by taking Nigeria back to the impracticable Defined Benefits Scheme and the fiscal disaster it entails when the Federal Government, once again, is saddled with the sole responsibility for police pensions. That is unrealistic.

WEST Africans on July 7, 2024, witnessed the tragic split of their region into two opposing blocs. The first time since the 1975 establishment of the Economic Community of West African States, ECOWAS.

Eleven regional Heads of State met in Abuja under the ECOWAS umbrella while three of their counterparts: Presidents Assimi Goita of Mali, Ibrahim Traoré, Burkina Faso and Abdourahamane Tchiani, Niger, met in Niamey for the inaugural Summit of the Alliance of Sahel States, AES.

Given these separate meetings, the matter is no longer a question of recalling those three countries, or their returning to ECOWAS. It became more an issue of how to merge both organisations that are developing different structures and have two diametrically opposed political views.

The ECOWAS, which is set in its old bureaucratic ways, is more conservative with clear pro-West sympathies. In contrast, the AES which is manifesting more radical inclinations, seems impatient with economic and political integration and is manifestly pro-East.

While the latter has made up its mind to move on and may want other countries to join it, ECOWAS is playing an elder brother’s role of urging its siblings to return to the homestead. But in doing so, ECOWAS does not seem to understand that as far as the AES members are concerned, they are fighting a war of survival in which they are in the firing sights of France and the United States. Also, ECOWAS seems oblivious of the fact that the troika have rejected the old model of trade in which the underdeveloped countries are brutally exploited and impoverished by the West. For instance, Niger Republic is irritated that while it is the fourth largest producer of uranium in the world and lights up one third of France, 80 per cent of its populace have no electricity. So it had to rely on neigbouring Nigeria for electricity supply, which was cut off following the July 26, 2023 coup. It is also angry that while additionally, the country is rich in gold, iron ore, phosphate, tin, salt, gypsum and petroleum, Niger is one of the poorest countries in the world. Furthermore, it was unhappy that while its territory had been turned into French and American military bases, terrorists and bandits were freely running around.

Burkina Faso does not see why as one of the largest producers of gold, copper, zinc, manganese, limestone and phosphate, 40 per cent of its populace should live below the poverty line. Similarly, Mali is angry that despite its huge gold, marble, salt and kaolin deposits, 42.5 per cent of Malians are under the poverty line. So, they not only decided that the trade relations with the rest of the world should change, but that they also need an urgent mutual defence pact to jointly tackle the terrorist challenge they face.

ECOWAS seems comfortable with such exploitative trade relations. It also seems at home issuing bland statements and declarations. For instance, its July 7, 2024 communiqué contained flat statements like welcoming “the positive economic outlook for ECOWAS in 2024”, noting “the persistent inflationary pressures and growing public debt ratio” and, asking Member States to continue implementing economic and financial policies “that will lead to compliance with the macroeconomic convergence.”

The ECOWAS lack of seriousness was visible last week on the basic issue of a common currency, the Eco. It had announced its birth in 2000 and, promised to introduce it in 2003. But last week, two dozen years later, it was just directing its Commission to submit a “draft Supplementary Act defining the modalities for the participation of Member States in the Monetary Union at its first Ordinary Session in 2025.”

So, when ECOWAS declares it wants the three countries back, what is it offering them? Security? Economic, political or currency integration? Better economic integration or a common front against exploitation?

Unsurprisingly, ECOWAS is bungling even the issue of setting up a team to negotiate with the AES countries. The basic ECOWAS claim against them and why it decided to sanction them was allegedly because they are military regimes whereas ECOWAS is wedded to constitutional rule.

ECOWAS choice of Senegalese President Bassirou Diomaye Faye as its facilitator with the three countries, is brilliant. He symbolises the insistence of the populace to exercise sovereignty over who presides over their affairs. Even after then President Macky Sall had thrown Faye and his pro-democracy comrades into prison in a vain attempt to stop their election, ECOWAS, rather than condemn this, was praising Sall as a fine democrat and encouraging “him to continue to defend and protect Senegal’s long-standing democratic tradition”. Despite these obstacles, Faye moved from prison to the Presidential Palace.

But the ECOWAS choice of two coup plotters: President Faure Essozimna Gnassingbé of Togo, and Guinea Bissau’s General Umaro Sissoco Embaló, as co-facilitators, were blunders.

Faure’s father, General Gnassingbé Eyadema who had on April 14, 1967 overthrown the Togolese government, died in office on February 5, 2005 after 38 years in power. Faure immediately overthrew the government. When some countries denounced his coup, he was forced to step down. But his regime immediately organised elections and he was declared elected. After 19 years in power, Faure in April, 2024, changed his country’s constitution from presidential to parliamentary, a move which extended his stay in office to 2031 after which he could be appointed into the new position of President of the Council of Ministers.

In his own case, retired General Embaló had been elected President on December 20, 2019. In May, 2022, when he had differences with the parliament, he dissolved it and ruled as a dictator. But when new parliamentary elections were conducted, his party lost. A clash in December 2023 between the National Guard and the Presidential Guard in which two persons were killed, provided Embalo an excuse to, again, dissolve the parliament. It was his second coup against the constitution. Unfortunately, ECOWAS has continued to support this civilian coup in Guinea Bissau.

At its meeting last week, rather than demand that the Embalo regime allow the parliament to reconvene and continue its constitutional duties, the ECOWAS Heads of State urged “the Government to accelerate the process of holding new legislative elections to re-establish the Popular National Assembly…”

The choice of Faure and Embalo as part of the three-person ECOWAS team to facilitate negotiations with the AES is an avoidable blunder.

At the AES inauguration, Captain Traoré thundered: “The imperialists see Africa as an empire of slaves (that) Africans belong to them, our land belongs to them, our sub-soils belong to them…this is why we have decided to revolt and to take the fate of our countries in our own hands…we came to break the chains.” Is this a voice ECOWAS recognises and wishes to accommodate?

It is a platitude to restate that Africa has been impacted negatively by colonialism and imperialism. In varying degrees, English has come to supplant Nigerian languages as the dominant mode of communication. Inevitably, this has bred an attendant recession of pre colonial traditional languages. Moreso the Yoruba, who were unarguably the first to receive Western education in Nigeria and had been receiving mass education literacy since 1842. With the legacy of this head start comes a collateral damage. 

Growing up, inability to speak fluently in Yoruba language and concomitant ability to speak fluent English was a trademark of upper class elitism and belonging in the hierarchy of social class perking order. Quite often, in such upper crust families, English was the first language of communication. A cultivated inability to speak Yoruba qualifies you to be complimented as ajẹbota ( those whose family menu substantially tends towards English/continental dishes).The popular comic, Gbenga Adeyinka, is a veteran of the dramatisation of this mockery. 

The bias against Yoruba in primary and secondary schools is illustrated in the classification of Yoruba as vernacular language. Prize awards for the best students in English and other subjects were routine save Yoruba language. Other than Dele Momodu, I don’t know any of our peers who graduated from the University in Yoruba studies. The fact that Nigeria comprises several multilingual cultural groups practically makes English our lingua franca. As an aside, baulking this neutrality and objectivity, President Muhammadu Buhari holds the dubious distinction of the first Nigerian President to address this unfortunate country in Hausa language from his sick bed in London. 

The extent to which we have become sheepishly enchanted with the English language was demonstrated by a friend living in Germany. He referred to Germans as illiterates because they could not speak English! In the spirit of the saying ‘physician heal thyself’ I once considered myself an object of pity. It was at the University of Hamburg where my hosts, all four of them, mischievously chose to converse in the Hausa language, in the full knowledge that I comprehend next to nothing of the language. Yet, I am from Nigeria.

I accept as a personal failure the substantial limitations of my own children to communicate in Yoruba. Moreso, when in the consciousness of a deepening and widespread ignorance of Yoruba tradition, I have dedicated the latter part of my educational and cultural development to proficiency in the propagation of Yoruba tradition and religion. The greater my sadness when I have the anecdotal evidence that relative to other Nigerian cultural groups ie Igbo and Hausa-Fulani, the Yoruba are worse off in the ability of their children to converse in the language of their forefathers. I needed to understand the wherewithal of this dilemma. 

Originally, it was to the Berlin conference (prior to colonialism) that we owe the sociocultural disarticulation of the Yoruba and other African nations. This was the occasion in which ‘African nations were divided and taken over by European nations. The preexisting African groups, tribes, and nations were arbitrarily divided, even if the divisions didn’t make any sense according to the indigenous peoples’. In Nigeria, prior to and after the amalgamation of 1914, colonial rule took the form of indirect rule and the partition of Nigeria into three protectorates namely the Eastern, Western and Northern protectorates.

The language of the majorities in these protectorates were the Igbo, Yoruba and the Hausa-Fulani. The essence of the indirect rule (dual mandate) was the employment of the preexisting traditional administration organs as delegated authorities of governance on behalf of the British colonialists. Of the three protectorates, the Yoruba has been the least successful in the intergenerational transfer of their mother tongue to subsequent successor generations. In the formation of the culture of the colonial and post colonial WAZOBIA the imperialist religions of Christianity and Islam have exerted varying influence on the ability of the language groups to preserve their culture. 

In the Pan Islamic North, (after the colonial military subjugation of the Sokoto Caliphate), the theocratic rulers successfully negotiated the insulation of the region from Christian proselytization and evangelism (and a concomitant preservation of the emirate system) with Lord Lugard. The latter readily granted the concession because it roundly suited the deployment of the indirect rule and his innate bias for the region. This provided the North an ample opportunity to preserve their Pan Arabic culture and language in opposition to Westernization/ Modernisation.

Prior to colonialism and contemporary Nigeria, the Igbo dominated (hitherto) Eastern region had remained impermeable to the jihadist spread of Islam thus ceding the playfield to the monopoly of Christian proliferation and acculturation (Igbos’ sense of common identity as a single people is said to have grown particularly in the last century, in the face of colonialism, and grew even into a national identity when Igbo people tried to declare their independence from Nigeria in 1967. Despite their inability to achieve that independence, Igbo have continued to standardize the language and build a somewhat more shared pan-Igbo identity).

Unlike these two colleagues, the Yoruba were simultaneously rendered prone to the incursion of the two imperialist religions under whose influence they became more culturally diffused and liberal. You will likely find more mixed marriages among the Yoruba than other ethnic groups. Whilst Christianity penetrated through the South West coastal city of Lagos and adjoining provinces of Abeokuta, Islam burst forth from Ilorin and the ruins of the destruction and dislocation of the Oyo empire. Recent data suggests that the Yoruba population are evenly divided between Christian and Muslims thus precluding the cultural enclave mentality. 

The phenomenon of the diaspora returnees equally fostered the unintended consequence of reinforcing the attenuation of intergenerational transfer of the Yoruba language. The returnees were, in the main, culturally English following their Euro-American diaspora acculturation. A byproduct of this cultural background was its instrumentality to socioeconomic upward mobility and assimilation into the ranks of the mid echelon of the colonial elite. This is in contrast and juxtaposition to the self-conscious anti colonialist cultural posture manifested in such variables as the replacement of their European names with Yoruba names. Consciousness of this collateral damage to the preservation of Yoruba culture has manifested in the resurgence of scholarship on Yoruba traditional religion, Ifa.

As elaborated by the he President of the International Council for Ifa Religion, (ICIR), Dr. Fayemi Fatunde Fakayode “The issue of Yoruba Language and Religion can be compared to a Computer whose hardware cannot function without the software. In the case of Yoruba culture, Language and other components are hardware while Yoruba Religion is the software on which other components rely.

“Today, Yoruba Language is an International Language because, all the people who practice Yoruba Religion irrespective of color or race need to be versed in Ifa, the scripture which can only be rendered in Yoruba Language. As Arabic is the language of the holy Quran so is Yoruba the language of Ifá.

“Therefore, as the spread of Islam throughout the world makes Arabic international so is Yoruba Religion makes Yoruba Language international. This is because, once one accepts a religion, one automatically accepts the culture of the source of the religion”.

“The future of Yoruba Language and Culture is promising because it is witnessing a renaissance. Yoruba religion is said to be in the sixth position among the religions of the world today. It is certain that as Yoruba Religion continues to grow, so will the language and culture continue”

It is equally the opinion of this writer that versatility and proficiency in spoken Yoruba language is concomitant with highly informed familiarity with Ifa inspired Yoruba vocabulary and idiom which ‘often convey deep theological or metaphysical meaning.

According to Professor Wande Abimbọla “The decay we are seeing everywhere in Nigeria is the result of the large scale abandonment of the traditional way of our fathers and mothers. We have condemned our way of life and embraced foreign culture. You can be a Christian or Muslim and still see some values in the way of life of our forefathers. Today, parents give their children Mary, Michael, Rasheed or Isiaka. Where are our own names? That kind of life is ruining our culture and our view of the universe in which we live. It leads to hopelessness”

“Professor Bolaji Idowu highlights the significance of the religion of the Yoruba that permeates their lives so much that it expresses itself in multifarious ways. It forms the theme of songs, makes topics more minstrelsy, finds vehicles in myths, folktales, proverbs and saying and it is the basis of philosophy.” (Bolaji Idowu)

It is noteworthy, that as African indigenous religion (the core element and organising principle of Yoruba tradition) was steadily losing adherence, legitimacy and acceptance at home, a contrary trend ensued in the diaspora especially in South America where ‘African descendants in Brazil adopted the Yoruba religious culture (as Afro-Brazilian) and built an all embracing African identity around its universal character’. The phenomenon prompted the remark by Robin Horton on a contemporary ‘Ifa distinctiveness being dramatically revealed, not in Yorubaland itself, but in the Afro- American societies of Brazil’.

A Refresher On Colonialism 

It is often unnoticed for instance that the only non Western nations to have successfully modernised-Japan and China-are those that have not been colonised. Is it an accident that all Asian and African nations formerly colonised by Europeans have a uniform history of failure in attempts to modernise? (Professor Peter Ekeh)

Professor Festus Ade-Ajayi deployed the proclivity of the colonial rulers to employ “as a weapon of domination the demoralization and frustration that came from denying basic humanity to peoples of Africa descent by denying that they had a history”

Jean-Paul Sartre (in wretched of the earth) calls colonialism ‘the sinister strategy of erasing native identities in which the aim is to supplant Indigenous culture with the colonizer’s own, leaving the population in a vacuum of identity’.

“It was not the benevolence of European nations that attracted them to Africa. It was the search for wealth that they could exploit. Indeed, some of the coastal nations of West Africa were once known by the commodities that lay beneath their soils: Gold Coast (now Ghana) was known for its gold; Ivory Coast or Cote D’voire was known for its ivory and Guinea, or Republic of Guinea was known for its gold coins from which the guinea as currency was made” (WalterRodney). 

Indeed, only a person with Nnaji’s faith in Nigeria could insist, for a whole 20 years, on proceeding with the 181Megawatt Geometric Power Plant in Aba and the Aba Power Electric Company; both are valued at $800m. All these investments were in the face of spirited sabotage by top Federal Government officials between 2012 and 2015. The fact that the Aba Independent Power Project was commissioned last February 26, is nothing short of a miracle. It is frequently difficult to comprehend what drives Nnaji’s optimism against all evidence and rationality. This is all the more so because, as the great American thinker, Francis Fukuyama, notes in The End of History and The Last Man, we live in a world where pessimists are considered profound and optimists are regarded as naïve, even in instances where events eventually vindicate optimists.