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![[OPINION] After Kenya: Lessons on Home-grown Economy for Nigeria - Sam Amadi](/media/k2/items/cache/3fcb8fbbaa8568df4a6d58d268321f3e_L.jpg)
We have not heard the last of the ongoing protests in Kenya against a new finance law enacted by the country’s legislature. The youths opposed the law because it will overtax the already impoverished Kenyans who are enduring high inflation and general economic distress. The president was very heady and even threatened to arrest the protesting youths. In the crackdown, the police shot dead more than 9 protesters. The youths became irate and destroyed property worth millions of dollars. The alarmed president has sued for peace, discarded the finance law, cut down presidential budgetary allocations, including those of the office of the first lady, and abolishing about 47 agencies to cut costs. But the youths are not appeased. They have asked the president to resign. The frightened and chastened president have been on twitter space to win hearts and minds. Protest continues and the Kenyan economy worsens with a negative rating because of its fiscal crisis and uncertainties.
But the crisis was unavoidable. The president did not need to be as mulish as he was. The dogmatism was unnecessary. Many put it to the pressure from the international financial institutions that have made Kenya a poster child of market-oriented reforms. It is true that Kenya suffers much fiscal instability and would need a lot of extra revenue to cope with dwindling revenue. But it needs not be reckless and insensitive in pushing through the bill. Kenya like Nigeria and the rest of the developing world are constantly barraged to implement market-oriented policies like removal of subsidies on essential products that further diminish the wellbeing of their already impoverished population. Like in the 1980s when trade deficit and fiscal instability pushed these countries to swallow the entire Structural Adjustment Programme of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank without adjusting them to the realities of their countries, today’s leaders in the distressed south are proceeding in error in focusing on tax and subsidy removal without considering the abysmal levels of human development and welfare in their countries.
Nigeria could have been in the same social turmoil as Kenya but for some different social dynamics. On social media, Nigerian youth have been praising and admiring Kenyans for their doggedness and effectiveness in forcing down the overconfident president and are wishing for another opportunity to prove their mettle. Arguably, Nigerians are suffering as much if not more than Kenyans. Nigerians could re-enact Kenya if socioeconomic realities remain this way and leaders fail to rise to responsible leadership. Nigerian leaders need to pay attention to the crisis in Kenya and learn how to head off such massive protests in Nigeria. To do so, they need to learn the lessons in the crisis. What are the lessons in the Kenyan crisis? I think about four such lessons.
Government is over, Governance has come:
The first lesson to learn from Kenya is that we have come to the end of government. We are now in the era of governance. That sounds like nonsensical. How can government be over when we are daily confronted with the intrusion of the behemoth? What is the difference between government and governance? But truly government is over. We are now in the era of governance. The difference may be subtle, but it is consequential. Government means hierarchy, force, and control. Governance means network, collaboration, and persuasion. The end of government is tied to the End of Power, as Moses Naim puts it in his book by the same title. According to the foreign policy expert, globalization and technological innovation have unsettled the traditional domination of power. From government house to boardroom to churches, power is no longer what it used to be. We are now in the state of powerlessness where political potentates can no longer how their ways. ‘Powerlessness’ in the sense of the end of the Weberian concept of state as the Leviathan who can do and undo, foists upon political authorities the imperative to engage humbly and constructively with citizens. To borrow, Amartya Sen’s phrase, states should be argumentative, not authoritarian, or even authoritative. Political authorities must come down from their high horses, engage citizens and compete for their hearts and minds.
The end of power goes with what Thomas Friedman in his book, The World is Flat, calls flatness. The flat world is a world where distance and disadvantages of economic divergences have been destroyed through information technology and social media such that everyone is empowered to plug and play. A necessary corollary to digital empowerment is that angry youths are superempowered to build mass movements to express their anger more effectively. The social media has enabled the mobilization of anger and made its expression damaging. States are now more vulnerable to social expression of discontent than before. End SAR and now Kenya Spring speak about the changed landscape of political power. You cannot disregard the voice of angry citizens because you are government. You must respond quick and smart otherwise you will lose credibility and risk global political and economic downgrades. Political regimes are now vulnerable to social sentiments and uncertainties. As Friedman notes in the earlier book, The Lexus and Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization, nations are now hooked on a straitjacket. In the past, killing 100 protesters will not undermine the political power of an African dictator. He will shrug it off and the news will not make it to any CNN. Today, killing two protesters will be a recurring news on CNN and BBC and will receive thousands of comments on social media platforms. In days the behemoth will quiver. The interconnectedness of the world and international financial institutions’ responsivity to viral narratives make today’s governments vulnerable to social strife.
The balance of power has largely tilted away from governments and towards citizens and non-governmental groups. The reality is that governments have become weaker as citizens and groups have gained power relative to government because of the disruptions of technology and social media. We now live with the reality that governments across the world find it difficult to overcome terrorists, even the most rudimentary like Boko Haram, because of the growing asymmetricity of conflicts. This is more so for African governments further assailed by growing illegitimacy. It is highly pretentious for these governments to act as if they are all-powerful. It is patently foolish for them to implement harsh and disfavoured reform policies in their countries without striving for stronger coalition with civic leaders. The era of strong men and strong governments of the SAP reforms are no longer with us. We are in an era of governance, not government, where smart power through credible and smart communication is replacing hard power. Ruto would have done better if he engaged in twitter spaces with his citizens as he is doing now before taking the bill to parliament. The result would have been different if he had paused and engaged with twitter spaces with the youths of Kenya when the bill elicited massive protests. That singular gesture would have prevented the current carnage and portents of fiscal collapse.
Beware of Ideology Masked as Economics:
President Ruto pushed the finance bill because he was told Kenya had no alternative than to push through fiscal severity despite the resentment and suffering of the people. It is called in the industry of policy reform ‘shock therapy’. It sounds familiar. In the days of East Europe’s transition to western oriented market economy there was a lot of talks about shock therapy and what some have called the ‘dictatorship of no alternative’. It was Margreth Thatcher, another strong leader who arguably damaged the economic fortunes of his country through a mindless pro-market fundamentalism that resulted in destruction of the social protection system of the Post-war era, who minted the phrase “There is No Alternative (TINA)’. But there is always an alternative as Professor Aluko reminded General Babangida in the days of SAP debate.
African leaders need a crash course on managing economic development in the age of deceptive economic ideology. They need to wise up as Asian leaders who pragmatically steered their economies outside the straitjacket of the American Business Model, alias ‘Washington Consensus’. IMF and the World Bank did not advise Ruto to begin his quest for fiscal stability by first cutting down on costs of government so as to generate public trust before cutting through livelihood. They did not remind him that the Office of the First Lady is actually dispensable in the face of worsening fiscal crisis. By raising tax and eliminating critical subsidies are always the low-hanging fruits.
We cannot make light the fiscal crisis that countries across are going through. The crisis requires drastic and difficult actions. But beyond ideology, the first to fall should not social welfare. It should be the last and only after the government have eliminated the waste that is associated with elitism and patrimonial politics. We can solve the crisis through a more effective strategy that does not involve the destructive dynamics of market fundamentalism. East Asian economies succeeded not because they embraced the whole doctrine of free market. They succeeded because they avoided ideology and embraced pragmatism. China has a long history of false steps, even up to the period of Mao Zedong and the cultural revolution. The Great Leap Forward set China back, especially with the collectivization of agriculture, resulting in mass death and failed industrialization. Deng Xiaoping changed the game. He initiated a gradual, programmatic and sensible reform that started with returning the land to dispossessed peasants with guaranteed tenure to encourage irrigation, higher seedlings and extension services. Xiaoping tracked the benefit of increased productivity in agriculture into gradual industrialization. At a point he started to open China to western technology and capital, but in a controlled and strategic manner using special economic zones.
China abhorred the rigid ideologies of communism and the laisse faire theory of neoliberalism and embraced pragmatism. This approach is exemplified by the famous saying of Deng Xiaoping that it does not matter whether my cat is red or white if it catches rat. China followed the example of Japan and South Korea where pragmatic leaders like General Park wisely implemented transformative reform of agriculture and deliberate but systematic protection and nurturing of infant industry to transition their countries to industrial economies. In these countries, pragmatic leaders enhanced efficiency not by surrendering to the free trade, but rather using export discipline to improve productivity. The secret of the success of the East Asian countries is the pragmatic insight that what will ensure industrialization is to protect and nurture infant industry through export discipline. Export promotion worked where import substitution failed in Africa.
China and the rest recognized the pitfall of crony capitalism. When they raise tariff to protect infant industries, they forced those industries to perform according to export benchmarks. Those who failed lost the fiscal and policy support. By so doing they chose winners and losses, not through political patronage, but through the discipline of international trade. This is the model of a development state; a government, as Stephen Cohen and J Bradford DeLong in their book, Concrete Economics: The Hamilton Approach to Economic Growth and Policy, “that signalled the direction, cleared the way, set up the path, and – when needed- provided the means”.
Nigerian, nay African, leaders need to embrace pragmatism not fundamentalism in economic policymaking. The plumbline should be whether the policies would not undermine household income and further destroy the long-term productivity of the economy by eroding the human and social capital necessary for transformative economic development. The lesson from Kenya is that it pays more to listen to the people than to the bureaucrats in Washington institutions with no skins in the game of economic survival in Africa.
![[OPINION] A Tale Of Two Elections: The United Kingdom And Nigeria - Olufunke Baruwa](/media/k2/items/cache/fddcdd8b0d86cfed75da8fd773b85340_L.jpg)
July 4, 2024, was anticipated to be a pivotal moment, potentially reshaping the United Kingdom’s political landscape and future direction as the general elections were held.
The hot race was among key parties and leaders including the Conservative Party led by the incumbent Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, Labour Party led by Sir Keir Starmer, Liberal Democrats led by Ed Davey, Scottish National Party led by Humza Yousaf and the Green Party Co-led by Carla Denyer and Adrian Ramsay.
The main issues for debate were the economy and the cost-of-living crisis, inflation, and economic recovery post-COVID-19; healthcare and the NHS funding and reform; climate change and the impact of environmental policies and green energy initiative; the lingering Brexit debate and future relationship with the EU; and finally social issues around immigration, education, and housing.
There was also the issue of the incumbent Conservative Party leader, Rishi Sunak’s performance as PM, the Labour Party’s strategy to regain power after a decade in opposition as well as the influence of smaller parties or “Third Force” in Nigeria speak and potential for coalition governments.
A Comparative Overview
Electoral processes in the UK and Nigeria differ significantly in terms of structure, procedure, and political context.
The UK operates a Parliamentary system, and general elections are held every five years but can be called earlier. The voting age is 18 years and older and voter registration is automatic and mandatory. Campaign finance is highly regulated with spending limits and public transparency.
Voter turnout and participation is typically around 60-70 per cent with high levels of political awareness and media coverage. Key issues and campaigns are often around economic policies, including high cost of living, taxation, public spending, health and NHS reform, Brexit and climate change.
Election administration in the UK is managed by the Electoral Commission, an independent body that oversees elections and regulates political finance. Security is generally low with low levels of election-related violence, limited use of technology and voting is predominantly paper-based.
Voting takes place seamlessly from 7am to 10pm in polling stations situated in schools, community centres, churches etc. Paper ballots with a single ‘X’ mark next to the chosen candidate represent a vote. Post-election, government formation is seamless and quick, the party with the majority of seats in the House of Commons forms the government.
Nigeria on the other hand operates a Presidential system of governance held every four years. The voting age is 18 years and older and requires proactive registration by voters. While campaign finance is regulated, enforcement and transparency issues exist.
The major parties are the All Progressives Congress, People’s Democratic Party and the Labour Party. Voter turnout is lower at around 30-40 per cent. Political engagement is varied, with significant regional differences in voter engagement and participation.
The key issues are around security with the Boko Haram insurgency, banditry, and regional conflicts taking centre stage. Others are the economy, diversification, unemployment, and poverty alleviation; corruption and governance reforms and critical infrastructure including roads, electricity, and public services in education, health and water. Elections are often marked by ethno-religious sentiments and voter apathy.
The Independent National Electoral Commission oversees elections. Security is always very high because of high levels of election-related violence and security concerns. Technology plays a significant role with the introduction of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) for voter registration and results transmission, but challenges remain.
Voting hours are from 8am to 2pm but voters in line by 2pm can still vote and it can take a whole day to vote. Schools, public buildings, open spaces serve as polling stations and paper ballots are used with voters marking their choice with thumbprints. The President is elected separately from the legislature and transition to power can be contentious, marked with disputes and legal challenges around vote rigging, widespread election violence and disenfranchisement.
Both countries have unique electoral processes shaped by their distinct political histories, cultural contexts, and governance structures. The UK’s elections are characterized by stability and regulatory oversight, while Nigeria’s elections are marked by significant challenges related to security, voter turnout, and transparency.
Why Can’t This Happen In Nigeria?
For many Africans who voted for the first time in this general election, it was a culture shock. Within months of taking up residence in the UK legally, you will most likely get a notification from the electoral registration office for your local council to register. You will have the option to register online or fill out a form as well as the option to vote by post if you are unavailable on election day.
On July 4, the entire voting process took only a few minutes without any tech enabled device to verify voter identity save for a poll card or a government issued ID – no special ‘PVC’ or ‘BVAS’. There was no public holiday, schools, offices and markets were open, transport services moved freely without restrictions, there were no thugs, no violence, no gun totting military or police personnel scaring the citizenry.
On the contrary here in Nigeria and across many African countries, manipulation of election results, voter intimidation, and other forms of fraud undermine the integrity of elections, discourage certain groups from voting and can skew election outcomes and undermine democracy.
The spread of false information misleads voters and influence election results. In many regions, elections are marred by violence and intimidation, deterring voter participation and skewing results. Gerrymandering, unequal access to voting facilities, and other structural issues distort representation and affect the fairness of elections.
So, elections are currently the way they are in Nigeria because the political class want it that way. The easier it is for citizens to participate in the electoral and democratic process, the less they can perpetuate themselves in power.
Promoting Democratic Elections
Elections are the cornerstone of democracy, the primary mechanism through which citizens express their will and hold their leaders accountable. Sadly, elections in many African nations including Nigeria are conducted like war leaving many citizens disenfranchised and disillusioned.
Elections ensure that the government reflects the will of the people. Citizens vote for representatives who they believe will best serve their interests. By participating in free and fair elections, citizens confer legitimacy on their government – a crucial requirement for maintaining political stability and public trust in the system.
Government must ensure that all eligible citizens have the right to vote without discrimination in a safe and dignified manner. This includes provisions for voter registration and access to polling places and the process should be transparent to ensure public confidence with clear procedures for voting, counting, and reporting results. A healthy democracy requires competition among multiple political parties and candidates with genuine choices among contenders.
To promote democratic elections, electoral commissions must be fully independent bodies to oversee elections and ensure their integrity and impartiality. Secondly, educating citizens about their rights and the electoral process encourages informed participation. Thirdly, continuous evaluation and reform of electoral laws and practices can address emerging challenges and improve the system including the simplification of voter registration processes and ensuring the security of voters is crucial.
Finally, given our numbers and peculiarities, leveraging technology, such as electronic voting systems and biometric registration, can enhance the efficiency and security of elections, though it also introduces new risks that must be managed.
Congratulations and all the best to the Labour Party as they steer the UK to a brighter future and may Nigeria learn from this experience.
![[OPINION] Trump vs Biden sequel sets the bar very low - Adekeye Adebanjo](/media/k2/items/cache/6eed8bd573a166ae93674123ee4c33a6_M.jpg)
Hollywood loves a sequel, so it is fitting that the current US presidential contest is a repeat of the bitter 2020 slugfest.
The recent presidential debate between Joe Biden, the incumbent 81-year-old Democrat, and Donald Trump, his 78-year-old Republican challenger, has been widely portrayed as a contest between a geriatric octogenarian drifting gently into senility, and a hate-spewing lunatic recently convicted for using campaign funds to pay a porn star hush money.
How has it come to this in the world’s richest country, with its dynamic innovators and elite universities?
Though fewer than half of Americans view either candidate favourably, much of the US “liberal” corporate media focused on Biden’s apparently disastrous debate performance, with the New York Times and CNN’s talking-heads calling for his resignation. Several senior Democrats continue to voice discontent.
In stark contrast, conservative media and Republican politicians have doggedly defended Trump, showing the ruthless discipline that has enabled them to reverse decades of progressive legislation.
Astonishingly, centre-left critics were surprised by Biden’s lack of mental acuity during the debate. Yet just this year he has verbally mistaken former German chancellor Angela Merkel for the dead former chancellor Helmut Kohl; erroneously referred to French President Emmanuel Macron as the dead Gallic president Francois Mitterand; and mistakenly described Egypt’s leader as the “president of Mexico”. In 2023, Biden stated that Russia was losing the “war in Iraq” and noted that “over 100 Americans” had died of Covid-19 (the actual figure is 1.2-million).
In 2022, Biden called out onstage to Republican congresswoman Jackie Walorski before being reminded that the legislator had died a month earlier. Critics of his debate performance also appear to have ignored the recent description of Biden by special counsel Robert Hur — who cleared the president of charges of mishandling classified documents — as “a sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory”.
Trump has similarly experienced his own “senior citizen moments”. He verbally confused Biden with former president Barack Obama seven times, while also mistakenly referring to his Republican rival, Nikki Haley, as former Democratic House speaker Nancy Pelosi.
The contestants pointedly did not shake hands before or after this presidential debate, underlining the lack of civility that now pervades US politics. Biden was widely portrayed as hoarse and halting, while Trump was depicted as fierce and forceful. The president sought to paint his opponent as a danger to democracy, architect of the Supreme Court decision to deny women the right to abortions, and a climate change denier. He wrongly claimed to have inherited 9% inflation from Trump instead of 1.4%.
Trump was characteristically full of bombast and bluster, lying brazenly throughout the debate. He falsely accused Biden of letting criminal illegal migrants into the country, erroneously claiming these migrants are stealing jobs from blacks and Hispanics.
He xenophobically described Biden as a China-funded “Manchurian candidate” and a “bad Palestinian” who had failed to fully back Israel’s military assault on Gaza. Trump further alleged that Biden had “encouraged” Russia to attack Ukraine, strangely accused Democrats of backing abortions after babies had been born, downplayed the attack on the Capitol by his supporters in 2021, and refused to say unequivocally whether he would accept the result of November’s election.
Given Biden’s frequent memory lapses before this debate the panicked reaction of his supporters to his lacklustre performance is somewhat disingenuous. I watched the full debate having factored in Biden’s weaknesses, and felt he actually remembered many facts and landed some good punches.
Trump certainly did not win this debate on substance, and if the ability to appear mentally fitter than your opponent while spewing bile and being economical with the truth is enough to triumph, this is a rather low bar for a country that likes to pride itself on being the “greatest nation on earth”.
• Adebajo is professor and senior research fellow at the University of Pretoria’s Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship.
![[OPINION] Kongi at 90 - Louis Odion, FNGE](/media/k2/items/cache/0349545dccd8aa1d32a89631e6fffd6c_M.jpg)
Yes, take a glimpse at this photograph. You would probably imagine, momentarily, a model among the bevy paraded by, say, the popular ritzy GQ magazine.
If so, well, you just fell for a disguise.
Now, take a closer look. Strip that bucket hat and you will behold, in its luxuriant bloom, that familiar hoary mane complemented by no less immaculate goatee to which folks around the world have long grown accustomed as evocative of no other than Kongi in any gathering, anywhere.
Today, it took more than “yabis” (teasing) to extract a few seconds from Professor Akinwande Oluwole Soyinka and get him to shed his accustomed stern mien and momentarily act a model, one hand fashionably in the pocket, on a North African soil. But without the usual preening or sashaying of the runway.
That fleeting GQ moment was, by the way, captured in Fes (Morocco) in June 2023 by this writer with a camera phone as an emergency “paparazzi”, after sidestepping a bit to get a perfect angle for the lens against blinding lights by the elementary law of photography. Amid sustained volleys of “yabis” by an old disciple, Sir K (Kunle Ajibade) alongside Mrs Rakiya Dhikru-Yagboyaju and Ahmed Garba-Gombe who formed Kongi’s entourage while guests of King Mohammed VI of Morocco as part of activities to mark Morocco’s 28th Book Fair last year.
The location was the vast lounge of Nejjarine Ensemble, ornate with its Oriental mosaic and sculptures, perhaps the most remarkable among the kaleidoscope of historical monuments and buildings long classified by UNESCO as world heritage sites in Fes. Outside this sprawling palace (built in 1711 by Sultan Moulay Ismail), history cast a rather long, sepulchral shadow on the forecourt under the mild pre-summer sun.
Indeed, hours earlier in faraway Rabat, no sooner had Prof materialised in a rare white linen shirt from the elevator into a waiting party of his entourage (from Nigeria) and Moroccan officials at the lobby of the exquisite Sofitel Hotel than Sir K lobbed the first “yabis” by joking if Prof was already considering career switch from literature to modelling.
Of course, an inexhaustible bag of humour himself, Prof absorbed as much as he dispensed withering ripostes that sometimes left us breathless with tearful laughter. Sometimes, his humour was self-deprecatory. Like his recall of once being made to repeat a passage — and again — through the scanner at an international airport abroad, until a further meticulous search by apprehensive security agents revealed that the trigger of the persistently treacherous alarm bell was not more than the phial of granulated native African pepper Prof habitually carries around to spice his meals at Oyinbo restaurants.
Even more extraordinary was Kongi’s undiminished agility and razor-sharp sense of recall at such an advanced age. Eager to show off their abundant tourism treasures, the Moroccan officials had taken us to many high and low locations. Not once did Kongi, barely a month short of his 89th birthday then, appear to have missed a single breath or betray the slightest hint of weariness over an otherwise loaded itinerary.
Indeed, something seemed to have moved a day earlier in Rabat (Morocco’s political capital) when news circulated that the literary eagle had landed in Casablanca (the commercial nerve centre), straight from the U.S. (We had flown from Lagos and arrived in Rabat hours before Kongi).
For the four days we spent in Morocco, there was always a scramble by local folks to see or come near the first black Nobel laureate in Literature who, according to the Swedish Academy, “with poetic overtones, fashioned the drama of existence.” The one who, with the sheer power of the written word, had achieved world celebrity. The one whose voice forever instils mortal fear in the hearts of tyrants and bigots everywhere.
Words also reached our mercurial Emir Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, a bosom friend of the King of Morocco, who was also in Rabat around the same time. The Nigerian ambassador to Morocco, Mansur Nuhu Bamali (now late), brought His Royal Majesty to see Kongi on arrival at Sofitel. Both had a lengthy private chat on the plum couch in the lounge.
As for the occasional bucket hat, those who know will reveal a darker story. In the 90s, it served Kongi abroad as a disguise against Abacha’s paid killers after being publicly charged with treasonable felony in Nigeria on account of his pivotal role in the pro-democracy struggle after the June 12 annulment at grave personal risk. Indeed, throughout Nigeria’s postcolonial history, only a few — if any — could be said to have been as invested in pursuing the common purpose as Kongi. (A fact now lost on some of our millennials and Gen Z utterly bereft of a sense of history and quickly recruited as online trolls for puerile graffiti).
But in the latter years, that bucket hat has evolved into a civil utility: either as a prop to sneak into a targeted tavern undetected or simply evade a never-ending stream of autograph hunters and hustlers for photo ops.
Two Mercedes limousines were provided for the journey to Fes. But before take-off, Kongi asked I “abandon Kunle and others” in the second car and keep him company in his.
For the about two-hour trip, it felt invigorating to sit next to and converse non-stop with arguably one of the world’s greatest minds in the last century, the monarch of the language himself, famously described as “the conscience of the African continent.”
Indeed, as Prof enters the nonagenarian club this week, there is no doubt that what obsesses him remains a fierce commitment to the values of tolerance, justice, good governance and compassion for the vulnerable in Nigeria and everywhere. Plus, an advocacy for youth empowerment in the political economy where gerontocrats seem reluctant to let go.
The said linen shirt he “premiered” in Morocco was, in fact, a gift from a young Nigerian fashion designer. He chose to “launch” it before a foreign audience to help promote Nigerian talent.
To the far younger ones like yours sincerely, Prof’s father-figure stature naturally makes him a guardian. But despite the vast age difference, Kongi also relates to you as a friend with uncommon solidarity and loyalty.
That spirit was on display when this writer turned 50 in March 2023. He was not in the country when “OPEC President” (Tunji Bello) hosted a dinner in my honour in Lagos, attended by the likes of Aremo Segun Osoba, Pa Julius Adelusi-Adeluyi, Dr. Yemi Ogunbiyi and several media heavyweights.
On returning to Nigeria two weeks later, Kongi chose to host a lavish luncheon for his younger disciple at one exclusive “hideout” in Ikeja GRA. T.B. was excused because of Muslim Ramadan. But the “gang” (Sam Omatseye, Kayode Komolafe, Azu Ishiekwene and Andrew Odion) had a swell time feasting. Of course, wine flowed freely.
Azu won the additional lottery of a bottle of vintage wine as a “takeaway” from Kongi’s famous cellar for a tribute he wrote earlier on me which Prof found interesting.
Eventually, when the waiter brought the invoice, I tried to play smart.
In the hoary years, the mammal, according to African wisecrack, should suckle her brood instead by a reversed law of nature. I thought being hosted by a Nobel laureate alone was already a significant honour and, as a cultured Bini man, I should not allow that to leave a hole in the old man’s pocket.
But on sighting my ATM card and conspiratorial whisper to the waiter on the side, Kongi preempted me. With a vehemence, he insisted on picking up the bill himself and thrust forward his credit card. Overwhelmed, I knelt in gratitude, to which he frowned, jocularly waving me to stand up “And stop embarrassing me in the public.”
That’s the essential Prof.
On his 80th birthday in 2014, I wrote a tribute for Kongi. Ten years later, nothing has changed to persuade me to rethink or regret my words. I crave readers’ indulgence to bring the following extracts from that essay:
“What truly makes Soyinka great is not so much for the monumentality of a talent that spews pithy poetry, gripping prose and transcendental drama. His greatness lies more in the courage and character he brings to bear on creativity. At an age when no territory seems restricted any more, when many of yesterday’s heroes and heroines have been exposed to be counterfeits, and when more and more of the surviving statesmen would instead trade away their honour for temporary gains, Kongi remains an exemplar.
“His fiery pen and caustic tongue notwithstanding, Kongi remains tender at heart, one who may disagree with you in principle but never holds back in the fellowship of humanity or be detained by bitterness over the past. Only that could explain the complicated relationship he has had over the years with his relative, ex-President Olusegun Obasanjo. Feisty OBJ had decided to veer from the political turf as sitting president in 2005 to engage Soyinka in an epistolary joust. In a signed statement, he took a swipe at Kongi for criticising his policies.
“But discerning observers who read the open letter could not but raise their hands in panic immediately, fearful of the approaching literary wrath on the proverbial errant native doctor who carries his ritual offering past a mosque. While it was readily conceded that OBJ was fussy by nature, many had expected that his fabled native intelligence would have served him well by dissuading him from venturing into a square rope against Kongi in a literary duel.
“Their worst fears were soon proved right. Soyinka’s response was an atomic bomb. OBJ’s presidential garment was torn beyond recognition by the time the smoke cleared. For once, the Ota chicken farmer became tongue-tied. Months later, the hatred that open ‘roforofo’ (dirty fight) had generated would not prevent Kongi from showing up at the funeral of OBJ’s spouse, Stella, who died suddenly following complications arising from a medical procedure in Spain.
“When OBJ finally met with Kongi face to face on the aisle outside the funeral parlour, the story is told of how the president exploded in a playful rage, ‘Wole, iwo! (Wole, you!)’, raising an arm in mock threat. Defiant Kongi fired back, “Segun, Ori e!” thumping his head in a supreme Yoruba gesture of contempt. More embarrassed than amused by such audacity, the guards around the President cleverly looked away.
“Again, when Chief Emeka Ojukwu qualified the victory he achieved in the sham elections arranged by the Abacha junta to select delegates for the 1994 Constitutional Conference as conferring on him a mandate ‘superior to June 12’, vintage Soyinka gave expression to popular thinking in the country then by simply dismissing the ex-Biafran secessionist as ‘an expired warlord’. That critical riposte would not prevent Kongi from attending Ojukwu’s burial (in 2012) to pay last respects to a personal friend.
“The same generosity of spirit is evident in his warm relationship with General Yakubu Gowon today. At the presentation of a memoir by the Oba of Benin early (in 2014), Soyinka continually poked good-natured jokes at Gowon while giving a keynote address to the audience's admiration. It was hard to believe that it was the same Gowon who had clamped him into the gulag during the Nigerian Civil War. His 28-month solitary confinement birthed the book, ‘The Man Died’.
“When it was his turn to speak, the former head of state threw the crowd into a fresh bout of laughter by cautioning Kongi to watch his tongue: ‘You should remember that it was because of the same sharp tongue of yours that I sent you to prison in the 60s.’
“Being the first black man to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, Soyinka’s life sends an enduring message: the infinite possibilities of the black race.”
![[OPINION] Managing political crisis: how is Joe Biden doing? - Etim Etim](/media/k2/items/cache/78e558691694fc8a8817b5d2a844ca7b_M.jpg)
Every presidential election cycle in the US comes with its own peculiar dramas that sometimes influence the outcomes of the race. Usually, these dramatic events come up in October, a month to the election, giving rise to the term ‘’October Surprise’’ coined in 1980 by William Cassey when he served as Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign manager. But even before 1980, there had always been unpredicted political developments that affected the results of elections. This year, the October Surprise came in June and President Joe Biden is fighting hard to save his legacy and reelection bid. I stayed up late to watch the Biden-Trump debate on June 27 (1am Nigerian time) and was surprised at how poorly the President performed, especially in the first few minutes. He stared blankly into space, stumbled on words, lost his trend of thoughts and left sentences uncompleted. On the other hand, his opponent, Donald Trump, was in his elements, lying through his teeth and looking more determined and stronger. The difference was stark and I was embarrassed for the President.
As soon as the debate ended, a fierce political firestorm erupted in the Democratic party, with many leaders, commentators and analysts asking the president to drop off the race because he had showed signs of cognitive decline during the debate. For the first five days, the administration was besieged, the Biden campaign was unsettled and the President himself was quiet. He later acknowledged that he had a bad night due to a cold, sore throat and jet lag. He had just returned from a G7 Summit and had gone straight to attend a fund raiser a day to the debate. Yet the calls for him to exit the race was growing louder and louder. They claimed that an afflicted Biden would not be able to beat Donald Trump in the November 5 election. But the president quickly recovered from the shock and embarrassment, and insisted that he’s the only one who can defeat the Republican nominee, recalling how he came out victorious in the 2020 race and the 2022 midterms despite similar negative predictions.
It's been two weeks since the debate, and in terms of public relations and crisis management techniques, how has President Biden and his team handled the situation? Crisis management is anchored on deployment of effective communication strategy and broadly, there are ways of doing that: The five C’s of crisis communications developed by Prof. Joe Zaldarriaga, a renowned communications specialist. They are: care (concern for the wellbeing of the customers); commitment (relevant, factual and updated information); competency (a team of competent and credible staffs should be out there to speak for the organization); community (stakeholder relationship-building) and continuity (continued and consistent engagements). In the last two weeks, the Biden team has been more focused on fending off calls for him to drop off than amplifying the president’s major achievements and laying out his vision for the next four years. In his first term, the president has recorded important legislative achievements like gun control and climate control bills; got more people working than at any point in US history; rescued the economy and changes the course of the COVID-19 pandemic; rebuilt infrastructure; lowered costs of medications and expanded benefits and services for veterans exposed to toxic veterans. It is a surprise that the president did not tout these in the debate and so far, the campaign is not pushing them aggressively. A major drawback in crisis management is allowing yourself to be overwhelmed by the talking points of the opposition, instead of focusing on your own records and agenda.
But Biden and his team have done well for acknowledging his pitfalls and being truthful to the public. The president earned my sympathy when he announced at a campaign rally soon after the debate, ‘’I don’t debate as I used to; I don’t walk as swiftly as I used to, but I know how to do this job and I will always tell Americans the truth’’, an indirect dig at his opponent. Truthfulness, forthrightness and admitting your wrongs are good in crisis management.
The White House Communications team has also been very professional under intense media scrutiny, upright, forthcoming and factual. They have not issued threats to the media as we saw in Nigeria in 2022 and 2023 when Bayo Onanuga, the spokesman for the Tinubu campaign, was busy threatening the media and insulting people of different ethnic backgrounds. Over one year after the elections, our media is still under constant threats, intimidation and assaults, with many journalists detained or kidnapped or killed in Nigeria. President Biden has also been busy in the last one week granting interviews, addressing rallies and speaking to donors and party leaders. On Monday, he wrote a beautifully worded letter to party chieftains, urging them to close ranks and get ready for the election.
This week, Biden will host a NATO summit in Washington during which he will meet world leaders and address the US and international media. The summit is an opportunity for the president to showcase his foreign policy credentials for which he’s well renowned. Fixing a PR crisis is all about taking action and proving your point to counter the negative narratives. It is also notable that the major leaders of the Democratic Party, including House Majority Leader, Hakeem Jefferies; former Speaker Nancy Pelosi; Senate Minority Leader, Chuck Schumer; majority of the Democratic governors and even former President Barack Obama are with the President. Building a formidable stakeholder relationship is an important ingredient in managing a crisis. As a leader, you must build a consensus, lay out your gameplan and motivate the team to follow you to the battle.
As you execute your plans, there may be slips on the way. You have to recover quickly and move ahead. Joe Biden told ABC News interview over the weekend that if he ends up failing the election, he’d be satisfied that he had done his best. That turned out to be a dump answer, given the circumstances. To fix it, he called into a talk show on Monday morning and was asked the same question. He bellowed: ‘’I will not lose the election. The question of losing does not arise. I am the man to beat Trump’’. His supporters loved that. In all, the president has managed this crisis fairly well. In our last general elections, Bola Tinubu failed to show up for the debates with his opponents. His team accused the media of bias, but we knew better. Looking back and taking everything into consideration, we can now understand why presidential candidates should subject themselves to the scrutiny that a debate offers.
![[OPINION] Project Management as Key Driver for National Development - Kenechukwu Aguolu](/media/k2/items/cache/5415769690e7d1b1a10b359d01c018f6_M.jpg)
In pursuit of national development, effective project management is a critical success factor. According to the Project Management Institute ‘” Project management is the application of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to project activities to meet project requirements. It’s the practice of planning, organizing, and executing the tasks needed to turn a brilliant idea into a tangible product, service, or deliverable.”. Developed countries increasingly acknowledge the pivotal role of project management, reflected in the competitive compensation of professional project managers.
According to the Project Management Institute,’ A project is a temporary endeavor undertaken to create unique products, services, or result. It can involve anything from the glamorous events of Fashion Week to humanitarian aid efforts overseas. More specifically, a project is a series of structured tasks, activities, and deliverables that are carefully executed to achieve a desired outcome.’’
Abandoned projects in Nigeria have not only led to financial losses but also represent missed opportunities for societal advancement and economic growth. This can be prevented by projects being managed by professional project managers. Whether in construction, healthcare, or social interventions, rigorous project management practices ensure that projects stay on track, delivering intended benefits to communities.
The definition of project scope involves comprehensive requirement gathering to outline what needs to be achieved. By establishing a precise scope from the outset, project managers can mitigate scope creep—uncontrolled changes in a project's scope. This clarity helps in setting realistic expectations and provides a roadmap for project execution.
Task scheduling and time management are prioritized in project management. Tools like critical Path Analysis (CPA) and Gantt charts are essential in this regard. CPA helps identify the sequence of critical tasks that determine the minimum project duration, while Gantt charts provide a visual timeline of the project schedule. Using these tools, project managers can allocate resources efficiently, identify potential bottlenecks, and ensure adherence to timelines, thereby avoiding unnecessary delays.
Project managers employ robust cost management strategies to monitor expenditures and prevent budget overruns. Quality assurance measures are implemented to guarantee that deliverables meet predefined standards. This dual focus on cost and quality enhances stakeholder satisfaction and trust, ensuring that projects deliver value.
Project managers facilitate open channels of communication among team members and stakeholders, ensuring transparency and alignment of expectations. Effective stakeholder engagement fosters collaboration, secures buy-in, and minimizes conflicts. Regular updates, feedback sessions, and stakeholder meetings are crucial for maintaining engagement and addressing concerns promptly, thus enhancing project outcomes and sustainability.
Efficient resource management is critical in optimizing project performance. This involves the strategic acquisition, allocation, and utilization of resources—whether human, financial, or material. Effective resource management ensures that resources are used responsibly and efficiently, minimizing waste and maximizing productivity. Furthermore, effective procurement practices ensure that goods and services are acquired at the right time, cost, and quality, contributing to overall project efficiency.
Project management integrates proactive risk management strategies to anticipate, assess, and mitigate potential threats. By identifying risks early in the project lifecycle, managers can implement contingency plans and safeguards to protect project objectives and minimize disruptions. Risk management involves continuous monitoring and adaptation to changing circumstances, ensuring that potential issues are addressed before they escalate.
The Government should establish dedicated project management offices (PMOs) within government agencies to standardize project oversight, enhance accountability, and optimize resource utilization. By institutionalizing project management practices, governments can mitigate the risks of project failure, promote sustainable development, and maximize socio-economic impact.
Project Management remains key to National Development. . Project management principles offer a structured approach to addressing the challenges of abandoned projects and inefficiencies. By institutionalizing these practices, fostering stakeholder collaboration, and prioritizing efficient resource management, Nigeria can ensure that projects deliver their intended benefits, driving national development and improving the quality of life for its citizens
Kenechukwu Aguolu FCA, PMP, CBAP
Abuja, Nigeria
![[OPINION] Mr. President, It’s Time to Pass the Torch to Kamala Harris - Lanny Davis](/media/k2/items/cache/01dc3677f7259a1e7ffdcf65248e610c_S.jpg)
With pain, I have changed my mind: I ask you, President Biden, to think again and please decide to pass the torch to your vice president, Kamala Harris. Friday night’s George Stephanopoulos interview changed my mind.
Last week, I wrote a column in this space:
Mr. President, to repeat: I am not asking you to withdraw. I am asking you to be a lawyer and look at the evidence, test yourself as to whether you can defeat Donald Trump and do the job for the next four years, and then – make the right decision for yourself, for your family, and most importantly, for your country. I know you well enough to be confident, and to trust you to make the right decision.
Mr. President: Now that I have seen your interview on Friday night, I cannot honestly say that I trust you to make the right decision. There were four answers to George’s questions that led me to that extremely painful conclusion.
First and probably most important to me, you were asked what your reaction would be if you ended up being defeated by Donald Trump. Your response was: “I’ll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the goodest job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about.”
With all due respect, Mr. President: No, you’re doing the “goodest job” is not what “this is about.” What this election should be about for you is saving us from a man whom everyone in the Democratic Party – our political party, sir – believes poses a grave threat to the country and the Constitution.
Second, I worry that many of your words during the interview seemed to deny political realities, reinforcing the worry about your mental condition. For example, George said to you: “I’ve never seen a president with 36% approval get reelected.” And you responded: “Well, I don’t believe that’s my approval rating. That’s not what our polls show.”
Mr. President, yes, of course individual or small numbers of polls can be incorrect snapshots of a moving picture. But to disbelieve sites aggregating all polls with job approval average percentages in the mid-30s – such as RealClearPolitics – is to deny facts, to deny realities. That is worrisome. It circles back to the troubling impression you left during your debate, which was an inability to recall, appreciate, and articulate facts.
Third, you repeatedly ducked George’s question about taking a cognitive test, and you never explained why you were refusing to take one. That left an unavoidable impression you feared the results, which reinforced the impression, wrongly or not, that what happened at the first debate, as Nancy Pelosi said, was not just an “episode” but a “condition.”
And fourth was your answer to George’s question about whether you watched last week’s debate. Your response was: “I don’t think I did, no.”
This one tipped the scales for me to write this column. You couldn’t even recall for certain if you had watched the debate that brought all this to a head – a debate that took place eight days earlier? Mr. President, how could you not be certain whether or not you watched the debate? And more important: Why didn’t you watch the debate – not once, but again and again and again? To be able to do what I wrote in my column last week that I expected you would do, as a great lawyer and politician – to gather the evidence of your capabilities as a candidate to beat Donald Trump – or not.
Finally, it is not correct that if you withdraw, that must mean a divided Democratic Party that would make Donald Trump’s election even more likely. History and the evidence are to the contrary.
Kamala Harris was your pick to succeed you if anything happened to you. She still should be. She won five out of five elections in California, including two terms as attorney general and then as a U.S. senator, succeeding the great Barbara Boxer. According to the most recent CNN “A-rated” poll, she is in a dead heat with Donald Trump now – stronger than you or any other Democrat by a good margin. Other polls back that up.
I know – there are some who think her performance in 2020 shows she is not a good candidate – plus there are negative perceptions of her as VP.
That is BS – and I can’t believe the same would be said if she were white and male. If you give her the nod, there will be a unified convention and she will inherit all the funds you and she have already raised together. No other candidate can legally do that.
Then, at the convention, you, Barack Obama, and Bill Clinton will introduce her. And finally, she and her running mate – perhaps selected by an open convention vote, as occurred in 1956, when John F. Kennedy sought the VP nomination and lost in a contested vote to Tennessee Sen. Estes Kefauver. And the nominated vice president will probably be one of the half dozen or more outstanding Democratic sitting governors with proven records of executive leadership and accomplishment, such as Illinois’ JB Pritzker, Kentucky’s Andy Beshear, or California’s Gavin Newsom – who will receive an enthusiastic standing ovation by a united Democratic Party. And as in 1992, the profile of the ticket first published in media across the nation will mark the turning of a new generation of leadership for the Democratic Party.
And then, in front of more than one hundred million people, Kamala Harris will deliver a stirring acceptance speech reminiscent of Ronald Reagan: We can have “morning again in America,” without the darkness and division and carnage and chaos of the first Donald Trump term. We can feel good about America again – and know that we will be shoulder to shoulder with our European democratic allies, including helping the heroic Ukrainian people defend themselves from the man Donald Trump hero-worships, Vladimir Putin.
“Yes, we can,” as Barack Obama loved to remind us. The general election would be neatly framed between an optimistic future with new younger leaders vs. Donald Trump’s darkness, retribution, and feeding off lies and division.
That is the frame that will almost certainly carry the Kamala Harris Democratic ticket to victory … and a promise by the vice president to build a bipartisan coalition composed of Democrats, Nikki Haley Republicans, and independents in her future Cabinet.
We can be civil Americans again – learning how to disagree agreeably. And our long national nightmare of the dark and divisive Donald Trump will be over.
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Lanny Davis is the founder of the Washington, D.C., law firm Lanny J. Davis & Associates. He is co-chair of the global public affairs and strategic communications firm Actum LLC. From 2018-2024 Davis served as a legal advisor for Michael Cohen, but for the N.Y. DA trial Cohen is represented by experienced N.Y. counsel. Davis uniquely operates at the intersection of law, media, and politics to solve client problems. From 1996-98, Mr. Davis served as special White House counsel to President Bill Clinton. In 2006, he was appointed by his Yale College friend, President George W. Bush, to serve on a special post-9/11 White House panel to advise the president on privacy and civil liberties issues. He is the author of six books on politics, government, law, and crisis management. He has been writing his “Purple Nation” column since 2010
![[OPINION] Samoa LGBT Agreement and Freedom of Expression - Funmi Adebayo](/media/k2/items/cache/f6de411523213d40f30b5e476dcf098b_S.jpg)
It is sad that the Tinubu government has resorted to intimidating, threatening, and blackmailing individuals and the media for exercising their constitutional right to freedom of expression by commenting on the Samoa LGBT Agreement, which Nigeria has unfortunately signed. The Tinubu government is reportedly either threatening to sue or has sued the Daily Trust Newspaper over its fair comment on the Samoa LGBT Agreement. Blinded by misplaced sycophancy, Doyin Okupe was quoted as saying that "deliberate misinformation" on the Samoa Agreement is treasonable. This is very childish. No reasonable Nigerian takes Doyin Okupe seriously. Mr. Okupe used to be the Labour Party spokesman, but now he is the spokesman of the ruling party simply because of money. He speaks from both sides of his mouth depending on where the money is coming from.
There is an ARISE TV video clip that has been trending on WhatsApp and social media platforms. It is the clip wherein Sonnie Ekwowusi, a lawyer and Chairman of the Human and Constitutional Rights Committee of the African Bar Association, explained the Samoa Agreement and the implications of Nigeria signing the Agreement. Commenting on this video clip, the government or its agents tried to blackmail Sonnie Ekwowusi by alleging that he is a member of the pro-Peter Obi campaign and that there is no provision for any LGBTQ rights in the Samoa Agreement.
This is untrue. I have just finished listening to a Channels TV video clip which is also circulating on social media. In the clip, Sonnie Ekwowusi explained the Samoa Agreement and the implications of Nigeria signing the Agreement. He stated that the Samoa LGBT Agreement contains Articles 2(5), 29(5), and 36(1)(2) promoting LGBT, Comprehensive Sexuality Education, abortion, and transgender issues, which violate Nigerian cultural and religious heritage and Chapter 2 of the 1999 Nigerian Constitution, and Articles 2, 8, 17, 18, 28, and 29 of the African Charter on Human and People's Rights, which are now part and parcel of Nigerian law. Barr. Ekwowusi also said that during the negotiation stages of the Agreement, which he attended, the European Union was requested to expunge the aforesaid offensive articles from the Agreement, but it refused. Instead of doing so, the European Union went about bribing different African government officials to sign the Agreement. He also mentioned that the Samoa Agreement has no glossary or interpretation section to define the words and phrases in the Agreement.
He further said that the Agreement is like giving an open cheque to the European Union because, in the coming months and years, the European Union will be making dangerous decisions binding on Nigeria and other countries that signed the Agreement. He said that the European Union does not care about the ratification and domestication of the Samoa Agreement by Nigeria and that since Nigeria has signed the Agreement, the European Union will be sending their envoys to Nigeria for the implementation of the Agreement.
So, how can the Minister for Information and the Minister for Budget and Planning go about denying that the Agreement contains the aforesaid offensive provisions? He who asserts must prove. If the two Ministers are asserting that the copy of the Agreement signed by Nigeria does not contain the offensive provisions, they should make it available for the public to see. Merely blackmailing someone or threatening the Daily Trust for speaking the truth is in bad taste. The difference between our political officeholders and those abroad is that the latter admit the truth when they err. For example, look at the humble manner in which the British former Minister Rishi Sunak came out in public to apologize to the whole world for the failure of his government. Can this happen in Nigeria? No. Can any Nigerian political officeholder come out in public to admit failure? No. Most political officeholders in Nigeria are arrogant and proud. They want to always appear in a good light in public even when they are wrong.
By virtue of section 39 (1) and (2) of the 1999 Constitution, every person in Nigeria is entitled to freedom of expression, including the freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart ideas and information without interference. Since 1859, when Rev. Henry Townsend’s Iwe Irohin Yoruba (the first newspaper in Nigeria) made its debut, the print media has effectively performed its traditional function as a societal watchdog in Nigeria to the best of its ability. Given its role in constitutional democracy, the press is dubbed the Fourth Estate of the Realm, after the Legislature. In common parlance, the press is simply referred to as the watchdog of society. Therefore, the press is not a societal nuisance. Nigerian journalists come within the purview of the law, and their activities are governed by law.
Therefore, any individual in Nigeria can freely express his or her opinion in public. Under the law, he or she can freely criticize the government. Similarly, a newspaper or a publisher of a newspaper cannot be punished for commenting on matters of public interest. In Akinrinsola v. A.G. Anambra State (1980) 2NLR 17, the court held that a publication of a general comment on a matter related to a court proceeding presided over by a judge cannot be held to be contemptuous of the court. Remember the case of Tony Momoh? Tony Momoh, a lawyer, journalist, and Editor of the Daily Times from March 1976 to May 1980, ran a column in the Daily Times named "Grape Vine." On February 4, 1980, Momoh published in his column a story entitled "MPs, Senators, and Cards." In the story, Momoh insinuated that some members of the National Assembly were taking advantage of their privileged position as MPs to enter government offices and obtain contracts. The story caused a significant stir at the National Assembly. After exhaustively debating the matter, the Senate resolved to invite Momoh to come to the Senate and disclose what he knew about the members of the National Assembly who were abusing their privileges, as well as disclose the names of the legislators referred to in his "Grape Vine." On February 11, 1980, this resolution was communicated to Tony Momoh.
On February 18, 1980, Momoh went to court to challenge his invitation by the Senate. His lawyer, Chief Gani Fawehinmi, argued that the invitation by the Senate was a complete violation of his fundamental rights, including the right to express his opinion. In his ruling, Justice Candidate Johnson (then Chief of Lagos State) granted Momoh’s prayer and agreed that the Senate's invitation violated Momoh’s right to freedom of expression. The judge also emphasized the importance of the freedom of the press in Nigeria. He stated that any attempt to force a person like Momoh, who disseminates information through the medium of a newspaper, to disclose the source of his information apparently given in confidence is an interference with the freedom of the press. The Senate got annoyed and appealed against the ruling. While ruling that the Senate had no power to invite Momoh, the Court of Appeal said that the Senate could only invite a member of the public to the Senate when they wanted to gather facts for the purpose of enabling them to make laws on a matter.
More importantly, the Freedom of Information Act is aimed at placing information in the public domain. The major value underlying freedom of information is society’s need for the maximum flow of information. It is the duty of the press to keep the citizens informed of the different opinions being expressed and what is happening in the seat of government so that the citizens will be able to make better political decisions. With the Freedom of Information Act, a journalist can walk into any government office and demand information or documents exposing any corrupt public servant.
What this translates to is that the people enjoy the freedom to express themselves as well as criticize the government in our constitutional democracy. A government that does not accept criticism or opposition is an irresponsible government. The Tinubu government must understand that the people are the sovereigns in our presidential democracy. Power belongs to the people. Our political office holders are mere servants of the people and should be accountable to the people for all their deeds and misdeeds.
Under the different military dictatorships and totalitarian regimes in Nigeria, the people and the Nigerian press suffered emasculation, intimidation, suppression, and proscriptions. However, with the restoration of democratic government in Nigeria since May 29, 1999, the fundamental human rights enshrined in sections 33-46 of the 1999 Constitution are enforceable. The 1999 Constitution is rooted in national ethos. The government cannot blackmail anybody or any media outlet for exercising their right to freedom of expression. Freedom of expression is not negotiable.
Mrs. Adebayo*, a criminologist, writes from Ogun State.
![[OPINION] The Geo-Politics of Nigeria’s Insecurity - Dakuku Peterside](/media/k2/items/cache/9a8f959409fedef164a1fc71ba7a0de6_S.jpg)
In the past ten years, the South-East and North-East geopolitical zones, more than other geopolitical zones, have been sites of experiments on insecurity and militia reign. Either terrorists, kidnappers, or militias were testing the will of the government to see how long it would take for a determined state to take charge, or it was just a playground of absurdity. The result is known. Political leadership and the elite failed the people irredeemably. Admittedly, insecurity on a national scale abhors partitioning. The factors at play in a place may owe their origins to factors emanating from a totally different region, but there is good reason to focus on the two zones.
In the two zones, the persistent violence had three distinct features: first, the impunity with which Boko Haram and its affiliates, and unknown gunmen have been allowed to operate; second, the helplessness of the residents; and third, the seeming indifference of the political elite. These defining features fuel existential anger among the people.
Somehow, lately, it appears governors from both regions have found their mojo and courage to rise to the challenge, and that deserves examination and commendation. The source of this new energy and focus is unknown. One thing is clear: the federal government has done its best to redeem the situation, but its best is not good enough. The federal government just did not know how to deal with the situation beyond a military-centric option, and the military deserves commendation for the successes they have recorded so far. Both regions have never been safe places for residents and businesses.
The connection between concrete development and the decimation of militia-led insecurity and related complications has long been established as a theoretical and practical fact. This has been lacking over the years in both regions. Save for a few cases, there has been a substantial disconnect between the people’s development aspirations and the area’s government. Actual development, especially education, helps fight violence, terrorism, and its like. Lately, we have begun to see development programs in a handful of states in both regions, which impacts insecurity in the area.
Besides, the people, too, are beginning to resist the domination of their areas by these non-state actors. Community leaders are now more involved in intelligence gathering. The locals have started organising themselves into quasi-security formations and are beginning to be the first resistance point even before the organised formal security apparatus of the state is involved. This calls for more synergy between the informal and formal security structures and systems in these areas for better operations.
Also, the people’s sensitisation to the fact that these non-state actors purportedly fighting for unknown causes are not doing so for the collective interest of the locals. Instead, the locals in their various communities are the casualties of the needless violence and murderous orgies meted out on them. This new consciousness must be harnessed efficiently to the advantage of the communities. The fight against insecurity is becoming local, and interestingly, the public sphere and media framing the conflicts as banditry and criminality rather than a fight for freedom, self-determination, or religious zealotry is helping matters. I sincerely think that even the perpetrators recognise the impact of this new approach and have turned to symbols of the state for their attacks to legitimise their acts as actions against the state when they are not.
There is a temptation to believe that the insecurity in the northeast and southeast is a scam and a cash cow for interested parties due to its persistence and nature. Additionally, there is a general belief that the security establishment deployed to secure the southeast has found collaboration with criminals and conflict merchants to exploit the separatist agitation. In the northeast, we also find that Sahelian jihadist insurgency had been increased by socioeconomic pressures from the most impoverished states in the nation.
The southeast represents a false agitation for self-determination, whereas the northeast’s insurgency is neither ideological nor religious. Both cases involve ordinary criminals acting as agitators and religious zealots. The criminal colonisation of both regions for an extended period is horrible and disastrous. The political and traditional establishments of both geopolitical zones, led by the governors and National Assembly members, must band together, seek support from wherever possible, and bring this tragedy, which is economically strangulating and socially demoralising, to a stop. Tomorrow is too late.
Recent attacks have shown the ruthlessness of these criminals and demonstrated unequivocally the need for exorcising this evil madness from our communities. A pattern is beginning to emerge: shoot-and-run attacks on soft targets and targeting military/police personnel to instill fear in the people. Unknown gunmen, who were said to have been enforcing the sit-at-home directive of the proscribed Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), on May 21st opened fire on a military checkpoint in Obikabia junction in Aba, killing five soldiers. The response of the state government was decisive. The least we expected from the federal security apparatus was to fish out these culprits and use them to demonstrate the new vigor of fighting criminality posing as agitators. We seem to have lost this opportunity to prove a point. This applies to the recent twin bombing in Gwoza, Borno state.
In Ebonyi state a few weeks ago, gunmen invaded Ishieke Divisional Police Headquarters and started firing sporadic shots. They killed and maimed people, although the report shows that five of the gunmen were killed. Hours before the attack in Ebonyi, gunmen wreaked havoc in Okigwe Local Government Area of Imo State where they killed six people. A few days later, gunmen killed two police operatives and injured two others in Aba, the commercial hub of Abia state. Between 22 and 26 May 2024, a non-state armed group attacked communities in Gujba local government area in Yobe State. The incident displaced 732 households and resulted in three fatalities and 12 injuries. Among the affected were 2,720 children, 1,038 women, and 976 men. These incidences are ongoing, and the casualties are increasing daily. There is a need to quickly optimise the power of collaborative strategy between the federal security apparatus, emerging regional architecture, state governments, and communities.
On the issue of historical injustices, especially in the southeast, unfortunately, the FGN since 2015 has not addressed the grievances; they just looked away. However, the elite of the southeast have realized that there is a need to change their strategy. One of the manifestations of this change in strategy is the resolution by South-East Governors, supported by members of the National Assembly from the zone, to approach the president to release Nnamdi Kanu. Governors of the South-East had earlier resolved to fight insecurity decisively in the region, individually and collectively, in partnership with the federal government of Nigeria and other stakeholders. Though the details of how they intend to fight insecurity are scanty, at least they have found their voice.
As Chief Security Officers of their respective states, governors must demonstrate significant commitment to confronting perpetrators of violence and resolving core causes of insecurity in their states and, by extension, the geopolitical zone. The sign that governors appreciate the enormity of the challenge is there. The next logical step is to confront the monster from its root. The battle is not just kinetic in nature. It is a battle to win the hearts and minds of people, both the perpetrators and their victims. The perpetrators of these heinous crimes are often community members and are known to the local people.
The ideological prism which has held many people hostage to support the call for Islamic militancy or Biafra romanticism resonates with people who are disenchanted or dissatisfied with the existing system. This is rooted in deep-seated anger against a system they feel is holding them hostage and from perceived development. I am sure that when we put good governance and leadership that brings dividends of democracy such as economic and infrastructural development, social justice, and the rule of law, the level of agitation will reduce, and people will have little reason to want to upturn the system.
It is time the states addressed the interconnected concerns such as unemployment, poverty, bad governance, injustices, resource competitiveness, and the development of an inclusive society. Effective governance at the state and grassroots levels is critical to resolving the issue of extreme violence and criminality. Regional cooperation among states and between states and the center is beginning to bear fruit, albeit only in terms of psychological effect and public perception.
We must all work together, irrespective of geopolitical zones, to create a better future for the affected communities, states, and regions. Conflicts have their place in the agitation for change. However, as we see in these and other regions, permanent conflict will only reduce the affected areas to barbarism and put them further away from modernity.
![[OPINION] Monday Lines Britain is Nigeria’s ‘bad’ teacher - Lasisi Olagunju](/media/k2/items/cache/a6c67b877792f6478ddf7c5715b638ce_S.jpg)
“The parliament is supreme in the United Kingdom; in Nigeria, the president is the supremo before whom nothing existed and after whom nothing will. The heroes of the past didn’t bargain for this when they were fighting for independence for Nigeria and for democracy. We lost it, and it is sad. How easy is it now for our leper to pick up his slipped needle? (The Yoruba say abéré bó l’ówó adétè, ó d’ète). The British gave us a system designed to make it easy for us to live in peace, punish insults and reward good behaviour. They gave us a constitutional arrangement which allowed us to engage and to throw out our husbands when they went mad. We messed it up within five years of independence. In 1979, after 13 years in the wilderness of the military, we went for the most expensive of the systems in the books – presidential democracy. It may have worked in all other places, but, here, it has steadily evolved into a most fiendish monarchy – a kábíyèsí system where the legislature and the judiciary are the king’s phlegm eaters”.
The parliament is supreme in the United Kingdom; in Nigeria, the president is the supremo before whom nothing existed and after whom nothing will. The heroes of the past didn’t bargain for this when they were fighting for independence for Nigeria and for democracy. We lost it, and it is sad. How easy is it now for our leper to pick up his slipped needle? (The Yoruba say abéré bó l’ówó adétè, ó d’ète). The British gave us a system designed to make it easy for us to live in peace, punish insults and reward good behaviour. They gave us a constitutional arrangement which allowed us to engage and to throw out our husbands when they went mad. We messed it up within five years of independence. In 1979, after 13 years in the wilderness of the military, we went for the most expensive of the systems in the books – presidential democracy. It may have worked in all other places, but, here, it has steadily evolved into a most fiendish monarchy – a kábíyèsí system where the legislature and the judiciary are the king’s phlegm eaters.
Number 10, Downing Street has been home to Britain’s prime ministers since 1735 AD. Why would a hugely popular new prime minister move into a 289-year-old mansion without spending good pounds on it to buff it up to today’s taste? Keir Starmer, the new British prime minister, moved into that official residence soon after he was appointed last Friday. There was neither a renovation of the building nor a sanctification of the rooms by clerics and priests. Red candles, white tapers were not lit; neither was turari (incense) assigned a role.
“I’ll teach you differences,” Shakespeare wrote in King Lear. He also wrote about “sweet fool” and “bitter fool” and how they are not the same. Britain used the last election to teach us the difference between good and bad; sanity and madness. The British held their elections on Thursday, declaring neither a public holiday nor a restriction of movements. Schools opened, businesses flourished, votes were cast and counted, results were announced without shots fired and machetes wielded. There was no election tribunal, no lawyer to hire and no judge to bribe. Those who lost simply agreed they lost, offered thanks for past favours and apologies for failing their people. Wearing regrets as lapels, the defeated went quietly into the night counting their loss under the dim light of their mourning moon.
You would think that the British who always hailed the way we elected our leaders would copy our ways. This past weekend, the teacher didn’t do the nonsense they taught their students. Their dog refused to follow our monkey to do what locusts do to grain farms. They chose those they wanted as leaders without our usual fireworks and water cannons. For the winner, it was straight from the polling booth to the Government House; there was no interlude, no respite, no recess. There was even no transition committee; neither was there a budget for new furniture and new cars for the prime minister’s family. The Prime Minister took over almost immediately after the sun set for the man whose party lost in spectacular detail. Ministers were appointed the same day and portfolios assigned them on the spot, leaving us to wonder why the haste. We didn’t hear of the parliament grilling the appointees and asking them to sing ‘God save the King’ – their national anthem. Was the head of government even sworn in? Who did?
There is nothing they do in the husband’s bedroom that does not happen in the concubine’s bedchamber. We have rats here that eat vital documents and get presidents sick. The British have over there too. But the PM’s residence in London has a simple solution to the problem: a mouser, a celebrity cat is in firm control of the rodent issues there. The cat’s name is Larry; for the past 13 years, it has been helping heads of government in that country to fix what our cowardly presidents run away from here. We’ve not heard that Labour’s Starmer aims at sacking the cat from the residence because the conservatives took it there.
Since his appointment on Friday last week, Starmer, with his family, has settled in properly in 10 Downing Street.
Our own President Muhammadu Buhari moved into our Presidential Villa late in June 2015 – three weeks after he was sworn in. The old man needed to be sure that the residence was properly fumigated of the sacked party and be rid of rodents and cockroaches – visible and invisible. Despite all his carefulness, impudent rats still ran the ramrod General out of the building and out of the country. He was away in London for months suffering from what could be anything. He came back and, again, got run out of the office part of the building by the same rats. We forget things here. Seven years ago (August 2017), one of Buhari’s spokespersons announced (with uncommon sensation) that rodents had damaged furniture and air conditioning fittings in the president’s “official” office while he was in London receiving treatment. The gentleman said our leader wouldn’t, therefore, be seen working in the president’s office until the damage was undone. And that was it. The big boss stayed off work until the rats accepted his sacrifice and said he should come in.
In his own case, President Bola Tinubu has been more attentive to details. The Yoruba man is well acquainted with the functional relationship between the rolling eyes of the crab and its delicate head. He was sworn in on May 29, 2023, made a rash of careless policy pronouncements but was careful about where he would be accommodated. Unlike Starmer who rushed into the PM’s mansion like a hungry cat, Tinubu rushed nothing and overlooked nothing. Sixty-three days after he took over power, a reluctant Tinubu gingerly detoured into a villa building called the Glass House on Sunday, July 31, 2023. It was there he hibernated until the main residence begged him to come and occupy it. Perhaps because he is the Capone, we have not heard stories about ratty encounters in the nation’s most secure edifice.
In his inaugural speech, Starmer spoke of “the gap between the sacrifices made by the people” and “the service they receive from politicians.” He said when this grew “big,” the heart of the nation became infested with “weariness”. He spoke about that and about the “draining away of the hope, the spirit, the belief in a better future.” That is today’s Nigeria. To hope here is to be stupid – if not downright silly. Starmer could be speaking about this Nigeria where those who preach sacrifice overeat and belch, and the people hunger and yawn.
‘Equal distribution of pain’ is the title of a piece written by good old Nosa Igiebor in the January 13, 1986 issue of Newswatch magazine. It was his panting analysis of the 1986 budget of this country which required “Nigerians to live with less of everything.” Today is a degeneration of what was bad with us yesterday. Here, now, we not only roll in the mud of a regime of unequal distribution of pain; we are daily left to live with less of nothing.
A very senior professor sent to me a text two weeks ago: “Olagunju, I was granted permanent residency in the US in 2017. I have not taken it up. Most of my friends and colleagues believe I’m stupid. I keep hoping against hope that things cannot get worse here. I had my first offer of appointment after PhD in the UK in 1988. I declined because I didn’t apply. My supervisor was asked to source for a good candidate. He called me and told me of the offer. It was a guaranteed position. Instead, I chose to return to Nigeria. My friend, an Englishman who is now a professor at … University told me I was making a mistake returning to Nigeria. I said he was wrong. I did not realise he is the grandson of Nostradamus.” My prof is not the only one who now agrees that things can always get worse here.
The parliament is supreme in the United Kingdom; in Nigeria, the president is the supremo before whom nothing existed and after whom nothing will. The heroes of the past didn’t bargain for this when they were fighting for independence for Nigeria and for democracy. We lost it, and it is sad. How easy is it now for our leper to pick up his slipped needle? (The Yoruba say abéré bó l’ówó adétè, ó d’ète). The British gave us a system designed to make it easy for us to live in peace, punish insults and reward good behaviour. They gave us a constitutional arrangement which allowed us to engage and to throw out our husbands when they went mad. We messed it up within five years of independence. In 1979, after 13 years in the wilderness of the military, we went for the most expensive of the systems in the books – presidential democracy. It may have worked in all other places, but, here, it has steadily evolved into a most fiendish monarchy – a kábíyèsí system where the legislature and the judiciary are the king’s phlegm eaters.
In the opening lines of his ‘Two Thousand Seasons’, Ghanaian writer, Ayi Kwei Armah, warns our spring water to stop “flowing to the desert.” He says “there is no regeneration” where it flows. It is there in the Bible (and in the Quran) that the Lord restored Job’s fortunes only after he changed his course and did as he ought to do. “In fact, the Lord gave him twice as much as before” – Job: 42:10. The afflicted got reprieve because he cooperated with his Maker. Here, we cling to what will never work and pray for increased blessings. When we talk about restructuring of Nigeria, it is because we want Nigeria to regain what it lost to unitary presidentialism. We saw how simple the UK elections were last week. There was no movement of ballots across constituencies. The man who emerged as prime minister contested for votes only in his Holborn and St Pancras constituency. It was exactly like that with the December 1959 election which ushered us into independence in 1960. Prime Minister Abubakar Tafawa Balewa did not have to break the bank to contest that election. His constituency was his Tafawa Balewa locality.
For 99 years (1861 – 1960), the British were officially here working hard on their broth of strange ingredients. With the magical deft and expertise of the enchanter, they came up with an arrangement that should work for the happiness of all. They gave each region a constitution and the country itself a super constitution. And, so, Nigeria started on a note of globally expressed optimism. At the British House of Lords on Thursday 28 July, 1960, while debating the bill that granted Nigeria independence, the then Earl of Swinton said “Nigeria has proved how diverse peoples can combine in successful union while maintaining their own individuality.” Indeed, the whole House – and the other one, the House of Commons – hailed our negotiated federalism and expressed confidence in our commitment to constitutional parliamentary democracy.
But, in less than six quick years of that constitutional arrangement, we tore it and plunged ourselves down beyond ground zero. Today, the country is centralized – unitarized – and atrophied. The central government owns and controls everything with an imperial presidency summoning governors to its presence for daily obeisance.
“It is easy to go down into Hell,” Virgil, Roman poet (70 BC – 19 BC), warned. He added that “night and day, the gates of dark Death stand wide; but to climb back again, to retrace one’s steps to the upper air – there’s the rub, the task.” We have a very complex structural issue which we have not managed well. We continually subvert our federalism because it is suicidally sweet to do so. But how long will the leaky titanic remain afloat? The way to regeneration is for our river to stop flowing towards the desert of unitarism. Nigeria is not irredeemable if it chooses redemption. Britain has as much complicated structure; but it is a delicate balance well managed. We read of a kingdom of four countries – England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – and the kingdom is paradoxically a working democracy. We saw it last week.
Will democracy ever work for Nigeria? Or, will Nigeria ever allow democracy to work for Nigerians? Multi-genre performer, Tar Ukoh, was engaged at the Eagle Square in Abuja on 29 May, 1999 for the inauguration of President Olusegun Obasanjo. Everyone around him exuded joy at the dawn of that new day. They were sure the exit of the military after so many years meant the good times had come. Tar Ukoh was asked by The New York Times how he felt about Nigeria’s brand new democracy. He cautiously told the American newspaper that he feared that the joy of that moment might be misplaced or short lived. The New York Times still has the report of that encounter on its website. The man said: “I hope this event is not a re-awakening of illusions of freedom, or a Eureka, like we had during independence in my youth.” Tar Ukoh, who was 46 years old at that time, concluded that “having returned to civilian rule, we now have to fight for democracy.” Nothing can be truer than his fears and his conclusion. The “fight for democracy” entered its 25th year this year. It is still on. But, the battle will be lost unless we ‘borrow’ ourselves sense and go back to “the way.”
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![[OPINION] Interpreting court judgments in Nigeria - Tonnie Iredia](/media/k2/items/cache/91047cc1fc9cad3c0f369714184ee720_XS.jpg)
During Nigeria’s First and Second Republics, not many people had faith in the country ’s judiciary. To start with, court cases dragged on for too long; making it practically impossible for litigants to enjoy the fruits of judicial victories. In other cases, many criminals were set free on account of some technicalities couched in Latin that ordinary people never understood. Part of the assignments of some transition bodies set up during military rule was to educate Nigerians on the dangers of extra- judicial activities. But if the truth must be told, it has been quite difficult to persuade politicians to follow the ser- mons on the rule of law which seem to provide inconsequential efficacy.
Years ago, there were Nigerian politicians who had no patience for a long wait to take a seat in parliament when they could have been returned unopposed even before voting by merely organising thugs to kill their opponents. However, political assassinations have reduced considerably since 1999 but they have been replaced by a new design by which the judiciary is used to win cases, especially election petitions. The danger is that those who are unable to command what it takes to manipulate the judiciary may, as time goes on, be forced to return to such evils as assassinations while proclaiming that their ambition is not worth the blood of fellow citizens. If this must be prevented from recurring, there is no better time than now to stop our judges who speak in tongues while on duty.
In Nigeria today, every court judgment or judicial pronouncement is often subjected to multiple interpretations by the different parties in a case. This usually happens when two or more courts with coordinate jurisdiction give contradicting rulings on the same case. Another aspect is when some courts grant daily ex parte orders despite the repeated caution of the Chief Justice of the Federation against such behaviour. At the same time, there is the issue of jurisdiction which should ordinarily not be difficult to ascertain; yet, many courts hear and determine several cases where the law states clearly that they have no jurisdiction. When that happens, all we hear is that those adversely affected should go on appeal. But can the judiciary not stop it from happening at all?
If a layman does not know the court which has jurisdiction to hear his case, are his lawyers and the judge to whose court the case was assigned also ignorant of the law? This question and some others that many of my readers have asked me in the last one month and which I obviously have no answers for are raised in this piece in the hope that someone can help me out. The first set of questions I received had to do with the reinstatement of Emir Muhammadu Sanusi II of Kano. Whereas the federal court presided over by Justice Abdullahi Liman nullified the reinstatement of the Emir, a state high court, presided over by Justice Aminu Adamu Aliyu, issued a restraining order preventing the police, the DSS and the military from forcibly re- moving Sanusi 11.
What explains why both a state and a federal high court located in the same city were both hearing the same case is the issue of jurisdiction which is essentially one of the mysteries of our legal system. It is only a court that can de- termine whether it has juris- diction over a case or not de- spite what the law says. Those who believe that Justice Liman had no jurisdiction argued that the case of Emirship being a chieftaincy mat- ter ought to be a state affair. But then, Jurisdiction in Nigeria is more than mathematics hence the pro-federal judge claimed that those dis- placed by the new Kano chieftaincy law were bothered about their fundamen- tal human rights which they think explains the interest of the federal judge.
The only other persons who understand the issue of jurisdiction between the state and federal courts are our lawmakers who in their own self- interest ensured that the federal high courts were so empowered especially in political matters. While the rest of us are bothered that there is some confusion in the system, our legislators are comfortable. This is because once a federal legislator sees the need to institute a case, it is the federal high court that first occurs to him because it can be difficult getting justice from a state high court which a state governor has control over. In other words, confusion in our courts was deliberately planted by politicians hence judgments in those courts are always communicated in such a way that they can be interpreted to suit any party’s position.
If applied to the lingering case between the executive and the legislature in Rivers State, it is easy to see every party interpreting last week’s judgment of the Court of Ap- peal on the fate of majority of the lawmakers as it suits them. The decision of the court which was in favour of the Amaewhule-led legislators said nothing about the real subject in contention. Instead, it nullified the previous contrary order on the grounds that the state high court which earlier determined the case had no jurisdiction. But the real issue of whether or not speaker Amaewhule and his colleagues had lost their seats for decamping to another party is yet to be resolved.
Also last week, an Abuja federal high court presided over by Justice Inyang Ekwogave a judgment concerning the Edo PDP governorship primaries that everyone is still busy debating. The real order made by the court was that certain lawfully elected delegates must not be excluded from the party’s primaries scheduled for February 22, 2024. How does anyone understand such an order to be carried out concerning an election that had already been conducted some 5 months ago? What would the court have lost if it had declined to make such an academic order which had been overtaken by events? While some people would have appreciated the need to penalise a careless political party, there is doubt if such an intention would have made sense considering the position of the law on internal matters of a political party
If it is true as some critics have argued that the litigants being delegates and not aspirants ought not to have been allowed to bring up such a case, what public good was served in dealing with the case at all? Talking about the public good what exactly are our courts enjoying in the unending litigations that distract governance? The judiciary as an arm of government cannot be exculpated from blame if it does not work together with other arms of government to assist Nigeria to attain good governance that can improve the living standards of the people. For example, it is clear that asking parties to maintain status quo is severally interpreted to suit each person’s wish. If so, of what use is a jargon if all those to whom it is addressed, do not have same meaning for it?
Considering the level of confusion that the term status quo has been causing in society by those who are exploiting it, is it not time for judges to clearly spell out the true position they want par- ties to maintain? No one needs to be a professional communicator to recognise the defect in using a term that is subject to more than one meaning. In other words, engaging in effective communication can easily enhance the prospects of relevant actors in the justice delivery system attaining greater professional competence. As it is today in Nigeria, it is difficult to make the average citizen to comprehend the rationale for certain judgments even if translated into local dialects of the people. The real problem is that there is too much of working to the answer especially when compared with other cases with similar facts.
The trend whereby Nigerian court judgments are never self-explicit is worrisome as the trend continues to adversely affect the image of our judiciary that was in times past internationally respected. Painfully, majority of our judges who have continued to perform well are watching helplessly as a few of their colleagues are holding high an inglorious emblem on behalf of all. If per chance any law enforcement agency invades judges’ home again in search of different currencies, no one should be surprised if it elicits public applause across the nation.
[OPINION] Universities without electricity: Nigeria’s contribution to 21st Century knowledge - Owei Lakemfa
Admin![[OPINION] Universities without electricity: Nigeria’s contribution to 21st Century knowledge - Owei Lakemfa](/media/k2/items/cache/55aa658a8b33874ff67716f733315904_XS.jpg)
JUNE 2024. Festivity was in the air. Professors and students, staff and high class visitors were in attendance. The highlight was a first class dinner. Africa’s book factory, Professor Toyin Falola, flew into the country to deliver the farewell lecture. It was all in honour of Professor Abd-Rasheed Na’Allah, out-going Vice Chancellor of the University of Abuja, UNIABUJA. But, trust spoilers.
They are never far away from festivities. As the wining and dining went on with fine speeches seeing off the VC at month end, students of the university were lamenting the N500 daily they pay to charge their cell phones. It was the second week the university had been plunged into darkness. It was not that the university is new to power outages, but this particular one had lengthened to pay farewell to Professor Na’Allah.
UNIABUJA claims it is “the model University in Nigeria (and) a pride of Nigerians and in the provision of higher education”. I am amazed it achieved these and attained such lofty heights while enveloped in darkness.
UNIABUJA students are quite measured: they can live under any condition. But not so the students of the University of Benin, UNIBEN. Confronted with the same circumstances, they took to the streets, blocking the busy Benin-Ore Highway to protest weeks of electricity cut. The students were two weeks away from their examinations, yet had no electricity to study after lectures. They demanded a 24-hour electricity supply. The authorities could not meet the demand, so they shut down the university.
While professors in other countries are professing and advancing the frontiers of knowledge, their counterparts in the Ahmadu Bello University, ABU, are lamenting the lack of electricity to do basic work. So, 40 of them signed a petition last week asking the Visitor, President Bola Tinubu, to intervene given the centrality of electricity supply to the operations of the university. They stated what appears to be the obvious. That a university with an average total annual budgetary overhead grant of N150 million, cannot pay an electricity bill of N3.6 billion. The egg heads calculated that if the bill were to be transferred to the 50,000 students of the institution, charges would need to be hiked by over 500 per cent.
The professors suggested alternatives. Government could pay for the cost of electricity as part of its overhead grant or, use its 49 per cent shareholding in the electricity companies to direct them to supply universities uninterrupted power supply in exchange for tax credits. A third suggestion is to mandate the electricity companies to introduce a dedicated social tariff band with rates the universities can afford.
The government’s response is uncertain, but I assume that the university still has many moons to go: producing first class materials without the benefit of electricity supply. Is it for nothing our national anthem proclaims ‘Nigeria, we hail thee’?
The University College Hospital, Ibadan, founded in 1952, is the pioneer teaching hospital in the country. Its 1,000 beds makes it one of the biggest hospitals in the country.
The legendary UCH proclaims, like Ozymandias: “We are the flagship tertiary healthcare institution in Nigeria, offering world-class Training, Research and Services.” It even has a Department of Nuclear Medicine, that branch involved in the use of radioactive substances in the diagnosis and treatment of diseases, including nuclear imaging. Short of witchcraft, how can the UCH perform all these, including blood storage and endless operations, with power outages and even conscious power disconnections? The Ibadan Electricity Distribution Company had for several days, disconnected UCH from the electricity system for owing N400 million.
Six years ago, the College of Medicine, University of Lagos, Idi-Araba decided to check power cuts by imposing an N11,000 electricity levy on each student. When the students refused to pay, the tertiary health institution reduced power supply to four hours daily. But mass protests led the authorities to seek other ways of reducing the power outages.
The first generation University of Nigeria, UNN, was by 2018 producing about 10,000 first degree graduates and 3,000 higher degrees. But its power outages were between 48 and 120 hours weekly. Sometimes, power cuts lasted a whole week. So, small or micro generators began to pollute the campus.
The Federal University Kashere, FUK, Gombe State is in an area with sweltering temperatures. So, the authorities supply the hostels two hours of electricity daily. The students in most cases pay commercial centres to charge their phones and laptops.
But these power cuts to universities, lasting weeks at a stretch, is like child’s play when compared to the case of the Kaduna State University, KASU. The Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU, branch Chairperson, Peter Adamu, who made a diagnostic analysis, said the situation, like advancing cancer, had gone from intermittent and epileptic to a total blackout. It became so bad that the Kafanchan campus had no electricity supply for over seven months! Adamu described the atmosphere in the university: “There is a feeling of pessimism, hopelessness, despair, despondency and dissent premonition that if the management of the university did not redouble their efforts, the end to this ugly situation might not be palatable.”
The miracle is that KASU, which is like a patient on life support, is still breathing and giving birth to new graduates and post- graduates!
Power failures, I must say, is not just a disease of public universities, the private ones also suffer it. For instance, the students of the American University of Nigeria, AUN, on April 24, 2024 staged peaceful demonstrations against persistent power cuts. To assuage the students anger, school authorities gave an assurance of a minimum five-hour power supply daily until public power supply is restored. They also shifted the commencement of examinations and, agreed to halt regular teaching to give the students more time to study.
Anybody who does not believe academics, staff and students can perform miracles, should visit Nigerian universities.
Electricity is central to the operation of universities, polytechnics and technical institutions. It is necessary for the running or functioning of equipment. It is fundamental to learning, industrialisation and development. So, running tertiary institutions with little, epileptic or no electricity, is nothing short of the miraculous . But it is not a lesson other institutions outside Nigeria want to learn from or experiment.
Do our universities deserve what they are getting having failed to find solutions to the country’s problems, including electricity generation and distribution? Or, does the country deserve the universities it has for not providing even the most basic needs like electricity? On the other hand, do they deserve themselves? But this is no time to trade blames. Rather, it is the time to put our hands on the plough and let there be light.
![[OPINION] Should Abiola have died incarcerated? - Bolanle Bolawole](/media/k2/items/cache/be653cfc04ff084fa7d94d4a86d0b063_XS.jpg)
WHAT you are about to read was written by me and was published in The PUNCH edition of Monday, July 7, 1998; which is 26 years ago, the very day the winner of the June 12, 1993 presidential election, Basorun MKO Abiola, died in incarceration in Abuja. I must have scribbled the piece a day or two before Abiola’s death; it is titled “Abiola: Coming home empty-handed?” Enjoy it:
Once again, we are living in interesting times! Events are happening in rapid successions. Last week as Nigerians feverishly debated the way forward, all manner of rumour was agog. Kites of various colours, sizes and shapes were flown. When former President Ibrahim Babangida, the greatest disaster to have befallen this country, visited General Olusegun Obasanjo, recently released from jail on trumped-up charges, tongues were set wagging. A few days later when Obasanjo told journalists he was not available for anything except where he was (Ota farm), not a few people tried to add up the equation. Did IBB go to Ota with any proposal for Obasanjo’s consideration? Softly, softly, Aremu! Once bitten, twice shy!
Tongues are still wagging concerning IBB’s high visibility lately. The “evil genius”, so thoroughly evil that despite the havoc he has visited on the nation, still wouldn’t leave us alone, is rumoured to be plotting a come-back! Tufia! There are talks, too, of this or that think-tank. And talking of think-tanks reminds me of a group called “The New Millennium Collective”. In newspaper adverts, the group lionised General Abacha, a man whose demise generated applause worldwide for his many “achievements”, one of which was that “the late General also succeeded in checking the traditional sacred cows” And who are these “sacred cows”? Alhaji Ibrahim Dasuki? General Olusegun Obasanjo? The late General Shehu Musa Yar’Adua? The chief executives of supposed distressed banks who have been awaiting trial in detention camps these past years? So much for this group’s respect for the rule of law and the fundamental rights of the people. Yet, the group, in the same breath, advocated the setting up of a Transitional Government with, wait for it, General Obasanjo at its head!
If this suggestion by the New Millennium is silly, its reasons for tipping Obasanjo shows a willingness to distort contemporary history. According to the group, Obasanjo is acceptable “to both the June 12 protagonists and antagonists alike…” Lies! Obasanjo was not acceptable to June 12 protagonists in 1993; he will be more stridently opposed by them today if he falls for this New Millennium deceit. Space constraints will not allow me to take up the group item by item, but let’s take a look at one of its suggestions for the way forward. We are to “groom credible persons to take over the politics of the Fourth Republic, preferably those with military background, so as to achieve stability in the praxis of politics and democratization” What a gratuitous insult!
So there are no credible persons in civil society to be groomed for the democratization project? Only in the armed forces will you find them, serving or retired? Pray, which armed forces are they talking about? The one rubbished by IBB and laid waste by Abacha? The Millennium people wouldn’t end their treatise until they had taught the press its job: “Very important, journalists should be responsible and re-orientate themselves towards the truth. It has been said that journalism is the first rough draft of history. This duty is onerous” That is right, but if I may ask, what is the truth of our situation? Isn’t it that a man won an election but has been prevented from assuming his mandate? Isn’t it the cause of all the subterfuge, rigmarole, somersault, beating about the bush, speaking from both sides of the mouth, inconsistencies, confusion, the way forward, the way backward, stepping aside, illegal ING, brutal dictatorship, Viagra and the ‘last supper’, Abdulsalami Abubakar, etc. Yet, this group of Nigerians gleefully announced that they are ‘committed to a new Nigeria’! I am not surprised, though! Two organizations that I know which mouth the same ‘New Nigeria’ slogan – one, a bank; the other, a newspaper, are both not doing well at all!
If one can excuse a faceless group (like the New Millennium Collective), what does one make of Tony Lloyd, deputy foreign affairs minister of Britain, and Koffi Annan, United Nations Secretary-General? The two, together with Nigeria’s Emeka Anyaoku, the Commonwealth’s Secretary-General, were in the country last week to help us seek ‘the way forward’. Of the three, only Anyaoku proved his calling. For Lloyd, some are suggesting that his comments on June 12 are a confirmation of the rumoured ‘agreement’ between the British Empire and the Sokoto Caliphate that only Northerners would forever rule over Nigeria. Says (one-time Senegalese president) Leopold Sedar Senghor in his poem titled ‘Pain’: Lord, God, forgive white Europe! But there is a recent precedent that should have guided the international community on Abiola’s case.
In April 1985, Nelson Mandela, the world’s then most famous prisoner (of conscience), found himself in the same position that Chief MKO Abiola (at the moment one of the world’s most famous prisoners of conscience), finds himself today. The racist regime of PW Botha had offered to release Mandela from Pollsmoor prison on stringent conditions. Mandela demanded to consult with his comrades in the ANC and with the people of South Africa. The racist regime refused. Unfolding events in this country (Nigeria) today bear striking resemblance to those in racist South Africa in 1985, except in one very significant sense. Mandela, incarcerated under white minority rulers, enjoyed more freedom than Abiola, who was detained under black majority rule. Mandela was met in prison by his lawyer and wife, Winnie, and was able to send out messages from prison, later read to the people by his daughter, Zindzi, stating why he was refusing conditional release. In 1998, Abiola, held by his own (Black) people, was not allowed visits by his wives. He is not allowed to consult with his comrades; neither has he a statement to be read to the people by his daughter. In short, Abiola is treated worse in a free, independent Black-ruled Nigeria than Mandela was treated under the racist, white minority apartheid regime of Botha. And to think that the UN Secretary-General could be a party to this charade!
When I compare the two situations – a free Nigeria under self-rule and a racist South Africa under white minority rule, I feel like crying! I reproduce here, today, in an abridged form, the statement by Mandela as read to the people of South Africa by his daughter, Zindzi. It goes thus: ‘On Friday, my mother and our attorney saw my father at Pollsmoor prison to obtain his answer to Botha’s offer of conditional release. The prison authorities attempted to stop this statement from being made but he (Mandela) would have none of this and made it clear that he would make the statement to you, the people. Strangers like Bethell from England and Professor Dash from the United States have in recent weeks been authorised to see my father without restriction; yet, Pretoria cannot allow you, the people, to hear what he has to say directly. He should be here himself to tell you what he thinks of this statement by Botha. He is not allowed to do so. My father and his comrades wish to make this statement to you, the people, first. They are clear that they are accountable to you and to you alone. And that you should hear their views directly and not through others. My father says: I am surprised at the conditions that the government wants to impose on me. I am not a violent man. I cherish my own freedom dearly but I care even more for your own freedom. Too many have died since I went to prison. Too many have suffered for the love of freedom. I owe it to their widows, to their orphans, to their mothers and to their fathers who have grieved and wept for them. Not only have I suffered during these long, lonely, wasted years, I am not less life-loving than you are. But I cannot sell my birthright nor am I prepared to sell the birthright of the people to be free. I am in prison as the representative of the people…Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts. My father says: I cannot and will not give any undertaking at a time when I and you are not free. Your freedom and mine cannot be separated. I will return!”
If Nigeria were as liberal as racist South Africa where political prisoners like Mandela, Walter Sisulu and others could spend nearly three decades in prison and still come out of it sane and sound, I would have encouraged Abiola to persevere and reject out of hand any offer of conditional release; but from what I have seen of recently-released detainees like Chief Frank Kokori, Dr. Beko Ransome-Kuti, General Olusegun Obasanjo and the recent photographs of (a thoroughly emaciated) Abiola himself as released by the Commonwealth Secretary-General, Chief Emeka Anyaoku, Chief Abiola should say whatever they want him to say, sign whatever they want him to sign, even allow himself to be videotaped by Aso Villa video experts – just anything – to regain his freedom. Concerning his mandate, leave that for God and the people to determine! Leave all those who seek to bury the truth to contend with God. Let those who want to build the ‘new Nigeria’ of their dream contend with Thomas Hobbes when he said, ‘When men build on false grounds, the more they build, the greater is the ruin’…
The most reasonable and enduring way forward for Nigeria is not to impose an unjust peace, a diktat, on Abiola and the army of June 12 loyalists. But if the powers-that-be insist that they must have a diktat, I will advise Abiola to take it and go home. The ultimate loser will be Nigeria”
When The PUNCH chairman, Chief Ajibola Ogunshola, read the piece in the early parts of the day, he wrote this comment on top of the page and sent it to the MD/Editor-in-Chief, Ademola Osinubi: “MD, the weight of his argument is totally contrary to his conclusion. It is curious. Please bring these my remarks to Bola’s attention. 7/7/97” I was the Deputy Editor-in-Chief at the time. For those in the know, the chairman’s language was coded. Bolawole must have compromised on June 12! But before the end of the day, when news of Abiola’s death broke, Chief Ogunshola rushed down from his Lagos Island office to the PUNCH office at Kudeti to ask me questions. But it’s too late! I was a Foreign Affairs correspondent for many years and kept my sources, usually impeccable, even after I became editor. So much more to say about those years of the jackals!
On this day, the 26th anniversary of Abiola’s death, may his blood and the sacrifice of other martyrs continue to water Nigeria’s tree of liberty!
![[OPINION] J. F. Odunjo and the hunger this time - Festus Adedayo](/media/k2/items/cache/ca9ea00950bfc12513570d703b104fc9_XS.jpg)
One phenomenon that cannot be denied in Nigeria today is hunger. Nigerian people are hungry. Very unusually, no one – politicians, elected government functionaries or their appendages – has been able to allege that this general cry of hunger is politically motivated. So many occurrences have been painted with the camwood of that word, “politically motivated”. It is worse for some of us who write. We must have taken overnight instructions from political baron opponents to paint the government black. Or, our views are hangovers from ancient hatred and bile. But, hunger seems to be in a class of its own. It is borderless.
Hunger is like death. Permit me to cite a line of a song I have cited severally which relates to one of death’s innumerable cognomens. It is the line in a song of Ibadan master singer, Awurebe lord, Alhaji Dauda Adeeyo, a.k.a. Epo Akara. In an elegy to General Murtala Muhammed on his assassination by Colonel Bukar Suka Dimka, Epo made an evergreen quip. He sang, “Ikú tí ó p’eni à ńpè, á p’eni tí ńpe ni” – death the leveller is the one that will kill the chanter and the enchanter.
Hunger is such a monstrous and awesome phenomenon, so much so that Yoruba promoted it from its inanimate to an animate being status. In doing this, they conferred on death the cognomen, “ebi òp’àgbà f’owó m’éké”. I have struggled to defrost this deep Yoruba saying of its inscrutable meaning. The farthest I have gone was to explain it. In ancient society, when people were hungry at home, all they did was look heavenwards at the ceiling rafter, as if looking unto Eledumare – God – for redemption. It was almost as if Hunger had turned into a huge snake which crawled up the eké wood, up to the rafter. All that the hungry did was look towards the ceiling, the àjà.
In this piece, I want to take the liberty to talk about hunger, poverty and connect them with Chief Joseph Folahan Odunjo. Odunjo was known simply as J. F. Odunjo. His highly celebrated poem, Isé l’òògùn ìsé – Work is an antidote to poverty – is my referent. I chose Odunjo so as to analyze his poem which can be found in the famous Alawiye series. That poem was used in syllabi of primary schools in the 1970s and 1980s. By the way, who is Odunjo? Literary colossus, educator and politician who was best known for his works in Yoruba children’s literature, Odunjo, in 1951, won a seat in the Western House of Assembly and was later appointed Western Region’s first minister of lands and labour by Chief Obafemi Awolowo. In his immense literary prowess, Odunjo communicated Yoruba values through folklore and myths.
Africans used folklore as a strong imprint from the past. Odunjo then deployed those folklores to relate to our present social and sociological conditions. Like D.O. Fagunwa, Odunjo was greatly respected for having shaped the minds of generations of Yoruba of western Nigeria, especially through his highly famous Alawiye series. The series transformed into a book from the oral folklore and stories of traditional society told at moonlight after dinner. With this, he was able to communicate the values, beliefs and literary skills of the people. Using fictive characters (human or non-human) like Trickster Tortoise (Ijapa, his wife, Yannibo and their son, Irere), ghomids, (ebora) streams, animal kingdom, human kingdom, etc., Odunjo intermixed ìtàn (traditional mythology, history and philosophy.) and ààló (beliefs, customs and stories of a community passed through generations through words of mouth). Ìtàn was more believable because they are factual, dependable and historical than myths, in conveying the reality of the time.
Like all other ethnic groups, Yoruba have very many epistemological stands on hunger. In their paper entitled Poverty Alleviation in Nigeria: Lessons from Socioeconomic Thoughts of the Yoruba, four scholars, Joel Babalola, Adesoji Oni, Ademola Atanda and Benedicta Oyejola-Oshodi did this. They examined how Yoruba distinguish between three seemingly similar concepts of “òsì”, “ìsé” and “ìyà.” While Òsì is unending chronic poverty, ìsé is acute, transitory poverty and ìyà is suffering, hunger, psychological torture and shame. The three are borne out of denial of essential needs necessary for the sustenance of life.
In Igbo philosophy, poverty is ụ̀bị̀àm̀. Igbo believe that hunger is the complete erosion of human dignity. A man who is unable to feed himself and his family is éfűléfụ (a worthless person) and Igbo see hunger and poverty as a disease, expressed in Ụbịam bụ ajọ ọrịa or ágūū bụ ọnyà – hunger is a sickness of its own. To them, evil or human suffering comes from the interplay of man and their god, the Chi or the machinations of some known or unknown mischievous spirits. Igbo cosmological study seems to agree that human suffering cannot be fully explained and as such, human suffering is a mystery.
Aminu, M. L., in a then-unpublished doctoral thesis, entitled The Hausa Metaphysical World View: A Paremeological Exposition, submitted to the Department of Nigerian and African Language, A.B.U. Zaria, after scrutinizing 230 proverbs, came to the conclusion that the Hausa identify the chief goal of human life as peaceful living, what is called Zaman lafiya. He also found out that there are fourteen attributes of world life. Poverty, called talauci, is a variety of pain, expressed as drinking, like in sunàa shân wàhalàa, literally meaning, drinking trouble.
Yoruba believe that human personal intervention is key to arresting poverty and hunger. This is why they express it in “bí ebi bá kùrò nínú ìsé, ìsé bùse” (by removing hunger from poverty, you have defeated it). To curtail poverty, individual effort is necessary. The people however also believe that, no matter how harrowing and persistent the pangs of poverty may be, whether for 20 years or 30 months, once poverty does not lead to death, it has an expiry. So, they say, “Ìsé tó sé omo l’ógún odún, ìyà tó je omo l’ógbòn osù, tí kò bá pa omo, á dèhìn léhìn omo.” No matter how difficult poverty may be to man, the people still believe that you can wrestle it and conquer it. This speaks to the capacity of human intervention in existential travails.
From whatever human prism you may want to look at it, food security is sine non qua non to human existence. Yoruba even made the stomach, a deity. They did in such statements as “no god demands propitiations as the god of the throat – òrìsà tìí gb’ebo bí òfun s’òwón”. This is why the sky-high cost of living that has made food scarce on Nigerians’ tables, as well as unprecedented inflation, are causing untold hardships in the country today. However, the above dips into traditional epistemology of hunger have shown that, while governments of all cadres are complicit in the mass hunger across Nigeria, as individuals, we seem to have abandoned what used to be done. This has resulted in the unusual happening.
Our situation today was painted by William Butler Yeats’ 1919 poem, The Second Coming. In it, he said, “The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” I am sure we all have recollections of our personal gardening in the 1970s and 80s. This was at a time when, comparatively, Nigerians were not hungry. This has almost totally dried off now.
Odunjo’s evergreen poem teaches that work is the only antidote to poverty (Isé l’òògùn ìsé) and hunger. It tells us that hard work and self-reliance have pleasant endings. He also counselled that hard work is the only pedestal to the top (Isé la fií d’eni gíga). Today, this virtue has gone to the dogs. Indolent but street-smart Nigerians are the ones at the top, exploring tact and terse energy to sustain their leeching leverage. In those days, resolute persons, who though were bereft of helpers, were recorded to have made it in life, as the poem says (Bí a kò bá r’éni f’èyìn tì, bí òle làá rí, bí a kò bá r’éni gbékèlé) in which case, we needed to work harder (A te’ra mósé eni). Odunjo frowned at reliance on parental wealth (Ìya re leè l’ówó l’’ówó/ Bàbá re leè l’ésin l’éèkàn/Bí o bá gbó’jú lé won/O té tán ni mo so fún o). Today, people don’t suffer for the attainments they get. You only need to be a politician or Yahoo Boy. But, Odunjo has a word for them: Whatever accomplishment that is not complemented with sweats has a twinkle-of-an-eye endurance (Ohun tí a kò bá jì’yà fún/Sé kìí leè t’ójó). It is only what is laboured for, the – Ohun tí a bá f’ara sisé fún/Níí pé l’ówó eni – that endures, he says.
Odunjo also counsels on total reliance on our strength (Apá l’ará/Ìgúnpá n’ìyekan). The world only loves you on account of your material accomplishment (B’áyé bá ńfé o lónìí/Bí o bá l’ówó l’ówó/Ayé á má fé o l’óla). They can also love you if you occupy a prestigious position (Tàbí tí o bá wà n’ípò àtàtà/ Ayé á máa yé o sí t’èrín t’èrín). However, the day you become poor or lose that position, (Jé k’óo de’ni tí ń’rágó/Ayé a máa yínmú sí o) you will be a recipient of their grimaces. Odunjo then ends the poem by canvassing the eternal essence of education (Èkó sì’ńso ni d’ògá/Múra kí o kó dára dára) and the need to flee the midst of those who mock education (Bí o sì rí òpò ènìyàn/Tì wón ńf’èkó s’èrín rín/ Dákun má f’ara wé won). The consequences of abandoning education, he says, are dire (Ìyà ń’bò f’ómo tí kò gbón/Ekún ń’be f’ómo tí ńsá kiri).
Finally, Odunjo pleaded with those who turn their youths into casinos to get off the waste of their youth because time waits for no man (Má f’òwúrò se’ré, òré mi/Múra sísé, ojó ńlo). An Apala musician, Ayinla Omowura, in his elegy to Murtala, later adapted this poem to say that when a man (I add, a woman, as well) wakes up early in the morning and he is not being pursued by anything, he must pursue something because of the finality that dusk poses for hard work. Whoever works conquers poverty – eni bá s’isé jàre òsì, he says.
I gave the above as a keynote address yesterday at a Rotary International, Ibadan, Oyo State (Ring Road) Investiture of Rotn. Bolade Ipadeola. The government cannot claim not to know that hunger is killing Nigerians. I completely share the Igbo philosophical understanding of hunger as a complete erosion of human dignity.
Most Nigerian men have become éfűléfụ, de-