BudgIT’s dire verdict, on states and their debts, made sensational headlines.  But it was hinged on two suspect premises.

One, the delegitimization, if not criminalization, of debts.  That premise is arch-conservative, if not outright archaic.

Good old usury is at the core of any financial system, international or local — barring the alternative Islamic banking.  It makes the big difference between working for money and money working for you.

Besides, with the neo-con unrelenting screeds about smaller government and more private sector participation, the debt market gathers more fillip.

BudgIT’s second suspect premise is a fixation with growth without development.  Its analyses gripe at “heavy” debts.  But it freezes its mind to whatever developmental goods such “heavy debts” could do.

That rings true of Lagos (which BudgIT canonizes as the best) and Osun (which BudgIT demonizes, using its one-track technique, as the worst).  It would appear not completely right, if not outright wrong, on both scores.

But there is a valid fact that appears to drive BudgIT’s fear — and dire verdict: both the Federal Government and the states have a parlous record of misapplied debts, thus causing socio-economic troubles for the future generation.

Still, not even legitimate fears should cripple financial creativity, in the grim reality of vanishing resources.

If you don’t have the cash to stimulate economic growth and midwife development by providing social infrastructure, and you still shun the debt market, all you are running is a voodoo economy that, sooner than later, would collapse on you.

That is the point BudgIT missed; but which Lagos and Osun excellently push.  That has helped to revamp the Lagos economy as a national model.  It may yet push the Osun economy outside the perpetual woods.

Ironically, the statistical nay voices, that back then told Lagos it was heading for doom, when the Bola Tinubu governorship started the financial revolution way back in its first term (1999-2003), is now telling Osun it’s on a scary journey to nowhere.

Yet, linked to its meagre earnings from the Federation Account, Osun would appear to trump every other state, in the quality of infrastructure it has birthed.  The creative use of debt did the seeming magic.

Now, how can that be bad for anyone — the Osun economy, the Osun people or even the Osun future generation, on whose behalf BudgIT’s ringing stats yelp, in an amusing irony of statistical hysteria?

But back to Lagos and BudgIT fears.

When Lagos embarked on massive urban infrastructure renewal, most — if not all — of the roads were not tollable: Kudirat Abiola Way (old Oregun Road), Awolowo Road, South West Ikoyi, Yaba-Lawanson-Itire road, Ikotun-Igando road, LASU-Iba road and the Lagos Business District, complete with the renovation of the Tinubu fountain and statue, finished at the tail-end of the Tinubu government in 2007.

Yet, all the roads gave business and commerce a fillip, boosted real estate value and enhanced the state’s ability to expand its tax net and boost internally generated revenue (IGR).

Lagos couldn’t have achieved this great infrastructural upgrade by depending on conventional sources of funding, with an IGR of N600 million a month as at May 1999.

Yet, when Lagos started its financial activism, getting into the bond market and approaching international finance agencies for developmental loans, the emotive lobby wept and howled and whimpered that Lagos was shackling its future generation to soulless peonage.

The present realities have debunked that.  Lagos, by those very actions, has become a model economy among Nigerian states.

But if Lagos continues to borrow — by BudgIT’s stats, at 24.2 per cent of states’ total debt, the highest borrower — it is because the job is not yet done; and it’s still in the throes of expanding its economy to suit its sweet-sour bill as the country’s foremost land of opportunities, not because its managers are reckless or soulless.

Yes, a bit of caution would do — everything after all, no matter how well done, can be improved upon.

But that caution should come with empathy — empathy, springing from thorough understanding; not statistical stacking of cards that spreads needless alarms.

Back to Osun, and BudgIT’s penchant for stats for stats’ sake, flowing from a wilful lack of appreciation of the complete picture, is well and truly alarming.

Here is Osun, in BudgIT’s dock, verbatim as reported by Premium Times:

“Osun’s spending plan over the years came with the borrowing of N18.38 billion to build six mini-stadia to amuse, and at best make its youthful population active.

“Also borrowed was N30 billion at a lending rate of 14.75 per cent, for roads and waterworks infrastructure which generate no income and therefore cannot provide for long-term sustainability repayment plans.

“Another N11.4 billion was borrowed at a 14.75per cent lending rate to build schools, which would also unfortunately bring in no income into the State’s coffers. Even more debilitating to Osun’s economic prospects was that the repayments for all these debts ran concurrently, and deductions were made out of whatever revenue was to accrue to Osun State.

“Taking these loans which did nothing to improve internally generated revenue amid large Overhead costs means the bulk of the State’s existing revenue is instead diverted into debt repayment.”

Running through the BudgIT “charge sheet” is the craven worship of capital; and abject contempt for human development — hence the gratuitous lines about building mini-stadia to “amuse” Osun youth (so, you can’t boost the economy through sports?); and waterworks not fetching cash.

Yet, the human is the most critical in the developmental mix.

Indeed,  BudgIT’s claim that borrowing to build schools is wasted investment, simply because it doesn’t translate to instant cash, is nothing but ringing fallacy.  Behind every investment is the concept of delayed gratification.

Besides, between Osun and Ondo, two neighbouring states, with two parallel situations, history beckons.

Two governments, at very early stages in their lives, staged educational summits.  While Osun used its to revamp and radically modernize education, and still preserve Awolowo’s most vital developmental legacy of free education, Ondo, by vibes coming out of its summit, appears preparing to wriggle out of it.  Yet, Ondo grosses some coins from oil, Osun doesn’t.

If these “expat experts” (with apologies to Wole Soyinka’s The Interpreters) cannot appreciate the sacrifice to the future generation that went into Osun’s thinking, they can at least save the empty statistics that not only suggests the contrary but also helps to mislead the unwary.

The penchant to mislead also applies to BudgIT’s claim that because some roads are not tolled, they don’t — or can’t — contribute to IGR.  That is another fallacy; as the Lagos experience has shown.

Lagos and Osun are battling the odds in the worst of economic times. The least they deserve is misleading stats, that shut from its sight the complete picture.

The post BudgIT and stats for stats’ sake appeared first on The Nation Nigeria.

Good product, bad pitch — that, in marketing terms, about captures the current “restructuring campaign”, to correct the anomaly of Nigeria’s “unitary federalism”.

Sure, other things being equal, Nigeria needs to urgently re-federalize to development and prosperity; from the current unitary illusion of mass stagnation and poverty.

And yes, all things considered, the most promising elixir would appear “restructuring”.  That tool is essentially economic.  But like everything Nigerian, it has been corrupted — one hopes not irredeemably? — by crass politics.

Indeed worse: corrupted by the dross of other impurities that can only imperil its much desired realization.  Yet, without it, Nigeria appears fated to just wilt away.

In the South West, its pristine forte, restructuring is polluted by the unfazed pushers of Yoruba nationalism, if not outright irredentism.

To this insensitive lobby, restructuring is yet another umpteenth proof of a Yoruba superior world view, before which every other part of the country must crouch and bow!  It is pure manifest goodness, other fears be damned!

But that is even the purest of this impure motive. When you mix this relative “purity” with the harsh campaign of the electoral losers of 2015, savagely spurring the stallion of “restructuring” to thrust themselves back where they once lost face, you can appreciate the harm they do to the cause.

In the South East, the howling neophytes out there, as new converts bawling the sheer beauty of their new faith, have infected the cause with Biafra and allied malcontents.

But their tactics to cope with the present pathology of losing power would appear without  prejudice to future strategies of a changed equation of power (or lolly) re-gained — restructuring be damned!

So though for “restructuring”, the mythical “South” — for while Nigeria surely has a geographical South, it hardly has a political South — appears to band together, that sweetheart alliance is unlikely to hold, if the power calculus changes.

Pray, if the South-South (the eternally cheated and disadvantaged minorities), under Goodluck Jonathan completely forgot “restructuring”, just for a few years of presidential glory, what is the assurance that “restructuring” won’t vanish, from the South East front, for a few years of Igbo presidency?

Ay, President Jonathan staged a last-minute national conference towards some re-federalization.  But who doesn’t know that was cynical fobbing to fend off a looming defeat at the polls, after a most catastrophic tenure?

Even in the South West, pristine home of restructuring, the dominant elite appears now split: between the brutal, self-serving activism by the Afenifere old guard, operating from the core philosophy of post-defeat sour grapes; and the new-found moderation of the triumphant bloc, that with Muhammadu Buhari’s North West in 2015, sent Jonathan and his court to presidential purgatory.

But even with the purest of motives, selling “restructuring” in the current stentorian tones, which suggests a plus for the South but a minus for the North, is set to send the North stonewalling.

Yet, the North is no god to be propitiated, by retaining a nation-wrecking unitary federalism — whatever that means — that thrives on rent to a few; but death to the majority.

Indeed, if it quakes with fear, that comeuppance would appear well earned.  For all its dominance of the political space since independence, and its monopoly of the military era (save the Obasanjo accidental interregnum from 1976-1979), the northern dominant power elite has had little to show — not to their long-suffering masses, not to Nigerians as a whole.

Still, comeuppance or no, the North is unlikely to just roll over, if it fears the new order might fairly dominate it, as by the present order, it has unfairly dominated others.

It’s a perfectly normal human reaction.  Yet, the present order could lead nowhere but collective death.  That’s why the “restructuring” pitch must change tack.

“Restructuring” is not necessarily against the North for its past dominance.  It is rather for a future Nigerian renaissance, that is a win-win for all.

Clinical thinking therefore demands a change of message, which aim is to secure a pan-Nigeria consensus.  The North and the South must therefore talk to each other, instead of yelling at each other.

That brings the discourse back to the “mythical” South, politically speaking.

It is good the “South” is developing some consensus over “restructuring”. But it would even be better for it to first explore and cement confidence and trust-building core principles.  Otherwise, that alliance could vanish at the very first show of storm.

The old West (now South West) and the old East (now South East and South-South) had always drifted apart, vis-a-vis their political engagement with the North.

The last Southern Governors Meeting, before this year’s, was in 2005.  Shortly after, everything fizzled out.

It was the high noon of Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) hegemony, and the whole swathe of the old East was too busy enjoying federal power, to pay attention to any “southern” distraction.

At the beginning of the 2nd Republic (1979-1983), the Nigeria People’s Party (NPP), which won in the old Anambra and Imo states — and also in Plateau State — opted for an alliance with the North-led National Party of Nigeria (NPN), as against the West-led Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN).  The two minority states back then in the old East, Rivers and Cross River, were NPN states.

At its end, even after the NPN-NPP alliance had collapsed, the Progressive Parties Alliance (PPA), supposed to fuse UPN, NPP, Great Nigeria People’s Party (GNPP) and a faction of Aminu Kano’s People’s Redemption Party (PRP), could not agree on a common presidential candidate between Zik and Awo.

They went into the 1983 election separate; and got all roasted by the NPN formidable rigging incinerator.

The 1983 experience was a near-encore of the tail end of the 1st Republic, when the United Progressive Grand Alliance (UPGA), between the rump of the West’s Action Group (AG) and the East’s National Council of Nigerian Citizens (NCNC).

That, too little, too late, came after the Northern People’s Congress (NPC)-NCNC power alliance had crashed.  An ill-fated boycott ensured the Nigerian National Alliance (NNA) — NPC plus Ladoke Akintola’s Nigerian National Democratic Party (NNDP) — romped into a crushing victory, that nevertheless crushed the 1st Republic.

Could the AG’s offer to NCNC, for an alliance that would have crowned Zik as prime minister at independence, in exchange for Awo as Finance minister, have made a difference in East-West entente, and therefore better southern solidarity?  That is pure conjecture now.

But the notorious fact of history is that rapprochement never came to be.  Nothing, in the present, suggests the ancient feuds that drove that development have disappeared, especially with the raw pathosis  that oozed from Nnamdi Kanu’s scalding Biafra campaign.

This foray into history is not to prove an intra-South entente is impossible.

Rather, it is to show it would be a hard road to travel — like any other good thing.

Therefore, the geographical South must first morph into a cohesive political South, before it can pull off a pan-Nigeria consensus on “restructuring”.

Even then, “restructuring” must be served as win-win, not win-lose.  That is the logical way to earn a pan-Nigeria consensus, to productively re-federalize Nigeria.

The post Good product, bad pitch appeared first on The Nation Nigeria.

Remember Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, that seminal work first published in 1972, which audacious thinking set the academia on fire?

In the Nigerian university campus of the 1980s, you didn’t belong if you hadn’t read the book; and pressed, into service, its enchanting quotes.

Given the current media temper, marked by slanted stories, unfazed finger-pointing and pseudo-analyses, perhaps a Rodney follow-up is due: How the Nigerian media underdevelop Nigerian politics!  Is any media scholar game?

Were you to transpose media fare today back to the 1980s, the unceasing stream of jeremiads, on the alleged  hopelessness of the Nigerian situation, would probably have inspired another band of military pseudo-saviours to storm the Bastille.

But maybe the media had always misled the polity with sensational reactions, when a reflective, introspective and well-reasoned option would do.

Maybe that had always helped to derail the state, and feed it to a military train, clanging and chugging to nowhere.

And maybe, present media howling aren’t producing past follies simply because the media, in its fatal hubris, is blissfully shackled to the past — far behind the society it has thrust itself to lead!

That’s why its havoc on politics — and the polity — would appear humongous indeed; but which the fourth estate, in its holy rage, appears to least appreciate.

Ringing renunciation from within?  Perhaps!  But maybe ringing media naivety, always passing the routine as the novel, explains why.

Take the hysteria over the so-called “cabal”.

The word cabal crept into pubic consciousness, during the Goodluck Jonathan presidential cause of 2009-2010, when a Katsina power bloc tried to stonewall the then Vice President, in the name of fatally ill President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua.

It was a battle well fought and won, in the best tradition of Nigerian media crusading; dating back to the era of the old masters: John Payne Jackson and his son, Horatio (Lagos Weekly Record), George Alfred Williams (Lagos Standard), James Bright Davies (Times of Nigeria) and Herbert Macaulay (Lagos Daily News) to mention just a few Titans in the early Nigerian press.

Since then, however, no thanks to analytical naivety, if not outright analytical corruption, “cabal” has seized a section of the southern media.

From Yar’Adua’s “Katsina cabal” to Muhammadu Buhari’s so-called “Daura cabal”, you would think a governmental inner caucus was novel.  It isn’t.

Indeed, between 1967 and 1983, approximating early military rule and President Shehu Shagari’s 2nd Republic, the southern media was fixated with the so-called “Kaduna mafia”.  That was at the apex of the northern power hegemony.

Even if “Kaduna mafia” was justifiable southern angst against blatant northern political domination, a “mafia” or “cabal” is a harsh power reality.

Indeed, where two or three are gathered to form a ruling bloc — over an association, town’s union, government or even churches and mosques — there probably is a cabal.

Why, even President Jonathan, of the minority of minorities, had his “Ijaw cabal”! So did the all-powerful Afenifere of old.  Or why did some peeved Oyo-speaking partisans back then rail at the so-called “Ijebu mafia”?

But make no mistake: a cabal or mafia that skews public policy, in favour of its narrow clan, deserves ringing condemnation.  Thus, the Yar’Adua era “Katsina cabal” deserved all its knocks.  So does the Buhari “Daura cabal”, if charges are proved.

What is not right is freezing extant cases — proven or speculative — hold them up as novel but eternal and proceed to approach every matter, no matter how harmless, from that skewed prism.

That is the cul-de-sac much of the southern media have run themselves into. At best, it is analytical mischief.  At worst, it is analytical fraud, which full wages may yet, in future, plague a southern president.

After all,  no section of the country boasts a monopoly of terrorism — media or otherwise.

Take the needless controversy over the reported Buhari instruction to the World Bank to concentrate developmental efforts in the “North”.  In a media driven by good faith, that should sound asinine to anybody.

For one, Nigeria’s North East, scene of Boko Haram’s humongous destruction and grave human misery, couldn’t have been in the “South”, whether by Nigeria’s politics or geography.  Are fellow Nigerians up there not entitled to some quick relief?

For another, the statement clearly issued from the naivety of the World Bank president,  Jim Yong Kim, whose honest statement was wilfully slanted to suit Nigeria’s explosive political geography.

The controversy raged nonetheless, with full venom, based on the faulty premise — but sweet emotions — that  a northern cabal, with full presidential charter, was there, at the ready, to do in the “South”!

A fierce, anti-south northern cabal must also have driven the sensational report, by a business newspaper, that President Buhari’s “appointments” were skewed eight-to-two, in North’s favour.

It was a scandalous stacking of cards, toward a preconceived direction, to suck in the unwary.  Brandishing a “fact-check”, its skewed “facts” indeed “proved” Buhari’s presidential appointments were 81 per cent “northern”.  But arrayed against fairer parameters, one-sided cynicism never barged so loud!

Incidentally, the report excluded — cleverly? — ministerial appointees, perhaps because that did not paint the one-sided picture it was pushing.  Yet, that opened a more even vista into the subject.

From the breakdown later given by presidential sources, the South West got the highest (40, after delivering 15.7% of presidential votes), even above the president’s native North West (30, which nevertheless gave him 46% of the votes).

The newspaper’s mischief, if not outright malice, was even more manifest from the South East tally.  For 1.3% of the vote, that region got 22 ministerial appointments, only two less than North East’s 24 (18.5% of the vote), but one more than North Central’s 21 (for 14.7% of the vote) and a clear two above the South-South’s 20 (for an equally lowly 2.7% of the vote.)

So long for reportorial fiction from a southern media, unfazed about cutting its nose to spite its face!

Still, the ever ready riposte — where are the “juicy” portfolios?  Simple: if you want “juicy” portfolios (whatever that means) deliver juicy votes.

Frankly, it is dishonourable and unconscionable to deliver minuscule vote but insist on ministerial juice!  The juice is no manna from heaven. Some citizens put it there by their votes.

Still, this is no ringing endorsement of the Buhari presidency.  For its blunders, it must take adequate knocks, if only to show that the people are the masters in a democracy; and that the media is their chief agent to assert that right.

But in seeking to chase a northern cabal, the southern media has itself developed a cabalistic mindset, which spews nothing but hate, malice and bigotry.

That is a self-imposed tragedy — which shows how it might be under-developing Nigerian politics — and polity.

The post Media under-developing Nigerian politics? appeared first on The Nation Nigeria.

In periods of national foibles, the immortal lyrics of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, himself the Abami Eda (strange creature), comes to mind.

In one of his vintage numbers, he was at his irreverent best: “Teacher, don’t teach me nonsense”!

That, to be sure, was brash.  But at least the Fela persona, even if a pupil, knew enough to rebel and challenge his teacher.

The poor Kaduna children, whose teachers the Kaduna government accuses of dispensing ignorance, might not have been that lucky!

That generational evil is, therefore, the tragedy.  Whoever now cares about the half-baked children, grinded out under the tutelage of these teachers (?), but consigned to a bitter future of half-education, which the popular idiom says is dangerous?

For that blighted generation, there is no union to plead their cause.

On the contrary, it is the wrong and the faulty now playing the victim.  That is the long and short of the orchestrated wail of the teachers and allied unions.

They have — is there no more shame in this land? — launched an emotive blackmail to retain a name — teacher — they never deserved; and a pay they never earned, simply because — a harvest of whimpers and a bucketful of tears — they must “feed their family”.

Some satanic feeding there, after pumping other families’ offspring with thumping ignorance!

Of course, for Nigeria, where a sense of right-and-wrong appears to have vanished, this is yet another controversy.

That would appear the lot of the country since 1993, when a reckless cabal in the military cancelled the June 12 presidential election; but sustained the crime because all it evoked was, not bristling outrage at a monumental injustice, but a sterile controversy to justify the unjustifiable.

That loss of innocence Nigeria still battles till today, despite the return of democracy since 1999; and a deliberate ploy to placate the South West, with an Olusegun Obasanjo presidency, for the MKO Abiola injustice.

But that is one direction the Kaduna teachers affair must not be allowed to head.  Education is just too important to be sorted out by political compromises.

Thomas Malthus (1766-1834), the British clergyman and Industrial Revolution-era economist it was, that raised the spectre of wealth growing at arithmetical proportion; but population booming at geometrical proportion, thus forecasting mass misery and anguish.

That didn’t come to pass, because the Industrial Revolution (1760-1840), as well as the discovery of the so-called new world (America, Brazil, Australia, etc) drew not a few Brits away, whether as outlaws shipped off as punishment; or just adventurers looking beyond the tiny British isles.

But Malthus could also be applied to a looming tragedy, if this Kaduna case is not rightly resolved, without recourse to any sick political compromise.

The 1999 Army Arrangement (again, apologies to the Abami Eda), which compensated the South West with an Obasanjo presidency, looked like political retardation, in “arithmetical proportions”; until the 2015 elections halted the Obasanjo era descent at its very nadir, the Goodluck Jonathan years, during which everything was going to crash.

So long for political compromises, with neither soul nor equity!

But the Jonathan-era political collapse would appear a child’s play with the current education debacle.

Indeed — and back to Malthus — if politics and governance had collapsed by “arithmetical proportion”, education would appear collapsing by “geometrical proportion” — and the root is a rotten foundation, as exemplified by the Kaduna teachers scandal.

That is why those who cry and wail about giving the quacks who claim to be teachers in Kaduna some soft landing entirely miss the point.  Indeed, such a stand would appear insensitive, if not outright unconscionable.

Yet, there is a lot to be said about the rotten processes that installed these quacks; and the imperative of dealing with the rot from the fundament.

For starters, how could the Kaduna teacher recruitment system be riddled with so much self-ruin, to the extent that those that lexically challenged end up as “teachers”?  And their victims, young impressionable minds, whose families are probably the society’s most vulnerable, given their lowly demographics?

But before you point fingers at Kaduna, that state might well point to a nationwide rot.  That is why the Kaduna government should spare nothing to get to the root of the problems and ensure any racket in the teacher recruitment system is smashed; and there are vibrant checks-and-balances to henceforth continuously sanitize the system.

All these point to a past where the abnormal had been so brazenly pushed it has now become the norm.  The Nasir El Rufai governorship holds it a sacred duty, to the coming generation, that the rot is completely reversed.

Then the below-par teachers and their so-called welfare, on which the Nigeria Union of Teachers (NUT) and the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), have screamed and bawled, in the mistaken belief that you win a discourse by raising your voice, not your logic.

Strictly speaking, if welfare is linked to work privileges, any Kaduna teacher deemed to have failed so dismally in his or her teaching duties is not entitled to work-related welfare.  This is trite: for you to enjoy, you must deliver value.

Besides, it is not charity.  Indeed, in this very case, to resort to an appeal to charity is nothing but double jeopardy, for such failure ought to attract stiff sanctions, not reward, given the harm it has done to the victim-pupils.

Still, in dealing with citizens, hardly any government would want to, Draco-wise, strictly apply the law, without mercy or compassion.  That would appear the only pillar on which the Kaduna teachers, with proven dereliction of duties, can access any favour.

But whatever happens, present and future generation of public school pupils should not be made guinea pigs, in that laboratory of mercy.

Except for the few that can be retrained, the others should be shipped off to that segment of the civil service, where they would cease being a menace to the future generation.

To this legion, teaching must be strictly off-limits, more so with the evidence that there are qualified teachers ready and willing to fill the vacated positions.

For those who could neither be retrained as teachers nor fit into other areas of the civil service, however, the Kaduna government should end their appointment but promptly pay them their dues.  That way, they can get on with their lives, with little or no dislocation of the lives of their equally innocent dependents.

That is the line the teachers union and organized Labour should push.  Otherwise, NUT would be fairly charged as undermining its own professional essence; and organized Labour legitimately charged with, by its empty grandstanding, pushing no dignity in honest labour.

The post Tisa, no teach me nonsense appeared first on The Nation Nigeria.

Nigeria perpetually treads the wide and merry way, which the bible says, leads to destruction.  The result is the present sorry state, which everyone hates.

But each time it makes for the straight-and-narrow, which leads to salvation, these same people kick and scream and bellow and holler and screech!

It is the children of Israel all over again.  For their foul-tempered bedlam over short-term pains, they prolonged a 40-day breeze through the wilds, to a 40-year odyssey to their promised land.

Will Nigeria replicate the manna-gobbling, do-nothing, ever-grumbling ancient Israelites?  Or seize the times and bite the bullet that comes with harsh rectitude, after merry, free-wheeling turpitude?

Golden dreams!  But the prognoses are dire.

Opinion shapers, piqued by some short-term hurts, have turned the media space into a plebeian din, condemning everything under the sun.

Yet they, at this delicate and decisive historic juncture, ought to be tempered patricians, countering the plebeian babble, explaining issues with rare wisdom and illuminating insights.

Pray, which country ever gets it right, when its media is the unfazed redoubt of plebeian screeches?  That about approximates the present Nigerian situation.

Yet if education is expensive, goes the saying, try ignorance.  If rectitude is expensive, try turpitude.

Fortunately, between rectitude and turpitude, Nigeria has had two excellent examples, with Muhammadu Buhari ironically at the vortex of both.

Between 1984 and 1985, a certain Major-General Muhammadu Buhari, with grim and dour lieutenant, Major-General Babatunde Idiagbon (now dead), was at the centre of a brave attempt to pull Nigeria off self-induced catastrophe.

President Shehu Shagari’s 2nd Republic had just collapsed in the throes of a rigged election and unprecedented decadence.

It was a historic prelude to the immediate post-Goodluck Jonathan era: the national wealth was gone, no thanks to unconscionable and thieving politicians.

So was the national pride.  Indeed, it was vaunted patriotism to flee from the Nigerian debacle.  Remember the (in)famous Andrew, in the NTA commercial, who strutted like a peacock, while piping his decision to “check out”?

Besides, it’s tribute to the shallowness of the Nigerian media that the present salary crisis is reported as if it were something novel.  No, an earlier version came with the pitiful collapse of the 2nd Republic.

Now, the Buhari-Idiagbon regime stands condemned for its general high-handedness; unprecedented brutality and queer ethnic-equalization formula to democratize punishment, even if that meant punishing the innocent, if only to tar all the ousted politicians.

That was an eternal blight, especially on the all-important front of fairness and fair play.  But even that, history might excuse as nothing but a draconian method to tackle a most daunting decadence.

Look no further for proof: the Buhari regime was succeeded, via a palace coup, by far the most decadent and most wayward — perhaps bar the Jonathan meltdown —  regime in Nigerian history.

The way became giddily wider; the party recklessly merrier; and a fun-loving people, who grumbled all through the Buhari cramp, cheered full-throat, at the dawn of the Ibrahim Babangida era.  It was, indeed, a sweet and intoxicating path that led nowhere but unqualified perdition!

But after the stark Sani Abacha, he of jumbo sleaze; the giddy but empty messianism of Olusegun Obasanjo’s second coming and the ill-fated Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, the tragic chicken finally came home to roost in Jonathan-era ruins.

Then a dazed and raped nation finally came to its senses and zeroed in on a superman to bale it out of its own self-induced folly — Muhammadu Buhari!

But why this hated nemesis-turned-doted-messiah tale?  While others thoroughly messed themselves up during the wild, partying years, Buhari kept himself whole and sane.

Enter then, Buhari’s second coming, courtesy of the epochal 2015 elections.  But it is clear the president himself didn’t reckon with the Nigerian Israelites’ syndrome — do nothing but demand instant manna — even if the situation is not helped by Buhari’s own natural tardiness.

But as it was during Buhari’s first coming, there are more fundamental problems beyond speed or tardiness.  It was the morning after the wild party; and the head-splitting hangover would naturally slow things down.

Besides, some gluttons of the present have gobbled up the future.  The economy was not only in ruins, it is structured towards eternally boosting already thriving foreign economies but sapping the Nigerian real economy.

So, a ringing re-thinking was called for.  Though the administration captured it in “make what you eat and eat what you make” — a catching phrase, if any, towards agricultural renaissance and re-industrialization — the Nigerian mind would appear firmly hooked in the slovenly past of little work, bountiful manna.

Factor in the paralyzing corruption — and how the Church generally turned a deaf ear — the electricity power conundrum and the sundry telling distractions: Niger Delta Avengers, wild Islamization allegations by CAN, Nnamdi Kanu’s IPOB’s cacophony of searing ethnic hate, etc, and you’d realize how almost everyone has been tragically distracted.

Of course, all of these would not have been if the media had not devoted itself to chasing the mundane, thus shunning fundamental issues a citizen-media should tackle, at a crucial historic juncture.

It became the merry voices of ethnic champions, and the lionization and demonization that come with that.  It also became the unfazed ombudsman for appointment equalization — no crime, to be sure, and quite legitimate.

But in its howling jeremiads, it hardly has time for a concerted anti-corruption push — except when arguing forcefully why it would not work — which could make or mar Nigeria’s future.

Goading itself to pushing a bigoted agenda, it all but blinded itself to vital developments that could sweep away the present mess: in less than three years, terror-induced slaughter was down by 90 per cent.  So is Nigeria’s importation of rice, with a bright prospect of 100 per cent local rice sufficiency by 2018.

In Nigeria’s greatest hour of need, its media, self-trapped in ethnic laagers, is too distracted to focus on the real issues.  If therefore the country breaks a new mould, it would be in spite of the opinion moulders in the media.

If it fails, the nihilistic media would have preserved its niche — like the Israelites, eternal lamentation in the eternal Nigerian jungle — even as the whole world moves on to things new.

The post Straight-and-narrow appeared first on The Nation Nigeria.

Good old outrage is alive — and the nationwide uproar, over the Fulani herdsmen Benue killing, is proof.

What routinized sleaze had numbed, shocking gore just woke — and just as well!

A nation, in search of the right soul, must develop a Mannichaean ethos — that stark awareness of good and evil: the one to fulsomely praise; the other to utterly raze.

It is the narrow and winding way to equity and justice for all.

Still, outrage must be well calibrated, so that it doesn’t become a regular catharsis for avoidable tragedy.

No sympathy for the killer herdsmen; and their alleged sponsors.   The Nigerian state must ensure the Benue 73 get justice.

Still, that should not equate a blanket condemnation of the entire Fulani, just because a segment of their stock is criminal and murderous.

Nor should the present wailing lay the foundation for future tragedies — just as past wailings appeared to have laid the foundation for this one — by adopting the sweet tragedy of wailing without thinking.

Unfortunately, that ruinous pattern is emerging yet again.   It’s time to break that tragic cycle.

For starters, avoid over-simplifying the problem, just because such inanities thrive in the heat of the moment.

Take the Fayose Ekiti elixir.  With anti-Fulani hysteria flaring, Ayo Fayose, the majestic master of vacuity and merry poster-boy of gubernatorial vacuum, has come up with a winner!

He just drafted a colony of Ekiti hunters, with their Dane guns and assorted charms and amulets, to the defence of Ekiti farmers.  The same media that thrust his tragi-comic derring-do upon their readers, report that the “Fulani killer herdsmen” prowl with AK-47 and other sophisticated arms and ammo.

“Shakabula” (Yoruba pejorative term for crude arms) versus AK-47?  If that’s not another avoidable tragedy loading, kindly point to a worse threat!

Then, the law as swashbuckler!  Again, Ekiti is prime example.

Ekiti’s anti-open grazing law, against rampaging herdsmen, was a great hit, with many an editorial comment recommending it to others.  But no thanks to simplistic thinking, what has worked for Ekiti has proved sheer catastrophe for Benue.

Simon Lalung, Plateau governor, claimed he warned Samuel Ortom, the Benue governor, about the dangers of an anti-open grazing law.  Ortom has countermanded this claim.

What is important, however, is not the controversy, or even the justness or otherwise of that law.  It is rather how the local dynamics fated it to catastrophe.

Still, the point here is not to romanticize outlawry or rationalize brazen slaughter.  It is rather to ask: could that law have better served everyone, if it had been more sensitive to every stakeholder’s perceived rights — native or settler, farmer or herdsman — than in its present form of perceived championing of the right of farmers against pastoralists?

Ay, every farmer needs protection against the plague of rampaging herdsmen.  But the problem is not even this basic fact, which is commonsense enough.

It is rather the combined pathology of ethnicity and politicking, in a vast territory of native communities, which federal system is not robust enough to come to terms with the dynamics of its rippling settler communities, driven by sheer economic push.

So, the Benue crises — and those of the contiguous Plateau, southern Kaduna, Taraba and even Adamawa — are, at the roots, neither communal nor ethnic.  They are economic.  Therefore, it all boils down to perceived threat to livelihoods — and its fatal consequences.

That must underscore the Lalung claim that he “warned” Ortom against the dangers of the Benue anti-open grazing law.  Both states face similar dynamics in itinerant livestock farming, itinerant crop farming (rotational farming in basic economics), as well as native-settler landholding tension  — a dangerous cocktail that is always political volcano waiting to explode.

But the same dynamics that make the Benue anti-open grazing law so dangerous also doom the so-called “grazing colonies”, which the Federal Government is currently floating.

So, averting these tragedies demands you plot the economic rights of farmers against the economic rights of herdsmen; and work out a mutually beneficial compromise.

That could result in a much more equitable law,  even if less popular with both economic partisans.  But it guarantees the livelihood of all.  It is a simple solution from complex thinking.

Such, more than ever now, is needed to stop these periodic orgies of gore, of which the Benue massacre is the latest, but not necessarily the last.

Talking about pastoral rights: has anyone deeply interrogated the morphing of the stick-carrying Fulani cattle boy of yore to the AK-47 dreaded killer of today?

Here is a quotation straight from the Christmas 2017 double issue of The Economist: “When you have cows, the first thing you must do is get a gun.  If you don’t have a gun, people will take your cow.”

Straight out of the Benue, Plateau, southern Kaduna and Taraba axis, the vortex of herdsmen’s killing in Nigeria?  No.  That was from a herder from Wau, a city in South Sudan.

In Wau, just as these blighted areas of Nigeria, cattle rustling is a big rural crime.  So, the state must find an antidote.

But as the herder has resorted to self-help, to secure self and asset, the criminal-minded among the lot have left heinous killings in their trail.  Sad!

To be sure, that criminality must be condemned and stiffly punished — which is the angst not a few have against the Buhari Presidency.

But the  solution is simple(?): the state must secure the herdsmen’s cattle asset; as well as his personal safety to tend his cows — a standard demand by other citizens, in other far-flung sectors as banking, manufacturing, IT, transport, trade and commerce, and even crop farming.

It is under the rubrics of this trade security that modernization of the process, via ranching, must be comprehensively discussed; and fashioned out over a target period of time.

That way, itinerant cattle herding can be gradually phased out.  But in the interim, the available land can be carefully tracked, thus limiting farmers-pastoralists clashes, and the attendant blood-spilling crises. Any other way is baiting needless tragedy.

But even as this process evolves, the Federal Government must not fail in its duty of law and order.  Criminal elements among the cattle-herding community must be caught and swiftly brought to justice.

So should rogue elements of the state, that for ethnic and religious reasons, aid and abet the criminal segment of the cattle lobby. Such intra-government criminals would appear to fire the rising notoriety of a faction of the Miyetti Allah cattle lobby.

To solve this problem, the state must think clearly, while the media must be less hysterical, even when expressing understandable outrage.

Happy new year! 

It’s nice to be back after a period of rest, even if that, with the present tension in the land, near-equates breezing into Dante’s inferno. But the media must be part of the solution, not part of the problem.

The post Beyond outrage appeared first on The Nation Nigeria.

When the Rwanda madness boiled over, a local radio it was that directed the grim orgy of point-and-kill.

Here, “point-and-kill” is leisure lingo for local pepper soup gourmets.  But the Kigali party was a grisly affair.

So, when Radio Mille Collines belted out the order, “Cut down the tall trees!”, “Crush the cockroaches!”, the globe was awake to perhaps the greatest horror since Hitler.

The “tall trees” were the tall, gangling Tutsi, who though a minority, monopolized political power.  Their hunters were the Hutu, the bitter majority, bent on throwing off the Tutsi yoke.

When the smoke cleared, on the Rwanda genocide of April-July 1994, Radio Television Mille Collines rebranded the media as nation wrecker, from nation builder.

Yet, its hate  broadcast lasted one year: July 1993 to July 1994.

The Rwanda genocide would be 24 years this year.  But the Nigerian media appears to have learnt nothing from the Rwanda media’s road to catastrophe.

This is clear from the base role the media had played — and continue to play — in the crises, real or contrived, that have faced the Muhammadu Buhari presidency.

For President Buhari, it has been one year, one major crisis: Niger Delta Avengers bombing expedition (2015/2016), Nnamdi Kanu IPOB’s ferocious harvest of hate (2016/2017) and the herdsmen killing spree (2018).

In all of these, the media would appear bent on stoking the fires, than snuffing them out.

The especial grouse appears the president’s Fulani nativity; which a hysterical segment — more or less the bulk of the southern press — appears determined to scapegoat and demonize to the hilt.

Media-bred hate can only build a road to Kigali, paved with innocent skulls, blood and gore.  After Rwanda, should any country ever traverse this route?

Still, make no mistake.  Nigeria is a federation of many ethnic nations, each with its cherished world views and idiosyncrasies; not to talk of mutual but thick prejudices, fanned by ancestral feuds, real or apocryphal.

Such feuds and prejudices, therefore, bob up in the media, no matter how careful the gatekeepers are.

Besides, all politics is local.  So, it is a function of the willy-nilly federalization of the Nigerian media that Daily Trust, for instance, would push for northern interests, just as The Punch would for the West, Daily Sun for the Igbo South East; just as Vanguard would cast its lot with the southern, oil-rich minorities, in the fierce contestation for plums, in the Nigerian space.

The media, as traditional champion of local rights, fits pat into that fray, in the best tradition of crusading journalism.

But crusading for rights is one thing.  Recklessly baiting catastrophe, is another.  In handling these crises, the media has tended towards the second than the first.

The result is a media roaring as rabid ultra-nationalists and ethnic chauvinists; spreading hate, baiting doom and pushing a poisoned pool of bigotry, to the unwary, as an immaculate spring of fairness.

Take the opener of the crises, the bombing spree of the so-called Niger Delta Avengers.

Now, this was a criminal gang drafted — or which drafted itself — into the political space, following the the loss of presidential power, by local boy, Goodluck Jonathan; and resultant loss of gravy, by local parasites.

That appeared the make-good of the threat to make Nigeria ungovernable, should President Jonathan be voted out.  The tragi-comedy, of one government becoming a fugitive to another, added to the suspect Avengers campaign.

While the bombs boomed, Government Ekpemupolo aka Tompolo vanished, a fugitive from the law, wanted for alleged jumbo sleaze. It would appear a legitimate supposition, therefore, to claim that the Avengers bombing had more to do with covering Tompolo’s tracks, than fighting for Niger Delta rights.

Yet, much of the South-South media, with most of the southern media in tow, framed this ultra-dangerous precedent as some Niger Delta liberation struggle. It was not.

Now, resorting to violence, just because you lost a free election, is an atrocious precedent, which an enlightened media ought to slam as a concerned and concerted bloc.

If today, a southern group resorted to bombing just because it lost an election, what stops a northern group following the same formula tomorrow?

After the Avengers, came the IPOB campaign — a rabid, hate-filled denunciation of the rest of Nigeria.  Though popular among the plebs in South East streets, it put the Igbo and their interests at loggerheads, with other parts of Nigeria.

Again, the southern media cheered on this madness, until another lunatic fringe from the North gave the Igbo residents there an  1 October 2017 exit deadline — or else!  That triggered a chain of events that eventually turned Nnamdi Kanu a fugitive from the law.

The herdsmen killings, that broke with the new year, put the president exactly where his traducers want him — the hysterics against Fulani criminality, with not a few even suggesting presidential complicity and sweeping ethnic guilt by association!

Again, no pity for killer herdsmen.  Killing is a grievous crime that must be stiffly punished by the state.

But to now frame it as an exclusive Fulani crime is the apex of stupidity.  Yet, that’s the line much of the southern media push — and with such hate, rabidity and brazenness.

But the terrible news just broke that Islamic State (IS) fanatics, with their penchant for vicious killing, may just be operating in Nigeria.

That doesn’t automatically put in the clear, the criminal colony of herdsmen.  But it shows the folly — and danger — of a one-track media criminalization of a group, when others could well be the culprit.

Besides, in the present seasonal hate-for-hate orchestra, the herdsman and the media could well be two sides of the same hateful coin.

The herdsman unleashes terror in the grisly field.  The media counters, with own fervency, in the air, in the press and, of course, in the (anti)social media.

It is terror for terror (just like an eye for an eye that makes everyone blind), that dooms all.

Such rabidity should be infra-dig for the media, except Nigeria is doomed to the road to Kigali.

Between Fafowora and Opaleye

Last week was, for Ripples, a sumptuous feast in humanity, from a young old man; and an old young man.

Young old man, Ambassador Oladapo Fafowora, 77, consultant to The Nation Editorial Board, retired — and was his sent-forth an event to remember! That was January 17.

Old young man, Abolade Opaleye, Esq., maritime lawyer and family man extraordinaire, turned 60.  It was January 19, and all roads led to the Oriental Hotel, Lekki, for a sumptuous birthday bash, with class and glitz.

But what made it for Ripples was the gush of testimonies, about the duo, on their humanity, their decency, their hearts of gold!

Ambassador, happy retirement sir.  They don’t make them that suave any more.  To Opaleye, old young man, well, life begins at 60 — so no retirement for you yet.

Thank you both for being a riveting tutorial in basic humanity. Would sure love to be like you when I grow up!

The post The media and road to Kigali appeared first on The Nation Nigeria.

Olusegun Obasanjo, former president of the Federal Republic, has thundered yet again!  But it is nothing but jaded deja vu.

Those swooning over Obasanjo’s latest Coalition for Nigeria (CN), would do well to remember his Association for Democracy and Good Governance in Nigeria (ADGN).

He ghosted that body amidst the uproar that greeted Ibrahim Babangida’s annulment of MKO Abiola’s 12 June 1993 presidential mandate.

Among the many starry-eyed that descended on his Ota farm, searching for leadership, was a certain ramrod Muhammadu Buhari, outraged by IBB’s ultra-recklessness.

But as the naive were focused at doing justice by MKO, Obasanjo was priming himself for crass opportunism.

That journey, in patriotic perfidy, landed Obasanjo in gaol.  It also cost Shehu Musa Yar’Adua his life.  Still, Obasanjo would end up the prime beneficiary of the Abacha debacle.

It is ode to Obasanjo’s essential gracelessness that though MKO’s martyrdom ensured his second coming, he not only struggled to completely bury MKO throughout his presidential years (1999-2007), he also ogled an illegal third term which ended in a fiasco.

So, those swearing by Baba Iyabo’s latest CN gambit, especially after strafing both the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) and the power-obsessed People’s Democratic Party (PDP), are entitled to their naivety.

By the way, does Obasanjo’s old “Abiola is no messiah” mantra gel with his present “APC and PDP have failed, so try my CN” new war cry?

The foxy Owu chief, pushing a so-called “third force”, brimming with patriotic zeal to save Nigeria, might just be pointing to nobody but himself!  Call it neo-third term through the bad door!

Now, to Obasanjo’s January 24 press release on the present state of things.

Do the counting, at least in the democratic era: Second Republic President Shehu Shagari (1979-1983), President Umaru Yar’Adua (2007-2010) and President Goodluck Jonathan (2010-2015) — all were victims of Obasanjo’s tumbling adjectives, in explosive letters, similar to the present press release on President Buhari.

Yet, all three were Obasanjo’s power protégés.

The Obasanjo military junta aided and abetted Richard Akinjide’s twelve-two-thirds joker that sprung Candidate Shagari from a looming presidential run-off, as the 1979 Constitution ordered.

As outgoing president, Obasanjo declared Yar’Adua’s election a “do-or-die” affair; and inflicted such on the polity, producing the most brazen rape on democracy Nigeria ever saw, making even Yar’Adua so ashamed of his own “election”.

Of course, Yar’Adua’s fatal illness (hardly a secret) made the sorry Jonathan a fait accompli, that would nevertheless collapse the Obasanjo presidential house of straw, of which the PDP, which he robbed of its soul, was only a grand victim; and Jonathan, poor soul, the grand fall guy.

Tracked back to 1979, therefore, the Nigerian debacle has had but one constant: Obasanjo.  He handed over to Shagari; but that government’s collapse, after one democratic term, hallmarked Nigeria’s most virulent military rule.

That started with Muhammadu Buhari’s stone-age despotism; featured IBB’s brutal and wayward power-wield, chalking the first annulment of presidential mandate in Nigerian history; and hit the very nadir in the stark, thieving and murderous Abacha, who had to expire for his country, which he brutally raped, to progress.

The Obasanjo-led 4th Republic (from 1999) has followed the same regressive pattern — with Obasanjo’s successors sinking steadily in the mire, until the threatened collapse (not only of Obasanjo’s house of straw, but of the whole ruling class) of 2015, which rallied that class to rally around a clean name, to save them all.

It is again tribute to Obasanjo’s holy illogic that his sacred Pope must consistently produce profane priests — to borrow an image of the Catholic Church.

That, at least to the acute, captures Obasanjo’s latest media grandstanding on the present state of affairs.

Yet, give the devil his due.  Of all charges Obasanjo laid against Buhari, the only valid one would appear the president’s ultra-narrow appointments, on the security front, along northern lines.

Normally, since the appointees are no foreigners but Nigerians the president deems fit to do the job, Ripples won’t raise much eye brows.  This is especially so when these are evened out with a southern phalanx, on the economic management front.

Still, there are cries that these appointees, by their alleged ethnic agenda, undermine the president and cast him as an ultra-narrow ethnic champion.  The president must address and correct these grave allegations.

But aside from this sole point, the other allegations, coming from the former president, are tantamount to pure gas: they are logical legacies from Obasanjo’s ruinous foundation, as first president of the 4th Republic.

PDP: That PDP is rotten, coming from Obasanjo, is simply rich.  Did anyone, living or dead, contribute more to crippling that party than the former president?

Corruption:  Given the progeny of his Presidential Library as unfazed shrine of brazen extortion (with a sitting president and oil minister suborning the cream of Nigeria to “donate”, it’s amazing Obasanjo would have the nerves to pontificate on corruption.

Petroleum queues: a natural result of Obasanjo’s “brilliant” policy of liberalizing petroleum downstream by product importation, instead of local refining.  The Buhari government has a sounder policy on that front than Obasanjo’s.

Killings and tension: Much as a section of the media has fraudulently coloured herdsmen killing as novel and exclusive to the Buhari presidency, that is arrant nonsense, for herdsmen-farmers tension is nothing new.

It happened under Obasanjo.  So did it, under Yar’Adua and Jonathan.  Instead of emotive finger-pointing and ethnic scape-goating, therefore, it is time to find lasting solutions, instead of playing to the gallery.

Economy: Obasanjo roars on the poor management of the economy.  But pray, what were his own records, apart from wholesale pandering to Breton-woods, that gorged Nigeria of its “real economy”?

From the Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala days of structural underdevelopment of the local economy, a government is mining the golden opportunities in agriculture, much more than any in Nigeria’s 4th Republic. Despite its huffing and puffing, that was beyond Obasanjo’s eight-year presidency.

One term: Is it not laughable that the one that hankered after an illegal third term, now decries another’s right to a legal second?

Obasanjo is at his usual pastime, when things are tough, and his conceit spurs him to posture to plebeian roar.

But ask yourself, since 1979, which Obasanjo-led movement has left Nigeria better than it met it?

Baba Iyabo is an integral part of the Nigerian mess.  If you think he can be part of the solution, you’re entitled to your democratic delusion.

The post Again, Baba Iyabo thunders appeared first on The Nation Nigeria.

“May your road be rough, may you have a hard time this year” – Tai Solarin (of blessed memory), 1 January 1964

In this season of emergency messiahs, it is meet to x-ray that Nigerian penchant to chase shadows, when common sense — hardly ever common — dictates you stick to the substance, no matter how grinding.

Might that have inspired the late Tai Solarin’s iconoclastic wish, quoted as prelude to this piece, as relevant today as it was on 1 January 1964 when it was released, in lieu of the conventional “happy new year”?

Indeed, may your road be rough!  In there lies any grain of natural progress.

But most times when that happens, and Nigeria seems at a serious crossroads, a flighty ensemble gallops into town, and with thunderous roar from the dim, start vending fake magic.

Most times, however, that easy way always forms the root for a future gnashing of teeth, in a vicious merry-go-round.

Former President Olusegun Obsanjo’s latest fancy, the “non-partisan” Coalition for Nigeria (CN) fits pat into that umpteenth pattern — and Ripples gave his take on the Owu fox’s latest gambit in this column last week.

Still, that would appear a crescendo to a well-calibrated mirage, masterfully conjured to hook the unwary and sucker the simplistic.  Unfortunately, the Nigerian space teems with such in their millions.

That brings the discourse to the day’s main menu: between IBB and Atiku.

To Gen. Ibrahim Babangida (IBB), former self-named “military president” and Abubakar Atiku, former elected Vice President of the Federal Republic, Muhammadu Buhari would appear a constant.

In Babangida, it is how, after Buhari, a past got so frightfully awry, with a mess that climaxed in 2015; with both IBB and new, self-promoting messiah, Obasanjo, playing more than active roles.

In Atiku, it is how, again after Buhari, a future could turn so spirally wrong; so much so that it could well nigh be beyond redemption.  Again, an Obasanjo is huffing and puffing; pawning old poison as new elixir.

During the military era, IBB postured easy comfort, from the Buhari-Idiagbon Grim Republic, after emerging new “military president”, after a palace coup in August 1985.  At the end, he delivered nothing but sweet peril, that forged this present lament.

Before Obasanjo barged into his party, with his CN Hobson’s choice, Atiku was staking his claim as some rosy future, after Buhari’s grim present — if not a contemporary Nigerian Pericles, the greatest of the Greek old lawgivers, then certainly a Solon, the wisest of them all.

Indeed, Atiku postured as the latest neo-Fulani progressive-liberal in town, at home with state police (the battle cry of the fringe of those craving a rebirth of Nigeria’s skewed federalism); is comfy with “resource control” (the war cry of the Niger Delta) and absolutely in love with “restructuring” —  the turn-defeat-into-triumph gamble of the Afenifere grandees of the South West.

In this high-pitch Atiku circus of colourful nothings, you could never lose!  Whoever gains anything from the rainbow of a soap bubble — except the thrill of its final pop?

Perhaps the “new” Atiku sent Baba Iyabo scampering to his new CN gambit.  Perhaps it was, from the Buhari angle, that eternal panic of being out-shone by anyone in the contemporary Nigerian cosmos, especially on the anti-corruption front, that stampeded Baba into the fray.

But whatever it was, something is escaping the duo: the high presidential institution they sunk in the mud, by their roforofo fight based on nothing but empty ego, is being restored to its full lofty heights, by quiet grace, by an incorruptible duo.

With Baba sounding so hollow on the anti-corruption front, “federal character” in presidential appointments is his new game — hardly a crime!

But back to IBB and Atiku in the Nigerian economic debacle.

As a University of Ibadan undergraduate in 1984, Ripples never liked the Buhari junta’s political policy.

The treatment of the ousted politicians was too draconian, back then hallmarking the most vicious face of military rule ever.  The arrests were also lop-sided, with a penchant to punish, just for punishment’s sake.  Thirty-four years after, that impression remains unchanged.

But not so, the economic policy.  Back then as at now, the thrust was self-sufficiency, no matter how hard at first, to build a real local economy.  But the avant-garde experts back then, pumped full with self-underdevelopment theories, courtesy of their Western teacher-ideologues, balked.

Buhari lost out.  IBB, charming the gullible — which was about everyone, including the media — sided with these Nigerian “expat experts”, to echo Prof. Wole Soyinka’s sarcastic pun in The Interpreters.

In the very first week of the structural adjustment programme (SAP) in 1986, the Naira forever(?) crashed as a viable currency.

That economic debacle, of totally surrendering to imports, while playing yo-yo with the Naira parity, hoping gushing petro-dollars would absorb the shock, had lasted all through military rule (1986-1999), and spanned the 4th Republic Obasanjo presidential establishment (1999-2015).

Of course, there were “reforms” (that highfalutin jazz word of Obasanjo-era high orthodoxy): some of them critical (like the pension reforms); others laughable (like liberalizing petroleum downstream by refined fuel import); and yet others, trip to ego land, as Chukwuma Soludo’s NEEDS (National Economic Empowerment and Development Strategy) which, in full golden triumph, beckoned the states to come up with their own SEEDS; and the local governments, with own LEEDS.

It was the golden age of empty sloganeering with raucous applause!

Even when the Buhari Presidency in 2015 changed tack, and instead settled for massive agriculture to power back the local economy, these same “expat experts” pronounced a dire verdict on the new government.

Yet, less than three years down the line, rice importation, by figures from the Nigeria Bureau of Statistics (NBS), is down by 90 per cent.  By year end 2018, according to the same NBS projection, Nigeria should be self-sufficient in rice and most other grains.

What SAP and Obasanjo era reforms could not even touch in 30 long years, a government delivered in less than three years — and some lobbies still claim that government knows no economics!

Atiku’s link to IBB?  Simple.  As IBB took Nigeria on an economic wild goose chase 32 years ago, followed by administrations that succeeded him, so would the “new” Atiku take Nigeria to a future economic quicksand, away from the current fast-forming firm grounds.

If those grounds are consolidated and built upon, a robust economy would logically result, other things being equal.

And Baba Iyabo and his CN gang?  Just empty drama and vacuous grandstanding — hardly a democratic crime!  But it could well turn vicious distraction, with its parasitic tactics of preying on current pains, only to sell a far worse future anguish.

That is Nigeria’s current crossroads, with equal opportunity messiahs stalking the gullible.

But as their past records have shown, over the past 32 years,  theirs is the wide and merry way that leads to perdition, not the straight-and-narrow that leads to salvation.

The post Between IBB and Atiku appeared first on The Nation Nigeria.

W ant to gauge your community value?  Fix your birthday on a Monday morning; and see how many people would turn up.

Well, anyone of high community value would dare no such hubris.  Yet, that was what Mother Nature dared for Ayobami Oladele Atanda Afolabi (Ayo Afolabi, for short).

He turned 70 on Monday, February 5.  His friends decided to celebrate him that same day.   The result was simply a marvel.  The main hall, of the University of Ibadan International Conference Centre, teemed with well-wishers.

Indeed, it must be a big deal: two sitting governors (Oyo and Ondo); a deputy governor (Ogun); the secretary to a state government, with the governor’s chief of staff, plus key cabinet members (Osun); federal cabinet members (from Ekiti, Lagos and other parts of the Western Region); the South West chairmen of the All Progressives Congress (APC); professionals and academics, active and retired — gathered to celebrate a non-office holder, on a Monday morning!

Yet, the man that triggered all this love was an Abiku — that terrible born-to-die child in Yoruba traditional belief.  Indeed when he was born in 1948, he was the fifth in a relay of nine boys; but the first not to die shortly after.

Even then, he endured ”gbekude”, (Yoruba for: “hold death at bay”), a charmed necklace, for his first five years.  It was his parents’ final double insurance cover, that the Abiku might finally stay.

He did — and so did four boys after him.  The Yoruba race has been the richer — and luckier — for it.

Still, what sort of Abiku might he have been — the unfazed rebel, in Wole Soyinka’s poem of that same title? Or the one, in John Pepper Clark’s version, who could pity his plaintive parents?

Perhaps, a bit of the two!  Still, his 70 years have manifested something of a perpetual rebel — dating back to his earliest years.

A time was, he reportedly mocked a neighbour with facial scarifications.  But that triggered, from his mom, his own tribal mark tale.

A day before he was to be scarified, the toddler fell ill.  On the eve of the second attempt, he fell ill again.  One the third try, the scarifier was determined to have his way, let the heavens fall.  But lo, on the eve of that now-or-never attempt, the traditional surgeon himself died! That scared off everyone.

But beyond the Abiku-rebel-in-the-cradle, Mr. Afolabi would rebel, all through his life, against social trends that tend to retard his immediate and extended Yoruba environment, even if by that, drawing grave personal danger.

That fetched him his intrepid reputation, echoing back to his Owu nativity, of fearless warrior-ancestors, from his native Ode-Omu.

But unlike his more famous Owu cousin from Abeokuta, Olusegun Obasanjo, who seems rather cool towards Yoruba interest, Ayo Afolabi presses his Owu valour to Yoruba service, at the slightest opportunity, in the best Awoist and Afenifere progressive tradition.

Yet, save a youthful blunder into politics when he was 17, in secondary school, he never played politics when Awo was still alive, in the 2nd Republic (1979-1983).

It would seem, then, a gripping irony: one of the best Awoists ever never raised the flag, when the avatar himself was alive!  Yet, not a few zealots who did, have long betrayed the cause!

Indeed, as the saying goes, it’s not how long but how far!

At 17, out of youthful exuberance, the young Ayo served as accidental polling agent at Tonkere, in today’s Osun, to the local candidate of the  United Progressive Grand Alliance (UPGA) — a 1st Republic electoral alliance between the rump of Awolowo’s Action Group (AG) and Michael Opara’s National Council of Nigerian Citizens (NCNC), in the 1965 West regional elections.

But that turned awry — indeed, near-fatal — when the losing candidate, of the  dreaded “Demo” — shortened and corrupted form for Nigerian National

Democratic Party (NNPC) — seized his Dane gun and started shooting from his house, all through the polling precincts, sending everyone scuttling for dear lives!

His post-secondary school years he would spend building a career as a sales, marketing and advertising professional, so much so that during the 2nd Republic he was apolitical.  But all that would change, with the  12 June 1993 presidential election annulment by the military.

Indeed, his fiercest political battles would be the post-June 12 challenge to the Sani Abacha dictatorship, pitching rogue military elements from the North, that nevertheless had cells all over Nigeria, against nationalist elements among the Yoruba.

It was the era of incendiary posters and organized protests, standard civil resistance menus, which nevertheless put the nervy military on edge.

It was also the era of political prisoners of war (POWs), the harried military’s term for detained agitators, pushing for justice for MKO Abiola.

These elements, with the late Bola Ige firmly on the saddle, in Mr. Afolabi’s sector of the “war front”, felt the annulment of MKO’s mandate was a thunderous slap on the Yoruba face.

That, they insisted, must be resisted, even if the foot soldiers died trying.  That was the epic war that vanquished military rule but didn’t quite deliver democracy.

Nor did it deliver justice for the slain MKO, even if his fellow Egba-man, Gen. Obasanjo, ended up as prime beneficiary.

That was how Mr. Afolabi earned his pips in the many fierce battles for just Yoruba causes, with Nigeria’s pseudo-federal fronts providing the battle ground.

This same trajectory has powered his partisan politicking and political activism, all through the advent of the 4th Republic, from 1999 till now.  Even when the battle appeared so hopeless and forlorn, the intrepid warrior was always ready to give it his all.

Still, the February 5 show was much a personal celebration of Mr. Afolabi as it was an ode to community value.

In that hall, the celebrator was a link with the past, just as he was a beam into the future.

The master of ceremonies was Muyiwa Ige, son of the late Cicero of Esa Oke, that charismatic politician and 2nd Republic governor of Oyo State.  Mr. Afolabi was one of Ige’s trusted ideological foot soldiers.

Afolabi’s tutelage under Ige, on setting up progressive cells and organizations, to push fairer deals for everyone, has yielded tremendous harvests: the NADECO years’ “Idile”, New Generation and Heritage groups; and post-1999 Afenifere Renewal Group (ARG), whose brainchild is the Yoruba Academy, which later birthed the Development Agenda for Western Nigeria (DAWN), which commission is the present foremost regional policy think-thank for Western Nigeria.

His birthday also inspired sweet community service, hallmarked by how his protégés, led by Kunle Famoriyo; and other younger friends, like Niyi Akintola, SAN, masterminded a most befitting birthday bash.

But even as Mr. Afolabi becomes one of the youngest old men in town, he would be especially pleased that a posse of youths are poised to inherit his spirit of service.

Right there, Awa Bamiji, and his Grand Council of Yoruba Youths, honoured the celebrator with a special award at 70.

An ode to community value never sounded sweeter — and more reassuring.

The post Afolabi: Ode to community value appeared first on The Nation Nigeria.