This title is my cry for Nigeria. It is a title I used in my column of January 1, 2012.

The latest (as of the time I am writing this) horrifying bombing of an interstate commuter bus station in Sabon-Gari, Kano on Monday 18 March, blasting through four buses, killing scores of innocent lives and leaving several scores more wounded has brought it back to me.

Since the time of that last column a few more bewildering angles have been lent to the whole Boko Haram madness, both in terms of “speculated” source of their grievance and suggested panacea.

Highly placed northern brethren have helped the terrorists to add “economic deprivation” to their grouse, and general “amnesty” to the solution.

Now I know we are truly cursed as a people and as a country. Everything in this country is seen from ethnic prism and reduced to ethnicity — be it the glaring need for restructuring the dysfunctional system or electing leaders with the vision to fast-track our development.

Now we are told a major (if not suddenly the sole) reason for the Boko Haram war on our (I cannot even say “their” as it is suspected many of them are not Nigerians) fatherland is the abject poverty they suffer as a result of the inequity in the sharing of our national revenue!

These same highly placed brethren are asking for “amnesty” for the Boko Haram insurgents. Those, they say, that are “innocent of any crime,” an oxymoron if ever there was one. Dictionary meaning of amnesty is “an act of forgiveness for past offences, especially to a class of persons as a whole.” In the Nigerian parlance, based on the precedent with the Niger Delta militants, “amnesty” also includes “buying out” or providing livelihood to those so pardoned.

Let us grant, for the sake of the argument, that we can put face, name, and number to those constituting the Boko Haram class, seeing that poverty and “inequity” are such a country-wide phenomenon, is it farfetched to expect, after the Boko Haram may have been appeased, yet another terrorist group rising from the Middle-Belt, South-West, South-East or wherever in the near future, wrecking havoc with even more devilish modus operandi and zanier demands? But who cares?

We are in big trouble in this country. The devil is abroad.

Back to my column of January 2012, I wrote:

“Boko Haram, the amorphous group of terrorists within our shores, took their campaign of terror to the most contemptible level during the Christian festival season as their Christmas gift to their fellow country folks.

“It rounded off what has been a year in which the group systematically and incrementally imposed terror on the land and demonstrated utter contempt for man and state.The sad part is that they are winning for neither man nor the state has figured a way to halt or appease the menace.

“For a start, the demands of the group are uncertain and dubious. In one breath they are against “Western education” even whilst they embrace products of it, in another they demand “Sharianisation” of Northern states or even the whole country!And the latest, they want the constitution abrogated. Absurd?

“More absurd is the fact that these faceless devils have gone about their evil business killing the very poor people they claim to want to rescue from “hell-fire” and making life on earth hellish enough for all.

“A number of things are clear to my mind: one, these Boko Haram terrorists are not real Muslims and are not fighting an Islamic cause; two, there is a yet undeclared agenda for their protest, sorry, terrorism; three, the modus and facility (material and mind) of their campaign are beyond what is locally available in their part of the country in particular and Nigeria as a whole; four, some powerful people in their part of the country are behind, or aware of those behind, this group, and are tacitly in support, out of fear or from a convergence of interest….

“How do we get out of this mess?

“…The powers (external and internal) that are fuelling it are not into this for the fun of it and are not fighting for any clear “equitable” share of anything; not of power, not of resources. There is no meeting point, and if ever there was one it is guaranteed to be a shifting one – with one met another is made!

“We will live with this for a while, a long while, one incomprehensible group replacing another, one incomprehensible demand after another.

“Are we then on the “road to Kigali”? Is sectarian strife the new order? …Are we at the onset of the disintegration of Nigeria or will the centre hold?”

The latest Sabon-Gari, Kano bus station bombing, with the rumoured or threatened reprisal by folk in the East whose people are the main casualties, has forced upon the Sultan of Sokoto, His Eminence Saad Abubakar III, one of the strong pro-amnesty proponents, a new appreciation of the danger the country faces.

He is quoted to have said: “This new trend of bombing at a motor park, and the killings that ensued, on innocent people that gathered to travel to various destinations at New Road, Sabon-Gari, Kano, is disturbing and alarming… It seems there is a design to set the entire North on crises and by extension, the whole country, starting with Kano…”

For Nigeria, tomorrow is hard to foretell.

Femi Osofisan’s playwrights’ angle

Even as the country is enveloped in the smoke from Boko Haram nihilism, the fog of unimaginable corruption, and the daze of leadership mediocrity, some folk still have it in them to figure the start of something new, sow an acorn seed in their own little corner, and shine a torch of hope unto the gloomy landscape.

A couple of weeks ago, renowned playwright and university don, Prof. Femi Osofisan, initiated and convened the first ever playwrights confab in Nigeria at the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ife, to propound ways of bringing theatre back to life to assume its rightful place in provoking positive change in the country.

Theatre, perhaps more than other art forms, has a history of stirring uprising and bringing about change in the society and of governments from ancient times to now. It was not for nothing that a government of Western Region in the 60s banned the Hubert Ogunde Travelling Theatre from performing the “Yoruba Ronu” play anywhere in the region.

Femi’s first thought was a “small, weekend affair” with a handful gathering “around some barbeque and calabashes of palmwine” to “chat and banter” “then disperse, spiritually renewed.”

But it blew into a full grown event attracting some of the country’s big “masqueraders” of theatre intellection and practice, including J.P. Clark, Biodun Jeyifo, Rasheed Gbadamosi, Ahmed Yerima, Olu Obafemi, Jimi Solanke, Ben Tomoloju, Jahman Anikulapo, Tunde Fatunde, and so many more space does not permit me to list.

My friend and aburo Onukaba Adinoyi-Ojo, a playwright in his own right, was there and wondered what a writer or columnist like me was doing in their midst. Poor Onukaba, little did he know that way back in the early 60s at the then famous Kiriji Memorial College I won the “best actor” award for three consecutive years!

In my days stage plays were an integral part of learning and living, right from primary schools to high schools and universities; in religious places and communities.

As Osofisan says of playwrights and theatre practitioners: “We are dreamers, and the product of dreams. And it is these lofty dreams that shape and reshape our world.”

That is right.

Nigeria is in bondage, bondage of mediocrity and ethnicity. Each factor on its own is dangerous, combined, there can be no worse fate for a country.

Right now Nigerians are disgusted with the leadership cadre they are saddled with, right from the presidency through to the legislative chambers. We are cringing when most of our leaders speak publicly, inspiring none and evincing no soundness of mind. At international fora, we sit and watch our leaders address the world, we hold our breath and pray silently for no gaffes or blunders, to no avail.

Quickly, the ethnic card flashes on the minds of those not from the ethnic group of such leader, falsely associating the mediocrity on display to the speaker’s ethnic group, and fuelling even more ethnic resentment, one of another.

 Conversely, Nigerians feel unitedly proud with themselves when a Nigerian stands out at a public forum, especially of an international kind, and mesmerises the audience with smooth eloquence and force of his argument. We smile, we clap, and, at that point, we bury our differences and identify our nationality with the speaker.

This much was brought home to me at the just concluded week-long 6th Joint Annual Meetings of the African Union and Economic Commission for Africa Conference of Ministers of Economy and Finance held in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire, which I attended at the invitation of the ECA.

The theme of the conference was “Industrialisation for an Emerging Africa.” Throughout the conference, there was barely anything more than the perfunctory, often tepid, diplomatise applause after one leader-of-delegate’s or another’s speech. Then on the last day and at the last key-issue titled, “Financing Africa’s Industrialisation,” treated by a high-table array of governors of central banks in a number of African countries and top global financial gurus, the unusual happened – repeated deafening applause from the otherwise conservative hall after one particular speaker’s delivery.

That particular speaker was none other than our very own Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, governor of Nigeria’s Central Bank! This small-framed stormy-petrel was a sight to behold as, in the manner of a stage actor, he held everyone spellbound, starting out calmly then, with increasing tempo and alto, delivering his points, quoting one authority or another, spewing data, even as he spoke extempore!

He insisted that Africa’s non-industrialisation, and by extension non-development, rests squarely with bad governance. Finance is globally awash, he postulates, but it would only follow good policies, security and stability. Though central banks universally have a role to play, he insisted that until African countries “have the right policies, we won’t be able to have the right finance” for industrialisation.

 “If you talk about Malaysia, you talk about Tun Abdul Razak Hussein; if you talk about Singapore, you talk about Lee; you talk about the Indonesian experience, you talk about Suharto… If there is a deficit in leadership at the highest level, there will be a deficit in finance,” he concluded.

Nobody cared if he was merely grandstanding or playing to the gallery with stuff that may under intense intellectual scrutiny collapse, it was just enough that there was one speaker who appeared not only to know his onions but had the gift of the garb to mesmerize the audience. Our Sanusi spoke passionately; he spoke with conviction. And everyone seemed to nod along in appreciation, even his colleague gurus on the high table.

Sitting a seat or two away from me in the audience was a black guy who had erstwhile kept to himself, minding his business and not showing any interest in me whatsoever, I was dressed pointedly Nigerian – with the Yoruba goobi cap. But from his looks, (and European dressing) I couldn’t tell if he was Nigerian or not. However, as Sanusi spoke and spoke, and as the audience (including this guy) clapped and clapped, he looked in my direction for joyous fraternity, smiled, shifted towards me, stretched his hands (just holding back from embracing me), grinned from ear to ear, and the very first words he said to me was, “this guy is great.”

So this ‘brother’ is Nigerian after all, I thought to myself. “Look,” he said rhetorically, “why don’t we have someone like this as our leader in that country. Who would care which part of the country he comes from? See us,” he continued, “I’m Igbo, this guy is Hausa or Fulani, and I take it you are Yoruba, and here I am filled with pride at being a Nigerian because of him.”

“Sanusi’s performance,” my new brother concluded of Nigeria, “rekindles hope that all is not lost.” He gave me his card; yes he’s Igbo and works at the UN in New York.

Sorry, I got so carried away eulogising SLS, but the point I’m making, a point I also made to some foreigners at an evening relaxation joint in Abidjan, is that Nigeria is a country of over 160 million people. We’ve got some of the best brains on the planet living within Nigeria and scattered all over the Diaspora. We’ve got scores of medical doctors in Saudi Arabia, Europe, and America; we’ve got great historians; great scientists; great writers; great scholars; great artistes. Why then do we keep ending up having leaders who shame us?

And that also nicely brings me to the hope in the horizon: It doesn’t have to be like that. The fault (to paraphrase Cassius in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar) is not in our stars but in ourselves. Nigerians must wake up to the fact that they can bring about the change in leadership that they desire with their votes come 2015!

The group of Nigerians with which I have identified, going by the name “Kick-Out Siddon Look (in) 2015, (KOSIL) aimed at galvanising Nigerians to choose and elect a leader, they would be proud of, have now released their website: www.kickoutsiddonlook.org to register and mobilise.

And as my 18-year old daughter, Torera, wrote to me, “It is a breath of fresh air to see a movement like KOSIL come into play, into the tragic comedy that is Nigerian politics… The name of Nigeria, once a land on which Kings walked, has been smeared by post-colonial kleptocracy and religious preposterousness… The revolution must be live – it must be on every doorstep and in the heart of every Nigerian, those at home and those in the Diaspora… Ultimately, we must start by electing a man or woman who has not been tainted by the lure of riches – those riches which arrive at the expense of the people… And since the power is really with the people, the arms must be taken up by every caring citizen. Our hearts are weapons the size of our fists, and it is with heart that we must go forth into the fray, however daunting it may be…” Wow, and she’s 18.

We would do this (kick out siddon look) even as tribute to Chinua Achebe, the late great African writer who asserted: “The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership.”

We would not doubt that it could happen. As Margaret Mead, American cultural anthropologist, once said: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

Wanted! A leader to be proud of!

I wasn’t going to write anything further on the great literary giant of our time, Chinua Achebe, even upon his transition from this world, believing that I had written all I had to write both in praise of him and in lament of the disappointing image he presented of himself through his (now realised as) valedictory book, There Was A Country: A Personal History of Biafra, while the griot lived.

And I had hitherto ignored the prodding and even rude taunts of a number of my Igbo readers to add my voice to the appropriate global stream of eulogies. One, a Jude from Akoka, accused that “Chinua Achebe died, yet for two weeks now you haven’t found him worthy of mention in your articles because you are still heavily pained by the bitter truth he told about your hero (Awolowo) in his book…if I may say, you are one of the ethnic jingoists of our time”.

But when I read the column of the respected Hakeem Baba-Ahmed in the Vanguard of April 9, and learnt with my mouth agape in shock at the torrent of vitriol poured on him by many Igbos (most of whom he could father or grandfather) who had read his earlier column on Achebe’s works and legacies, and were not happy with the views he had expressed, I knew I had got away lightly indeed with the calibre of vitriol I’ve received on this occasion and in the past from this set of people.

And on account of that I would have to say a word or two, not necessarily on Achebe but on the sort of people he had left behind, especially a whole generation of poisoned minds who rather than being helped out of their ruinous preoccupation of victimhood and ethnic complex by their revered patriarch had merely been thrown deeper into the quagmire by him as his passing gift to them.

Let us first get some of the nasty stuff, “dripping with venom and hate” as Mallam Hakeem put it:

“A cow minder like you came here to mess Achebe, a literary genius that has brought glory to the entire black race; but deliberately forgot that no Hausa-Fulani of your low types has even exhibited as much as a mere quarter of Achebe’s globally acknowledged intelligence.”

“The miserable descendant of a devil incarnate himself has a compulsive, pathological grudge against the Igbo… … As intellectually barren as they are, awusa does not write book… How can awusa man write a book when there are human beings to decapitate and public money to embezzle…”

“Mr. Hakeem Baba-Ahmed is a typical example of those who have kept this nation in dark state. He obviously lives in denial, grossly ignorant, deeply jealous, lacks nationalistic mind but went ahead to accuse Achebe of that. I will simply advise this young man (Hakeem Baba-Ahmed a young man? Hehehe) to celebrate greatness… it is quite appalling how we judge what we envy… poor minds.”

Graciously, however, Baba-Ahmed concluded: “I have to say I was not disappointed by the venom which followed my column. But I am sad that one of the greatest literary assets mankind has just lost will leave behind this type of champions… It is sad that he is leaving these ambassadors to speak for him. He doesn’t deserve them, and they certainly have no business defending a man like Achebe. It is even sadder that these defenders of the tribal watering holes are all over the nation, and they represent those Nigerians who can only communicate by insulting each other.”

Of these his brethren, Achebe himself had ‘admonished’, first in his book “The Trouble With Nigeria” and repeated in “There Was A Country”:

“I will be the first to concede that the Igbo as a group is not without its flaws. Its success can and did carry deadly penalties: the dangers of hubris, overweening pride, and thoughtlessness, which invite envy and hatred or, even worse, that can obsess the mind with material success and dispose it to all kinds of crude showiness. There is no doubt at all that there is a strand in contemporary Igbo behaviour that can offend by its noisy exhibitionism and disregard for humility and quietness.”

It is not difficult to see even in Achebe’s “concession” above conceit and the harbouring of the dangerous and false sense of ethnic superiority that pervades the group.

I recall a true incident. In a group discussion during Olusegun Obasanjo’s years as President of Nigeria, I pointed out what I saw as an unprecedented de-ethnicised composition of his ‘kitchen cabinet” whereby President Obasanjo surrounded himself predominantly with people outside his Yoruba ethnic origin, mainly Igbos and some Hausa/Fulani.

 “Well,” responded one of the Igbos in the group with typical cockiness, “that’s because he knows he can’t find our kind of quality – brilliance and dependability – amongst his Yoruba people.”

And it was not said in jest. It was too much to even give credit of being “detribalised” to a non-Igbo like Obasanjo!

The whole thing makes me sick as it drives those of us born in an age and environment (in my case Northern Nigeria) where we saw ourselves as one regardless of ethnic origin into ethnic cocoons against our desire. Most of my best friends and aburos are Igbos, for crying out loud!

Every week I get hate-filled texts from Achebe’s Igbo warriors damning my column for “always writing about Yoruba people and states”! The many times I have written about others don’t count; it’s all or nothing. Yet Achebe spent all his years and writings, almost without exception, proclaiming the Igbo culture and people; and rightly so, yet to appreciation of all. But were that to be someone else – a Hausa, a Yoruba, an Efik, a Tiv, a Nupe – these “warriors” would have spent their lives castigating him and seeing no good in his works.

As for an ethnic-bias defence of Awolowo, it is all bunkum. I dare say without fear of contradiction, there is historically no ethnic group in Nigeria that has consistently been unsparing in open criticism, even abuse, of themselves and their leaders – be it of Awolowo, Soyinka, MKO Abiola, Obasanjo, Tinubu, etc – as the Yoruba have been.

I have said it before, and I will repeat it. I have no problem with Achebe attributing the policy of “barricade” or “starvation as a weapon” during the war to Awolowo. But to go further to impugn motive to the “diabolical policy” of Awo seeing it as a chance “to reduce the numbers of his enemies significantly through starvation” to attain his “overriding ambition” to rule the country, of which he saw “the dominant Igbos at the time as the obstacles to that goal” is beneath an Achebe.

And as I wrote in my column on the issue: “What emerges from it all, and from reading the book, is that Prof. Chinua Achebe is a very bitter man. And at 82, going to his grave (how prescient), that is not a good thing to harbour. Definitely, the ruins the Nigeria of his dream (with his place in it) came to and the failed “Biafra War” hurt him, hurt him to irrationality.”

But it was a relief, I must say, to read one Nnenna’s contribution on Twitter saying, “I totally agree that the book ‘There Was A Country’ was full of half truths and a poor attempt to rewrite history. It displayed a high level of tribalism.”

Nnenna too is young and Igbo. It shows all is not lost.

May the soul of Professor Chinua Achebe rest in peace.

Have you heard the good news, ol’ boy? President Jonathan has agreed to granting Boko Haram amnesty. And he’s even gone ahead to set up a committee to work out the modalities.

“So what’s good about that? Committee again! I laugh, ‘committee to work out the modalities.’ Modalities for what? Modalities for discovering ghosts or modalities for fresh chopping? O, abi you be member of the committee? Knowing you, that’s what could make you happy with it – chop don come!”

“Get serious, man. Everyone has commended it, Christians, Muslims, and even those of your kind who are neither. I even hear America too has. The fact is that it opens a new window of possibility. Jaw-jaw is better than war-war.”

“Please don’t spoil my day. So all of a sudden, Boko Haram are not ghosts anymore? The whole thing is fishy. And please don’t give me the America nonsense, they will never agree to such. In any case, what do I care if the whole world is happy with it, this amnesty thing is either a big ruse or a big swindle. What is there to negotiate, tell me? The first rule is that you don’t negotiate with terrorists.”

 “But you did with Niger Delta terrorists, didn’t you?”

“That’s silly, comparing oranges with apples doesn’t make sense. The Niger Delta folk are not ‘terrorists,’ they are fighters, freedom and equity fighters, militants if you like.”

“Hehehe, grammar. Terrorists, fighters, militants, the same ten-pence-apeney if you ask me. Just semantics. People who carry arms to arm-twist government and terrorise their country are terrorists, simple.”

“But the Niger Delta folk had a grouse against Nigeria. Their land was being despoiled to oil the wheel of the country while the owners of the land had nothing to show for it. That’s understandable.”

“And you think Boko Haram has no grouse against Nigeria, right? Wrong! They do have and they’ve stated it many times.”

“Like what and what? Oh, I remember: They want Sharia rule all over Nigeria; they don’t like Western education that’s corrupted their womenfolk and they live in abject poverty compared to other parts of the country. And I forgot, they want a separate country of their own, right?”

“You are making light of it, right? Forget all the discordant tunes. They do have a grouse, and only by engaging them would the truth be known.”

“And what happens to the thousands of innocent lives they’ve taken and peoples’ properties ruined? And is there any part of the country without its own grouse against this Nigeria?”

“One at a time, my brother, one at a time.”

“Niger Delta militants didn’t go about killing and destroying people indiscriminately.”

“Not true. They were bombing places outside of their area; they even bombed Eagle Square, Abuja, didn’t they? And created a scare in Lagos. And what does it matter, does Boko Haram have to follow Niger Delta or any other’s template?”

“All this comparison makes me sick by its fraudulence.”

“What’s fraudulent about it any more than the country itself is? Abeg go siddon. All I know is we’ve had no peace, these so-called ghosts have wantonly killed and caused destruction in several places of the North, thousands of lives and billions of properties have been destroyed, and since that has not made the country to hearken to their cries, they’re now threatening to take the fight to other parts of the country.”

“Let them try it. That’s when we will know that they that truly want an end to Nigeria.”

“So what would you do, tell me? Go and bomb ‘ghosts’ and ‘ghosts-land’ any more than they are doing themselves? Get sensible. You have on your hands people who already think little about their own lives, people who go ahead and self-immolate and sacrifice their own lives as suicide-bombers.Tell me how does the threat of coming to kill them make more meaning to them? That is why I feel sorry to hear about some so-called reprisals against their perceived kind in the South. It’s senseless. How do killing poor maigadis, and poor suyamen, and poor cattle-herders equate the quality of lives of southerners being wasted in the north?”

“Well, you are wrong. When everything go scatter-scatter, as Fela would say, we know those to go for and their paymasters. By the time we go for all their billionaires and leaders here and there, it will then be clear nobody has monopoly of violence.”

“So if you know that what’s taken you so long?”

“Have you heard of the parable of how to catch a monkey?”

“No, tell me.”

“You put peanuts in a cookie-jar tied to a tree. The monkey dips his hand into the jar through the narrow neck to go for the peanut. The hand gets stuck and you get your monkey.”

“I don’t get it.”

“No, you wouldn’t, ‘cause you are also a monkey. We all are!”

Requiem for Odegbami and Olayinka

Death and its undying lessons. At the age one has reached, one has come to learn that life is a continuation of death, and death of life. Or, to put it differently, life needs death to put ‘life’ into death.

Still no matter how much or how often I say to myself that I would no longer dignify death by shedding any tear upon anyone’s death, I find myself every now and then with watery eyes and numbed body being mocked by death.

When tributes flow and testimonies are waxed in attestation to the quality of life a dear departed has lived and how many lives he or she has positively impacted upon, we cry not for the dead but for ourselves whose lives have been made poorer.

Such was the case as my brother (only a year older than I) Dele Odegbami, aka One Life (how true) was being “sent forth” last Thursday, as the officiating pastor at the wake keep aptly put it. I wept. Dele, bosom elder brother to Segun Odegbami, was truly a loving and kind man; a human being!

So also did the death of Mrs. Funmi Olayinka, the deputy governor of Ekiti State, bring grief to many who knew her.

There is no woman who ever held that office that has more charm, more grace, more dignity, and more gentleness than Mrs. Funmi Olayinka. What a loss.

Re: “Achebe and his Igbo warriors”

Dear Tunde, Thank you for your views expressed in your write-up. The vitriol you received from Igbo youths is not peculiar to Igbo youths. If today, an Igbo columnist writes anything perceived to be against any prominent Yoruba man, let’s say Prof. Soyinka, Yoruba youths will equally throw vitriol at him.

Our leaders did not make efforts after the civil war to reunite this country, as a result, ethnic suspicion still runs deep in our people. Like you rightly said, when I was equally growing up in Kaduna in the 50s and 60s, we knew nothing like religious riots. Most of my friends were from the North. We were taught in schools to see ourselves first as Nigerians.

Today, it is common to hear expressions like you are first a Yoruba/ Hausa/ Igbo before being a Nigerian. We cannot build a united country with this kind of expression. If I had my way, we would revert to our first national anthem. It captured our being as Nigerians. It reminded us that though our tongue and tribe may differ, in brotherhood we stand. It played up our unity in diversity.

A. I. Olisadebe (08033119751)

I read with relish Asiwaju Bola Tinubu’s speech at the just held National Convention of his ACN party signalling its transmutation to the newly formed All Progressive Congress. But how I wish I were there to listen to it (or watch it on TV).

I wish so, just to know how much he did (or failed to do) justice to that speech by his delivery for as political speeches go, I have not come across a better crafted, more evocative, more suitably succinct speech in a long time. And, I should add, not only of any Nigerian leader, of a leader anywhere else for that matter.

I must congratulate the speechwriters who penned that masterpiece, but knowing Tinubu as I do, he would have participated equally in the substance. And, give or take a few pronunciation challenge, he is not a bad deliverer either;occasion-grabbing, mood-reading, and punch-jabbing.

He began by putting the present situation of the country in context:

“Rich in manpower and material resources, Nigeria should set the agenda for economic development and broadly shared prosperity on the African continent. Today, the opposite is the case. Instead of having a wealth of domestically produced goods in our manufacturing basket, we hold a virtually empty basket. As such, we have become a basket case.”

With his peculiar figure of speech, he lamented further that though joblessness is the order of the day, yet for those who manage to be employed, the wages are so meagre and the end of the month for another pay is far too long: “With too little food and more tears in their eyes than drinkable water in their cups, they stare into the darkness of despair on a constant basis.”

“This is not the way of a great nation,” he added. ‘‘It is the way of heartless and mean governance that puts the interests of small elite above the interests of the common working man and woman who are the soul and backbone of this nation.”

Here, of course, the question would rise in the minds of the millions of poor “working man and woman” out there: Aren’t these moving words from a member of the same elite class, the other side of the same coin? But that would not be reason enough to dismiss it for history is replete with instances where revolutionary changes are wrought through such elite class-disavowal.

Not done with the situation the present PDP-led government has left Nigeria, Tinubu went on: “Where the road is bad, they budget for it, still the road gets worse off. Where the road is impassable, they offer excuses and empty promises. The touted improvement in electricity supply is now a mirage. In the midst of petrol dollars and abundance of natural gas Nigerians are without a commensurate standard of living. Our billions are embezzled and shared to cronies. The slogan of the ruling party is power, but corruption is the fuel that powers their government.”

And here’s a characteristic Tinubu-speak: “If they want to stand still, that is their right. However, they have no right to force the whole nation to stagnate with them. We have things to accomplish and progress to make for the good of the people.” That is hard to beat. Sounds much like the memorable Thatcher punch line of “If you want to turn you may turn, but this lady is not for turning.”

Then the nuncdimittis of ACN: “I stand to tell you that for the good of Nigeria this must be the last and final convention of the Action Congress of Nigeria, ACN.”

      He knew it could bring tears to some eyes and choke some throats, but he rose to it to stoutly reassure his multitude that the “brewing storm” is for the better: “Don’t be frightened. It is a positive storm with a positive wind,” he said. ‘‘Those things that have no roots and offer no solution to the plight of the people shall be swept away. This storm will change the political terrain forever. I am not afraid of this storm. I welcome it because the storm is us – our new vision. Our new party.”

He went further, “As one of the national leaders of this party, I have dedicated myself to our political collaboration. I am attached to it in the strongest way. I am proud of what we have accomplished. Had we not held fast in the South-West against onslaught and intrigue, Nigeria would effectively be a one party state. When history writes its tale of the past decade, it will say the ACN preserved Nigerian democracy when it came under great threat.”

      Pressing further on the rationale for the dismantling of ACN to form APC, he spoke with conviction:

      “Weighing all things in the balance, if I must decide between the existence of this party and the improvement of Nigeria, I must choose the improvement of Nigeria. That is our duty and responsibility. While it would be most comfortable to remain with our party as is, with its unique symbol, manifesto and constitution, we are not here to do what is comfortable. We are here to do what is right for our people and our country.

      “I ask you my brothers and sisters to take pride in what ACN has accomplished but to have the vision and courage to see that our national imperatives require us to enter a new phase of political maturity, sacrifice and cooperation in order to bring an era of progressive governance to the whole of Nigeria and not just part of it.”

      “If we must end the ACN identity to form a new party so that Nigeria can survive and our people can live better life and face a rewarding future, then so be it. We shall do this with serious yet happy purpose and no regrets.”

Summoning the power of a statesman he added, “May your chests fill with pride at what we have done and may your hearts fill with optimism at the better future that we shall create.”

Of the bigger APC he assures: “It shall be this family that saves Nigeria by bringing to the people the creative policies that promote wide prosperity, employment, infrastructural overhaul, education, health care, civil rights, peace, stability and justice.’’

And of the ending of ACN: “For us this is not a sad ending, it is but the beginning of a great beginning. Let us do what is right so that when history writes its account of this day, it shall write that we lived up to our moral duties by doing what the moment required.”

Although the speech was great and rousing, as I have said, one felt there was the need to have enumerated what his about-to-be-dissolved ACN could proudly lay claim to, if only for the records.

Ascribing the moment to the call of history that must be answered he stated:  “All the prior achievements and feats we have recorded in the past will matter little unless we now answer the challenge now facing us”- the challenge of killing ACN to give birth to APC. But what were those “achievements and feats?” It couldn’t be that he didn’t want to blow the party’s trumpet, far from it, that’s what politicians do best.

It is true, neither good deeds nor good leaders good speeches necessarily make; but, for Christ’s sake, at least let’s have something to stir our weary souls. In the eyes of many, Tinubu may not be the messiah we are looking for, nevertheless that speech of his is messianic! Bravo!

There’s an adage that a picture is worth more than a thousand words. If that is so then, how many words would hundreds and hundreds of such pictures be worth? Too numerous to calculate.

These and more imaginations ran through my mind as I sat there in the office of one “oga at the top” on my recent visit to Abuja, beholding pages upon pages of this coffee-table book with Nigeria emblazoned on its front cover.

There are just too many things that are enthralling about this book. First, its size: As books go, this pictorial document is a giant of a book. Made of the best and heaviest paper material for a book of its nature, and weighing about two kilogrammes, the 22 by 18-inch hardbound book is a challenge for one hand to lift.

Then the aesthetic quality of the book: Its 317 pages contain some of the most breathtaking pictures ever taken or seen of cultures, artefacts, natural endowments, images, and landscapes in Nigeria. Each of the about 400 photographs arrests the imagination and speaks to the soul.

They make you happy and sad at once. You cannot but wonder, is this truly Nigeria? Every photograph here leaps at you and challenges you to experience it. But just as soon, you are jerked awake by any of the myriad of horrors and disappointments besetting the country, from her NEPA-less-ness to the murderous state of the roads, from her uninspiring leadership to her asphyxiating and thieving system. You are reminded that nothing works, and nagged that these things in this beautiful book are but make-believe!

Yet it takes a different kind of person, some incurable patriot blessed with superlative talent to think this up, work this up, and deliver this up!

There are more amazing things about this book. One, it is the dream and work of one man and one man alone! Although he lists a ton of research sources for information he gathered and, in his acknowledgment, scores of people who helped along the way. But each and every one of the hundreds of photographs were taken by the author and photographer, ‘DayoAdedayo, himself.

Two, this book was published in 2010, so how come I’m just coming across it now in 2013?

Surely, no greater evidence that I am not on the “scene” anymore! I apologise. Still, this book is for all times and so commands a review and an appreciation at all times – anew.

There are photographs in this collection that are simply works of art. Some, like the “Sand Dunes” of Damasak, Borno State, or “Dusk on Jabi Lake”  in Abuja, or the “Ryom Rock Formation” in Plateau State, among many others, are of such haunting beauty that reminds one of some of the classics of an older generation photographer, my big brother the great Sunmi Smart-Cole.

Trained as a photographer at the Westminster College and the University of Westminster in the UK and specialising in landscape photography, Adedayo spent seven years travelling to all the 36 states and Abuja in the making of the book.

The blurb reveals: “Several thousand stills were edited into the images in this special edition.” Awesome! “There are many firsts in the book: the Awhum Waterfalls in Enugu State have never been photographed, neither is the Jaffi Falls in Borno State.”

No one can fail to be enraptured by the images in this amazing book. THE PUNCH Newspaper is quoted as saying, “Here is proof that Nigeria is beautiful.” While former President OlusegunObasanjo, someone of abiding faith in Nigeria wrote with pride, “This work is both a graphic representation of the uncommon enterprise and the abundant endowments of Nigeria’s diverse cultures. It is therefore a tribute to the Nigerian spirit as it demonstrates, in an eloquent way, the beauty of our civilization…”

University don and former Artistic Director of National Troupe of Nigeria, Prof. Ahmed Yerima, sums it up nicely: “The book takes one on a safari of pictures of a lifetime…(it) serves as an inspirational work of art for those who are yet to physically see the country and as a great resource handbook for scholars and tourists…(Dayo) prepares even the Nigerian for the ego trip, the sense of pride – that of patriotism to reclaim a motherland of greatness.”

In a country filled with cynics, betrayals, intrigues, corruption, and put-him-down malice, I do wonder if this great book would ever have seen the light of day had ‘Dayo based his calculations on government (at any level)’s sponsorship or even collaboration. As a consequence I can also only imagine the hurdles he would have had to scale, the mountains he would have had to climb, the rivers to cross in the seven years it took him to bring this great work to fruition.

This, then, is a monument to the creative and undying spirit of the Nigerian.

I started by saying I “beheld” pages upon pages of the book when I first saw it. Yes, it’s not a book to flip through in a hurry; the pages demand to be handled with respect. Of the highest quality print to be found anywhere in the world, the book carries a beauty and a message, as Yerima said, “that of patriotism to reclaim a motherland of greatness.”

I do not expect this heavy and voluminous book to be for the hoi polloi, but no establishment, no institution, no library, no “oga’s” coffee-table, is worth its name if it does not have a copy of ‘DayoAdedayo’s NIGERIA!

NCC to the rescue – for once!

It’s not often that you find a government department or agency act on behalf of the poor Nigerian consumer. Most times “the oga at the top” is one that is beholding to some “invisible” forces of capitalism, some foreign power, or the sheer greed of his pocket!

It was such a relief then to hear about the latest intervention of the Nigerian Communications Commission, the regulatory agency for the mobile telephony companies, demanding the portability of the consumer’s GSM number from any provider to any other.

Over the years the GSM providers in Nigeria have earned themselves the unenviable reputation of being uncaring, even heartless exploiters of the poor consumers in what is unquestionably the biggest market in Africa; yanking billions of dollars to the bank at our expense.

One of the benefits in a competitive milieu is for improved services and cheaper products in the struggle for customers. The customer is “king.” Not with our GSM providers here. The customer has consistently been treated with disdain; abused and raped. We are forced to get messages we do not ask for and get billed for it; the strength of their signals is abysmal, perhaps intentionally, the sooner credits get exhausted,the better for them; users are forced to carry several providers’ SIM cards, edging their bets to make or get calls from place to place.

Nobody seems to care. The authorities seem to be powerless or conniving.

However, now with the Mobile Number Portability, subscribers are back in the saddle, even if with half a buttock. Being able to change from one provider to another and keep one’s number is a huge advantage to the user and can only deepen competition and force better service.

Good job NCC, as we, the poor consumers, keep our fingers crossed!

My 33-year old RADA-trained actor son, OlaTunde (aka O-T) once, when he was but 15, asked me what I would consider the wisest saying of all. I thought deeply then recalled one I had come across but whose author I knew not. It goes: “There is no wisdom greater than kindness.” O-T interrogated me no further but to my admiration, it became his motto; he also grew up and patterned his life along it.

But this column today is not about my son; I was merely reminded of that little anecdote of many years ago by another incident recalled by another Tunde, Mr. Babatunde Fashola, SAN, the admirable governor of Lagos State, in his foreword to the newly launched book of my good friend, Segun Odegbami, titled, ‘Me, Football, and More – a selection of the media writings of “Mathematical” Segun Odegbami, MON.

Permit me to quote Governor Fashola’s narration in full:

“Finally,” he wrote, “Let me thank you (Odegbami) for a chance encounter that has remained impactful all my life as I remember it vividly to this day. For me, the sobriquet ‘Big Seg’ is more apt than many might think, in describing our author. For those who knew me as a teenager, Segun Odegbami was my football hero. I idolised and venerated him. One school day in 1976 when I was 13, I decided to play a truant.

“IICC Shooting Stars Football Club were camped in a hotel behind Tejuosho market preparing for a continental match and I had strayed there hoping to catch a glimpse of my hero. I ended up in a sports store at the end of Iyun Street, adjacent to the hotel. I was admiring a pair of green football shorts but certainly could not afford to buy them.

“If dreams come true for children, mine came true many fold that day. As I was longingly admiring the shorts, the man I came to catch a glimpse of walked in and asked me if I liked them and when I nodded, he asked me to take it and told the shopkeeper that he would come back to pay for it. ‘Big Seg’ was big then in my eyes and he remains even bigger today.

“So I seize this opportunity to say ‘thank you’ for the smile you put on my face on that fateful day.”

The audience was deeply touched (and surprised) by this narration and the applause was resounding. The lessons of Fashola’s recall are many. It was a lesson in humility and sense of gratitude on the part of the governor; and a lesson in character sustenance, or what Fashola somewhere else referred to as a “dedication (that is) total and consistent,” on the part of Segun Odegbami to his ventures, be it football, column-writing, or nurturing the youth! Above all, it is a lesson in the wisdom in kindness – you never know when, where, or how, it would be recompensed, not necessarily to the giver or even his offspring but into a pool of humanity (or human kindness) from which many would drink.

The book-launch itself was a model in tastefulness and class, one to which Mr. Gamaliel Onosode as chairman of the occasion lent his renowned suavity and paternalism, not letting go, even if in passing, a moment to educate the audience in appropriate grammar: “enable someone do something is wrong; it is: enable someone ‘to’ do something.” It is not a laughing matter. Mr. Onosode is of the old school, studied Classics (Latin, et al) at the University College, Ibadan – the precursor of today’s University of Ibadan – and, like his contemporaries Chief Emeka Anyaoku and the late Uncle Bola Ige, he takes his “Queen’s English” seriously!

The reviewer of the 343-page book was none other than Olusegun Adeniyi, the younger generation, cerebral well-connected journalist and chairman Editorial Board of ThisDay newspapers who flew in from Abuja just for it. He couldn’t have done greater justice to the book and he got a standing ovation from everyone in the audience.

They all came in from far and near, including representatives of governors of a few states like Kano, Ogun, Osun, and Ekiti, some countries’ ambassadors, co-launchers Toye Okeowo and Hillel Gilleao, the Israeli MD of a construction company, sundry friends and personalities. As I said, it was nothing vulgar yet an event that brought in handsome reward to Big Seg.

Odegbami deserved it all and more, something that was most forcefully buttressed by Otunba Olusegun Runsewe, the Director-General of Nigerian Tourism Board, who expressed his dismay that not all states’ sports commissioners were at the occasion to honour someone who had brought great glory to his fatherland and joy to many with his soccer artistry and exploits in his days.

Odegbami’s incursion into sports writing (that has seen his column in many newspapers including Nigeria HomeNews (UK), PUNCH, Champion, Vanguard, Trust, The Guardian, etc) began way back in 1978 when the then new editor of Nigerian Tribune newspapers, Banji Ogundele, persuaded him to take up the challenge of writing for the paper. He wrote in the preface: “Never in the history of Nigerian football had a footballer been a newspaper columnist, I was told. In fact, when Banji made the suggestion, I was at the peak of my career in football. I had been part of the team that won the Africa Cup in 1976; played in Africa Cup of Nations; won the All-Africa Games silver medal; gone to the 1976 Montreal Olympic Games. I had also been rated as the third best player in Africa, the first time any Nigerian footballer would have been nominated in Africa’s official best player poll in 1978, and was to be named second best two years later in 1980! …Without realising what I was getting myself into, on January 10, 1979, I wrote my first column. It was the start of a journey that has not ended!”

In his acknowledgment Odegbami wrote of his beautiful consort: “As the work on this book concluded, one person stood up magnificently, sharing the days and nights with me in quest for direction, taking the slack of my doubts, and restlessness, and turning them into bouts of confidence and courage, making me to aim beyond the skies, and supporting me to the finish line in grand style what I had started as a small mustard seed of an idea. I thank you Oyindamola.”

Can there be any wisdom greater than kindness – well, and love?

Hail, Prof. Makay, to Athletic Federation of Nigeria!

I am happy that my good friend of ages (co-member of our Family Friends club), Tunde Makanju, aka Makay, psychology professor at the University of Lagos and chairman Lagos State Athletics Association, was recently elected as the zonal representative (South-West) unto the board of the Athletic Federation of Nigeria, after only his second attempt – contrary to the false account that it was his fifth.

And my joy is more for AFN and Nigeria, for the quality of mind and dedication Makay can, and would, bring to the table. A national sprinter in his heyday, Makay has over the years demonstrated unequalled commitment to the development of sports in Nigeria, nurturing the youth and providing psychological succour to their weary souls.

Congratulations!

What do I think of the latest huff and puff by some folk of the Niger Delta region threatening that “there will be no peace” in Nigeria if Goodluck Jonathan does not get a second term in 2015?

It is easy and tempting to dismiss the voices, of the Dokubo-Asaris or Kingsley Kukus, as the ranting of inconsequential ants and mere rabble-rousers. But that would be wrong. I think there is need to look beyond the messengers and re-examine the message for its real origin and any group mentality or sentimentality.

If we say Dokubo-Asari is a flip-flopper with no abiding loyalty to anyone or any principle other than money, what does one say of Kuku, Special Adviser to the President on Niger Delta and chairman of the presidential amnesty programme, who said in the United States that there would be “dire consequences in the Niger Delta if President Jonathan is not re-elected?” Or what do we say of Chief Edwin Clark who has been reported to express similar sentiments in the past?

The truth is these are errand deliverers of group sentimentality whose origin lies in a perverse sense of entitlement to the booty from oil resources of the region induced by an equally perverse political structure of the country.

But what more do these Niger Delta agent provocateurs want? Has the country not paid enough to the Niger Delta militants and their sponsors through the amnesty programme granted them, the huge “protectionism” contracts the president has given them, and the bunkering that still goes on with the connivance of some “ogas at the top” of security apparatuses?

That is precisely the point; in the face of greed there can never be enough. The so-called amnesty granted the militants ab initio was itself laughable. It was a case of throwing money at the festering sore of the region in the belief that that’s all that’s needed. This is not a country based on any sound or deep thinking. And so many actions of government take off from the country – surface and quick fix. There can never be enough. The “protectionism” being paid by the government, once started, must continue. And anything that threatens it or is capable of threatening it will be met with a resistance fiercer than that that originally forced the amnesty. That protectionism has enjoyed astronomic proportions in the hands of Jonathan – a son of the soil. The gravy train must not stop, now or in the future.

This selfish pecuniary interest interlocks with the political. The very thought, the very idea, that some groups whose political leadership has ruled (and ruined, though not any worse than others) this country for a disproportionate long time are now up at arms against the country, and demanding that the country be run on their own terms riles. What the BokoHaram are doing in their part of the country but with serious ramification on the rest of the country is unfathomable and provocative to say the least. Consequently, the grandstanding of the Niger Delta agent provocateurs is as a counterforce, an indication of balance of violence, pre-emptive of 2015.

All told, what all these means is that we are in a big mess in this country and things are only likely to get from bad to worse.

But what with President Jonathan recanting on the issue of amnesty for the BokoHaram, why hasn’t that been embraced? What do the Boko Haramites want?

Although BokoHaram may have had its origin in the hands of a few political lords in the North as a force to arm-twist the political process for power and selfish ends, it does appear as if, like the Niger Delta militants too, the group has been hijacked by forces stronger than those initial politicians and perhaps by international nihilists with no agenda other than destabilisation and destruction of countries in which they gain a foothold.

So the simple answer is that the Boko Haram wants nothing, the least of which is your so-called amnesty. Amnesty in Nigeria is not “forgiveness,” amnesty in Nigeria is bribery: “Here’s money, stop the killing.” But it is not a once and for all thing; can never be. The money has to keep flowing, and increase with demand, lest the killing resumes with even greater ferocity and “ingenuity.”

So where does this lead Nigeria?

 I am despondent. At no time in the history of this country did we have a chaotic, anarchical, multilateral hacking at the fabric of the country as we do now.

Into the cauldron of ethno-political mess one former House of Represetatives member, Farouk Adamu Aliyu, threw his own warning that “It is either a northerner as president in 2015 or there will be no more Nigeria,” while MASSOB’s Uwazurike continues to insist on the actualisation of a Sovereign State of Biafra.

Yes, the sanctity of the Nigerian state has been challenged in the past, no doubt, but it is unprecedented to have more than one section of the country tear at the country at once and the same time as we have now.

It all boils down to the nature of the country, a country without a soul. We have no nation. The cry of restructuring of ages still blows in the wind. It would take a great statesman to forgo his personal interest and hold the bull by the horn to bring us all to the drawing board of redrawing and re-determining a workable Nigeria – lest the end is nigh!

And Pini is gone

Was it not the other day, and so recently, that I gleaned from the Facebook that my very good friend Ashikwe Adione-Egom, the brilliant Cambridge University educated “motor park economist” was gone? And I cried.

Now, again, another is gone, announced on the Facebook almost at the instant it was happening – Pini Jason is dead.

All I could remark on Facebook in the “comments” was that ‘this hurts.” Yes, it hurts.

Every day one is cruelly stripped of the company, companionship, or presence of friends or those whose lives help to make life richer and living more attractively challenging.

I have had very few encounters with Pini and each time I got the impression, not different from what one gets through his prolific writings, of a grown and sober mind, even an intellectual. He comes across with his sharp wit, good humour spiced with occasional cynicism, but severe candour.

When on one occasion he told me how much he read and respected me I felt like taking it to the bank, for here was a man I adored.

Upon his death I have come to realise to my amazement that Pini was only 65. I could have sworn he was older than I am. He looked it, but only in the positive sense of being older in mind.

A description of him on Gboyega Adelaja’s Facebook page from which I also learnt that Pini (full name Jason Onyegbadue) was an “Old Grammarian” says: “An engaging personality and columnist of distinction who featured regularly in Vanguard, Pini established himself very early as a courageous combatant of the pen profession. He was an unrepentant believer in the Free Press, an untiring defender of the underdog, a conscientious humanist and a dependable ally in the seemingly endless quest to reinvent Nigeria.”

That aptly sums up Pini. Rest, my friend, rest in peace.

The title is a common aphorism in Nigeria and the fact of its commonplace itself is a reflection of the general state of distrust in our society where “dog eats dog”, siblings betray siblings, and true friendship is at a discount.

Distrust and betrayals permeate the society and, in a way, may be fundamental to many of the problems bedevilling the country. It affects the growth of business, it conditions our psyche in social interaction, and, most importantly, in power play and governance of the country it has been at the root of the derailment of the country.

That last aspect, the nature of friendship and its fatal consequences for governance in countries, especially African countries or countries without strong structural institutions, was what engaged the mind of a Nigerian don, Dr. Wale Adebanwi, Associate Professor at the University of California, Davis, USA in his lecture titled, “What Are Friends For? The Fatality of Affinity in the Post-colony,” delivered at St. Anthony’s College, Oxford University, UK for their 2013 Annual African Studies Lecture.

Wale, who is also a good aburo of mine, had invited me to the lecture and it was an honour I could not let pass. Also honouring Wale’s invitation were important personalities including the Governor of Ekiti State, Dr. Kayode Fayemi, and his wife, Bisi Fayemi, Senator Babafemi Ojudu, Dr. Tokunbo Awolowo-Dosumu, British publisher Mr. James Currey, MD/Editor-in-Chief of Tribune newspapers, Mr. Edward Dickson, former editor of The NEWS Mr. Muyiwa Adekeye, my son and attorney, Kunle Fagbenle, Mr. Kayode Samuel and others, joining an array of Oxford University dons including the chief host, Director of the African Studies Centre, Dr. David Pratten, and our well known Dr. Anthony Akinola.

It was very clear that Nigeria with her political history of insincerity, backstabbing and betrayals amongst “friends” in power was on the mind of Adebanwi in choosing and embarking on research of the subject. And in the over two-hour long lecture, Adebanwi copiously used a surfeit of Nigerian examples to demonstrate his position that “in the context of political competition, friendship is often not used for virtue but for utility thereby turning friends into enemies.”

Adebanwi, a former Bill Gates Scholar at Cambridge University, illustrated his theory of the incompatibility of friendship and power with the examples of the “friendship” between president General Babangida and Babangida’s Best Man at his marriage, Major-General Mamman Vatsa whose execution Babangida went on to sanction on the charge of planning a coup against him, a charge which General Domkat Bali, who was Minister of Defence and Chairman, Joint Chief of Staff in Babangida’s regime, in later years dismissed as having no clear evidence, saying he was “not so sure whether we were right to have killed Vatsa.”

Another example cited by Adebanwi was the “friendship” between a President Obasanjo and his minister of justice, Chief Bola Ige, adding the surprise that in spite of the gruesome way in which Ige was killed and his loyalty to President Obasanjo, Obasanjo later flippantly dismissed his late friend as someone who did not know his left from his right. The audience was also reminded that Ige was assassinated while planning to leave Obasanjo’s cabinet to work on stopping Obasanjo’s party from winning or rigging the 2003 elections in the South-West.

Further examples given by Adebanwi were: the assassination of Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso by his friend Blaise Compaore; the alleged killing of General Shehu Yar’Adua through the injection of a killer virus into his body by agents of his “friend”, General Abacha; the annulment of MKO Abiola’s election by his “friend”, General Babangida, which led to the imprisonment in solitary confinement (from which he did not come out alive) of Abiola by yet another “friend” of his, General Abacha; and so on and so forth, insisting on the “political fatality of friendship” in the pursuit of power, position and prominence.

Says Adebanwi, “The fact that their friendships were also fatal in virtually every case invites us to examine the potential fatality of friendship when friendship intersects with the search for power in Africa. Secondly, the friendships and ambitions of these men have largely defined the political history of Nigeria in the past three decades and half. Thirdly, the friendships of these men were largely cross-cutting.”

Adebanwi’s elaborate treatise states that from Aristotle and Plato through Montaigne and Durkheim to Giddens “the meaning, significance and purpose of friendship in public life have exercised the minds of philosophers, theologians, political scientists, social thinkers, and later sociologists and anthropologists.”

He then urges “students of African politics should pay greater attention to (political) friendship and use the phenomenon in new ways to understand the dynamics of, and the struggle for, power in contemporary Africa.”

Although Adebanwi considers politics as “a real testing ground of friendship” being “a testing ground of character and goodness,” he must have countries other than Nigeria in mind. Here, politics is not about “character and goodness,” the opposite is the case; hence strange bedfellows cohabit and conjugate; they become “friends” that need no enemies!

Methinks, however, the “nature of friendship” and its import for power and governance is essentially a function of the state of political development of a country and the strength of the institutional structures in place. Where there are entrenched systems and structures no one bothers about the “nature of friendship” of individuals. Leadership of a country should not be a whimsical, pass-me-down thing like an Obasanjo handpicking a Yar’Adua. Time to grow up Nigeria!

 The shenanigan of Portuguese embassy

There is a Yoruba saying that “bi iya nla ba gbe ‘ni san’le, kekeke a maa g’ori eni”, literally meaning “when a big affliction plagues one, all manner of smaller ones come to have their own fun too.”

That’s what came to mind when I read on the ubiquitous FaceBook, on the status of a high school senior and friend of mine, Dr. Seyi Lufadeju, the following:

“The world needs to know the real reasons why Portugal adopted a policy of failing to grant visas to some Africans to attend the RI Convention in Lisbon in June, 2013!”

RI stands for Rotary International, the global club of over 1.2 million members whose objective is “service – in the community, in the workplace, and around the globe.”

RI is not a backyard, fly-by-night, inconsequential club for crying out loud. Its members globally are highly respected professionals noted for their principles and integrity in service. So why would a country, not a particularly first-rated one at that, deny visas to hundreds of members from all over Nigeria intending to attend the RI Convention about to hold in Lisbon, Portugal come June, 2013?

The whole story is nauseating. It involved a long story of rigmarole by the Portuguese Ambassador that included being passed to “Agent” of the embassy that increased visa fees from 60 Euro to 100 euro and conflicting and conflating requirements and waivers.

Nigerians all over the world, especially those in England, were in understandable frenzy during the week after the British media, true to type, made a song of the “Nigerian descent” of the two young British men held over the most horrific killing of a British soldier in Woolwich area of London on Tuesday, May 21.

The social media went agog as mortified Nigerians cringed and cursed at the fear of further demonisation of themselves abroad because of the mere association of the British boys with probable Nigerian parentage. That is the nature of the times we live in. It’s a world of quick and irrational damnation of ‘otherness,’ especially those bearing sharp and visible distinction like colour, tongue, or religion; and for the sin of one, blame all! Such blame game is effectual particularly against groups who have no strong counter force like national economy or interwoven cultural linkages.

Because of this, it is a bad time to be a black or Arabian, or a Muslim, and when two or more combine in you, then it is double jeopardy. The horror of Woolwich is beyond comprehension. One Michael Mujihad Adeboloja and his friend Michael Oluwatobi Adebowale, rammed their car into one Drummer Rigby, an off-duty British soldier, on a Woolwich street in broad daylight, then pounced on him and hacked him to death wielding butcher knives. The two assailants then started raining Islamist tirade to passers-by, even uncaring of being photographed, until the police arrived to shoot them down (not fatally) and arrest them.

But hardly do such psychopathic attacks under the guise of religion or politics bear understanding. How could one comprehend or find any justification for what another Nigerian, Farouk Abdulmuhtalab, did wearing a nappy-bomb in an attempt to blow up an American airliner over Detroit, US? Or can one comprehend the more recent case of Boston Marathon bomber- brothers, Dzhokbar Tsarnaev and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who are Chechens?

The common factor in all of these cases as in most of the others is the claim of being Muslims and of “defending their faith” by these clearly mentally unhinged youths. In the case of Adeboloja, he had converted from being Christian and Michael to “Islam” and Mujihad (“a Jihad warrior”).

The truth is even if in all instances the culprits are of the Islamic faith, shouting “Alhakbar” as they committed their crime against humanity, it would still be very wrong to then hang it on Islam. Rather, they should be seen for what they are, mindless psychopath of the animal kind.

As Joe Hildebrand of the London Daily Telegraph said quoting portions of both the Bible and the Quran that forbid killing, “But you don’t need a holy book to tell you that what happened on an otherwise unremarkable street in Woolwich was a gross abomination against any God worth worshipping.”

Similarly, although it is in the general nature of journalism to provide as much background information on a subject as possible, it is mischievous of the British media (and all Western media, come to think of it) to lay emphasis on a most irrelevant trace (of “Nigerian descent”) over and above the reality (of them being born British citizens) for what can serve no other purpose than to cast a slur on the trace over the substance, or the distant over the instant. So being “Nigerian” has risen to join the other categorisations as if we’ve not had it bad enough already!

One posting by some miffed Nigerians on Facebook stressed the double standard of the British media poignantly enough, thus:

“The beheading was done by a British citizen and not a Nigerian as speculated, his name does not confirm his nationality. This lunatic was born in the United Kingdom, never been to Nigeria, (was) issued a birth certificate in the UK and held a British passport. Suddenly he is now a Nigerian? This guy is not a Nigerian. British born Michael ‘Mujahid’ Adeboloja with an accomplice yesterday beheaded a British soldier on a street in Woolwich, London.

“Because he is not Gabriel Agbonlahor playing for Aston Villa and Three Lions, or Andrew Osagie, UK’s reigning 800m champion, or Lawrence Okoye, British discus record holder (68.24m), or Abiodun Oyepitan, British Olympic silver and gold medallist, or Zoe Oputah, singer/songwriter superstar and Youth Christian-Aid Ambassador or Christine Ohuruogu, Beijing Olympic British gold medallist, or Eniola Aluko, British Olympic female football star, or Temi Fagbenle, British Olympic basketball queen, or several other thousands of British citizens with Nigerian connection who are making the country proud, it is being made to look like Nigeria has “shown itself again” in the action of that British boy who beheaded a soldier yesterday.

“Nigeria should just be left out of this. Please pass on to educate the ignorant ones.”

The situation is not any different from the horrors and fears that Chechens in America faced over the media coloration of the Boston Marathon bombers to look as if where the brothers came from and being “Muslims” were what made them what they turned out to be. Worse, that all Chechens and/or Muslims must henceforth be suspect.

Demonising an entire people or faith simply because some deranged people of their race, ethnicity or religion committed a crime is itself demonic. It is more so consequently putting innocent people to “defend” themselves at every turn.

I read a reaction whose author or medium I cannot recall that puts it most succinctly:

“Let us (Americans) stop this facade that we are beacon of tolerance. I don’t need you to ‘tolerate’ me. I don’t want you to merely put up with my presence. All I ask, all I have ever asked, is to be treated as a human being, that bigoted jingoism is not injected into every minute facet of my life, that there remains at least the illusion of decency.

“Despite being a native English speaker who was born in New Orleans and a physician who trained at a prestigious institution, all people see is the colour of my skin. After this incident, I will no longer apologise, either for my faith or my complexion. It is not my job to convince you to distinguish me from the violent sociopaths that claim to be Muslims, whose terrorism I neither support, nor condone. It is your job. Just like when a disturbed young white man shoots up a movie theatre or a school, it is my job, as someone with a conscience, to distinguish them from others. It’s not my job to plead with you to shake my hand without cringing, nor am I going to applaud you when you treat me with common decency; it’s not an accomplishment. It’s simply the right thing to do. Honestly, it’s not that hard.”

Other Nigerians must not be made to feel guilty or responsible for the action or inaction of some crazed people out there, no matter their number, simply because they share or claim to share same place of origin remotely or otherwise. Leave Nigeria out of this – we have enough of our own wahala back at home!

As I read our own Ayo Olukotun (PUNCH columnist)’s column of last Friday with the above title, I chuckled. In it Ayo, a political science professor, was lamenting Nigeria’s exclusion from America’s President Obama’s forthcoming African tour, with his wife Michelle, of countries including Senegal, South Africa, and Tanzania between June 26 and July 3. The snub, Ayo infers, is America’s “way of delivering a strong message to (Nigeria’s) rulers on their slack anti-corruption policy and poor human rights record.”

For me, what’s new? This will not be Obama’s first snub of Nigeria. In July 2009, Obama threw it more “in our face” by visiting next-door Ghana on his first visit to sub-Saharan Africa without casting as much as a glance in our direction. “Part of the reason that we’re travelling to Ghana,” Obama had said before leaving for Ghana, “is because you’ve got there a functioning democracy, a president who’s serious about reducing corruption, and you’ve seen significant economic growth.”

Translated, Nigeria then (in 2009) did not score highly on any of those criteria, and now (in 2013) has faired no better – so much for our President Jonathan’s chest-beating, “marking-scheme,” scorecard! What is happening to Governor Rotimi Amaechi in Rivers State is not exactly reflective of a “functioning democracy;” the presidential pardon granted ex-convict and former Bayelsa State Governor, Diepreye Alamieyeseigha, is hardly the stuff serious anti-corruption governance is made of; worsening unemployment, heightened insecurity, and mass poverty snigger at any vaunted economic growth.

Nigeria and her leadership may bury their head ostrich-like in the sand all they want, but the rest of the world have their own opinion of the country and her leaders; an opinion that is unflattering and sad to say the least. And until and unless we get our act together, kick out mediocre leaders, collectively abjure corruption, and embark on rigorous reconstruction of the country, the snub has just begun!

If we need reminding of how Nigeria is perceived, below is an excerpt of this column of 10/01/2010.

America: Punishing Nigerians to get at our government

But America, to say the least, is pissed off with Nigeria. And no one demonstrates, even appropriate, this disgust more than Obama himself. Obama is angry with Nigeria. But it is an anger borne of love and disappointment. Way back in Obama’s pre-presidency book, “Dreams From My Father,” he lampooned Nigeria as a country that has disappointed the black race. “Look what tribalism has done to places like Nigeria and Liberia,” he remarked to his aunts, Jane and Zeituni, in the book. He cannot get over how a land of such intellectual and moral giants like Achebe and Soyinka could be so hopelessly run and incessantly dominated by evil and visionless leaders.

I hazard a guess, America’s hostile response to Nigeria is a direct consequence of what Obama feels about Nigeria and her long catalogue of unbelievable nonsense, from inept and roguish leadership, to senseless ethno-religious massacres of unimaginable proportions.

For those who could read “between the lines,” Obama’s shunning of Nigeria on his maiden presidential visit to Africa was a big statement of his administration’s intention to put Nigeria in “her place” – a disappointing country of reducing international relevance.

And no one has put this in stronger perspective than Mr. Lyman, a former US Ambassador to Nigeria and South Africa, in his speech at the Achebe Colloquium at Brown University, USA, on December 11, 2009, now in wide circulation.

Mr. Lyman shocked the audience when he spoke about the need to consign Nigeria to her self-chosen place of irrelevance in global account. But Lyman prefaced his speech with an “allocutus” that he speaks from hurt for a country he loves: “I have a long connection to Nigeria,” Lyman says. “Not only was I ambassador there, I have travelled to and from Nigeria for a number of years and have a deep and abiding vital emotional attachment to the Nigerian people, their magnificence, their courage, artistic brilliance, their irony, sense of humour in the face of challenges, etc.”

Lyman believes that Nigeria is not being helped by any continued notion that she still holds some meaningful strategic relevance and goes on to deconstruct, one after another, factors that had given rise to such vaunted notion in the past, namely: that “it is a major oil producer, it is the most populous country in Africa, it has made major contributions to Africa in peacekeeping, and, of course, negatively, if Nigeria were to fall apart, the ripple effects would be tremendous, etc.”

Then he goes on: “But I wonder if all this emphasis on Nigeria’s importance creates a tendency to inflate Nigeria’s opinion of its own invulnerability” even when she is bedeviled by “disgraceful lack of infrastructure, the growing problems of unemployment, the failure to deal with the underlying problems in the Niger Delta, (and) the failure to consolidate democracy.”

And deconstruct Lyman did of each of those elements. Nigeria’s size and population is meaningless unless she can harness entrepreneurial talent and economic capacity to make her a major economic and political force. Nigeria’s oil would mean less to America and the rest of the world as more and more countries discover oil and make better use of it, and, more importantly, as the world ‘moves on to alternative sources of energy.’ According to him, Nigeria’s contribution to the continent is becoming nothing but “history,” especially with her presence or influence discounted in troubled places like Guinea, Dafur or even Somalia! There is nothing to say for Nigeria economically with an all but collapsed infrastructure in a country that does not generate more power than a mere district of South Africa does.

Then the punch was Lyman’s quote of an Assistant Secretary of State that he had worked for who once retorted to charges against America on Nigeria: “You know, the biggest danger for your (Nigeria’s) relationship with the United States is not our opposition but that we will find you irrelevant.”

America, in taking the stand it took against Nigeria, is seeking ways to punish Nigeria’s leadership, not her people. But, unfortunately, the people will suffer as much, if not more, than the leadership who though, worried about the security of their personal loot stashed abroad, has withdrawn their threat of an “ultimatum” and now begged for “dialogue” with America. (Note: On account of the attempt to blow off an American Delta Airline by a 23-year old Nigerian, America had hurriedly placed Nigeria on its watch list of ‘countries harbouring terrorists or with sympathy, tendency or inclination for terrorism.’ Our National Assembly responded by giving America a laughable “7-day ultimatum” to reverse herself and take Nigeria off the list.)

As a nation – were we one – our pride would be hurt – had we one. But we are a country in confusion and disarray, a country in the throes of unravelling, unable to locate her identity and finding herself incapable of undertaking the simple task of fashioning a way forward from the rot. Rather, choosing to leave “everything in the hands of God” who is “all-knowing and good” and who will “see Nigeria through.”

 I shake my head!

There’s been a flurry of activity in the State of Osun (you call a person or place how it chooses to be called, jo) in the last few weeks to invite the attention of Nigerians everywhere and raise the curiosity of many a serious thinker – what is all these about? Is there much substance to it or is it more of noise and make-belief?

It started with Oyes-TECH, itself an offshoot of O-YES (the Osun Youth Empowerment Scheme which reportedly employed 20,000 youths in the take-off of its rolling scheme at the onset of the administration), as one of the many O-This and O-That by which the state continues to brand its sundry development programmes, quickly appropriating the ‘O’ such that any other state with first letter O has to figure something else with which to distinguish itself or its programmes.

I happened to be in Osogbo to tend to my farm that day in early May and was opportuned to witness the graduation (“Freedom” in our traditional artisans’ parlance) of the Oyes-Tech participants. It was an impressive event at the open field around the government house overlooking the high street from which curious passersby could catch a glimpse.

The political fanfare of it aside, I was truly touched by the sight of fresh graduands, young male and female, clearly impromptu stating their experiences during the training programme that imbued them with broad understanding of the theoretical framework in ICT and the skills to engage in repairs, servicing, maintenance and assembling of mobile phones, computers, etc.

The crash-programme aimed at training 20,000 youths was run in conjunction with a technical partner, RLG-Communications, that set up some ten training centres spread all over the state as part of the government’s broader “state industrialisation and citizenry empowerment” agenda – the “teach a man how to fish” principle.

There’s the O-REAP (for Osun Rural Enterprise & Agric Programme that aims to turn the state into the food basket for the region if not the country), the O-CLEAN (for environment hygiene and cleanliness) and a number of other ‘O’ programmes all over the place, simultaneous and bewildering. Are these fancy ideas or are they well grounded? Are they sustainable? These are valid questions to engage the mind more from genuine fear and sincere hope than from arrant pessimism or sheer negativity of idle naysayers.

But the real story, the mother of all, is this one about the state’s recently launched “Tablet of Knowledge,” a technological contraption specially designed for secondary school pupils of the State of Osun. Typically of Ogbeni’s fierce advocacy for resurgence and promotion of Yoruba culture, religion and language, the tablet is christened OpónÌmò.

Word about it has been about in the last month or so but I was not enthused. I was filled with reservation, even apprehension about it.  Why this? Why now? What cost? How meaningful? How sustainable? Where is the precedent? What result? And a million other queries concentrated my mind. I am of the old school, and that may partly accounts for my reservation, but I’m far better than a mate of mine (name withheld!) who is still stuck with his typewriter and remains grumpy,even resistant, to the advent of computers.

I began to put phone calls around the globe to those whose opinion I respect. “What is this Ogbeni’s OpónÌmò about?” I asked. No one seemed able to argue well for it. Everyone was going to make a check and get back to me. Has this man been railroaded into it by some smooth-talking Nigerian-Americans eager to do business and prey on Ogbeni’s passion for education and eagerness for trail-blazing?

But I am getting to be a convert to the futuristic possibilities of the OpónÌmò. I have taken time to read some available literature on it, including its own dedicated website: http://www.opon-imo.com, and comparative tendencies in other countries. But it started with unblocking my prejudice and reminding myself that all new and great ideas require vision and courage to pursue them to fruition.

There is no gainsaying the fact that education is the bedrock of development and electronic technology is the new age in education. OpónÌmò is seen as the learning tool that could revolutionise learning in developing states around the world. It is a stand alone e-learning tablet to be distributed free of charge to senior secondary school pupils and their teachers in Osun hoping it will radically transform the state into the leading educated state in Nigeria in the immediate and Africa’s Japan in the not too distant future. The Android 4.0 technology is preloaded with learning materials consisting of 56 E-books on 17 core subjects, wide-ranging video and audio tutorials, some 10 years past question papers and Mock Exam tests for WASSCE, brain-developing games, etc.

From research, which the website also highlights, the tablet technology is being embraced by a number of countries including the US, the UK, Thailand, Turkey, etc. Thailand, for example last year, distributed 850,000 to Thai students and teachers out of its planned 1.7 million tablets in its “One Tablet Per Child” scheme. Turkey too is aiming to bring as many as 10.6 million tablets to local schoolchildren as part of its ‘Fatih’ project, says a report, with the proviso by the government that “The production of tablets should be in Turkey and the producer company should establish a research and development centre within the borders of Turkey.”

The State of Osun is said to be having the tablet assembly factory in Osogbo with nine support centres (one per federal constituency) to ensure development of local capacity and gainful employment that, again, the OYES-TECH keys into.

To be sure, in all the other countries cited, the tablet is seen only in complementarity with traditional books and not in displacement. But there is a building consensus that the technology is the future trend, with its cost-saving element countervailing budget constraints in education. As Apple puts it: “Budget constraints force schools to use the same books year after year, long after the content is out of date. But with textbooks on ipad (tablet) students can get a brand-new version each year — for a fraction of the price of a paper book.”

I still have my worries about OpónÌmò although its website tries to allay most of them.  Its success will depend on all of us – pupils, teachers, parents – setting aside our objections, reservations, or antagonism – to embrace it,first and foremost by developing a sense of collective ownership such that any careless handling by any pupil would be rebuked and forbidden.

The maverick governor of the state, Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola, is clearly in a hurry to move the state forward, not only ahead of its peers but thrust it sufficiently to catch up with the rest of the developed world. But I cannot in all honesty charge the governor with “too much haste” having myself long posited that there cannot be anything like “too much hurry” in the repair of the mess we are in this country.

Something tells me we are at the onset of a revolutionary development in Osun. O yes, I hope we are.

The struggle for power in Nigeria has long degenerated into a gang thing – the struggle to control the resources of the country largely for the benefit of the gang leaders and the patronage to their followers. The common good, a clearly enunciated programme for the sustainable development of the country, economically and technologically, for the improvement of the lot of the masses (beyond the mouthing of bland platitudes), are farthermost in the concern of our current gang of political actors.

There is hardly telling one “party” from another, other than in the occasional loud cry against a perceived excessiveness of the gang in power or denunciation of some appointment into juicy positions that rival gangs wish they had. The concentration of thinking of all the gangs – either the one in power or the rival ones – is in strategising on how to grab the bone from the top dog and run away with it. And nothing bears this contention out more than the indistinguishable quality of most of the leading characters within one party or another, save in, perhaps, a totally eclipsed party like the National Conscience Party (NCP), founded by the late Gani Fawehinmi, a man whose only friend, one to whom he was unreservedly committed while he lived, was the masses.

Consequently, it is with the greatest ease, and least compunction, that leaders of one party flow into another, hither and thither like a yo-yo – all, birds of the same feather. They know themselves and they welcome (or negotiate) themselves back on to the “gravy train”. After all, none can flaunt any moral superiority over another.

That is the present reality of the country we live in. Government is the party, the only party, and the gravitation of all is towards the “party” to get a piece of the action. And that is what makes it look like the PDP is the only “real” party around. But the same trend, the same logic, applies to the few states outside of the PDP grip.

It all boils down to the structural deficiency of the country, a deficiency that in turn produces a malapropos economic relationship whereby the government is the source of livelihood of 80 per cent (some say 90 per cent) of the people. Let no one kid you, from the biggest corporations to the smallest one-man business, everyone looks up to the government either for sustenance or for that elusive “big break.”

How else would it be in a country where the small scale businesses, let alone the big industries and manufacturers, are faced with huge infrastructural problems that make their products and services uncompetitive and unsupportable – since they have to be their own ‘government’: mount their own electricity, bore their own holes for water, construct their own roads, police their own premises for security, etc.

And so we now have a situation where five months or so to the general elections that is meant to usher in a “new” government, we hear nothing of any party programme for the country; no party is proposing a welfare dream for the poor and demonstrating how it can be funded; none is placing before the citizenry some superior idea on how to tackle the hydra-headed NEPA / PHCN or whatever it’s called now, different from the route that Obasanjo took us, all of eight years and hundreds of billion naira down the drain! No party is talking to us about developmental strategies for education, housing or health.

Unless I’ve missed it, the only voice so far, and most strangely so, that presents us with some idea of fundamental changes he intends to pursue if we give him our vote is General Ibrahim Babangida. IBB talks about structural changes to the federation, he talks about devolution of powers and a centre that would only concern itself with some common services and national integrity, he talks about state police. But unfortunately his is a voice no one wants to hear and one we do not believe in. Why him and why now, we ask.  Isn’t the master dribbler at his game again, saying things he knows some sections of the country like to hear? With so much trust deficiency, how can we trust him or his motive this time?

Whoever is coming up next to ask for our votes, whether at the state or federal level, must be taken to task on his understanding of the critical infrastructural, economic and educational issues facing us, and must be able to articulate his position with informed data, comparative analysis and funding options.

For now, no party is different from the other, we are in an osmotic political environment, and our poverty level ensures that whatever government there is, is the only party there is.

Lord have mercy!

(This piece was first published in this column of 22/08/10.)

Renowned artist, Jimoh Buraimoh, turns 70

I hadn’t been to Heritage Hotel in Osogbo for a long time, but when I did a few weeks ago, it was pleasant to meet the proprietor and a good old friend, Chief Jimoh Buraimoh, aka JB, there sitting at a corner of the outdoor lounge, self-effacing and unobtrusive as ever.

But his face lit as I came out of the car and approached. “Ido-Osi, Ido-Osi!” he exclaimed affably. Ido-Osi had become his callout to me since my column of 10/05/2009 on that infamy of an election rigging against Dr. Kayode Fayemi at the Ido-Osi Local Government of his Ekiti State. The parodic column said Ido-Osi has unfortunately entered the lexicon as another word for “falsehood”, “rigging”, “cheating,” etc. It was a column he enjoyed and I would not hear the last of it.

I cannot forget JB’s magnanimity in allowing me the use of his hotel as my base during my run for senate in the 2003 elections under NCP for the Osun Central senatorial district. That was a risky gesture that could have had backlash for a hospitality business such as his. But friendship mattered more to him.

It was more a pleasant surprise to learn that JB had just turned 70, which makes him one of the youngest, yet probably the most internationally famous, of the old “Osogbo School” painters and artists. He began his career in the 1960s in workshops conducted by Ulli and Georgina Beier in Osogbo.

Prolific in oil painting and etching, distinguishable by his signature bead paintings and mosaic murals with traditional Yoruba mythology and culture influences, Jimoh Buraimoh’s work is permanently displayed at the Smithsonian Museum of African Art in Washington DC, and his colourful large-scale mosaic murals adorn many reputable institutions in Nigeria and all over the world.

Seventy hearty cheers to JB, a great painter, artist, gentleman and friend. I salute.

If there was going to be any iota of sympathy or allowance left for the terrorist group going by the name Boko Haram, or whatever, they lost it with me and I hope for any other right thinking person on earth when penultimate Saturday (July 6) they went murdering 29 schoolchildren and a teacher of the Government Secondary School in Mamudo village near Potiskum, Yobe State.

The bastards (permit the use for they must be ones) invaded the school, setting fire on the hostels and shooting fleeing pupils. A horrified President Goodluck Jonathan described the attack as “barbaric, horrific and wicked”. He then went on to pronounce that they would go to hell when they die.

“Anybody,” the president is quoted to have said, “who will target innocent children for any kind of grief (grievance) will certainly go to hell.” I’d like to add that it is not just hell but the hottest part of hell is reserved for those who carried out that Saturday horror!

And may their hell start here on earth since we don’t know much about the next: may the fleas of a thousand camels infest the armpit of each and everyone of them and may leprosy chop off all their fingers so they cannot scratch the itch; may a colony of Acanthamoeba keratitis (Eye-eating parasite) infest their eyes and gorge them out while they are on earth; may they all turn blind, dumb, deaf, and paralysed on earth; may their limbs get eaten off slowly by the worst form of disease; may they spend the rest of their days crawling on their bellies; and may no human or god show them mercy.

Only the other day, my brother Okey Ndibe, literary icon and professor in a US university, posted a picture on his Facebook page. It was of two children, each probably no more than six years old, strolling under the tropical sun; holding hands, innocent and blissful. There couldn’t have been a more beautiful photograph. I looked at the picture, the usual tears of emotion welling in me. Then I added my comment, as if a foreboding of Saturday the July 6, wondering how anyone with a human heart could look at children such as these and choose to blow them off the earth!

And to think this latest of their inhuman acts came at a period of some supposed “amnesty” or “ceasefire” negotiation! What could be on their minds? What message was this meant to send?

True these animals have, right from the beginning, stated that they are up in arms against “Western education” – from which their name derives. And destroying of places of “Western education” could then be seen as understandable fallout. But to then deliberately murder scores of schoolchildren? Haba!

Which also makes one unable to completely absolve the high-powered Joint Task Force suffusing the state (especially upon the Federal Government’s declaration of a State of Emergency) of culpability. I should think that even an ordinary boy scout like me would imagine all educational institutions, particularly those with boarding facilities (and how many are there for Allah’s sake in an educationally challenged state like Yobe?), are high targets               for a lawless group that ab initio stated their mission is to wipe out “Western education” from their society!

However, before now, all sorts of nonsense excuses and “justifications” have been propounded by sophists who like to think these Boko Haramites are human beings: O, it’s a result of the extreme economic deprivation they suffer; O, it’s because Niger Delta militants are getting so much and Boko Haram’s northeast part of the country is neglected; O, it’s the disparity in the social and economic conditions of the country that fuels it; O, this; O, that; ad nauseam.

Questions have been asked before and we can now ask them again: are these animals called Boko Haram Nigerians? Do they live amongst us? Are they identifiable or are they “ghosts”, animal ghosts?

One thing is clear; they cannot exist in a vacuum or obscurity such that no one would know who they are, where they sleep, etc. It has been said, and I agree, that terrorists succeed only to the degree of the persuasion, indulgence, or collaboration of the bulk of their people. If the people do not want them, then they have no hiding place. And if they are invaders from foreign land, shame on the country if we cannot defend our territory against these evil marauders.

Cut my story short: after that Saturday, July 6 dastardly act, no more meaningless negotiation, no silly amnesty, nothing, for the “animals in human skin” (apology to the great Fela).

Let them be told: those young innocent kids of Mamudo they killed are my children; those kids are the children of Nigeria; those kids are our future. To so kill them in the manner they have done, this Boko Haram people (sorry, animals) have killed me! Dem no go die beta – insha Allah!

Jimi Solanke’s literary exploration

On July 4 Nigeria’s foremost folklorist, Jimi Solanke, came all the way from his Ile-Ife base to Lagos for the launch of his new book titled, Ancient & Modern Tales, with a Foreword by Africa’s first Nobel Laureate in Literature, Professor Wole Soyinka.

The venue was appropriately the new Lagos State’s Freedom Park, an imaginative arty restoration of the old Broad Street Prison into a romantic garden, historical museum and recreational centre rolled into one. It takes a government of ideas to do what Babatunde Fashola’s Lagos State has done to that historic site.

In the days of yore, it housed the dreaded prison famed for its most distinguished inmate, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, way back in the early 60s. The prison subsequently went into decline and disuse, eventually becoming habitation for unimprisoned delinquents and wretches who shared it with wild rodents, snakes, etc.

Making my way through the impossible Ibadan-Lagos motorway (a misnomer, though better than the more ludicrous “expressway”) I got to the venue well past the launch proper but caught up with the after launch thrill of Jimi entertaining an assemblage of old actor folk like Larry Williams (who I hadn’t seen in over two decades) and Dejumo Lewis; friends like Segun Odegbami, Femi Esho, Yinka Alakija, and so on; Jimi’s ever youthful and beautiful wife, Toyin; and many others.

The book reviewer, Tunde Ogunsanwo, Professor of Analytical / Environmental Chemistry, did a dissection of the book, like he was pouring a solution unto a compound in his chemistry lab, highlighting every aspect of the innovative style – a creative montage of folklore, culture, traditional religion, and humanity; dealing with issues such as: Ogun, Ori, Egungun, Emere, Baba Ifa, Ologomugomu, Egbere, Afinja, Etu, Alaari, Almajiris, Unknown Pastor, OsupaIjio, Bamubamu Ni Mo Yo, Ijapa Tiroko, etc.

As Ogunsanwo noted, “It is a combination of Creative Art, Historical Articulation, Fashion, Cultural Rejuvenation, Folklore, and Subtle Activism.

“JimiSolanke has once again demonstrated in this book, just as he has consistently done in his songs, his superb skill of relating the past to the present. In so doing, he takes his readers to live the past and suddenly wake to the present…

 “Clarity of expression is the reason I love this book, because not only does the author make you to see the things he sees, he makes you feel the things he feels…It is a book that will always remind us of our origin, our virtues, our strength and our identity.”

Congratulations, Baba Agba!

“Something tells me, that woman will be the downfall of not only her man but our land, if care is not taken.”

“Patience, young man, patience. You need patience. Your agitation is rash, presumptuous and unnecessary.”

“You are blowing grammar, my friend. If you have not forgotten your history then you will know how right from the time of Adam and Eve, to that of Samson and Delilah, to that of Caesar and Calpurnia, to innumerable others the woman has been the cause of downfall of the man and the nation!”

 “Again, I say, patience, learn patience.”

“You exasperate me with your nonsense ‘patience’. I don’t think we need ‘patience’ any less than we need poison. It is time to let her know where to get off. This land belongs to us all and we cannot allow the unchecked ambition of a woman to ruin it for us.”

“What, in all fairness, has she done that anyone in her shoes would not have done?”

“What shoes? Her husband never had shoes in the beginning, and neither did she.”

 “You are not in a position to know that.”

“Yes, I am. I knew her as one little native girl of Okrika, running about without shoes and not much else.”

“But that’s the story of all of us. We were once kids.”

“True, but we grow up, have shoes and wear good clothes, and they don’t make us forget where or how we started; we don’t go running our mouth as if we own the world.”

“I still don’t know what your grouse is. She is beautiful and she loves her husband. And like all beautiful and loving wives, she stands tall to defend her husband at all times.”

“What husband? Our husband! She can do all that without polluting the air for the rest of us. After all, she is not the first one to be wife of a president. Make we hear word.”

“Would you have her stand by while an ordinary governor disrespect her on her own land like her husband has not been a governor before? That, I hear, was the beginning.”

“Rubbish. On that occasion four years ago and in public, she grabbed the microphone and told the governor to shut up for saying the demolition being carried out in Anyagubiri in Okrika is for public good. Told him to shut up in public just because she is from there and she’s ‘President’s wife’.Who, as a governor, would forget that? Is that a way to endear people to yourself or your husband?”

“That’s not all; not the whole matter.”

“What else? She claims the governor further went ahead to sack the Okrika Local Government chairman who was her man, as if the governor needs to get her permission to take decisions in governing the state.”

“But the governor knows she’s from Okrika and it’s only decent to take her into account on actions that may affect her or her people – if you are not deliberately spiting her or courting trouble.”

“Not after she has publicly disgraced him. In any case why must these personal matters be overblown to create so much havoc and unrest for everyone in the state and even the rest of the country? Turning it into roforofo fight, getting the police and security forces involved is bound to bring the house down on all. And now the husband is going to pay for not being able to put his wife in check.”

“How is that?”

“She’s making more enemies for him than he needs and that’s putting the prospect of a second term for him in further jeopardy. In fact he may at this point kiss it goodbye.”

“Is that why the governor is said to be gunning for her husband’s seat come 2015? That’s not fair in my view. He should’ve tried to let the husband know his displeasure with what the wife was doing in first place.”

“What husband, whose wife? She’s the boss o!”

“You don’t know that.”

“That’s public enough. She showed it coming out of the aeroplane the other day on an international visit, and she’s showed it in the way she throws herself every time.”

“Still, the governor gunning for her husband’s office isn’t a friendly act.”

“This is silly. The guy hasn’t said he was running, and even if he was, so?”

“That’s the point. What’s his hurry, can’t he wait for another time instead of running against a fellow Niger Delta man? Patience, he needs patience.”

“Ha, ha. ‘Patience’! Jonathan can keep ‘that’.

Not yet time to forget those kids

Last week I rained curses (most uncharacteristically!) on the terrorist group going by the name Boko Haram, or whatever, for the latest of their dastardly deeds – the murder of about 30 children in cold blood. I had (also uncharacteristically) endorsed President Jonathan’s curse on the killers that they end up in hell.

The boarding house of Government Secondary School, Mamudo, Potiskum, Yobe State, was set on fire at dawn by the bandits. Then, as the smoked-out kids ran for dear lives they were gunned down like rodents one after another by those evil creatures.

Incidentally, my good aburo and one of Nigeria’s most gifted columnists of his generation, Azubuike Ishiekwene (simply, Azu) formerly of PUNCH now of Leadership Newspaper, also wrote on the horrifying incident. But Azu distanced himself from President Jonathan’s damnation of the killers. In typically Azu caustic sarcasm: “If in two years over 150 students have been murdered in four states (Kano, Adamawa, Borno and Yobe) by Boko Haram and not a single one of the murderers has been brought to book, then, the president can be sure that Boko Haram will not go to hell unaccompanied.”

And I can understand and share Azu’s anger. There have just been too many murders in the President’s time and on his hands, and ones involving children and innocent people, murders with impunity – all evoking nothing more than the same gratuitous assurance of government action, the same platitude of leaving it in God’s hand, by the President to mean anything.

Worse, Azu shudders and so do I at a country in which these deaths mean nothing; evoke no public outcry; get no memorial to remind us.

Azu reminds us: “Twenty children were killed in Sandy Hook and the US came to a standstill, mourning beyond comfort…When 16 persons, mostly students, were killed at a German secondary school in March 2009, the German flag was flown at half-mast…”For the rest of my life, as a feeling parent and human being, the image of those children trying to escape from the inferno only to be gunned down in the dawn of day and of their lives will remain on my mind.

Please, for whatever it is worth, let there be something erected out there at the site in Mamudo, in memoriam of those children killed by the Boko Haram terrorists – that is, as Azu said, if anyone of the victims is known by name, even as I write. What a country!

Nigeria is a peculiar country. Peculiar and sad. The more one looks at the country, her political structure and her leadership, the more convinced one gets that we are not a particularly serious country. Of course there are many things grossly lacking in the country but the most gross, the most fundamental is the spirit, the eagerness, to develop as a country and the readiness to make it an overriding objective of governance.

True, one has written about this so many times; one has cried oneself hoarse hoping somebody is listening to no avail. Or as our Pentecostal pastors would say: “somebody shout Hallelujah!” – and all what one gets is a deafening silence. Not quite, rather a maddening rush of those at the top to grab what they can while it lasts or before the rocking boat goes under.

How else can one interpret a situation in which the Nigerian federal legislators are the highest paid in the world, as reported recently by UK’s The Economist magazine? The report, quoting data from the International Monetary Fund considered the salaries of lawmakers around the world and expressed them as a ratio of Gross Domestic Product per capita.

Would it change? Is anyone alarmed? Does it disturb the mind of anyone out there sufficiently to want to probe this and seek amelioration? Of course not, a shrug is perhaps the most you’ll get, and business goes on as usual. Those who could do something are those carting away the booty.

How else can one interpret a situation in which everyone, even the moron amongst us, recognises that the presidential system foisted upon us by the military several decades ago, and as being practised here, is a dead weight on the neck of the country that is bound to sink it and yet decades afterwards, we persist in it unable to summon the collective will to retrace our steps or make required drastic changes that would move the country forward?

Am I an alarmist? Then don’t take my word for it. But what about it coming from someone as high up and knowledgeable as the governor of Central Bank of Nigeria, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, himself? Has he not on several occasions cried out that the country is heading for doom if she persists in the course she is taking, both in terms of the political structure and the emoluments of her leadership?

Let me quote from The PUNCH newspaper of January 12, 2012: “Sanusi said in an interview on Africa Independent Television that the political structure of a huge Federal Government, bicameral legislature, 36 states, 774 local governments is quite unsustainable.” At another time (delivering a paper in Kaduna in honour of Professor AdamuBaike) the Vanguard newspaper of October 30, 2011 quoted him as saying: “Ultimately, we will have to be confronted with the task of taking the difficult step of overhauling the political structure that we have.”

To be sure, both Sanusi and other serious economists in the country and abroad had severally decried the wasteful political system of the country, her unsustainable structure, the unjustifiable earnings of the legislature and the bloated civil service that mean over 70 per cent of the country’s budget goes on recurrent expenditure, wondering how any country can hope to develop under such scenario.

Yet nothing changes leaving one to wonder if there is really nothing intrinsically wrong with us as a people, or with us bounded together as a country.

However, it gets worse. Nothing demonstrates the pettiness, the wrongheadedness of our political leaders and their total disinterest in putting the people first more than the personalisation of “development” that goes on in the name of politics particularly at the federal level, which, again, buttresses the need to rework the country along true federation or confederation lines if we are to get out of the present quagmire of underdevelopment.

Here in London delivering a lecture on “Resource and Governance in Nigeria” at Chatham House, the presently embattled governor of Rivers State, Mr. RotimiAmaechi, narrates how as a result of his face-off with President Goodluck Jonathan, the Federal Government is forestalling several development projects of the state.

According to Governor Amaechi, “When the Federal Government suspects that you have an ambition, they do everything to bring you down. For instance, we have two helicopters to monitor security that they have refused permission to be brought into the country and they have frustrated plans we have to open a syringe- manufacturing factory in Rivers State.”

He went further: “Even if they have an issue with me, why should the whole of Rivers State suffer? We have numerous projects which we have signed agreements with the Federal Government to introduce and implement but since this crisis began, they have suspended all of them and the people feeling it are the ordinary people of Rivers State.”

Only to undeveloped minds in an underdeveloped country would blocking development programmes that would benefit the people be something to consider simply because you make an adversary of one political leader or another.

But that is the nature of politics in Nigeria, and as Amaechi said, “the political culture in Nigeria where politicians believe they are doing the people a favour is a huge impediment…”

No president in the history of Nigeria made greater mockery of the seat and personalised the presidency more than Chief Olusegun Obasanjo of whom I should say no more. Nothing we are witnessing today, no political brigandage, no chicanery, no resort to force over the will of the people, no denial of rights, no spiting of development imperatives, no negation of the constitution that that man Obasanjo did not visit on Nigeria and Nigerians.

We will recall how, just because he felt like it, he (Obasanjo) ordered the stoppage of the federal allocations to Local Governments in Lagos State under Governor Bola Tinubu. Obasanjo cared less even when the courts ordered that the funds be released. And the stoppage went on for a couple of years until the end of Obasanjo’s regime. Obasanjo was law, nay god, unto himself. It mattered little that the poor people of Lagos State were at the receiving end of his illegal action.

Similarly, virtually all development projects for Lagos State were stalled or cancelled outright simply because a federal president Obasanjo could not differentiate between personal interest and people’s interest. A case in point was the visionary desire of governor Tinubu to give Lagos State independent and steady electricity supply that, again, Obasanjo hindered.

Earlier, in military government period, Lagos State had also suffered a similar setback in the hands of a General Muhammadu Buhari who came in and stopped the dream of Governor Lateef Kayode Jakande to give Lagos (and indeed Nigeria) its first metro-line (rail system). That singular action had not only set Lagos State back decades, it has cost her incalculable sum in years hardship, accidents, and sundry losses.

Nigeria is a troubling country, but for how long more must our leaders allow their pettiness to becloud their judgment; for how long more must we as a people not wake up to the imperative of the country’s restructuring? As 2015 draws near we should seek answers to these and many more questions.

It is news that has left a bad taste in the mouth since it broke about a week ago. Whichever way it is looked upon and no matter the honey-coating state government officials or agents have tried to give it, the sight of scores (the number is put at about 70) of destitute-looking fellow Nigerians herded into a bus in Lagos and dumped at a point in Onitsha is most unpleasant.

From all indications, it was the handiwork of a Lagos State Government exasperated by the unending flow of human traffic, predominantly of the jobless and penurious kind, daily into Lagos, and frightened by the growing security and social implications for the state.

To be honest, I sympathise with the state of Lagos in what is looking like a “Rock of Sisyphus” challenge it faces; one in which the harder it strives to make Lagos beautiful, habitable and prosperous the more it draws in more dregs abandoning the unpleasantness of their own poorly governed states!

It is a familiar story all over the world that plays out for different reasons and at many levels, microcosmic to macrocosmic, from village to town to state to country to the global world – from the Plateau State “indigenes” seeking to drive out “settlers,” to Nigeria’s “Ghana-Must-Go” of the 80s, to series of deportations and discriminatory laws engaged in by a number of European and American countries. Whenever a place feels its economy, social equilibrium and or security is threatened the culprit to look for is the outsider or “foreigner.”

The question on my mind, however, is: how come Onitsha? Why and how was Lagos able to determine and herd all 70 or so destitute persons and put them as Anambra people. Or was it that it left it to the state of Anambra the business of further sorting out and dispatching to other states those that are not her own? I mean, to get to Onitsha the bus must have crossed at least three or four other states – Ogun, Ondo, Edo and Delta.

A justifiably bemused, if not angry, Governor of Anambra State, Peter Obi, has gone crying out to the country’s president, Goodluck Jonathan, asking for his quick intervention lest the situation degenerates into a dangerous tit-for-tat. Obi says it’s not the first time, and that similar incident happened “last September.”

According to Governor Obi, “Lagos State did not even bother to consult with Anambra State, before deporting 72 persons considered to be of Igbo extraction to Anambra State.”

Ah ha, were they all Igbo and was that why Onitsha (Anambra) was chosen as their ‘distribution” point?

But to get more serious, Obi has raised a cogent point, why would the state of Lagos have embarked on such desperate and untoward action that should have been a last resort, without the courtesy of first raising the issue with his counterpart, the governor of the state of Anambra?

Conversely Obi has committed two errors in return, as Governor Tunde Fashola of Lagos has pointed out.

Says Fashola, “It is unfortunate that my colleague governor has made this a media issue. As I speak, I haven’t received any telephone call or letter from him to complain and I don’t think that is the way government works. On less important matters like this, he had called me before.”

More grievous, why would Obi be running to the president like a baby whose candy has been snatched running to mummy, thus further giving the Abuja the wrong notion of being the “parent’ over states, rather than being “partners?”

The whole business is not funny in the context of our supposed “One Nigeria.” And all that contest between two governors on their last lap aside, human lives are involved, and that of fellow Nigerians at that.

As I have indicated earlier, it is a human sociological tendency for people to feel aggrieved at the sight or thought of some other people coming to take overly undue advantage of the openness or generosity on offer by their clime or sweat. It is worse when this advantage being taken turns into an abuse or even appropriation of ownership or control of the land.

The pressure on Lagos is onerous, and the creation of, and movement of the Federal seat to, Abuja has not abated it in anticipated proportion. Unfortunately ours remains a self-spiting, Ostrich-like, silly country, denying Lagos its deserved “special status” for Federal allocation purposes to handle the continuing influx of people from all over the place. At the same time the same country has not found it imperative and urgent to develop other coastal cities with the potential of having sea ports to reduce the pressure on Lagos.

But more grievously, what is called for is the necessity for other states to hold their governors responsible for the development of their states and the creation of an environment to reduce the urge to migrate to places whose governors are striving to make life more abundant for her citizenry.

A good example is the State of Osun, I daresay. Since that maverick OgbeniRaufAregbesola became governor, he has turned the state rapidly into an economic and intellectual beehive such that all Osun persons are drawn into the state, and none I know is seeking to leave for even Lagos. Therein lies the lesson.

Sports Youth Summer Camp

Talking of engaging the youths and filling their “free” time especially during this long holiday from school, it is heart-warming to know of yet another creative effort of our untiring Chief Segun Odegbami – the Mathematical Odegbami, in his football playing years for Nigeria.

There is probably no Nigerian who has demonstrated greater and as total a commitment to sports development and youth-engagement-through-sports than this great Nigerian, Odegbami. And I am not saying this flippantly. I have watched him at close quarters and I know.

A few years ago, seemingly from nowhere, and from nothing but an expanse of forest land in his Wasimi (near Abeokuta, Ogun State) village, he dreamt of and began his boarding high school – The International (Sports) Academy – that set out to combine regular academic teaching with active sports. Since my friend Segun was not flowing in money I was a “Doubting Thomas”. But Odegbami has pulled it through, and today the Academy has a full high school class-complement, producing sports talents for the country. This effort has already earned him some international awards.

Now, concerned about what happens to the young ones (and their hapless parents) over long holidays, he is introducing “2013 Sports Youth Summer Holiday Camp” on the Wasimi academy grounds, from 15-25 August, a residency thing that would include coaching in basketball, football, tennis; experience of musical and acting performances by Nollywood stars; night time camp fire; leadership training; and much more. All that for a paltry N75,000. Of course I told him unless he gets good corporate sponsorship that sum won’t add up.

And so the requests from parents have piled up. But for me it is enough that there is at least one Nigerian who continues to dream noble dreams for Nigeria and the Nigerian youths, and pursues the dream with uncommon vigour. Good luck, Big Seg!

Random musings they are, playing around my mind today for no particular reason. How many humans ever lived since “the creation” or since Homo sapiens evolved? And then: have all of whatever figure is assumed (and “assumed” is the operative word for most part) been new and different or have, at least some, been “recycled” as in reincarnated? This latter, in itself, already admits existence of the “soul” or that aspect of human (at least) life that is separate from and survives the physical body and could come again and again — in different bodies, at perhaps different families or even places.

Now, there’s no pretending these random musings are not “inflammable” thoughts, especially for the very religious amongst us. And large is the number. And some 1,000 (even 500) years ago I would engage publicly in these thoughts only at the risk of “my head not remaining on my neck” beyond the moment!

I am, therefore, not addressing myself to those who would rather not allow these thoughts to engage their minds; those for whom the world has only begun no more than 4,000 or so years ago for the simple reason that to contemplate anything beyond that, to admit scientific evidence of human life, even “modern humans”, having been around for 100,000 years (not to talk of 500,000!) is to negate their religious contentions — of creation and expected terminus; its imminence and even hour!

I seek to offend no one religion, I seek merely to think and imagine. And in doing so, recognise the unfathomable essence of life. But in recognising it, not therefore sitting there idly wringing my hands but taking it that the job is not done until all questions are asked and all answers are sought; that the advancement of mankind has come only through such enquiries and desires to add to knowledge; not in being told that “the earth is flat” and leaving it at that!

Anyway, after all that preamble, how many people have ever lived on earth? Thank God (!) for the Internet. I went searching. Approximately 108 billion came the answer, according to the Population Reference Bureau. As it turns out (expectedly) it is a perennial question that many ask and seek answers to. Right now (well as at 2011) the world population is some 7 billion. And the periodic segmentation of that “Since — homo-sapiens — evolved” world population is thus:

It began with the assumed first “Two” (Adam and Eve?) – a minimalist approach, say about 50,000 B.C (Before Christ). By 8000 BC the world population was 5 million, rising to 300m by 1 A.D (After Death – of Christ). The figure was 450m by 1200; 500m by 1650; and 795m by 1750. By 1850 the world entered into the billion mark with estimated global population of 1.2 billion. There were 1.6b by 1900; 2.5b by 1950; 5.7b by 1995 and finally 6.9b by 2011.

It should be noted that the 108b figure is arrived at by assumed figures of Births Between the Benchmarks.These were 1.1b, 46b, 26.5b, 12.7b, 3b, 4b, 2.9b, 3.3b, 5.4b, and 2.1b respectively.

This is a highly speculative exercise bearing in mind that for 99 per cent of the span of human existence on earth no demographic data was available.

The Internet article I read by Carl Haub also admits that these figures have at least two constraints: One, how long ago actually did humans begin (or evolved) on earth; two, the assumption of the average size of human population at different periods.

According to the UN Determinants and Consequences of Population Trends, modern Homo Sapiens may have appeared about 50,000 B.C, but there are serious indications that we have ancestors in one form or another dating back 700,000 B.C and “Hominids (bipedal folks) walked the earth as early as several million years ago”!

Carl Haub says, “Our birth rate assumption will greatly affect the estimate of the number of people ever born. Infant mortality in the human race’s earliest days is thought to have been very high — perhaps 500 infant deaths per 1,000 births, or even higher…Under these circumstances, a disproportionately large number of births would be required to maintain population growth, and that would raise our estimated number of the “ever born.”

Haub, a senior visiting scholar at the Population Reference Bureau, then concluded: “So our estimate is that about 6.5 per cent of all people ever born are alive today. That’s actually a fairly large percentage when you think about it.”

How reading Carl Haub’s article led me into wondering about  “repeat comings” or reincarnation, I don’t know. But I did. And this is not the place for a detailed or exhaustive engagement of this more perilous province. Howbeit, there’s a Dr. Ian Stevenson who turns out to be one of the most respected authorities in this area and whose scientific studies led Dr. Harold Lief to write in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease that “Either he (Dr. Stevenson) is making a colossal mistake. Or he will be known as the Galileo of the 20th century.”

Dr. Stevenson preoccupied himself with collecting and studying thousands of cases of children all over the world “who spontaneously (without hypnosis) remember a past life. His life’s work spanning over 40 years is said to be “Probably the best known, if not most respected, collection of scientific data that appears to provide scientific proof that reincarnation is real.” Stevenson methodically documents the child’s statements of a previous life, then “he identifies the deceased person the child remembers being, and verifies the facts of the deceased person’s life that match the child’s memory. He even matches birthmarks and birth defects to wounds and scars on the deceased, verified by medical records.”

Born in 1918, Stevenson, a medical doctor and scholar of impeccable credentials, has over 3000 cases in his files, and many people, “including sceptics and scholars, agree that these cases offer the best evidence yet for reincarnation.”

Even with all of Stevenson’s prodigious research into reincarnation it left more questions than answers. We know little of what proportion of human lives, if so, do reincarnate; what necessitates it; not to talk of what happens to the billions of others. As Stevenson himself said in his very lengthy interview in OMNI magazine way back in 1987, “With only 2000 cases to go on, I’d hardly dare speculate about the billions of human beings since the beginning of the human race who have disappeared without a trace.”

So, where does all these leave us? Sadly, for us in Nigeria we don’t even in 2013 have a near-accurate data of how many we are. We have figures ranging from 120 million to 200 million, depending on who is talking and for what purpose! We have had our own long history of ogbanjes or abikus. From Dr. Stevenson’s account they may not all be the hocuspocus, illiterate balderdash, imagined.

More frightening, with Nigeria in its perpetual state of stagnation, if not regression, could we be having the wrong kind of mad leaders reincarnating in our midst whilst the good ones are finding saner climes for themselves?Just a thought. Happy Sunday!

Dear Afam,

I don’t know where you are, Afam, I don’t even know if you are alive or not since about 50 years ago we last saw. That was before the Nigerian Civil War (or the Biafra War) broke. Ever since the war ended I have been hoping to catch a glimpse of you somewhere, run into you, read of you, or just simply meet someone who had been part of our childhood years and could just assure me you are doing fine somewhere. We were the closest of friends; nay, we were brothers!

I remember many things about our youth, about our Minna days in Keterengwari – as our area was called. I remember your family lived across the road from mine, almost directly opposite but for one or two houses, one of which was my cousins’, the Faniyans. We didn’t attend the same school, you and I didn’t.

I remember you were in Roman Catholic Mission School like most of your Igbo folk, and I was in the Yoruba-dominated Baptist Day School that also moved to the Bosso area as your school. When I say Yoruba, actually they were mostly Ogbomoso and Offa people. We also had a sprinkle of native folk. You guys in RCM used to taunt us like hell, calling us Bam-tuwo, Bam-teba, as if that was all we knew how to do – eat tuwo and eba! I can’t even remember what name we called you guys in return, but the rivalry between the schools was exciting and healthy. There was also the Native Authority (NA) School that IBB attended (although older than us), largely populated by the Gwari, Nupe, and Hausa peoples.

Do you remember, Afam, that day when we (you and I) wanted to order some stuff for ourselves from a catalogue for Christmas of that year? It must have been some toys or item of clothing. You cracked me up real good.

Yes, in those days in Nigeria one could pick up the catalogue of a store in England, select any item, and place an order by sending the appropriate amount in Postal Order and one was guaranteed to receive the item(s) in due course by return post. The Nigerian Post Office worked! – Just as efficiently as the ones in England!

Each of us had to make a choice of what shipment method he preferred – by air or sea – and the total cost of the order goes up by the choice. The fare by air was about twice by sea but also faster by much more. I had wasted no time making my choice – by sea. But you looked at the choices and their respective rates for a long, exasperating, time. “Afam, what are you waiting for,” I rasped. “Hmmm,” came your pensive response: “by bicycle no dey?”

I still roll on the floor whenever I remember. Yes, you were the frugal type. Indeed the impression we had in those days of the Igbo was of frugality if not stinginess. Your folk would go about with torn singlets or shirts, but make no mistake they have built a house or two!

I was better known then as Adisa, my oriki in Yoruba. When I got to secondary school, I changed to Tunde as I, in my ignorance, associated Adisa with being a Muslim just because I knew one or two Muslim friends bearing the name. So if you read this and wonder if it was the same brother of yours, yes it’s me.

Do you remember, Afam, those we grew up with in Keterengwari and other areas – the Hospital Area, Kwangila, and the Railway Quarters towards Canteen? Those bigger boys that used to beat us up, and the ones we looked up to? Do you remember the Odus, the Nwabukus, the Okafors, the Ugbodagas (Vincent and Casmir), the Imoukhuedes, etc. For some strange reason, and in retrospect, you guys were everywhere. And all I had for friends were Igbos with only one or two Yoruba or Nupe/Gwari. My Yoruba friend was Yekinni whose father, Abudu, was considered the richest man in Minna, whilst Bawa, son of the Soje Lapai, was my Gwari friend and Dansofo was my Nupe friend.

Most of the Yoruba in Minna were Ogbomoso and Offa who were mainly traders, contractors, teachers, or pastors, and they lived away from Keterengwari, mostly in Kwangila or Market areas – the Abudus (Ibiyeyes), Oyedeles, Ogunjumos, etc. Our own fathers were Railway workers. My father was Instructor Driver (ID) and retired as Locomotive Inspector (LI).

Have you since met any from our Minna days? I once ran into George Nwabuku some years ago in Washington, D.C at one of the many pro-democracy talks held in America where I was on self-exile in those inglorious days of Gen. Sani Abacha. Somehow George spotted me in the crowd. Good old George. I screamed and we hugged. I asked him of Anthony (my second best friend after you, LOL) and Rose, his younger siblings. I think he said he had lost them during the war. It made me cry.

Remember, George was older than us, he was my elder brother, Layi’s, mate. And in those days, George was one of the ‘best boys in town’, flaunting his attending King’s College, Lagos like a banner whenever he returned home on holidays. He was the cocky one. There was unspoken rivalry between him and my brother Layi who was attending Igbobi College, Lagos (he missed out on King’s College on account of receiving his letter of interview too late). I think it was because your sister Patricia fell for my brother rather than George who imagined he was the best thing to girls since strapless bra! (Laugh). Where and how is Pat? I hope she survived the war! So sad how all fell apart.

Do you remember, Afam, those social nights during the long Christmas holidays? School was January to December and the long holiday period was in December. The Social Nights held at the Recreation Club hall, remember? And it went all night long dancing to those Ghana Highlife tunes, or Roy Chicago, Eddie Okonta, Bobby Benson, Victor Olaiya, and then the foreign ones like the Beatles, Everly Brothers, Cliff Richard, Elvis Presley, etc. The bigger boys (George, brother Layi, Ojo Latilo (now sadly late), the Odus, the Ugbodagas, the Imoukhuedes, etc) ran the show and held sway. You and I were too young for much other than pretending. We didn’t have girlfriends and if we did, it started and ended in love letters only to take to our heels when and if, perchance, we set our eyes on the lass!

We used to sleep over at each other’s house interchangeably. And our families were so close. We didn’t see one as Igbo and the other as Yoruba. We slept and ate at each other’s house and our fathers didn’t frown on it. I remember how we spent our after-school hours playing football in the dust – first “toronto” and later proper football when we grew older. I was always shifting between being the goalkeeper and playing outside-left! We played until dusk when the first Mama’s call brought the day to a grudging close.

There are just too much to remember, Afam, of our youth in Minna. The memories keep my heart warm, but also saddened at the turn Nigeria has taken – an ethnic-riven, retrogressive – thinking, underdeveloped country.

Afamefuna Okapu, I hope you are alive and well. Yes, there was a country!

I have not seen, talk less read, the 31-page manifesto of the All Progressives Congress (APC) launched with expected pomp during the past week and so my opinion is based on excerpts published in various media. The excerpts may not tell it all but, by and large, together with the media report on the manifesto, give a glimpse of the intendment of this new-kid-on-the-block party.

The online Dictionary.com definition of manifesto is “a public declaration of intent, policy, aims, etc, as issued by a political party, government, or movement.”

But going through what has been published of the APC manifesto one gets the idea of some people merely putting together a long list of the myriad of what ails Nigeria and promising, sorry, saying their ‘intent’ (in the manner the itinerant medicine man peddles the good old APC medicine of yore)to cure it all; this would be done, that would be done. The mass of intendment has not been aggregated into any ideological framework, a guiding ethos.

You will pardon the lewd analogy but one gets the feeling of a Casanova wanting to get a lady to bed at all costs and offering all sweet nothings that he knows she wants to hear – he would build her a house, buy her a car, fly her to the moon – knowing full well that all his earnings even in a lifetime could do no such things.

Elsewhere a political party’s manifesto is its “bible”, but not in Nigeria. They have generally meant nothing beyond the paper on which they are printed; hardly ever referred to by the party, and the party hardly ever held down to it by the public. Perhaps the most remembered of any meaningful party manifesto was that of ObafemiAwolowo’s Action Group way back in the 50s and 60s with the cardinal slogan of “Freedom for All, Life More Abundant.” It was a welfarist manifesto with a main thrust of “free education” for all.But those were the days of genuine parties for genuine governance. I doubt if anyone, even those in the PDP, could tell you in a nutshell what the PDP manifesto is all about today!

I have nothing against the APC, on the contrary it is a party in which I join millions of Nigerians in reposing hope. We have reached a point in Nigeria where it is anything but the ruling and ruining PDP. Unfortunately that should not be the basis for making a choice of party at an election, but that is where we have found ourselves.

To be sure forming a credible and masses-accepting political party is not a child’s play, as those who have ventured into it would tell you. It requires deep pockets; it requires commitment and sincerity of purpose; and above all, it requires youthful and visionary leadership. Unfortunately, the two leading faces on parade by the APC, namely General Buhari and Chief Bisi Akande, are not the faces to qualify as “youthful and visionary”! It is, therefore, necessary and urgent for them to yield places to those young and vibrant ones within the rank and file of the party. Gladly, they are there in good numbers and across ethnic divides.

But back to the APC manifesto.

Virtually all the media led with the core issue of electricity. The intractable problem of poor electricity supply has been the bane of our economic development. It is a recurring theme, with government after government promising to tackle it to no avail, yet with billions of naira going down the drain. APC seem to have it as its core objective in the manifesto, ‘promising’ to end power outage by generating 40,000MW of electricity within 8 years of being in government. To be honest, those thousands of megawatts, or whatever, are no more than a pie in the sky, an annoying one too remembering how Obasanjo flogged those figures, followed by Yar’Adua, and now Jonathan. In any case, Jonathan seems to have embarked (though with doubtful seriousness) on the line of action the APC proposes, namely, liberalising the monopoly of the Federal Government in the sector.

Another lead issue in the manifesto is “corruption”, that hydra-headed monster that has held the country by the jugular. The APC ‘promises’ to wage a “War Against Corruption” believing rightly that “none of (their) cardinal programmes will succeed if the current level of corruption and looting going on in the land” continues.

Again, we’ve heard it all before! Obasanjo swore against corruption, sending fears down the spine of everyone, sadly only to end up being himself the repository of all corruption and corrupt practices. But, here, the APC comes with bigger dose of credibility having a Buhari in its fold. Buhari is one person whose anti-corruption stance most Nigerians can swear by; but that is one person, and unfortunately not in a military government. What is more predictable, sooner than later, is the parting of ways between Buhari and the rest of the party when it is realised that Buhari’s ascetic holiness is antithetical to oiling the wheel of political business!

Most of the core intent of the APC, such as “to remove immunity from prosecution for elected officers in criminal cases,” “devolving powers, duties and responsibilities to states and local governments in order to entrench Federalism and the Federal Spirit,”and “to decentralise the police command,”would require constitutional amendments and having concomitant majority in most of the states and in the National Assembly. For that to happen, Nigerians must truly have had enough of the PDP and go all out to rout them massively.

Not done, the manifesto ‘promises’ to “construct 4,000 kilometres of “supper highways,” “revitalise the railway system…build 200 kilometres of standard railway lines annually,” carry out a thorough review of the education sector, allocating up to 10% of the country’s annual budget to the sector, and invest massively in the health sector!

Overall, the manifesto is a hotchpotch of fancy ideas to “please the ears,” broad in generality and without required sharpness of focus on what the country needs in answer to its nationality crises.

As intents go what the APC released as their manifesto isexceedingly ambitious. But it’s no crime to be ambitious, is it?

Re: Memories of childhood

Last weeks column with the above title generated huge positive responses from Nigerians, home and abroad. It led one to the conclusion that Nigerians in the main want Nigeria, but one that is beautiful, free-for-all and fair to all!

Sadly and strangely, I am yet to hear from anyone about the Okapu family of Afam, Patricia, etc, whether they are alive or not.

Here’s one reader searching for his Nigeria:

“Sir, your write-up of August 18 is quite thought provoking. Honestly I was moved to tears as I read through the piece. You really painted a picture of a Nigeria we deserve but do not have. Please we need to take back our country from these greedy politicians. I work in a commercial bank in Lagos and after reading this piece I’m moved to ask if there’s any organisation or movement that is working towards recreating Nigeria. I mean a movement that does not have any political connotation. I want to join/support such a group. Want to thank you once again. emenyke@yahoo.co.uk